How was your week?
It was good; I mixed two records and had a recording session yesterday, so that was the last seven days. I mixed Jeremiah Lloyd Harmon's record and the new Sky Chefs record, then had a recording session yesterday for Brian Moore. I'm mixing the new I Come to Shanghai record next week. Next Thursday I've got John Herndon, Ben Boye, and Devin Hoff coming in for a session doing a live dub project for Stephen Buono's Church Chords Presents. A bunch of it was recorded at Electrical Audio – horns, reeds, and organ – then we're going to mix that in live with what John, Devin, and Ben are playing. I've got a children's record coming in right after that for Jazzy Ash.
What is your ideal process, from artist relations all the way to mixing?
I try to work with people I'm excited about. Everything that I'm working toward is in advocacy for an artist. I want to champion them. I like to have a couple of pre-production meetings, listen to demos, have them play me the songs, and figure out who's going to play on the record. What shape it will take. I get all the musicians involved, and then set up a few days for recording. We usually knock out two to five songs in a day when we're tracking. It's done very much in a '60s or '70s session style. I've got a stable of maybe 20 different musicians that I'll pull in for different projects. We'll usually spend a couple of days recording, then three to five days mixing, and we've got a record.
Do you approach a session differently, depending on the type of music or the level of playing?
I prefer not to deliberate too much. When we do a pre-production meeting, I'll usually hash out a broad structure. But the rubber hits the road when everybody's in the studio together. I'm always thinking of the macro view of an album. I want to make sure that people are listening to this whole record and we don't start going, "Oh, I heard this on the last song. It's like the song before that." I'm thinking, "Do we have a ballad? An uptempo song? Do we have contrast?"
How do you feel about overdubs?
I have no problems with overdubs, in general; it really depends on the project. We do a lot of things live in the room – that's my starting point. One of the things that I've noticed is that with a band – especially when you're putting a group together for an artist – there's no substitute for the artist singing the song with their instrument in the room with the band, because now it means something. It's not an abstract idea like, "Okay. How many bars until the chorus and then we go back to this section?" Your vocalist is like your lead melody instrument in jazz, right? This is the thing that you're listening to.
BIG EGO isn't what I'd consider a retro studio. You have efficient modern gear where you need it. What remains retro is your philosophy.
Absolutely. The biggest decision when we opened the studio was the console – the second biggest being the RADAR system. I spent a year and a half deliberating on what to get. I'd been looking at Neotek consoles. I looked at all those Trident consoles, like Series 65, 70, 80 and so on. I looked at API consoles. I read Pete Townshend's autobiography [Who I Am] and he talks about running professional recording studios. Then I saw a video of him with the Audient ASP4816 and he said, "We have Audient consoles in all of my studios now, and they have no down time." I thought, "This guy has owned everything I can't afford, and he's decided to go with something I can afford." It's an inline console, so it works perfectly with the RADAR. For projects that come in for remote mixing, or things that need to be done into a DAW – we use the [Antelope Audio] Orion 32. For anything that I produce, or that starts here, we use the RADAR. The Leonard Cohen project [Like a Drunk In A Midnight Choir: Record Store Day Celebrates the Music of Leonard Cohen] was a perfect example. With an inline console, you can start to put your mix together while you're recording, because it's a different set of EQs and faders. With Avi Buffalo we tracked it in the morning and Devin [O'Brien, house engineer] and I mixed it two hours after he left because the mix was already 80 percent there. It didn't require any extra work. For me it's a thousand times faster than doing it in a computer. There are also the wonderful accidents that happen where you go to another track. Let's say you're mixing a record on the console and you get your first mix done. The second song comes around and you run it through the same settings, and usually it's 80 percent there already. And then the exciting, weird things happen where something's coming in too hot to a channel, but it sounds really cool because it's being compressed, or it's being run through a delay or something...
It's taking the stage when you might not have expected it to. Sometimes a percussion instrument is slammed way up high.
Right. You're like, "Shit, that sounds great!"
I see your approach as similar to the jazz and pop recordists of the '50s and '60s. That makes me think of Rudy Van Gelder [Tape Op #43]. A warm but still hi-fi sound.
It's interesting that you say hi-fi, because I never think of my music as being hi-fi.
To me, hi-fi is hearing all the frequencies.
I never classify what I'm doing that way. But I just mastered Psychic Temple IV with Ian Sefchick at Capitol Studios, and he said, "This is an audiophile recording."
You only use a few effects.
Yeah, I embrace those limitations. We just picked up an Ecoplate II [plate reverb] but the Demeter [spring-based] Real Reverb sounds amazing too. We did a session yesterday where we put the Pearlman mic out in the hall, left the door open, and then in the mix – when I made rough mixes for the client – I took the hall out and ran it pre-fader through the spring reverb. It sounded amazing.
It's best not to have too many reverbs and delays active in a mix.
Exactly. This is the other reason why we have four effects sends on the console. We've got the [Lexicon] Prime Time 93 [digital delay], the plate, the spring, and the tape echo [Roland Chorus Echo SRE-555], and I feel like that's a really good balance. We basically have two delays and two reverbs.
What about some upcoming projects?
We've got the Jazzy Ash record, Swing Set; a children's album. It's going to be done in a Folkways style. We're going to have groups of kids in the studio, and everything live. Maybe a six or seven-piece band. No effects, just what happens in the room. For me, it's a dream project. I love listening to all the old Ella Jenkins records.
You mentioned a gospel record.
We're starting a record for the Christian Fellowship Chorale soon. I'm very excited about that. That's with choir director Timothy Williams. We had a meeting here the other day, but we're doing the first day of tracking at the end of the month, with the full chorale and the full band live in the room together.
I can imagine that sounding really good with your style. You're making it sound legit.
Yeah, that's what I'm hoping for. It's funny, in my first conversation with Timothy I basically said, "If you want this record to sound like Kirk Franklin or something like that, I'm not the guy to produce it." There are certain artists that come around, in any genre, and they create all these copycats. But nobody ever said, "I want to sound like the artist who tried to sound like someone else." If you want to make a copycat record, I'm not the one.
