While you may or may not recognize Mark Bingham's name, his career as a musician, engineer, producer and arranger has spanned four decades. From sessions in the '60s watching the Doors record, producing cult bands in the '70s, working briefly with R.E.M. in the early '90s, to his recent opening of a fine studio in New Orleans, he has recorded more styles of music than there are categories. Mark Bingham's career started at Elektra's studios when the label was still setting trends. After leaving Elektra, Bingham and his then- frequent collaborator Mark Hood recorded classics like MX- 80 Sound's Out of the Tunnel and the Bush Tetras' "Too Many Creeps" single. He has worked with experimental jazz giants like saxophonist Kidd Jordan and bassist Mark Dresser. Today, his Piety Street Recording in New Orleans helps to preserve the work of local legends like Aaron Neville and Allen Toussaint.
Bingham formed a rock band while still in high school. "Our band won a band battle, and the judges were Howard Cosell, Cousin Bruce Morrow, and Bill Harvey from Elektra Records, the art director who made those beautiful Nonesuch LP covers. They liked the songs, and I was writing the songs, so they brought me to Elektra, who signed me up as a songwriter. I was 17 and still in high school. It's goofy. I was making all this music that had backwards [parts] in 1966. In the spring of '67, I signed with Elektra's publishing wing. I was still in high school, and they gave me money! Immediately, they were saying, 'Now you've got to learn to write boy-girl songs, me-you songs.' I'm just writing all this crazy stuff in six parts, and I was stupid and stubborn. My boy-girl songs were not so good. It was very stupid. There was one song I wrote [that] the Everly Brothers did. I heard it — I don't think it even got released on a compilation or anything."
While on staff as a songwriter, Mark enjoyed his opportunity to investigate the studio. "They gave me the job of apprentice producer. I did everything from get coffee. I got to see Bruce Botnick, John Haeny, Paul Rothchild and Frazier Mohawk [Barry Friedman] make records. I got to see Doors records getting made, Judy Collins, Rhinoceros. I got to see an awful lot of great music go down as an 18- and 19-year-old. A lot of the sessions I saw were [recorded] live. People were just playing music in a room. I remember this combination of loose and groovy with very meticulous engineering. They had very limited equipment. I remember dealing with the low end of the room. I learned about using omni mics and getting 'em real close on acoustic guitars, over- amping compressors. I also saw how people would put mics up two feet away and get a really beautiful [sound] that never would happen when you stuck mics really close to things. Love's Forever Changes "was around that [time], and that was — and still is — amazing. There's a Nico record called The Marble Index. That's one of the coolest, strange, pop records. Nico and John Cale and that was it. It was all John Cale overdubs. John Cale making this really amazing sound and then the engineers [would] manipulate the sound as it was going down. Frazier Mohawk produced those Nico records.
"You learn how to do stuff with home tape recorders, and sometimes it doesn't translate in big studios. Fortunately for me, I learned early on that you could bring your cassette deck into this big recording studio, plug your guitar into it, put it into record and pause, turn the mic preamps all the way up, and plug that into your amp. That's going to give you this incredible sound just like you got at home that you liked. These professional guys would tell you, 'Oh you can't do that because it's going to do something bad to the equipment.' I, early on, had a bad attitude toward engineers because they were the people that told you you couldn't do things. The good thing about the Elektra engineers was they were willing to try anything. I finally, eventually, understood the concept of turning down, but I've always been into letting 'em play, and figuring out how to sort it out from there. Not going, 'You have to do this because of technology.'
"In L.A., in those days, studios were building their own consoles, like the console at Elektra, I think. I remember that Allen Emig had built a console at Columbia and maybe one at Capitol. He was the Elektra head tech. Engineers were constantly trying to get things to work better, and shit was falling apart left and right, and it was a big ordeal to do audio and get it to sound great. Now, what we've learned is that by having those kinds of equipment where each component did one thing, even if it was difficult and noisy, there's something about it that we liked very much, and that's why all this stuff is now coming back in droves, [with] new capacitors and new parts, and they work great.
"In 1969, I got a deal with Warner Brothers. I've still got my single on Warner Brothers from that era. They signed me as an artist. I started making a record, and then stopped making a record. It's produced by Frazier Mohawk, who was an Elektra producer. [He] had a bunch of legal problems and that's when I went back to Indiana. I [had] started Indiana University right out of high school, but then I just left immediately and went to L.A. to work for Elektra because I didn't like school very much. After my L.A. experience, I went back [to Indiana] and I did the school part again."
In the early '70s, when Bingham played in the band Screaming Gypsy Bandits, hippie culture of the '60s remained more prominent in college towns like Bloomington than in big American cities. It combined with newer influences to produce unusual results. "Screaming Gypsy Bandits started before I got there. Because I had the experience in Los Angeles and I knew about studios a bit, I started being sort of the producer, simply because I could. I had a grandiose idea that we could record a lot of the stuff in Indiana and get it out into the world. When I made all the Bloomington compilations, most of the bands were probably better left undone."
Of the five samplers, only one was ultimately released, 1975's Bloomington One compilation. "We were attempting to find a populist musical vision. Frazier Mohawk had turned me on to Charlie Parker and Archie Shepp. I had gone from being groomed to be a pop star kid to wanting to listen to John Coltrane. Screaming Gypsy Bandits were playing — as was fairly typical of that time — Sun Ra stuff and 'Trane heads with a back beat, and playing country music at the same time, all mixed together. It's funny, now, that whole concept is back in the jam band thing. I feel like it's a flashback."
In Bloomington at the time, "there was this guy Jack Gilfoy. He was Henry Mancini's drummer, and Nancy Wilson and Johnny Mathis. Jack was an African music expert and had hundreds of African drums — he was of another generation than the Screaming Gypsy Bandit crowd. Jack was not a hippie, but was a sympathizer. He didn't care how weird anybody was — he was into music. Jack Gilfoy was the linchpin of the whole thing. He was trying to keep up and have good equipment. When I first went there, he had an 8-track — the first Screaming Gypsy Bandits stuff was 1" 8-track. By '73 he had a 2" 16-track. He had [Neumann] U87s and a lot of ElectroVoice [mics]. He had a circumstance where people could actually play music together. A lot of it had to do with shutting the piano [lid] and putting a [baffle] over it. The drums were probably too soft and [mimics timid '70s drum sounds]. You don't realize that you can bring your own drums, move the microphones back five inches — it'll sound fine. We already knew about the Glyn Johns' [Tape Op #109] three-mic drum sound that now so many people use all the time, or four mic as it were, snare, kick, one here and one there. We didn't know anything about the Coles. We knew about ribbon mics, but we knew kind of that they were bad and that you couldn't put them in front of a loud amp, that's sort of all. I think he had a Spectrasonics board at that point, which is good. We had big JBL monitors and that was it. In about '74 or '75, I discovered that I could take my AR 7s, and that the mixes would be much better if we listened on those things. People started bringing Auratones in, but Auratones are some cheesy stuff. Then I started using those little metal Radio Shack [Minimus 7s]. Those became another standard that people would use.
"Mark Hood was the engineer. Mark Hood is still in Bloomington, and has a studio, Echo Park. Mark had been recording orchestras since he was a kid. He was really good. The funny part is I worked with him for years and I never learned anything because he was so secretive about what he was doing. In those days, a lot of engineers, they didn't want to tell you anything because they'd lose their gig. I didn't really know how to bus things. I'd say, 'Okay, I want to send these four mics down to stereo,' and, 'Yes sir.' He retained a lot of power by basically being the only person who knew how to do anything on that level."
Bingham and Hood started the Bar- B-Q label to release albums by the local bands that they recorded. "A Caroline Peyton thing and a Bill Wilson thing actually became sort of national [hits], on the radio, [with] like 150 stations playing those things. That 'Stardust Train' song [by Bill Wilson], you'd hear it next to 'Dream Weaver'. I was trying to just infuse it with some musicality that wasn't just Nashville. That's notable as being the first recorded performance of [John Cougar Mellencamp drummer] Kenny Aronoff. Bill hated it so much that he went and re-did the entire record by himself on a small label because I had put on a backwards saxophone. Caroline Peyton had this song called 'Call of the Wild' that was everywhere. It was really bizarre. That meant we had to press 30,000 records, and of course the distributors never paid us and the record label went out of business. That was the '70s. You get two hits out of this little dipshit label in Indiana and then that's the end, your hits. Otherwise we were making 1000 records at a time and getting rid of them.
"We had a relationship with Jack Gilfoy, where — I can't remember if we gave him a thousand dollars a month to get all the off hours — it was something ridiculous like that. We were trying to record all kinds of stuff, and we did a lot of really wild music. We [also] recorded the Carillon bell tower — climbed up into the back and hung boom mics out to get 'em 15 feet away. I didn't know how else to do it. We couldn't go up in a helicopter, couldn't build a 200-foot mic stand."
Guitarist Bruce Anderson, who went on to found MX-80 Sound, "was in the Screaming Gypsy Bandits. He's an amazing guitar player, he really approached the guitar in an entirely different way than anyone I've ever seen. He put that band [MX- 80 Sound] together, and there was really nothing like it on earth. He took guitars and mutated them, and put different strings in different levels, which ended up being the whole signature of Sonic Youth, ten years later. MX- 80 was originally a quartet. It had two drummers — neither very accomplished. Dale Sopheia, the bass player, had been a music major and he was learning to play bass. [Later] they got [vocalist and saxophonist] Rich Stim, and Rich basically was a comedian."
"They would rehearse almost every day. They recorded a lot of their rehearsals. I believe the first sessions we did were [a Neumann] KM84 over each drummer [and] a kick drum mic on each drummer. The kick drums really sounded like waterbeds in those days. It was a whole different concept of kick drums. So the first [MX-80 Sound 7" single] that was called 'Big Hits' was actually recorded pretty good. Bruce was in the office with his amp. We had the drummers in the same room, the bass in the same room. It wasn't that big of a space. Mark Hood could record anything — he's really good.
"The next record [Hard Attack] was really amazing. Somehow it ended up that Rich was so fuckin' loud on that record, his vocal. It ended up like this giant singer and this little band. I don't know what was wrong with us and how we managed to screw that up." MX-80 Sound assert that Island altered the sound of the album in mastering in a misguided effort to market it to heavy metal audiences. "We may have made it almost like that and they made it worse, who knows. I felt like I wanted remix it, but I think Rich took the original master tapes and recorded over it so we'll never be able to do it. I did at one point make a remix of 'Crushed Ice' that was pretty amazing."
The second and third MX-80 Sound albums, on the Residents' label "Ralph were pretty simple recordings. The band just rehearsed all the time. You didn't put effects on Bruce. You just recorded it, and compressed things as you needed. Oliver DiCicco," who engineered Out of the Tunnel "was really good. 'How do you want to do the drums?' 'Let's do them like regular, let's put two overheads, and we'll mic the toms and we'll mic the snare drum. Occasionally I would do stupid shit, like I'd find somebody with a Marshall Tone Modulator or something, and put the underside of the snare drum in the Marshall. I didn't do too much of that stuff. Rich's saxophone is so out of it that I'd often put a lot of weird shit on that just because I couldn't stand [it]. I've been used to playing with real great musicians. MX-80 was trying to then become more commercial or something, whatever that means. They were doing more 'pop' songs, and [one] drummer, Jeff Armour, left because he couldn't stand that they were trying to be straight.
"I did play guitar on 'Gary and Priscilla', but in those days you're just not even credited on things like that. I feel stupid because it would have been good if I had played a lot, because I could play good with Bruce. Out of the Tunnel is so amazing, so intense. We were mixing to 1/2" analog and smearing. Oliver had a console that ran on a car battery, I think, so it was so clean and it didn't distort anywhere. You'd have to ask him [what it was]. Now he's got Neves, but 20-some years ago, God knows what he had. I think the [7" single] they made [with DiCicco] that I didn't work on called 'O Type' [is] a really beautiful piece.
"I was in New York for a long time, but I would go to Indiana because I'd still have gigs in Indiana, and I'd go there and play and work with MX-80. [In] '76 I actually moved. I didn't quite know what I was doing [in New York]. I got a job managing a massage parlor on the weekends, and that was really curious. I'd take money from guys and they'd go back and pick out a girl and go in a room. I got to see the world of gangsters and prostitutes and pimps. I did that for six months and I couldn't take it anymore. The gangsters actually went out of their way to hire musicians, because musicians never had to pay for sex and were less likely to be interacting with the prostitutes.
"I started the Social Climbers with two basses. Everyone in the scene is nothing but a social climber so we'll just call our band that, which was kind of stupid. This woman, Jean Shaw, a music major at Indiana too, just took up the bass, like everyone was taking up instruments back then. The Social Climbers played a lot of gigs. We went to Europe and we toured all over the country. We never made any money. Some people actually liked the band." The Social Climbers' lone 7" on Gulcher wins raves from everyone able to track it down. "From that, I started doing utility guitarist for Theoretical Girls, and Jeffrey Lohn and Glenn Branca. I was a composer too, and I could read music enough. That's how I met Elliott Sharp. If you're in that scene and you could actually read music and knew how to direct traffic a little bit, it was cool. I recorded the Bush Tetras single 'Too Many Creeps'. I got no credit for it, because me and Mark Hood stole the studio time on a Sunday at this studio Mark was working in. We just went and did it and we couldn't give it credit. Ed Bahlman of 99 Records — everyone always wants to take credit for everything they didn't do, so let 'em have it. That record came out and it did really good, but it didn't help me any because no one knew that I had anything to do with it.
"In New York, I went for years without any studio. I was a producer and a collaborator, a writer and arranger. I did a couple of theater things. I tried to start a studio in New York, in the late '70s. We ordered a Neve compressor [that he still owns], and got wire in the walls, and that's as far as we got. Eventually Philip Glass and Kurt Munkasci took over the space and had a studio there for a while, so the wires came in handy for them.
"I used to record at Media Sound. It was this old temple on 57th Street that they turned into a studio. It had this huge arched ceiling. It got ruined because they were doing subway renovation during the workday. It went out of business. They would record guitars with [Sennheiser] 409s slammed up right against the amps.
"The first Glenn Branca thing, Lesson No. 1, I think we did a really terrible job on. Then I recorded a bunch of stuff with him where I'm just playing. He had the good fortune to meet James Farber and do The Ascension, and that was another set of borrowed studio time at the Power Station. That's a really cool record. I was gone by then. It was right around when I moved to New Orleans. I just kind of got sick of the whole scene in New York. The Mudd Club was great at the start, and I saw it just go to hell in a rowboat. I just got really tired of kids with trust funds acting like they had no money. Some famous bands get lost in the Bowery and then get mom's limousine to bring them steaks every day. Some people dealt with it with good humor. I still talk to Arto [Lindsay, who was then in DNA] now and then. There are a lot of people from that scene that I still really respect that were musicians, but the amount of posing and dilettantism in that scene was just staggering. Even someone like John Lurie, who I really respect, was still kind of playing with music, not playing music. The whole thing was about playing the press and playing the game. I'm just, like, a dumb fuck who likes to play music.
"Coming to New Orleans was better. I've become like a service industry. I've recorded hundreds of things. A lot of them probably wouldn't have gotten recorded if I didn't do it. People I know will go to Chicago, and they'll tell me, 'Wow, people up there think of you as a guitar player. I thought you were just a button pusher.' Here in New Orleans, there's living, breathing music, all the time, that happens live. You actually get to hear a lot of music here with no PA system, so you hear the music, you don't hear some angry guy in a booth making it really loud. New Orleans has a lot of problems, but it's still an amazing place to live and it's been an amazing place to interact. I love New York and I still go there and I work with Peter Stampfel. I worked with [Alan] Ginsberg and with Hal Willner. I love it there, I have so many friends there, but I just didn't want to stay there. It grinds me into submission. I can go there for a month, six weeks at a time, and I've got to get out.
"I had met John Scofield. My sister was still living in Bloomington. Somehow he went there to play with Gary Burton and came back to New York with my sister, and they've been married ever since. I did some work with him then, and that was one way I started getting a lot of gigs as a producer. The guy that was recording John then was a really great engineer, Dave Baker. For some reason, Dave and John were out by the pool a lot, and I ended up doing a lot of the automation mixing dealing with Steve Jordan's tom toms. Somehow this impressed them enough that they actually gave me credit, even though I was supposed to be an assistant monkey boy. Thus, I actually co-produced one of John's records. Soon after that, John started working with Joe Ferla all the time, and I can't compete with Joe Ferla. It's nice to see that quality and working relationships actually do take precedent over nepotism in the world occasionally. John was just down here with his band, it sounded amazing.
"One theater thing I did here Showtime made into a movie. It supported me for a while. It's called Ruby's Bucket of Blood. It just came out not too long ago. While I was away in New York, they had kicked half my music off the show. If you think the music business is bad, just try the movie business. People screw you on their cell phones on their way to meditation class."
Bingham collaborated with Hal Willner on the tribute album compilations that spawned this trend. "I had a friend at Elektra that was relentlessly pushing Natalie Merchant on me. They had made the first 10,000 Maniacs record and it was really cool. They thought it would be really good to have her on one of these multi-artist records. I liked her, and we were trying to figure out who else we wanted to do this duet. She's the one that said, 'What about Michael Stipe?' and I'm like, 'Who is that?' R.E.M. already probably had sold a million records and I didn't know who they were. Stipe called me up and he was so rude. I went to Georgia and I worked with him and I met their manager [Jefferson Holt] there. I did this session with Michael and Natalie and I brought the stuff back to New York, for the Stay Awake [Disney tribute] record, 'Little April Shower'."
"When I met Jefferson, he started visiting New Orleans, and he said, 'What are you doing on your own?' They had a record label, Dog Gone Records, and they signed me up and put out this thing that I'd made, I Passed for Human."
Bingham provided string and horn arrangements for R.E.M.'s Out of Time, with a horn section of legendary jazz saxophonist Kidd Jordan and former Bacharach collaborator Cecil Welch on flugelhorn. "They just called out of nowhere, because they needed someone to help them. I didn't have a bad experience with R.E.M., but since [Jefferson] left, and he was my friend, and they did bad things to him, I haven't really talked to any of them since that whole marriage broke up. Once you do [a big record], all those people [that] used to call you, they think you're gonna go do that kind of stuff the rest of your life. You lose independent jobs — you have to almost tell people, 'No, I can still do that. I couldn't do the Whitesnake record.'"
Yet contact with Jefferson Holt led to some interesting work. "I really liked the Flat Duo Jets after seeing the film Athens Inside Out. Dexter Romweber, their guitarist, was a unique musician — he was part Django, part Gene Vincent, part punker, and the drummer was named Crow. In 1988 we were both on Dog Gone and Jefferson thought I could get a good record from them. We decided to record live to 2-track. I found an old theatre we could rent for a week in Decatur, GA, right outside Atlanta. The gear I brought was an eight pack of API mic pres/EQs, my Neve compressor and a bunch of basic mics. I brought some delays and reverbs and gates. The mixer was a Soundcraft 200. I took the API stuff line in on the Soundcraft and used its effects sends. I had a Yamaha amp and Tannoy NRM-8 speakers." Mark opted out of tracking to analog 2-track, instead using a now-outdated digital format, "a Sony F-1 and a Beta deck." The record's "so lo-fi, people assumed it was both analog and an attempt at a 'period' sound. Nope, it's just the way they sound. The band refused to stay in their motel room, choosing to sleep in their van, as the motel was 'too comfortable'."
The band's gear wasn't very comfortable either. "Dexter's amp was so full of buzzes and ground hum that I used four mics to record it at 1", 16", 5'‚ and 20' — each having a gate that would open later than the one closer. He was loud. Dexter had the disconcerting habit of banging his head into the wall really hard if he didn't like a take. When the record [Flat Duo Jets] came out sounding so absurdly raw, many engineer friends wondered why I had the nerve to put my name on it. Others thought it to be just right for the band. It was the '80s, and live to 2- track lo-fi wasn't in the cards for most bands."
The Rebirth Brass Band's Kickin' it Live record could have been even better than it was, in Mark's opinion. "In 1990 Rounder Records hired me to record the Rebirth Brass Band live at the Glass House, a club on 2nd and Saratoga in the middle of the Central City 'hood. Paul Christiansen's truck from Dallas — the old Wally Heider truck — came and we set up outside the club. The truck had an API and I brought my Tannoys. I used room mics in the back and clipped on Countryman and [Neumann] KM 84s and any other 'light' mics they had so the band could run around the room like they always did. Those of us who heard the original tapes were really happy" — until the producer got ahold of them. "The 'producer' decided to run the live to 2-track mix though a 'quad buss' of an old Neve, destroying all the phase detail and ending up with something so flat and so unlike the tapes he got that the band and I were stunned. It's a great record — too bad no one got to hear it properly."
His first studio was "the Boiler Room space, set up in '93. That had a Trident console. It was a hot- rodded 70. It's like an 80, only the monitor section didn't have EQ on it. I foolishly let someone do a bunch of mods on it and he destroyed it. I had an [Otari] MTR 90. I had a whole collection of junk reverbs, which are really great, and we still use [them] all the time. It was over around the end of '99.
With John Fischbach [Tape Op #21] and former R.E.M. manager Holt, Bingham then started Piety Street Recording. Studio construction lasted "about a year — it wasn't bad, considering what people spend on crap these days. It was under a half a million dollars to buy the building and fix it all up. This room was all wide open. First, it was a post office, and then it was a center for retarded citizens." Much of the live room is lined with exposed, unevenly-cut wood to disperse sound. "I just basically had them find me a cypress log and mill it in a certain way. The second room, with the Sony DMX-R 100 mixer, is where I work more than the [main] room. This is a really nice space. I've learned to really enjoy [B&W Matrix 805s for monitoring]. What's funny is if I'm tracking or mixing and I work on those B&Ws and then I move to the Mackie [HR824]s, it's great. But if I start with the Mackies and go to that, it's stupid." Bingham likes both of his old pairs of Tannoy monitors, a pair of coaxial NFM-8s and "the black ones with the gold thing in the middle, [from] maybe '84."
The main room's SSL SL4064 G+ "was in another studio. We moved it in here and the Trident became EQs and the frame went to the landfill. I've learned to like the SSL. Over the years, I really liked Neve stuff more than SSL. When they made me use an SSL I would, but I didn't really know how to run it. I never was on one enough, so I'd always have to have a good assistant. 'What was that, Goto Final From Here?' How do I do this? Now at least I know how to do it to a certain extent. I think it's a beautiful thing, now that I understand what to do with it. It's a little weird to get used to," because things are in unintuitive places. "There's so much stuff that you can possibly do. I was so used to using whatever high bit-rate digital storage I could get and chopping things up within Pro Tools, then re-doing the edits in mastering. I wasn't doing automated mixing. I was doing mixing in pieces or throwing it into workstations, not using the Trident. Nowadays, having to do all these cuts and things, I can just go up on the Pro Tools. You can use things in conjunction, like Pro Tools and the SSL automation, and it's easier now. The SSL is still a pretty amazing tool. I've learned what the compressors do better. Sonically, it's good — [for] mixing, it's amazing. The old Trident EQ is so round, and this is not, but I've learned ways around it. All these bell things are actually pretty good, and that gets it much more round. It's the kind of EQ that it's typically better when you lose things, as opposed to add a lot. I don't have a whole lot of outboard EQs in here now, but the Daking EQ is amazing and I'll kick over stuff to that. I've got these old White EQs — they're like room EQs — and I'll use those things, just to really [add] bombast. I've really learned that if you recorded something through the Neves and it's on tape properly, the SSL is okay. I've made some really beautiful sounding records in the last couple of months so I can't really bitch about it. Bring in Nashville engineers, and they call the board 'Sounds So Little.' I'm happy with it, and I'm gonna get more channels of it."
Piety Street stores its microphone collection alphabetically by manuf- acturer. Among them, Bingham loves new BLUE condensers, like the Mouse, and hates Neumann U-87s, of which the studio has none. He also raves about the Soundelux U-95, the cheapest model that the company no longer makes.
"I think ElectroVoice mics are really underrated. They're a lot of really great mics I still use. So many people want the sound of great records, and they've neglected to realize that [the sound came from] workhorse ElectroVoice mics. I've got a 664 and the RE50s, and that series of those long skinny things with the grille on the end — not 635s, those are like pretty horrible, but the omni ones that you can hammer nails in with, RE15s. All of those mics are actually really good. So many of them were so hypercardioid, so you could have people playing at once. People today have forgotten about the way Sennheiser 441s work, where you can put horns in a room with those things on them. It's not going to sound like putting 'em in a room with a [Neumann U] 47 or a new BLUE mic or something, but it's gonna get saxophone, and it's gonna sound like a saxophone, and it's gonna be able to have a drummer right over there, and not have hardly any drums in it. Therefore they can play together. The dynamics are so good when people play music together. The minute you start layering everything, the dynamics go from this wide, they become miniscule." He has similar praise for his old EV CS-15 condenser, "an equivalent to a slightly noisier KM84. They're great. They're so hyper-cardioid. You can put these things on hi-hat and not hear the snare drum.
"We've got 20 Neve channels. The bottom ones were from the BBC Wales. From what I understand from the British engineers, they have a little different specs. At full throttle, you should be able to take a microphone and blast a trumpet, [with] the microphone stuck in the bell, and not crap out the mic preamp. They've got a double gain stage, so you can use 'em like a guitar amp. You can maximize one and hardly turn the other up and use it as a distortion box, so that's really good, over-amping.
"These [Valley People Kepexs] are really good mic preamps. These are like mid-'70s Nashville things, and [for] certain things, like basses, they sound better than the Neves. A lot of times you can find Kepex racks, and what people don't realize is that these mic preamps are really killer. Somebody's got to look at 'em and make sure they do not have leaky capacitors, but the bottom end is amazing. Nobody cares about them, they're dirt-cheap.
"One thing that's of interest, we've all become really sick of vintage equipment that breaks. I really think all this Universal Audio stuff that's coming out in these reissues and the Vintech stuff is really awesome. I've got 20 old Neve modules and I use them, but I'm tired of them breaking."
While "the SSL compressors are okay," Bingham often prefers choices among his outboard gear. "The Avalon compressor is really great, and I like it, but some of the other engineers here don't like [it] because you can't hear it. Compressors are special effects to a lot of people, they like to change the sound a lot. The [dbx] 160s, I've had those for a long time, and they're the original ones. The [UREI] 1176s are original ones. I've got original [dbx] 165s, and I've got a Spectrasonics [610] that's been around for 30 some years that's still really good for mashing things.
"This is my Maestro Guitar Enhancer, the earliest trigger device, [from] like '68. [To double a] tambourine under the snare drum, send the snare drum off tape into that. I got this at the gas station at the corner of Elizabeth and Houston from some guy for 25 bucks. He was drunk and selling it for some reason, I was just walking by, and 'Hey man, you want?' And I'm like, 'Sure.' The guy told me Brian Eno [Tape Op #85] has one, but mine's the only one I've ever seen.
"Alesis made something good [the MasterLink], can you believe it? It'll do 24/96 recording, and all kind of crap. It'll do all these different sample rates, and then you can instantly burn CDs. This thing is really good, especially since it was made by Alesis."
Bingham employs creative strategies to assemble his studio affordably. "I got [big UREI 8II monitors] cause they were Jimmy Swaggert's. When he lost everything, he had to sell 'em all. I thought it was really cool to have Jimmy Swaggert's monitors. We've got this weird Hammond that we just got for a hundred bucks at a flea market, same make as the one used on 'Gimme Some Lovin'. I've got a Baldwin that's really great, that makes some really weird sounds. It was the organ for the all- lesbian Christian church in the French Quarter. I got it from them and now they have a synthesizer. I just got three couches from the thrift store for a hundred twenty nine dollars. That's how you keep a studio in business."
Piety Street has opened up a comfortable "guest house" down the street, and John Fischbach is operating Bywater Masters in a space upstairs from the main studio. Recent sessions have included artists like the Blind Boys of Alabama, Ryan Adams, Terence Blanchard, Less Than Jake, Peter Stampfel and Harry Shearer. The futures of Piety Street Recording and Mark Bingham look to stay as interesting as ever — and still all over the map.
