The Barn | TapeOp

The common image of a studio is a warehouse or basement setup in a decent sized city. Or maybe it's a fancy resort styled place in the woods where millionaire rockers can relax and make hit records. One doesn't usually conjure up images of an adobe building 7 miles from the smallest of towns in the high desert of New Mexico, yet that's where we found the MudHive. Dave and Anne Costanza moved out here 10 years ago from San Francisco, where they had been in The Whitefronts, one of that city's most overlooked treasures. All along, they had planned to build a recording studio and a home. Somehow they ended up living in the recording studio, where they've done albums for Granfaloon Bus, Hieronymus Firebrain, Dent, and ten cassettes for their own band, The Lords of Howling. I interviewed Dave while Marila and I were visiting during our "vacation." We had all played music together, and recorded some, the night before (and it was quite fun).

So how did you end up with this recording gear?

We saw an ad in the paper that said, "Wanted wood floors refinished in exchange for recording equipment."

It really said that?

We were like, "This is not for real." We didn't really have any gear. We used to just record direct to cassette; that was cool for live. So we went to this guy's house and he had cases of wine. He had just done recording in exchange for wine. We had this idea that we wanted a Sennheiser mic, that's all we knew, and he was, "What kind of gear do you have?" We had an AKG microphone. We had never heard of old gear. Finally he decided, "You know floors and you don't know shit about recording so I'll just give you stuff." It was like magic beans. We did floors in three different houses and we got two Neumann, KM53, mics. Someone might know about them. If you get the stuff that's harder to sell that's not name brand...

Neumann's a name brand...

Right, but people know KM84s and U47s. These are tube omnis and they're just amazing. Then he gave us two C12As, which we had never heard of. They're little babies of the big C12s, with the exact same diaphragam.

Those little AKG ones?

Yeah, like the grandfather of the 414. The guy who I was working with, Bill, was just like, "Dude, what is going on here?" Then I got the two Big Red monitors that used to belong to Blue Oyster Cult. They're great speakers but people aren't really using big speakers to monitor anymore. They're cool for the room and we can use them as a PA.

What brand are they?

They're Altec, I think. I took them in [to be worked on] and the guy was all, "They're cast magnets!" To be honest, for what the floor would have cost and what I could sell this for now, I could get 20 times [more back]. The money would've been spent. His theory was a good mic, a good preamp and it didn't matter what the deck was. We had an Otari at the time which disappeared. We used a Teac ¼" four track. All our tapes, from one to ten, are all ¼" four track, and now we're gonna start doing the eight track, which definitely sounds better. The difference between the Teac with worn heads and the Otari [5050] is a lot more than I thought it was gonna be. Anyway, he gave us those [mics] and the API preamps that he built into a box for us--I have four of them. I went back and did more work and I got those 2254E Neve compressors. So we got all this amazing shit that we probably shouldn't have and we can't afford to fix. No one in town would even know how to do it. I had to send a cord back because someone twisted it and the wires came out and there was no way to figure it out. I guess I could've gotten a schematic but it's hard to find a schematic for a 50 year old microphone. So that's how the gear showed up. That was ten years ago and it probably took 8 years for me to get any clue on how to use it. We thought, "It's a great microphone, just shove it in a room and record and it'll sound great." But the way they work, they hear so much, as opposed to most mics which are kinda deaf, and they can cancel so much worse.

They're omnidirectional.

We record six tracks at once. We kind of know how to work this room, like where to put the vocalists, and we always do that basic setup. That kind of showed us. The deck [Otari 5050] I just bought. That's recent. I got it for $800.

No way.

It didn't work when I got it. It had a bad transformer and a bad spindle. It's in a rack and came with a remote, which was a real intrigue. The plate reverb came later.

What kind is that?

It's an EMT 140 S. They made a small one with a 12" plate. This one is 3' x 5'. It weighs 435 pounds. It had to be brought out here in a U-Haul.

Its outside dimensions...

It's 8' x 4' x 1'. Then we got this board, that 1604 Mackie.

It only has six mic inputs.

We don't use them except for a PA. They have one now with 16 inputs. Why put 16 cheap ones when you could put 6 high quality, professional mic preamps in there?

Well you know...selling points once again. What other projects, besides the Lords, have you done here?

The first Granfaloon Bus CD, A Love Restrained, was done here. We did There by Hieronymus Firebrain. They did Here and There . One's here and one's in Oakland, CA. Mostly Lords. In the last three years we've done 33 reels of ¼".

What kind of deck was that on?

Teac 2340 SX. Someone gave it to me, and we got a lot of use out of it. When we used the four track, we printed left and right of the room. We had the bass, electric guitar — we ran the acoustic through an amp — and the drums...all sharing two mics. Then we sang on track three and we used track four for overdubs. One advice we got was never to use the board and print straight through, which actually people are doing in studios. The signal path is the Neumann [mic] to the API [preamp] to the [Neve] compressor to tape. No EQ, just 'cause we don't have any to run it through.

Well, you're lucky to have a good sounding room.

I guess so. We didn't know. We have a 21 foot ceiling, in the middle. The wood floors might be somewhat of a problem but the room sounds good. You can play in here.

It's got some reverberation. It's not tiny.

Actually it is a good sounding room.

See. Told you so.

The walls are mud. Maybe that's the secret. They're softer than brick.

They don't seem to reflect much. How do you get around working without a control room?

We built one up there, which is now my little girl's room. When she got old enough to turn knobs we decided to move out. Now, she knows how to fade this down and she knows how to press play and record. They think that by 8 she'll be running the tape deck. She'll press play and record but at 6, she starts to lose interest. She falls asleep with the headphones. She's heard a lot and she's on a lot of the tapes. We just let a lot of the noise in. It just seems ridiculous to have this recording scene and be all, "Hush everyone!" As soon as you shut the world out then everything seems all overimportant and it's really stupid. "We just spanked all the kids to be quiet and now we're doing this dumb little song." So now we just do it and let them run around. One time we wanted them to be on tape and they shut up. Then it seemed kinda stupid to ask them to talk while we were recording. There was a period There was a period when we started that someone came through and he isolated every track. Every track had to be done separately even though it drove the musicians crazy. You'd be trying to do a song, "How many verses?" He used to fade up a track and go, "Look at all that bleed. I can hear a little bit of guitar on it." We'd go a whole day with bleed and the way we did it. A friend of mine that worked in LA at a real studio was, "Go with what's more for playing." So we started at square one and it didn't sound too bad. We thought if we could hear the vocals it was okay. The stuff sounds great, like grainy old films. What I found, from having a lot of the similar gear to big studios, is until you have tons of it and tons of time, you're never gonna sound like that. Not in your wildest dreams. They've set up this weird thing...I was thinking the other day, the hippies don't like to eat white bread but they sure like to make it. The studio's like, just torture yourself and do this really clean, processed stuff. So I was playing, going up and down the stairs, in and out of the booth, so we just put it [the deck and mixer] in where it is. That isn't a problem unless your tape deck makes a lot of noise. My reel-to-reel was scraping and you could hear it on the quiet songs. It's actually pretty cool on one song but after a while we were getting tired of it.

It's always there. So basically, when you're recording you'll be playing at the same time.

I used to walk over, which kept me out of the first verse. Chris doesn't like to waste tape so he would start. Now we always start, as soon as we press play we start and then we come together and play. Now I have my volume pedal and distortion box back at the board. I feel a little isolated but not too much 'cause we all wear headphones. Everyone's used to that.

I couldn't hear the banjo last night so I took them off.

With a room mic going last night and a wild free-for-all it's kind of fun. I went without them too. When we play, we play real quiet, and our drummer, Peter, plays to the mics. Now we are dealing with 5 years of experience with just this exact setup. Now we're kinda spoiled; we couldn't go anywhere else! We have enough decent gear to do it. It almost isn't flexible for other bands. It isn't really a studio for hire. It doesn't work really well. It's built around our scene. None of the gear's paid for itself, just spiritually.

The projects that you've done here, like Granfaloon Bus, that's your brother's band.

They like the vibe. They come here for the space. It works pretty good for them; they get a completely different thing. I realized that some things don't work. The drummer plays louder so a lot of this stuff had to be regrouped. We ended up redoing vocals after, which they like doing anyway. A lot of our songs, you'd never find it. We do vocals live. As long as anything else isn't louder than the thing you're trying to record on the track. You don't have to try to make the drums sound like they're in a room. Sometimes the vocal bleed on the main mics can be kinda bad. Kinda cavernous. So I try to keep that to a minimum.

How?

Like if Chris is singing, and he gets picked up by the Neumanns [overheads] on the drums. It's almost a slapback. Our room is the size that's really the minimum to really record live in. We're 20' x 30'. That's kind of a luxury. We just kind of do it. We had somebody basically choose the equipment for us. Used the tape deck that somebody gave me. That's the thing that I think for people...really to use what you have, not to think about what you don't have. Go to a studio and find out what you will never have and by the time you have it it will be either broken or out of date! I'm kind of a slack engineer, and that's why the compressors help. These are real accurate and you don't notice it sounding squashed. They do a good job.

They're not tube, are they?

Someone else would know more; I'd hate to say the wrong thing. They're from the 70s.

They're probably transistor.

They're discrete. You pay more for that these days. This is early 70s Neve stuff.

Your tapes seem to present a good feel of the band playing.

That's underrated in the studio world.

You find more of that in jazz. Especially early recordings which were done with a few mics.

But those are amazing sounding. What I consider a great sounding album is [Coltrane's] A Love Supreme. Wasn't that as part of a soundcheck for some other project?

I think so.

That's what I consider a great sounding album. I don't consider ELO a great sounding album even though there's 5001 tracks.

But the way you're approaching it is like that. The drummer would learn to play so the parts he wants to get heard cut through.

Right. Those Neumanns, we hang them from a beam [above the drummer]. When we first started we used the omnis in an X/Y pattern on a coffee table, and I guess you can't do that with omnis. They cancel like crazy. Chris put the lyrics on the table and sang into the X/Y, the drums were right behind him, the bass was behind the drums, the acoustic guitar was printing straight into a mic, and the electric lead was going — no compression, straight in. Then we'd do two tracks of overdubs. That was our tapes, 2, 3, and 4 were all done that way. When I go back, it's really strange sounding. The slightest movement changes all these cancellations. I was in Nashville, a friend of mine works in a fancy studio and he's the mastering engineer. In Nashville, you can't be upfront about smoking pot ('cause it's all red, white and blue) so they have to hide it. They hide in the mastering room with a friend of mine and smoke pot. So this big engineer's in there smoking pot and I'm like, I've got a captive audience, let's listen to the Lords. So I find the cassette deck and I'm blasting it through this million dollar system and they guy's like, "Y'all getting a lot of signal cancellation. You got two omni-directionals too close together." He heard it! He told me you've got to be at least three feet apart. The other advice he taught me was how to print reverse reverb. Just to flip your tape, run whatever tracks through the reverb, and then print that to another track. I think that's a great sound. We get kinda hooked on it, actually. The plate's a great sound.

You said you were using a spring reverb before?

I got a Master Room and I gave it away. It was noisy and took a lot of volume and then it would crash. I actually never used reverb on anything. I used the chorus a lot, I think it sounds a lot better, that Roland Tape Chorus.

Does it have a built in spring reverb too?

It has a spring.

I used a Master Room reverb and we gated it, so it would cut out the noise when it wasn't being used.

I always wanted to buy one of those gates 'cause when you compress stuff, it boosts the noise level when people aren't doing stuff. I don't know what that'll do to my sound; another thing in the chain.

They're tricky.

We kind of slam the tape. We don't care much if it distorts.

Do you ever hear any distortion?

I don't. I haven't heard much. I think it can take a lot more than those meters. I know how to bias it and stuff now. You have the advantage, at least, that you know where you stand. This is biased at minus 3/250. If you bias it at something else, it's all relevant. I've had the meters all slamming. Some people look at those, and if it's not zero they get all weird.

My meters stick all the time. Especially channel 8. It'll fly over and stick. You have to tap it.

That's a good machine [the Otari]. The difference between that and the bigger ones is not as much as it was jumping from the 4 track to that.

But you've got the same track width as the 4 track.

But it's twice the speed. It's got better heads. It was a lot better sounding than I thought it would be. We record 6 tracks live and then do overdubs. Then we mix down to DAT and then we make the cassettes from the DAT. That was why we got the DAT. Instead of having to print one hundred of each, we just print them to order. I'm wondering when that will wear out my DAT. I'll worry about that later. It's funny, I don't know what sounds good. Things are so different. People are reading about it — you go from one tip to the next, and you should record. Anyone can think of an excuse not to.

Write The Barn at HC 81, Box 629, Questa, NM 87556