You were involved with punk from an early age long before you started recording, began Clean Plate Records, and played in Laceration in high school.
Yeah, I’m problematically motivated – or I have a problematic work ethic – or something. I don't know if you dare to remember the zine Punk Planet, but I was part of starting that back even before Clean Plate. I think I was 15, and it started on AOL. At that time, I was living outside of Birmingham, Alabama, and was very into DIY punk and hardcore. There was a little bit going on around me that was great and very helpful, but also there wasn't much of a scene – there weren't that many bands and there wasn't much happening. I would read Maximum Rocknroll, and it felt like there was this whole world out there that was of so much interest to me, but I felt so removed from it. All these things I was doing were me wanting to participate more in that world. I could see all this cool stuff happening, and I was like, "I want to do that!"
Weren’t some of your earliest recordings done at Hampshire College? I saw it credited on Orchid’s Skull Sessions.
Hampshire is a make-up-your-own-major kind of hippie school. So, my Division III, which is like a major, was called The Recording Process, but it was essentially whatever I made it up to be. I interned at a local studio, plus Hampshire had a small studio that I was using, and there was one recording class that I took so that I could use the studio. But, you know, you don't go to Hampshire to learn recording. [laughter] I recorded the Orchid demo in the Hampshire studio on a 1-inch, 8-track. They also had one of the original black [Alesis] ADATs, which is what got me started on the ADAT path that I was on for ten or more years.
You also recorded Jeromes Dream there? What was the setup?
There was a very small control room that was barely 10 ft by 6 ft. Next to it, there was a performance hall that you could use, and there was another small computer music room where they had a modular synth and some early MIDI gear. The Orchid demo was recorded in the performance hall, and we played on the stage. But for Jeromes Dream, they were shoved in this small computer music room, because the rooms had to be booked individually ahead of time. Everyone who did music at the college had to share these rooms, so you would sign up for time slots, and it was one of those classic things where we started recording at midnight and went until 5 a.m., for two minutes of music!
Is it true that you decided early on that you only wanted to record music you liked?
When I first set up a Dead Air space in my house, I had recorded a few punk bands. I was putting up flyers and trying to get anyone in to record. I was thinking that that was what I should do. Like, how else would people know I was recording? So, there were some very bad, college bro funk bands and stuff like that. I quickly realized that people who end up in your weird-music demographics usually have other weird personality traits that align with yours, to an extent. Also, I realized I don't want to spend my days with totally random bands. But I wish them well!
By 2000 you had set up Dead Air, in a shared house?
Yeah. It was a punk house, with an alternating amount of three to five other roommates. The control room was basically an old mud room, an entrance to the house. It barely had flooring – it was just particle board – and the bands would play in the attached garage. This was a house that was from the 1800s that had been a farmhouse and had been added onto many times over the decades. Clearly, the one car garage was not an original piece of the house. It had a concrete floor, and the walls were exposed frames. I put up some insulation and did some pretty crummy DIY soundproofing so that the neighbors didn't complain too much. In that house, I had to be pretty mindful of the time of day. The control room was a very weird size and shape. There was barely room for my mixing board, a chair for me, and a little couch behind me for the band to sit. I built a double door going to the garage, but it was comically small; it must have been about 20 inches wide and maybe six feet tall! People would come in with a bigger kick drum, and we would have to take a hoop off to get it through the door! If they had an Ampeg "fridge" [bass cabinet] coming in, they would have to put it on its side so that it could go through. It was kind of comical – a little bit like a clown car! You would think, "Why not load in through the garage?" Garage doors are not very soundproof, but I had it blocked off pretty well. I had tried to seal it up in a way that I could later reverse when we moved out, but not in a way where it was meant to be opened once a week.
You said you went through a few consoles. Did you have two ADATs linked?
Yeah. Back when I was at Hampshire and they had the one ADAT machine, I had thought, "Oh, if I get another ADAT, I can sync these together and record bands with 16 tracks." That's obviously a game changer, in terms of drum mic'ing. When it came time to make my own space, it seemed logical to get a second ADAT for myself and then I had 16 tracks at home. For outboard, I had the cheapest rack compressors you could buy, like the Alesis 3630 and the dbx 266. These were $100 units that were decent. I also had a used dbx 160 [compressor], but I really didn't have much at all.
Was there a recording from this period that gave you confidence in your studio work?
I became good friends with the Boston band The Cancer Kids through the process of recording their album The Possible Dream, and we were all very excited by how it came out. I grew up listening to ‘90s crust punk and powerviolence records, and most of those are not recorded extremely well, to be honest. Maybe what I was aiming for wasn't even necessarily that high, but it felt like it was standing up amongst those [records], and that was a good feeling.
By then you had recorded in Orchid [Chaos is Me] with Kurt Ballou [at his GodCity Studio, Tape Op #76]. I imagine seeing his setup must have been inspiring to you.
It was definitely cool to see, and to think, "This is possible." His setup at the time was in this kind of industrial building, and he had a few rooms. It was functional, but it wasn't fancy. I think it gave me the perspective that you can produce good material out of a place that isn't like your typical recording studio. You can make it suit your needs. Leading up to this interview, I've been thinking about when I first read Tape Op. At that time, if you were interested in recording, you could go to Barnes & Noble and flip through Mix Magazine or something, but that seemed like a world apart from where I was at. But it made me think, "Is this what all recording is like?" I didn't have a huge background of recording in different places, so it was definitely cool to see functional punk and underground recording setups working, and to also realize, "This can be a thing." It doesn't have to be this world-class facility that's recording hits.
Dead Air is now at its third location?
I am in the third iteration, and it’s still in my house. Back when I was in the first Dead Air spot, in the mud room and the garage, it was functional, but it wasn't really ideal. I didn't long for much, but I would've liked an isolation room or more soundproofing. I started looking at rental spaces, but when thinking about the cost of those spaces and building them out, I was getting nervous that I was also going to have to raise my rates enough that maybe the punk bands that I wanted to work with would no longer think it was affordable. Such a move would basically work against what I wanted to be doing. I realized that having the studio in a house was a functional way of getting my expenses down and making everything easier. So, I started looking for another house to live in. Not a punk house with so many roommates, but thinking, "Does it have a bigger garage, a big basement, or some weird outbuilding?" I figured, if I could do that and not have all of these other expenses, that would be a huge deal. My partner, Meghan, and I bought this house seven or eight years ago, and the basement was one open room that I then framed out. I built a live room, three isolation booths, and a control room, so that I could make it more functional. In the second iteration, I had done more soundproofing that was very functional. When we moved in here I upped the ante a little more, especially since we bought this house when the others were rentals. We were thinking, "Hopefully, we’ll be here a while. Let's put in the effort to try and soundproof." I don't think any of our neighbors even realized that music is played in this house. It’s pretty great!
How did you learn about soundproofing and how to frame out a room?
That's all message board learning, and trial and error. The live room is framed on two-by-sixes instead of two-by-fours. Then you stagger two-by-four vertical studs. Only one side of each two-by-four is connected to one of the walls, and then the other alternating studs connect to the other wall. You're removing the coupling, basically. You weave insulation between those staggered studs and put up double drywall on the walls and ceiling. I was lucky to have help from some friends who’d come by to pitch in.
You spoke of keeping costs down for bands, and it seems you’ve also cracked the code with your affordable mastering rates, which helps in keeping a steady flow of music coming your way.
I realized that after bands would spend a few hundred dollars on recording, they were reluctant to pay a similar amount to get it mastered. I understood their perspective, but I also felt like the recordings were selling themselves short by skipping the mastering process. I didn't really have the tools to take it there, but the bands also didn't have the finances to take it there. As I moved towards [Avid] Pro Tools and experimented with mastering on my own, I realized, “If these bands could pay $50 to $80, they would probably say yes,” and it would sound better. I wished this existed, and maybe it was on me to make it happen. It’s kind of absurd to be the guy that wants to master 7-minute long, D-beat and extreme punk records, but I wanted some alternative to exist. I wanted those records to sound good. I didn't have anyone to direct the bands to, and I also wanted some alternative to exist. The first thing I did with Pro Tools was to find saturation plug-ins that I liked. I’d been abusing my outboard tube compressors to try and get saturation, but I found ways to get that in the box. Working in the box is partially necessary for me in keeping overhead down. Additionally, it helps to remove the stress that came from asking bands for mix notes and not touching the board for five days when I was working out of the box on an analog board.
You also didn’t have a computer monitor in the studio until 2015?
Alesis evolved the ADAT brand into a 24-track hard disc recorder [HD24] where you’d insert your own IDE hard drives into a special caddy. Those machines were great and pretty fast, but also kind of awful. You could copy, paste, and undo (which was scary and unreliable), and edit by scrubbing and finding transients. It was a huge step up from the older ADATs, but there was no monitor. By 2010, bands would come in and say, “I can’t believe you don’t have a computer in here. What are you doing?!” It kind of felt great – you’re more in the wizard category, where no one understands what the hell you’re doing! But once you move to Pro Tools, it’s like, "Oh, tab to transient! Great!" That would’ve taken me a minute to find before. It’s hard to put myself back in those shoes, but at the time I was reluctant to make the switch to Pro Tools. I didn’t want to have to worry about latency or menu diving to solve some problem on a computer. The Alesis machines were plug-and-play, like a tape machine, and there’s a beauty in the simplicity of hitting record, play, and rewind.
We have to talk about your Dead Air pedals. I loved the launch of the Chaos Drive you did with Reverb.com.
When we were practicing for the Orchid reunion shows; it was initially drummer Jeff Salane, second guitarist Brad Wallace, and myself. Since the late ‘90s, Brad and I have gone on to love gear and tube amps. I set up my Marshall JCM 800, and Brad had an earlier Mark I Mesa Boogie. The amps sounded good, but it didn’t really sound like Orchid, so that sent me on a quest. After that practice, I went down a rabbit hole trying to recreate some of those tones with different pedals, whether it was an EQ, distortion, or a preamp in a box. Different ways to approach the "problem." Some of them got close, but they didn't really satisfy. For the next practice, I picked up an old Marshall Valvestate, which was the amp I had used back in the day. That had the right sound, but only at a very specific volume, which is well below show volume. But it had the feel of the gain and midrange, and it confirmed to me that there was something I was looking for that I wasn’t finding. One of the first things I tried in developing the Chaos Drive was a distortion where I modified the tone stack, searching for that certain midrange scoop. That version of the idea got very close, and Brad and I practiced with that and got close to the sound, but it was weirdly intense. In a way that was cool, but also right on the edge of unusable. It was a fine line of controlled chaos, but a little too far and too nasty. I took that idea and started again, using overdrive instead of distortion. I had to rig together three or four building blocks of circuits to end up where I did.
I’m admittedly ignorant on this subject, but do I sense a community of pedal builders out there?
There's a Discord channel for pedal builders that's really great. It's a tight knit community of people sharing problems and solutions that has been unbelievably helpful for me. My background with electronics is more from a circuit bending angle. Fuck around and change this resistor value or change it to a pot and hope that something cool happens. I don't have an electrical engineering background. I was making small tweaks to the Chaos Drive up until the last minute before we left for the tour, and that week of shows was the real beta test of the circuit design. When people at the shows, or online, were saying that we "really nailed" the guitar sound, I thought, "I guess it worked!” [laughter] From there, the final version launched through Reverb.com soon after. I went from frantically wondering if this was the right idea, to quickly selling a few hundred of them. I guess it’s a thing!
It’s a cool parallel to a rare 7-inch or a vinyl variant; a small batch that sells out quickly. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a pedal like your Full of Hell noise generator. What is it exactly?
Over the years, there have been a few bands that I’ve been in, like Bucket Full of Teeth, where there’s a noise element, and 20 years ago I’d use circuit-bent toys and a few oscillator boxes through guitar pedals. Nothing too earth shattering, but I always wanted an actual pedal to make noise and weird sounds. Another studio project, No Faith, played a few shows where the bass player, Shane Dupuy, would trigger noise through a looper – but that wasn’t an ideal solution either. It might cut out the bass signal, or he’d hit it wrong and then it’d be recording. I wanted a pedal I can step on that makes noise, and then I can turn it off and play guitar. Not a revolutionary idea, but there weren’t many things available. Many oscillator box options don’t have an input, or they are fragile. With Full of Hell, I had first worked with them mastering a 7-inch about nine years ago. When I made my first batch of noise generator pedals, I traded a few to Spencer Hazard, the guitar player. We thought it would be cool to make a Full of Hell pedal, but what would that be? I eventually had an idea of turning four or five circuits I had been working on into some weird, fucked up box. I sent Spencer a prototype; he thought it was sick and was down to do it. I pushed the circuit further, and he and I were psyched on how it came out, but I wasn’t sure if this would be something that more than 20 people would want. Full of Hell is a cool band, but would the people that like them want this weird thing? I had no way of measuring the interest. The first batch of 50 sold out in two minutes, and there was immediate online outrage. “Why were there so few?!” [laughs] I want people to use it and have fun with it but releasing something like this is a bit of a weird experiment. That said, there are a few hundred of these in existence now, so people have a better idea of what they’re getting these days. I hope they’re putting them to good use and making some fucked up sounds with it!
I hope you kept one for yourself! What is the music scene like in Amherst?
Well, I think the umbrella that it fits under is Western Mass, in general, and I feel like there is something special here. There are several colleges here, so you get that influx of fresh blood and new ideas. There’s also the downside of it being a transient area, where a lot of people will leave for bigger cities. There are enough people who stick around, so there are core groups of people here doing interesting things. There'll be a couple of years where there's some house that's doing crazy shows, and then that goes away and things die down again for a bit. That can be frustrating, but part of the charm is that there are these waves. In a place like New York, there's so much happening that it can seem oversaturated. Since Western Mass is relatively small, there's inevitably more cross-pollination of scenes. My hardcore band will play a show with a noise band and a more indie band, and these people are all friends and go to other shows together. You get a bit less walled in by what your interests are. You get exposed to new things, and, whether or not you’re even aware of it, your own ideas can grow a little bit differently or in different directions. A lot of the bands that people like from Western Mass are not rigidly defined bands; they’re a little weirder or more divergent. They might not sound like this other indie band or noise project, but they’re still in that stew and picking up some of those flavors.
Looking at your gear racks, it seems your earlier digital gear is on the left and the nicer lunchbox racks are on the right.
For recording, I have a bunch of CAPI [Classic Audio Products, Inc.] mic pres that I love, and I go directly from them to a MOTU 16A interface into Pro Tools. I have some older interfaces that I could chain together for more tracks, but 16 tracks is usually plenty to record most of the bands that I work with. I still have some outboard compressors and gear that I like, but I don't use them that much because most of the time I'd rather not commit that processing when tracking. Honestly, the more I mix, the less I compress on individual tracks and sources. Bass guitar would be the exception, but even with that I use a multiband compressor, not just a normal compressor. I have many mixes where I don't compress the kick, snare drum, or the overheads. I do it all on the drum bus. I don’t need to over-compress the individual mics; I’d rather mix the drums as the drums and get a collective sound from it. In the past, it was more likely that I might overcook the compression on a single drum mic and then wish that I hadn’t, rather than have something that I wished I had compressed going in. I can always add that compression in the box, later. I find it's a nicer way to treat the drums as a performance, rather than getting caught up in soloing the kick or snare and getting that to sound perfect on its own. I’ll put it in the mix, and it kind of doesn't matter what I did anymore. It’s taken me many years to realize or unlearn that. I still solo those things and think about the EQ, but maybe I'll turn down the low end on the drum bus instead of that kick mic, because I like how everything's interacting. Meanwhile, thinking back to before I was using Pro Tools, that would have been very difficult, as my busses didn’t have EQ and I didn’t have much outboard EQ to patch in anyways. These options weren’t even really available to me for first 10 to 15 years that I was recording, but now it is so simple.
It’s great to know new bands are seeking out Dead Air and your unfiltered sound. I was surprised you hadn’t been in the magazine already.
Well, thank you. I remember very specifically playing Portland, Oregon, on the last Orchid tour in 2000, and I went to Powell’s Books. I was looking at the zine rack and saw the Tape Op with Fugazi in it [#12]. "What is this fanzine about recording?" It blew my mind, and it was such a crazy breath of fresh air and affirmation that I was not alone in this world. There are other people coming at recording from this other angle.
