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...
The focus had to be on the songs rather than on the production for 69 Love Songs, so most of the world would find 69 Love Songs under-produced. Like Carol King's Tapestry, it's a little painfully under produced. Not that I'm comparing their production styles but I find Tapestry shockingly badly recorded. But I guess that was the style, the post White Album "under produced album". As The Beatles' reaction against Sgt. Pepper... and such.
I read that you thought the last great studio album was The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy?
I think I said that that was the last important record in rock.
Why that one?
It was the last new idea in rock production. What's a newer idea in rock production. No one has ever been able to counter this. [laughter] That was 1986. What's new in rock production? My thesis is that rock has become a dead language, so that if there is a new idea it isn't rock.
Do you think you're adding anything new?
Not all of what I do is rock anyway. A lot of it is rock. Some of it is disco, electro pop, cabaret, Irish balladeering. 69 Love Songs was an orgy of non-rock numbers. But the new Magnetic Fields record is soft rock. A little light jazz, mostly soft rock.
How do you keep yourself interested in it, especially if the studio is in the room next to you.
Well, when I'm not interested I procrastinate. In fact whether I'm interested or not I procrastinate a great deal. The thing I do is I get to switch between writing songs and recording and I'm almost never not interested in writing songs. I spend a lot more time writing than I do recording.
Is the song finished when you bring it in to record it?
I always have the song finished before I start recording it. Once every five years or so I'll change something in a song in the middle of the recording process. A problem I have is that I write songs that seem very complete to me only to discover that they are a minute and a half long when I time them. And I'll end up with a recording of thirty one minute songs or something and that I wouldn't find very aesthetically satisfying. So I have to discard a lot of songs that I like 'cause I don't just want to fill them up with extra verses or such things.
Is there a vocal mic that you find yourself using a lot?
From playing live I'm so used to the sound of Shure SM 57s and 58s. I feel like I know them as well as I know my ears. So I feel like I know what I'm going to hear before I hear it through those. But often I'm not looking for realism. I don't have any special, interesting mics. My voice doesn't really sound good through a condenser mic. Claudia's probably would. I'm just as happy with a mic simulator, these computer plug-ins that simulate various mics. Tell it what mic you wish you used and what mic you really used and it will create the EQ curve of the mic you wish you used. Unfortunately, if you've already compressed, it it's not going to be realistic, but again I'm rarely going for realism. And when I am going for realism I'll often use something fake that sounds more realistic anyway.
Can you give me an example of that?
Well, half the world records guitars through SansAmps at this point cause they sound more like amplifiers than amplifiers do. And if I were using condenser mics, people use condenser mics to produce the sound of older recordings, which sound less realistic than, less transparent, than newer recordings. There are advantages to that, they also sound more gentle, fewer spikes, fewer transients. Or I have a Beyerdynamic mic that seems to take louder volumes better, even better, I should say. I only have one of those so I don't use it in stereo.
