What first excited you about the studio?
In junior high and high school I was playing in a band and a friend of ours had a little recording setup in his basement. I was the uncomfortable, grumpy guy. I said, "Look, man, we can't wear headphones. I don't even want to see the mics." He was really gracious and, surprisingly, the tracks came out really well. Then I got into Indiana University. I was looking for an alternative to business school. I saw a "Studio Resources and Techniques" class. It said to you had to talk to the professor. I met with the professor and he said, "You realize this is for graduate students in electronic music. You're entering your sophomore year as a business major." But he'd gone to school where I had grown up and he said, "Aw, what the hell. You're in." I believe he realized that in the next year or two the electronic music program was going away; they were going to start an audio program to record their operas, orchestras and recitals. He saw that as an opportunity and thought I might be handy a few years down the road. I was there when they started their audio program and was able to record five operas a year, with four performances of each, for three and a half years.
You did that to tape with stage mics?
We had a [Neumann] SM 69 in the catwalk and dropped it down. For a couple of years, all we could do was play with the angle and width of it, as well as how high or low we could get. Then we got the okay and dropped a few placement mics and a couple of hidden mics for support, if needed. We got a little bit more into that, particularly with the orchestra. The Musical Arts Center at Indiana University was just an incredible hall.
What did you learn back then that you're still using today?
Listen to things acoustically. If it's an amp, you can get it out of a little room and into a bigger one where it doesn't blow your ears out. Sometimes you want to hear the compression in the space. To sense these elements in the room is a great way to understand them, and to know whether you want that or whether you're scared of that. [laughter] There're a gazillion steps — and you can simplify them as much as you want — but if a recording starts off bad, every other step after that is struggling to make it up. I'm not going to say that if it starts bad there's no way anything can get better. That's ridiculous. But with anything you lose at the beginning, you can't get as much back and it gets harder and harder to add to it.
So you put in a lot of critical energy, even before you're mic'ing.
Right. I have many friends who are really talented that say, "Just get it in Pro Tools. Once it's in [the computer] you can deal with whatever you need to do. You can clean it up." I recognize and respect that, but I haven't gone that way yet. I still want to explore all the possibilities of getting real sounds. I'm a traditionalist, only in the sense of hearing and capturing music; not necessarily in how I treat it. Whether it's an ensemble or an individual overdub, performance-based music is one of my favorite things and that's why I maintain a large room. If it's a convincing and transcending performance, those are the things people recognize and feel. Not whether I put up this cool mic and did this and that. Hopefully that makes the recording sound even better and makes it go straight to your heart more. It's a performance you're trying to capture, and the environment you create to capture that performance is crucial.
What were you doing before moving to Austin?
I finished school and received a job offer from Universal Recording in Chicago. By job, I should say, "paid internship." It seemed like a pretty sweet deal, but I had been experiencing this phenomena called "poor and cold" for two solid years. I just couldn't take it.
What happened once you got to Austin in 1983?
I got a job at Texas French Bread [bakery/café] and went around asking all these studios if they needed an intern. Nobody was too interested. [I got into] Lone Star Studios, which is now gone. Willis Alan Ramsey had a record [his self-titled debut] that was popular, and the song "Muskrat Love" was a huge hit for Captain & Tennille [Tape Op #69]. Willis, flush with money, bought that studio and had John Storyk [Tape Op #59] build it up for him. It was tiny little place, but it was cool.
How did you work yourself into Lone Star Studios?
I knew how to clean and do a lot of stuff. At night I would go in, put up my tape and play with their [AKG] BX 10 spring reverb and their Lexicon Prime Time — a stereo echo that was badass. After about a year the people that were building Arlyn Studios, Freddy Fletcher and Michael Block, started working out of Lone Star. With them came their Lexicon 224 and, eventually, the Lexicon model 200. I started getting time made available to me because I'd cleaned the place so much. Michael Hall, who now writes for Texas Monthly, had a band called The Wild Seeds. We did a record [Life Is Grand (In Soul City)] and it got pressed on vinyl. Then I did one with Alejandro Escovedo. Some of the songs were "Ballad of the Sun and the Moon" and "Hard Road" and [that album] became the predecessor for the first True Believers record. Then came a crazy band called The Hickoids, who were insane country-punk guys. There were absolute stretches of insanity during the making of that record [We're In It For the Corn]. That record ended up being real popular with a number of guys I've worked with since. Krist Novoselic mentioned he liked that record. It's funny how some of these crazy things you do early on end up having popularity. Suddenly The Wild Seeds were hot. The Hickoids were kind of hot. True Believers were the breakout band; they got signed to EMI and I got to work on their first record.
How did you end up at Arlyn Recording?
The guys from Arlyn were about to open and asked me to be the assistant over there. I started helping wire the place up. The engineer at Arlyn, Dave McNair [Tape Op #23], was selective about what he worked on and that allowed me to have a lot of work. Not only was there a burgeoning punk or "new sincerity" scene that I got bands from, there were also more obscure and weird country things that Dave didn't want to do. Right about that time Clifford Antone decided to start a record company [Antone's Records and Tapes]. I think I just happened to be in the room when he decided. It was literally like, "You wanna make my records?" I'm was 25 and kind of scrambling. I said, "Yes sir, Mr. Antone." Then I was immediately plopped into the whole Antone's scene. At first I was very intimidated. There was this sense about the Antone's world that it was very insular and clubby, but most of the players were not really part of the club. You'd get in with the musicians and they'd say, "You like music; I like music. We're cool." I'd always ask the musicians — George Rains, Derek O'Brien and Sarah Brown — "Does it sound good to you?" The two things I got out of that were the knowledge that there are a gazillion ways to approach things and people hear everything with different ears. And I also learned that room mics are badass! If the sound of the room works, an ambient mic is going to be pretty good. Find the right spot, crank down on it, exaggerate it and a room mic can be stunning. One of the things that I don't like about close mics is that they have frequency spikes. A lot of those spikes are on the top end and poke at you. Room mics have this natural thing — air is a natural compressor. If you move it away and have some distance, that top end dissipates and you have presence in the low end, but you also get this mid to top end clarity. You can get incredible detail and clarity the farther away you go. Obviously, if your room is resonant, or has a tone, it starts to interfere with the sound.
Which room mics have you found to be the most effective?
I have a pair of Mojave MA-100s. If you use the omni capsules, they give you better phase control and a truer sound. They also have a really high output. One of the problems with room mics is you have to gain them up so much; especially if it's a ribbon and the noise floor begins to creep in. With the Mojave mics that's not going to be a problem. I have a Telefunken SM2; it's like a pair of [Neumann] KM 56s and you can leave it in cardioid. Right now it's up against the window, about six to eight inches off the glass. That's a standard drum ambient position for me; I have a small room, so I'll put it in cardioid and then reflect it off the glass. The reflection not only gives me a little more delay, it also takes away a little of the edge and smears it so the image isn't quite as clear. It varies, depending on what you're doing. One thing about room mics: they're very susceptible to tempos. The more the room is a thing, the more susceptible to tempos they are.
So for a faster song, what would you do?
Drums are there to emphasize the rhythm. I would generally move the mics closer to get less time delay. If it's moving out of sync with the rhythm of the drums it deemphasizes the rhythm. It's a similar concept, but a different effect, as the top and bottom mics on a snare. One's moving in one direction and one's moving in the other — together they're kind of funky. On a snare top and bottom mic, because of the proximity, a phase flip helps you. With room mics we're talking a number of milliseconds and a phase flip does nothing for you.
How many close mics are you using on a drum set?
For the jazz thing, it's a three mic set up. I'll do an X/Y overhead and I'll have a kick mic. For a rock band, it's 15.
When you're using 15 mics, how do you control the phase issues?
I rarely ever use them all at once in the mix. I'll put up my overhead mics first, and then I'll bring up my kick and snare. If it's a good drummer with good sounds, toms tend to be quick and easy. If the toms aren't tuned well, it's a bummer. You've got the drums and the player. That's the biggest variance. Weak drummers — I'm sorry, but there's just not that much you can do. You can sample and trigger. But if you get a great drummer, everything's different. There's no loss of grace, dynamics, or subtlety if you can keep the real tracks. The room mics all sound completely natural, clear and defined. For the new Sublime with Rome record we had 15 mics on one kit and three mics on another kit.
