Scott Fritz of KRCW

Years ago a friend of mine sent me a cassete with a live broadcast of the Go-Betweens, Downey Mildew and Glass Eye that he recorded off the radio from KCRW (public radio 89.9FM) in Santa Monica, California. These weren't crummy recordings by any means, and when I saw that compilations of tracks from KCRW sessions were being released (via Mammoth records) I wasn't surprised. The show is called Morning Becomes Electric and Scott Fritz has born one of the main engineers for the show for the last eight years.

How did you end up with a job at KCRW? What's the university it is associated with?

Many years ago our general manager walked in saying, "Hey, I have a vision. I want to take this tiny station and turn it into a community service." KCRW started out as a training facility for returning veterans in 1948. We get special breaks because of that. So we stay here, but we are not part of the tutorial aspect of the college. We do have interns, but there is a separate broadcasting department in another part of the campus.

So you're separated financially from the college.

Yes we have our own budget, we raise our own money. We just got done with our fund driving; we raised over a million. We have two fund-raisers a year.Because we are in LA and the industry is here, the musicians are here, and people who get it live here. We are very unique, very fortunate and very thankful to the people who give us money. We are able to afford things like the Amek board. The gear that we have is professional quality. Many bands walk in here thinking it's going to be a couple of mics and playing in a closet. They are just blown away by the equipment that we have.

How did you end up working there?

I started out in broadcasting. I was at KROQ for a little bit, and then I went to a company called Digital Planet, doing audio production. The company was funded by venture capitalists and they pulled the money out from underneath us. I went on vacation and came back, I was told "By the way, you don't have a job." Which was lovely. Then it was a whole timing thing, I lucked out that the director was leaving from KCRW. That opened up a slot, and me being a musician since I was five. Being around microphones and mixing boards, it all came together. Everything that I had learned so far came together when I walked into KCRW.

The station was doing live broadcasts before you showed up.

Yes, and there is some amazing stuff. They've got old Love Tractor live. The things they have just blow your mind. Back then they were recording it to reel to reel still. They stopped that. When I got here they were recording them to DAT, simply because of lack of space. If we had everything that we've done on reels, it would take up a lot of room.

That's true, it would be kind of big. Is the show once a week?

No, it's every day, five days a week.

Well, no wonder your tapes are piling up. So you're there every morning?

We usually, on average, have four bands a week. Sometimes more during touring season. There are two other people that are also engineers here. Bob Carlson and J.C. Swiatek. Then there's the DJ, Nic Harcourt. I do other things, than just the bands. There's regular audio production, and what's also great about this place, I'll be working with Yo La Tengo one day. The next day I'll be recording a radio drama down at the other end of the studio for the BBC.

A good variety of work.

Exactly. Mic'ing a radio drama is a completely different thing... getting it to work in a stereo spectrum.

Have you studied up for some of these things that you had to do?

For the radio drama stuff, most of it comes naturally. You know what you want. X/Y [stereo mic pair] for the radio drama stuff. You've basically got to tell the director, "Look we are working with audio, you're doing visual." Stuff like that, trying to get them to switch gears. Trying to get them to not look. So if you don't look and you're listening you catch weird things.

Kind of like the first time you hear your voice recorded. You are used to hearing your voice in a certain way. But when confronted with how it really sounds, it sounds strange.

Yeah. It's a bit of a Foley [sound effects] thing that you need to know to get that sound. It's not really tricky microphone activity really. It's just getting the actors to get up, intimately close to the mic and then away from the mic. A lot of proximity stuff that you have to be aware of that the director doesn't even get. You have to go through the script, before, and find where and when you need the proximity.

So do you still have to spend a lot of time researching scripts, and deciding how it's going to be laid out?

You just have to go through it the weekend before you start on it. You just go through the script and mark those for yourself. If you go through a scene and a director changes something, you need to remember where mics and actors were.

Do you keep continuity charts?

Yeah, little notes to yourself.

When you're doing something like that do you record in ProTools, so you can fly in sound effects and things?

We have Sonic Solutions here. We still record to DAT with it and then dump it into Sonic. Either that or sometimes they will take it with them and the BBC will edit it over there. Add stuff to it.

Are these things you broadcast?

Oh yeah, they are broadcast here and on the BBC as well. LA Theater Works is another company that we work with and that is just strictly LA. What's great about it is that you think, "Radio drama. Nobody does radio drama anymore." But we get these great actors and actresses who give these amazing performances.

My friend does post production all the time, and he's always raving about the really good voice talent.

It's the same thing with instruments. You got a shitty sounding guitar, you put a really good microphone up to it, you're going to show how bad guitars can sound. It's the same way with actors. If the emotion is not coming out of their voice and they're not feeling it, it's very apparent.

And harder to fix than a bad band.

You really can't EQ that out can you?

Compress it.

EQ in some emotion.

Describe a typical scenario of a live band session. Beginning to end.

Every band that I do, I research the record, I listen to it and figure out what they are about, if I don't already know. We get an input list from them. Sometimes you send the input list back, because there are too many things. It's a 20 by 20 room, but 9 times out of 10 we are okay with it. The night before I set everything up. Position things in the room. The drums in a certain spot, mics and everything. So when the band walks in everything's ready to go and we just need to get their gear up and mic'd. We have bands come in at 9:00, the show is always live at 11:15.

Don't bands complain about being there at nine in the morning?

Yeah. 3 out of 10 bands drive from San Francisco. This is how hard the record companies make them work. The will play live in a club in San Francisco that night. Drive down to LA that night and play in the morning, and then go to sleep. I know it's a great thing to play here, but god you're going to kill these people with this schedule. They're really tired and grumpy and they don't want to play. You do get some of them, where it really is early for them. With that in mind, a lot of bands are late. Which makes my job ten times harder. There's this band AIR, who is actually on our CD. There was no soundcheck. This happens, and I've gotten to be pretty good at it. They had a huge set- up, and because they use all vintage equipment they were having problems. We go on at 11:15, and about 11:30 the producer is climbing the walls. I keep telling her, "Five more minutes. We're not ready yet." At 11:45 we went on the air. They were almost an hour late, add that to the amount of equipment and the problems they were having. This just wasn't your straight up four piece rock band. You can actually hear in the beginning of the track, the drums are really low in the mix. Just due to that was the first soundcheck. So late bands are stressful challenge. But we're going to make it happen. That's my whole thought process — give me an obstacle, I'll find a solution. We may go on late, but we aren't going to go on until the band is ready.

I got a tape of Downy Mildew, years ago, off of KCRW. There's this piano and vocal song and it's half through and then finally the vocals come in. A mic must have been out or off or something.

That's back when we had the Neotek board. In the days of the Neotek it was like, "Don't use fader 9, or 13. Fader 1 will work, but you need to turn the trim on it a couple of times." It was really a kind of dodgy board.

You got a new Amek board.

It's actually now a couple of years old. It's a 32 channel Amek with virtual dynamics on every channel. Which is a godsend. It's compression, limiter and a gate. The EQ is on the board.

So this is some sort of computer.

It's virtual, so the dynamics are done by the computer. For vocals I use the 1176s. We also have a couple of LA 4s. So, I'll bypass the board compression on vocals. But when you have mega-inputs, synths, samples that are sampled at different volumes, the virtual dynamics help.

I'm not sure people realize how hard that is to mix a band live. I find that mixing from tape you get a little bit of compression. But you don't have that happening with your set-up. The virtual dynamics take place of that.

Yeah. Exactly. We don't have the tape compression cause we are going to an Apogee convertor to a Panasonic 3700 [DAT]. We are going live on the air and recording two track onto DAT. People say; "Why don't you multi-track every session?"

Who's going back to mix all that?

Exactly. It's just too much, and it kind of takes away from the fact that this is a live session. This is how the listener heard it on that day, not from post production stuff where everything is perfect and slick.

What do you do from 9: 00 to 11: 15, from the time the band gets there, until the show begins?

The band comes in and they usually have their people setting up amps and stuff like that. Sometimes the band, sometimes a crew that comes in. I just basically get them AC, get the mics in position, and start soundchecking stuff. I usually start out checking the drums first. You get line checks and kind of go from there.

Do you have them run through a few songs?

Once we get everything up, we have to get monitors, but we don't have monitors we have headphone mixes.

So it's just like being in the studio for the band.

Right. Some of them don't like that. Playing with headphones is an art. Some of them love it cause they can hear themselves. Then I get other people who throw the headphones down. "I can't play with these fucking things. Where's the monitors?" They whine and moan, but once you play around for awhile with them, it starts to feel better.

How many headphone sends can you get up?

Well here's the thing. We have six separate headphones. Mono. I also begged and pleadedand finally got in a Furman headphone monitor system. On this the band can dial in their own mix. We can't use it for the nine member bands, but for small groups, it's great.

I always wondered if that would cause more trouble or would it work out?

It actually works. It works out well, it saves time. While they are getting their headphone mixes going, you are getting your mix going. I used it today with Billy Bragg.

I've seen those, but I always wondered if it would work. Sometimes people can't even comprehend the five knobs I have on my headphone amp.

This was one of our concerns. It had to have knobs and not faders. We forget that a lot of musicians haven't been around recording equipment. A four track maybe. But it needed to be really user friendly, and knobs are easier than faders. We tape it off as well. "This is this and this is this, etc." So it works in some applications really, really well. The band is supposed to be there at 9, so you don't start sound checking until 10. From 10 to 11 you are checking individual instruments and then pretty much, from right around 11 to 11:15 is a full song, and then you're on and you got to be right there with it. Sometimes you're late, and you just have to allow that.

Do you ever get really nervous yourself? As the clock's ticking away...

I used to get more tense, not nervous, but more tense. Now that I'm seasoned I don't become that intense and the energy is more focused.

With the drums, do you go for a simpler live approach for mic'ing or do you go in and close mic it all?

With the drums, what I do depends on the sound of the band. But my main thing for drums is an RE20 on the kick, the rest using [AKG] 414s (this freaks a lot of people out), a Schoeps on the hi-hat, and a couple of AKG D224s on the overheads. I'm a drummer myself and I really like to hear that I'm behind the drums. I guess I'm saying that I pay attention to the drum kit when I'm mixing just as much as any other instrument. It's amazing, even if youtooka414offofthesnareandputaSM57on, like most people use. It closes the kit up, a little bit more. With the 414 the kit is more open and raised, like you're sitting behind the kit. I've been doing that for a while, the 414 on the snare and toms.

How close do you get them in there?

Right in there, like you would with a 57.

Do you have to pad it?

Yeah 10 dB pad on everything. The one right on the mic. Wow that's crazy. I know that it's crazy, but it sounds amazing. Then what I do, is I take that and send it to at wo mix [buss] and then a two mix into a Valley compressor and back into the mixing board and then mix that with the rest. So you still get the spikes, the percussion spikes. But it thickens the drum kit up all together.

I've done that before. Just fill out the entire sound of the drums.

The other thing I do, the alternative Scott drum mic'ing technique, is a 57 on the kick and an American D22. Do you know that mic?

No.

Oh, it's funky looking. It's an amazing microphone and you compress the hell out of it and put it as an overhead. So you have one overhead and one kick. It's gives you this really great lo-fi, Beatlesque kind of sound. The American is kind of an old microphone. It's really good and has a narrow bandwidth.

What do you use for vocals?

Everything from a U87 to a Beta 58. Depending on style. We get so many different bands. So whatever fits the bill.

And you have to make all these decisions before the session starts.

That's the thing, you can't A/B three different vocal mics on the person. You stick with one and make it happen. I don't know we have RE20s, Coles ribbon mics, and 57s. We got a really nice AKG C-422 stereo mic. TL 170s. Neumanns. A bunch of 414s.

What's been a really good session, what makes it smooth.

You know it's usually the sessions where people are really professional. The sessions I have problems with are the "rock star" attitudes. It's amazing to me, in the style of music that I work with, that it even exists. Because it goes against the whole vibe of the music. I think it would be okay to be a rock star if you're into the Top Forty environment. But when that's not what you're supposedly about, and you come in (um, Dandy Warhols) with the rock star attitude. It's just really.... They come in going, "You're the enemy, it's you against us." From that stems a lot of stuff. "I'm not going to play. This isn't right." "No, I'm moving my stuff over here, I'm over here." Yeah but if you're over here, it's going to bleed into this acoustic guitar. They don't work with you at all and don't listen to what you're saying about the sound. They don't care. They have no respect. Those are rare though, I've had three bad sessions out of all the sessions I've done here over 8 years. The rest of them are great, and when they are really, really great for me is when it's a band that I've been in love with forever.

I think Yo La Tengo would be a case like that.

Yes, Yo La Tengo was amazing and Mazzy Star, because I've been a Dave Roback fan ever since Rain Parade. That session, they didn't speak a whole lot. They weren't very chatty, but they were very professional, and I just melted behind the desk. Stereolab were another great great band; Luna another one. So really these bands were good and we won't mention the names of the bad ones.

You can say Dandy Warhols though. They'll love it. I think I've heard tapes of the show on people's record. "Here we are on Morning Becomes Eclectic."

Several bands have put stuff out, that I've recorded here. I just got an email saying that Cake is going to put out some stuff. My favorite is that the Pale Blue Saints put something out that I mixed here, and I am a huge fan of Pale Blue Saints. It was when I first started working here and they broke up right afterwards. It was good to capture that. Possum Dixon, Poster Children, King for a Day, Soul Coughing, Stereolab, Tendersticks, Grant Lee Buffalo, Geraldine Fibbers...

That's a lot of cool stuff. I thought that this article wouldn't suit Tape Op, but the irony is that this has everything to do with recording. I mean the music is out there, on albums, and you seem to be bridging the gap between recording and live music.

That's exactly what it is, it's the blending of those two types.

Are there plans to keep doing archive releases.

We have about 5 or 6 CDs out that are all compilations.

Who is on the new album?

AIR, Freestylers, Ednaswap, Mercury Rev, Brad Mehldau, PJ Harvey, Morcheeba, Joe Henry, Buffalo Daughter, Cake, John Martyn, Angelique Kidjo, Pink Martini...

That's a really wild mix. Have you done any work outside of the station?

I've done remixes for Kristen Hersh, Fiona Apple and Luscious Jackson. I try to keep my fingers in anything to do with audio production. I'm always open to opportunity, and I never take it for granted. I've never taken this job for granted. It's easy to do when you do it every day. I know it's a very rare thing in my life, it's been great so far.

Have any full radio performances from the show ever been released?

Rufus Wainwright released the full session, the interview and the music. It was a limited release. See we never know if it's going to be just tracks or the entire session. But bands are always welcome to release anything they want.

Do they have to purchase it?

Oh god, no!

With the BBC or John Peel you have to buy them.

Oh really? That's just wrong. You've got to buy the session? What is wrong with that picture?

Have you've ever seen bootlegs of stuff you've done?

Get on E Bay.

Really?

Get on Ebay and look up KCRW.

Oh my God. Is it tape trading, or CD-R?

Both. You know "so and so" sessions live on KCRW. Some guy's making them in his room.