You grew up in Baltimore?
I did, until I was in my early 20s.
What was going on scene-wise, and what about that got you interested in recording and making music?
In Baltimore, there was a very arty punk scene. I don't know how to describe it, but lots of bands that were sort of post-emo. Baltimore was running alongside the DC/Dischord Records scene, but the Baltimore scene was different. A lot of the kids in the bands went to the art school in Baltimore, and, for lack of a better word, it was like beatniks making hardcore. It was a great scene, and it still is a great scene. There've been a lot of great bands to come out of that scene. But at the time, like in every town in America, there are certain kids that get electric guitars, then they find somebody else who has a bass, and they put together a group of friends and make a band. Eventually, it's time to go to the recording studio. For the bands that were in my friend group, the recording studio that everyone went to was a place called A.C.R [Studios]. There was another one called Social Services. These small, punk recording studios in Baltimore were these mythical places that, even though I'd never been to them, I would have dreams about what they were like. The funny thing is I would eventually go to these studios, and they were nothing like what I imagined. They were basically like a warehouse full of junk. But my roommates had a band, they were recording at A.C.R., and they invited me. At that time, I had been doing this mad scientist electronic music studio in my basement of the row house where I lived in Baltimore. I had tons of effects racks, synthesizers, modular stuff, and drum machines that were synced up with other drum machines. Bands would say, “We're gonna go record the songs, and then maybe you could come in and maybe make the songs more unusual” – effect them or give them treatments. That began my early teenage time of being something like Baltimore's Martin Hannett [Tape Op #103]. Taking a punk band and making it sound strange. In the '90s, in recording, there were a lot of things that were very by the book, and a lot of that had to do with the entire world of indie and punk recording being enamored with Steve Albini [#87] and his techniques. They were considered the grand alternative to doing things in a mainstream way. The problem with those techniques is, that while they sounded great and they work for certain bands, to me, they didn't feel very adventurous. I wanted to dub out the recordings by putting lots of effects. I learned that if I flipped the reels upside down I could record backwards. Then I learned about vari-speed, so I started recording parts an octave higher by speeding up the tape machine and then playing at normal speed. All of the instruments would have this strange sound. It wasn’t just that they were pitched down, but there was something strange about the performances. If you see a David Lynch or [Stanley] Kubrick film, there's this over-the-top acting style where people aren't acting like normal people. They're reciting their lines, maybe they have a different look in their eye, or maybe they're accenting different parts of the sentences, or just doing something unusual, and it creates an atmosphere. If you record something slow and speed it up to normal speed, then you've got a thinner, brighter track, and vice versa. Putting a click track down on the tape, speeding up the song, having the drummer play to that tempo, then slowing it down, and suddenly I'd have these monstrous drums that sound bigger than any drum set ever heard. I'd then add lots of digital delays and stuff.
And this is after they've tracked?
A lot of times it's before they tracked. The bands would lose patience sometimes when I would want them to wait for me to try out every possible vari-speed to get the drums to sound weird enough, especially since, back then, everyone was paying by the hour. In Baltimore, my career as a recording engineer, then producer and mixer, started with me making experimental electronic music in my basement and friends of mine asking me to come to the studio to provide treatments and effects and different approaches to each song instead of it being just the Steve Albini way where it's almost like making a documentary. By doing it the Steve Albini way, you do get a sense of the band. Where it really works are the bands that are just incredible bands. But if the band is not incredibly technically skilled and they go and record in that way, whether the song is good or not, it kind of kills the vibe.
Some of the greatest musical minds I've met are not great players.
I want someone to be able to play well on a recording because I want it to sound good, but there are a lot of ways that could be made up for. So, anyway, by collaborating with my friend’s bands in this way, I was able to visit these recording studios that I'd heard of. The big aha moment was like, “Oh, they're in the other room, we're in this room, and we can hear them through the speakers." The whole live room and control room. That was a big realization for me. From that point on, I knew it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
You bring up a good point. So much of production is problem-solving, and if you're working with younger or less established bands there may be another whole set of issues.
Right, they're still getting good.
One of the best parts about your records is that they are always interesting sounding. Perhaps that's a result of creative problem-solving. For example, the new DIIV record, Frog in Boiling Water, sounds different than a lot of records. It's thick and gooey.
Yeah, that was a long project. We had a number of breakthroughs where the record went from sounding like a band playing in a studio to sounding like something more special. And also, because a lot of that album was made where we recorded everyone playing together at the beginning. But then, we spent a year in this house trying absolutely everything. We ended up re-recording most of what we recorded live, except for the drums. I'd be mostly working with one musician at a time in the band, and we'd have another three who are either thinking about the next thing to do. A lot of them would go off on their own and make things and say, “Hey, maybe we could try this,” and we'd fly it in and try it out. There are a lot of tape loops and strange samples that we pulled from different places. It became something that felt like a layered concept record. That was a hard record to make, but it did become that way on its own in a sense.
It becomes what it becomes.
Yeah, there's always a point, like the end of the first third of making a record is usually there's a point where it tips over. So, instead of trying to make the record be something, what it is becomes a reality. And then you have to finish it based on what it is, if that makes sense.
Totally.
So, instead of telling the record what it's going to be, the record starts telling you what it's going to be, and you become a servant to the record. A great example is, "Okay, we need a keyboard in this bridge," and then you play a keyboard that's not right. Why is it not right? Because it doesn't fit with the song that we've created. The song is telling us what's right or not. The song is telling us what the keyboard should be. When you're serving the song, for weeks on end it can be tough. Especially when you can't find the thing that the song is looking for. But I like that. Often, if the song is good, once the song starts telling you what it needs then you just have to listen to it and go with it. In the end, when you listen back to a song having told you what it needs, it all feels like, “Hey, look. It works.”
When you're starting a record, are you going in with firm, definitive ideas about how you want to start?
Well, one thing I find essential is that every song gets approached from a different direction so that there's no one-size-fits-all approach to producing a song. Every song has to be special and unique from its foundation, and the foundation is the part that I put a lot of emphasis on. You could call it the basic tracks, or some albums are a lot of programming. Also, depending on if the song is all built around a vocal. In that case, try and get a good scratch vocal to build the track around. I try and do every one of them differently, or I break them into pairs and say, “Okay, this drum sound we're going to use for these two songs.” Some certain kinds of folk albums, or a punk album that's maybe a more traditional punk album, benefits from having the same snare sound the whole record. Or a folk album, you don't want to change the mic on the guitar every song. But these are the things that keep me up at night before a project. Almost as if it was filmmaking, how to shoot each scene with different lighting. So, as you pass through the album it doesn't feel like you're just looking at it from one perspective.
It probably depends on who you're working with. That approach requires a luxury of time.
Sometimes.
Say you've got a week to get a band recorded. How are you approaching that?
Well, for a ten song album I try and get three songs down per day, with one day getting four. If we're doing a four-day drum session, one day we can get one less. If we don't get it that day, we don't have to stress out. In between each song, I tear the drum set apart and often I have three sets of toms that I'm rotating. Once that song is down, those files go to the editor. The editor is usually an engineer in the next room over. I've written notes saying, "These are the takes that I like. These are the sections where those takes stood out." They take that into consideration. While those files are being edited, that's when I go back in, and we hear the drum beat for the next song. Usually, there are a couple of members of the band that want to be a part of this. We do it as a committee, where we all go in and listen to the drummer playing. Sometimes the drummer will say, “I would maybe use this snare on the song.” Often it's an average of about eight snare drums that I have. I get them all tuned differently from one another. Having that many snare drums is for two reasons. One, to have the variety to be able to customize the drum sound going down so that it feels like it's meant for that beat. But also, after a drummer plays that drum for an entire song it's not recordable again until it gets tuned up. I usually put a piece of red gaffer tape or something on the ones that are out of tune. Otherwise, we'll keep trying them to see if they work. Maybe it was out of tune two songs ago. Maybe it's in tune now. Angel City Drums comes in the morning, and they tune the drums, and then they come in the evening after dinner and tune them up again. This sounds like crazy overkill, but it's not very expensive when you consider the results. Some drummers will say, “I'm really good at tuning the drums. Maybe I can just do it.” Often I'll have the drum tuner come anyway. Not to tune the drums how I want them, but to do the drums the way the drummer wants them. I do want the drums to sound like that drummer. Doing all of this is to elevate that drummer for who they are and the way that they play. But I'll change out the toms, I'll change out the kick, or I'll leave it all exactly the same if it sounds good for that particular beat. I also rotate the hi-hats and the cymbals. The cymbals have a pitch. Maybe it's because I'm obsessive about every detail, but I do want the cymbals to be in harmony with the song. A lot of times when we're testing out the drum sounds, I'll have someone play along on a bass or guitar to hear, in the room the key of the song and the key of the drum set. The same thing goes with bass sounds. Usually, I have four or five basses that we'll rotate. Sometimes an album sounds good with flatwound strings on every song. But often, I find that there are songs, especially more rocking songs, where the round wounds are better. So, we'll rotate them, we'll try everyone out. I do that for every single instrument, on every single song. Everything gets shot out against every other possibility before going down. There are people who lose patience. They don't want to do that. If I get the feeling where I'm losing more than I'm gaining by making this person wait when they want to play right now, I will let go. But most of the time people like hearing the results. When I like the way it sounds and I say, "Okay. I'd like to go with that," everyone else is usually on the same page. They like it too.
Well, I would imagine that it probably feels pretty good to the artist to have somebody spend the time to get it right.
Yeah. Aside from my ideas, or my grand idea for what the record sounds like, it's very common for someone to say, “Hey, I had an idea. Maybe we could try some sort of effect on this guitar or bass for the song.” When somebody does that, a lot of times we go on a tone quest together to try and get the best possible version of that effect. I want it to stand out and I want to not just happen to have a flange on the bass at this certain point, but to have it be a memorable flange where it doesn't sound like a plug-in that everyone has. But I'll contradict myself. Almost every song that I've ever worked on that resonated with people has been done extremely spontaneously with very little setup – just, "One, two, three, go." Some of the best things I've ever worked on have been made that way, where the whole thing was done in a day. I heard Al Green's Let's Stay Together record was tracked and mixed in one day. It's absolute perfection; the sound quality and the way that the production suits and supports the songs. It couldn't be any better. Granted, every single person involved in that project was insanely skilled, but they didn't have time to second guess anything. You hear about The Beatles, and you'd think that they spent so long on those tracks. A lot of those great Beatles songs were done immediately. But, as we all know, there's not a right way. I guess I said that because there's virtue in not going through it all. And whatever the snare drum happens to be, that's the snare drum and you go for it and then you get a great song. I don't want to ever stand in the way of that!
That's such an important part of the job, knowing when to dig into that minutiae and the details and also knowing when to step aside and let the process take over.
There's also a “reading the room” thing. I can tell if I'm talking about all these crazy techniques and doing it the hard way and I don't get a reaction. If it doesn't seem like they're excited about it. Some people want the record-making process to be fun, and other people want the recording process to be absolutely miserable for them. They want to go to hell and back and they want a recording of that. It's more common than you think. Sometimes there is a dark energy in the studio where, I’ve got to choose my moves wisely because I know there's a tension in the room. It might be because one band member took the reins, and the other ones are resenting that person for doing it. Who knows what it could be? A lot of times I find out along the way. Sometimes, it's really fucking quiet, and the vibe is weird and I'm making the record wondering what the deal is, but that's how they want to do it. I'm not trying to make anyone have fun who doesn't like fun. I want to make a good record, so I try and acclimate to whatever that calls for.
It's interesting what you're saying about some people wanting that process to be painful.
Once I was working on an album with Alan Moulder, and we were in the depths of tracking – 40 days in or something. He's like, “How's everything going there?” And I was like, “Oh, it's pretty weird. No one likes each other. Songs are good. There's a lot of tension.” A lot of these tension records, once they get on the road they're best friends all over again. It’s something about that time in the studio where it's very concentrated energy. But I was venting my frustrations to Alan Moulder on the phone because I was going to be giving him the tapes or the files for him to mix. And he said, “You know, most good records are made with conflict.” He said it pretty nonchalantly. I thought about it, and he's worked with Smashing Pumpkins and all these bands that famously had infighting. I was like, “Oh, yeah, those were some good records. Maybe this is a good record too.” So, I try and embrace it. Although I want people to be happy around me so I can be happy too, sometimes I don't really know what I'm signing up for when I agree to do a record. Or maybe I just need a job, and so I end up in a studio for a month with people who are not happy. I can do the best I can, but sometimes just shutting up and taking up as little space in the room while I'm doing my thing is the way to go.
I was talking to our mutual friend, Thom Monahan, and he had mentioned that you had moved from Baltimore to New York and had a job at Quad [Recording Studios]. Was that your first gig in New York?
First, I was working at a synthesizer store that was right near the remains of the World Trade Center, south of Canal [Street] on Broadway. It didn't pay very much, and I was struggling. One of the customers worked at a jingle house in Soho, and he helped me get a job there. I worked there for a little over a year. Quad was looking for a new tech to handle Pro Tools. Pro Tools at the time was new. Tape was the way that the albums were made, and Pro Tools was just used to edit those tapes, but it was becoming more common, especially in rap and R&B. There were sessions every single day, but there were also rooms that were wide open all the time. The deal I had with the studio was that I could use the rooms when they weren't in use to make up for the fact that they were paying less. Business was slower because of 9/11. So, I got the keys to the castle. There were five SSL consoles there and every room was loaded with gear. The studio had been made in the ‘70s so it had tons of tube mics but also the latest, SSL consoles, etc. That was going to college for me, working at Quad.
Who was coming through there? Were you running Pro Tools for those sessions?
Sometimes I would, but most of my job was facilitating the sessions. I was a tech. But I ended up being a bit of a go-between, between the studio's management and the clients. The floors were mostly hip-hop. One of the records we're working on was nine months with Kanye West's College Dropout. He was still a producer who was trying to break out as an artist. Roc-A-Fella Records had one of the floors blocked out the whole time I was there, so I spent a lot of time with Roc-A-Fella Records and then Kanye got Roc-A-Fella to rent him a floor for nine months to make that record. They took a chance on him. Culturally, the label and Kanye were coming from different places. The label was these tough guys, and Kanye was a smart guy, but Kanye kept delivering for them with these singles. So, that was one record that was going on while I was there. Then there was a lot of Alicia Keys and Mariah Carey. Another person that inadvertently became a mentor of mine, because every day I would have to check in with him, was Michael Brauer [Tape Op #131], who was mixing records. His setup was constantly changing. So, my job at Quad would be to check in with Kanye, “What do we need today?” Mostly he needed an Ensoniq ASR-10 plugged into the desk and that's it. Michael Brauer might be on a 96 kHz session, which meant we needed to get specialty hard drives that could deal with that. I remember the first 96 kHz session that came through was Coldplay. We had to run it on two SCSI hard drives at the same time, with round-robin record allocation, in order to play the thing back. It couldn't play off one drive and it couldn't play off Firewire either, because Firewire 400 was the only Firewire at that point. We had to use SCSI and split the files half on one drive and half on the other. Every other track had to be on one or the other drive. It had to be, kick, drive one, snare, drive two. This was the kind of thing that my job entailed. But it was super awesome because once we got it going, we hit play on the desk, and 96 kHz Pro Tools was playing, it felt like a moment in history. We were like, “Wow, it works.”
And what album was that for?
X&Y. The song that was being worked on by Michael first for a while was “Speed of Sound”, which was their new single. It was interesting seeing Michael – this extremely established mixer – and he was mixing this new Coldplay single like his life depended on it. It was that moment where I realized that you could do this 20 or 30 years and it doesn't get easier. You still have to mix for your life, especially if you want the job. He got the job, but he worked really hard to get it.
Wow. Who else was coming through there at this time?
I had a session with Serban Ghenea once, which was interesting. Serban was booked in there and we'd never seen anyone mix in the box before. I don't even know if he was using Pro Tools. It was normal for producers to come through that studio with racks of gear, and then we plugged in their gear into the patch bays. That was part of their sound, their rackmount gear that they brought with them. Serban came with two rackmount computers. I thought that he was going to mix on the desk and capture it to those computers, so I put them in the machine room and tied them to the desk so they could be monitored and ran lines to them. But he was like, “No, no. They come in here.” I was like, “What's the other one for?” He's like, “Oh, it's for redundancy." They're identical setups.” If anything happened to the one, he had this identical computer with all the same plug-ins and everything.
Right.
I remember talking to Stuart White, “There's this guy downstairs mixing on his computer with the million-dollar SSL right next to him. He's not even touching it. He's mixing in the box." That was craziness. But now he's the best mixer in history. There's nobody who's mixed more hits than that guy, still mixing in the box. He figured it out early and didn't care how many people told him he was crazy. I also saw heavy metal mixers and a lot of rap mixers come through, and it was fascinating to watch these people work. To me, they were superheroes. I wanted to do what they were doing. Sometimes I would get a band that were friends of mine that I could bring into Quad and record for free in the SSL room. A lot of times I would ask my friend, "Can you give me some Roots or Beyoncé multitracks?” I would get a Roots song and mix it over and over, record all of my mixes to a DAT, and then compare them. I obsessively started practicing mixing. My mixes were extremely bad. Especially when I had so many options. When I was back in Baltimore mixing a screaming punk record, I only had high and low EQ and two compressors. But in an SSL you've got 96 compressors and [Teletronix] LA-2As and [Urie] 1176s in the wall.
You used them all!
I'd plug in every single piece of gear, and the mixes sounded like ass – I still have them. There's the Yeah Yeah Yeahs Fever to Tell album. Dave Sitek, Chris Moore, and I made our version of it. This is before they got signed to Interscope. Then Interscope suggested, “Maybe you should mix with somebody on this list.” It was all the great mixers of the day. They went with Alan Moulder, and we were confused because we were like, “But the album was mixed. There's no need to mix it again.” But I learned pretty fast – once I heard the Alan Moulder mixes, I was like, "Okay. That is much better." I still have a copy of our original version. We were all trying our best, but we didn't have the experience level of someone like Alan.
Right.
It sounds laughably bad. It's a shitty version of the record that no one ever needs to hear. But one cool thing was at the end, Karen [O] decided to take two of the mixes that we had done and put them on the album. All was not lost. When I listen back to the work that I did now, 25 years ago, it's crazy. I was so sure of myself. I was so proud of my work. I would tell people it was the best. When I listen to it now, I'm like, "Wow. I had no idea what I was talking about. I had no idea what I was hearing.” I deal with that a lot now, where I will get a rough mix that somebody wants to stick with. They want me to stay close to it, and the rough mix is awful. I run a risk there. If I go rogue, it could be hard for them to wrap their head around it if they're so used to it the other way. I can be doing a disservice. The puzzle you have to really decode in the beginning is, can you do your own thing in a mix, or should you stick close to the rough mix and just improve it a little?
That's a great point. People do fall in love with rough mixes.
Yeah. I don't even want to listen to anyone's rough mix. Maybe I want to get a sense of what the instrumentation is before I set up for the mix if I'm patching things in. But, I want to intuitively mix a song, make it sound in a way that's satisfying to me, and then run it by the artist. If someone wants me to stick close to the rough mix, it is not that fun of an experience for me. I try and make some kind of art form out of it, but it's tough. It's a lot of A/B. I put on headphones and I'm switching between the old one and the new one. I'm like, "Is it the same? Is it a little better?" I definitely suffer during those projects. But it's not my record. I'm just here to help. While I want to put some of my own artistry into it, if there's no room for it…
Are you always trying to integrate everything that's sent to you in a session, or are you just taking what you're given and radically reimagining it?
It depends on how familiar I am with them. Once I was producing a song and Tchad Blake [Tape Op #16, #133] was mixing it. I don't know if he listens to the rough mix very much, because what he sent back bore no resemblance to anything we had going on. But I'm the kind of producer where I hear it and I'm like, “Wow, that sounds new to me all of a sudden.” So, I really liked that. The band I was working with had worked with him many times before, so that's what they wanted. Tchad took this background layer and made it the lead hook. It was the opposite of what it was intended for, but it really worked, and it was better. It was better than what I had in the rough mix. So, that's me and Tchad working together. If it's me and some stranger working together, and I say, “Oh, this section's way too busy. I'm going to take some of this out and now it sounds so much better when that transition happens." That can get me in a lot of hot water. If I feel strongly about it, I'll make two versions and I'll run off one exactly the way it was and say, “Hey, I did a little manicuring of this section, or, "I flew these vocals around." Sometimes, I'll make a dub vocal section if the bridge is too barren, or the outro doesn't have that element that feels like a finale. Maybe I'll create a finale by moving some files around. But I usually say, “Here are two versions. Take a look and listen to this other version. I tried some things.” I usually have no way of predicting what their reaction is going to be. Sometimes they'll say, “We're feeling that idea. Let's go with that.” Every once in a while they get pissed off. I try not to give it too much energy if they do, because I'm just trying to help. I don't mean any harm.
You would hope that when somebody hires you, they're hiring you for your artistry. You would also hope that the people that have hired you have heard your records and that there's some expectation of what might come back.
A lot of them haven't. It's about one-third of the projects I work on where they'll ask me to keep it close to the rough mix. That's me being spoiled by having a lot of people want to hear what I want to do. There are a lot of times when I'll do a version where I change it and make it sound the way I think it should. Then, on the next round of notes, they undo every single thing I did. It's important not to take that personally. It's hard because my life and my work are so tightly combined – this is maybe a symptom of workaholism – but I feel like the records and the sound of the records that I work on is such a big part of my identity. I want people to like me and my work in the same way. It's so intertwined that if someone doesn't like my mix, it's hard not to take it personally. When I was younger, I'd be like, “Well, they're just stupid," or, “They don't know what's up,” or something. Another thing that comes from having done this for such a long time is that times have changed. People are different and culture is different. I try and stay with the times, but there's a chance that some young person that I'm working for, who's hot shit, isn't going to think anything about my past. It doesn't even factor in. I just happen to be the person mixing this person's record, and a lot of times I'm lucky to be doing it. I have to make sure that I'm not bringing an unfashionable sensibility to a cutting-edge young person's thing. There are a few good examples of people who have adapted repeatedly. The first that comes to mind is Spike Stent. Spike has been doing this longer than I have. His sensibilities started in the late '80s or something, and he's still mixing the most modern music to this day. He's been able to stay current and it doesn't seem like it's something he had to fight to do. It's just in his personality to keep learning and keep conscious of what the sound of today is.
What do you think are the elements that define a modern sound?
Well, it's interesting. Last night, my friend Josh Da Costa was DJ'ing and I went to his thing. It was a Friday night at Zebulon, and it was full of 19-year-olds. He was DJ'ing deep cuts on vinyl and his set was unbelievable. There were still people coming up and saying, “Hey, can we hear Chappell Roan?" He was like, “Well, I don't have that." They were like, “Can you play something from this generation?" He was thinking about like, "What do I even have that would fit that?" He was doing a masterful job. As we all know, people's music is different for everyone. Some people just want to hear Chappell Roan and dance with their friends. I love a DJ that plays my favorite song I've never heard before, and they don't. That doesn't mean that that I listen to music in a better way than them. It's just different.
What does music even mean to people?
I think about it constantly. I'm always observing people listening to music. We all have the same emotions, but music is something different for everybody. Music affects us in different ways. Getting back to what I was saying about Spike Stent and his ability to mix back then and today. I think that the way to adapt is to be a lifelong learner and to soak it up. The young people who are making the new sounds in mixing; I’ll see sessions where somebody is using three instances of a multi-band compressor at the same time to achieve a result, and I'm like, “Well, you're losing all the feeling like that.” But it works in this weird way. There's a kind of new audio science of today that's based on having all this FFT and spectral processing at your disposal. You don't just have an EQ – one linear phase GML EQ in the wall that you put on the string section or something. You've got 32 bands of completely spectral equalizer that can do everything and can be multi-band in a different way. People are putting multi-band expanders on their vocal or on their drum bus. I watch a lot of YouTube's of young people saying, “Hey, here's how I…,” or I see some insane new way of de-essing a vocal. I'm not necessarily going to do it, but I want to be aware of it. I want to know how things are made. And it's not just audio; it's anything. I remember during the It's Blitz! Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, Karen O said, “It's not the strongest or smartest animals that survive in the forest. It's the most adaptable." 
