Nic Hard: Just Keep Cooking...

Where are you at right now?

I'm in Spain. I'm up at Michael League's studio [Estudi Vint]. We're working on a record together, mixing.

Michael seems like he's always got a project going.

For as long as I've known him, it's been constant.

How did you two first start working together?

We were introduced by a mutual friend, Henry Hey, a keyboardist [of Forq]. I started mixing other records that Michael was producing before the Snarky Puppy work.

I can't believe the number of live Snarky Puppy concerts that have been released!

That's where I started with Snarky. They were recording the shows and sending it to me for one tour, and it wasn't a fast enough turnaround. Hard drives were getting stuck in customs. We did a European tour where I went with them, recorded a live show, and then mixed at night on the bus and released it within 24 hours. I've probably mixed 200 or 300 live shows for them.

What were you using for monitoring? Headphones?

It was largely headphones. I might have taken a little pair of KRKs, but maybe that was for something different. Mixing on the bus is less than perfect, as the lounge is above the engine compartment. One of the most challenging aspects was using a mouse while the bus is rocking!

Get a trackball?I would think even the rumble of the vehicle would be hard to deal with.

Yeah. I would have to revise it in the morning when the bus had stopped moving. After the first week there was more of a template and I was getting used to the environment.

Did you get any sleep?

No, almost not at all for the first two weeks. Toward the end of the tour I figured out this sleep schedule, between 7 and 10 in the morning, and then between 3 and 6 in the evening. It was pretty insane.

How did you get your start in this?

In the '90s, in high school, I got into DJing and making electronic music; all techno. I haven't done that in 20 years! That led me into manipulating sounds and twiddling knobs, so it let me learn engineering. I went to IAR [Institute of Audio Research] in New York for a six-month program. I did an internship at the same time, and was also an assistant engineer at Unique [Recording Studios] before even graduating that program. After that, I got a job as an assistant at RPM [Studios]. I became the house engineer there, and then I went freelance in 2002. There was a steep learning curve. I remember being an intern and assistant and not having a musical background. I had to learn the terminology of what everybody was talking about, even super basic things like, "What is a chorus?" The technical part was easy compared to learning the basics of music!

All the different skills we have to know to get the job done is extensive.

Yeah. We need to follow the conversations and know what somebody's talking about when they say they want to punch in. Once I was working in studios, I was working 12 or 14 hours a day. I don't think there was any time that wasn't in the studio. No vacations. At RPM I was on almost every session.

And a pretty wide variety of music?

Yeah. It was great. There was loads of people to learn from, and different producers and engineers that would come in. Not too much hip-hop, but I got a lot of that before at Unique.

What was some of the first work that you took on as a producer/engineer?

One of the first records that I produced was the Boston band Aberdeen City. I had mixed an EP for them, and then I produced a record [ The Freezing Atlantic ] with them a year later. It was a rock band in the early 2000s. They ended up signing to Sony, and I got to work with Steve Lillywhite [ Tape Op #93 ] who was their A&R. He would come into the studio and give feedback on a couple of parts that we'd re-cut, which was cool. Usually I would mix something for somebody and then they would come back and ask me to produce. When I'm mixing, I will often change some parts, with the preface that I'm not offended if they don't like it. It does get a bit into production.

The Bravery debut album [ The Bravery ] you worked on sounded great.

Yeah. The drums were done at a studio, but a lot of it was done in my apartment studio in 2002 or 2003.

A lot of your productions and mixes I assume have a real nice sense of width, and the vocals are always centered and clear.

Well that's good. Obviously, I always want to make sure that I'm getting that part correct! When I started, I definitely was thinking, "Bury the vocal," and I was more about the music, but slowly I've come around. It's constant learning.

The Church album you co-produced, Forget Yourself , sounded great as well.

Yeah, that was super, super early on. That is one that I didn't mix. That was co-produced, but I was hired as an engineer. That was the record that made me go freelance. I was working at RPM, and The Church had come through one year and I got along well with the producer [Tim Powles] who is also the drummer. They came through town a year later, played a show, and he was like, "Yo, we're going to make another record. Do you want to come to Australia and do this?" It was supposed to be for two months, and it ended up being four. It was an amazing session, and the closest thing to Spinal Tap that I've experienced. Tim was the lead producer on that and mixed it. That was the record that got me out of RPM and enticed me away from a steady job.

How did work go after that? Did you have management?

No management. It's up and down. It was difficult to get established. Later on, I ended up getting management with Joe D'Ambrosio for eight years. Now, most of my work comes through word-of-mouth. A lot of what I do is direct with the artist or a small label. I haven't had much interaction with majors in the last bunch of years.

It's different now, isn't it?

It's weird, but I have to say it's also good. Creatively, loads more is happening. People are free to do more, because the costs are now less. Obviously, we don't make as much money. I was never one of those guys who was making hundreds of thousands of dollars and lost it all. There's a lot more freedom now for people to make music, do some at home, and then work with somebody like me to bring it together. That's cool.

Where are you living now?

I live four hours south of here.

In Spain?

In 2019, I was changing studios for the fourth time in three years, and I was like, "This is a real bummer. I'm going to go stay somewhere, just bring a laptop, completely not use a built-out studio, and figure out how to work and travel." I came and stayed for a bit in Spain, near Valencia, and I loved it. I was going to come back in March of 2020, but then the pandemic happened. I came back in July of 2020, rented a house, and ended up staying. It's so different than what was happening in New York. I had two roommates, a five-story walkup, and took the train out to Brooklyn every day. I'm still working in America now, flying back for projects a few times a year for recording, trying to organize them into blocks of two or three projects, and then I'll come back here for a few weeks. So much of the mixing is remote for the last few years. It's so quiet where I live; it's amazing.

That new Snarky Puppy record, Empire Central , is fantastic. I talked to Michael about it, and I hadn't realized how crazy it was that there were multiple drums that would be switching off for parts of a song.

Yeah, with 19 core band members; three drummers, three percussionists, four horns, four keyboardists, violin, three guitarists, and bass. It's a lot!

This was at Deep Ellum Art Company, which is more of a performance space.

It's like a venue/bar. We took up the whole space, and we weren't even using the stage. We brought all of the gear in.

How long did that take to set up?

It was about two days. We started rehearsing part of the way through the set up.

Did you have assistants?

There were two others. I had one assistant engineer who's a student. I found her [Skyler Childress] by Googling and finding a school nearby. The two live sound engineers for Snarky were there as well. Because there was an audience, we had two consoles. One for the live mix, which Michael Harrison did. He'd take my setup and mix it for the audience members there. The other console was so I could solo and monitor, and the monitor engineer could make sure that people had what they needed in headphones. We did use the [Hear Technologies] Hear Back system, but there still had to be submixes. Having somebody dedicated to do that is super important for this.

Did you use mic splitters before they went to mixers and preamps?

No, because it was digital consoles, it was all a digital split. I had two computers, one main and one redundant, in case one bit it halfway through. This whole session was one of the most painless, and least amount of trouble ever.

I can't believe you! [ laughter ]

We had one bad mic cable. I swapped out mics, but that was more of a personal choice. I had to keep checking the hard drive to make sure it was still recording, because I was expecting more to be wrong.

What were some of the difficulties, with so many people playing?

The editing, which Michael did a lot of. All the muting of parts where people aren't playing – especially for percussion, drums, or the live mics – was time consuming. I have to say the bleed situation was way more under control than I thought it was going to be. It's a mostly untreated room, and there are horns lined up, almost directly, next to three drummers. I was expecting it to be worse, but it ended up being relatively decent isolation. I was pretty happy about it.

That seems impossible, given that many open mics!

There were 100 microphones, all told. It was 128 channels going in. I had ten ambient mics on the ceiling, mostly for the audience. Lauten lent us some microphones, and so did Audio-Technica. It was a big thing to cover. The Lauten LS-208 has got a very narrow pattern. I was super surprised by how much rejection it had. I used them on horns. For each horn player, I had a condenser and a ribbon mic. I used the Audio-Technica AT4081 and a bunch of AT4050s, for their selectable patterns. A lot of those were for the percussion and the ambient mics. On the drums, the toms were all Lauten LA-220s. We used their Clarion mics on kick. The only mics that I rented were the overheads, the beyerdynamic M 160s. I always love those on overheads, because they're hypercardioid but also ribbon mics. It's less harsh.

Did you add any digital reverbs when mixing?

Oh, yeah. It's mixed like any other record that I would mix, and not treating it too much like a live album. Treating it like a studio album, just without overdubs. There was maybe some restraint in not making it sound too crazy, so it does fit the video. I did have the rough cut of the video while mixing. I wanted to make sure we could hear parts, and I definitely ran sounds through pedals, guitar amps, and did some post manipulation of sounds. With panning, we didn't worry about placement. With the previous live shows, I mixed them like it looks on stage. But with this, because of different camera angles, that wouldn't work.

The bass sound on this is fantastic. It's really clear.

I don't think I can take credit. When working with guys this good at playing their instruments, that really is everything. People always ask, "Oh man, how'd you get that drum sound?" If a person knows how to hit the drum, I can put almost any microphone in front of it and it's going to sound okay.

So true.

All of these guys are really good at playing their instruments. Michael was playing his bass, and we did a DI to keep the bleed down in the room. I re-amped it here with an [Ampeg] B-15. Nothing crazy! The musicianship is super important.

I assume you were mixing this in the box?

Oh, yeah. Honestly, almost everything I do now I'm in the box. If I'm using outboard effects, or such, and I'll print it back into the session. The recallability for me is super important.

Are you putting anything on the master bus?

I'm doing a bunch. I'll put the [Dangerous Music/UAD] BAX EQ. I'll do a little bit of compression. I'll use a plug-in, probably one of the SSL bus compressors, as well as tape emulation.

Is that one of the higher track count sessions you've ever had for Snarky?

For Snarky, yeah. For one of Michael's other bands, Bokanté, on their second record [ What Heat ] we were more around 350 tracks. Because of the Metropole Orkest, there would be a couple of stacks of orchestra happening in certain moments. That was a difficult thing to get. I'd be doing a mix revision and would want to bring out one of the violin sections, but attempting to scroll through and even find a track? I ended up programming an Avid S5 [control surface] with a bunch of banks so we could go straight to parts.

That record sounds beautiful.

Yeah, thanks. It was a fun process for that record.

I'd imagine working with Michael has led to a lot of different and interesting work as an engineer.

Totally. I've gotten to work with a bunch of different musicians on different projects. It's a real joy to work on some of this. It's been fantastic!

nichard.com

Read: Michael League: Just Keep Cooking...