When did you get this house?
March of 2003. I was moving up from Murfreesboro to Nashville. I was looking for a house that had multiple bedrooms. I wanted to have roommates that would help pay the mortgage, and I was looking for a house that had a recording space or a basement.
There's a lot to be said for a basement space.
I started off recording in garages in Indiana, because we didn't have that many basements. When I was in Murfreesboro I would go to people's practice spaces, which were extra bedrooms or whatever, so I was comfortable with that kind of environment – probably more comfortable with that than I was in a professional studio.
You studied recording at Middle Tennessee State University. What kind of rooms did they have?
The first time I ever spent in a real, professional space was at that school. It was set up more like a commercial studio of the day. They had three rooms back then.
With desks?
Yeah, they had an SSL in Room C, a Neotek in B, and I can't remember what they had in A prior to getting a Studer D950, which was a digital board. It was probably '99 or 2000 when they got that. I think they have an API Legacy in there now, so they probably spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on this digital desk, then sold it for lunch money. They were also teaching us on DASH recorders [Digital Audio Stationary Head, a reel-to-reel, digital audio tape format]. The first Pro Tools class I took was in the summer of 2001, on Pro Tools 3. I think the Digi 001 was introduced around that time, but even for the "home-pro" it was a bit of an investment. They had 2-inch tape machines too, but they taught us on DASH. We would say, "Let's go to the 2-inch, now that we've got our project for school done on DASH." It was like night and day. I haven't used DASH since; I could probably make it sound better now, but I remember being really amazed at the same inputs going into the different recorders, as well as the difference at playback.
What was the tape machine?
A Studer A820 or A827. They had really nice Studers.
You went down to MTSU from Indiana, specifically for the recording program?
I had gone to Purdue University [in Indiana] for a couple of years. When I was a kid, I was really into drawing and writing, so I went to Purdue thinking I was going to do marketing or something, like it was going to be this "creative" thing. But it was more like, "How do you trick people into buying things?" I was also really getting into recording at that time.
What were you using?
A Yamaha MT4X 4-track recorder, and I think by the time I left Purdue I had a Roland VS-880. I had a digital 8-track and a cassette 4-track, and I used them both together quite a bit to make records in the early aughts and late '90s. I was wanting to go to school for recording, but I didn't know what existed except for Full Sail [University]. My dad was doing some research and found Middle Tennessee State. I also had a friend there, Katie Haas [née Krampf]. I met her and her sister [Courtney] at a Weezer show; she went to MTSU and had a radio show. She knew a bunch of people from the radio station [WMTS], so I made a lot of friends that way. It took me a couple of months to get used to the South, but there were all these venues, shows, and bands, which was not like where I came from.
What year are we talking about?
'98. Murfreesboro had already gone through the whole Self and Spongebath Records period, but it was getting ready to move into the next phase with a bunch of other different bands. We had the Red Rose and a hundred venues. It was a really good time. A lot of those bands were people who ended up moving to Nashville. It was the whole DIY scene that really led me to want to do the thing in the basement.
Murfreesboro is very un–Music Row in that way.
I could have just as easily said, "I want to go and work on Music Row," but I didn't have any interest in making coffee for a year so that I could assist and all that. When I interned at Alex the Great [Recording], the vibe was this bohemian, converted house thing. I was able to get in front of the computer, or get on the tape machine, right off. I had to do a bunch of shit work too, but it was never the focus.
Did you get that internship through the program?
Yeah, you had to do an internship to graduate.
Did you luck out, or did you know you wanted to work at Alex?
I had no idea. I didn't spend any time thinking about Nashville studios. My friend, Tony Read, had interned at Alex the semester before me, and he introduced me to Brad Jones and Robin Eaton [co-owners of Alex the Great]. I knew enough people who had worked at other studios, and none of them were really sticking with recording.
Did you learn much in recording school that you still use?
Of course. It was all fundamental and helpful, especially since up until that point I wouldn't have known anything, except what I'd read in a manual or something. They had the technical side, and the business side, and you had to take both. Like copyright law and all those other things.
So you graduated in 2001 and got the house in Nashville in 2003. In between?
