Rafter Roberts

Almost everything of note that's come out of San Diego for the last few years has the name "Rafter Roberts" on it somewhere. Besides being the local master of mastering, Roberts has also been recording and producing several recent projects by the Black Heart Procession, Soul Junk, The Album Leaf, Kill Me Tomorrow and Go Go Go Airheart, building a new studio and making music for commercials (through Singing Serpent) to fund his labors of love. I got to talk to Rafter in the almost-completed studio about some of what he's done and about what's to come for him and for recording music in general.

So you don't just record bands and that kind of thing here. You also make music for commercials, right? What's that all about?

Tapping into making silly money for doing commercials is such a weird thing, and so many people hate working at shitty jobs, but if you know that you're a talented musician you can make ridiculous music and get paid for it. Independent rock won't pay the rent for a place like this — We have eight employees right now, and payroll is staggering every month. Add rent and utilities and we're about $100,000 in debt, so we do scoring and sound design for commercials. I don't know what would be a tasteful way to solicit people in underground music who can produce. Todd Trainer from Shellac does stuff for us. There's Rob Crow, Araby Harrison, Jimmy LaValle, Sufjan Stevens. They're all amazing and I'd like to increase the stable of talented composers in the independent music world for this kind of thing.

What would the requirements be?

They would have to be able to write, record and produce professional sounding work on their own with quick turn-around and fire it off as MP3s.

So how did you get started doing this?

With Glen Galloway, from Soul Junk and Truman's Water. He's co-owner of the business here as well. We started working on the record of his, 1956, and we worked on that record for six months every day. Every day of the week we'd do a few hours on it. We just enjoyed working together and that was his day job, making music for commercials, and he had started using me to do that, so instead of charging $15 and hour I'd charge $50 an hour to these ad people. I was just laughing my butt off because it was so silly. I was just having fun making music and getting paid $50 an hour and that's just ludicrous. So we finished the record and kept on doing that stuff and the company he was working for was going to close so we decided to start a company of our own and we did. We needed to find a place where we could build a studio and have offices and whatnot.

What's the name of the studio? Is it going to be called Singing Serpent as well?

I don't know.

The Burning Bunker?

[laughter] The Flaming Hole? I don't know. I'm hesitant to name it. It seems like it would be cheesy. You give anything a name it's like, "This studio's called the this-that," you know?

Just makes it easier to refer to something, I suppose. Who put the flames on it?

The bikers that had it before we did. They were a custom Harley Davidson shop and the reason we got the place is because they all got thrown in jail. I think they were using it as a meth lab.

I heard about that. I heard it was also once an illegal telemarketing sweatshop.

Really? Yeah, you know it was set up for a hundred phones or something when we got here. It was a crackhouse for many years too. The windows were all broken and people would crawl in through the windows.

Some special features of the place? You've got a lot of things going on that most people don't do.

A lot of what exists and will exist in the studio will be a result of a dialogue between Bill Skibbe, myself and my brother, Jan. Bill helped design and build Steve Albini's studio [Electrical Audio] in Chicago and worked there for a long time. He also helped build John McEntire's studio, Soma, and he's working on his own now. He came here for a week and we looked at this empty shell and just figured out the best way we could make the space work. It was really good. We drew up a bunch of plans and wrote down the ideas and my brother came down from Northern California and has taken three or four months off of his job just to help and be foreman. It's a big undertaking. We've been lucky to have some really great construction people. Jason Lane is number one!

That is lucky to have a lot of folks who can help out like that. This looks like a lot of work.

Yeah. We have a 2000 square foot live room. 1200 cubic foot reverb chamber, which is about ideal. Large live iso and a small dead iso. Two control rooms that face the large performance room and two separate mixing, editing and mastering suites. They're "suites". Oooooooh! So basically we can work on four different records or projects at the same time in this building without them bothering each other, which I think is the key ingredient. It's not going to have the rehearsal space syndrome where you're practicing and if the band next door is practicing in a different key it doesn't sound good. These are Stanley brand exterior garage doors, metal doors filled with foam, very light, but they have a magnetic seal at the top and sides and a multiveined vinyl sweep at the bottom. We've taken these doors and clad each side with a layer of MDF [multiple density fiberboard]. The MDF is keyed into another seal that is a sort of vinyl strip seal, so this way there are two seals at each edge of the door. The walls we've made are of a double wall construction, two separately framed walls with three layers of drywall on each side, two layers of 5/8" and then resilient channel with 1/2" on top of the R.C. So each wall gets a door in it, each door gets two seals, and we hope and hope that it doesn't let sound through. The floors are floated and filled with sand and the slab is cut around the perimeter of the main control room so that even the bass vibrations in the concrete don't transmit through the slab into the floated floor on the sand. Almost overkill, but it's going to be fun. We have a skylight in our main room for beautiful light in the daytime, which will be nice. It's super central to downtown San Diego, we've got our own exit off the I5 freeway, 15 minutes from Mexico. As far as equipment goes, we'll be doing a lot of hard disk recording, using Vegas and SoundForge a lot. We also have the 1" 16-track for band stuff and as soon as I can afford it we'll be getting a 2" 16-track. I have a pretty massive collection of instruments, amps and bizarre effects and goodies.

Wow.

Yeah, I really think it will change things around town to have a facility and a resource like this, because as of right now, independent music has been my garage, Gar Wood's garage [Tanner, Fishwife, Hot Snakes] and Araby taking her 8-track around to different places. Gar has done so much stuff over the years and he's really good. He's really good at rock and roll. Some great drum sounds out of a two- car garage. That's why it's called the "Box". It's totally amazing what he gets out of that room. He's just been recording there so long he really knows its sound. 1" 16 and a Mackie board and a couple little effects things and he just does an amazing job. I've mastered two or three records with him and I've mastered about 15 that he's recorded. He's done some Rocket From the Crypt and Tourette's Lautrec and Freedom for Saturn and much more. His band the White Apes is fantastic. Amazing stuff. Oh, I know what I want to call the studio. "B-A-Star Studios". I can't tell if it's for real or not, but I like it. Everybody wants to be a star, right?

Sure. [laughter] You've been doing digital recording for quite a while, right? Weren't you going around and setting home computer recording systems for people?

Uh huh.

How did you get involved with hard disk recording?

Well, when I first moved to San Diego I had been recording to all analog for probably eight years or so. My first 4-track was an old reel-to-reel from the '70s. Like a Teac 2348. Neat little tape machine. Messed around with a lot of cassette 4-tracks and recorded about 25 records like that and then started working with 8-tracks. When I moved down here I went over to Zach's [Three Mile Pilot, Pinback] and he was doing some stuff with his computer and I saw it and it was crazy. Have you ever seen digital multi-tracking in the computer world?

Not really.

Basically you have infinity tracks. (Pulls up something on his computer screen). So here's a kick drum and the snare and the tom and an overhead and a room mic and a guitar and a guitar and a keyboard and an upright bass and a banjo and a Rhodes and a Memory Man Delay pedal and any of these can be taken and moved. Basically the thing about working with computers is that if you can think of something you can make it happen and that's just crazy. So much of what music is is working with limitations. You know, trying to figure out how to do what you want with limited resources. It makes a lot of music really amazing and with computers it's really easy to make things too slick, but it also offers incredible versatility. You can see all this time and there's no cost of tape and it sounds like music if you play it. [Plays a piece off of the computer] It doesn't sound like a "computer". People will record with ADATs or things like that and a computer is able to have the same sound quality or better and the equivalent of racks upon racks of effects and compressors and la, la, la. When I first saw somebody doing this I was blown away. You can really see sounds and work with... say you want to go to a different part, right? You just take the other part you played and squoosh it on over. It allows for a lot more possibilities, whereas back in the '60s and '70s people used to do the laborious tape splicing process. I don't know if you've ever tried to splice tape, but it's totally scary because that's it. That's the tape, you know? With stuff like this you have the freedom to experiment with it without being worried at all. You're just limited by your imagination. Any sound you think of you can create.

So why do you think there seems to be a bordering on ethical problem, particularly in indie-rock, between people that are hardcore analog versus digital?

Well, it's all different. There isn't a good or a bad. Things are just different. Digital technology influences the way music gets made and it influences the way it sounds, but that's not a bad thing. When digital equipment was first around it didn't sound very good. Your first impression of somebody is a strong impression and if it's in the negative the next time you see them you're probably not going to like them even if they're acting nice.

Right.

Digital offers a lot that has never been possible before, but then drums all distorted on tape sound so good, you know? And that's something you just don't get naturally when you're working with computers or ADATs or whatever. But then also tape hiss can be a problem and you don't get tape hiss working with computers and back and forth.

So is tape distortion or warmth something at this point in time that you could deliberately simulate if you wanted to?

Yeah, and it's getting better and better as time goes by. The whole Rocket From the Crypt compilations that they do get a lot of simulated tape distortion.

What about mastering? You do a great deal of that. A lot of people aren't even really sure what it consists of.

The process of mastering is very simple. All it is, is if you know your speakers that you use and you know the room that you're in and then you just do small things that help recordings sound good. You help the character of the music come through. Equalization and compression and a lot of the times editing. Every Black Heart Procession record, so far, gets recorded up at Bear Creek up in Seattle and then all the songs come back and either they're too long or one part is too long. So we take their master mix-downs and start cutting them up and doing overdubbing and just getting totally illegal with it, but it ends up making a record instead of a bunch of songs. That's why I really like helping people put together the final thing that they recorded somewhere else. A lot of times with music that I wouldn't necessarily enjoy recording, I can really enjoy helping them put it together as a whole thing. It's really easy to see a record as just a bunch of different recordings, but then when you put it together and sequence it it can become a cohesive thingy.

When did you first start doing mastering?

I think about three years ago.

So what kind of programs do you use to do that?

There's SoundForge, which is really good, and then the company Sonic Foundry makes a program called CD Architect, which is that. [points to screen] They're super basic tools. They just do whatever you'd hope that they would do. It's really simple. I like that about it. There's no real big crazy secret, except for having ears and just knowing how records that you like sound, knowing how they sound out of speakers that you use. These speakers I've had for four or five years and it depends on the room that you're in, but I've listened to enough music on them so I know if it sounds "this way" on these speakers it will sound good.

What kind of speakers are they?

JBL 6208s. It's also really just important to have the right ones for you. Everybody has different feelings about what they want to listen to. I just brought some CDs down to Guitar Center and listened to every set of speakers there and these were the ones I liked the best just because I felt like I could work on them for hours and hours on end without getting tired.

Compared to something classic like NS10s?

They're a lot more full in the bottom. NS10s are hard for me to work on for long periods of time. I like hearing things on them "once", you know? But I don't like to listen to music on little boomboxes and that's what the NS10s sound like. Just sort of like a dry, small sound. I like to hear music where it has a bottom.

Do you do a car stereo test?

Yeah. CD Walkmans, boomboxes, home stereos and stuff. Ideally, with mastering, it will sound good afterwards anywhere you take it, but it will always sound like whatever stereo it's being played on. If you play music on a boombox, it will always sound like a boombox. There's no mastering job that can make it sound like, "Wow, is that really just that boombox?", because if it did then on big speakers it would be all funny sounding.

How was the last Go Go Go Airheart recorded? The white one? How was it put together?

It was recorded onto 8-track and a lot of it was recorded into the computer. It was all mixed on the computer. We'd just dump it in and start editing and mixing it and I think that that is most versatile way to work. If you record stuff on analog to get everything that you want to sound nasty and distorted and funky, then you dump it down to the digital world you can put it together there into what you imagined it would be.

What things have you recorded that were the most satisfying and rewarding for you?

We just finished mixing the Maquiladora record. Three guys. They recorded onto ADAT I helped them set that up in this cathedral that one of them had the keys to and they recorded it all in the middle of the night. I helped them set up mics and took off because I was busy and then they did all the overdubs at home and brought the ADATs here and we mixed it. There's some really good songs on that. The first time I heard them it was stuff recorded off of an ADAT and it was really distorted and digital distortion on ADAT is nasty, but it just sounded so good. They just didn't know what they were doing recording-wise, but it was great. So when they brought this in I kind of wanted to make it sound like that first cassette tape I heard of them a few years ago. I like the guitar sounds — like bad AM reception.

So you've done a whole album's worth of stuff for these guys?

Yeah, that was fun. We just finished that up a week ago and we're gonna start a series of 7"s for Black Heart next week.

Great. Any last thoughts?

One thing I don't see emphasized enough in Tape Op is the radical and punk rock end of digital technology, how it could completely de-commercialize music. You don't need money after the recording process to get music to people. That whole concept is really radical in and of itself. I don't think many indie people making music feel friendly towards these technologies yet. If there is anything I'd like to put out in an interview it would be for people to be excited and informed about current technology. Like amplifiers and electric instruments and rock and roll happened. Like the fusing of blues music with loud volumes and new electric stuff. Like in hip-hop when people figured out how to cut records. The explosion in creative music that happens when there is a technological and procedural breakthrough is amazing. You know? It's great. It's good seeing a cross between things that are like a band and not a band. Organic and not organic. Analog tape machines are wonderful and LPs are beautiful and the artwork that can go with them is amazing and all that. It is beautiful, but the potential that comes with these new technologies is mind-blowing. As far as MP3s go, in a way they kind of purify the music making process. There is not going to be a way that bands can make money by giving away their music for free so more and more music will be divorced from money and I believe that is a positive thing for sure. I make my money doing music, but still I'm really excited about this whole thing because of what it's creating in peoples' lives.