How did you start the studio, Dangerous Rhythm in Oakland, with Kevin Army in the '80s?
I'll go back a little further. When I was 13, living overseas, I was the nerdy dude. Later I was in bands. We were playing a lot of Deep Purple, early Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Black Sabbath. I was really into that, but I was also into pop radio. I was always the nerdy guy who decided, "We should record our music." We moved to the States and I had a 4-track, so I conned my parents into allowing me space in the garage for a couple of years. Later, I sold all my instruments, and I got into debt with Mastercard. I had an 8-track studio; a Tascam 80-8, 1/2-inch deck, and a [Tascam] M-35 [mixer], which had eight channels. I ended up building a flanger, a spring reverb, and a couple of plate reverbs.
What sparked that interest in electronics?
When I was seven or eight, I was in Cub Scouts. One of those merit badges was that you had to learn how to wire a lamp. My dad, who was always a handy dude, was like, "Here's how you do it!" In retrospect, that was the moment that opened my mind to, "Well, if I can do that with electricity, then I can do that with electronics." I ended up developing a "noise reduction" for my cassette deck; a couple of capacitors that knocked down the high end. I built a remedial synthesizer that sounded terrible. When I got to the States, I ended up with a couple of cassette decks and a Peavey mono mixer. I recorded my band playing on cassette, then we'd play it through this mono mixer and sing onto another cassette deck. I walked this fine line between the technical aspects of making music and also being a player and a performer. I was always living in this weird sphere of influences and interests.
How did you come together with Kevin Army?
I was recording bands out of my parent's garage in Moraga, in the [San Francisco] Bay Area. He came by because he was looking for a place to record. I never ended up recording him, but we stayed in touch. When I moved and built my own studio in Oakland, he wanted to learn how to record, so I ended up teaching him what I knew and we started working together. It got to a point where he was so comfortable that I could have him engineer things, and/or I would go work somewhere else. When I was starting to get into 16- and 24-track - and he would run the studio. He started recording bands that I didn't have time for, became the second-in-command, and ultimately ended up buying the studio from me and running it for a number of years after I'd moved on.
What was the set up over there?
It was the same damn Tascam 80-8. I ended up buying a 16-channel Carvin board, but the EQ was really focused. You couldn't really mess with it, whereas my Tascam had parametric EQ. I could do a lot more with it. I didn't have any money to buy the new digital reverbs, so I ended up setting up a very acoustically dead room with all this padding to the right of the control room. I knew I was going to do vocals in there. I built this weird device where I could stick a Marshall cabinet in it and close it, but it went for another eight feet of fiberglass batt, so the guitar had a place to push the sound. I built a drum room that had some plywood in it. My entryway was very open and ambient, so I put mics out there. I also had a bathroom under the stairwell, and I painted it with all this enamel to make it really live. I used to send sound there while mixing. One day I had this idea, "I'll put a snare drum in there!" I put a speaker there, flipped a snare drum upside down, and duct taped it on there with a microphone. I had this bathroom in lieu of gated snare reverb. While mixing, and sometimes during tracking, I'd send the snare out there, bring it back, and compress and gate it. I became good at using my acoustic spaces to achieve what it was I wanted, because I didn't have digital reverb. I had a spring reverb, which didn't work for drums. I was on 8-track, so I had to record the drums to one or two tracks. I was mixing, EQing, compressing, and printing reverb while we were tracking. I learned to pre-mix a lot because I was working on an 8-track.
How did you make that transition from working on these projects that were 8-track to bigger bands and bigger projects?
