Chris Ballew

Seattle-based Chris Ballew has been a sideman for Beck, a front man for The Presidents of the United States of America, an integral part of Supergroup, the entire mysterious cast of The Giraffes, and most recently fifty percent of Chris & Tad. He recently chatted with producer/ engineer/artist Pete Weiss [ Tape Op #23 ]. The two have known each other since Chris' years in Boston, back in the early '90s. Pete, always a fan of catchy pop with a wink, covered two of Chris's songs on his 1996 solo album. These days, Ballew's been keeping a slightly lower profile than the mid- '90s when "Lump" was everywhere. But he's been more productive than ever. Here's what's been happening:

How ya been?

I've been excellent. Super creative. Busy. Just movin' and groovin'. I'm working with this guy Tad from the Young Fresh Fellows. The drummer. And we've been super busy trying to get our soundtrack business up and running. And I've been building stuff at my house — I built a studio in the yard and I'm painting it inside and out — doin' all kinds of stuff. So I've been feeling good, feeling busy. Sleeping deeply and all that goodness.

Excellent. Do you want to tell me about the studio? Is it up and running?

Yeah, it kind of is. It's really simple. It's a little 8' x 12' shack. It's mostly for mixing and tracking vocals, guitars and keyboards. Stuff like that. I don't think I'd want to set a drum kit up in here. I'm running the Digi 001 Pro Tools LE on a Mac G4. A lot of the studios around here have the same thing, so when we want to track drums or loud guitars we go to Jupiter with Martin Feveyear [ Tape Op #23 ]. Then we take the tracks back to my house and cut 'em up and do some mixing. Actually we'll probably go back to a "real" studio to do the mixing. But at my place we do all the editing, shuffling and, you know, "Let's try cutting that verse in half and see how it sits for a week," which is so liberating. It frees us up from having the feeling that we're on the clock and somebody's looking over our shoulder and we have to explain our ideas. It's great to be able to do the majority of the work at home and still have the opportunity to make the end result "fully realized" and sonically satisfying. I LOVE the computer environment. I can't believe how much fun it is. It turns out I've sort of been seeing songs in my brain the way they look on the screen. I've been seeing music my whole life as, like, this row of tracks and waveforms. In the past I had thought the Pro Tools system was distracting, but it turns out it was mostly because I'd been looking over someone else's shoulder as they were operating the system, and I was always impatient. You know [laughs], "C'mon, can't you just cut that thing and move it over there? Move it! Move it!"

I feel your pain. I've been there.

So now that I'm in there doing it myself... well of course time slides by and three hours later I don't even realize I haven't eaten dinner. [laughing] But I do find that it's extremely intuitive for me and it's great to be able to slide parts of songs around or cut and paste or edit. Tad and I are not really arranging songs before we record them. We just usually have the chords to the verse and chorus set, but we don't initially have a structure ready. We've always done it this way, but it was much more difficult to do with tape. So now it's extremely easy and flexible. There's no such thing as a bad idea when you can do that kind of heavy editing later.

Do you do most of the engineering for your recordings with Tad?

I do all the engineering. But I'd use that term loosely. Actually, Tad and I should work with you some time. You have the ability to get these really exciting, clear, distinct sounds that all kind of lock together to make a unit. I've always been impressed by your work — you always seem to have one really good-sounding guitar part, rather than, like, four poorly-recorded ones. I always fall back on combining an electric and an acoustic guitar to make a nice thick sound, whereas you're able to get the nice thick sound with just one guitar. I'm more of a performer than an engineer. I mostly just fiddle until it sounds right.

Well, there's something to be said for that. I mean, that's pretty much what I do too.

I'm most likely missing some fundamentals that would get me to where I could be quicker but I'm too preoccupied with writing and playing the song to get to caught up in the tech side. It can be exhausting doing both and I usually end up wired and fried by the end of a recording session.

Ah yes. We all have to deal with being wired and fried. I'm always curious how different engineers deal with it. Something that I find helpful is walking home — a couple of miles, in my case — from the studio after a session, but even after that bit of exercise, I often find myself lying in bed trying to sleep, but unable to stop some crazy melody line from looping in my head.

I just need to stop working a half an hour or so before I am on deck with the nightly family activities and lie down and close my eyes and breath deep. That seems to do the trick. [laughs] Problem is I never do it!

Do you think you'll ever go back to tape?

I actually still use tape. We do film and television oundtrack stuff and, well, for example we just got a call from Ed McMahon's new Star Search-type show to do a theme song. So what we'll do then is go to our friend's garage. He's built a little practice space with a P.A. and everything. We have a cassette 8-track at his place. I've hung a few mics there, and it's set up so we can just go in, flip a switch, and very easily record multitrack drums, guitar and a vocal. Then we take the cassette out of the 8-track and bring it to my place where I have the same cassette 8-track machine. So we can then dump it into the computer and take it from there. So tape is still involved.

What do you use for mic preamps?

I really haven't worked out the whole preamp situation yet 'cause that's a new area for me. I'm going to try a few things. I just ordered this little tube preamp through Musician's Friend, but right now I'm just using a Pod for everything — mics, guitars, keyboards, bass...

Wow, for mics? How do you like the Pod? People have brought them into my studio and I've been really impressed. I haven't gotten a chance to really sit down with one and see what it's all about.

The Pod is really cool. There are a few things I'd change. They have a basic tube preamp setting that I use all the time, the compressor's nice...

So you just run everything through it?

Yeah. Even vocals.

What do you use for a vocal mic?

I use an AKG C1000-S for vocals. I've found that it "likes" the computer because it's not too airy and crystalline. It has its own little condenser quality which I like. And through the Pod I can dial in a little drive and compress it and it sounds pretty good. Of course I use this room a lot. It's a little 8' x 12' room coated with plywood, so it's very snappy sounding. So I usually don't get right up on the mic for my vocals. I'll step back a few feet and let the room do some of the work.

Can I back up a second and ask you about The Giraffes? I just listened to those CDs and I was curious about the chronology of The Giraffes. What's going on? Was it a band or was it just you?

Well, I was working on that before I quit the Presidents and eventually finished it up and put it out in February of '98. I played and sang all the parts. Both Giraffes records are just me doing everything on a my cassette 8-track.

It sounds amazing for a cassette 8- track.

Well, thanks.

Yeah that format can sometimes sound absolutely awful, but you got it to sound great. I'm completely impressed and I have to ask, what the hell did you do?

The first CD, 13 Other Dimensions, is purposely a little dull sounding. At the time I was listening to a lot of AM radio and really loving the sound of AM. This station we have here called KIXI: "The Music of Your Life". They play, like, Mama Cass and old Perry Como and all these great old songs where the vocals are way up front. The thing I really loved is that it was like a big warm ball of sound. No cymbals poking out — none of that stuff. Then I would switch over to the alternative station and it would be just the opposite. The middle's all scooped out and there's high end killin' me and low end jigglin' my spleen. So I really appreciated that warm middle thing. It seems more like how the human ear responds. Or at least my ears. So anyway I purposely tried to make that first Giraffes record sound like that. The concept is that it's a puppet band from the '70s whose tapes I found and re-released.

What about the second Giraffes record?

So then for the second record I bought a five band stereo EQ because after I tracked to cassette I was finding I wanted to get a little more breadth and high end "air". And I bought a Rode NT-2 mic just because it looked fancy [laughs]...

Not always a bad reason to buy a mic...

I used that for vocals. So with the new mic and EQ I tried to get away from the AM radio sound.

What was your signal path?

Well, let's see, I'd go to a Mackie board, then a Crane Song compressor. Sometimes I'd track everything through the Crane Song and sometimes I'd do less of that and run the whole mix through it.

[laughing] Wow, that's quite a sonic jump there... Mackie to Crane Song!

I know. Every time I'd go into an audio store and describe my setup to the sales guy, his jaw would hit the floor. Like, "What are you doing going from a Mackie into a Crane Song?"

But you know, you got great results.

I used to not worry too much about what the sound was like when it hit the tape. I'm less that way now with the computer, but back in the 8-track cassette days, I'd just get the tracks to the tape and process them later. Like, with guitars, if I didn't like the clean tracked sound, I'd just loop the track through a distortion pedal. So, I'm kind of about capturing the moment and inspiration quickly and hoping that it comes out okay. Or at least useable.

Both those Giraffes CDs are very clean sounding. That's not a characteristic that I think of when I think about the 8-track cassette format. Did you have to do a lot of de- noising in, like, the mastering process?

No, the Mackie is great for headroom. I was able to always stay way above the noise threshold. I like to record everything really hot. In mastering we did run into some popping and crackling problems from signals that had been too hot.

Did you use dbx noise reduction on the 8-track?

Yeah. Actually, since I bought it I've never turned it off. When I had a 4-track I used to sometimes take the dbx off for mixing to get a sort of compressed sound because I didn't have a compressor at the time.

I remember that old trick. I used to do it just on the kick drum track. Oh I almost forgot to ask what you mixed to?

DAT. In the early days before I bought the EQ, the DAT was part of the equation. When I mixed to DAT, the sound changed just tiny bit for the worse. In a way it's a bit thinner sounding. So I used to have to mix and listen and then adjust and remix. CD burners weren't readily available back then.

Remember those days when it used to cost like a hundred bucks to get a CD-R reference?

I know, it's amazing.

And now they're like ten cents.

Yeah, I love it. I'm fully enjoying the digital realm and combining it with my old techniques. A cassette and a G4 are pretty much opposite ends of the spectrum and getting them together is really fun. When I first got the computer setup I spent some time experimenting with loops and click tracks, but in the end I've kind of found that stuff to be boring and laborious. I'm really into just using the computer as an editing tool and making the sounds in an organic way.

Would you mind sharing with us your worst studio experience? You don't need to name names.

[laughs] Oh yeah. It was a long time ago. I was in college and I used to write songs with this guy Rob Taylor. He was a great songwriter and we used to 4- track together. And he had a friend who was an intern at a studio called Minot Studio. We got free studio time so that this intern could learn how to run a session. Everything went wrong. The sounds were horrendous and crappy. The worst part was that we labored and labored over Rob's lead vocal. When he was relaxed, he could really belt out a tune, but this was his first time in a "real" studio so he was a little nervous. Anyway, we spent hours and hours piecing together a good vocal take. We're talking line by line, word by word, syllable by syllable. So we eventually had a comped vocal track that we thought was cool, and the owner of the studio shows up. He immediately tells the intern that the vocal mic had been facing the wrong way the whole time! We had wondered why the vocal was a little muffled-sounding, but, being green you know, we didn't want to say anything.

That is so sad.

Yeah, but, well, it was my first time in a studio. I can't say I've had a real nightmarish time in the studio since then. I guess the worst experience these days is just being uninspired. With The Presidents we tried to make our second album at Bad Animals in Seattle and we just found ourselves uninspired by the clinical environment there. We ended up scrapping the whole thing and starting over elsewhere. So, no big stories. Just a general frustration of putting time in and ending up with something that's useless. I just spent $15,000 trying to record a third Giraffes album and wound up scrapping the whole thing.

What happened?

Well I tried to turn the Giraffes into a band by hiring musicians but it just didn't work out.

I heard those tapes and sure didn't think they were bad. They definitely sounded more like a band.

Well, in the end I just decided that being the boss of a hired band wasn't right for me. I realized that what I was looking for was a strong collaborator — which is what I eventually found in Tad. I thought if I went ahead and released it, it would do more damage than good.

Well, it sounds like you've got a cool thing happening with Tad.

Oh yeah, he's great.

I'm only familiar with his drumming — which is phenomenal. How is he with other stuff?

Oh he's great on guitar. He writes. He sings. He's the first person I've worked with that brings as much to the table as I do. He'll come in to a session having re-written my lyrics and it's like, "Yes, these are much better."

Your album with Tad — entitled Hand Me That Door — is really fun and seems to be an extension of the Giraffes both musically and sonically. Did you do it on Pro Tools?

We did it on the cassette 8-track. But we really pushed the tracks this time. It was a little out of control. With all the bouncing, some tracks had like four or five things on them. Mixing was like a performance.

Other than writing with you, playing drums, guitar, and singing, what is Tad's role in the recording process?

Tad sits on a couch in the corner and is the objective ears. He does the casual listen then zeros in on the details from time to time and points out brilliant spots and rough ones as we go. VERY HELPFUL. Invaluable actually.