When he's not being tortured on remote recordings, Max Feldman is responsible for taking care of Effanel Music's Chelsea studio in NYC. For those of you who aren't familiar with Effanel, their 50-foot long rolling recording studio makes them the world's premiere mobile recording outfit. Their credits include everything from the annual Grammy Awards and Video Music Awards to live DVDs by Dave Matthews, Madonna, and Eric Clapton. Max's personal engineering credits include U2, Phish, Cindy Lauper, Cassandra Wilson, Cher, Brian Wilson, Elton John and Bobby McFerrin. When Max isn't hard at work polishing the sound of major label stars, he's busy focusing on his self-described "real job": as an engineer/producer for independent artists whose music simply inspires him to record it. His most recent work is The Mammals' Evolver. Recorded with a station wagon load of borrowed gear in the band's cottage home in upstate New York, Max proves that with the right equipment and know how, there's no place like home.
What was it that attracted you to The Mammals?
The first time I heard them play, I was shocked in a way that I think a lot of people are at their first Mammals experience: I've never heard anything like this before! Something in the way they play this old music seems so new. First of all, they're all three amazing musicians. They each play about six different instruments, none of them badly, and their musical sense is just amazing. Besides that, they're all great people. I've never met three people who laugh so much. They laugh at everything. And that lightheartedness comes across in their music. It's just great fun to listen to them.
The Mammals being mostly an acoustic outfit, did you have to change your approach any?
It's true, I don't see a lot of acoustic instruments these days, and the ones I do see usually have pickups. But no, my approach didn't change. I like to think that any self-respecting engineer should know how to record acoustic instruments. Anyone can plug in a sampler and hit record. The real artistry in recording is being able to capture the sound of an actual instrument. Mic choice and placement is key, and that's something that you just have to have experience with to know how it's going to work.
Please run down the gear you brought up to their house.
We were literally confined to the amount of gear we could fit in the back of Mike's Volvo station wagon. In fact, I had to change my equipment list when Mike told me Tao was coming along! It was a really simple signal flow: mic to preamp to tape. I monitored off of the recorder with a little 16 channel Spirit mixer they had at the house. In other words, the mixer wasn't in the signal path until after the recorder, which was a Tascam MX-2424. I hooked the MX-2424 into my PowerBook. I could do editing on my Mac, I used it as a transport control, and I did all the file management there. It was pretty cool — it just hooks up with Ethernet, and I didn't have to use the front panel on the Tascam once. I also had a SCSI expansion chassis on the MX-2424 with four removable 18 Gig hard drives. As far as mics are concerned, I tried to bring a good variety of really excellent mics. I was fortunate that my boss was willing to let me bring these beautiful mics out on the road. I don't know if I would have done the same, honestly. I brought a Neumann M-149, which is just a beautiful-sounding mic. Open and airy — really amazing detail. I brought a couple of Schoepps 221b's, these small diaphragm tube condensers. They had these funny little clear plastic rings around the diaphragm end of the mic. The band took to calling them "the occuli". Also, a pair of Audio Technica 4060s. These are great new tube mics. "New" meaning not 40 years old. Probably the coolest one was the Coles 4038. It's a ribbon mic, really delicate and really heavy, because of the big magnets inside. It's funny looking, too, with this kind of triangular swivel top. Their name for that one was the "alien head". Also a classic U67, and the requisite SM57 and 421. Oh, and an AKG D112. That pretty much did it for mics. My secret weapon was the mic preamps. I brought twelve channels of John Hardy M-1s. I love those pres. Big and fat sounding, but clean as a whistle. I know a few engineers who swear by them. Also great because there's four of them in a single rack space. I topped off the Volvo with a pair of Meyer HD-1 monitors and a single Neve 33609 compressor.
You basically set up shop in a completely foreign environment. Could you tell me a little bit about the space you were in to record Evolver?
Well, we were in their house. And a little house, at that. At first I thought I was going to try and use different rooms for different things at the house. They have this really neat little room that's all tile and stone, with these strange angles in the ceiling. I thought of using it as some sort of effect. But we went around the house with a banjo, a fiddle, and a guitar and tried the three rooms in the house that could be used. It turned out that the living room, with these wood paneled walls and a hardwood floor with a rug sounded really good. It was also right next to a smaller room they used as an office. I set up the "control room" in there. It was pretty tight, but I got all my gear into one stack next to a desk. I put my laptop and the little mixer on the desk, set up the monitors in front of me on speaker stands I had brought. We wrapped some kind of bedspread over the door, and put a bunch of blankets up on the walls. The cats loved it in there once the gear got hot. The three musicians all sat out in the living room in a tight circle, facing each other. From hanging with them so much before we actually started, I knew that they would want to be close to each other. They play off of each other, feed off of each other really, and I didn't want to have it any way other than what would make them perform the best. Comfort for the artists is always a paramount concern of mine.
So no separation?
No. I knew that if I could get the sounds right with them all together we'd be okay. If we needed to edit, we'd edit takes together instead of trying to replace certain parts. As far as that was concerned, we were locked into the performances we got in basic tracks. But I knew they could pull it off.
How did you lay down tracks? Was it mostly live, mostly overdubs?
It was really a little bit backwards. The basic tracks consisted of doing whatever three instruments they usually play live for the given song. It could be a banjo, a fiddle, and a 12-string, or it could be two banjos and a ukulele or something. I don't think the basics were the same for any two songs. It was always the stringed instruments first, though. Some of the songs consisted of just the basic tracks, but in several songs we actually went back and overdubbed the drums. None of the songs were tracked with drums in the basics. In fact, they didn't even play to a click. They're that good! Mike played the drums, and we had some bass and electric guitar overdubs too. Our man Ken Maiuri came over and did a beautiful guitar solo on the tune "69 Pleasant Street". Another guy with an amazing sense of musical taste, who also seems to play every instrument there is. He did some of the electric bass parts, too. Like I said, it was pretty much backwards from the way you would track a rock band. For a couple of songs, Ruthy's dad, Jay Ungar, and his wife, Molly Mason, came out and played live with them. Molly plays the acoustic bass, and Jay plays a mean fiddle. Lots of people know this, they're pretty well known in their field. They did a few overdubs for us too. Jay did this great mandolin part on "Wandering Boy". One of my favorite tracking moments on the CD was "Stairway to the Stars". It was about 3 am. Ruthy wanted to do a version of this song from the 1930s, just her singing with a uke. I put that Neumann M-149 about five feet in front of her, and let her rip. The second take is what's on the record... exactly what's on the record. It hasn't changed a bit since it went into that microphone. No EQ, no compression, no editing, no nothing. One night at my apartment, that track, like I told the band, brought a room full of rowdy Christmas partiers to a complete silence. Just music. I love that.
Where was the record mixed?
I mixed it back at the Effanel studio in New York City. We have a room that started its life out as a live room to record in when the truck was parked in our garage. Eventually the room acquired a Neve Capricorn, a 48-track Pro Tools rig, and outboard that matched the truck. The idea being that we could record something on the road, and send the tapes and a disk with the console setup back to the studio to mix. It's a real interesting space, bigger than most control rooms. It's a digital desk, probably the first large-format digital console made. There aren't many of them around any more, but we have two and they fit our needs perfectly. Our outboard gear isn't too exotic. We have a Lexicon 960L and a TC Electronic System 6000 for effects. As far as analog signal processing, I used two Distressors, a TubeTech CL1A, two 33609s, a GML 8900 and an 8200.
Did you use Pro Tools?
Can you still make a record without Pro Tools? Yes, I used it, and I'm not afraid to admit it. I find it to be an indispensable tool. In live shows, there's no such thing as multiple takes. I have the music that was performed live, and that's about it. So if the artist completely blows a note or something, the only way to fix it is to do it in Pro Tools. Sometimes I will take a note from the dress rehearsal and use it to replace a note in the show. Pro Tools makes that very simple. Also, there is a lot of ambient noise on stage. I can clean open microphones really quickly in Pro Tools. On a certain DVD project, the name I won't mention, I took two entirely different performances from two different nights and spliced them together. Not so revolutionary, but a bit more of a challenge when you consider that the picture the music had to sync with was not spliced together; it was only available from one of those performances. Pro Tools is a necessity in situations like that. I never use Pro Tools as a mixer, more as a tape machine/editor. I think that's where a lot of people find that they don't like the sound of Pro Tools, when they start doing everything in it. I use the plug-ins sparingly, but some of them are really cool and are very specific tools. We have a 48 track system that goes digitally into our Capricorn, with Apogee AD-8000s instead of 888s and an Nvision master clock for the entire system. So the "sound" of Pro Tools is pretty much a non-issue in our world.
Where did you have the record mastered?
Mark Wilder over at Sony Music was really generous and gave us a good deal. He's a great guy, with great ears. He was recommended to me as being a great engineer for acoustic records. He's done a lot of those re-masters of classic records like Bob Dylan and Miles Davis. He did a really nice job for us, and it didn't seem to matter to him that it wasn't a big name project.
So, truth be told, the tracking was done in a home studio environment and mixing and mastering were done in professional studios.
Yes, albeit a home studio with $30,000 worth of mics and mic preamps.
How did your employers at Effanel react to your taking time off of work to do a freelance project?
Randy Ezratty is more that happy to let his employees try and expand their careers and expertise. In my case, he was willing to lend a great deal of help, too. And to him, it's like training. Getting to know what I do better can only help him. He also knows that I will remember it when he needs a little something extra from me.
