Brendan Bell | TapeOp

Ahh, the saga of Brendan Bell. A British expatriate who somehow ended up in Portland and later a member of the elusive Bugskull to boot. In Bugskull he managed to hone his recording skills and as a long-term "temporary" member of Sone got to play with more recording toys. Along the way he's worked on records by the Irving Klaw Trio, Kaia, Pete Krebs, New Bad Things along with many others and his open-book recording technique has helped many musicians get a grasp on the recording process and should stand as a good example to other engineers who'd like to keep us all in the dark. Anyway, we met at the Tape Op headquarters and after a quick tour of the basement recording facilities we retired to the front porch with a few pints of water and had a nice long chat.

How did you get started in recording?

Well, I first got a guitar when I was 10, I was really into the Beatles, and I had these two little mono, shitty tape recorders and I would just go back and forth through one of those little Realistic 4 channel mixers. I would do all these things live, I had a drum machine, guitar and a vocal all going live and I'd sorta bounce back, play along with...

The cassette? Would you play along with yourself then?

Yeah, I would record along with the backing track onto another tape recorder. It was very primitive and I was getting an awful lot of hiss. My mom's a piano teacher and she was always trying to figure out how to record her students and so I would help her out. She got some okay gear, like fancier boom-boxes, and I got to use those. I gradually got some better gear...guitars and pedals. I got my first pedal for Christmas, a DOD stereo chorus, my parents got me one for Christmas. From then, I went into a few studios and saw how things were done and was never really that happy with the way things came out of there. They were just 8 track studios, very cheap.

Were you playing in a band?

I was. I played in half a dozen bands, in England, from age 14 on. The first studio I ever went to was in this old railway station, this 8 track in the basement, the trains still came by and so every time they did you'd have to scratch that take. It was a really fancy studio, the room was suspended, but of course it would just shake when the trains went by. Other than that, I didn't start multi-tracking or using a 4 track until Bugskull in '91. Sean had this 4 track and he'd just been sort of goofing around with tape loops and doing things straight in.

Like a reel-to-reel 4 track?

No, it was a Fostex X-15, one you could only record two tracks at once, but a really great machine. We still have it and it still works really good, somehow. We've put thousands of hours on it and it's working great. We had this god-awful Tapco mixer which was just a nightmare, a real pain in the ass, and various cheap, shitty microphones. I'm amazed, listening to that stuff now, like the early tape Garbled Melodies and the early singles, that they were all done on that little 4 track. We had this basement room that we built.

And you'd practice down there and record a bunch?

It was very nice 'cause Bugskull was always very organic and we could just make a song. There's tons of stuff that's been discarded. We're pretty selective about what we've given out. There's an awful lot of really dodgy stuff and stuff that was never finished. One of these days we're gonna get through it...From the Vaults, Bugskull!

A four CD retrospective.

Box set! Oh my god.

With Bugskull did you ever record with anyone else?

The only times we've recorded on other equipment was for live things we did. Dean Fletcher, who did the live X-Ray recordings, really liked Bugskull so he recorded us a few times. I have 3 or 4 tapes of us live from various different places and they sound pretty good. Dean had his own idea of how things should sound and we would just go over and mix it, just listen to it once through and get something approximate. Anyway, we had this one room in the basement which was all carpet and stuff and we tore that out and we built a proper room with insulation and drywall, a door, a window and tried to seal it off a little.

Did you take turns engineering on stuff?

Mostly me. Sean [Byrne--Bugskull guitarist] did some of it. A lot of the Bugskull stuff was done a track at a time. A sort of layering of ideas. Particularly the more out-there stuff. Usually it was like when the mood striked you'd go down and listen to the new tape and if you're inspired lay down something. It was all very individual but then we would come together for the last track and decide what would bring this whole thing together. It was a really fun way to work.

What kind of micing do you use for things?

I generally mic things individually. It's only in the last couple of years that I've really experimented with lots of different micing techniques. I've used PZMs a bunch and DI [direct inject]ing things. Running guitars into weird compressors and reverbs and whatever. We had a lot of access with our pretty close relationship with Sone, and they had lots of neat toys. I also got a 4 track open reel, Teac 23440.

When did you start using that?

Three years ago, maybe. It's a great, really solid machine.

Did you notice a big jump in sound quality?

Totally. From running at 1 7/8 [inches per second] to 7 1/2 ips. I also got a mixer at the same time. An old Studiomaster 16 channel board.

A little better than the Tapco?

Oh man! So much better. The Tapco had bass and treble [EQ] and this has sweepable mids and shelving and phantom power.

Where have you found your gear?

Generally I always buy things used. I bought a bunch of gear from SuperDuper [a local studio-supply shop] and yard sales and through the paper. I often check the Nickel Ads [local want ad paper].

I always call people in the Nickel Ads. "You still got that microphone?"..."No."

That's the thing, getting microphones. Everyone's picking up on the buyer's market, especially in this town where there's a lot of people in basements.

There's a lot of basements in Portland.

There's a lot of basements around here. I don't know.

There's a lot of people who have setups like this where they record downstairs.

I think it adds such a healthy thing. It really encourages collaborative things and a sharing of ideas.

It makes recording more casual. It'd be hard for me to imagine Bgskll "working up" your set and then going to some 16 track studio and paying $25 an hour!

I could never do that. Without all that hiss and bum notes. Being able to capture the moment, that magical moment...so many recordings done in "big" studios are clean but they're sterile, they have no life. Who cares if there's a couple of pops in there? It's the feeling that matters! I think people have realized that slick-sounding rock is not the be all of recorded music.

We were talking about microphones. What kind of microphones do you like using?

My PZM is broken. I don't have anything extraordinary or odd. I have [Shure] 57's and a 58 and an SM 81 which is really nice. It's a Shure condenser, a long silver thing, and an excellent overhead mic and I use that on vocals a lot, too.

Is it real crisp?

Really crisp. It has a high cut and a low cut and a pad on it. You can do lots of different stuff with it, like distant micing. It's just so clean and sensitive. I have a bass drum mic. I have a bunch of old, fucked up mics, like this old Beyer which sounds really interesting.

Do you have any kind of preamps or anything?

I don't have any of my own. I borrowed this great tube preamp and I can't remember what it's called but it might be from a kit. It just had this on-off [switch], a big knob and a 1/4" out with an XLR in. I just ran everything in there. All the vocals were done on a 58, 57 or an EV all run through this preamp and they sound so good. They're kind of dull, compared to a condenser mic, but they're just so middley and warm.

It seems, on those sort of mics, that a mic preamp brings it out a lot more.

I guess it's the difference between running your fancy guitar through a Peavy solid state amp or a really nice Fender.

True. When you do vocals do you use pop filters?

I do if I have one!

You can make one, you know!

I know I can make one, I'm just a little lazy. I generally use them and they make things a lot easier. I like to do as much first take as possible and I actually use a fair amount of compression. It depends who it is. Like John [Vehicle guitarist], he has a really nice voice but his dynamic range is HUGE! For a lot of vocals I usually have the ratio really low with a fast attack and fast release but with him I totally had to crank the ratio to about 8:1 or so.

Ow. That's pretty high.

Yeah, but that's the one thing that I do have is a really nice compressor. It's an Ashley, a beautiful thing, and it's really simple to use but it's so transparent, fast and smooth. You never hear it. Compression is a dangerous thing. I want to find the guy who invented compression and rip his liver out. I use it a lot. If you don't have really nice microphones and great separation you have to use it if you want to capture a lot of things. I record things really hot. With modern tape and a [Tascam] 38 you can just crank it.

I've never found any tape distortion and I peg the meters constantly. Have you ever used any noise reduction?

Unless it's a really high quality noise reduction I don't

like using it. On our LP's, when we mastered them onto 1/4" tape we used Dolby SR which is amazing. Dolby SR is great.

You said you were doing recordings with Vehicle all over their house.

We were doing it in their house and they all live together so I used their practice place as an engineering room and we used various different rooms in the house and we had a couple of snakes so we could send cables ways aways.

How did you talk to the band while recording?

That was a problem. I had this Dynaco amp that I rigged up but it would constantly distort stuff through the headphones. I really need to get myself a headphone amp. It was really only necessary on the overdubs for which I got it down, distorting the least. Using the different rooms in their house was really fun. We tried the drums in the kitchen and the living room. Vocals on the porch and in the stairs.

No way.

Yeah, on the porch. We did several takes.

Were there background noises?

Like wind. We did it late at night so it was fairly quiet but there were cars going by. For one song it fits really beautifully. It's nice to have some ambient sounds.

They make you have pictures in your head.

Absolutely.

Did you try any bathrooms?

They had this upstairs hallway which was long. We did some bass up there and tried a vocal track up there which I really liked but it didn't quite fit the song so we changed that. I did 6 foot micing on the vocals so we had this weird slapback, echo thing going on. We did the bass in the kitchen.

To give it some presence?

Yeah, just messing around.

When you're recording something like that do you use a couple of mics?

It depends on what sort of amp it is. He had a 4 ten [inch speaker] cabinet which I miced. Sometimes I ran it into the tube preamp but it was harder, it distorted a lot. He also had this really neat tube direct box and I used that quite a bit, just run the instrument straight in there and then into the compressor.

The one thing I'm so happy with that I got to be involved in is the Irving Klaw Trio record [on Silly Bird and Imp records]. That was a dream to record. Jason is a brilliant, consistent drummer and has a well tuned drum kit and I was really lucky micing it. I did that in the old house where we had a super-live room and I turned the amps away from the drums but didn't use much isolation. Everyone in the same room, two guitar amps and drums.

Did the amps rattle the snare and make it buzz a lot?

Maybe it did a little bit. He had a pretty well tuned snare which didn't seem to rattle. I'd record the drums on 4 tracks [of an 8 track] and the guitars on 2 and then mix the drums down to a stereo mix and then we'd have 4 tracks to play with. They had Michael Griffin from Noggin come in and play on a couple of tracks and they did various different tape splices here and there.

With their material?

Yeah, their weird little boom-box recordings, drop them in. We did that from the source onto the reel 'cause it was usually part of the song. Like a radio through a phaser with tremolo. Jeff has a really good vision of how he wants things to be so it was a relatively easy thing to do. And it was fun, I love those guys.

What other things have you worked on?

I've done a lot of recordings and some of them have not turned out so great, even though the bands have been great. I did this one thing with Third Sex when they were fairly young and the songs are great but it didn't really happen onto tape very well. I did a bunch of the first Sone tape which was all done on the PortaStudio 4 track and I'm pretty happy with those. I worked on a bunch of different Sone things on their two full length CD's as an engineer and I played bass on a few things, too. I did a Pete Krebs [of Hazel/Golden Delicious] record. The most recent thing that just came out is the new Kaia [of Team Dresch] record which I'm very happy with. That came out great. I helped a lot with the New Bad Things on their first record. I engineered a bunch of it. They had an eight track and I had a board and we came together and had this studio. I started off engineering and encouraged them to learn and by the end of it they were very competent.

That's a nice approach as opposed to the, "You won't understand what I'm doing here."

Definitely. Have you ever been to Smegma Studios [in Portland]? He [Mike Lastra] has a really good studio and he's one of the most "hand's off" engineers I've ever met. He really encourages you to go to the board and do it yourself which can be good. Sometimes it's best, depending on the band, to let the engineer do things 'cause otherwise you can spend eons farting around.

It seems like you help people learn and explain things.

Having a studio in a basement is so non intimidating and people feel really comfortable there and it's not such an out there concept, it's real and it's not intimidating. When you have a studio that only charges a few dollars an hour people feel they can take their time. Sometimes I get kinda lazy and I tend to rush things when it gets near the end of a project. I'm getting much better, just learning what's a wrong shortcut to take.

Does that have anything to do with studio fatigue?

I'm pretty good about taking breaks. I think it's really important when taking a break to get away and not think about it. "Let's not think about it right now."

I like to send people home with rough mixed cassettes of what they're working on and tell them to listen to it and think about what it needs.

Also, during a session, I like to change things around between songs. Change a microphone.

That's a good idea and that's where I get lazy.

You run the risk of, "Oh that was such a great sound on that song, why didn't I use it here."

But every time you mix something it sounds different. We're not using automated mixers!

Thank god!