Brooklyn Studios

[ image rare2 type=center ]

Brooklyn, New York, has become a hot studio spot during the last few years. Free from the space crunch of Manhattan, rents are lower and smaller studios can survive. Nicolas Vernhes runs Rare Book Room (named after an EP by a band he had been in) out of a nondescript building there and has made some amazing records with bands like Versus, Silver Jews and many more. There's a real attention to the detail of sounds in his work that's exciting to listen to and there's also a "timelessness" that will help his recordings survive the test of time. All are good qualities in my book.

Your studio is kind of similar to mine, we do a lot of indie-rock type stuff. I kept seeing your name on the Versus records and the Silver Jews' record.

Is that how you heard about the studio?

I think the first time I heard about it was the Versus EP, the one with the strings.

Deep Red. It was recorded the same time as their other full release, Secret Swingers, on Caroline.

You did that one too?

It was all at the same time. Afterwards, once all the songs were finished and mixed, the decision was made as to what was going to go on what. They wanted Mark Robinson's label [Teenbeat] to put out the EP and Caroline did the full length. From the same sessions, the choices were made about which songs to use turned out to give a completely different flavor to each record, the EP is kind of crazier. It was over a few months because they live nearby so they could come in and do a few days. We tried an insane thing, we tried to mix the entire record in one session.

Why?

For fun. It was 38 hours non-stop. We just kept going until it was done and it got really edgy in the room.

What were some of the first things you started working on here?

Well that was one of them. Just before that I started working on the Containe record, which is Fontaine's [bassist / vocalist for Versus] band with Connie of the Pacific Ocean. The very first recording that was released was this band called Pumpernickel. My friend David, who was in the band with me at the time, produced. We tried everything possible at the time. We took the stereo mix and EQ'd all the high end out of one side and the low end out of the other. When we used them together it was perfectly balanced. In mono it was fine, but if you killed one of the channels it sounds horrible. We noticed that with a few of Led Zeppelin's records where there was a side that was just much duller. It was a way to separate the sound, giving the speaker a function on the recording. I noticed that because in my car one of the speakers went out and I would listen to the radio or a tape and I couldn't listen to it. There was just nothing, it was completely different. Together it made a lot of sense, it gave a lot of spatial spreading. It was just like one speaker did the high end and one did the low end.

And you started doing that on the Pumpernickel record?

We mixed it through an EQ and did it until it sounded right. Once we had all the levels right we did all the moves accordingly. We also spread the drum kit from high to low, all the cymbals were on the left, the snare drum was in the center and the kick drum was on the right.

When you had headphones on, did it feel like things were kind of tugging back and forth?

A little bit, what happens is it dictates the motion... you're right, exactly. The high end moves to the right if that's the high end speaker. A guitar part that starts slow and starts moving up would naturally go from right to left. It sounded crazy, that was before I had my 1/2" and we mixed it to DAT so it sounds a little cold and clinical.

What kind of projects came after that? Did you have enough gear to start on stuff?

To start I had the 24-track which has been a 16- track 2" — those records were done on a 16-track 2". It was only two years later that I put on the 24-track heads.

That's when you found it in the box?

Yeah, the box that came with the machine. There was a set of heads that were in really good shape and I had JRF in New Jersey do all the heads. I sent it to them and asked how they were. They told me something great, they said the playback head was on its last leg, which is when it would sound the best because it was the least amount of metal between the magnet and the tape. It would be extra high up, but the next step after that that would be bad. But the record and the play heads were in good shape.

That's a 3M 79?

Yeah, it's a good machine. They have a completely different tape path than Studers or MCIs. It doesn't have springs around the capstans to load the tape. It was designed for submarines. The original design for those machines were for triangulation for finding a rotation in the ocean. They would put out all these buoys in the ocean that would send out these... you'd know from a signature of a certain transmission that it was that buoy in this location triangulating with other sounds coming in you could tell.

The first 2" 16 tracks that came out, like Ampex, were basically video tape machines that were converted to audio recorders.

That's funny, the same thing happened to ADAT.

That's true! [laughter]

Last week, Tara Jane O'Neil [ex-Rodan] came in to mix her solo record. She had done it on a couple of ADAT 20-bit XTs. She did a nice job.

She recorded it at home?

Most of it — she would carry it with her. If she wanted a drum overdub she would go to the drummer's place. You get that side of it, the portability and the inspiration. Obviously, I can't move a 24-track around.

How do you use the space in here?

Sort of by default, the standard square-ish part of it is where I put the drums. If I do a recording live, we'll find spaces and use the baffles to minimize the bleed. If it's going to be all in the same room I don't mind a little bleed, I just try to control it. The Silver Jews record was all in one room with no separation. Well, I put two amps in the garage. I just have to find the right location for the room mics to get a mutual balance. The Deep Red EP from Versus, a lot of that was room mics placed so that I could build from them and then add kick and snare as support. I get more defined low end with close mics so I kind of balance the two. I started building all the mixes with the room mics and then I just tried to see how the bass would fit in there, etc. It was literally raising the faders until the snare came into the picture the right way.

Did you plan a lot when you were designing this room?

I thought about it for a month or two as I was getting my stuff over here. I just thought of having a baseball diamond. The board wasn't in that window, that window didn't exist. I only had this small window to see. Since it's a small room, I was afraid of getting too much bleed to put a second window in, plus I ran out of money at that point. To this day, the bleed that comes in from the live room is through the door. That's a solid door, but these are all studio constructed separate walls... two layers of sound board, sheet-rock, separate studs, insulation and air between the two. The wall is about 12" thick.

My studio's exactly the same way, the door bleeds but the window never bleeds.

If I sit in the middle of the room the sound is totally coming from the door. The door is far though, I hear it come through but not enough.

Are you worried about moving and having to totally build a new space, or excited?

I'm excited, this will be the second incarnation, so all the things I've learned over the past few years will become the new design. A bigger control room would be nice, to have slightly bigger speakers to monitor all the levels comfortably.

Let's go into the control room and talk about some of the toys. You were talking about what you mix down to and how much difference that makes to what your working on.

Recording and mix down are amazingly different to me. I've recorded on the computer quite a bit lately and it doesn't really do to the sounds I'm recording what a 24-track will do. If I do another all computer project I'll probably just record the basic tracks on 24. I think it makes a really big difference.

And dump it over?

Yeah, you use the same reel and transfer the tracks over and do stuff to them and then mix to 1/2". The 2" is a real convenient format because you don't need to do a data backup of it like you do on a computer. Also, you know you can find 20- year old tapes and play them if they've been taken care of properly.

When did you get the computer system installed?

I got it in early '97. I'm still running the same software that I was running before, the TripleDAT software. At the time it was relatively cheap and it had the features that I wanted so it still applies... terrible reverbs though.

When do you use the computers and when do you just work on 2" tape?

In general, if it's a rock band, I'm just working on 2" tape unless they're getting into production more than anything else. It's kind of too complicated, right now, for me to dump just a specific section and repair it and then dump it back in perfect time. I haven't really tried stuff like that at all. It's more of just an easier way to do tape edits than to use the 1/2" right now. Although, I've done that too, where I would mix a song in sections and tape it together. That works pretty well.

Was that easy to learn, the tape splicing?

It was horrifying at first, I didn't have time to really... I was already running when I got my first 1/2" and people would ask me to cut in another version of the outro or something. I would sit there and just by listening and by really making sure I was marking the right spots that it was going to work. 30 i.p.s is pretty forgiving. Actually, I was conservative on the cut which is a fine thing. It's totally unnerving to cut tape for the first few times.

I just got a 1/4" deck and I have to learn how to do it and I'm terrified. I want to learn it before I have to do it.

You can just goof around, just record some music and start cutting in other pieces.

What kind of projects do you like to use the computer for?

Recently I did a project for a French label called Lithium Records. A solo artist came in and did tracks, but he really wanted to use the cut and paste aspect of it. I gave him the choice when he came in. I said, "Well, we can work with the 24 and you'll basically have to record the main track and go back and do the overdubs. Or we can do it in the computer where we can do loops," etc.... do a drum part for a few minutes and take out some sections and put it back together. The problem was that he was unable to play to a click track. So I was unable to do anything until later when he played some traditional instruments. There was kind of an obvious realization, when he was playing, that a lot of the freedom of the playing is exactly what kind of dynamics we might consider, like volume. The volume doesn't necessarily fuck up your timing, but the dynamics like tempo will. The best thing about using the computer, that time, was getting multiple takes of vocals and putting them together as a comp. track. That's really easy. It's not too hard with the 24-track, it's just that much easier on the computer. Once in a while a drummer would come in and do a track and that would be on the 24-track. We were worried about the sound quality issue — with a record that's a 1/3 24-track material and 2/3 computer. The sounds had what we wanted, like the depth that we wanted originally.

You made sure to get the sound you wanted before going into the computer.

Well, you know that, with digital, you sort of have to get the sound before. It's too transparent, which could be good thing because you can totally use it. You can get that weird sound you want and pretty much just record that. Come back with that same high and low end that you had when you were tracking. On a 24-track if your hitting the tape harder and harder the spread of harmonics changes dramatically. I recorded some acoustic guitar yesterday, finger picking on a classical. I had the tape, so it was saturating just the low end and that was giving me mid and high harmonics, which went with the song. I could've never done that on the computer. I wasn't hitting any pre-amps hard, if I had it wouldn't have been the same result anyway. It would've distorted a different way than the tape. And it doesn't crackle, if your machine is running really well, the distortion won't crackle.

It takes a lot.

There is a lot of headroom. It's also the electronics in the machine. For example, the Studer 1/2" won't have as much headroom and you'll hear distortion on the cards. That's not the same thing as tape distortion, it's very different. The op amps on this machine have different thresholds I guess. Whereas on the 3M 79 they're really, really solid. It's very forgiving. I think if you record live or improv... to have a machine that can basically go with you like a microphone or a pre-amp can. You won't fuck up the take.

Yeah, I'll look over at my machine and see the needle and the bass is just flat out stuck.

That's also because they're calibrated to monitor 1K, the high end won't register on the needles. They're average, not peak. So, if the high hat's not even moving you'll still have it pretty loud.

I notice that with shakers or tambourine...

Well, because it doesn't even hear it, it's listening to 1K.

The transients are insane, you look at your LED meters and they're going really high, but over here it's just... it's barely moving.

For cymbals.

Yeah, 'cause if you saturate them it also changes the sound of them.

Cymbals and snares I don't usually like to saturate unless I'm specifically going for something.

I've done records where you just smash the snare with a little bit of crunch...

Yeah it depends, it can be frustrating and it can get kind of rubbery too. Sometimes you lose the attack by your compressor. It catches it so quickly, it totally sucks out the front end of the sound wave. In a weird way, that would actually make it for a less aggressive record.

You've got some good toys going here.

Yeah, that's my recording rack and my effects rack, basically.

Is this one of those Fostex spring reverbs?

Yeah, my friend had one that I heard a few times and I found one for $60 or $70. They're good for guitar because it's exactly like a spring reverb in a guitar amp. For vocals it's pretty good. Drums... it can be pretty weird, it can make that ping sound, but it's great on cymbals.

I know on the overheads you can pull some stuff off with this.

It's got more mid-range and it accentuates the highs a little longer. I tend to record flat and dry and I tend to mix that way. I don't really go for effects as a default setting to make something work.

What albums have sounds on it that you like? Do you ever think about that?

Oh yeah... I'm glad that after doing this for four years, that when I listen to records I still listen to music. I think if you're recording for quite awhile and you listen to music, you sort of go into engineering mode. It's something you have to be aware of.

You try to shut it off.

Yeah, and that can only help you because you should have control over the engineering and not really worry about the music, but they're linked hand in hand.

The sound of something is very relative to how it's perceived.

There's a record that I like by The Fall which sounds crazy. A friend of mine let me hear it. It's called Slates, it's an EP that's really, really amazing.

Do you stay pretty busy here with work all the time?

Pretty much. I had a slow August, which was actually great because I got to relax. That's actually another important thing because I work here by myself. Only one other engineer has really worked here for a period of time. That gave me a little rest but I was usually here anyway because the studio has it's own idiosyncracies so I had to make sure everything was cool.

How much do you end up working per week or month?

Average, I probably work three-weeks a month at least. Last year I did a 65 day stint with no breaks which was really hard. That was the Silver Jews record, and just before that the French record on Lithium. They came over here to record... it was a crazy record. That was 35 days and there was 12 for the Silver Jews and there's two other records in there. I was done after those... cooked.

Did you take a vacation? [laughter]

Yes, I actually went to England to master the Silver Jews record. That was the beginning of the break, that was two months later.

How was it mastering? You were mastering for the vinyl mostly weren't you?

It was both. It was both simultaneously, which was kind of weird because the mediums are so different in the way they have to be mastered, I think.

Were you happy with how the vinyl sounded?

I don't have one. I just called Drag City today and they're sending me one. It was my fault, I forgot to ask them for one.

Was it on regular vinyl or 180 gram?

I'm not sure. I just saw the direct metal master. It was fun, we went from each song on side A. Wes ampled the reel because they only had 14" reels there so we put the whole side on one reel. We listened to every song and wrote down all the EQs and compression settings and did it in real-time with my hands on the EQs and compression and doing the fade between each song. I was pretty happy with the mastering — I got a DAT copy and they actually did very little to it. I sort of wrote down in my mind what they were doing to it and like I said, it was very similar to other EQ curves I've seen mastering places do. There was barely any limiting of any kind, maybe a dB or two. I didn't mix with any compression. There was a little compression on the vocals but there was no mix compression for one thing. I love to do that really.

I don't know why people do that.

On certain material it lends an effect. I guess I don't really record that kind of material that often. I've tried it with the Manley — we put everything through it just a little bit. There wasn't that much compression on the recording itself so it was a way to kind congeal everything. It's easy to go too far with that and it's almost impossible to recoup. The plug-ins for Cubase has this... the threshold, instead of going down you go up, it'll boost the loud sections of the song. It's very smooth, you can set it for a dB or two if you feel like there has been a mistake mixing or something I haven't tried that yet.

That's interesting. If you take something that's been done on a 4- track or with a real limited dynamic recording gear in the first place and then to add that in during the mastering process to try and open it up a little it might be helpful.

I've been curious about mastering. The first record I did came back from mastering totally fucked up. It wasn't a hi-fi thing to begin with, but instead of leaving it alone and trying to humor us, they decided to brighten it up and they removed some low end, which they thought was probably in the interest of the music. It turns out it was losing a lot of the low end stuff that we were doing, which was really bad. We did really cool stuff with the distorted bass and I guess they thought it wasn't going to please people... I don't know. It was too late, it was a small label and they pressed like 500... forget it. After that I attended just about every mastering session of anything I worked on.

When you're recording a record and producing for the band — when it comes to mastering do you charge the client to show up at mastering?

I never have.

I never have either.

Mostly I think it's because the clients have been under strict budgets. I felt like they're already paying to get it mastered. I never charge. It's just a day off but it's still work. The other thing is if I have no budget I'll just do the mastering here.

What do you use for here?

I use the TC Electronics for conversion.

Is it the "Finalizer"?

Yeah, it's the Finalizer Plus so it's got 24-bit input. I've been pretty happy with it actually, definitley a step up from the converters in the DA 30 that I used to use. I can actually give somebody a copy, whether it's a master or for them to evaluate the mixes and what they think it'll eventually need... song order and sequence. If I give them a CD — and most likely it will become a CD — they can make an informed judgement about the final product. They can have the CDs of the mixes, I'll just transfer it from 1/2", I won't compress or anything. I'll maximize the levels but I won't compress or limit it. I'll just give them exactly what we have on CD. This way when they do go to mastering, they can say they've heard it on four different systems. Basically, the job of the engineer... listen to it on the Realistics [Minimus 7s] for a little while then the NS10s and just see how it translates. Obviously it should be a similar picture from speaker to speaker. If it's too radically different then you know your spreading things a little too off.

This looks almost like my studio. I noticed on the Realistic speakers [Minimus 7s] that I wasn't hearing the bass guitar coming through on them.

It's bad because you should really be able to hear it. It shouldn't have the punch like it does on regular speakers, but if it's losing itself entirely then there's a problem. Usually, it's the guitar. When you've got two or three layers of guitar chords, it takes up an enormous amount of room. I'd rather record one take with all the right sounds than to create texture, by layering, as a remedy. If the part is well worked out and well played, I don't think there should be a need for overdubs. Unless you want to do doubles. People do exact doubles and pan them, that makes more sense to me than a lot of layering on the thick chords.

I like layering when it's for specific things, like My Bloody Valentine [Tape Op#26] or Cocteau Twins... going for the depth thing with crazy layers.

In that case, they are the bass mixes where the bass is just more like an extension of the guitar sometimes. It just makes up a big string instrument, with a cool, solid low-end. I did that once for a recording where I split the guitar through two amps. One amp I made it sound like a guitar as much as possible, with a nice even representation of what the guitarist was playing. Then I split the signal and went to the B15 (Ampeg) and sort of drove it pretty hard and cut all the high-end off, and mixed the two signals. It was great, he would go to a low note and the bass sounded amazing. He was detuned below D, it was really deep. The guitar amp wouldn't have really shown that effect the way a 15" speaker with a really good tube amp might do.

How did you even decide that you wanted to do a studio?

I wasn't happy with the other studios. It was partly my fault, I didn't have the information to guide the engineers to the vision of the music. I would come out of the studios being like, "That's wrong, that's not how it's supposed to sound." The best way I thought of assuring that I would have exactly the image in my head become something I could hear, would be to have control of the recording. The only way to do that was to get a studio. It was everything, like engineer-to-band relationships. Bands don't necessarily work very well under pressure, they spend weeks, months or years writing songs, it doesn't just translate to just a few chords. Those chords probably had a sound when they were using them and it probably informed their plan. I was playing guitar yesterday, for two hours, working out a part. As soon as I started mic'ing it, it was wrong. I used the headphones to monitor what the mics were picking up and I spent a good ten minutes trying different things. I was playing the melody on the high strings, which was complementing one of the low strings, and I couldn't hear it. It was very clear that when I was playing that this one open string was ringing and the other note I was playing should be there as well, but it wasn't. Other aspects of the guitar were becoming dominant and they weren't the ones I wanted. I record a lot, for myself. I haven't released anything, but I think it's important to...

It's good to put yourself on the other side of the glass occasionally. To try and accomplish something,and getting frustrated in your own studio, you realize how...

Imagine somebody who doesn't know how this stuff works, they don't know. You don't know either, you don't know what's going to happen when you move the mic over... If you want that open A string to ring well, that's going to take moving around, mostly on an acoustic instrument.

Putting an acoustic guitar on a rock band track is one of the hardest things in the world.

It is; a great example is recording the acoustic guitar for David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, it has an incredible guitar sound and when the band comes in it's still incredibly solid and defined.

What did they do?

I think a lot of it is in the playing, but the thing is, is that the acoustic guitar wasn't an afterthought. It's the core of the song and when the drums come in it fits into the sound so well, everything grows out, in a way. They're produced by somebody who's job is not to be behind the board, but his job is to listen and make sure it's all going well. Sometimes, if you're an engineer, you're listening to whether or not this thing is going to crackle or if there's any phase issues etc... Meanwhile there's the other people in there who say, "It's just wrong " or "It has to be more lively." If you're just an engineer getting a band you've never heard before, you probably don't have a vision of it.