How did you get into the world of recording?
Well, I apprenticed as a recording engineer while still in high school but didn’t think I had the people skills to make a career of it. A lot of studios closed after 9/11, and it didn’t seem like there were any jobs. I thought, "Fuck, I can’t figure this out." Meanwhile, my interest in recording became very granular. I wanted to know – on a component physics level – how to get the tones I liked, so I went to school for electronics. In 2005, I began working for Purple Audio, assembling new gear, and also fixing everything I could get my hands on, as well as helping refurbish old consoles. That’s how I met Gabe Roth [Tape Op #59] from Daptone. He brought in a Trident Series 65 console that got refurbished at Coral Sound (who shared the shop with Purple) and eventually installed it as the main desk at Daptone.
I was assisting Gabe back then and was the one who drove to rural Georgia to pick that console up and deliver it to you.
Crazy. Gabe would come over and bring tons of records, so that’s how I became aware of Sharon Jones, The Budos Band, and Menahan Street Band. Later on, I started doing a bunch of tech work for the Menahan guys. And after we built Diamond Mine in 2014, I would get to hang out and have a beer on the couch listening to Charles Bradley do an overdub. I thought, "This is fucking amazing." But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, and had to say things like, "Hey, this is dope but there’s a problem at 130 Hz." So, [the producer] Tommy Brenneck [Tape Op #147] realized I had good ears, and started asking me to do more and more tape op'ing and assistant engineering. That evolved organically to where I was engineering there, because the owners were four incredible musicians who had always just done it themselves. That’s pretty hard to do when you’re in the band and on the other side of the glass.
Thinking about great R&B and rock records from the '50s, '60s, and '70s, how would you describe the sound of a great record?
The idea of a transparent recording is a complete fallacy. When sound is moving through the air it’s stimulating tons of harmonic distortion and it’s touching you. This is a really rich and emotional experience, and to try and make a documentary of that is a fool’s errand. As soon as you use a transducer and convert acoustic sounds to voltage, we have already lost so much. We’ll never be able to hear all of what we were trying to capture after the signal passes through a bunch of junk and comes out some speakers, no matter how good the speakers and listening environment are. To me, a good record embraces the fact that a recording is not reality. A recording shouldn’t be transparent. We need to add back all the distortion that would have occurred in real life in some analogous, electronic way. We need to build an idealized acoustic environment inside the space of the speakers that can’t exist in real life, because real life can’t exist in those boxes. I’m always trying to maximize the emotional impact of the music being recorded. The sounds are all enhanced or degraded in such a way as to create this little immersive universe where the listener forgets who and where they are and just has feelings.
How do you approach tracking a project?
I try to get the sounds as finished as I can in the room. I’ll spend hours treating the drum kit and moving it around the room. I’ll do whatever I can to make the instruments sound like a record already in the acoustic space. Then I have all my mics that I know will translate whatever I’m hearing. I find the spots for them by covering one ear and moving my head around in that zone until I’m like, "Yeah, that’s the sound." Then I’m thinking, "What head basket design would the right mic have? What’s the right diaphragm design? Is there a network in there to slow it down but saturate the transformer? What impedance is that going to require, in terms of preamps?" Okay, so now we have an idea of our signals. If we're hitting tape, that’s going to dictate how much extra shit I run through. Then, depending on what style of music and where each instrument needs to sit in the mix, that will influence additional gear selection. And gear selection can get pretty exhausting. I’d rather roll into a studio and see a Neve 8078 console. There are 40 great sounding preamps with EQ and everything’s going through them. I love having no choices, capturing what’s there in the room, and knowing we’re already going to have an excellent soundscape because we’ve got a whole bunch of the same signal chain accumulating. The best scenarios that I’ve been in are with a producer like Leon Michels who's in the live room writing with a band, and however long they take to work it out is how much time I have to keep moving mics and turning knobs.
Speaking of turning knobs, did you help design a custom console for James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem?
Yeah. I’ve had a lot of great mentors, but a big one is the tech, John Klett, who has had James as a client for many years. He and James had conceived of a large-format 64 input custom console for the DFA studio in Williamsburg. It was a long, drawn out project with several collaborators, one of them being Malcolm Toft [Tape Op #26, #165]. I helped John with the EQ design, the backplanes, and drew a lot of the circuit boards that went into the center section, which was pretty involved because James has sort of an '80s way of working where there's a high analog channel count. He’s always got a mix up on the board, there’s a ton of outboard patched in, a lot of bypass-able insert points, and a bunch of different ways of monitoring and comparing. We tried to give him what he wanted; it was really fucking hard and I’m not sure we’ll do that again, but I’m psyched for the experience because building a console was definitely one of the things on my checklist of becoming a complete engineer.
Speaking of engineering, you started Eisen Audio which made preamps and DIY kits for the 500 Series early on. You’ve done design work for Purple Audio, AwTAC, and NonLinearAudio. What’s the coolest box you’ve worked on?
DIYRE Colour Palette [500 Series tone module] is arguably the coolest, because it’s an open source collaboration. After helping DIYRE's Peterson [Goodwyn] with the mkII redesign, and making a few [physical] plug-ins for it, it’s fun to see what the other designers come up with.
What mixing projects are you excited about right now?
I’m mixing another album for Norah Jones that’s an absolute pleasure. She’s an amazing talent. I never get tired of her voice, and she likes what I do. She wants a high level of refinement without losing the rough vibe, and she is very detail-oriented. I get tremendous feedback from her that keeps pushing the mixes to be better and better. Then sometimes other clients send emails like the one I just got while we’ve been talking. It was basically, "I like this mix, but can we go back to the rough?"
I hate those.
"The rough is your digital demo, and I had the assignment of making it sound like it was recorded at an expensive analog studio. So, that’s what I spent days doing and now we’re going to scrap it? Okay."
Tell me about working with Quincy Jones!
In 2018, Rashida Jones was producing a documentary, Quincy, for Netflix and they asked Mark Ronson and his writing partner, Andrew Wyatt, to compose an end credits song. The song was called “Keep Reachin'.” They got the idea that it would be cool to hire Quincy and Michael Jackson’s studio musicians to record it at Westlake [Recording Studios] in L.A., where they had recorded Off the Wall and Thriller. And then they also wanted to shoot the whole thing as B-roll for the documentary. God bless Mark, because he can hire anybody, but he tends to hire me. He said, "I want you to get the Bruce Swedien [Tape Op #91] sounds, nail it, and make it sound legit." I was like, "Okay, that’s a tall order but let’s do it." I’ve learned to do my homework. I get to the studio a day early to talk to the manager and the assistants and see what we need to rent. I can’t take anything for granted, even at really nice studios. Then I set up way in advance, because once Mark and whoever he’s working with walk in we’ve got 20 minutes before they want to be rolling. Even if I say, "Let’s do one for levels and test the waters," it could be “the” take.
Were you using Off the Wall or Thriller as your reference?
Off the Wall. Thriller is more programmed and close mic’d gated sounds. Off the Wall is more organic. We were going for organic, but I didn’t know who the drummer would be. It ended up being Jonathan "Sugarfoot" Moffett, Michael’s live drummer who hits harder than anybody I’ve ever met. It’s painful. Somehow Ross and I got it to sound good. Ross Garfield is “The Drum Doctor.” He’s the secret weapon. You can play him a reference, and he will show up on the day with the right kit tuned the right way and even help figure out how they might have mic'd it back in the day. The keyboardist was Greg Phillinganes, who is a super-talented sweetheart. The guitarist was Ray Parker Jr. of "Ghostbusters." These guys were all sweethearts and were so happy to be together doing something for Quincy again. Then Quincy eventually arrived, and that was a trip.
I bet! Did he roll with an entourage?
Oh yeah, he came with an entourage. It was mostly young people. One of them was one of his daughters, and another was his nurse and nutritionist. And by the way, Ed Cherney was there too, who was Bruce Swedien’s assistant engineer on those Michael records. He had been there already filming a replay of “Rock With You” in the same studio, with the same guys! I said, "Mark, can’t we just use Ed?" But no, to get the right sound for our original song I had to strike all his mics, borrow a few, which he was very nice about, and then do my own set up. But Quincy got there, Mark introduced him to me, and I became his target for some reason. I didn’t know this going into it, but he had this whole bag of tricks to size you up... a power trip thing. He'd ask your name and then figure out what ethnicity you are, and then he'd start speaking to you in that language because "The Dude" spoke a lot of languages. I’m a quarter Danish, so he started speaking to me in Danish! Apparently he lived there for a while, and was like, “You don’t speak the language? You've got to know your roots, Jens!” I brushed it off and went on with it, but he kept coming back to stuff like that throughout the session. I just wanted to work on the music, but he kept being like, “But what about your roots, man?” I got impatient and tried to shut him up by saying something like, “Okay, old man,” which I don't remember, but Mark said that’s what I said, and it left an impression. [laughter] I do try to treat everyone as peers in the studio, whether they're famous or not. Quincy was a trip.
Did he like the sounds?
Yeah, he liked everything, and it was fine. He seemed a little checked out at times, so we didn’t always know who was driving and the band would start dragging a bit. Then Quincy would jump up, get on the talkback, and tell the band to tighten up. They would right away, and they would play ten times better! In the end, the tune got reworked several which ways, and the version that came out didn’t sound like the basic tracks, but that’s life.
I heard Mark [Ronson] tapped you to remix the Barbie opening music at the eleventh hour?
I helped them do a bunch of tracking, which is typical. I tracked all the drums, some of the percussion, and some of the horns. I don't usually get to mix projects for Mark because he has his guy, Tom Elmhirst, and there's no room for anybody else. But a lot of the orchestral score for the movie got done at Abbey Road, and they have their cookie cutter system where they've got well over 100 mics up. The film opens with a cover of “Also sprach Zarathustra.” They didn't license the original [2001: A Space Odyssey version]; they re-recorded it at Abbey Road at the last minute, like the weekend before they were going to master. Mark wasn't feeling that piece; it sounded too new, and he wanted it to sound old. He had the Abbey Road people send me the files; I reduced it from 100 tracks to 11, passed it through a console, a tape machine, a couple plates, and some tube EQs, and tried to make it sound old. That piece of mixing opens the movie, and because it was last minute and not through proper channels I did not get credit. I didn't get credit on the movie at all. In the credits, they've got the text all formatted symmetrically. There were so many engineers that they had to drop one to make the text look right, and the name they dropped was me!
That's ridiculous.
Botched credits for the tracking engineers is sadly typical, and one reason why I'm less and less interested in tracking.
You recorded and mixed Clairo’s new record Charm. What was that like?
I had been sworn to secrecy, but now that it’s out I can talk about it. I mixed it in the box at home, which I could get away with because it was well recorded. A lot of it we recorded at Allaire, which was like camping. Allaire is hard to lookup now. It’s semi-gutted and not what it was, but it was a big deal when it opened 25 years ago. David Bowie recorded Heathen there. It’s on top of a mountain in the woods and has giant windows and porches showing the mountain view. The one room that’s left to record in is this grand hall. It’s a cool vibe to write in. Claire [Cottrill, aka Clairo] wanted to write there with Leon [Michels] and the guys in his band. We all lived there for the duration. She had made her last album at Allaire this way. We were given the one big room with vaulted ceilings and no acoustic treatment whatsoever. Very reverberant. No control room. No iso booths. A blank slate with some gear to hook up and move around. I wanted to build a drum-brella somehow, or else it would be impossible to get a dead drum sound to fit with the overall aesthetic of the album. John Rooney, the other engineer, had the brilliant idea to buy a 10-foot square beach canopy tent and line and cover it with packing blankets. This gave us an enclosed drum hut. It wasn’t nearly enough to stop drum sounds leaking out into the room, but it was enough to keep room reflections from getting back to the drum kit's close mics. That way we could have our dry drum sound while also having the option of room mics outside the tent. Whether Allaire, Diamond Mine, or Diamond Mine North [Leon’s upstate studio], the basic tracking was always live with little or no isolation, and so there was always bleed. This is typical for a Leon Michels production, but what’s unusual is what happened with the bleed on a few songs. Maybe we’d redo the drums while keeping the live piano for a section, so the original drum take is buried in there. Or we’d fly in a slide guitar whose amp was in the middle of a room during a different take. Or on "Nomad," we used the scratch acoustic guitar as the drum room sound, even though we’d otherwise intended to overdub and replace that acoustic guitar. Complex, and at times uncorrelated layers made for unique textures. On a related note, we only had 8-tracks on a Scully that I rented from my friend, Glen Forrest, so only the main sources could hit tape while tracking live and scratch mics, DIs, or room mics that we didn’t plan on using went direct to digital. When we did end up using those in a mix, the decoupling effect of the digital having no flutter turned out to be useful in terms of creating depth of space, as reverb sends, or in further complicating our textures. Claire insisted on cutting all of her vocals through tape on the way to Pro Tools, and then she insisted on zero reverb or effects during mixdown. All the vocal layers are bone dry and meant to be heard as one mono entity. I don’t think I’ve ever done another record that way.
What did you use for Clairo’s vocals? Did you end up sculpting her original sound much in the mix?
On some songs it’s a Neumann M 49. On other songs it’s an Electro-Voice RE15. Usually through a [Neve] 1073 flat and a Tube-Tech CL 1B. Typically, a healthy amount of EQ in the box. Sometimes high-passed. Never low-passed. On most songs, I used a ton of Pro Tools clip gain: To turn down esses, turn down loud words, and turn up quiet ones. I do this to avoid needing de-esser and compressor plug-ins, because I'm highly sensitive to the artifacts and smearing that I hear most dynamics plug-ins impart on a source so complex and revealing as breathy lead vocals from analog tape. Painstaking manual leveling, and then I'll finish the vocal bus with a brickwall limiter so that the consonants line up with the drum peaks just right.
Do you recall describing a monitoring technique to me where you bounce back and forth between a set of active nearfields and Yamaha NS-10s, and when they sound matched is when you know you are in the right zone mix-wise?
Yup. Active nearfields (hyped highs and lows, and scooped mids) and NS-10s or Auratones (rolled off highs and lows, and forward mids) are what I encounter at most studios. They have opposite curves, and I switch back and forth frequently, and when the balances sound the same I have translation. There might still be a problem if they don’t have a sub to check, but at least the balances are correct. There’s a reason little boxy mids-forward monitors have always stuck around for decades while the mains trend has become ever more highs and lows hyped and scooped in the middle.
I want to try something: Let’s say I asked you to do a session for me, and I want the drums to sound like Bob James’ 1977 version of “Pure Imagination.” Can you walk me through how you might approach the session?
Sure!
[Jens listens to the recording. I call him back the next day.]
Ready?
Yeah. This is a Rudy Van Gelder [Tape Op #43] recording from late 1976. When I serviced Rudy’s 80 series Neve console in 2008, he told me he’d been using it to track through since about ’73, and if you told me his album, BJ4, was a Neve recording, I’d believe you. I don’t hear any bleed or natural reverb that we’d expect from Van Gelder’s cavernous live room – it sounds like the drums are in a booth. Indeed, when I visited Rudy’s place it was half full of booths, which he said he’d also had for quite a long time. I can hear some close, bright reflections from the glass and the slats, but mostly it’s tight and dead around the kit. My first impression says this doesn’t have the clarity of a live-to-2-track master but, upon closer listen, I think the generational dullness I detect has more to do with mastering. It sounds like the digital transfer came from an EQ’d master – a set of tape-transferred mixes they’d use to cut an LP side – and that some sort of limiting or other processing may have been applied digitally. I don’t know what tape machines Rudy had, but to get this sound I would want either a 3M M79 or one of the later MCI JH-16s. I don’t hear any Dolby noise reduction at work. It does not sound like they were using an IEC EQ curve or European tape formula.* Most likely this is 15 IPS (inches per second, tape speed) NAB on 3M tape with a lot of careful EQ'ing, filtering, and mic selection, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a higher speed with some pre-AES NAB-type EQ. I’ve gotten close to this texture by varispeeding a modified MCI JH-110 to approximately 25 IPS and using ATR tape. I don't think Steve Gadd was sponsored or carrying around the same kit, so let’s not even bother trying to research what he might’ve used. On this recording, I don’t hear anything unusual or shiny and new with the kit. Wood-tipped sticks and not too heavy. Played precisely and lightly. For the kick, I hear your typical hardened felt beater on a coated head with a large hole cut into the center of the front head and some damping inside the drum. For the toms, I hear coated heads, top and bottom. Not clear. Not concert toms. It's hard to tell what the snare is. I don’t think it’s a wood shell, and I don’t think it’s particularly deep, but it is a well-damped shell. It sounds like the standard 10-strand wires, not this new brass shit. Maybe some brand of partially-damped coated batter head. I don’t know what the cymbals are, but they’re a bit chunky. Not paper thin. I don’t hear anything exotic, so most likely Zildjian. The ride might be a K. But the hats sound like A. The mic'ing is unusual, in that I don’t really hear any close mics. Certainly, there’s nothing up on the snare. The toms, at first, give the impression of gated close mics being panned, but I think what’s actually going on is zone-mic'ing, and that the toms correspond to the stereo spread of those mics along with the cymbals. Rudy has done a fantastic job of keeping the kick, snare, and hat centered. But there’s definitely a mic near the floor tom and ride panned left, and there seems to be another one near some rack toms mounted over and above the hi-hat. There might also be a few pan moves during the fills. I hear a mic out in front of the kick, but not in it, and I hear two mics that you might call overheads, but they’re positioned and angled very carefully to get player-side detail and booth ambience, which blends seamlessly with the front of kit and the rest. The stereo image at first seems surreal, and yet it folds to mono perfectly – no cancellation or smearing. The drum sound is mostly mono, mostly panned center. Only those side tom/cymbal mics mixed low. The aforementioned “overheads” are panned, and they’re placed to keep the kick/snare/hat center line coherent. Rudy obviously spent a lot of time getting the phase right throughout. I couldn’t tell you which mics he used, but following my ears I’d ideally want some vintage [Neumann] U 67s overhead, an M 49 out front, and RCA 44s filling out the sides. I don’t hear compression on the whole drum mix, only clipping and saturation. But whichever mics are closest to the kick and the hi-hat seem to have some light compression on them, and I hear it as something like a dbx 160VU. A soft, mushy attack. Not a FET. It might also be some sort of variable mu compressor. I don’t hear any drum reverb either. Anyway, that’s the type of analysis I do in my head when someone plays me a drum sound. People working now are impressed with the depth-of-knowledge, but I suspect old-timers who were there might think I’m a hack. Either way, opinions don’t mean jack if I can’t intuitively substitute and experiment my way to something that gives an impression of the reference sound within a few hours, and I almost always can if I follow my ears. That’s what matters. 
