Rock and roll can cause you to behave irrationally. I was working on a renovation project at my home and while carrying a bunch of lumber, I stepped on 2-inch nail that went straight through my foot. It hurt like hell, and as you can imagine, there was a lot of blood. I got in my car and drove straight to the doctor's office, where they made a special appointment for me, saying they would look it over and give me a tetanus shot. It hurt so badly I could barely touch the brakes. On the way to the doctor's office, I was listening to 90.7 WFUV and Ivy's version of "Let's Go To Bed" by The Cure came on. The arrangement, the instrumentation and the recording were breathtaking, and gave me goose bumps. I made an unexpected detour towards the record store, hobbled in to hear the whole CD and bought the record on the spot. I missed my doctor's appointment. That evening, the delicate, moody sounds of Ivy's Guestroom (this record really sounds really fantastic on headphones) helped ease my pain. Andy Chase and Adam Schlesinger, members of the band Ivy (along with singer Dominique Durand), are also partners in New York's Stratosphere Sound, along with James Iha (ex-Smashing Pumpkin). Stratosphere Sound has overcome adverse circumstances due to the remarkable work ethic and perseverance of its owners. First, a fire nearly caused the partners to call it quits as they were forced to abandon their first studio, The Place, salvaging their smoke-damaged equipment. Second, the partners have managed to successfully navigate what has been a very difficult post 9/11 economic environment for many Manhattan studio owners. I talked first to Andy Chase as we toured Stratosphere Sound.
What did Stratosphere's building look like before you moved in?
The space was just storage lockers — it was 30 feet high. You'd walk in and it was just this huge cavernous space that went on for 8000 square feet — we just thought how much we wanted to put up a dividing wall. Then we bunkered down for ten months.
And this was after the fire in The Place?
Yeah. I had had a studio for eight years, since I was right out of school. That studio was literally built by myself and some friends. We learned how to drill into the drywall and put up the studs...
So you had really done some basic construction from the ground up...
Well, I was more what they called the lackey. My friend, who is also a musician, would do carpentry work on the side and stuff. I just kind of helped him. This new studio was an enormous step up — obviously financially, technologically — on every level it was bigger. I bought out my partners at the old studio and — I was talking to James Iha and Adam. I was talking about if I buy out my old partners and reform with these guys, that we could maybe find a new place.
Were you able to salvage any equipment from the fire?
The fire didn't affect our space, per se. The flames didn't lap up at our equipment. We were on the third floor. We suffered severe smoke damage and damage to the studio structure and everything else because the firemen just busted through everything to put out the fire. The building was destroyed enough so that they didn't repair it, and they used this clause in the New York State lease that says that in a catastrophic fire a landlord can terminate all leases. So that's what he did. We had fifteen days to get everything out of there.
I can't imagine how you can just pick up the pieces and move on to build Stratosphere.
We almost gave up. At first we were optimistic. "We'll just find another space." Then everything seemed to come together. We got a call, because Billboard wrote a piece on the demise of Stratosphere, the unfortunate fire, our plight and the search for our space. There's a woman who works at Billboard who's kind of an acquaintance of James' and Adam's. She called us up and said, "My father owns a lot of real estate in Manhattan, maybe you guys could talk to him." So we met with him, and he was about as accommodating as you could get. He mentioned that there was one here, which was three blocks from where we lived.
Where did you find this board [Neve 8086]? It's beautiful.
It was in upstate New York... I can't remember the name of the studio. This is a '78. And it's just like your classic gorgeous Neve with GML automation. It's been heavily, heavily modified by Dan Zellman [Zeltech Industries]. I mean, these boards were really no frills. It seems like they weren't back then, but compared to what you'd get with a Mackie today, you know that a Mackie's more flexible than the way this board was designed.
So you're talking mainly functional modifications?
Well, there's lots of modifications that you can do to update it so that it is every bit as flexible as any board you'd buy today.
How deeply involved were you in spec'ing out the board and getting it fit electronically?
I'm not that hands-on with that kind of thing. If a module would go down, I would just call Dan. He's one of the premier Neve guys on the East Coast and he happens to be in New York, which is convenient. And he's totally modified this board so that it's incredibly flexible and can pretty much do anything you wanna do today. It's been totally re-capped as well. By his own admission, it's one of the best sounding Neves that he's come across. We've got a good marriage between old vintage stuff and new solid state, tube. You'll have a Focusrite next to the old Beatle-esque mic pres. So it's a pretty wide selection, fully blown Pro Tools, but we've also got a 16-track, 2" tape machine for those purists who like to do bass and drums on that.
So you are tracking directly to 2" for the most part and dump into Pro Tools to mix?
I always track to 2". Not even just to mix. The tracks get recorded and may only spend their life for five minutes on multi-track tape. And as soon as the band takes a break and has Chinese food upstairs, we're transferring it into Pro Tools through our A/D converters. So this is kind of like the guts here. We've got our 16-track 2", Munchy Crunchy Intermittent, you know, MCI? We pretty much run everything on the Studer [827] over here, just to capture the sound, and then it goes into Pro Tools.
How quickly do you typically dump it into Pro Tools?
It could be as quick as a guy comes in and does two guitar parts and I would say, you know, between those two I could comp together a good one, and he, like, goes to the bathroom or something and by the time he's back. As long as we capture on the multitrack, it can immediately go in.
Where did all this gear originate?
Most of the stuff in here is just all the gear that we have amassed between the three partners since we were kids. That CP-70 was my first keyboard that my parents bought for me. I've been waiting for a studio big enough so I could take it from my parent's garage and bring it up here.
How hands-on are you managing the studio?
We have a studio manager who runs the place, and I'd say that the lion's share of the business has been coming by what we call in-house stuff. Projects that I bring in that are my projects... Tahiti 80, some Japanese bands that I have worked with, Mexican bands...
Lots of internationally-flavored stuff?
Yeah, I seem to be a little like the United Nations producer. France, Spain, Mexico and Japan.
How are you finding all this stuff? Are they finding you?
Tahiti 80 started it. They had a massive, massive hit on their first record in Japan. I guess I already had a profile from my work in Ivy, but it was more like kind of indie-underground in Japan. But the Tahiti 80 record was one of the biggest records in Japan when it came out. Their first record. So that led to a lot work from like higher profile Japanese artists who wanted to work with me.
Word gets around...
You need your one little big break to kind of jump-start things.
Are there any other projects that come in from the outside that have caught your ear?
Yes, I'd say most, 70% of our projects have come from the inside. I mean, studios have been just dropping left and right. We've been fortunate that most of the work, since we've opened a year ago, has originated through projects we had something to do with. For example, the first projects since then have been Ivy doing the Shallow Hal score, then a Mexican band I did, then I did the Tahiti 80 record, which took us to Christmas. Then Adam did a whole bunch of stuff here. Adam and James, they have Scratchie Records, did their first big signings with Scratchie Records here.
It's really comfortable in here. It doesn't seem too clinical or clean, like many other upscale studios around town.
Well, we gave [studio designer] Francis Manzella a mandate which was that sonically, it had to be every bit as competitive with studios that were twice as expensive as this. But we wanted to kind of keep the vibe a little funky and we didn't want to go too nuts on all the finishings, because to us that's what also can make it very corporate. The word corporate came up a lot as something we wanted to try to find whatever the antithesis to that would be.
So your primary instrument was keyboards, right?
I started off as a keyboard player and a frustrated drummer. I think I was maybe technically a little better on the drums, but mostly, because I was a composer, I was writing on the keyboards.
So that's obviously your best vehicle for composing?
It was at first, but then I met Dominique and then we fell in love and she thought that keyboards weren't cool — all her favorite bands were guitar bands. So I immediately sold all my keyboards and bought a guitar.
Now you're back to working more closely with keyboards...
Well now I think we kind of like... now it's a little of whatever we grab.
Guestroom is a very electronic-based record.
The last five songs were songs that we have done over the course of our career.
And the first few songs were new studio songs, correct?
For that, we took three weeks here and we just recorded those five, which was a blast. It's so much fun when you're not working on your own songs.
Because when it's your own material, you are overly critical...
Yeah, there's a psychological, liberating element like you're disconnected from anything... any kind of over-analytical kind of approach that you usually have with your own music. [We walk into live room.] We have tied all the rooms into each other. For example, in the little room if you are mixing and not using the live room but the little room wants to do a piano track, or a John Bonham-esque drum track, in the live room, they can do it because the rooms are all tied into each other. The only thing we don't have is like a video screen where you can see each other, but the talk back systems work.
So you can work all rooms simultaneously.
Yeah, and the rooms are also tied in upstairs. We ran out of money, so we don't have the stereo system we wanted where both rooms would feed into the stereo system so you can hang on the couch and listen to the mixes in progress, but it's coming. All the wiring is there.
Tell me about the materials specification. Was all this done primarily by Fran, or did you folks kind of prescribe some of the things you wanted? Is this aluminum above the console?
That is brushed aluminum. We were really hands-on. Not to take anything away from Fran, because I think he's a genius. I can't say enough about the job he did, and how way above and beyond the call of duty he went. It became a labor of love, and it was just so clear after some point that you just can't stay on the clock for everything or the bill would just be too high.
So the passion for doing it right was really driving his work?
Yeah. We spent so much time together without billing us, and he really went the extra mile. There were things he felt were really important. He really did lay down the law in terms of how things had to be physically structured because he wanted this room to sound phenomenal.
The control room.
The control room especially. There were all kinds of angles and measurements that had to be in place.
Did he see the place well before you started construction? When did you get him involved? Did he help you choose the space?
He didn't help us choose the space, but we brought him in here as soon as they took out the storage lockers packed in here. It was one big cavernous area. And we walked around and he gave us different scenarios of... you want a control room this size? You know, we had talked about a smaller control room so we had a bigger live room, and we kind of felt that the way things are going, it's better to have a larger control room.
It's where everyone will be working.
But, for example, our engineer Geoff [Sanoff] found these sconces. He came and brought us a sample, and we were like, "Well done, Geoff, that's what we wanted." Fran was showing me his book one day and I saw a door that he had done in a recording studio where it was like plates that looked almost like an old airline from the '50s, where they were all aluminum plates. So I asked him if we could do that on this wall. Just for aesthetic. I just thought it would be cool. So each partner kind of had his own input — but I would say those are little details compared [to] the overall, this is like "Fran".
This is beautiful.
[We walk into the smaller control room.]
So here we are in the small control room. Fully loaded Pro Tools again...
Do you often have both rooms working in tandem? Or are there typically separate projects going on?
For example, these guys have hooked up both rooms, so in here they're doing edits and mixing. There's Pro Tools in both rooms, so you just walk out with your drive and swap files. [We walk into smallish, live-ish room.]
So do you track vocals in here?
Drums, too. We're kind of fans of dry — not dead dry, but dry — like tight, warm ambient drums. It's all done in rooms like this. Fran was really careful about making this room lively, rather than dead. There's all kinds of like weird honeycomb stuff up above the ceiling to kind of let the sound still breathe. [Andy takes me upstairs to the lounge area.] So we had to cut through the concrete slab. This was a mezzanine that was here that was another part of the building. You have a nice view of the Empire State building here, through these huge windows. The first thing we had to get was the Defender machine. That was my obsession since I was a kid. [laughs] This is kind of, like, a place to put up all our paraphernalia, posters and stuff.
Do you do all of your work at Stratosphere, or do you have a studio at home as well?
I have a studio at home. I work a lot there, too. And I have a kid and it's a lot of fun to be able to just hang out at the house. And frankly, you know, the studio gets so booked, like it has been the last month, that I have no choice. And I'm not an early person, so the idea of coming in at 8 to 11, when I'd be able to come in — it's just not practical.
One of the first things I noticed about Guestroom is that it is a really good headphones album.
Well, my favorite records have been headphone albums. For me, that is the litmus test. If it takes you to another world in headphones, then it's done and it's served its purpose. And if it doesn't, it still needs work. Those are my favorite records that do something a little bit more than you realize by listening on a pair of speakers.
How many of the tracks off [of it] were done live versus building them up by sequencing, programming, etc.?
Obviously,"Let's Go to Bed" was all programmed. We put down this keyboard part which sounds like a guitar. It's kind of a guitar sample played on a keyboard. I added a Wurlitzer part to it and Adam put the bass line down and we had this pulsing kick drum. Kind of like a heartbeat. We got to the point where I knew we needed something aggressive, but I don't think Ivy is really the right call to come up with something really aggressive and edgy, rhythmically speaking with our programming, so I called Pedro, who is the bass player and key programmer in Tahiti 80, and I asked him if he wanted to help us, and so I just sent him the tracks. He's got a Pro Tools system in France and that's what he came up with. So he single-handedly came up with the whole drumbeat, and that kind of set the song in motion.
The cover of "Kite" is driven by a fabulous melody, with a driving beat and gentle acoustic guitars. On the chorus melody, Dominique's vocal kind of soars. How did you get her voice to sound so expansive? During the first part of the song, her voice is kind of minimalist. But then in the chorus, it just gets wider.
I like to do that a lot on choruses, where you feel like a chorus kind of explodes, but not in a Nirvana-esque way, but in a lush, pop way you know, where it just kind of spreads out when you get to the chorus. So typically I will take a double track, or two double tracks of the vocal and split them in, so that it thickens up her voice. And many times, I'll still keep the same effect on her lead vocal, but when the double track vocals come in, they've got lots of delay, and kind of an analog or tape delay with filtering and just a sense of twisting and turning. Not just a repetitive digital delay, but something that just kind of morphs into something else. That will be on the background vocals, and that's just enough to kind of spread out the whole feeling of her voice, like with this angelic quality that comes on. But you still get the tight crispness of the lead vocal where nothing has been put on it.
The drums sound really tight and crisp as well. I'd be interested to know your mic set up and distances used.
Yeah, that's our touring drummer Marty — he came in and played on "Kite". We set up our Ludwig kit. I like to close mic stuff, and I like to record it in a pretty dry room. I am more of a fan of starting with something that on tape might be closer to Sea and Cake style or more classic, maybe like Fleetwood Mac — where it's really, really dry. So the mics are really close. 421s on the toms. Sometimes I might do a 421 and a 414 on the bottom. Sometimes I don't like the way the bottom end responds on the low tom. D112 on the kick. A 57 on the snare, pretty close for the proximity effects. You get kind of a fat sound. B&Ks on the cymbals. The problem with the B&Ks sometimes is that when you are really trying to get a big fat, bashy sound on the overheads, they are a little to tight and pristine sounding. So if we're going for something less polite, then I'll swap those out and put maybe U87s or something with a bigger diaphragm up there.
Do you usually record Dominique's voice dry, or are you EQ'ing going in?
I've been recording her voice for so many years that I almost do things before she's even sung, because I just know. I know the song, I've heard her sing it a couple times practicing it, I know which mic I'm probably going to pick, and based on that mic, I know the whole chain already. So it's nice having worked with the same people for so long. When we're going for your basic meat and potatoes voice sound, I use a Telefunken U47 and I like to put her really, really close to it. As close as I can get with a windscreen in between. Maybe even 2" from the mic. For vocals, I am also a big fan of the 421s. I'd say half of the Tahiti 80 record was recorded with him through that. But you really have to crank the mic pre — if the mic pre is too low and you have a singer singing through it, it's kind of lame sounding, unexciting. But if you go too hot on the mic pre it's really electric and you get this really present but focused compact vocal sound. The girl in the Cardigans, that's all she sings with.
Do you give Dominique much guidance on how loud or soft to sing? She seems to have a very soft voice, almost whispery.
You know, I'll give her some directions, but she seems to have a pretty good handle on what she needs to do. She sings very softly, and I find that putting her up real close on there gets a nice low end bump, and more crispness to her voice. I'll usually put that through a 1073 and immediately put it though a high- pass filter. Sometimes I cut everything off at 160 kHz.
Other than that, no EQ coming in?
No. I listen in the track and if it's sounding that there will be a lot of EQing needed at the mixing stage you can already hear it, since the song is well underway. So if her voice is sounding muddy, I might even just change the mic, but if I've tried all the mics and it keeps going back to the U47, but it's a little dark, then I will probably boost her anywhere from, you know, like, 3 kHz, to sometimes as high as 7 kHz.
Your version of "Be My Baby" sounds 180 degrees different from the original. The Ronettes version kind of sounds hopeful and dense, while yours sounds kind of lonely and sparser.
Well, that song is so famous. We weren't huge fans of that song, and it wasn't something that we had been dying to do. Our publisher at the time wanted some of their artists to do a compilation so they just happened to ask us towards the end and all the choice songs that we would have gravitated to first had all been taken, so there's of course "Be My Baby", and it's like who wants to cover that? We took a lot of creative liberties with that song. We just changed the arrangement, left out a verse...
Who handles the male background vocals?
Typically in Ivy, it's me. Sometimes Adam does, but 90% of the backgrounds are me. For some reason I sound like Dominique, like when I'm [singing] high. So it's fallen on me to do a lot of harmonies.
On the Serge Gainsbourg cover you did your French is perfect. You must speak French now obviously, right?
[laughs] Enough to get by, but what people don't see is that there's a big piece of paper in front of you with the whole thing spelled out phonetically. Also, I have the luxury of punching enough times, too.
On "Say Goodbye" is that a Roland TR 808 I hear as the drum track?
You know where that came from? The Alesis DM Pro. People underestimate the flexibility of that unit. It has banks in there running through all the old Roland classic sounds, the 808s, etc. With a little EQing, you can push it even further.
What other sound modules do you reach for? Do you like the Korg Trinity, or other samples, or...
I'm not a huge fan of the Korg Trinity. Sometimes I find that the keyboard sounds are so high fidelity and realistic that there's this shimmery gloss to it that I don't think is appropriate for the type of music we play. I like the DM Pro stuff, my only gripe is that it often comes out sounding, for lack of a better word, just a little MIDI. A little cold and right out of a box. A lot of times what I'll do is I'll record it to cassette tape. And I'll make sure I pick a cassette tape that's not a high bias, but a crappy old used tape that always has drop- outs and stuff. And I'll record it at a low volume so there's some tape hiss, too. The idea is to record it to cassette tape to make it smaller and loosen the fidelity, then re-import that back into Pro Tools, line it up with the original, because obviously the tape moves and warbles. And then what you end up getting is something that's a little bit more vintage sounding. And it takes the edge off the MIDI sounds when they're sounding too polished. I do that all the time. So my cassette deck still get used a lot, but not the DAT.
Was mastering Guestroom difficult, since you were pulling tracks from so many different parts of your career?
It was actually really interesting because, going back to "...Too Sensitive", that was '94 — the first cover we did. I didn't want to start with the master of that, I wanted to go back and find the 2-track mix, pre-mastering, which I did. So when we brought all that stuff to Vlado [Meller] at Sony Mastering, this is in 2002, going back from '94. Eight years later. You know how long eight years are, technologically speaking, like 50 years. So the difference in mastering was just unbelievable. Like how much louder they could get. How much more high fidelity. Go put on our original EP, Lately, and listen to "...Too Sensitive", then go quickly put in Guestroom and listen, and if you're an audiophile you'll hear a real difference — all that is attributed to the difference in mastering today versus where we were in '94.
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Adam Schlesinger of Ivy:
I know you play bass on Guestroom, but do you play anything else?
I am actually primarily a keyboard player and so is Andy. That's the funny thing about Ivy. When we started it, we were both just trying to become guitar players, but we both started as keyboard players. We both play a little of everything. We both kind of take turns experimenting on everything, put it down and see what works and see what doesn't.
What is some of your favorite gear?
Well, I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but one of our favorite pieces of gear is this Roland XP 60 keyboard that we have, which is just a very generic kind of all-purpose synth. You can use the Roland expansion cards that have vintage synths and vintage all kinds of things. They're just really convenient and easy to use and we like to take the stock sounds from there and kind of mess with them a little bit with plug-ins, run them through amps and stuff like that. As just sort of an all-purpose instrument, we're almost too reliant on it. We actually keep saying that we've got to stop using it and get some other shit. [laughing] We'll just use an organ in the Roland as a temp to see if we like the part, and if we like it, we'll go and use the Hammond. And half the time, we don't even bother to replace it! [laughs] The thing for me is in the studio is that I am really, really impatient. I don't have the patience to deal with samplers. I like to be able to scroll through a lot of stuff and just try something instantly and if I don't like it, try something else. The time it takes to load samples and search for sounds just bums me out. On Apartment Life, we used more samples because we were working with a guy who was really adept at that stuff and had quick access to a lot of different sounds we could check out.
But if you don't have someone like that, it can be a lot of futzing around and wasted time.
It's funny, because Andy and I are kind of like opposites in the studio. He is very meticulous and likes to try every available option, even if he has something going on that he likes, he wants to make sure that he hasn't missed something better. He'll sit there for hours and try every variation of something, whereas I'm really impatient, and as soon as I get something half-decent, I just want to move on to the next idea. So we kind of balance each other out like that pretty well.
