Daniel Burton

Daniel Burton has seen it all and would rather stay home. This does not mean he is jaded or a hermit — he just knows what should be done in order to get things done. If you listen to any of his recordings, be it albums by acclaimed artists such as Songs: Ohia, Dave Fischoff or the Early Day Miners (whom he also plays with), your ears will be treated to vivid yet transparent sound images that are downright honest. He is an important fixture (or, "country doctor", if you will) in the music community in Bloomington, Indiana. He has already been to the big city. He has witnessed first-hand the bizarre breeding process that makes up the "big time" scene. He has observed it, participated in it, took what he needed from it, and went back home. And now he has his own humble home studio and does not mind turning yours into one, if that is what you need to feel "at home" — and people like that. And being rather young, there is a lot ahead of him. He knows this, but doesn't really think about it because it doesn't exist yet. Instead, he would rather be busy doing things right now.

You made a temporary exodus from Indiana to California — and you ended up interning at Daniel Lanois' Teatro studio. How did that happen?

Well, I was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, and of course in 6th grade I bought [U2's] Joshua Tree and really liked it. At that age I was beginning to start looking at liner notes and that type of stuff and started to buy Brian Eno [ Tape Op #85 ] and Daniel Lanois [ #37  & #127 ] records. Right about that time — a year or so later, I discovered [Lanois'] first album Acadie and I really, really liked it. As I grew older I started to get excited about a lot of his philosophies, which involve recording in your house or recording in a movie theater or a castle — whatever. So, it was sort of a thing where I needed to do an internship for school and I really didn't want to settle on something that I wasn't 100% excited about. I ended up tracking Mark Howard down, who is Lanois' co-producer/engineer. He was very cool and just said, "Well come out here — I want to meet you before I would ever work with you.". So, I flew out there, got to meet him, and he showed me a bit of their operations. So that's how it kind of came about. I worked there for almost 2 months I guess.

You could have stayed there longer but you felt you had enough — you mentioned that in an e-mail to me and I thought it was sort of humorous because you mentioned how while you were there you were polishing motorcycles, buying tube socks, answering pages, going about the town in search of fine wines and cheeses and what not...

Oh yeah — they had me doing everything. I was doing a lot of reorganizing of rooms, moving filing cabinets around and at one point I dusted a motorcycle a number of times.

One of his big old-style BMW bikes?

Yeah, it was! They have some BMWs and Harleys. They're really into bikes out there. It was interesting for me because those guys are really talented and work in a world that I am unfamiliar with, which is major label recording.

But they're also at a point where they can pretty much do whatever they want. It's beyond major label recording in a way.

Exactly, exactly. They're way beyond major label recordings.

So it gets to a point where we're talking about "limitations" — but they're past limitations!

They have none! It's incredible. They have all the freedom in the world to do a record anywhere they want and I found it really inspiring that they found places like New Orleans, Louisiana, and Oxnard, California, to do that, as opposed to "Los Angeles". I think they're in LA now, but when I was there they were making plans to move into an amazing movie palace in downtown Los Angeles, so once again they're not choosing the obvious option there. It's really exciting because those buildings have a "past" and anything that has a past generally has a character and creates a certain atmosphere. I was really excited by the budgets they had to work with, but I'm also from a background closer to a DIY aesthetic. I love that ability to do what it is you want to do and not answer to anybody. And, so, I'm a musician, and I love to play music and Teatro was a full-time job of assisting and engineering. They were very good about letting me run stuff like tape machines and showed me some of their techniques which was really cool. But, I love playing music and I wanted to finish my band's record and I'm really glad I made that choice — it was a difficult one to make.

So you actually got to work with Lanois for a couple of weeks. What did you get from that experience?

At that point he was working on the All the Pretty Horses soundtrack, which actually came out and to everybody's amazement, it was a different fella doing the soundtrack. I think Lanois has some stuff in the movie still, but when I was there he was working closely with Billy Bob Thornton on major thematic ideas for the music. Basically, Billy Bob Thornton would come up for the day, discuss scenes with Lanois and then Lanois would proceed to compliment them with music. It seemed with a lot of the ideas Lanois already had music in mind — themes he had created way before the movie was even written. At one point I was enlisted to run a drum machine — I had this overwhelming pressure to hit stop on the drum machine at the right time. I definitely look back at that moment with humor. Darryl Johnson, a bass player who's played with wonderful musicians like Emmylou Harris and the Neville Brothers was in to play one day. It was really exciting to be in the room and run the drum machine with Darryl Johnson, Daniel Lanois and Mark Howard at the board. I was kind of like, "Okay, I've gotten everything that I wanted so now I can leave." It was weird. Sometimes you think things are untouchable but they're really not.

If someone is really interested in something and maintains it, that interest will take them to where they need to be.

Yeah, exactly. But then again you have to ask yourself what do you really want. And for me, once again, it was to play and record music that I'm personally involved with as far as writing and singing. There's only so much you can do in this world! [laughter]

From listening to the Early Day Miners' Placer Found, I can tell that you're not really into the dead acoustic type of sound. You like makeshift environments, correct?

I really like recording in homes as opposed to places that feel sterile. Most music wasn't intended to be performed in hospitals.

And to an extent — listened to in either!

Yeah! The main goal is to have a good time and to hit some emotional buttons. I find that a little harder to get those feelings working at a studio. Now, more than ever, the ability is there to record wherever you want. Wherever it is you want to do a record you should be able to. The most extreme example of that would be this band called Lullaby For The Working Class. They do a lot of really excellent home recordings. They recorded a song for a 7" in the Pacific Ocean. They were actually just standing in the water — you can hear the surf in the background.

You just finished your band's new record. You did this on Tascam DA-38s.

I still have them but nowadays I'm going straight to hard disk. I think there are certain people out there who really have tried to make a recording sound like it's not an ADAT recording. A lot of independent rock bands have to use digital tape machines because once again you're not afforded the luxuries of using great studio tape machines. It's just like — getting back to the Mackie mixer — there are ways to make it not sound like a Mackie mixer. You kind of have to push the gear and it's a lot of work. It can get really monotonous and painful to hide digital harshness. I find treble with the 1604 Mackie mixer pre-amps to be really harsh and not smooth at all. You can hide a lot of it with good mic pre-amps which is what I am starting to get into. It just makes your job much easier. You don't have to completely rework things in the mix, you can just relax and enjoy it. I'm using some Sytek pre-amps which are made by one of the folks that has built microphones and pre-amps for Steve Albini [ #87 ]. This friend of mine, Paul, suggested that I pick up one of these pre-amps — it's 4 channels in one rackmount. They just sound great and are very reasonably priced. So that's the route I am going in. I'm not using my mixer anymore. It's nothing revolutionary but it's fun.

You mentioned Albini — he's recorded an album by your earlier band Ativin. So would he have been a type of source of experience and impression for your preference of getting things down naturally?

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of odd because I think I am one of the few people out there who can talk about how much they love both Steve Albini's recordings and Daniel Lanois recordings. Usually, fans of Steve don't seem to really be fans of what they would claim to be as "over production" and vice-versa. I think they're both just really talented and have a complete knack for capturing certain raw elements. I think a lot of Daniel Lanois' stuff sounds really raw and it's really exciting to listen to.

He's one of those types of "producers" who has a "sound" in a way, as with Mark Howard's stuff that he does on his own — there's particular tones, be it from amps and cabinets and what not that they use.

Totally.

But, Lanois is also involved very musically — his distinct style of guitar playing is present on a lot of the band's albums he produces.

Exactly. He gets right in there. That's something that Steve would absolutely never do. Probably even if you asked him he would very seriously consider not doing it. Yeah — it's two totally different takes, and I kind of like the idea of mixing both of them. I just recorded a band called Unwed Sailor which is this instrumental band from Chicago that write this really beautiful sweeping kind of cinematic music. It was really exciting because I got to employ what I like about both engineers. I got to play on a lot of it and add something that was sort of personal from me. I can listen back and get a lot out of it because I felt like I got to input something musically as well as sonically. I also gave what I think is a live feel to the overall recording with a bit of a room sound. And for all practical purposes, it was live. I think it is very important to track everything as live as you possibly can. I love the whole idea of not separating anything — I don't like control rooms at all. I don't understand the point of it really. I think everybody thought you had to build a control room one day so everybody did. Why can't you just play it back while they're sitting there with their guitar? Once again, with home recording — it all starts with the 4-track — we all start there. As soon as you begin separating that recording and playback process — it becomes this big ordeal of putting down equipment, going into the other room, and in the end breaking momentum.

I really liked the balance of the Songs: Ohia EP, Hecla & Griper, but Jonathan from the Secretly Canadian label said you weren't pleased with it for some reason.

It just ended up getting a really weird mastering job for one of the pressings of it, which is actually no longer the case because that pressing sold out and they had it re-mastered. It was kind of weirdly compressed — that was kind of at the beginning of our experiences making records — I think that was the second record I ever recorded. I ended up doing it in this studio in a music school. I had to run three different snakes downstairs just to be able to record it all live in a room and once again — working with limitations, they forsake using headphones. I mean — they have this fantastic recording studio in the building, but the tracking room just sounded way too dead for the music that they were doing so we decided to take it downstairs to the dance room. It worked out so much better in the end — there was a grand piano in there and a pretty good room sound — I think one of the guys ended up commenting that it sounded like a Steely Dan record, which I found kind of odd. I didn't know what to think of it at the time but now that time has passed I think it's an interesting take on it.

Dave Fischoff's Ox and the Rainbow is all over the place.

Dave is a guy that went to school here — we all met Dave and he played some shows around town. He used to do this totally whacked out fuzz distortion guitar improv set. Back then he used these tapes and would play them live and create all sound collages that were really fascinating. Dave is a big reason why I ended up getting into Pro Tools. It would have been impossible to pull off some of the sounds and edits on that record without the use of a computer. He was really excited about using a computer and I was really excited about working with Dave so that certainly gave me a push into the computer world. I can't really thank him enough for that. One common complaint people have about using computers for recording is the tendency for musicians to become lazy during tracking. The fear of copying and pasting takes that really should have been performed again. But really, all the musicians I've worked with have approached the computer with an analog work ethic, if that makes any sense.

It does indeed. They just use it in context for what they need to do and the convenience of something that is more affordable and it's more mobile.

Yeah — it's that ability to go, "Let's add 8 more tracks" — you can do that, and that's a freedom that isn't there with analog unfortunately. I think ideally I'll have both options in the future but right now this is working.

Grotto Home Studio. You've gone into your world of self-sufficiency, which is what you wanted.

Yeah [laughs]. I think that it was a big choice. I came to a point in my life where I had to choose what I wanted to do with music — and when I made a choice of not doing it as a career, I ended up doing about 6 times as much music. If I had chosen to go the career route, I would have maybe worked on one project in the time that I did 6. I like the idea of being really productive and I'm really proud of the music I've worked on. All the musicians I've worked with in the past are extremely great people and are willing to share what they know with me. All are genuinely really excited about the music they're doing. It's been a positive experience all the way around. Right now we're working on an another Early Day Miners album — it's overall darker than Placer Found, but those who like that album will like this new one, I think. When you're writing the music and playing the music you don't really notice what it sounds like from a listening point of view. Putting these songs back to back on a CD is sort of like hearing the songs for the first time. They take on a new life.

So you gel with being in a more rural and smaller city? How did you find Chicago?

I like the city a lot, but — I despise the limitations that are put on me space-wise. Some people thrive on that but it was just driving me crazy, because I wanted to be able to have a space where I could record and play at anytime.. I tried a number of spaces in Chicago. At one point I found out I was renting a space from a coke-addict dealer and didn't even know — and I had all my gear in the basement of the place — you run into that kind of stuff in cities.

Grim.

Yeah. A place like Bloomington is great because people are less tempted to take advantage of each other. It's a fairly tight-knit community, and at the same time it's an international community due to the school. Pretty much everybody that I met here has really gone on to do something with themselves — whether or not they "succeed" or not — nothing like that. Just the motivation is incredibly inspiring, and that was a big part as to why I moved back here. That and because I have an attachment to the city itself.