Danny Reisch | TapeOp

For over 15 years, drummer/producer/engineer Danny Reisch’s analog-centric studio Good Danny’s has been a hub of Austin, Texas’ thriving music scene. Danny cut his teeth making records with bands such as White Denim, Other Lives, Heartless Bastards, Pure X, The Octopus Project, David Ramirez, and The Bright Light Social Hour. Additionally, from 2011 to 2016 he also engineered and mixed more than 300 unusually crisp and vibrant live sessions for the pioneering music blog Daytrotter, recording everyone from Lizzo to HAIM to Jimmy Cliff. In recent years, he’s expanded his studio and branched out into mixing film scores in surround – including projects for A24, Disney, and Apple – but he’s also still recording and mixing bands, as well as playing drums for Other Lives. Meanwhile, he continues to find creative ways to use tape machines in a digital world. Full disclosure: Danny produced and engineered three albums for my band, Shearwater, but this isn’t just logrolling. He’s a joy to work with; I’ve always admired his meticulous, energetic approach, his dedication, and his sense of adventure.

Are those really your handclaps on the OutKast’s “Hey Ya!”?

I can’t say for sure that those are the handclaps I made and sent to André 3000, but it’s entirely possible. I hope they are. When you’re a sound designer, you just make the sounds.

How’d you get that gig?

I was the head sound designer at Syntaur Productions, which was my first real paid recording job, after I’d been an intern for a few years. Syntaur is based in New Braunfels, Texas, which is 20 minutes south of where I went to music school, in San Marcos. They were making aftermarket sample libraries for samplers like the Akai MPC and the Ensoniq ASR/EPS. It intrigued me that there was a company in this little Texas town making cool sounds for these cutting-edge samplers and producers; there weren’t a lot of people doing that at the time. I applied and got the job while I was still in school. It didn’t pay a lot, but I was thrilled to be able to go to work every day and learn more about MIDI, sampling, and sequencing. It was pretty mind-expanding for a kid who grew up playing in punk bands.

Forgive the question, but what’s an MPC?

Akai MPCs are like an all-in-one production center: a sequencer, sampler, and drum machine with lots of bells and whistles. They were especially popular in the hip-hop world then, right around the year 2000. There were people out there, like J Dilla, who were using them in absolutely brilliant, creative, and incredible ways. My job was to invent and create sample libraries those artists might want to use, one of which was an all-clap library. Most sampled handclap sounds at the time were cheesy – always the same bad, bright [Roland TR-]808 thing. I thought, “The claps I like are on old soul records, the ones that sound huge and dark, like bear paws.” I made a set of big, fat claps that have that huge, round sound. That ended up being one of the libraries André 3000 bought from us, along with another one I made of orchestral percussion.

Can you name any other songs where your samples found a home?

Oh man, those got used by everybody . It’s been about 20 years now. I don’t know if I could pick one out any more, but I remember hearing songs at the time and going, “Hey, I think that’s me!” Those libraries were used by everyone from Jay-Z to U2 to the Spice Girls. It was funny to me that a 20-year-old kid in a podunk town was making samples that big shot producers were using all over the world.

Fast-forward 15 years, to when you and I were working on Shearwater’s Jet Plane and Oxbow. We spent a few days in L. A. working with Brian Reitzell [Tape Op #107 ], who mostly does film and television work now. What did you learn from working with him?

He was who I wanted to be! The records he made with Air [ Tape Op #39 ] are still huge for me. He’s on a different level from me, but we’re both drummer/producer/ engineer/mixer/synth nerds with one foot in indie rock and another in film music. Brian has this curious, tinkering joy about him that invites everyone around him to bring that same energy. That was inspiring. I remember one afternoon; we’d had lunch, and Brian started bowing a chopstick he was holding against the top of a snare drum, going, “Listen! Listen to this amazing sound!” It was squealing like the most beautiful, insane guitar feedback. That curiosity and openness is important, and it’s why I have all the instruments up and running all the time in my studio. All my synths are plugged in and ready. There’s always a drum kit mic’d up, a mic on the vibraphone, and a line run to the Leslie. “You got an idea for something? Let’s try it now .” The problem with working that way, of course, is that you get some pure gold. However, you also end up with a lot of abandoned ideas that aren’t quite right, but they might be right for something else. Brian’s assembled a massive, unique palette of sounds and samples over years of working on so many different projects. I got much more intentional with my own library after we worked with him. I’m super careful with my file naming conventions now: labeling BPMs and pitch centers so I can find and use them later. Brian also taught me to concentrate on the shading behind the main elements of a song or a piece – all the glorious little details of tiny background sounds that you don’t necessarily perceive consciously, but you feel them.

A few years earlier, we mixed another Shearwater album [ Animal Joy ] with Peter Katis [ Tape Op #31 ], and I remember learning a lot from him, too. Before that, I’d been used to hoping that mixes would shine up a bit in mastering. But when his mixes left his studio, they sounded mastered already.

Absolutely, and that’s been my goal since we worked with him. Peter and I both mix through summing amps in the analog domain – in my case, a Rupert Neve Designs 5057 [Orbit] – with a pretty stout selection of analog bus compressors inserted on all the instrument subgroups. Then we both use a hefty mastering chain on our 2-bus before we bring our mixes back into the digital world. These days, I monitor through that entire analog mix/mastering chain from early on, even in tracking, so we can make informed decisions about where parts are going to sit and interact in the mix, and how they’re going to hold up once they get steamrolled by compression. Plus, it feels good when I’m playing something and the song already sounds awesome! When I feed a monitor mix to a drummer from a Coles [4038 mic] being smashed through an 1176, you can’t tell me that they don’t respond and play differently than when it’s coming back clean. It’s more exciting, and it gets more energy out of the player. This also means I can be steering a tune towards a finished mix the whole time we’re working on it.

What you were saying about Brian, and the importance of background elements and textures – some of that seems like a natural outgrowth of working in film, since soundtracks don’t always take center stage.

It is, and it’s pretty different from music mixing. There’s a different level of headroom, and the music is only one of many sonic elements you’re serving to the listener in a film.

When you’re mixing a soundtrack for a film, do you have all the dialogue and sound effects on hand too?

I like to have as much of that as possible, because I want to know what’s going to rub against the music. I don’t want to push the cellos or low brass super hard when there’s some tense sound design in the low mid frequencies, for example. Maybe the dialog is super intimate and quiet in the scene, and I can go 100 percent wet on the string treatment. Although often I’m working with temp sound design, or no sound design. Or maybe a scene gets re-edited last minute and the music’s role is different. In the film world, everything is printed in stems, so the re-recording mixer can still make adjustments at the final dubbing stage if something doesn’t work.

How would you compare mixing an album to a film score?

Mixing records, for me, is a game of smash and chop: removing unnecessary info that eats up headroom, so that a sound can go through the compression trash compactor and come out retaining the essence of what it was before you crushed it with ten limiters. All these weird resonances pop out when you clamp down with the amount of compression we use these days. So I’m a meticulous cutter, trying to control those honks and resonances. I don’t want to be able to not turn a song up or push into the limiter a little bit harder because of a few gremlins that are in there stabbing me. But with film, there’s more dynamic range. You don’t have to compress as hard, so there’s more room to work with actual dynamics, with your hands on the faders. Something can soar 15 dB and be this gigantic, impactful moment instead of doing tricks to create the illusion of impact, like sneaking down whatever’s happening just before a big event.

What’s the difference between mixing in stereo versus mixing in surround?

Surround is way more fun than stereo, because you can envelop the listener from every angle. Working in 3D space opens up this whole world of dimension and creativity – throwing delays behind you, mixing multiple reverbs to blend and interact in interesting ways. It’s so engaging as a mixer to get to paint with such a wide frame. You can create such a transportive, immersive environment around the listener.

I‘ve always assumed that mixing for film requires a big, expensive facility.

It turns out, no! My studio’s in a converted house in a little town 20 minutes from Austin. We make a lot of indie records here, but to get dialed in for 5.1 we did what we’ve always done with stereo, which is extrapolating across a bigger playback system. We spent a lot of time listening to reference material and making minor adjustments to speakers, level, tone, and crossovers. You see how the room reacts, and, at a certain point, you just say, “All right, let’s try it.” Recently I was working on Daniel Hart’s score for David Lowery’s film The Green Knight, and I got to go to Skywalker Sound and hear my mixes on the [Akira] Kurosawa dubbing stage. I’m not going to lie, it was a little scary taking mixes from my control room to one of the best mix rooms in the world, surrounded by some of the best ears in the world. But they sounded great, to my great relief.

What happens in the final mix of a film like that?

All the elements – music, sound effects, sound design, dialog, and ambiences – all of that – are mixed together for the last time on the big dubbing stage, which is essentially a theater-sized mix room. But you don’t have to have that; you can do great surround mixes on a budget. All you need is a monitor controller, five speakers, a sub, and an interface that has six outputs. The big hurdle for me was room calibration, because that’s what allowed my mixes from here to translate to Skywalker and hit the mark. It takes time, but it’s running tones and moving speakers around a little bit, as well as adjusting levels. Fortunately my studio partner, Max Lorenzen, is a total wizard at that. Then, boom; mix your friend’s indie documentary in surround! There’s a perception that mixing for film and working in surround is this elite, academic mixing, and it’s totally not.

Did working at Skywalker Sound change the way you work at home?

Aside from a very, very small tweak to my sub level when I got back, the real thing I took away was that even though I was working with the very best mixers, editors, and sound designers, there was very little ego in that room. In film, everyone has the same goal: to tell the story. Mix decisions are guided by that principle. If something isn’t serving that goal – even if it’s incredible sounding, even if somebody put weeks of time into it – it gets ditched, and everyone moves on. I’ve often seen bands make bad choices because they spent a lot of time on a part, or because it’s the one thing that’s new to them, or because they spent $2,000 on the string quartet even though everyone knows the original Mellotron part still sounds cooler. Or maybe there’s some kind of pecking order and people are jockeying for position. I wish everyone in the music world could see how productive a less ego-driven dynamic can be.

What are the most fun items of audio gear in your collection?

I have a comically large collection of 1/4-inch reel-to-reel decks and cassette decks, which I use all the time to run tracks to and print back in the box. They all have their own distortion characteristics and non-linearities, so everything comes back with this unique, grainy texture. It’s not a static distortion, grit, or saturation; the machines are reactive, which makes them feel more alive. One of them has some motor issues, so it’s got this seasick warble – which can be so cool on backup vocals or a synth. I did an album for the band Star Parks, and all of the vocals and horns on that record were run down to a Concord 444 1/4-inch tube reel-to-reel deck.

You also made a whole record on an 8-track cassette recorder.

That was a trip! I did the new Tele Novella record [ Merlynn Belle ] on a Tascam 488 MKII. It brought me back to my teenage years. On the 8-track, there’s never a moment where you can be checked out because you’re printing all the effects and the compression. Everything’s going down the way it’s going to sound on the record right then. It means everyone has to be working together on building the arrangement, as well as on the same page discussing tones and parts. There’s no undo. People play differently when they know you can’t fix it.

You were recording the band live into the 8-track?

Not exactly. We built the record in layers. But getting it to where we could put all the drums and percussion on one track required everyone with a free hand to play something live. I’d be playing drums, with shakers coming in on the pre-chorus, then tambourine coming in on the chorus, then my assistant’s in the iso booth with the timpani and castanets for one crescendo – it was an exciting way to track. It feels great when you land it.

Did you bring it into the computer to mix it?

No, I mixed it on the Tascam. We had a mantra while making that album, “Ninety percent is 100 percent.” I had to embrace that in the mix too, because every mix was a single performance. It’s hands on eight little faders; I had the “high” and “low” EQ. There’s a lot of panning and movement in the record, so it was a real challenge. But I loved being committed to that all the way through – keeping it handmade and focused on performance, warts and all, even in the mix. And that record sounds really good! Especially for a format that’s below the bottom rung. Working like that was a great way to get everyone involved in the process.

This reminds me of another seat-of-the-pants gig: All of those Daytrotter sessions you recorded at South by Southwest for a few years.

Daytrotter was a music blog started by my pal, Sean Moeller, who created this kind of cult following around it. The idea was simple: good, live, in-studio sessions that they’d post online, along with a thoughtful writeup by Sean and a cartoony, hand-drawn picture of the bands or artists. Eventually they were bought by Paste magazine, but there’s a huge archive of Daytrotter sessions online through Paste, including the 300-plus sessions we did between 2011 and 2016. There are some amazing recordings in there, and some unique sessions.

A lot of bands dread live sessions. Since they often don’t come out sounding like a real performance, or a good recording, they’re just this terrible, muddy middle ground that often pleases no one.

Usually because the engineer doesn’t know how to record and mix your band for that format .

How did you try to avoid the typical pitfalls of live recording?

When Sean asked me if I’d turn my studio into Daytrotter’s Texas headquarters for South by Southwest, he told me we’d be recording 40 to 50 acts in six or seven days, which I knew would be insane. My first priority was making sure that the musicians’ headphone monitoring was simple and great, since it’s always alienating to walk into a live session and be hit with some elaborate headphone system with way too many channels. I always dialed in a killer stereo mix of the entire band on one knob of the headphone system before I sent any “more me” channels. That way, all the musicians could just turn up that one knob, everybody’s there, and it sounds great. Then everyone can trust their instincts and do what they do naturally.

What about on your end? How did you handle that many different setups in such a short time?

For one thing, we had a giant crew of interns from Texas State [University]’s recording program; I never could have done it without them. I also set up a pretty elaborate busing scheme on the console. We were mixing on my Toft ATB live to 2-track. It’s an 8-bus console, so I stacked each bus with different flavors of compression I could send any combination of tracks to. That way I could paint by numbers and go, “Okay. Drums and bass are going to hit the [Chandler Limited] TG1 for this band.” Maybe the guitars are a little screechy, so I’d say, “All the guitars are going to the [Empirical Labs] FATSO.” Or I’d put all the vocal mics into a pair of [Empirical Labs] Distressors to rein those in a little bit. It’s sort of the Michael Brauer [ Tape Op #131 , 37 ] approach; it’s a quick way to get instruments interacting with each other and build density in a mix. Working that way let us reconfigure the console quickly, because we only had 15 minutes between sessions sometimes, and I didn’t have time to re-patch. We mixed everyone from Lizzo to Haim to Father John Misty to Of Montreal [ #65 ] to Ed Sheeran. Being able to quickly throw instruments into various compression subgroups let us dial in radically different mixes very quickly. We’d play around with those bus assignments, and, when I’d hear it come together, it’s like, “Boom.”

You must have some stories from those sessions.

My favorite was working with The Zombies [ Tape Op #119 ], just on a music nerd level. Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone were playing my piano right next to me, drinking beers, and singing songs, and I was sitting there losing my mind! But, in terms of performance, the one that sticks out was watching Lizzo. She and her band attacked that session like they were playing a festival.

While that’s happening in front of you, what were you thinking?

You have to keep your hands on those faders! Something might happen in the next bar that’s going to shake up the mix, so I’ve got to stay focused so I can react quickly. But I did have a few moments where I got lost in it. Our control room isn’t separate from the tracking room, and when I’m in the room with someone I get butterflies in my stomach. The thrill of mic’ing up a snare drum and getting a great sound is long gone for me, but the energy I get out of magical moments like that is why I’m a lifer.

How have you found – and kept – clients whose work you enjoy?

Well, it’s not a Field of Dreams situation; if you build it, they will not come. Forget the fancy console and the Fairchild. Just do good work. People will seek you out if you’re doing that consistently. If you’re not at a point where people are seeking you out, you’ve got to seek them out. Find bands and artists whose work resonates with you, make something good together, then use it as a calling card. That can mean leaving work on the table if it’s not a great fit, which is hard to do in this industry and economy – but there’s so much power in saying no. Every single time I’ve done that, something else has opened up that’s totally thrilled me, or taken me somewhere new.