A self-described late-bloomer who "didn't even think about" playing music until he was 18, Ken Andrews' recording sensibilities have developed on a parallel track, almost simultaneously, with his guitar playing and singing. He is perhaps best known for his work in Failure (a band built around his creative partnership with Greg Edwards), who were active from 1991 until 1997. Ken's engineering ability blossomed fully just after the band's frustration with outside producers had peaked, so they decided to record Failure's third and final album on their own, with Andrews taking care of the tracking and mixing. Sprawling and dense with an almost cinematic feel, the resulting album, Fantastic Planet (1996), is highly regarded as an unsung classic by a small but growing group of people despite the fact that Failure, in Ken's own words, "didn't sell that many records." While it can be argued that Fantastic Planet''s atmospheric depth continues to quietly impact the sonic shape of recent heavy rock, Ken has had several opportunities to directly contribute with what he's done behind the boards for artists such as Tenacious D, Perry Farrell, Blinker The Star, Self, Creeper Lagoon, and Peter Yorn. Currently, Andrews is focused on his new band, Year of the Rabbit, but we can look forward to more outside production/engineering and mix jobs as he finds the time, as well as future releases from his more electronic-based, solo project, ON. Ken and I spoke three mornings in a row (twice while on his commute to Year of the Rabbit mixing sessions at L.A.'s Studio Atlantis). We talked at length about his time in Failure, working with Steve Albini [Tape Op #87], the virtues of digital recording, and the advantage of owning a mobile Pro Tools rig.
Failure's albums Magnified and Fantastic Planet seem to follow a natural progression, in terms of the sonic growth, but your first album, Comfort, is quite a contrast.
Well, Comfort was recorded probably a month after we signed [to Slash], which was probably like 14, 16 months into the life of the band.
With Steve Albini...
Yeah. You had a situation where you had a really green band that had done little or no recording, wasn't very good — I mean, had good ideas — we were really trying. We wanted to be original and be different and have a different sound — but we didn't really have the chops to pull it off, and I wasn't a very good singer. Combined with Steve's kind of dogmatic style of recording, it just didn't work out — I don't think it worked out. It's kind of interesting to hear the record, but as a whole, it wasn't really a success. He does so many bands and he has his way of doing things and he doesn't really change them to accommodate any sort of situation or help out any weaknesses in a band. It's like he does what he does and if it works out and syncs up with your sound, then you get a great record. The one thing that made me want to work with him when I talked to him was that I mentioned two specific records that he had done, Goat by the Jesus Lizard and Pod by the Breeders. And when I mentioned those records, he immediately said, "Those are the two records I'm most proud of."
It doesn't seem to me, just from a listening standpoint, that his approach is very adaptable.
I guess he thinks of himself more as this audio... documentarian or something, where he's just trying to take a picture of what's there, which is fine, and can work sometimes. It's just, I'm not interested in that — I look at the studio as an instrument and I wouldn't want to work with someone like that again. You get to a point and everyone's standing there looking at each other going, "Why does this suck?" It's usually, I think, the producer's job, or even the engineer's job or whoever's got the most experience in the room to go, "Let's try something different." Steve is very good at saying provocative things about recording. It's helped give him his notoriety. I think he likes to fuck with people. It's pretty awesome [when you think about it]: his whole thing — and I think he knows this and pretty much everyone else knows this — is that he enjoys getting attention by what he says. His dogma on recording really plays well with a lot of bands because it's got this like blue collar work ethic. Like if you just work, work, work, it's gonna happen sort of a stance — and bands like that. They want to hear that.
From the credits, it's not clear how much you guys were involved in the mixing.
It's hard to remember exactly... With Steve it's not like you really go in there and say, "Now we're mixing." He thinks mixing is over emphasized. I think, basically, as we finished the last overdub, he just kinda tweaked it for a few minutes and then printed it. Keep in mind this was ten years ago. My memory is a little foggy. I have no idea what he's like now.
And it's difficult for younger bands to even know where they fit into the mixing process.
I just remember there were some really awkward moments where he turned around and went, "That's it — does it sound alright?" and we were just like... we couldn't say anything. [laughs] We just didn't know what to say.
Sure, and you wouldn't have had the vocabulary at that point to even express...
Right, what would we [say]? [laughs] We thought it didn't sound good — we were just kind of hoping, "Well, maybe when we take it home, it'll sound different or something..." It was really hard. I just remember the communication process didn't feel open.
And from there to Magnified?
Greg and I lived in an apartment together and we started demo'ing Magnified, and during the demo process for that record, Robert quit. The demos were pretty good. I think we had an 8-track cassette at that point. I was [really] starting to get into recording at that point. I mean, I had a natural interest in it, but I think the disappointment of Comfort helped push me a little bit. We were working more on the sound of the band and everything. The label really liked the demos and they didn't really seem to care who we were gonna work with. They were just like, "If you beat the demos, we'll be happy." So our manager at the time hooked us up with this guy Paul [Lani], who got what we were doing but it just became one of these things where I guess by the time we were into tracking on that record I was starting to come into my own and I had my ideas on how to record... and engineering and sound and I started to have a pretty firm grip of the way I wanted the band to sound. We started butting heads [about] two or three weeks into it and basically he quit. He walked out pretty much two-thirds of the way through the recording of the record, so I just finished it with the assistant. My technical knowledge was still too low to mix the record, so we got David Bianco [Tape Op #104] to do it, although he had so little time that he mixed I think eight songs because he only had seven days available, and the first day almost got blown out because there was a problem with the board. So we squeaked out eight mixes and there was pretty much no time for any notes of ours, for changes or anything. So when he left, we looked at all his mixes and went, "You know what? He did a really good job on the basics, but we wish the vocal had a special echo here..." and like little bells and whistles that we wanted and little massaging of certain tones and maybe a little bit more automation on certain things [that] weren't there because of his time constraint, so I ended up recalling almost all of his mixes and tweaking them, which isn't credited. But I really was just polishing his work, and I think it's something he would have done had he not been so rushed, but he was literally in-between Tom Petty and Mick Jagger or something like that.
By that point, how much would you say Greg Edwards was helping — consciously or unconsciously — shape your sonic sensibility and vice-versa?
The producing side of it was very much a team effort on both [the later] records. He had a lot of great production ideas all the time, and it worked really well because a lot of times I was literally there working the gear and he would have a bit more distance, like more of a classic producer where you sit in the back, walk in and out of the room...
Then you go from there to setting up Fantastic Planet Studios.
Well, that's just wherever our gear was. That wasn't a real place. For [the third album] — it was really funny — we actually rented a little house up in the hills outside of L.A. from Lita Ford, if you can believe that. What a trip... and she even came by a couple of times. We were holed up there for like nine months — it took us about six months to do Fantastic Planet and then the Replicants album right after.
You didn't have to do any persuading to the label to not have any outside people?
Basically, they knew what had happened on Magnified. They were pretty happy with [it]. They thought it was good, and they knew that I had done a lot of it on my own. They were very supportive about that whole situation. Some bands were starting to do that... the turning point for us was the demos for Magnified — they thought those were good and I think they actually still said, even when Magnified was done that there were a couple of songs that they liked the demos better on, but we didn't so we didn't want 'em on the record. So when we approached them and said, "You know, we don't even want [or need] anyone," they were really fine with it. I think they [allotted] some money in the budget for a mixer, which they didn't end up using. It was really cool of [Slash Records owner] Bob Biggs and Randy Kaye [A&R] to let me do it because that was the record that really launched my whole career as a producer.
Fantastic Planet is very dense.
On certain songs, the rhythm tracks are pretty layered. Sometimes there is just a pair, of literally one mic on one cabinet, one performance on the left and one on the right. Other times it's like two cabinets and an ambient mic [for each] performance with two performances where both mics [per performance] are hard panned, and the ambient mics are panned the opposite way — you know what I mean? — and then maybe even another couple of guitars, another whole pass, but maybe not quite as much mic'ing of a different guitar. Instead of a Les Paul there'd be a Jazzmaster or something. I had a Marshall and I had a Twin with a Big Muff on it and I could switch that on independently. There's something about the Big Muff and Twin which is like this not-very-much-mid- range, lots-of-bottom, fizzy-top, you know, Big Muff sound, with a more cutting Marshall sound... they blended well together, filled each other's gaps. The Marshall pretty much sat inside the Fender. I had this one bathroom in this house that was just awesome for guitar. It was sort of L-shaped and I put the cabinets down in the short end, and then I would put the ambient mic at the end of the long end.
And where in the timeframe does the Replicants album fit into all this?
When we presented our whole idea and budget and Slash decided to make [Fantastic Planet], we told them we had the house, but we didn't. All we had was this rehearsal space, so we bought all the gear and just brought it to this rehearsal space. It just so happened that me and Paul [D'Amour, then bassist in Tool] were hanging out a lot at that time and Chris Pitman was hanging out a lot with us, and me, Greg, Chris and Paul ended up just hanging in our rehearsal space a couple of times right after we bought this gear, and we were just jamming with everyone on different instruments than we would normally play. We were just doing it for fun. I had just gotten the ADATs and was just figuring out, like, what wiring was, and we recorded these demos, and it was a good test for me to just make sure everything was working before we actually rented the house and moved in and were on the clock. I made a cassette — we did like two or three songs, I think — and, it was literally just for fun. I didn't even think that anyone in that — it wasn't even a group — even wanted a copy of it, but Paul and Chris each got a copy. Somehow, Paul was with Tool's A&R guy, Matt Marshall, way after that. We were like in the last month or two of finishing Fantastic Planet, and Matt heard those demos and was freaked out and thought it was awesome. By then he was already a big Failure fan too. He was like, "Why don't you guys just do a one-off record of all covers just like this and Zoo [Entertainment, Tool's label at the time] will put it out?" And we're just like, "How much money you gonna give us?" [laughs] And they gave us some cash, and it just made it worth our while to stay in the house basically, and we knocked it out in like two- and-a-half months. And it was really fun, too. We didn't work that hard on it or that long. We just did it when we felt like it. Paul and Chris didn't move up there. Me and Greg were already living there. The ironic thing is that we delivered that record about three months after we delivered Fantastic Planet, but that record came out like four months after we delivered it, and Fantastic Planet came out eighteen months after we delivered it. The waiting for Fantastic Planet to come out was one of the reasons Failure ended up breaking up. Waiting that long just fucked us up bad. We had put our heart and soul into that record, and by the time it came out, we were just so bummed. Warner Brothers liked it and sort of promoted it for a while, but I don't know, there was already a dark cloud over us by that time. Drug abuse had crept in as well.
How smooth of a transition was it from producing your own stuff to being at the helm for someone else's album, the first time around on Blinker The Star's album, A Bourgeois Kitten?
It didn't seem that difficult to me, especially with Jordan [Zadorozny, Blinker The Star's main songwriter] because we kind of thought alike and we liked each other and we got along pretty well musically, and for the most part the label left us alone and wasn't all over us during the process, so it was good. It generally wasn't that hard. One thing that I think about producing, at least for me, is that I really benefit a lot from having been an artist. Whoever I'm working with, I can see things from their point of view, especially when there's conflicts, I just empathize with them.
Conflicts within the band?
Conflicts in the band, conflicts with me, conflicts with them and the label — wherever they come up. I feel their pain 'cause I've usually experienced it. At the end of the day, they're the ones [whose] whole lives are riding on that record, and I think a lot of producers who haven't come at it from the artist point of view don't really see that. 'Cause to them it's just a gig that they're working on right now and it's gonna go away in a few months.
In your opinion, what should the role of a producer be?
I guess in the broadest terms it would be to help an artist make a record that they like and are proud of.
When you were doing the ON record how much did programming affect your perspective on capturing rhythm as a producer? It sounds like you were able to push things a little further in your own rhythmic sensibility than with live drums.
Yeah, weirder patterns. Like you'd end up programming patterns that a drummer wouldn't play? That's just the nature of the technology, because you're not really sitting behind a drum kit, where the bass drum is on your foot and the way drums are set up to be played... I think you end up stumbling upon different, weirder things.
Has working on that affected your rhythmic sense in the live fold when you work on other people's stuff?
I don't know. I think I just learned more about drums in general, going through the experience of making that record, where I didn't have a drummer and I had to program everything — although I did use a lot of programming help from my friend Jeff Turzo, and he's a master at cutting up beats. I learned a lot from him. He actually worked on quite a few of the tracks. Like I would find a loop and maybe do some primitive chopping-up of the loop just to get the beat to sync up with the riff the way I wanted it to, so I'd get a main groove for like a verse and a chorus, maybe a slight variation for the chorus, and then I'd have him come in and he would create fills out of the same actual loop. He would cut the snares and kicks up individually and he would do little fills and turnarounds in the choruses and stuff for me. I can sort of do that now 'cause I've learned from him, but he was so awesome at coming in and listening to the song and hearing what it needed.
When did Pro Tools enter the picture for you?
I started using the computer, period, [at] the end of '97 after Failure broke up, 'cause I used it to make the first ON demos, which got me the deal with Epic.
And now you're using Pro Tools TDM with an SSL 9000-J, right?
When I'm mixing, yeah.
Your place, Red Swan — how much is it just for your own stuff, or do you do other mixes there as well?
No, I don't really do mixes there 'cause it's basically a Pro Tools studio on wheels. I have a serious Pro Tools rig with Apogee converters, like 20 channels of mic pre, a bunch of good compressors, mics, snakes, you know... basically I can set up anywhere. And I have. I've moved the studio probably like four times. I'm in a space now.
But it's kind of like what you had referred to as FPS studios, where you can move it around, it's very mobile.
Yeah, especially my Pro Tools rig, which consists of 4 or 5 road cases, that gets moved in and out of my studio all the time, like today it's coming from Atlantis and going back to my space.
What kind of backup system do you use?
I record to 2" and/or Pro Tools, and I back up to FireWire drives and when I mix down I mix back to 1/2" and Pro Tools.
Can you tell me about any mic placement techniques that you've grown attached to over the years?
My setup — as most people who see what I do [know] — is totally stock. It's really straightforward. It's not a secret. Generally I put a mic inside the kick drum and a mic outside. That will depend on what's available, but generally something like a D-112 inside, and something that can capture low end on the outside, which can range anywhere from a 421 to a [Neumann] FET 47, and sometimes I reverse that — I put the 421 inside. It just depends what's around, really — and the sound of the drum. The thing that I have grown to really like is putting a mic inside and outside [the kick drum]. Assuming the drum is double-headed of course. It sounds more like a drum that way. Inside-only sometimes gets a little one- dimensional. It's like you're mic'ing two heads — if you do it that way, you get the whole sound... 57 top and bottom on the snare drum.
I was gonna ask you about that.
I always mic the bottom of the snare. It's a snare drum 'cause it has snares on the bottom, and a lot of times when you only mic the top it starts sounding like either a tom or a timbale or something, you know. I notice that in recordings all the time that sometimes snares start to sound like timbales — which are essentially snare drums without snares. So I like to make sure that I'm getting that — I mean you should be getting some of the sound of the snares in your ambient mics too, but it's just nice to have. So I usually print it to a separate track. Also, when a drummer's doing grace notes, sometimes those don't really get that well picked up on the top mic if it's a quiet passage. You'll hear them first on the bottom mic... 421s on toms. If I'm going nuts, and I really feel like it calls for it, I'll do bottom mics too, like 421s, but I've pretty much stopped doing that. It's just a pain, so many mics. And then whatever for overheads — a condenser of some sort, whatever's the best mic around. And the same thing with room mics, although I like to go with large condensers if possible. And then hi-hat and ride usually I'll mic too with something like a 451.
Besides the texture and tone of the electric guitars, one of the things that distinguishes your mixes is the acoustic guitar. It's got this real bright and tight sound. Any comments on that?
Not really. I don't really know what I do that's different. I like acoustics that are pretty up-front sounding, though. I always use a nice amount of compression. I don't mind when I hear string noise. I like a sustain-y sound.
The stuff you've mixed has a very wide frequency range without being harsh, particularly in the high end. It's very clear, but it doesn't have that harshness.
I think partially that's just the way I hear things. Maybe I just don't brighten things as much as some people do. Their ears are just different. I'm sure something that may sound harsh to you as compared to mine, to the person who recorded it, it might sound right to them, and my stuff might sound dark to them. I always try to mix down to 1/2", which I think helps smooth over any harshness that may have been there in the mix, and kind of round out the edges a little bit, which I think is a pleasant, nice thing. Also, it compresses it just a little bit more so you can get a little bit more level on CD if you go to 1/2", 'cause it almost peak limits it before I get to mastering. If I'm involved in the mastering, I've been known to send things back because they sound too bright to me.
Besides your Pro Tools rig, what gear do you bring to another facility to make it more comfortable for you?
I bring my speakers [Genelec 1031As]. I bring my screen. I have an Apple cinema screen. They're like the aspect ratio of a film. It's just a great screen for Pro Tools. I can't work without it anymore 'cause I'm in there all day long and it really helps relieve eye strain. I will pretty much use whatever processing is there — generally I use very little outboard processing. If I'm on a 9000, 95% of what I'm using is coming from the console.
What do you think are some of the challenges facing the small studio owner today?
Guys like me. [laughs] I mean, I'm their worst nightmare 'cause I have their facility, basically, on wheels and I can do it anywhere I want for way cheaper than what they charge. Pro Tools has really taken out a huge chunk of the mid-level studio situation, at least here in L.A. There's very few mid- level studios anymore. It's basically guys like me, and the high end studios, like $1,500 to $2,500 a day, that have amazing mic collections, amazing vintage consoles, and amazing live rooms for tracking, and then SSL mix rooms. If I'm working with a band, it's hard to accommodate a whole band in my studio 'cause I don't have multiple acoustic spaces. What I tend to do is I track basics in a great tracking studio, transfer to Pro Tools and overdub at my studio, and then mix at an SSL studio, so I still use studios a lot.
How much more do you see programming fitting into your whole recording life?
I've had a couple of bands approach me to work with them because of the ON record. I haven't had time to work with an artist like that yet. [My new] band is not that — it's totally different, very guitar based, and that's kind of what I'm focused on now all the way around. I could definitely see going back to [programming-oriented work]. I don't see it in the big picture as being a one-time anomaly. Right now though, it's all about my Les Paul and my Marshall JTM45.
Now maybe you can get Steve Albini to record you.
That's right! [laughs]
