Elliott Smith | TapeOp

It was, strangely, a sunny day in the middle of a Portland winter when I came by to pry Elliott out of a studio/office space (actually, it's a room off the side of the Undercover Inc. office) where he was working on "leftovers" from his 3rd solo album-in-progress. We went to a bar next door that had seating out back and sat in the sun. It was a pleasant yet odd setting to be discussing the creation and recording of his soul-wrenching music. In earlier work with Heatmiser, angst and loud guitars careened around. On his solo albums, minimal yet precisely double tracked guitars and vocals ache with guilt and longing. During the recording of the 3rd Heatmiser album, Mic City Sons, he was witness to the disintegration of the band in the studio. Yet we sit and talk of the craft of songwriting and recording, how they've intermeshed for him in the past, and how they're leading to his 3rd solo album, due out this Spring (on Kill Rock Stars Records).

Had you done four tracking before your first solo album was even a thought?

I've done it since I was 14 or so. Hours and hours of unmarked blank tapes. I've been doing that for a long time, I just didn't play them for anybody.

As a way to write songs?

Just to record. I could borrow a four track. It was something I could understand. Mixing boards and eight tracks 24 tracks and all that seemed like a really complicated nightmare. It seems like there's some point where the guy who works at the studio doesn't know what in the world is going on and is running around, checking all the connections--can't figure out why he's not getting tape delay on the snare or whatever.

Seeing that from the perspective of a band that's recording...

Pretty intimidating.

So you borrowed a four track back then?

I borrowed one for a really long time. A year at a time. It was a friend of mines' brother-in-law's, and he didn't really need it. One of those old Tascam ones with the big knobs.

Were you using that before you were ever playing music in a band?

Yeah. Sometimes I would sync up two of them by cuing them up and hitting play at the same time and constantly adjusting the speed on one of them to catch up with the other.

No way.

That's not that hard to do. It seems like it'd be a nightmare. A lot of them [four tracks] don't have speed controls now. The old ones had sweepable mids for EQ and speed control.

Did you record with drums and stuff or did you just do guitar?

Mostly just guitar. A lot of piano. I didn't have any drums.

Were you playing around with sounds or were you working more on songs?

I didn't really look at it as separate aspects back then. I was really taken with the prospect of being able to record one thing and then another thing at a different time that would play at the same time. It was all about parts and I didn't think much about sounds. I EQ'd things, but I just did it instinctively.

Did you have one mic you used on everything?

Basically. I think it was a [Shure SM] 57.

It's probably the best choice.

It's a good mic. People overlook it as soon as they can afford a more expensive one sometimes. It's the one. Somebody told me that the [Shure SM] 58 is really the same mic with a different grill.

It's got a boost in the high end so there's more treble to it. The screen can help dampen the popped p's but not completely.

The 57s are great. You can't really break them.

So you were four tracking. Did you find yourself playing music with others eventually?

I was in a band in High School. We didn't really play out--we just made tapes. We'd be recording an "album," so to speak, except it'd be an album we'd record to cassette four track and then make some tapes.

Was everybody in the band into the recording process?

Yeah, everybody was pretty into it. It was pretty exciting. It was something to do. It was a good way to spend time. I can't say much for the music though.

How would you record those kind of things? Would you record the drums first or would you play live?

The first thing that we did, we had this drum machine called Dr. Rhythm which was not slick in any way at all. It didn't sound even remotely, like real drums.

Analog sounds.

The cymbal went, "Chhhhhhhh."

White noise with a gate on it.

So we'd program that and play that and something else at the same time onto a track. We did a lot of bouncing or ping ponging, whatever you want to call it. We'd try not to put more than a couple of things on the same track. Everything was totally dead. We didn't have any effects at all. The next year after that, we had a real drummer and two four tracks and we were syncing them up like I was talking about. We'd do the drums to two tracks in stereo because that was of the utmost importance to have the drums in stereo 'cause they could be now. We'd have that [the drums], the bass and one other thing on one four track, and the other one would be mostly for vocals. We'd just chase the drum...

Start the four track with the drums and try to follow it?

Right. Follow that one with the vocal track.

I can't believe you were doing that.

It's not that hard. It just sounds like it would be a nightmare. You have to have some patience.

Keep trying it over and over till you get it right. You'd just mix down to a cassette deck?

I had a friend who had a Nakamichi. One time we mixed down to Beta video tape 'cause supposedly that sounded better than cassettes. I couldn't really tell.

Did you use SM 57s for that stuff?

We'd get kind of extensive with micing the drums. We'd round up as many mics as we could. Sometimes I'd even use some headphones for a mic.

Did you have a little mixer to run them into?

Eventually. All we had were normal mics. We didn't have any fancy stuff.

Did you ever do any four track recording with Heatmiser?

That went straight to a real studio.

Obviously Tony Lash [Heatmiser's drummer and producer/engineer] was involved.

He was the guy who was in control of that and he was good at it. I was used to hearing things a certain way so it sort of threw me off the first time we went into a studio. It sounded extremely clean and I was really excited because it was a new way to do things. Over time I reverted back to things I initially liked, soundwise.

When did you think of doing a solo album? Did anyone approach you at first?

The first one [Roman Candle] was just the most recent four track stuff. I played the tapes for a couple of people and they encouraged me to play it for a couple of other people and send it to Denny and Christopher at Cavity Search Records and see if they wanted to do a single. They just wanted to put the whole thing out.

How did you record that stuff?

It was two four tracks. One was Neil's [Gust--other songwriter/guitarist in Heatmiser] and also this guy Jaime's. There was an SM 57 and a Radio Shack mic.

What kind?

I don't even know. It's one of those kind that you can't even take the cord off of and has an off/on switch. I didn't have many options 'cause the songs were really quiet. All I could do was plug in the mic and turn everything all the way up. The fader and the preamp and all that.

You put as much as you could to tape?

Yeah, but even at that there wasn't a whole lot getting to tape. It was really noisy. I kind of liked it. That was the way it had to be. There's something to be said for things having to be a certain way. Then you stop worrying whether you should have made this decision or that about how things sounded and just get down to the business of making songs.

I assume it was all mixed down to DAT.

It was, and Tony helped me do that.

Was there any way to clean tape hiss up, like EQ it out or anything?

There was an minimum of stuff done but it sounded a lot better coming through the [direct] tape outs and into the Mackie [board]. It sounded a lot better. He had a compressor that he put on a couple of things but everything seems to sound compressed on a cassette four track.

Did you bounce tracks much? It's pretty minimal music.

Most of it was straight double tracking. Two guitars, two vocals. Towards the end, there's a song, "Last Call," which has more stuff going on. That was 4 tracks of guitars bounced down to two on another cassette and I put that cassette into the recorder [and added two more tracks]. The last song, that's an instrumental, was a really old recording from several years before.

A song that fit in with the new stuff?

Yeah.

During all this time there were Heatmiser records being made, with Tony producing. Were you happy with that stuff too?

Tony has a great ear. He's totally gifted. I wasn't happy with those records but it wasn't just because of how they sounded. Sometimes I tried to make the way they sounded be the scapegoat, in my mind, but the problem was that I was really having a hard time thinking of anything that I wanted to be singing about at the top of my lungs all the time. I was trying to do that but my head was in a different space. I wasn't even happy with the songs that I had written so everything else further down the line was not gonna be right 'cause it wasn't starting out intact.

Were you happy with the process of working in a bigger studio as opposed to four tracking?

At the time it was pretty exciting to be in a real studio. Looking back, I prefer to be left alone, without a timeline, to not have to go and record an entire record in four days and have a cold and still have to sing all the songs.

After that, you started working on your second solo album on the 8 track. Was that done on your Tascam 38?

That was done on a Tascam but it wasn't mine, it was Leslie Uppinghouse's [one of the few decent local sound persons]. So I was going over to her house every day for a couple of weeks and recording in a big, pretty much empty, wooden room. She had a 57 and a 58 and this tube preamp that someone had built for her that just had one big knob on the front. I was running everything through that, mostly 'cause I couldn't hear it, not because I could. That was cool because there were four extra tracks now.

You seem to love doubling your voice.

Sometimes it's better not to. It's a really old studio trick. That, and cutting the tape--which I don't really do.

I saw that splicing block on your deck.

Yeah, but I don't have any splicing tape and it makes me nervous. I've seen people do it and it's like, if you're confident, you have a better chance of not fucking it all up.

Where did you end up mixing the second solo album?

I mixed it with Tony in his basement. He had a 12 channel rack-mount Mackie board. You couldn't do anything complicated on it. No sweepable mids. This stuff was all the reverse of Heatmiser, where the mix would be up on the board for 2 to 3 hours. I would take my solo stuff over to Tony's and mix the whole thing in a day or two. He was doing it as a favor.

You don't want to waste his time. For Heatmiser's third album [recorded for Virgin, out on Caroline] you bought your own recording gear.

We got the big check from Virgin, and then we were on a big do-it-yourself kick. We didn't know that Virgin wasn't gonna really fuck with us. People are always saying, "Oh major labels, they'll tell you what to do and make you do this and that." So we were totally paranoid going in to that deal and held out for a year, for total control, and then went so far as to buy our own stuff. They never bothered us at all. We got two of those Tascam DA-88s, which I don't recommend.

Why don't you recommend them?

The technology's not worked out yet. We had lots of problems with digital spikes that would have ruined our songs if we didn't know someone who had a computer and could take them out. It happened on almost every song. Say you have one machine on "slave," following another deck, and you're punching in on track two of the slave machine. If you do it too many times it'll create spikes in tracks three and one, the adjacent tracks. Someone said that every time you punch in on one of those machines it picks up all the data that was on the tape and adds the new number in and puts it all back on the tape. Every time it does that it makes a few little errors and after time they build up and the error light starts coming on. Then you see a digital spike. It was totally infuriating. We had an Otari [analog] 8 track that was also synced up so when we were using that, which we didn't need most of the time, the digital machines were chasing that. We got a bunch of stuff that was pretty good--it's all been sold now. Some of it was really clean and didn't have much of a sound, but some things really did have a sound. We got some API preamps, solid state, and they totally have a sound to them. If I was gonna get a good piece of equipment, I would recommend them. They've been making them the same way for a long time.

I think they're all discrete components. There's no integrated circuits in there. Most every processor thing you buy now has a couple of integrated circuit chips inside like a little computer. There's a difference, and it costs a lot more to make stuff like the API. What kind of mixing board did you buy?

It was a Soundcraft, Spirit. It was really big but it wasn't heavy.

Was that nice, soundwise?

It was okay. To my ears, it didn't have any color. It was the link in the chain that I never noticed. We had a couple of tube preamps and stuff like that. A lot of the tube preamps that you can get now, maybe they have one little tube at some stage but they're mostly solid state. They will not sound noticeably different from solid state stuff. You buy it thinking it's gonna sound like George Martin or something, and it's so disappointing.

Like those ads, "Sgt. Pepper's was recorded on a four track, buy a Portastudio." Sure. You got some mics too, like that one you brought over.

That was a mic I bought. A Langevin [CR-3A]. There's this company called Manley that makes obscenely expensive mics. They're really amazing sounding but they're also really bright. Langevin is in the same factory, supposedly. Manley is all the tube stuff and Langevin is all the solid state. It's nowhere near as expensive. If it's worth $2000 and it doesn't have wheels and an engine it's hard to justify it.

You guys picked up all this stuff and rented that house over in Northeast Portland. Did you make isolation rooms in the house?

We got a lot of foam, the kind that looks like egg cartons, and we made a dead room and had the kitchen for a live room. We'd take off the foam on the ceiling of the dead room sometimes and rearrange it depending on how we wanted it to sound. We got these big blocks of foam that were about a foot wide and you could stack them up on each other. We'd make the main room into two rooms by building a wall with those because the control room was not separated from the place where the drums were being recorded. We tracked everything there and we mixed in California, at the Bong Load studio. Then Tony mixed a couple of things back at our studio that used to be.

How long did you have that up?

Maybe half a year.

It seems like such a cool idea to record this way.

Yeah, it was good and bad. Instead of one person being at the helm there were a lot more people putting their two cents in. It was too many cooks in the kitchen.

Sam [Coomes, bassist for Heatmiser and Quasi co-leader, see issue #2 ) kept out the way, right?

For the most part, yeah. Everybody was extremely dissatisfied in one way or another. Some aspect of it rubbed somebody the wrong way.

What was bugging you?

Mainly, what was bugging me was everybody else's problem, whatever it was. I was trying to keep it together and trying to keep it going. Then again, it may have been my perception of their problem, which may not have been a problem. It was highly stressful. Our days were numbered and everybody knew it. We weren't unified. Nobody could speak for anybody else. The producers were supposed to direct traffic. They did that. It's a little weird, because previously it had been strictly within our band.

It was unusual, to begin with, to have had a member that was a really good producer. The first two albums sound great.

He always does a great job. He's really good. He makes things make sense, soundwise. Part of my deal was that I didn't want things to make too much sense and that can throw people off. They don't know where it stops and starts. On the other hand, at certain times I'd be really picky about what someone was playing on my songs and at another time I'd be like, "Just do whatever you want."

Do you think you're difficult to work with?

No I don't, but I don't think that was the right mix of people. I don't think that Tony's difficult to work with or Sam or Neil but for me it was often difficult to work in that situation. It was also hard for them.

What if you had just gone to a studio? Would that have made things easier?

Maybe. It would have been the same problem anywhere. It would have been better if everyone had put their trust in one person to take the reins. No one could put their trust in anybody else. It was kind of a nightmare.

When I heard that you guys were gonna record that way I thought that it was so cool.

It could've been.

It sounded good, like you'd have a lot of control over it, and it seemed really smart, financially.

It probably worked out about the same. We didn't, personally, make very much money. You sign, and you're gonna get a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and then you end up getting a check for eight thousand bucks. It's still a lot more than I'd ever had before but everybody else made more money--the lawyer and all that stuff.

I think a lot of bands will let the label tell them where to record.

You have to pick your battles. Some bands, they're not gonna be upset if their label strongly encourages them to put this song on instead of that song because what they want is for the song to be successful and if the label says, "That's the one," then they'll go, "Yay!" If that's not your battle, then why spend the time holding out for artistic control so you can tell your friends you have it. Some people are really better with somebody organizing for them. We didn't want that to be happening. There was nobody checking up on us. They were interested, and it was cool, but they knew that Tony was good and he wasn't gonna let anything by that was gonna be totally insane. They knew who the producers were. They had done Beck's first record. Rob [Schnapf] and Tom [Rothrock] had some kinda cool mics that I hadn't heard of. They're called Coles.

I've heard of them.

They used those a lot for room mics on drums. They put them down by the floor. They look sort of like a frying pan, it's not a normal shape, they're black, and they don't look like microphones. I think they're ribbon mics, actually. They were really dark sounding; they weren't dropping frequencies but they weren't really "glassy" like the Manleys. We had a Manley (not a gold plated one) but it was so incredibly expensive.

The Coles you'd use for stereo drum mics?

They'd set them several feet off the floor and point them at whatever they wanted to pickup. They'd use them, sometimes, to pick up the kick drum from ten feet away. They were doing lots of stuff with the drums that I thought was really cool and I hadn't seen before. Tony had a toy drum set that he played on at least one song. We made some drum loops on a computer for one song. I learned a lot of things from Rob and Tom.

They seem to have a real creative approach to recording. Their records sound fun.

They have a feel for the event of a song. They would always be zooming in and out. In to the details of how the compressor was set but then they'd zoom out and see how that fit into the song. I have a pretty high tolerance for fussing with things but I've never found it fruitful to fuss with things for very long. I'm totally capable of obsessing over a ridiculous detail. A week or month later, if I hadn't spent that extra hour trying to accomplish some small little task, I wouldn't remember. Nowadays I try to, mixing-wise, get it to sound like the song is happening and you can hear the things that you want to be heard. If it has good feeling to it just put it down like that. Why drive yourself insane?

Did you all go down to California for the mixing?

Yeah. They have a studio built in a barn out behind Tom's mom's house. There's a big panel with an X like a barn has and it just slid aside and there's a door. It didn't look like a dentist's office. They had a really cool mixing board that was built by this guy from Cuba and it used to be at some studio in L.A. and the first couple of Tom Waits records were done on it. It was all API parts and was all metal with big knobs. The mutes were switches.

Not buttons?

You had to flick them all on with your forearms. It was a really nice mixing board.

Did you spend a lot of time mixing this album?

Yeah, it was less than a week. We were mixing three songs a day. A lot of attention was paid to that. It didn't go to the point where everyone was totally fatigued.

I like it a lot. It's such a different record compared to your first two.

I like it a lot better than those other ones. It was a really stressful time.

So you're working on your third solo album.

Most of that was done at my house, some stuff was done at Joanna's [Bolme, Elliott's pal and bassist for local combo, Jr. High] house on a four track, a couple of songs at Mary Lou Lord's house on her four track, some on 16 track in California...all over the place.

Now you've got to pull it all together and finish it up.

Which was kind of hard. Everything sounded different. I kept recording more songs with no regard whether or not they were gonna be on anything. That's what I'm used to doing; recording all the time and not going, "What should I record for this record?" Usually it's put out whatever happened in the last 6 months. With this, I had way too many songs and no mechanism for picking between them.

Now you have to sit down and figure out which songs are gonna be on the album.

I think I did that last night. I've done that several times now and I hadn't been happy with it. There seemed to be no path through any 10 or 12 of them that made any sense. I think I happened on it last night. I'm kind of pleased to not have another decision to make. The records we were talking about before, at Leslie's house and on four track, were totally limited and there was no choice about what to use. Then I got my own stuff, and an eight track, and I have a choice between a couple of different mics, I got a compressor and one of those boxes that will make any effect that you have the patience to try to program. I fooled with it for two hours to make something that sounded like a plate reverb. That's pretty much all I ever use it for. I got lost in a sea of decisions that didn't really matter.

How do you balance the technical and song writing ends?

It's hard to wear all the hats, but it just makes it more hard if you get bogged down in sweating the small stuff, which I did for months. I like it, as long as I don't get really frustrated. I follow a few simple, provisional rules: Don't while mixing, keep the mix up for more than 20 minutes or half an hour. Don't drive yourself crazy with mic placement when all you're doing is an acoustic guitar track that's gonna be overlooked for the main melody of the song. When you're doing drums by yourself and you've got three mics on them you have to be extremely patient to play and then playing it back and see how it sounds. I just watch the lights. If there are too many red lights coming on the compressor I make it so only three come on. I make sure some signal is getting to tape. If I had more patience I'd be very concerned about tape levels.

That's what we're talking about. You might lose the feel of the song.

I got extremely interested in the technical stuff in the last year. I read all this stuff about the Beatles' sessions, even though there's no way to recreate those kind of sounds now. When I was recording Pete [Krebs, of Hazel/Golden Delicious for his second solo LP on Cavity Search] I was being very careful to get the level that I wanted to get.

It's easier when you're not having to perform.

I could hit the tape really hard with this guitar solo he's doing so it could imperceptivly compress and distort without sounding distorted. I don't have the patience to do that when I've just made up a song and want to record it.

Are you finished with Pete's record?

It's all tracked except for one song. I'm mixing it next week. I really like this record and hopefully I can do justice to it.