Where did you grow up, how did you get started, and what got you into music?
I grew up in Atlanta. When I was about 12 or 13 my best friend got a guitar and told me I needed to buy a bass. He knew a drummer, so it was clearly, "You need to buy a bass so you can be in the band." We knew that we wanted to make a tape to sell at gigs, and I thought, "I'd really like to figure that out." I bought a little cassette 4-track. I didn't have enough mic cables, so I just jammed a [Shure SM]57 into the front of the 4-track — into the XLR connector. That was my mic cable and mic stand! I sat it next to the drums, and I had one mic cable that ran out front. My parents had an unfinished basement that they said I could have a portion of for music. What I didn't know was that my dad, despite working for IBM for 30 years, was actually really good with his hands. That became our father-son bonding project; we built a studio in the basement. There was no Internet or any way to figure out how to treat it, so we gleaned information from anywhere we could. We tried to figure out some way of making it — not necessarily soundproof — but just not super annoying to my older sister. We built the studio, I started making these recordings, and pretty quickly I decided that was what I wanted to do with music. I still wanted to play, but I really wanted to record.
Did you get another recorder at some point, when you were still in high school?
No, I always did the 4-track and then a 2-track [cassette] to make the masters on. I always was careful about how many tracks we were using -we were a three piece, so it was drums, guitar, bass and vocal on four tracks. It wasn't a mystery. It's something that I probably ought to get back to today. Do you need a track for the bass drum, snare, and toms? Do you need all that stuff? I got to meet Glyn Johns, who has been a hero of mine forever, and he's not doing any of that stuff. His "just in case" mic istheoneonthesnaredrum!SoItoldmydadI wanted to go to music school and he frowned. I asked, "What if I go for engineering?" And he said, "That sounds like it's got a future." [laughs]
How did you find out about the University of Miami?
My music teacher in high school was one of those people who really wanted his students to continue into music. He told me about a couple of different programs — [University of] Miami and Middle Tennessee State; he also told me about places like Full Sail and Berklee. I did some research and found a few other places as well. My parents and I went on a little college tour. I really loved Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan. I called my sister and she said, "David, I don't even go to class when it rains. How are you going to go to class in the snow?"
But you ended up in Miami where there's quite a bit of rain...
Yeah, there's quite a bit of rain but it only happens for about a half an hour and then you're okay.
Were you developing your electronics skills while you were still in high school?
I was taking gear apart, but it wasn't going back together. I wanted to know how things worked. I didn't have anybody guiding me with that, so I definitely ruined a few things. When I went down to Miami on the college trip, I was really taken by their whole deal. It seemed like, "Wow, look at this. They're really doing it." Ken Pohlmann [Professor Emeritus, Music Engineering Technology] said to me, "I'm not going to teach you what knobs to turn, I'm going to teach you how to decide which knob to turn and you are going to make your own decisions." I was really enamored with that idea, because I was a teenager and no teenager wants some old dude telling him what to do. For me, it was, "Just give me a chance to try something out."
And Miami afforded that.
Completely. What I didn't realize, but I see now in hindsight, is that the other thing Miami has is a world-class pool of musicians on every instrument, and you can have access to them nearly any time you want. "I need a contrabassoon player at 3 a.m." In Miami, that's possible. I'm sure it's possible other places, but the value of that kind of environment cannot be overestimated. I was out of school in four years, and I went straight to New York City where I had a job lined up at a big time studio... making fruit baskets and running errands, with no chance of ever assisting. I'm not quite sure how they figured out that I knew how to fix things, or that I knew how to align a tape machine.
But you picked up all that from Miami?
Yeah, I got all that from Clyde Hagler, John Monforte and Ken Pohlmann during their classes. Of course all the rules change at every studio, but assistants didn't align the tape machines at this particular facility in NYC — a tech does. So I said, "You guys need a night tech. How about I do that until you can get me an assisting position?" I took the job and they said, "We're going to pay you $6.00 an hour now instead of $4.85." A month goes by and my paychecks didn't change. When I asked about it, they told me there was a "trial period" before I would get the pay raise. I thought, "This is starting to suck." Then my friend Joe Raia, who went to school with me, said, "You know Bob Clearmountain is looking for a new assistant. His guy has been there for three years and it's time for him to move on." So I sent him my résumé and three weeks later Clearmountain happened to be in NY. We met at the Starbucks across the street from where I was working and he offered me a job.
You hadn't even assisted in New York?
No. In fact, most of my recording experience in NYC was as the lead engineer in other studios. So Bob and his wife Betty [Bennett, Apogee electronics] asked me some everyday life questions. Roger Charlesworth from SSL, who was also at the meeting, asked me the technical questions. When Bob offered me the job I sold everything I had, grabbed my guitars, got on a plane, and went to Los Angeles. The studio managers in New York called me an opportunist and all these nasty names for leaving them after they'd given me the "opportunity"... to get shafted. [laughs] There was a system where the generation prior to mine "paid their dues." Unfortunately, when a studio doesn't promote from within the ranks or offer runners chances to get into studios as third engineers on big setups (or as second engineers on spec gigs), that system breaks down.
What year was that?
I started with Clearmountain in '98. I was at Bob's for three and a half years, where I met Mitchell Froom, Tony Berg, and a bunch of other people that I work with now. It was a great job. I modded Bob's console a few times, all with ideas that he came up with. The guys at SSL were really nice to me, and they helped me figure these mods out. I modded all 72 channels and the stereo bus — it took a long time. [laughs] It was a pretty amazing environment. Bob likes to be on the forefront of technology. When I started there, we were going to master and safety DATs. By the end of it we were printing stereo at 88.2 kHz bit split onto a Tascam machine, and surround at 44.1 to another Tascam machine. Every mix he did had a surround mix, because he was trying to 'future proof' — he didn't want someone coming in asking for a surround mix after the fact. By the time my successor left all of the mixing was at 88.2 kHz — all these different versions — and the console controlled Pro Tools. On and on it evolves.
Was Bob hands-on with the implementation, or did he leave it to you to figure out how to get it done?
He's very interested in it, and it was a team effort to figure out how to do a surround mix simultaneously with a stereo mix on the SSL. Issues would come up, like using a series of busses and extra center channel summing so you can pan between Left and Center or Right and Center — because of the whole odd/even bus thing — and front to back. And then, how are you going to do the six channel bus compression, and how does that tie into the stereo bus? So, yeah, he was hands-on.
From an engineering point of view, what do you think you walked away with from working with Bob?
You know, I learned a lot of how not to do things, because of projects he would receive as a mixer. Things like, "Why would you waste a track on this, but submix these?" Or, "Why did you print this synth on two tracks when it is a mono sound?" I learned a lot of ways to rescue something that is seemingly doomed. You can make something cool out of it. It may not be hi-fi anymore, but it can be compelling as long as the performance is there. And no matter how good Bob made it sound, if the song sucked it still sucked at the end of the day. I also learned how to be a good listener to the artist and the producer, and to know when to stand up for myself and what I thought was right. I also learned when to acquiesce to their desires, no matter what. There's that expression you sometimes hear about "saving the artists from themselves." That's an ugly expression.
In the end, it's their record.
Their name is on it and you do your best to make it as good as it can be, within their vision. To get uppity with somebody over his or her artistic intent is just wrong. That's one thing I learned from Bob, because I saw a lot of the opposite in New York. A lot of people telling clients to, "Shut it." Or, "This is the mix that you brought." No refining it. To his credit, Bob is a warm and generous dude.
Were you doing some recording gigs on the side then?
I did a lot at his house — vocal overdubs, piano or [Hammond] B3. Sometimes we'd do a drum set in the lounge. I ended up doing that recording myself, because he didn't want to get distracted with that part of it. I was also doing outside gigs whenever time would allow. I started acquiring more gear, as well as a Pro Tools system. I went from place to place, recording when I could.
Do you like doing the mobile recording thing?
I like it more now. It's really cool to go to an acoustic space, record something in its entirety, and then never set foot in there again. You might have to deal with certain things — sound isolation issues, honky-ness, reverberation — but they become constraints that you can work within. In the end they limit you in a productive way. A recent example is this: Andrew Bird came out, rented a house, and said, "I want to work at the house." I said, "Okay." I put a studio in the house on day one. By day three it was a well-oiled machine. We were recording all the things he does, with guest artists too. It was on a busy street, and we'd lose the occasional take to a truck passing, but he's a consummate musician and there's little he can't replay. If he couldn't, then we'd just live with the truck noise. The basics were done with Andrew's live sound guy, Neal Jensen, at Andrew's barn in Western Illinois. Neal did a great job and those sonic imprints make the album [Break It Yourself] sound like it does. The downside to mobile recording is that you can't go get mics out of the closet because there's only the stuff you bring. When I went to Andrew's place, I brought an RCA 77, an RCA 44, a couple of [Neumann] U 67's, a U 48, a [AKG] D19, a [Shure] SM7, and a [Shure] SM 57. If there was something else that I wanted, I had to get over it — it just wasn't going to be there.
But, like you said, that limitation factor can be a great spark for creativity. Do find limitations part of the headache or part of the joy?
It's the joy, for sure. You spend one extra second at the patchbay, and the artist loses the plot. It's not about telling somebody, "Oh, I used this vintage mic, with this vintage mic pre, and this vintage compressor. And I used this vintage tape machine, at this fluxivity." It's not about that. It's closer to, "Do the words matter? And if they matter, can I hear them and relate to them?" It's easy. [laughs]
It all flows from that.
