John O'Mahony | TapeOp

Electric Lady Studios has a long, amazing New York recording history. Under the guidance of Lee Foster, the studio has seen a renaissance over the last decade. Daft Punk, Arcade Fire, The National, Black Keys, and Lana Del Rey are just some of the recent clients. John O' Mahony, a charming Irish ex-pat, has a home here in the Mix Suite. He' s worked with Coldplay, Metric, Sara Bareilles, Madi Diaz, The Cribs, and Oh Land.

How'd you end up engineering?

I started with a Tascam Portastudio 464 that I bought when I was 16 to record my band. I learned more on that machine than anything else I've had. I listen to some of those recordings now, and I wish I could get those sounds again! When you're a kid you're doing it all wrong in the best way because you don't know any better. Straight out of high school in Cork City in Ireland, I was working at studios. I started off as a tape op. I came in every morning and cleaned the tape machine heads. I remember my first week: I cleaned an oven and punched a lead vocal. One was scary and the other was annoying. I had just turned 17. I've never had another job besides working at a recording studio. I moved to another studio in town and worked as the house engineer there. It was a 24- track studio with a Soundcraft console, and a Tascam MSR-24, 1-inch machine.

You never see those!

Yeah! The studio owner also did tour management and FOH. He went on a big tour and left the studio in my hands, so I ran the day to day for a little over a year. I would do the decent bands that would come through. We'd do demos, and if a band got a record deal they'd go straight to London, New York, L.A., or Nashville, never to be seen again. Whether they were successful or not, you weren't gonna get a shot at working on their record. I'm an obsessed Sonic Youth fan, and I was always really curious about New York. In October of '97 I came here for three weeks to check it out. I instantly thought, "I have to move here!" I went home, got everything sorted out, and I was living here four months later. There were studios all over town back then. I sent out 20 resumes, did 20 interviews, and got 20 offers. I took a starting job as an assistant engineer at Chung King [Studios] on Varick Street in '98. I picked that place because it seemed a little bit nuts. There were people there from all over the world. A Japanese assistant, a Brazilian assistant, an English guy, and other characters you couldn't invent if you tried. I loved the insanity. For consoles they had two [Neve] VRs, a Neve Capricorn, and they were installing an SSL J in a new room. The first session I assisted on was Blondie, then Lauryn Hill, and then later I got to work with David Bowie. About six months into assisting they started booking me engineering dates. Back then there were still house engineers. It was before DAW's took over, and even the most simple overdub needed a professional studio. Labels would call up and say, "We've got a vocal session, we need to book him at six o'clock tonight." Studios were booming! For the first two years, I didn't leave Manhattan, and I didn't get a single weekend off in the first nine months. I was 22 and I was hungry to work.

What happened after Chung King?

I left Chung King to go freelance, because I was getting calls for tracking and a little bit of mixing. I left the studio in June of 2001. I was still going back, because I'd be taking clients there, but I was also free to travel for other work. It was my next step out into the world. And then 9/11 happened, and the industry nearly shut down for nine months. It turned out to be the worst time ever to go freelance. So that was a scary year or two there.

Were you scrambling for work?

Yeah! Grabbing just enough gigs to keep going. I mean, there was stuff out there, but no one had any money. The labels weren't sending checks. You could do a gig that would be worth a lot of money on paper, but you might not get paid for six months. In mid 2003 I got called to stand in for Andy Wallace's [Tape Op #25] Pro Tools engineer. At first, I was hesitant because I didn't want to go and work underneath another engineer again. But I was curious to meet Andy because he'd made so many records that were really inspiring to me. He's an absolute gentleman. We hit it off straight away, you couldn't find a better guy to work for. So I said, "Anytime you need someone to fill in, I'll do it." Over the next couple months there was a lot of filling in to do, 'cause his guy had a career of his own taking off; and then the position fell to me full time. We worked solid for many years. Then Andy started taking less bookings, because he wanted to have more time off.

That might eventually happen.

Which was actually perfect for me, because I was still getting my own calls. I didn't wanna' lose my own momentum. I ended up doing half of the year on my own, and half of the year with Andy. I had a solid foundation of work, but then I could go off and do records like the Metric album [Live It Out]. This was early in their career and they didn't have much budget, but I didn't need to make money off of it if I scheduled it in my downtime. I produced Emily Haines' [of Metric] solo record [Knives Don't Have Your Back] for free, because Andy and I were in the middle of doing System Of A Down. I had two weeks off and said, "I'll make a record with you in ten days at Sunset Sound Factory." Andy's work paid my bills and allowed me to keep working with the independent bands I loved.

But that's some good stuff to have on your résumé, too.

Yeah! I made great friends through it and all those bands come back to me, and we still make records together. There's no better feeling than growing with a band and sharing the ups and downs together. At the end of 2008 I started to feel like it was time to do my own thing and handed over the Andy job to the next guy in line. Since then it's been running around and mixing!

When did you move into this space?

I first came to Electric Lady in August 2008 to mix Fantasies for Metric. They'd recorded it at their own Giant Studio in Toronto, and called me when it came to mixing and said, "We'd really love to do this in New York!" So, I suggested we try Electric Lady. We booked into Studio B for what was meant to be two weeks, and we ended up re-recording a lot of the record during mixing, a trend that's continued into every record we make together. We always have a guitar strapped onto Jimmy [Shaw], pedals under the desk, and a synth standing by as I'm mixing. Typically I'll have this really vague idea, and Jimmy or Emily will take it and turn it into something real and better than I could have ever imagined.

Something you heard missing from the mix?

Yeah. I'm not a musically trained guy, I just have reactions to what I'm hearing. I'd say, "You know the thing that goes like 'that'?," and I'll make a funny noise. Then Jimmy will come back with, "Okay! I know what you want!" So the first time I was here in August 2008, we ended up staying for a month to finish the record. At the end of that month I basically never left. Everything else that came along, I'd do here. I still travel a little bit though. I spent a summer in Copenhagen producing a record which I brought back here to mix, and I still enjoy going to Los Angeles and London, or wherever jobs take me. Now that Studio A is in such beautiful shape though, I try to do all my recording there.

The sound in the live room seems so cool.

That refurbished [Neve] 8078 is the kind of thing you dream about. I recorded the recent Sara Bareilles album on that desk and didn't use a single piece of outboard. Vintage King did a beautiful job on the restoration, you wouldn't believe how clean the signal path is for a desk that was built in 1974. It was refreshing because these days as a mixer you get a lot of things that have been self recorded in home studios or with temporary setups. You wonder "How am I gonna make this work?," all preconceptions or philosophies are out the window. You have to make it work. They'll have the wackiest ideas, but it's fun because you ultimately want to be doing stuff that's different every time. My biggest fear in the world is to get stuck in a rut and become a cookie- cutter engineer like one of those guys whose [Universal Audio] 1176 is always on the same setting.

Yeah.

I feel it's a generational shift right now, and that late '80s and early '90s way of working has come to an end. I think that's a good thing. I wouldn't want to send back a mix that says, "This is your song with my stamp." That's ridiculous. I know I don't want to listen to records made like that. My favorite producers and mixers are those who keep changing it up from record to record, which I think is absolutely brilliant. It's like when I send stuff to a mastering engineer. I want it to come back sounding like my mix, but with any possible enhancement that makes it better. With that logic, I'd like the producer, and ultimately the artist, to feel that I took what they were doing up a notch, not that I tried to force my brand on it.

Do you see yourself deliberately breaking your own rules though?

I'll hear a song and immediately go, "Maybe that vocal should be dry" or something I wasn't doing on the previous songs. Especially within an album if I find myself repeating the same treatment, I'll deliberately make myself do something different, until one day the band says, "Do what you were doing on that other song!" That can be a pitfall of having your own room. On one hand you don't have to come in and set up all the time, but you don't stumble upon things accidentally as much. There was one day at [Sunset] Sound Factory in L.A. I turned their plate reverb on and it happened to be at some crazy long setting from the last guy. It's something I would have never thought of doing on that song, but it had an eight second decay. I put it on most of the instruments really low and it sounded massive. Now I'll try to swap out my outboard and change things up regularly to keep it fresh. I'll bump into Michael Brauer [Tape Op #37] in the hallway and we'll trade ideas or pass around pieces of gear to try.

You've got mix work coming in from all over the world?

It's been good. I don't do Facebook or anything but I took good advice from my management, and I put up a simple website. Nearly all my work comes from bands calling me directly, more often than their labels and such. I'll get emails from all over: Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Scandinavia, Canada. A lot of it is people who don't know what it actually costs to make a record in the US, you know?

Oh yeah. I assume your rates are not ridiculously low, but not ridiculously high, either.

For a while I was losing a lot of money to studios. Especially with modern mixing culture, where recalls can be endless because everyone and their cousin gets forwarded a link to the mix and they naturally all have opinions. It might take days for notes to trickle in. Just when you think you've got all those little requests sorted out and you are in the clear, that one missing exec freshly back from the Hamptons or whatever will want to add their two cents. So, stop the press and get it back on the desk. That used to get expensive real fast, but would still be expected within the original budget. Also I was paying for a live room and a lounge, that nobody was using because the band's on tour or doesn't have the budget to fly in and attend the mix.

Because you were using Studio A downstairs, before.

Yeah, and the old studio C, upstairs. The lounge would see action when I would be watching soccer, drinking coffee, and waiting for notes. The live room would see action if the assistant and I were playing table tennis. But I was paying for it, because that's what came with the room. This studio's always been very good to me, and always tried to accommodate different budgets, but it's New York City and the overheads on space are what they are. So that was one of the reasons to get myself into this smaller footprint. No amenities. I walk in and work. For the most part, I don't use an assistant. I designed my new room around my AMS- Neve Genesys and re-thought my work flow to enable me to move between songs at lightning speed while still mixing all analog.

Are there people that work for the studio that are available?

Yeah, there's a pool of general assistants I can call from and they'll help me when I need an extra set of hands. Having Roger [Deller, studio tech] next door to me is invaluable. I've got my overhead costs down as much as physically possible. I can keep my rates intact, and still work with the newer budgets that are out there.

Why don't you set up your own space? But, then again, you've mentioned a number of amenities you're getting by having this space in a studio.

That's what I was going to do! Then Lee [Foster, studio manager] talked me into staying here. He's become a really good friend, has always supported me over the years, and he wanted to keep the family together as much as he could. For the most part, it seems mixers these days, especially in the US, all have their own studio. They're mixing in the box, they have a hybrid setup in their pool house, or guys like you, who put your own shop together. Lee had the vision to support residential mixers while re-establishing Electric Lady as a place for classic recording with vintage consoles in his commercial rooms. Michael Brauer has studio B locked down. Tom Elmhirst and his engineer, Ben Baptie, have taken over the renovated Studio C upstairs. There are fantastic records being made here daily. It's a really amazing little community to be part of.