Outer Marker Records is a flight-related name, right?
The three of us are all pilots, and we were casting around for a name for the label that we thought would be interesting and something we could relate to. We went through all these aviation terms, and all of them were already taken. An outer marker is a part of navigation assistance for an instrument landing system. Nobody in the audio world was using that. We think it’s great.
How did you all come up with the idea of doing high-resolution recordings?
It was actually the Hazelriggs that introduced me to DSD recording. They had been recording their jazz trio, the Hazelrigg Brothers, in DSD. Originally, it was a recorder made by Korg [MR-2000S], and then they went to the TASCAM DA-3000. We got a bunch of those, and we link them together for multitrack. We knew we needed something that was higher resolution, and we decided that Merging Technologies were the only people that were making a converter that did what we wanted to do. It is virtually an unlimited number of tracks, if you have the money.
A lot of classical recordists use Merging Technologies.
Yeah, that’s true. That seems to be their main focus, and it works well for that. DSD, in general, has so many drawbacks operationally, because it’s basically a tape recorder. You can record on it. You can punch in. You can splice the takes. But you can’t do any other manipulations within the machine. The only DAW that runs DSD that we’re aware of is Merging Technologies’ Pyramix. It has all the features of other DAWs in PCM mode (except for MIDI), but in DSD mode it does not allow you to use any plug-ins, level manipulation, or anything within the DAW. This means that if you need to mix multiple tracks, it can’t be done in the native DSD. You basically have two options, maybe three. First, you can convert it to PCM, a standard WAV file.
But you’re dumbing it down, losing some information.
You’re losing something, yes. But that allows us to do all the manipulation that you normally do: automation, plug-ins, and all that. The other option is to mix it analog. We’ve done both ways, depending on the project. For some of the more complex projects, we have no choice but to convert it to PCM, because we need all those features. Then it’s converted back to DSD for distribution. We’ve done analog mixes at different times, depending on the projects, on a little Neve mixer I have. We’ve also done it on a Speck [Electronics] line-level mixer with two channels out. Most recently, we did one at Sweetwater Studios using their Rupert Neve Designs 5088 [console]. If the project’s simple enough, we’ll just use a passive mixer we built.
I assume you also capture the mix via the output of the console to DSD.
Exactly.
Is the passive mixer taking the outputs and just panning and summing?
Yeah, we don’t even really have any panning built into that because most of the simpler recordings we do are stereo tracks.
You’re just overlaying stereo for a mix. Are you using resistor networks?
Yeah, just resistors. Then we use a D.W. Fearn VT-2 preamp as the summing make up gain. We usually run that through a [D.W. Fearn] VT-5 equalizer and VT-7 compressor, and then back into the DSD.
Some nice gear!
Our approach to recording is pretty different from a lot of contemporary recorders, because when we record to DSD, we basically mix as we’re recording. If a track is going to need some EQ, or if it needs compression, we apply that while we’re recording. We’ll just go mic preamp to processing to DSD converter. The recordings we do this way are 100 percent vacuum tube. The only solid state in the circuit is in the analog stage of the Merging [Technologies] converter.
That’s internally feeding the chip that does the conversion.
Right, which is very clean. It sounds excellent, and we’re pretty pleased with it.
DSD works by capturing a single bit at an incredibly high sample rate, right?
Exactly. I’m not an expert on it. What we use is what’s called DSD256, which is 256 times the 44.1 kHz CD sample rate. That’s sampling at 11.2 megahertz – to each sample, 11.2 million a second, it assigns one bit, whether it’s higher or lower in level than the previous bit. That’s a hard concept to get your mind around. But with a high enough sample rate, it works.
It’s like going down to the granular level of tape and magnetization – the ferrous oxide particles being in different states of magnetization.
Yeah, it’s sort of like tape without all the problems. [laughter] Tape is a valid sound. For one of the projects we’re doing, we’re going to take the DSD master, run it through a 1/2-inch tape machine, and use that for the lacquer master for the vinyl version. That’s an experiment we haven’t done yet.
How does the label partnership work?
The Hazelriggs produce their trio records themselves. They produced the new album [Show Me the Answer] with Jared Masters, a singer-songwriter from Oregon. I produce Corrie [Lynn Green]’s albums and a couple of the others on Outer Marker. But we all have a lot of input on each other’s projects. I have been involved in every mix for the label, for example. And the Hazelriggs have played on several songs for Corrie’s albums. John O’Reilly Jr. is the drummer in the Hazelrigg Brothers trio. I use John on Corrie’s albums, and he played on Jared Masters’ album. We use the musicians who are best suited for a particular song.
Where do you guys do the recordings?
The Hazelriggs have a studio where they do their trio recording, and we’ve done a couple of the other albums for the label there as well. Others are done at my studio, which is a little bit bigger and a little more equipped. For the more complex projects, we do them there. And except for the Sweetwater project, we’ve mixed them all at my studio.
You’ve got all your D.W. Fearn equipment, which we know is high fidelity!
It’s a wonderful luxury to be able to record and do all the mixing with gear that I designed to sound the way I want it to sound. It’s audio heaven to me.
There’s a wide range of music on Outer Marker.
If you look at our catalog, it’s highly variable in terms of genres. We have a punk album. We have a classical piano album. We have jazz trio albums. We have singer-songwriter albums.
And your environmental recordings of birds.
I live in the woods. I waited until the sound was quiet enough during the pandemic shutdown. I put a Neumann SM 69 stereo mic out there at 4 a.m. for a couple of days and let it roll right to DSD.
I’d never used one of those until recently. I love that mic.
Yeah, it’s an amazing mic. I probably would have preferred to use a stereo ribbon mic, like an [AEA] R88, but it’s outside in the wind.
You can blow the ribbon elements out in the wind for sure!
I tried to find a windscreen that was big enough to fit an R88, but nobody makes one. People can buy the DSD, which is a bit-for-bit version of the original recording. It does have some edits in it, because the birds are a little uncontrollable. They don’t take direction well. I had to cut out some sections where there was some really raucous bird that just wouldn’t stop!
The AEA R88 stereo ribbon mics are wonderful for that spatial capture. It’s a fixed Blumlein, so it has capture in the front and back of the mic.
Yeah. That’s the approach we take to almost all the recordings. The Hazelrigg Brothers trio is piano, upright bass, and drums, and they do it with two R88s. One is over the piano, with the top lid removed. The second R88 is between the drums and the bass. They’ve got it down to a science now, where they get everything balanced properly. It could be done with one mic, but the piano projects up and down, and the others project sideways.
Do you have to draw the line with music that just isn’t as acoustically balanced in the room?
We did a punk recording [Twin-Headed Dragon EP] with Disaster Artist – two young brothers, Jo and Chris Mayo. They’re really good players, and they wanted to capture that live performance sound in the studio. It was challenging to do that with one mic. That’s recorded with an R88 on the drums. I almost never put additional mics on with the R88, but you have to have a drummer that plays well and balanced, and Jo did. John O’Reilly Jr., who drums in The Hazelrigg Brothers and does Corrie’s albums, he’s really excellent and he can play with acoustic instruments with the proper balance in the room. But Disaster Artist was really an entirely different thing, so to be safe I used a [Shure] SM57 on the snare and a [Neumann] U47fet on the kick drum. We did end up mixing in a slight amount of that, but mostly it was the R88. Chris plays bass, but he plays bass like a guitar. To capture that properly, I needed something a little closer than the R88 on the drums, so I used an AEA R92 mic. I also took it direct through a D.W. Fearn VT-I/F, and we mixed a little of that in. That worked out great, but I’m used to having a little bit more of the bleed sound of the drums into the other instrument mics. So, I took a beyerdynamic M160 and put it out in the room – up high, aimed down at the drum kit from ten feet away, with a ton of compression.
So it pulls everything forward.
Right. So that went through a Hazelrigg Industries VLC-1 mic preamp and EQ, and a [Hazelrigg Industries] VNE compressed it like crazy. That sounded great.
You need that excitement with rock music.
It’s sort of a parallel compression concept, with that highly compressed distant mic plus the closer mics. For vocals, I used a pair of [Shure] SM7s because I figured the singers can work those close. I was amazed. It worked great. If the need arises, we’ll do that. We can use whatever translates the music better. On Corrie Lynn Green’s latest album [Day Four of Living on the Edge], we did a song [“Never Grow Old”] that’s recorded on just one R88. The challenge with single-mic recording is getting it set up right. This was two guitars, cello, and vocal. There is an electric guitar overdub, so it’s not pure single mic in the sense that we performed all at once. But we used the same mic, so it fits right into the original recording. For the productions that I do with Corrie, we record in my studio near Philadelphia, so we don’t have access to musicians that are native players of that Appalachian style. But we’ve got a really good studio band that we use for her records that are excellent at interpreting her songs and bringing that feel to it.
How do artists come to your label?
It’s been people that we encounter. We’re in the music business. When we come across somebody that is an exceptional talent, and we feel that their music needs to be recorded and made available, we do it. We recorded Numinosum by Karttikeya, who plays handpan drums. That’s a very specific genre – almost an environmental kind of sound. We’ve done another one [Tones: 8 Crystal Bowls] with Zoana that’s just crystal bowls. That is challenging to record, because they go from silence…
Those harmonics are crazy.
I ended up with a whole bunch of mics in the room to record on multiple tracks, just to see what was going to work, which was a pair of AEA R44s as a Blumlein pair.
Is there a mastering process? How are you approaching the pre-delivery?
It depends. For the more “commercial” projects, like Corrie Lynn Green, the approach that I take is usually to convert it to high-resolution PCM and mix it more or less conventionally in the box. I need to do that because I need the automation. When they’re doing an overdub, I say, “Play through the song. I’m not sure what I’m going to use.” These players are good enough that they deliver so much great stuff. If I have a couple people doing that, I have to “untangle” them. I need the automation. My process in mixing is to essentially deliver a mastered version. I use my usual VT-7 and VT-5 on the mix bus, and then – it’s the only plug-in I use [laughs] – I use the FLUX Elixir [plug-in] as the final limiter. Most of the time it’s doing nothing; it just captures those occasional peaks that would drop overall level a couple of dB. I’m always aiming for -14 [LUFS]. We have to tailor what we’re doing according to the format. If it is likely to get some traction on streaming, then we try to conform to something so that it’s not going to stand out as being like, “Oh, I can’t hear the words for this whole verse.” This new album we just finished with Jared Masters is the one we mixed at Sweetwater Studios, but with only hardware processing, no plug-ins, and only fader moves for level adjustments, so no automation.
Are these releases available for people who have DSD playback?
For people that want to buy a digital download of the original DSD, we have an international distributor, NativeDSD, that handles that for us. They also convert it to WAV files and other formats. But you know, the motivation for doing DSD is not to make all this extra work for ourselves. [laughter] It’s really a lot of work. The motivation is because the format gives us something that just goes beyond PCM. It’s hard to define, because if you were to measure it with test equipment, it doesn’t measure all that differently. But there’s something about the pristine nature of that original DSD capture that seems to make a huge difference all the way down the line. Even when it gets to the consumer, if they’re listening to even a data-compressed format like MP3, it’s still better.
