When did you decide that this was something you wanted to do in your house?
I've never decided to have a home studio — I gradually built one up. Without a recording studio my life would be very awkward. I also use outside studios for drums and such. Whenever I go to other people's studios I realize they don't have all these instruments! If I'm going to change one instrument's part I have to go home and get it.
Can you take me through what you have?
Well, this is a Mackie 24-channel board and this is an ADAT 24-track hard drive recorder, this is a Macintosh G4 for editing from the 24-channel hard drive recorder. And on top of the computer is the removable, easily transportable very large hard drive, I don't remember how much.
How did you come to these Camden speakers?
Everyone else seems to have the Yamaha NS10s, I think, which to me sound really tinny. But at this point I'm not really going to be mixing here anymore, not mixing alone anymore, because my hearing is shot. I recently had my right ear diagnosed with a significant amount of hearing loss around 8 kHz. Meniere's Syndrome, which causes buzzing in the ears, runs in my family. I can't even go out to amplified shows anymore because my left ear distorts. I have to go in for an MRI soon. I don't really like mixing very much so I'm not really disappointed.
What do you like about ADAT?
I like the remote control. The big remote controller, the BRC. It's a very convenient way of recording yourself. And when you're recording yourself you can't really have to cross the room every time you start and stop the tape. I know the ADAT BRC well, Claudia [Gonson, manager and collaborator] knows it well, and it's quiet and intuitive.
Do you ever get digital problems?
Ever? Yes. Not so far with this ADAT HD24. It's been very good. The manual is not really as thorough as I'd like it to be and the little hard drives are not as available as I'd want them to be. They record on IDE hard drives, which seems like a doomed format. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this as a long-term strategy. I imagine I'll be recording directly onto a computer in the next few years, which is how I started out. The first several Magnetic Fields albums were recorded onto a computer.
What are you using on your computer?
I've been using Digital Performer, the MIDI Sequencing software, since the mid '80s. What I like about it is the shallow learning curve. That's why I go with it rather than Pro Tools. I'm so tired of having to learn new technologies every two years. It's a huge waste of time for me. I'm not primarily a recording engineer, I'm primarily a songwriter. Even in song writing I don't like having to learn the new technologies once and a while. I started writing on my Palm Pilot with the keyboard adapter and it was ridiculous because I couldn't see the whole page at the same time. It's just as portable as a little notebook. And it can be uploaded into the computer without more typing. And it's easy to keep track of where things are. But the fact that you can't see the whole page at the same time makes it eventually useless for me.
A lot of this has to do with manipulation of sound. When you are recording a ukulele are there things that you tend to do to it? EQ it in a certain way? Add a certain reverb to it?
A solo ukulele? If I'm recording a ukulele that I want to sound like a pleasant ukulele I will take most of the very high end off because the ukulele tends to make unpleasant scraping sounds. And I'll use a felt pick, which takes off some of the more obnoxious brittleness. Keep the mic far enough from the ukulele so that it's not too focused. The ukulele is more or less one point of sound. It's not like a guitar where different parts of the instrument are making different sounds. The sound of the ukulele is coming out from the same place where the picking is happening. Which makes it hard to EQ problems away. I'll tune the ukulele obsessively and it still won't sound in tune in the end, but if it sounded in tune you wouldn't know it was a ukulele. And I would never record vocals at the same time as a ukulele unless I wanted a really unnatural ukulele sound. It's done with one mic. Otherwise you're going to be getting phasing problems because it's too small to have three feet distance between mics. Unless it's a really loud ukulele. I have recorded room tone with another mic but I wouldn't do that in here. In my old studio in Brooklyn I had the resonator ukulele, which is very loud, loud enough to have another mic ten feet away recording the uke. I don't know if I ended up using the room tone but I did put it on the tape. I've gotten some beautiful sounding ukulele, vocal demos for a musical I was doing, recorded in my bathroom in my old apartment. With just that and a stereo microphone. And the stereo mic is good for piano, too. As long as you're not playing the upper and bottom parts of a piano. If you stick it in the middle it's a good way of recording the piano.
69 Love Songs had a lot less "sonic trickery" than your other records...
