Jack Shirley - Remove the Middleman

Over the past decade, Jack Shirley has recorded what seems like every hardcore band in the Bay Area. I've wanted to interview Jack for years, so when he walked by me at Timeless Coffee in Oakland a few months ago, I introduced myself. Within 30 seconds we were talking gain staging and graphic EQs — total nerds! A few weeks later I drove down to an industrial park in East Palo Alto to check out Jack's studio, The Atomic Garden, and have this conversation.

Goddamn dude, you do a lot of records.

Yeah. The last four years, I've done a hundred records a year. That's either mastering, mixing, or full production.

That's insane. You're one of the go-to recording engineers for Bay Area punk and hardcore. How did that evolve?

I would say it's a "right place, right time" type of scenario. I've been doing this in the area for over 12 years, and when I started — with a [Digidesign] Mbox and a PC in my parents' garage — the peninsula between South San Francisco and Mountain View was full of punk kids playing music, and there wasn't anyone doing DIY recording. Maybe there were people doing what I do now, a mid-level kind of studio, but there was nobody doing the real low-level thing in their house. I was in a band that was part of a bigger community, and I think it was just a no-brainer. "Jack's recording over at his house. Let's go there." Some of those people who were part of that are still making music, and got bigger. Bands like Loma Prieta or Deafheaven. They get some recognition, and you just assume they'll go to the next step. But a lot of those people have kept coming back.

That's the best.

It is, because it's always better the second time. Or the third or fourth.

You do a lot of one-day sessions, right? I've seen a lot of "recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jack Shirley on..." and a single calendar date.

It's never completed in one day. They might have just tracked in a day, then I mixed and mastered later.

It's heartening to hear that! From a distance I'm like, "What the fuck? How does he do this?"

[laughs] That's just the band glossing over credits. I almost never mix the same day. It's very, very rare.

Well, for short sessions — say a band wants to track eight or ten songs in a day, what's the dynamic?

Almost every session that I do is live. Right there, that knocks off tons of time and painful shit. The band loads in. We figure out whether they're all going to be in the live room with the amps, or if it will be drums in the live room, amps in the iso booth, and people in here [the control room]. Those are the main choices. If it takes us two hours to set up and get mics checked, and the band has a half-hour worth of material, and they're well practiced, it's very conceivable that they could be done with their live takes in a couple hours. Then the bulk of the recording is done. Then we can do some vocals. I'm very much for the human error, the mistakes, and all that. I work quickly, but I spend a fair amount of time getting tones right. And because we're going to tape, I'm doing all my processing in the front-end. That speeds everything up.

I noticed you have mics on stands ready to go in your live room. That kind of thing is very different than working in someone else's room, where everything gets put away at the end of each session.

Every time I've been to another studio it takes forever to do anything, even with me engineering. Nothing's in the same room, none of the mics are around. I've been told that I work very quickly. There are things I just do to everything: I know that when the drummer hits as hard as she can, I want to get a couple of dB of compression. There's stuff that I do as a default. If, in the moment, it doesn't work I'll just bypass it. But, over the years, when I'm mixing similar styles of music, I find that I'm making a lot of the same moves.

Always adding 3 kHz to the kick drum?

Exactly. I love my [AKG] D12 on bass drum, but I know that it needs to go through the Pultec set a certain way for it to sound like I want. I want all this to go to tape very well-EQ'd so that I don't have to raise my noise floor. That's how I like to work, but it does save a bunch of time. When the band walks in to hear their take I want it to sound like the record's going to sound. Anytime anybody says, "But in the mix that'll be different, right?" I say, "Don't assume anything's going to be different. If it doesn't sound right to you right this second, tell me and we'll fix that." But I work fast, and I think musicians end up working fast as a result. Everyone's always surprised at how smooth and quickly things go. I don't ever use the computer when we're tracking. I don't know if that speeds things up, but it does give me great peace of mind, because I know that everything's going to work. I know that when I hit record on the tape machine that it's going to record without failure, unless the power goes out. I wouldn't bet any amount of money that my high-end Pro Tools system would do that.

Do you have to switch from "tracking mode" to "mixing mode"?

Kind of. This board isn't inline, so I have to use it as a split console. But I have enough inputs, so I can use 16 ins and monitor those 16 channels. And as soon as the live takes are done, I'll usually break down almost everything I set up. Then I have 24-channels open for the tape returns so I can start mixing. I'd still say 80% of my processing is done on the front-end. I might get into some surgical EQ [while mixing]. That's another thing I have to buy analog versions of now. I have two [Urei 565] Little Dippers [equalizers] on the way.

That's kind of funny, in the digital age. Surgical EQ is so easy with a plug-in.

I know! I started out digital, and I totally appreciate what it's capable of. I use it to my full advantage when the situation calls for it. But the more I use the analog equipment, the more I love it. And the more I understand what it must have been like for an all- analog guy in the ‘80s, when all this digital gear showed up and he might have been, "What the fuck is this? This is the new way?"

I can imagine looking at a little beige 1988 Macintosh, then looking across the room at your enormous, beautiful, Swiss-made tape machine, and saying, "Oh, hell no."

I had a MIDI controller propped up in the corner for ten years. Nobody ever said, "We should put keys on our record." The first week that my Hammond [organ] was here, it made it onto three records. [laughs] When the piano showed up it was like, "Oh dude! We should put piano on this record!" Bands who would never want spacey delay shit, they look at these tape echoes and they say, "We should put that on the recording." There's something about it. They don't care where it came from if they want delay. They don't even understand how a tape delay works. But they're excited by it. And when I get my EMT plate reverb tomorrow, I can walk people into the kitchen and say, "That's a reverb."

These days a lot of people probably have no idea what a plate reverb is!

Oh, dude. Half the people who walk in here ask me what that is [points at tape deck], because they've never seen a tape machine. Admittedly, when I went to go pick that up from the guy I bought it from, I had never seen a tape machine in real life.

Really?

I mean, I had the little one [1/4-inch, 2-track]. But I had never seen a 2-inch tape machine. I went to get it and it's like, "Whoa, this thing weighs 400 pounds!" But that's how it is when you have your own studio and all you ever do is work by yourself. If you want to learn how to use something, you have to go get one. That's why a lot of gear went in and out over the years — I was figuring out my tastes.

You also master a lot of your own recordings.

Probably ninety percent. Maybe more.

I've been getting more of that lately. "Can you master this too?" I don't love it, but it's increasingly common. And it's totally normal for you.

It came out of necessity. When you work with punk rock kids they're not going to spend $500 to master their $500 recording. They may not even know what mastering is. And, admittedly, I was really bad at it when I first started. I tried a lot of stupid techniques, mostly with my own band. But I feel like I've gotten pretty good at it, to the point now where I do a lot of just mastering. I say on my website, "I'm not a mastering engineer, and this is not a mastering studio." And it's cheap because of that. I just charge my regular hourly rate. I can't do the same kind of tricks that some places do, because I don't have the equipment.

Mastering is a fairly advanced art, at this point.

Absolutely. But for my own recordings the "mastering" won't be anything more than a little bit of fine-tuning EQ, and that's basically all I'm doing. The bulk of the work is done in the mix. By the time it's done it needs a few dB of volume and some surgical EQ to carve out a couple of spots, and that's it. I run it through the Massey Limiter, or the UAD Cambridge EQ, or the UAD Dangerous BAX EQ — that thing's badass.

So you're not trying to be super competitively loud?

No. I try to keep it reasonable, depending on the project. Kurt [Ballou, Tape Op #76] ruined it for all of us with [Converge's] Jane Doe . [laughs] But the more I upgrade this gear, the easier it gets to make loud recordings.

Is that the gear, or is that you?

Well, for instance — I was passive summing for a really long time. When I got to active summing, it was like, "Oh wow, this is great." Now I've got amplifiers [on the] channel. So when I push my kick drum up, it's getting saturated on its own. The passive summing is infinite headroom. It sounds cool, but it's not doing any squishiness.

So you feel like getting some saturation or compression on each individual channel is important.

Hell, yes. It's like tape. Not to the same extent, but, yes; I have my Pro Tools outputs calibrated hot so that I can clip the API console before the Pro Tools output will clip.

It's kind of ironic to buy a world-class console that was designed for wicked high headroom, then do your best to crush its inputs.

[laughs] Not crushing. Just enough to round it off. And I leave plenty of headroom on the master bus. But I'm pretty liberal when it's time to go to the 2-track tape at the end. And anything that comes off of that is flat — not in a brick wall way, but in the tape way. When you look at digital [waveforms], there are spikes everywhere. Tracks that come off the tape machine, even if it's moderately hitting tape — it's flat, and that's a beautiful thing. Especially if you're trying to do mastering. When I get music that I didn't mix, that machine [points at tape deck] is part of my mastering chain, because it does the work of a limiter without sounding like it. There're no stray transients anywhere. All I have to do is raise my fader and most of my loudness is already handled. There were times when I didn't have the gear to saturate sounds in a nice, musical way, and I didn't have the know-how to EQ something so it easily could be loud. And people were like, "I want my recording to be louder than Jane Doe ," And I'd say, "Alright. We'll try! Let's see what happens!" And those recordings sound fucking terrible. But you know, you learn. [laughs] I've found that the more analog my situation has gotten, the easier it is — it just does the sound that you are trying to do, all by itself. The same way that a film photo can get blown out, in a beautiful way. The tape is magic. Yes, I absolutely can emulate it in the computer, but it takes ten steps to do what I can do, just by pushing a fader up a little bit further.

A lot of the people I know who have tape decks, and who were tape proponents, have been slowly moving away from it. A lot of them have been moving more and more into the box, even the ones who have sick outboard gear. But tape specifically is challenging in a bunch of ways: cost, getting good tape stock, editing, commitment, and all that.

I think all those things are positives. Track limitation, editing limitation, and all that. To me it all filters down to "good."

You just have to find bands who...

Yes, yes. You have to find bands who can make it through a whole song. Which I'm lucky enough to have found. But it's still a hybrid situation; this place can also be a fully digital studio. All that means is we'll say, "Oh, that drum take was alright. But one fill was bad, and that fill was good on the last take. So let's bookmark that, and when we dump it all in the computer we'll just replace it." It's as simple as that. However, there are bands — like a Deafheaven kind of band — those dudes can just play . Those songs are ten minutes long. Those are live takes to tape, with no editing. One of the songs on the new record is the first take of the first day. All the way through, live to tape. A lot of bands that come here might not all be virtuosos, but they're all happy with what went down on a take. And that's great.

How hybrid are your sessions? A lot of people track drums to tape, then do everything else in Pro Tools.

Most sessions, it's all tracking to tape. When the band leaves, I'll dump to Pro Tools, through the console. That's when I do my "pre-mix." Whatever needs EQ'ing, I'll do it then. By the time it's in Pro Tools, the multitrack is fully processed. Almost nothing else needs to be done. I'll do some cleanup editing, some tom gating, as well as parallel gates for kick and snare. And then I sum through the console [for final mixing].

So it's been through the console three times, at that point.

Yeah. That's my [Pro Tools] workflow. But people are loving the full analog sessions, for the street cred or whatever. [laughs] The manual mix is the other magic side. I'm new to the whole thing, but I'm getting better at it and it's fun . We've done it where we have three people sitting here making moves. You have to get it right, or you do it again.

Let's talk about your console. The first time I saw your setup online, you had a mastering-style desk with a bunch of Shadow Hills gear, as well as three Avid Artist Mixes across the front.

That was maybe four years ago.

It looked classy, compact, and purpose- designed. But I looked at your website a year ago; all that gear was gone and you had an API 1608. Now, a year later, the API is twice as big.

The mastering-style desk was a product of having a big control surface before that, as well as realizing that I wasn't using it any more, other than [for] the faders. Meanwhile all this outboard gear, which was doing the bulk of my work, was on the sides. So that desk was really my feeble attempt at trying to make a console, and have it fit the workflow I was doing. It was the same thing — track to tape, use Pro Tools as a monitor, dump it all, keep working. But there was a seed in my brain of, "I want to be able to make a record without using a computer." So I explored all these options for essentially a glorified summing mixer with analog faders to see if I could somehow hybridize all my mic preamps and EQs that I already had, and liked, with some kind of back-end that was more than just a summing mixer. Every single person I talked to said, "Nah, dude; you're crazy. The thing you want is gonna cost twenty grand. Just buy a console." I talked to Peter Reardon [Shadow Hills], and I talked to Dave Marquette over at Mercury about the idea of a custom line mixer. And it was like, "No, the thing you want doesn't exist."

Well, it's called a mixing console!

[laughs] So I bit the bullet. I had all the EQs already, so I got the API unloaded. I sold all my mic pres, and I sold the summing mixer, and that paid for over half the console. So it was more of a trade up than it was a crazy purchase. And now I'm at the point where I'm starting to make records without a computer, and I totally love it.

I assume a lot of your clients are on tight budgets. I know mine are. Have you found it hard to balance that against things like the console, or Barefoot monitors, or what have you?

Nah. My overhead is really low. I live at the studio. When I moved in and built the studio, the plan since day one has been that I have to be able to pay for this place with a part-time job, if I need to. That's why other people share the [living] space with me. When I first moved in, there was a screen printing shop in the front part of the unit. So the rent's cheap. My gear habit started out big, then everything's been traded up in small steps. I didn't drop a hundred grand one day to buy a console; I sold a ton of gear. Everything has been like that. It's always been waves of, "I have all this shit and it doesn't feel right anymore. I have to get rid of all of it to try and get up to the next thing." The thing that got me into the Shadow Hills equipment — I had some Chandler Abbey Road gear I had the mixer and a couple of the channels — all that, plus my [AKG] C24 got traded to Vintage King. That, and a little more money, and I had the full line of Shadow Hills gear. Going from the Shadow Hills to the API console wasn't like, "This stuff sucks. I need to get rid of it." It was, "I really like this. I want to take it further." I learned that I didn't need Neve preamps by having that flavor for a little bit. I am kind of bummed out that I didn't just buy an API to begin with, because I probably would have saved a lot of money. But that's not how it works.

You did a lot of records with your own band, Comadre, over almost ten years.

The Comadre discography is a bit of a disaster. If you start at the beginning and go through to the end, there's a big dip. It starts with that thing where you don't know enough to know what you don't know. The first record [ The Youth ] was us in my parent's garage recording live, band practice style — all pointed at each other and everything. The room was crazy dead and it worked out fine. By the second record [ Burn Your Bones ] I knew about half of what I needed to know — and that other half was really important. So that record sounds like shit. I think I remixed that record twice for two re- presses, because it was a total mess. Musically it was the best thing we had done, and for people who like that band, that was the record that stuck out to them. By the time we got to the end, I knew how to record — it was probably the most "producer" I've ever been on a record. It's one of my favorite records that I've engineered because of that. It was a couple years' worth of preparation and deliberation. I'm a big Tom Waits fan, and a big part of Tom Waits' production is there's no cymbals on anything. So there's this crazy amount of air and headroom. Trying to translate that into a punk rock situation was a challenge.

So you recorded drums with no cymbals?

No cymbals. Closed hi-hat only. Our drummer typically used a hi-hat and a crash/ride, which was just a general wash of noise. So instead of that crash, we had him play his floor tom. Then, later, we overdubbed single crash hits. We didn't try to make it like he was playing everything normally — just crashes on the beginning of a part. And we added a tambourine any time he would have played his hi-hat open. So it filled that space, but in a much more musical way. Because of those things, the record [ Comadre ] ended up with a lot of space. The other thing we did was incorporating alternate instrumentation — not in an "extra layer way;" in more of an "instead of" way. So on a lot of songs you'll hear an organ or a piano, and it's in place of a guitar part. We wrote the songs like we normally would, then we took them completely apart and rearranged them.

So it's very much a record that a recording engineer lovingly made. That's cool. None of this is the way you'd make a record, for most other bands.

No, I don't think most bands would be open to that. I've toyed with the idea of Comadre producing a record for another band, because we did work well together as a group. I would love to do that, but I don't think the opportunity exists.

We joke in our band, "Preproduction? We just did three years of preproduction." But I think that's what it's like to be in a band with a recording engineer. For other bands, I've really been realizing the importance of demos, both for them and for me as the recordist. In some sessions, the first time you get to hear the vocal is as you're recording it, which invariably is the last thing you track. Then it's like, "Oh, oh, oh."

I've done a couple recordings where we demo the entire record live the first day. We just set them all up, and play the record like a set. I record it multitrack. I sit, and listen, and really pick things out. There are records where we've changed the entire sound of the record, based on that first day.

I love that idea. I have to try it sometime. Deafheaven's Sunbather really blew up. Was that a big surprise for you?

It was and it wasn't. They got a lot of attention from their first record, which was done pretty quickly and casually. When it started getting attention, we all looked at each other like, "Huh? We probably should have spent a little more time on that." So when Sunbather rolled around we were said, "We're going to do the job we should have done the last time." We didn't know it was going to be that big of a deal, but we at least knew that people were paying attention. They'd gotten Dan [Tracy], the current drummer, and he's a fucking Jedi. It was Kerry [McCoy] and George [Clarke] — just the three of them for that record. So Kerry played everything that wasn't drums or vocals. It was pretty intimate, and we took our time. But they played it live — the first guitar got done live with the drums, and we layered the rest.

It's cool that they came back to you a couple years later, when it was time to record a follow up [New Bermuda].

It is. I was surprised. They told me that they talked to some producers, and laid out what they wanted to do workflow-wise — they know that they're fast, and they don't want to take forever. The dudes just laughed at them. They'd say, "We want to track for about a week." I don't know who they talked to, but the guy was like, "Sorry, I don't work on anything for less than a month." And the price was super high for that month. They examined some options, and then came back to me I was stoked.

I imagine that's the biggest band and record you've worked on. The expectations of following up Sunbather hadtobepalpable.

Yes, bigger label, following up this big record, and all that. They weren't done writing when we got to the studio. They were under a little pressure. But thankfully it was more on them than me, because I don't have anything to do with that part of it. I'm not a producer; I'm an engineer.

I love that "show up, put one foot in front of the other like usual" attitude. But I'd still be a little anxious. You don't want to fuck it up.

You definitely don't want to fuck it up. But Sunbather was received well on all sides, and I knew that I'd gotten way better since then. So I wasn't worried, like, "Oh god, I hope this sounds good." I knew it would sound good.

You recorded at 25th Street Recording in Oakland, which is a damn nice studio. No punk rock roots there. It's easy to assume that someone at the label said, "You need to use a fancy studio."

It was my choice. Mostly because I wanted to work there. [laughs] 25th Street was rad. We got to use all this holy grail equipment. We used an [AKG] C24 for the overheads. For the room mics I got to use a Fairchild 670. I was actually a little bit disappointed by how not live their live room is. It's really tuned. My live room feels more live to me than that room does — and that room is humongous. It's 15 or 20 foot ceilings, something like that. I mean, it sounded great. And their gear setup is extremely similar to what I have here, so I felt super comfortable. We only did three days there. We did the live tracking. Then we did all the overdubs and the mixing here.

So the New Bermuda drums were done in three days?

Two days. It probably would have been one day, but they weren't done writing. We did two days at first, and then one song was done later. So four songs were done in that first session, but I'm pretty sure the drums were done the first day.

Awesome.

The second song on the record — that was the first take, on the first day. We spent maybe four hours setting everything up, and then it was a test take. Luckily I wasn't fucking with EQs, or levels, or anything. [laughs] Dan came in after playing, listened to it, and was like, "Yeah, it's cool. Let's go get lunch." That was the vibe of the whole record.

And, by the way, you mastered it yourself.

I am really stoked that the Anti- [Records] folks were cool about that. It wasn't even a conversation. It was like, "Hey, we want to do our own mastering. Is that cool?" "Yep, that's cool." My friend, Jeff Rosenstock, is a very talented musician and a producer, and he and I have worked on a few records together. We decided recently that we're not doing anything anymore just because we're "supposed" to. We worked on a record together and sent it to a high-end mastering place, and it sucked . But by the time we both got back to each other with our feedback, it was out of our hands, on its way to the plant. And we realized — we're not doing that anymore.

It's taken me a long time to realize that if I want to tell the mastering engineer, "Put all that 150Hz back" that's fine. I put it in there on purpose. It's really liberating to realize I actually know enough.

I know enough to know what I want. That's all it is. It might not be the best way to do it, but it's what we want. That's really the bottom line to everything that gets done here.

theatomicgarden. com Scott Evans plays in Kowloon Walled City and records loud bands in Oakland. antisleep. com