Royal Trux: Their home studio fun

Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty have led the Royal Trux for a number of years now. They pulled a coup of sorts when Virgin Records dumped a lot of money on them, put out two albums, and then dropped the Trux. Jennifer and Neil kept the house and full-on home studio that they bought with said money and now they're back to putting out fine records on Drag City , like they had before. Only now, they can do all the recording and mixing at their home studio! We caught up with Jennifer at EJ's in Portland before they tore the house down in a rockin' frenzy.

I was listening to Twin Infinitives today and I was wondering how it was recorded. There's all these layers of stuff going on.

Yeah there was. It was done 8 tracks at a time and dumped down.

Was this done on 8 track or was it 16?

No, this was done at Greg Freeman's in San Francisco.

Yeah, I know. I've worked with him.

He had a 2' 16 and he also had an 8 track there.

Did you do the second and third records with Greg?

No, we just did Twin Infinitives . Also some songs that we ended up using on the Live and Unreleased CD.

On Cats and Dogs did you play everything on that or did you have a live band?

We had a band. We actually did that in a 24 track studio with an API board that had belonged to Brian Wilson at one time. Omega Studios is the name of the place. It was really overpriced and all but we got a deal with this guy and we tracked in 2 days and mixed in two. It was with a drummer, a second guitar player, Neil and myself. As far as the basic tracks, it was all done simultaneously-live.

It sounds that way. That's pretty damn fast to record a record!

I guess it really was. It just seemed luxurious because I guess it was our first time ever in a very expensive studio.

Was that the first time with a band?

Yeah.

Did you rehearse a lot?

Yeah, yeah. Neil and I wrote all the songs and then we picked the musicians that we wanted to work with. It was three weeks straight of playing the set and trying out the arrangements.

Were the vocals live or did you over dub them?

The vocals? The vocals were live. I did my vocals, and I have a completely different phrasing than Neil does, so I did mine and he did his but without having each other in the headphones. Hearing that kind of thing...

It'd throw you off. So at this point you guys have a studio at your house.

Yeah.

You have 4 ADATs?

We have three ADATs but we just bought ProTools so it's all synced up. Kind of unlimited tracks.

Cool. Go crazy with that stuff.

We haven't replaced the BRC yet. It's so much easier than a mouse. We've got a clean board; a Mackie 24 by 8 but we have 16 channels of Drawmer 1960 mic pres. Everything goes through the Drawmers.

Where did you score those?

Through this place in Indiana called Sweetwater.

Yeah, I've gotten stuff through there.

We had a sales rep and we were buying so much stuff through them we were getting cut some really good deals.

So you went to recording school?

I went to recording school for a year and I went to college...

Pre Royal Trux?

College was simultaneous 'cause I moved to New York while we were doing it. Neil was gonna move to New York so I only applied to one school. I was a freshman and you can only get into the classes you can get in. There was one class that was on theory that was beyond calculus and I was like, 'Hmmmm.' There was one really technical class where it was about soldering and it started there and went on. It was all done at Planet Sound which is where the Fat Boys recorded. Neil and I had already started recording the first record and we'd gone to so many different studios-we'd worked with Wharton Tiers and all these different guys that all had this information about how things should be done. It's not that I disagreed but I wanted to know why they were saying it and what was going on. So I would go to the class at the studio and ask all these questions. 'Why this?' 'Why that?'

Were you driving them crazy?

Yeah, I guess I kinda... They were like older people that were trying to make a career and I was a real pain in the ass. But then I quit and dropped out of college and we moved to San Francisco. The School for Recording Arts in San Francisco. You know that place? You can take a semester for $400, and they had this certificate thing and I wanted to have it as an ID whenever I went in to record somewhere I would just flash it and keep moving. 'Pardon me.' I was there for two weeks and I blew it, I quit, but I picked up enough about what the hell was going on. Fundamentally it is all pretty simple.

What was the reason for bailing on the place?

In San Francisco? Uhh...

I can guess...

There was definitely problems.

Anyway, that whole Virgin Records deal enabled you to buy a house and set up a studio. Then you ended up working with David Briggs...

Yeah, he was the most awesome guy.

I kind of figured he helped you set up the studio.

The first Virgin album was done down in Memphis at Keynote recording studio that was, at the time, owned by Joe Walsh. David was a really particular and peculiar guy. He didn't really do a whole lot of work in his life, Spirit, Easy Action [Alice Cooper], and a bunch of Neil Young records. I remember the day he called me, and he said, " Cats and Dogs ... I love this. I'm coming out to your house." Two days later he flew out to the mid- dle of nowhere in Virginia and was sleeping on our floor. When the record was done, it didn't end. For a year afterwards he was call- ing twice a week. Then he got really sick, and we were always talking until the day before he died. There's liner notes in the Spirit reis- sues and Randy California wrote this really succinct description of David Briggs. You should get it.

Did he come across your stuff accidentally?

He had done a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds record and he'd been sent a bunch of records that were coming out around that time and he got Cats and Dogs . Then we signed to Virgin and he was a producer that we were kind of interested in talking to so we had our A &R person call him and he knew Cats and Dogs so he said, "Why don't you just call them?" So he called us and we started talking.

Were you under pressure to find a name producer?

No, we wanted one! We'd never had the money to have one. I mean, we were gonna use him for Sweet Sixteen too, and we were already talking about how we were gonna do it and that's how it came to pass that he'd come out to see the house after we'd bought it and we were doing a lot of remodeling and construction and we started talking about bass traps and stuff for the back room. He didn't know he had cancer- he just thought he had a really bad back. Sweet Sixteen , we were gonna do it there. Then he got really sick and we couldn't find... We met with one other producer, this guy, Peter Cohn, who had done a lot of Rush records and also happened to be the brother of our A & R person. It didn't work out that great. It was meant to be this other way, but since it can't be, we're just gonna deal with it on our own. And we had the guy, Greg Archilla, who did the engineering for Thank You , do the mixing as if everything had gone to plan.

Did Virgin want to supervise mixing?

They would have loved to have done all those things. They would have loved for us to use Peter Cohn, they would have loved for us to have not taken all that money and built a studio. It didn't make them happy at all. At a certain point I think they were like, "Hands off. If we give them enough rope they'll just hang themselves." It wasn't like a "Fuck You" to them at all. It was just how we thought it should be.

So, your last record you did all at home. Did you mix it somewhere else?

No, we mixed Accelerator there.

Through the Mackie? I've got a Mackie 32 x 8...

We record through the pre-amps but nothing goes down to tape without being put through them again. Everything is outboard. We don't even use EQ on the Mackie. It's basically the faders. It's just like a landscape machine.

So you've got a bunch of outboard EQ? Do you have a lot of racks?

Yeah.

You must have a massive patch bay system!

It gets really... the whole balanced/unbalanced... I'll be putting them in and out, the signals not going through, and I'll be, 'Fuck!' Every time we get something new we have to re-configure everything...

I know all about that.

Ya know, we've got nearfield monitors, Genelecs. And we'll check it on a boombox. Standard stuff.

Do you do all the engineering yourselves?

Yeah, and Paul [Oldham]. He didn't know that much about it at the beginning but we sent him to school. Actually, he's got two credits to go.

You haven't had anybody record at your house?

No. Nobody except for us.

Is there a reason or is that just the way it's gonna be?

Yeah, that's the way it's gonna be. The way we do stuff... the next thing is going to be a spectrum analyzer. My idea is to put on a hit record, watch the analysis, and make sure that the next album we write is gonna be the exact same pattern.

You'll need an oscilloscope too.

Yeah, of course. Behringer's got some awesome stuff coming out. It's gonna really encompass all of that. "We'll make it look like this." So nobody is allowed in there.

But you've done mixes for other people there.

If they send us stuff that's already been tracked and they dump it down to ADAT. But nobody can track in there.

So what about the Make-Up [In Mass Mind produced by Neil and Jennifer]?

I went with Neil. He and I set it up at this studio [Stillness] that was maybe an hour away from us. It's set up like ours, in a big, old house. The guy's done a lot of stuff. It's analog. Those guys in the Make-Up, they're kind of into a purist thing. We did all the tracking and all the mixing there.

Do you enjoy producing other bands?

Yeah. They just had these really rough ideas. Some riffs. Then we just made this thing and Ian was just furiously writing lyrics as we were arranging instruments.

He was actually writing down lyrics? It just sounds like he...

Well, he does make some up! We got him the Anita Baker cover, "We Really Want You To Do This Song." It is great working with them. 

What about Will Oldham? Have you done anything besides that Trudy Dies single?

No, we did Trudy Dies . We did Edith Frost... I left... We were offered the job and they sent the demos of just her, guitar and vocals, very simple. She wanted to put it to record as a full band. We started coming up with ideas for it and stuff and I just realized that I could not deal with it at all so I flew to San Francisco. So Neil called me up and he had her crying and stuff.

Did he play on it at all?

Well, he's played on everything he's worked on but I always make sure it's mixed really low 'cause there's no guitar player like Neil. I always insist that we get royalties as well as a producer's fee because when he put's anything on a record... It's gonna change it. On the Will thing he pretty much played all the instruments.

Isn't that like organ...

Actually we had Liam doing that. Liam from Plush. That's how they met; Will and Liam. Liam is just a Mellotron freak. That's all he does, is work on Mellotrons. It's the most insane endeavor, really.

I read that you forced Dan [at Drag City] to put out the first Palace record.

Wasn't into it at all. We were like, "Dan!"

Does he like it now?

He and Will are really tight. I don't think he's gonna put out any more of Will's records though. They're good friends but it wasn't really his cup of tea at all. He just wasn't into it. Neil and I put on a tape of Will's when we were in Chicago and we were like, "Hey. A singer/songwriter. Have you ever thought about this?" And he was, "Oh man!" We were like, "C'mon, listen." We kept playing it over and over for four days and finally he was just, "Shut up." We just talked him into it. We felt like he should branch out a bit, ya know? He only had 2 or 3 bands.

Wanna get technical? What kind of mics do you guys like to use?

The AKG 535 is my mic of choice. It's kind of a whiny mic. It's what I use for my vocals... exclusively. Neil uses an Audio Technica 4033.

What do you use for drums?

For the kick, there's this one AKG that the one drummer we were using before wanted. It was a D110, not the 112. He got really anal about it. We were just, "Okay. Whatever this shit is." We tried to find it. They only made it for a year. We spent a long time trying to find it so we got the D112. We use Sennheiser overheads and we always put PZMs up.

Does it always change?

There's no formula. Each record sounds really different but it's all within the scope of the equipment we own. We keep buying new stuff.

So that's all in the back part of your house?

Yeah. It's got a really high ceiling with beams going across. We've got a PZM that's always slapped at the very top. Sometimes it's good and sometimes you just erase that track. There's a bathroom that's pretty much a bass trap. It gets these really great sounds. We do a lot of the vocals there because when we built the studio we had custom 300 foot cables made that go to the fourth floor of the house. I do the vocals on the third floor. There's an old, wooden landing and the ceiling goes up 30 or 40 feet. The guy who owned the house before us was a carpenter and built mirrors into everything. Just clapping there... there's the most awesome sound.

Do you put an extra mic in there or let that mic pick up the ambience?

Yeah, it picks it up. A lot of times Neil will record a lot of his guitar tracks in the old part of the house, which has a lot of stone, stone fireplace, etc. Then, we take the tracks and set up a really large speaker cabinet on the landing and we play the guitar tracks back out and re-record them.

Do you have one of those Reamp boxes?

No...

It's called Reamp. They make this transformer box where you can take it straight off of tape and plug it into an amp and it's the perfect level for a guitar amp. That way you're not overdriving the input.

Yeah. We lost one of our Drawmers... it's really depressing. I haven't dealt with sending it back to England. As far as voltage and stuff like that... it's all hit or miss. We blow stuff up all the time.

Do you have any ribbon mics? You can fry those pretty easy.

Yeah, I know. No ribbons but we've got a shitload of drawers full of mics. Actually, the mic list I got-what to buy-came from David and Greg, our drummer. I already knew AKG was my vocal mic. David assigned it to me; "This is your mic." We used it on Thank You and I used it on tour. I grew to like it. It is really hot, and I have no lung capacity whatsoever. I don't even tour with it now-a lot of small clubs don't even have phantom power. We went on this long tour and we had this roadie, this kid from Philadelphia... really crusty, blowin' snot out of his nose... and he was always doing the sound checks and Neil would come up with the bleach. Neil would bleach my mic three times a day. By the end of the tour the diaphragm was just disintegrated. We had to send it to California to be redone. That's one good reason to carry your own mic. I've noticed that even if they're in good shape they smell like somebody else's bad breath. And there's all those little germs living inside it. Bleach is not the answer.

Are you planning to record some more stuff after the tour?

We started recording a little bit before we came out here. We're gonna take the band and record for two days, two songs, straight on with the band. We've been trying to work on this one song during sound checks.

While the band's playing well together?

Yeah. It's a 40 date tour... it's a long tour.

It sounds like a great setup. You're able to record at home on your own time.

It is, but we don't allow ourselves back there everyday. We go back there when there's a plan. Otherwise, the tapes would be stacked up to the ceiling. We'd be excessive and insane and we'd work too much! c/o: Drag City Recs ., PO Box 476867, Chicago, IL 60647