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Throughout her career, Ani Difranco has put out albums at an amazing rate, averaging about one release every nine months. Her fourteen albums have all been self-produced, and released on her own Righteous Babe Records. Despite working at such a clip, her production style has been anything but predictable. Since her first release in 1990, her sonic palette has expanded from a solo guitar and vocal sound to one incorporating drum kit, bass, accordion, and banjo, having also stopped off at various points with horn sections and sampled drum loops. All this studio work is squeezed into an aggressive touring schedule.
I met up with Ani and Andrew Gilchrist, her partner in life and production, at the Congress House Studio in Austin, TX. There, they were mixing Ani's second collaboration with storyteller and union troubadour Utah Phillips. For many hours they waxed poetic about ADAT's, instant studio gratification, and the eternal struggle to get a decent acoustic guitar tone on tape.
AG: We recorded this album down at Kingsway Studio in New Orleans. It was done as nights of live performances, we had an audience of about thirty people in there. The last four tracks are just live room mics. The first two are near where the band and Utah are, and the last two are in the back of the room on the other side of the audience. They picked up all kinds of crazy shit, whispering and rustling. Unbelievably, there was a dog at the studio and during the performances he wandered into the audience and his tags were rattling.
AD: And at one point he just sat down in front of Utah and started chomping on this bone.
AG: The dog is definitely on the record. We actually set up a small PA in the room, that was being mixed at the back of the room, it was a very strange setup.
Was that for monitors for the players? Or did you use headphones?
AG: The PA was for the audience. Nobody was on headphones, except the drummer, cause he was way in the back. Most stuff was happening pretty quietly and everyone could pretty much hear each other. Utah sat and told stories, Julie (Wolf) on keyboards, Jason (Mercer) on bass. The trumpet that you hear is Dave Pirner from Soul Asylum, who happened to be there, and he's taken up playing the trumpet. We said, "Come play on this track!" and it's this really warpy crazy trumpet. So off to one side of the house you've got the control room, which is very open. The whole concept is that there is no control room, there's no glass, you don't have that kind of separation. Off the control room there's another big room with a piano, and there's another room off that, and that makes up one half of the house. The house is symmetrical, and on the other half of the house is the big live room.
Has Kingsway been a studio for a long time?
AG: No, Daniel Lanois [#37] set it up, around '89. He came to New Orleans to do this Bob Dylan record, rented a house, set up a bunch of gear, really liked New Orleans, and then found this house, which was vacant at the time. So he bought it and basically installed a studio. But it's still very open. Until very recently, there was just a hundred foot snake that came off the back of the board and wherever you wanted to record you just ran the snake. Now they have, in a few different places, some remote boxes. That compressor there, the TubeTech, is a key piece of gear. Utah's voice is going through that. And pretty much any of the vocals that have been on the last three Ani records have gone through it. It's real transparent, it just adds a presence to it. We've been using the FMR Really Nice Compressor (RNC) too, they're actually made in Austin. Mark (Hallman, the head engineer and owner of Congress House) got one as a demo and I bought it off him. They're amazing, I use it a lot on drums, run it on the overheads. I pretty much don't use it in the "Super Nice" mode, because it's so transparent, it freaks me out. I was suspicious of it at first. I used to use that Valley People compressor (the Dynamite) that's sitting next to the RNC, it does the same kind of radical pumping, but it's really noisy. Now I've changed over. [The track Ani is mixing ends.] We're actually mixing this new Utah record in order, it's a very strange way to mix.
AD: Why is it strange? Just cause we've never done it before! Of all the records I've done with lots of crossfading and stuff, to figure out first how it's all supposed to flow...you know, Living In Clip, it was like, oh well, I guess this should be the order. And then it was, well, this song stops dead, and this one starts like this.
AG: No, mixing in order totally makes sense. Your instincts, which I really like for mixing, you do all the starts and the fadeouts. Most people don't do that, they leave it for mastering. All that junk, applause at the end, or count-ins and stuff.
You're using automation with this board?
AG: Yeah, it's not flying faders though, it's VCA controlled. Automation saved our lives. We do four copies of each mix, two at 48 and two at 44.
AD: We have to do 48 and 44, because you never know what's going to happen in mastering, and you can't do them at the same time.
AG: And since there's two machines here, we might as well do two of each. We just had our first major DAT fuckup in a long time. I think it was for "Providence," we had an unplayable DAT.
AD: Oh, yes, the DAT machines at Kingsway were doing a little dropping out, bink, bink.
AG: They're new as well, they're two [Panasonic] 3800's and the drum hours are really low. I don't know what is wrong with those machines.
Bad day at the factory.
AD: Yeah. And Kingsway has some crazy monitors. I feel like I have a blanket over my head at the board there. They have huge, what are they called? Like custom Tannoys.
AG: It's a fifteen [inch speaker] with a concentric tweeter mounted on the cone, two of them, so there are four in all.
AD: But basically there's no high end and there's no low end. These huge, muddy, low-middy speakers are in this room with a ceiling fifteen feet high, and a tile floor.
AG: There are curtains behind the board, but if you close them off it's very small in there. There's also these huge foam blocks that you can make walls out of. I did that, I closed it off while we were tracking.
AD: It's amazing to me, that Dan's whole thing is very low-mid oriented, very warm, except that that's all you can hear there!
AG: I know, what do his records sound like on those speakers? It must be insane. And when we're getting sounds in that control room, my instinct is I want to dip 200 [Hz] on everything.
AD: You're trying to clear up the bass and you do things you shouldn't be doing just cause you're listening through water.
AG: You just learn, it's going to sound big and muddy, and you get used to it. But if you put up the foam wall, close the curtains, and monitor real loud, it gets better. That's what I've been doing. It's so funny, it's like the Ani way: whatever is available to be used, she has this way of maximizing it. For this record, we were going to record to sixteen tracks, but we decided because ADAT's are so weird and because it's a live performance thing, we got a spare. And then suddenly, it's all on twenty- four. It's like, where did that spare ADAT go?
AD: But the last record, Up Up Up Up Up Up, was on sixteen tracks, and that seemed fine for that record.
AG: The Little Plastic Castle record, we did sixteen tracks of ADAT as beds, did all the transfers to two inch, overdubbed on two inch, mixed on two inch. And that was the idea, we went into Up Up... doing that.
AD: But then we started saying, why are we bouncing to analog?
AG: Well also we never got beyond sixteen tracks. So we ended up keeping it on sixteen, mixing on sixteen. I don't know, you could go on about that for a long time too, about working on eight tracks, working on sixteen, working on forty-eight. There's something about working on sixteen tracks.
AD: Well, I think for the Utah project, if I could speak for the engineers, because they were live performances, to have different instruments on their own tracks [made it easier]. Cause when you're comping stuff...and it's all happening one song after the other without any like, wait, OK, is this line working.
AG: No, and I can't imagine that there's any mix on there that's more than sixteen or eighteen tracks.
Who were the players on this album?
AD: Me on guitar, Jason Mercer on bass, Julie Wolf on keyboards, Wurlitzer, and Darren, who's my new drummer. This was his first gig! We went deep right away. But he did so wonderfully. Cause it's a crazy gig for the players, it's like, OK, we have to play with this guy who is very arrhythmic, and you can't freak him out but you've gotta groove hard. The whole collaboration was heavy, and we were just making it up as we went along. And Utah likes the doghouse bass, as he calls it, he doesn't like electric, so Jason played his upright the whole album.
Did Utah play any guitar?
AD: Yeah, there are some things where he was leading and we set music to his playing. Let's play you some mixes...
That moment where the drums drop out [on "Shoot Or Stab Them"], was that done live or was that a dub thing?
AD: That was in the mix. Yeah, we were supposed to do three nights of performances, but we had to cancel the third night which is unfortunate because it wasn't until the second night that things really started to come together. So let's see, what else is there....
AG: There's that crazy "Bread and Roses" thing that you did with Mark the other night.
AD: You know I don't really like that [mix], it doesn't have the vibe of the rough mix.
AG: Is it cause you don't like the bass?
AD: Hmm, yeah, I don't know. And also his voice...it's too loud. It was really teeny and squanky before. Yeah, so this is a story that Julie was playing piano to and then it went into this song, where the performances we did of were just not happening. It was a bunch of people trying to follow Utah, kind of careening along. So then I sent Darren in as an overdub to just groove on the drums and try and smooth over the rhythmic pushing and pulling of the song. And he laid down this great groove. So when the song starts we sucked Utah into this teeny little box of an EQ. And now in this mix I overdubbed a bass which now I'm not sure I like.
Did you take anything on this project and pull it into samplers and do a total remix?
AG: No, "Shoot Them and Stab Them" is pretty much the only non-literal one, he had just spoken that stuff and we laid that over the music. But really it's pretty far away from the other approach. OK, this track is "I Will Not Obey."
That's a really deep, warm guitar on there.
AD: That's my baritone guitar.
AG: And also going through the dbx 120 subharmonic box. That thing's amazing.
Do you run the 120 live?
AG: We used to a lot. Before there was a bass player. AD: Yeah, now I gotta move over. I kind of miss those days when I just toured with Andy, and people thought there were taped bass tracks or something.
Ani and Andrew continue mixing, later working on an grooved out version of the labor movement classic "The Internationale."
AG: We're running a 40ms digital delay here on the guitar amp for some stereo imaging. Pan the original to one side and the delayed signal to the other. It stops becoming a pinpoint signal and spreads out. You just have to watch it when you collapse to mono, with the phase cancellation. You can do that with an amp, take a 57 in front of an amp, and if it's an open-backed amp, put a mic in back of it, so that when the speaker throws forward on the one mic, it's throwing back on the other mic. It sounds big if you pan one hard left and the other hard right, but collapse it down and it's gone. This Roland Reverb box (the SRV330) is totally amazing, it's one of the best sounding and usable reverbs. Real simple, it's got around four hundred presets in it, not a lot of weird stuff, just reverbs. Lots of really short verbs. We use it a lot.
AD: It has that 250 plate thing. Our friend's studio in Hamilton has an actual EMT plate reverb, with the big levers. It's so excellent, you can make it so transparent, it takes away the sound of a microphone and it sounds like you're there. And this Roland box has a 250 plate emulator.
When you did [the live album] Living In Clip, that was all to one ADAT?
AG: Is that true?
AD: Yeah. Three people in the band, one ADAT. AG: Oh yeah, it was one. We're now carrying two.
AD: But it's worse than it used to be, cause nobody is monitoring the recording process. Back in the days of one ADAT and no compression, it was less things to fuck up I guess. It was kick, drum overheads, guitar, vocal, vocal, bass. Everything generally went to tape at really low levels, so everything was low and noisy until that one big hit where it would go crack!
AG: Then too, you had three guitars but they were all plugged into one [input], so the guitar could just go straight to tape. Now, you've got all these different guitars and they all have to get grouped.
AD: And Julie [Wolf], who plays organ and Wurlitzer and clav and accordion...
AG: And those all have to get grouped to two tracks, maybe...
AD: And now, we have two ADAT's, we were just mixing some stuff from them, half the instruments it's like, oh well, that didn't go to tape. Cause nobody's watching them. He just patches them all in and mixes the show and meanwhile.
AG: And Julie's melodica has a little mic in it, which we leave up and on, and suddenly it's all over everything. I just had a big conversation with Klondike, which is our sound company, talking about revamping the ADAT setup. Every night, for Steve, there's all these cables where it's like, OK, this plugs into aux one, and this goes to group out three, and this one goes straight to tape, and apparently it takes him half an hour to set the thing up, and sometimes he gets it right and obviously sometimes he mispatches things. So we're talking about creating a little interface box. Building an Elco, so all that stuff just lives in the back on the board, and we can just plug a snake in. And that'll also provide an opportunity to revamp how the whole thing's working.
So are you continually taping shows?
AD: Yeah, you know what happened? So, we carried an ADAT around for a year, pieced together a live album, and then I was like, OK, no need to keep taping shows, we made a record. That was the whole reason to get the ADAT, baby's first ADAT. And then what
happened is that Chuck Plotkin, who is like Springsteen's pseudo- manager / producer / buddy... He did Dan Bern's first album, right?
AD: Yeah, hence, because Dan was on the road with me and so Chuck was with us for a little while. And Chuck was talking to Scot [Fisher] my manager one night, like, "Son, this is what you need to know." AG: He was blown away by you and started saying, "Oh my god, I've never seen a performer this vital since Bruce."
AD: And so he says to Scot, "Document! There's very little footage of Bruce from his heyday," and there's very little this or that and Scot's like, "Oh, OK." So then after the live album came out, Scot's like, "What, it just gets loaded on the truck, it's just one more box, you just turn it on. Tapes are cheap." He insists. But it's just gotten so fucked up, it's two useless ADAT's per night of line hum.
Did you record Up Up Up Up Up Up [Ani's previous solo album] here at Congress House?
AD: No, we recorded it all at Kingsway too, and mixed it here.
What was the recording process for Up Up...?
AD: It was pretty much live. We went down to Kingsway. I had been down there for Jazz Fest and fell in love with the place. So then I decided the thing to do would be to go down there, not bring our mics or amps or anything, just our instruments, and use what was at the house, really try to utilize the house. Which was a bad idea when it came to amps. You realize that the room full of amps there were left behind by Dan for a reason! But it's incredible, because the house has fourteen bathrooms, for starters. So you're talking fourteen tiled room verbs. We just started walking around the house listening to rooms. Each song was different.
AG: We just kept moving around. It was like, OK, drums sound really good underneath the stairs and we'll use a certain tiled area for this...
AD: Apparently, according to Ethan, a lot of bands just go in and they set up in the main room and they just stay there.
AG: That's why they put those snake boxes there, because it was like all the time they were recording there, and it was a drag to have to pull that snake out to the same place all the time. The control room as well. The weird thing is that it's always been where it's been, but in theory, everything can move.
AD: Cause that was Dan's thing. "It's not a studio, it's just a house," and there's some gear in there but nothing is hardwired. Everything has to be floatable.
AG: So you could just literally take a rack and unplug it and move it, if you wanted to.
AD: But the thing is, you don't want to move the whole fucking board and the tape machines — nobody's ever moved it! But it can't be installed. Which makes for some...
AG: It makes for some fucked up wiring! I mean, I know everything that's a problem on this record is my fault, but there was really funky [wiring]... the patch bay leads to really strange places. Instead of just putting in a patch and having it go to a preamp, it actually goes to a weird little snake box where the preamp is temporarily plugged in. There's so many connections in that studio it's scary. Around the back of those racks, there's all these weird snakes, so that anything could go in and out, nothing is hardwired to anything.
Did you get a lot of noise problems?
AD: There's a lot of radio hum....
AG: RF on things. And crackly things. The board is a 1970 API console and it's in good shape, but it's from 1970.
AD: So every now and then channel one disappears. And you don't notice that the kick drum hasn't been there for a couple takes, or something. And you just have to get into the bleed. Make it bleed! The album was very much about performances, playing together.
AG: The other aspect of that record was that it actually took place over a long [time]. Most of those songs were also recorded in June, and a lot of those were recorded in February, by you solo.
AD: Yeah, so this is my big theory: Because I'm instant gratification slut, I just play it once, OK, fucked up the lyrics a little bit, whatever. I just can't perfect things, I just can't deal with doing things over and over. So, you know, you make quick recordings and live to regret most of them. So I thought, OK, make quick recordings, since I can't stand to take too much time on things, and do that in different places, different times of the year. I had this bunch of songs, and we recorded most of them here first. I thought, compare and save the recordings. It was cool, because you learn a little from the first times, but then we ended up just taking most of the Kingsway recordings. It just had a whole vibe.
AG: It definitely flavored the record in a big way.
AD: Yeah, mad Kingsway flavor.
AG: It's a great place to work. There are certain kinds of music and certain kinds of records that you just would not be able to make there. To try and work against that studio would be a real drag, to try and have lots of isolation. The whole place just lends itself to working in a certain way, so that's how you end up working when you go there.
How much time did you spend down there?
AD: A week and a half. The band was there for five days, and we were there for another three. So I guess that's just a week. But fuck.
AG: There's all these stories of people spending a month in the studio or two months. I don't know. The new Rufus Wainwright album... two years in the studio!
AD: Wow. So that's what you can do in two years! It's so complex, there's so much going on. Alright then, if anyone's going to take two years, you might as well have a million strings and stuff. I just don't have the attention span.
I think with any project, you get to a point where you just start to lose momentum.
AG: Yeah, like after the first eight months. [laughs] The way we did this one was very cool, because we were breaking it up, you did demo versions in February, out on tour, back in June, out on tour again, back to Kingsway. So it was kind of like spending a year or six months to make a record but not in the studio [the whole time].
Was that the first time you had done a demo-like process?
AD: Yeah, totally. Usually it's like, write the songs, play them live, drive around, do gigs, drink beer, and go in the studio for a week and make a record. I think it was making the live record that made me realize that the songs sound much more like themselves onstage. The songs that turned up on the live record probably sound totally different from the way they were recorded in the studio. But the studio was just a fluke! It was what that song sounded like at that moment in that studio, depending on... But the songs onstage are more indigenous, that's where they live, you know? And then getting the ADAT's into the studio then got it more like live. With two inch tape it's like, ok, rolling, go go go, and then it's do we keep it, do we do another, ah! Now because the tape is so cheap we can just keep rolling, keep all the takes. It's less pressured. But I have a very love/hate relationship with ADAT's. We get error messages all the time. They're fucking VCR's. One of the great things about the Kingsway setup is that Ethan the engineer there got these little sixteen channel Mackie mixers for headphone mixes so everybody's got a little rolling cart. We're all like invalids with our IV, rolling it around.
AG: And then [in the control room] there's a patch section with sixteen little inputs to send them to all the mixers, split from the tape outs basically.
AD: All the musicians can change everything in their headphones whenever. So the engineers at the board spend no time, like you were saying, after every take, "Can I get less organ?"
AG: "But you're sharing a headphone mix with Julie and she needs that organ." So this setup was just ridiculously easy.
AD: It is much more like a live recording in that you're not dealing with the needs of the musicians all the time.
AG: And with everyone in the same room, it's just making sure the preamps are connected properly and it's all going to tape.
AD: But Kingsway is up for sale now. It's been having a really precarious life the whole last year. Since we started going there, you never know, any moment a truck could show up and take all the gear away cause Dan has been wanting to get rid of it. This Utah record was supposed to be officially the last session.
When you did the previous Utah album (The Past Didn't Go Anywhere), what kind of sampling setup did you use? Or did his voice just get flown to tape?
D: H3000! Eventide H3000 SE. It's all about that box, that whole record. You can get it with a stereo sampler upgrade, so you can do sixteen seconds or something like that. Everything went through that box. All the drum loops Sixteen seconds? That's like old school hip hop production.
AG: And it wasn't MIDI'ed up to anything, it was just triggered.
AD: That album's sound is very much the capabilities of that machine. If you set up a loop, then press record [on the tape deck], and record five minutes of a drum loop, and then you want to set up some other kind of loop, eventually, in five minutes, they'll be out of sync with each other. But there's a triggering function, so I would set up a trigger for each track.
So you used a click as a trigger?
AD: Yeah, basically, or I'd record one instrument and that would trigger all the other loops.
AG: Or the kick from the beginning of a loop, you can use that as a trigger.
AD: But mostly it was just sampled drums and then I played everything else. It's a little Luddite.
The results don't sound too Luddite, I was thinking it was done with a whole digital audio system.
AD: I would go from a DAT of Utah's voice, which had transfers of all this stuff he had sent me on cassette, but cleaned up some at a mastering place. And then into the sampler. For the drums, I could only do about a four bar drum loop, but with a trigger I would have alternate drum loops so I could go back and forth. But listening back to it, the sound of that record, it's pretty simple stuff. I was learning my way around the H3000. It's a digital machine but it has an analog front end. If you overload it you can make some really crazy, cool distortion happen. And that was my big thing for a while, when I first discovered how it would distort, and then fucking Mr. Burst My Bubble Guy here comes along with the Brian Eno [#85] diary, the Year of Swollen Appendices.
AG: There's one little entry where he's like, [in stuffy British voice] "I've recently discovered that distorting the inputs of the H3000 produces this..."
AD: Blah blah blah! And I've had this inherent anti-Eno sentiment, only because I've toured for too many years with these enlightened Church of Eno Canadian boys. "There's not enough Africa in my computer." It's like, fucking bite me right now. And then he shows me this chapter, oh look, you and Brian...
Do you feel more in harmony with Brian now?
AD: No, it's just my animosity towards him [points to Andrew] has grown! [laughs] Yeah, so that first Utah record, there's not a lot of complex sampling going down, it's like set up a loop and pound it.
AG: It's funny, I've recently been buying old LL Cool J and Run DMC records and fuck, talk about simple. It's like a drum machine plugged directly into a board, a guy yelling into a microphone, and some eight bit orchestra shot samples. And it's got such a vibe to it. There's no big production happening, except that in itself it becomes this big thing. But it's deadly simple.
AD: When I was last checked out that Utah records, I was struck by the basic loops, they don't really evaporate or dissipate or tonally filter.
AG: Yeah, when we do remixes of stuff, I'm always trying to plan, OK it's going to drop out for these bars, and we'll put an alternate pattern here.
AD: The other thing is that, on our board at home, the mutes actually...
AG: It's some kind of damping, it's not a hard cut. You don't get a pop.
AD: It's like a quick fade. But on this board to mute something, it's pppt!, it pops every time.
AG: And then you're using the automation and you get it at a certain place, but because it's an analog board, it's slightly different every time.
AD: You'll be trying to mix down and things will be popping randomly. So all the remixes of my songs that we've done here, it's a very loose idea of remixing. Basically it's like set up a drum loop then replay all the instruments and re-sing a vocal, and if you want to drop something out stop playing.
AG: I think people are doing that more and more, with the remix as a redo. That whole Bjork remix album, all those vocals are redone. They pretty much used elements of the songs to create the new tracks, and then she redid the vocals. I think what we do as remixing is closer to the classic remixing than what a lot of people do.
AD: Remixing is supposed to be taking the original tapes...
AG: Yeah, but the remix of "Jukebox" is like that. AD: Right, we took the actual drums from the song. But we have no sampling gear so to take tracks and edit them, shift them around, it's kind of tough.
AG: I remember a while back when we were doing remixes, having that hellish time trying to sync everything up, and you were like, what are we doing wrong? And I was like, people don't remix like this, I mean, we're remixing to two inch tape, flying elements over to the tape (from ADAT) and adding stuff. People don't remix like that, it's done with a pair of headphones and a hard disk system.
AD: And we're discovering the hard way why all that fucking gear was invented!
AG: Yeah. If we're working with the two inch tape, we'll print SMPTE onto the last track, and then the ADAT's can sync up to that. That's another reason we're using the BRC, because it will either sync up to SMPTE or generate SMPTE, which is something the ADAT's won't do by themselves.
Do you ever use the track delay function on the ADAT's? Like to get drum overheads in phase?
AG: Yeah, but usually just for getting stuff to time. Usually for the bass track, if I use it. If the bass is a little late, you can delay everything else and [thereby] push it forward. You know what I feel like I'm just learning about? Documentation. For me it's like a lost world, my focus has never really been there. But the things we do have been getting more and more complicated. All these ADAT tapes, and doing the Up Up record over a series of months, just keeping track of stuff. Everything I'm used to doing is like, here's your multitrack tape and here's your DAT and that's it.
What is your current approach to recording acoustic guitars? That's something that obviously you've been dealing with forever.
AD: You know, I really wish I could tell you. I feel like I get worse and worse at it.
AG: I was going to say, it's almost like we've been avoiding it. You know, like let's just send it to an amp.
AD: The past however many records I've done, I always mic it, maybe stereo or maybe just a single mic. And then take the DI to a channel, which you can really get a good bass out of the higher registers sound a little magnetic on the DI. And then send it to an amp. That's been my whole thing, I think that's the only thing I know how to do, get different acoustic guitar sounds through amps. But in terms of micing it, I feel so disappointed, over and over again.
AG: It terrifies me, every time we go in. If you want to get the bottom out of it, it sounds all boxy. And then you get rid of that boxyness and it gets all shrill. We tried that thing of hanging a blanket between the two mics...
AD: Yeah, everything, baffling between the two mics. I have gotten some good acoustic guitar micing sounds in the past.
AG: We use (AKG) 414's a lot, for whatever reason. It's funny, people talk a lot about micing acoustic guitars, reading your basic EQ magazine, and all they every talk about is how to get that crisp...
AD: ....sparkle, all that fucking shit that I hate on an acoustic guitar! That brittle...
AG: Basically you could just retitle the article "How Not To Record An Acoustic Guitar."
AD: My whole quest is how do you get a full, warm, percussive, but still present sound.
AG: Without being tubby or boxy
AD: I don't know. I'm still wrestling with it. There's some EQ'ing involved definitely.
AG: It varies a lot, even the same kind of guitar, or the same guitar played at a different volume. I used to think we had kind a kind of technique, down at the bottom, on the wood, off the soundhole, and then sometimes that totally sucks, sometimes the soundhole is terrible.
So you're still at the mercy of nature and the wood.
AD: And ignorance and experimentation. And I've been playing the same guitars for years and I still don't know how to mic them. That's the other thing about being my own producer — that's the last thing I worry about so often. I'm worrying about drum sounds and the buzz on the bass, and the arrangement, and getting the whole vibe. I feel like I've been neglecting the acoustic sound the past few years. Listening back to some of my old records, before I had any ideas about sounds at all, and the sounds are all very suspect and haphazard, whatever engineer was working on them. But there are some acoustic sounds that are like...
AG: The other night we were making a tape for Darren to learn a song and I was like, that guitar sounds good!
Out of Range had some great guitar sounds. Big, sweeping, natural...
AG: That's what it was! That's what we were listening to and I was thinking the same thing.
AD: I don't remember. I don't know. I've no idea. AG: I suck, that's basically what it is.
AD: Yeah, it's all his fault.
AG: Maybe it's once we discovered all these cool amps and other ways of getting really interesting sounds.
AD: And also the past three years of having a bass player onstage, the level of the guitar has come down on stage and in the house, and it's one of many instruments, it's no longer playing the drums and the bass. I used to be so focused on the sound of it and now I think on stage my mission is how can I play less and make more space.
AG: There's a good side and a bad side to that. Live, your ability to play less, to sit back, it's great.
AD: There's a definite liberty to that, I can lay out or do something much more sparse and the song is still there. But you know, I was listening to some older songs, and I thinking, wow, I used to be able to play guitar better.
AG: You had that super percussive, breakneck speed crazy guitar.
AD: But now that would just be too busy cause there's a bass player and a drummer, so I find myself playing less and less. Generally it's stereo micing, in the vicinity of the soundhole. Some people put a mic on the neck to get that shimmering stuff that I hate. Generally I find micing the body gets woofy or boxy, so I try to get a stereo image on the soundhole. I've spent many an album baffling between the two mics, but then if you're singing live, also a baffle here (under the chin), so it's a T-form of baffle, to get as much separation as possible. And then also always taking a DI separately and sometimes, on some past records, even EQ'ing the DI to tape so that it's just low-end punch.
AG: If you're going to send something to the subharmonic synthesizer, it's always the DI. You get the definition.
AD: And the acoustic micing gives it its texture and its shape and the DI gives the punch. Often times the amp will give it a meat or a tone.
AG: Sometimes that'll be to tape, but I love sending things from tape to amp. I was talking about that before, finally having that spring reverb, so we don't have to send the signal to an amp to get the spring reverb.
AD: The good thing about having four or five channels of one acoustic guitar is that you can have more amp in the choruses, and more of the mics in the verses.
Do you have a studio in Buffalo currently?
AD: Yeah, at the house in Buffalo, we just have a big room that's a control room and [live] room. And we're just amassing stuff. We've got the famous ADAT's, those poor things, they do duty out on the road, and then they sit in the house, and we haul them out here. We take them in for service a lot cause they get real bashed around.
So it's a one room setup?
AG: Yeah, we recently hung curtains and carpets because it's a very live, big room.
Is there anything from there that's going to be released?
AD: Yeah, actually, on Up Up there's some Dust Bowl Studio tracks, that's what we call the place in Buffalo. The fucking house is covered in an inch of plaster dust, everything. There's a lot of construction at our house, when I bought it there was no kitchen and no bathrooms, the whole place was gutted.
AG: And we've been trying to do the studio thing. For the first six months all the stuff that we had stayed in its cardboard boxes, because it's so dusty and finally it was just, fuck, let's set it up and then we would cover it in tarps.
I'm sure that keeps the ADAT's going in to service.
AD: Yeah, I hate to think of our spanking new board. AG: Soundcraft, their kind of version of the Mackie board, which is called the Ghost. It's nice, it's fairly clean, well set up, little analog console, a real functional eight buss board. I think it sounds a lot nicer than the Mackie boards. The EQ is real subtle and really musical. And I'm a terminal gearhead so I collect stuff.
AD: Yeah, every day off in Des Moines is a trip to the pawn shop.
AG: I don't even play guitar and I have more guitar pedals than anyone. So many.
AD: He has to bring me around with him to all these crazy shops just to check out every pedal.
Last year you produced the Dan Bern album (Fifty Eggs, Sony/Work), which was the first big project you produced of someone else's music. What was that like?
AD: I have great aspirations of putting out other people's music, now that we've got a mechanism to do that with. I fell in love with Dan's songs and I think that he's got something special, and I was trying to convince him to make music on Righteous Babe Records. But he's doing the Sony thing. He had made his first record with Chuck Plotkin and then it was it expected that he would do the second record with Chuck. And then we met and Dan wanted it to it with me, and Chuck very graciously said, hey, whatever you're into. So we made the record, and we both learned a lot.
Did you go into with specific ideas on how you were going to produce the songs?
AD: Well, we share a booking agent, and Dan opened a few shows, and then a few more, and pretty soon Dan was a fixture on the old bus there. So I knew all the songs pretty intimately from touring. I just got together musicians that I know, Andy and Jason and Sara Lee, who used to be my bass player, and then Denny Fongheiser, a total session cat out in LA, a drummer who's played on more albums than any of us could begin to fathom. So it was a collection of people and it was all about the Congress House and the vibe there.
Did you use the ADAT's with Dan?
AD: Yeah, and then we bounced to two inch. That was back in the bouncing days, when I was still determined to end up on some kind of tape that had some weight. It was really cool for me to be able to step back from the music, stay in the control room and listen and figure out what was working and what wasn't and how to make it work. Producing your own stuff, it's hard to put down all the baggage. Like that track we were istening to earlier ("Bread and Roses") that I overdubbed that bass on, I don't really like that bass part so it's mixed kind of low. And typically with my mixes you cannot hear the acoustic guitar half the time because I'm playing it so I don't like it. It's really hard to listen to a mix and say "it needs more acoustic guitar," even though you played it, and it sucks, turn it up because that's what the mix needs. It's so hard not to emotional and immediate like that. I'm always turning down whatever I'm playing, just cause it's a closeness thing. So it was really cool to have a somewhat more objective view of what was going on. I feel with the first Utah record, it was so nice working with somebody else's voice and somebody else's ideas, I felt so much more at liberty to love it and really get off on it. I didn't have the tortured, self-loathing obstacle. But in all of my idealistic aspirations of working with other people and their music, I always come to the brutal realization that working with other people's music involves other people. [laughs] Which always seems to be a challenging proposition!
AG: Whatever baggage you may have working with your own stuff is only...
AD: Oh, fuck, baggage! We need to build a new wing on the Congress House to fit all the baggage that comes in. I only ever had to accommodate my own psychosis before.
What is the new speaker system you're using live?
AG: Live now we're using this new V-DOSC system. Traditionally with speaker systems, you don't want the speakers to overlap coverage areas because then certain frequencies will be emphasized, and whenever you hit a note in that range it'll be much louder than everything else. That's called coupling. It's something the Grateful Dead were experimenting with. They had sound systems with huge numbers of speakers, very tall, but not necessarily very powerful. And the whole idea was to get them all coupling, to throw the sound out. Bass specifically does not travel well forwards, high frequencies travel better. But if you can get bass frequencies coupled they'll actually move in a line. So V-DOSC, they're from France, they spent a lot of time and money figuring this out, and they've come up with a sound system that uses this coupling and they've got it down to a fine art, positioning speakers in relationship to each other so that they couple well. And then also, this is the part that freaks me out and where my understanding of it drops off, being able to tightly control the dispersion. You know, PA speakers are always rated in dispersion, whether it's ninety degrees or sixty degrees. The stuff we used to use, the AW 850's or the EV stuff, they were different cabinets, some of them were sixty degrees and some were nineties. What you don't want to do is start throwing a lot of sound into the side walls of the theater, or the roof, or the floor, or across the other side. You try to control the dispersion. And this system, the dispersion is controlled to the foot. You can focus it, it's like lighting. You position the box, aim it a certain way, couple it with the box underneath it, and you can keep the sound...it's so hard to even understand.
AD: My understanding of it is very experiential. From the vibey front man's perspective, what I'm used to hearing at the front of the stage, especially in these huge sheds (outdoor arenas), these cavernous barns, is just low end wash coming back from the balcony or the far back wall. It's just this sort of chaos, low mid to sub frequencies. Somehow with the V-DOSC you can tune it to throw but not reflect back. And the result is that you can be walking down the outside aisle of a shed and be able to hear the vocal totally as clearly as if you were mid-audience.
AG: A lot of it has to do with side-to-side too. If you were in a big basketball arena, and there's all that space to the side you're not using, you can walk out of range and it just drops off. You can keep it off the ceiling, you can keep it off the side walls. In a standard theater you have the orchestra section, and then the balcony rail, and then the balcony.
AD: It's balcony that always fucking kills me.
AG: You can actually stop it from bouncing off the front of that balcony, so that it's going down into the seats in front, and then the other boxes are aimed up at the balcony, and you don't get that throw off the balcony back to the stage. It's amazing.
AD: What I think is really admirable about the way the V-DOSC people are working is that it's all still very new and they don't just sell you the gear, cause if you don't use it right....so a V-DOSC technician has to come out and teach you how to use it and how to calibrate it to every room that you're in. But it has made such a difference. It's so funny, little folk girl touring around with this really high tech sound system.
AG: You have very specific problems that have to do with the fact that you're trying to get all these low frequencies out of the acoustic guitar. The only other person I've ever seen trying to do that is Luka Bloom.
AD: Yeah, he's got that smiley EQ: tons of low end, tons of high end. But Bruce Springsteen was like that too.
AG: But Luka Bloom has a closed body guitar, with no soundhole.
So he's cheating.
AD: Yeah. So the trick is how to crank between 60 and 125 Hz.
AG: It's basically a recipe for disaster what we're trying to do live.
AD: Every night, yeah. The acoustic guitar, you're talking about a really thin, resonant piece of wood, so what I have to contend with at the front of the stage is the kick drum and the bass guitar washing back off the very back of the house, the low end just keeps existing and existing forever. By the time it gets back to me, it's pulling my guitar into feedback. So the V- DOSC system has meant my level before feedback onstage has really gone up and the clarity of what I hear, I can start to hear the sidefills and the wedges without being consumed in wash. And we got to learn it on the Dylan tour, cause he's been traveling with that system for a while. Steve, who does my front of house, he had to start using the system. So contending with the sheds now it's a world of difference.
How much extra time is it to set up?
AG: Believe it or not, there's software that comes with it. That's what Larry, our PA tech, does now, his first job of the day is to come into the room and he literally, with a three hundred foot tape measure, does the whole room. And he enters all that info into the computer and it creates an image of the room, and then figures out where to hang the system. And there are these pieces of wood that go between the speakers, and the thickness of the wood corresponds to a certain number of degrees. You still tune it by ear after it's done. But the software will tell you, OK, hang this many speakers for this room, tilt this one two degrees and this one five degrees, and put a spacer in.
AD: And now friends who come to the show, they come backstage after and say, this is the best sounding show we've ever heard here, this is a terrible place. And we've been carrying our own speakers for a while anyway, there's only so many years you can, like in the days of just me and Andy, they'd see the rider and say, OK acoustic guitar and drums, it's a folk show, and so we'd get speakers on sticks. And underpowered teeny little wedges. Despite that fact that the rider says fifteen inch speakers and a certain amount of power.
I read a while back about you wiring monitors out of phase to help knock out some bass on stage. Does V-DOSC take care of it so you don't have to do that?
AD: Yeah, that was before V-DOSC. And we used to take the front house subs, and juxtapose the EQs?
AG: That was sort of the second generation of doing that. The crude way of doing it is you just take the left sub and the right sub and put them out of phase with each other. So the people on the left and right are getting good bass but straight down the middle where those two meet they literally cancel out. And that's where you stand on stage, at the center.
AD: That made a big difference in the bass wash that I got back off the balcony in those theaters. Theaters with aisles down the middle, hopefully it was narrow enough, but standing houses with people right down the middle...
AG: You always knew that there were a bunch of people down the center who were getting this weird phased bass thing going on. Right now Meyer has just come out with this thing that's a directional subwoofer [the PSW-6], which nobody has ever done before. It's the same kind of concept, it's massive, the thing is the size of a Volkswagon. There's a certain number of twenty-one inch speakers facing forwards, and then there's half as many facing the other direction, and very simply the ones facing the other direction are out of phase. So you've got the throw forward and then the other way you've got these other speakers pushing real hard to try and cancel them out. But they use massive amounts of power, they're extremely heavy, and they're exceedingly expensive. Klondike, the sound company we work with, demoed a pair, but the problem they had with them is that they were too big to tour with.
AD: Yeah, we would have to get another truck.
AG: And also the power requirements too, because you're using a lot of power just to cancel.
AD: But for that matter, V-DOSC is pretty insanely expensive. [For more info on the theories behind the V-DOSC system, check out www.coxaudio.com]
Andrew, what was your production experience before you got hooked up with Ani?
AG: I lived in Toronto for years and years and worked at a place that was really cool, it was a venue and a recording studio called the Music Gallery, specifically devoted to experimental music. In Canada there's all kinds of government money that goes into music and arts. So this place, I used to tell people, if you take everything that you know of as music and draw a circle around it, all the stuff that fell outside that circle, that's what we did. John Cage, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, that whole world, that's where that venue came out of, and then it expanded into free jazz, world music — basically anyone who was not mainstream enough to be playing in clubs.
Were the performances in the same space as the recording studio?
AG: Yeah. As a recording studio it was pretty limited, basically a one inch eight track machine that never got used. There were a couple grand pianos, a really nice live space. I spent a lot of time doing demo tapes for classical musicians, which you need if you're a student at a college and you're trying to get a job in an orchestra. It's basically you on your instrument and a piano accompaniment. And it's got to sound really good. So that was my bread and butter for recording, doing that just live to DAT. And the combinations were crazy, you know, soprano voice and piano, tuba and piano, chamber orchestra and tape. People would come in with their instrument and I'd be like, how the fuck do you mic this? So I was there for a long time. And Andy, who used to play drums with Ani, he was kind of plugged into that scene because he played hand drums and did all these things. He would get these weird gigs at this place, he would get hired to do recordings and do gigs. So I met him when I started working there and we kind of became friends and hung out and he got me doing all these other projects, I started recording some acoustic pop music, which I knew nothing about. He figured it was a cheap studio, and I'd let him in for free. We'd finish shows, I'd coil cables 'til midnight, then he'd come in with some Cajun trio and record until four in the morning for free. I did a lot of that. So then Ani was looking for somebody to help drive the van, sell CD's, and do sound, sort of tour manage. And it came at a really good place, when I was making really bad money, the hours were really long, it was five shows a week and then recording on days off. And the guy who was the head engineer there was stuck in his ways and I was not going any further than that in that world. So I was actively looking for other things when that came up. Ani brought me out for a week- long tour in the northeast and the rest is a long and involved and varied history...
AD: Sordid.
AG: Yes, sordid. It was not a direct or smooth path from that time to here but here we are. But I feel fortunate and pretty proud of that background. I know a bunch of people who did the recording studio thing where you're like the whipping boy in some commercial studio and you coil cables, watching the same setups every day, "This is how you mic drums, this is how you mic a guitar amp," and then eventually you get to push "record". What I got to do was working with minimal equipment in a weird space but being asked to do anything and being expected to do anything, being thrown all these challenges and being presented with music that was way out there. It was cool and I certainly learned things that you wouldn't normally learn and it gave me a mindset to be able to experiment.
AD: See, and this explains the highbrow/lowbrow war of art that has gone on in our musical marriage.
AG: I definitely have this weird highbrow art background, conceptual...
AD: Meanwhile, I'm busting ass in bars for ten years, strumming along, smiling with my acoustic guitar. It's a whole different world, the whole Music Gallery, government funded thing. If only, man, welcome to America... It's good, we balance each other out. You have all these insecurities: does this have a right to exist, masturbatory, high art shit. And I come from the other end of the spectrum: am I the most simple, inane, lame-ass, lowest common denominator, prop her up in the corner of the bar and play cover songs bitch. Somewhere in the middle there's got to be real specific, challenging art that exists in the world, which is not born of some elusive aesthetic, real art moving things, air molecules and people, but also on a grassroots level.
I see the dichotomy now, between you.
AD: It's Art Boy and Folk Girl!
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