Jarrett Pritchard has seen some shit. After coming up in Florida’s extreme music scene, he slugged it out as an educator, live sound engineer, and re-recording mixer for television before getting called back into action for loud and heavy bands. The likes of 1349, Exhumed, and Gruesome have invoked his ears and technical mind on the road and in the studio, and his work isn’t simply your standard clear-as-a-whistle metal production job. When a band like Goatwhore comes knocking, a producer needs to both capture their street-level grit and grime while simultaneously ensuring that not a single riff gets buried in the dirt. And, like any good producer, Jarrett Pritchard isn’t afraid to do what it takes to get his artists to perform to the day’s best. Even if that means busting out the puke bucket.
Was 1995 the first incarnation of New Constellation Studios?
No. My dad was an acoustics engineer for NASA for almost 30 years. I had recording equipment around my house my entire life. [In 1995], I called him up and I said, “I'm never going back to work again. Work is for schmucks.” My dad said, “Well, why don't you engineer?” My father and I, almost immediately, decided we would start a studio together in 1995. My first was called Anacron Studios, and it was in our house. It was the time of ADATs and [Yamaha] O2R mixers. I believe it was one of the first O2Rs that came to the East Coast. We had an early Cakewalk computer with a WaveCenter card and optical in and out. I asked a lot of questions – learning recording and learning automation. I was reading a lot; anything that I could get my hands on. I was solving a lot of my own problems, but my father was very much a scientist. The notion of crushing a room mic with a [Urei] 1176, he would say, “Why are you doing that? That's crazy. Why would you do that?” I was learning from my dad, who's very, very technical and clinical about engineering, while I'm being inspired by these rock engineers that do it way differently. “I'm going to put distortion on that snare.” He would ask, “What in the world are you doing?” But we had a good time with it, and I learned a ton from him.
You started getting a lot more engineer and producer credits on metal albums 10 to 15 years ago. What was going on between 1995 and 2007?
The first five years were hard. I was a live engineer, and I was running a studio, mostly local bands in Virginia. Live-wise, there was a lot of violence where I was. I had twins in 1998. I had kids and I saw everything, from riot squads at a DJ show to gunfire. In 2000, I retired from doing live sound and I went and got a job as a sound editor. I was a re-recording mixer for a lot of programming for Discovery, and FBI Files, New Detectives, Daring Capers, Diagnosis Unknown, The Prosecutors, and Interpol for National Geographic. In 2005, I got a telephone call to teach at one of the audio schools. It definitely made me better, because I had to articulate what I do. That's not necessarily something that you consider. But when you have to show a student, “This is a kick drum, that's 1 kHz. Here's what happens inside the shell. It sounds like crap. Get rid of that. Here is the cardboard: 200 to 400 Hz.” Being able to articulate it in that way that equals “this noise is this number.” I did it for four years. Those that can't do, teach. I don't know how true it is, but I decided that I had talked enough. I wanted to get back to work. I had become a better engineer. I played music. I took care of my kids, and once my kids were old enough to understand what was going on, I started going back to work and I didn't want to talk about it anymore. I wanted to do it and prove to myself that I still knew what I was doing. The return to metal in 2008 is what brought me out of retirement. Somebody asked me to go out with the Norwegian black metal band 1349, and we were opening for Carcass. At first, I said, "I don’t want anything to do with any church-burning Norwegians.” My friend that was asking was like, “No, dude, they’re not like that. Not like that at all.” Now, those Norwegian guys are still some of my closest friends and my favorite clients. I’ve done a few records for them over the years and continue to work alongside them. It was through them that I got involved with Tom Warrior [Thomas Gabriel Fischer] and his bands Triptykon, Celtic Frost, and Triumph of Death for the last 14 years, which resulted in the live Triumph of Death album [Resurrection of the Flesh] that...
