Clay Blair: Boulevard Recording Survives

The last time I dropped by was about ten years ago. The studio must have gotten busy after that.

Yeah, we got really busy. I'd probably had the studio for about three years when we first met, and I was still trying to get my bearings. It's a weird thing to open a studio in L.A., plus it's even weirder to open a studio in L.A. that used to be a former studio, and then additionally I was a guy that nobody knew here. I had to see where I'd fit in. We had the big studios, like Capitol [Tape Op #114], EastWest, Conway Recording, Sunset Sound, and United Recording (unfortunately not there anymore). We found a niche that worked for us, and in 2015 we got rid of our Trident 80B console. That was such a great board, but we got a 40-input API from the '70s, and that changed everything for me.

Sonically?

Yeah, and I dug myself deeper into this well, financially. But it was such a sonic imprint and I had always wanted that.

Was the API console helping bring clients in, or was it more what you felt you needed?

Both, I think. Maybe some of the bigger engineers would be more excited to go into a room with an API. It turned into a more serious room with a more serious console, and people loved the way it sounded. It had been sent back to API in 1993 by the owner that I bought it from, and Paul Wolff [ex-API, Fix Audio Designs] completely recapped, re-switched, repotted, and re-did the faceplates. It was in great shape. I still have pieces of it; I got as much as I could out of the board after the fire. I got at least enough 2520 op amps and transformers to make 22 channels of preamps. Jeff Steiger, from CAPI (Classic Audio Products Inc.), took my faceplate that I had, made me a new faceplate with his printing machine with my logo on it, and hooked it up. I bought all the kits from him; he's the best guy ever. 

What kind of work were you getting before the fire?

All sorts of local things, which were great. I was finding bands that I was producing and engineering, while trying to keep my mix career afloat. We would get a lot of label projects. The one thing that pops up that was the beacon for us was the War On Drugs album, A Deeper Understanding, which won the Grammy for Best Rock Album [2017].

They make cool, sonically-interesting music.

Absolutely. Adam Granduciel [Tape Op #102] is a friend. He worked on the last one here and he's going to probably work on the next one here as well. It was a combination of a lot of different people on that album engineering, and different drummers too. I like the way he makes records. St. Vincent [Annie Clark, #134] was here working on the Sleater-Kinney album [The Center Won't Hold].

That's a cool record.

We jumped into the genre of music that I love, and that I listen to, for the most part. I did a couple records with Mike Viola, including Watkins Family Hour, and I worked on a duo record with Jimbo Mathus and Andrew Bird. Mike started it at his house, and then we did half of it here. Andrew Bird did a couple of other things here, plus Madison Cunningham, who we love, has been in a couple times.

She's really good.

We're talking about a world before the studio fire and before Covid that was awesome. That's just a sampling of what was happening.

I hate to ask, but what caused the studio fire?

An unnamed security system company. A lot of that is stuff is wireless now, but this one had a lithium ion battery that exploded.

It was located in the front room?

In the lounge. It happened on a Sunday night. We only had fire alarms that are like the ones you have in your house.

They just beep in the room?

Yeah, and no sprinkler system. You might not see that in too many studios; it just depends on the studio. They think the fire started in the early evening and then it built slowly. Once it busted through the roof, that's when the LAFD [Los Angeles Fire Department] got called. The lounge was completely toast. The fire came into the control room through the door. It wasn't the fire that wrecked the control room. It was the heat and the soot that was baked into everything. The whole console would have had to have been rewired, which was not something I was dying to do. We saved lot of the outboard gear. But if I sold some of this, I would have to tell them it was in a fire because it would be obvious. You can see the warped Chandler knobs down there. I've got some replacements coming. I could never sell the gear that was in the fire without taking a hit on it. My insurance ended up covering most of what we needed except for the rebuilding part; that's something I committed to. I decided, "This is going to be a great studio again."

You'd already rebuilt this studio when you first moved in.

Yeah, it was the second time! We had to redo the electrical wiring, and parts of the rooms. But luckily there was no session in, so the mics were put away. If we'd had mics out, I probably wouldn't have been able to pull this off. With the smoke damage, they were saying, "You're not going to be able to get the smell out. You'll be chasing this for years if you try to piecemeal it."

Was there water damage?

Yeah. God bless the LAFD; they threw a huge tarp over the console. When they came in, they said, "Oh, that looks important." It didn't quite save it, but it probably saved it from a lot of damage that could have been. The Studer A800 tape machine looked okay, but I was standing in the other room and I heard somebody say, "There's an ember on that machine," and they sprayed the tape machine. I was in such shock that I didn't say anything. The nice thing was our insurance company basically gave me a complete loss on my policy. They said, "We don't know what to do with this. It's going to cost us more money to try to resell this gear or to even get it out of here."

Yeah, this is such a specific business.

I never, ever had to make a claim before; I just paid that premium every year. It took a while to get this escalated. I had the insurance to cover everything, but my insurance wouldn't touch it because they said, "In your lease, it says that your landlord will take care of this." The landlord refused to hold up their end of the deal. I decided to call an attorney. Luckily, we didn't have to go to court, and it all worked out.

I just renewed my policy for Jackpot! I always hope it's covered enough.

I spent $2,000 on DIs and mic stands, and that's not something that I put on my policy. I never added up cabling, patch cables, tables, chairs, thermostats, light switches, dimmers, and decorations. Put it all on there, because it all adds up. It's so important if you have a studio, or even just a small room. I don't care if you just have a laptop and an interface; insure it.

And you decided to rebuild this place even better than it was?

I had a lot of pictures and a lot of memories. I got together with Josh Nyback of Nyback Builds. He does incredible studio builds. We worked our way through and made a couple of improvements here and there. I loved the way the room sounded, so that was the scariest thing to me. The control room is one of these old L.A. rooms – they were all boxes.

It's smaller than you'd expect these days, but it's been here since the '60s.

You can't force a square into a circle. We did make improvements to the control room with the acoustic cloud. This is a classic old "tracking studio" control room. You can mix in it, but it's not what we do here, mostly. It's a tracking studio. But the live room, I could not believe that it was maybe a little better than it was before. We're building gobos right now – that's another thing to put on your insurance, even if they’re crappy. We improved our doors. We improved the lounge and got rid of the drop ceiling. It's also a pretty awesome echo chamber now. I tried it a couple weeks ago.

And now you have one of the new Sound Techniques consoles.

This is a custom board. I'm "officially" a historian for Sound Techniques, because people don't know the history.

Danny White bought the assets of Sound Techniques from [founder/owner] Geoff Frost a while back. These are new consoles built using the original designs from the UK in the '60s.

Yeah. The date on the original dual class A op amp schematic is February 1967. Danny had three or four input transformers from Geoff Frost. He had to sacrifice two of them because they didn't know what the metal makeup was. He got the exact makeup composition of those transformers through a scientific process at a university. If you had an electronic engineer look at the circuit of this preamp, they would say, "There's mistakes in there." They left all the mistakes and didn't try to "fix" anything because of how much people loved these consoles. Another unique thing that these guys were doing, long before anybody had the idea to do a variable impedance input, is they put transformer taps on the inputs. It's got 50, 200, and 1500 ohms that you can swap between for the mic input.

Load the mic differently.

Yeah. I do it every time I put a mic up. I don't care if it's even a tube mic. I'll give it a listen; it's fantastic.

John Wood, from the original Sound Techniques Studio [Tape Op #163] is one of my engineering heroes.

I have worked on a couple Richard Thompson records. Later in my life, I got into Fairport Convention, John Martyn, and Pentangle.

And The Incredible String Band.

Yeah. That was this special folk rock scene that crossed over into so many genres. If that's not enough, there was the early days with a Sound Techniques console at Trident Studios; the first couple of Elton John, David Bowie, and The Beatles doing the "White Album".

Right. People forget that's what Trident initially used.

They didn’t put one of their own boards into Trident Studios until later.

The Sound Techniques EQs are all inductor based, right?

They're incredible. You know when somebody says, "You can't make a Pultec EQ sound bad, no matter how much you boost"? They're similar in that way. The EQs are so easy to use. It is especially really sweet on the top end. When I decided to go with the Sound Techniques console, they lent me their eight-channel sidecar that was floating around L.A. I was doing a record with a friend of mine, and we started at a studio that had an old API console. I took the sidecar in, we started doing overdubs on it, and I said, "I wish I'd started with the Sound Techniques." It was just easier to get a sound; it translated better to me. In the audio world, if you say something is clean, it's a bad thing. But this is clean in the way that it translates well. It's got a big bottom, it's punchy and in your face, and it's not slow. It doesn't have the midrange color of an API console, but it's got the low end response of a Neve without the fluff. It sounds big. I own Neve and API outboard preamps, but I haven't used them since we got this. One thing that's cool about this console – that's probably different from the other Sound Techniques that exist right now – is that the middle 12 channels are from a different era altogether. In the early '70s, Sound Techniques decided to make something that they could sell more of quickly, but still retain the great sound quality and have a transformer-coupled design. This was the System 12 that came out in 1970 or '71. They're simplified, and they're based around a very early op amp chipset that they tuned to their liking; it sounds like an API! They ended up mostly in England, but there were three in Kingston, Jamaica, at Dynamic Sounds. A lot of the early Wailer’s records were cut on these.

The bus and master faders look like the early EMI REDD consoles.

That's the Painton quadrant fader. The original Sound Techniques consoles had Painton faders. Danny owns the rights to Painton faders, so he's making them again. He redesigned them. We also have the summing option. One thing that was always an issue for me, with my API console, was if I had a tracking session up for a couple of days, or someone else was in here, when I wanted to mix something in the box that was no problem. But if I wanted to use the console at all for summing, it was out of the question. So, we put a feature in that takes all of the faders out of the circuit and puts everything at +4. We can do a 56 track mix down as a summing mixer.

Totally calibrated analog summing.

And totally analog. It sounds enormous. It's like a muscle car wrecking through a brick wall! With digital, it's going to be the same every time. But when you start involving variables that are dependent on physics, that's the magic. That's why we listen to a record and relate to it. That's where the character comes from. At the end of the day, does it make your job easier? It makes my job easier, so I love that.

Are you keeping your mix room going, now that the studio is ready here?

I think so. I got the mix room in North Hollywood after the fire. I've been sharing it with a couple of engineers, because I've been spending 95% of my time here. We rewired this place ourselves. If anybody needs a DB25 cable, look me up. I can make one!

Not those! That's tedious soldering.

But that was good for me. It was therapeutic. That was like Chi [Qi], like, "I need to do this for my brain."

And now you have the studio back.

I did a TEC Tracks talk at NAMM, and someone asked me at the end, "What would you tell somebody who's young and doesn't have the budget to go into a studio? Like, 'I can record at my house. Why would I do that?'" I said, "I have a passion to do this, and that's why I do it. I don't make a billion dollars. I wouldn't be here at NAMM talking to you if I was loaded.”

We'd both be in the Bahamas!

Yeah! I do this because I'm passionate about it. I said, "If you want to record in a studio, you're going to find that passion. The first time I ever recorded in a studio I was 16 and in a band. I remember being on the other side of the glass, and not worried about anything but what I had to do." That's a luxury. Now we're all expected to do everything ourselves. He said, "Well, what can you do to inspire?" I replied, "That's a great question. I'm going to do my best. I have this cool studio in the middle of Hollywood. I'm going to call some schools and get some people in here that maybe never would see this otherwise. To inspire them, like when you're little and the fireman comes.”