Stuart Hallerman: Engineer and Studio Owner

Stuart Hallerman has run Seattle's Avast! studio since 1990. Stuart left his hometown of Chicago in 1980 to attend Evergreen College in Olympia,WA.After "the 5-year plan" at Evergreen's recording program and several years as Soundgarden's live soundman and scapegoat, Stuart realized a dream of opening his own recording studio. Avast! found a permanent home when Stuart installed an Ampex MM1200 2" 16-track purchased from Roger Fisher of Heart into an old mechanics garage in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood. Avast! is a very comfortable room that feels more like a spacious practice space than a studio. It is filled with amazing gear yet it is still accessibly priced. Over the years Avast! has hosted a wide range of artists including the Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, Built to Spill, Hater, Bikini Kill, Supersuckers and the Evil Tambourines. I have been lucky enough to work at Avast! on a number of occasions and have always been pleased with the results.

What were some of the first releases to come out of Avast!?

The first CD release that came out of Avast! was Christ on a Crutch's Crime Pays When Pigs Die with Nate Mendel [Sunny Day Real Estate, Foo Fighters] and Eric Akre [Treepeople, Citizens Utilities, Goodness]. Steve Fisk produced The Treepeople's Guilt, Regret, Embarrassment , as well the Jesse Bernstein record which was started while Jesse was still alive and finished after he died. I was very busy doing albums, 7 inches, & demos. The Screaming Trees did a round of demos here with Don Fleming for Sweet Oblivion . The Screaming Trees just have this sound, they're just always themselves . I asked Mark Lanegan jokingly as the session was concluding "why does Epic need to hear a demo of the new stuff? Couldn't you just send them one of your old tapes?" He laughed and said, "They just want to make sure we still sound exactly the same."

What are some of your favorite sessions or bands that you have worked with?

Some highlights? One of my favorites would be the Hater record. It was sort of a moment captured on tape. It's an informal pile of mistakes and jokes that comes out so musically. There are so many unplanned moments on that record that are just gems. The Jesse Bernstein album with Fisk, Jesse reading his poetry with Fisk doing the music. That will always stand out as a classic Avast! record. A recent highlight is Maktub. I keep playing their Subtle Ways CD for people and they are like, "What is this, where can I get one?" The Treepeople's Guilt, Regret, Embarrassment has a lot of depth and texture. A really quick record done in 5 days... tops. All the Built to Spill stuff. Doug [Martsch] has a fondness for recording here, he really goes out of his way to make sure that pieces of his records get recorded here. He consciously supports Avast! because he is a nice guy.

How did you end up in Evergreen's recording program?

If you knocked on Evergreen's door and said "Hey, I want to study recording, and be a recording engineer," they'd say, "Go to a vocational school." What they wanted to teach you was a fully rounded interdisciplinary liberal arts education. If you mentioned that you were interested in recording they would tell you to get lost. I wanted a full education, but still had to finagle my way in there. They had very few students in the department. There might be 10-15 students studying recording at one level or another at any one time. Evergreen's communications lab building was built in 1977 and it was fully outfitted with approximately the state of the art equipment at that time. It had an Ampex 2" 16-track tape machine; it had a fairly large API 2488 console, pretty good mic collection. Neumans, AKGs, RCAs, the standard good old mics of the day. Basically what's considered vintage now is what they had then. Besides the 16-track studio they had three 4-track studios with nice recording spaces attached to them. Because there was so much time, space, and gear you could actually get hours and hours... days and days of recording experience there. It was great.

It seems that it was a real vibrant time to be attending Evergreen?

At that time Olympia felt slightly like the center of the universe. Bruce Pavitt, who started Sub Pop, was there. Steve Fisk who was just leaving had made a real influence on the scene as a performer/engineer/producer. Calvin Johnson [ #32 ] was making cassettes in his bedroom and selling them through little flyers and word of mouth as the genesis of K records. During school I bought a PA and started doing live sound for local bands. That included Nirvana, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees or touring bands like Fugazi. I felt slightly misplaced. I really wanted to do recording but here I was doing sound for punk rock shows. On the other hand, when I did eventually move up to Seattle I knew all the early Seattle rock bands. I was acquainted with them, friends with them. They knew me from doing live sound and they trusted me. When it came time for them to record they felt that I understood what they were trying to accomplish. One of my last concert events in Olympia was a punk rock show that Slim Moon from Kill Rock Stars would put on every summer out in the park. As the 1987 show approached, the bands he had originally scheduled to perform cancelled and he was stuck. He said, "I guess we'll have to call it off it unless we can find some other bands." I offered, "I can call some friends in Seattle, they're called Soundgarden ." Slim excitedly goes, "You can get SOUNDGARDEN ?!", "Whatever, It's just rock, waddaya want?" Slim replied, "No, no, those guys are great! I really want them to play!" So I got him connected. The band had never played Olympia so they were into it. Nirvana ended up opening followed by My Eye and Soundgarden. Nirvana was great and the show had some intensely memorable moments. After the set, Soundgarden came up to me and said, "We're going on the road in January. You have a van don't you? Would you like to come be our sound man?" We're just standing outside in the park as the sun is setting and I'm thinking about this in my head, driving my crappy van all over the US in January , to go to all these crummy bars, with smoke and beer and doing sound on these crap-ass PAs... "Sounds great, I'll go!" They were also promising that we would go to Europe in the Spring. I'll believe that when I see it I thought. It all kind of worked out though. That was kind of a highlight and turned into about three years of touring!

How did you end up assisting on Soundgarden's Louder Than Love ?

I had done some 4-track recording for the band in '85 and they had loved the way it turned out. While we were recording I asked Kim [Thayil] how he wanted his guitar to sound. His answer was, "I want it to sound like Godzilla knocking over buildings." So I put the mic where I thought it might work, I turned the knobs and had him keep playing and within a few minutes I got a pretty crunchy and bold sound. Kim was pleased by how I translated his request into a taped sound that he had never actually gotten before. I brought something out of the band that other engineers had missed by trying to polish stuff up and basically wash them out. The other engineers would not respect the band's ideas. So when they were doing their first major label record with Terry Date they asked me to hang out and be a production assistant. I had no illusions that they should record with me in my living room in Olympia. I had no idea how to make a major label record and spend $80,000. They knew Terry but they didn't yet trust him. They were worried that they might get that same washed-out pop production they had gotten from other producers. They invited me along to keep an eye on him. The idea was that when I saw him do something wrong like gating the tom toms or whatever to go pull the band aside and warn 'em. I didn't have much to tell 'em though! Terry did a really great job of producing that record. In the end it was a little slicker than I think the band had wanted, but it's a pretty fun record to listen to still. There is so much texture in it.

Did you learn much from watching Terry work?

Mostly I saw that I had the right idea all along, but I did learn some great techniques from Terry. When he did the basic tracks he filled the first couple of tracks with kick, snare high hat, then he left two open tracks, and then ambience mics and stuff, and then the bass and guitars. Then up on the upper numbered tracks he recorded all the tom toms. I think it was four toms at the time, two floor toms, two rack toms, and we spent about two weeks doing all the basic tracks. When they finally had the drum tracks, Terry, Matt [Cameron], and myself sat down at the mixing board and ran a fine toothed comb through the tapes. We listened to the tom toms and bouncing from the 4 original tracks we made a stereo mix. He added some EQ and a little compression and bounced that to the open tracks in the drum kit area of the tape. What we would do is roll through the song and note where in the song Matt hit the toms. Where he hit the rack toms we would turn off the floor toms and bounce just the racks over and vice versa. Push up the faders, pull down the faders. Matt would sit there and push up the fader every time he did a fill. It went quickly because he knew exactly what he had played. The whole record was done on one 24-track machine. It was a relatively simple kind of recording. Later I observed them in the studio with Michael Beinhorn during the recording of Superunknown . Matt called me up at the studio and to commiserate with me "When we record at Avast! we get great drum sounds with like seven microphones. I've got a forest of microphones around me here." I used to have a picture on the wall here of that drum set up and I think there were something like 50 mics on and around his drum kit. Five snare mics, seven kick mics, three mics on each tom eight room mics, etc. Soundgarden did a demo recording with Beinhorn before Superunknown and Kim called up distressed and said, "we're kind of stuck here, Stuart. You have to tell Beinhorn how to get my guitar sound because we have put up seven mics, all these compressors and equalizers and every time he adds another microphone my sound gets smaller and smaller. I want it to sound huge. Let me put you on the line with him and you can tell him what you do to get my sound." Well, what I do for Kim is basically an Endino-ism. Put a SM57 on the cone of the speaker, run it through a Summit tube pre- amp straight to tape. No compression, no equalizer, just overload the mic pre a little bit. That's it. It still sounds like Godzilla knocking over buildings!

Is that what they ended up doing?

No, They mixed the seven mics until they were only halfway un satisfied.

What are some of your favorite low cost microphones?

That is a good question. One of the school standards that is still in production that you can still get is the Shure SM7, that they just re-released. It is a dynamic mic. It's like an SM57 but has a selected capsule. It is a very silky, very nice microphone. For that matter the SM57 is a very usable microphone for vocals or instruments. When Steve Fisk did the Gits' Frenching the Bully album here we tried out every nice microphone we had and ended up recording Mia Zapata with an SM57 because it was the perfect mic for her. It sounded right with her. Everything else was lumpy or shrill or harsh. Audio Technica makes a wide array of microphones. They make some for vocals, some for instruments, some for drums and there is something about their microphones. They are cheap, if you put them in the application they suggest they just fucking work. You don't have to hype em', EQ them, or work em'. You just put the kick mic [ATM 25] in a kick drum and run it to tape. It is not my favorite mic — I would rather use an AKG D-12, but I always have to EQ it to get the kick drum sound I want. They have a tube vocal mic called the AT- 4060. Put it up against some of the newer Neumanns, some of the better AKGs, it is a great sounding vocal mic. It is not a cheap alternative; it is just a great vocal mic. They have a new one called the AT4047 which I believe is supposed to be a copy of the U-47 Neumann. I have not heard that yet but I bet they hit the mark. They have a really cheap mic, about $140 that looks kind of like a skinny SM-58 and it is called the ATM-813 and it really sounds a lot like a U-87. The U-87 is about a $2500 dollar microphone and this is $150. You put them next to each other and you can hear the difference but it is hard to describe what the difference is. One has a golden sheen; one has a silver sheen. Is that worth the $2000 plus difference?

How do you balance being a creative person with being a businessperson?

I got into recording because I love music and I got into this business because I love recording.

Any other tales?

When I got my first 4-track rig in Olympia and four okay microphones (a couple of 421's and stuff) Calvin Johnson from K records, no, K Cassettes, was just starting his recording empire there. I knew him from around town and I saw him one day and I was like, "Hey Calvin, I just got these good microphones and a nice little 4-track reel- to-reel and I know you have been doing some home recording. Y'wanna record together? It'd be cheap and it would mostly be for me to get some experience, what do you think? You can make better tapes this way, not just those cassette things. He said, "You have good recording equipment?.... Nah, I'm not interested. We're doing just fine recording on cassette. Better is not something I am interested in." I was puzzled. I was talking about free recording, better equipment, how could he not want better sounding stuff? I just didn't even get it. Eventually Steve Fisk brought Beat Happening to Avast! to record and we rented a really nice microphone and were using the 2" 16-track and at that point Beat Happening had already been to the Music Source and been working their way up from cassettes to 2" tape. So over time Calvin had slowly gotten exposed to better recording techniques and he finally realized that if you sang into a really good mic, it was just satisfying. It really helps the music, and it helps the record. Calvin was becoming interested in better techniques and equipment and I was learning to appreciate the value of rawer sounds. We met in the middle and are now great friends. By that time I had been watching Jack Endino and Soundgarden work and I was really learning how to record a distorted guitar and a punk rock drum kit. I finally realized that recording has nothing to do with perfection. It is just capturing the spirit. So I went from schooled engineer, seeking 'perfection', to learning to just capture what you get... the mistakes are part of the beauty of it.