Russell Frehling

While Tape Op has covered countless recordists with low-budget, grass-roots backgrounds in rock recording, we've talked to very few grass-roots engineers in the avant-garde music world. Russell Frehling, who now runs the house studio at Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Space, is one of the most experienced. He's done everything from recording punk bands to the Jim Carroll Band to developing underwater sound fences for dolphins with Greenpeace in Japan, and his own creative pursuits involve large-scale sound installations. He's best known for his avant-garde recordings, and it's this experience that's led to his role in Oliveros' nonprofit foundation and its studio.

"I graduated as an undergraduate from Brandeis, and then I did that summer in Buffalo program. In those days, Morton Feldman ran this summer thing. They'd take a handful of young composers from around the country. They had a really top-notch music ensemble there. They'd have Morton and then a couple of guest composers. Pauline was one, and Joel Chadabe was the other. We lived in the dorm together and just became really close over the summer. She encouraged me to go to Mills, and we'd see each other on the road over the years."

When Frehling got involved with Deep Listening, he started by finishing the design and construction of the space. "There were two shells that we started with. David Gamper, who is in the Deep Listening Band with Pauline, did the first part—took this old building and framed out a couple of the rooms. From there, I made a few modifications for dimensional things and non- parallelism, and treated 'em basically by ear, with diffusion and damping where required. It's one of my pet things to try and find ways to build good sounding rooms and get good absorption and diffusion with the world's cheapest materials. I got a bunch of surplus ceiling tiles. They're that compressed junk. Instead of using 'em as absorbers, I make little 2x2 blocks that have been cut off at angles. I will put them on some kind of a backing board, and then glue those little squares on. You get these patterns of oddly matched shapes. They work great, and they cost next to nothing. Then building out walls where you build boxes literally on the wall, so you have variable depth cavities. You can put a mixture of straight absorption or panel type absorption, bass traps. Pegboard becomes really handy there as a sort of resonator. There's a formula that will figure out depth. If you just think random, you'll do pretty well in general contouring of the room. If you can afford it, you can build a room that sounds good everywhere in the room. If you can't afford it, then the best you can do is work to have it sound good at the critical position. Since we were a nonprofit and had to beg for every dollar we spent, you can guess which approach we used. It works fine. It's important what the music you're doing [is]. If you're doing acoustic music, it's silly to monitor loud, because the music isn't loud. That's something I learned in the old days, when I lived in the Bay Area still and had a commercial studio. I did a lot of part-time work, freelance work. You monitored very quietly because you were there for 12 hours. You wanted to be as good at the end of the day as you were at the beginning of the day. I learned a lot from those guys. It's important to match your listening levels to the music you're recording. Consequently, you're not loading the room as much by not listening really loud and having really artificially deep bass. The standing waves don't have much amplitude. You can do a lot in simple conditions in this sort of music. You just don't want things that are bizarre. The trouble we have, and the biggest constant fight I have, and I think everybody would have this battle, is low ceilings. It's very difficult to get separation with low ceilings. A few feet makes a lot of difference, between eight and ten feet is huge. It's not enough energy loss by the time it hits the ceiling surface. So gobos and things like that become ineffective because the sound just bounces over the top."

"For equipment, we use hard disk. It's on a Mac, dual- processor G4. One of the first pieces of equipment that was donated was the old, original MOTU 2408. I was using Pro Tools at home, a Digi001. My feeling was that it had no place in a studio where you never knew what was going to come in. There was just no flexibility to it whatsoever. It does a fine job where you control the environment. There's not enough I/O of various kinds, and you can't build on that system unless you go to full- blown Pro Tools, which we couldn't afford. MOTU is really great with having boxes of all shapes and sizes. We had a 308 in there that allowed us to interface with whatever came in. That's how that got started. I think all [of these units] do about the same thing, it's just getting used to the logic, or lack thereof, of the systems. Our main converters are Metric Halo Mobile I/O. We recently got the Focusrite 428, which is four Focusrite ISA preamps, and they have an 8-channel converter card, which is damn good, especially for the price. Over the years we moved up. I got the MOTU Mark III, which is just better all around than the other ones, but I basically don't use the converters in it, I use it as kind of the traffic cop of the system. I think the first good preamp we got was the old CLM, which is from Scotland, a really nice class A, very simple but very functional. We use the dbx 586, which I think is one of the most under-rated preamps in history. It's very clean, very nice, good headroom. The EQ on it is pretty vanilla. It's not a very tube-y tube amp, but it's a real tube amp, 250 Volts across the plate. It's definitely not a character amp. The music that we do, day in and day out, is acoustic, what you hear is what you get. We've got also a big Mackie 32 input, 8 bus. Pauline had gotten that when she was doing this big opera years ago. I don't like it. In three years, I don't think I've put anything through it. I use it like this giant monitor mixer."

"We have the Meyer's HD1s. They're very good nearfields. It took a little getting used to working that close. It's quiet music, not overly loud is probably a better word. It's like anything else—you sort of refine that a little bit over time. I think later records are better than the first ones. That's the nature of the beast."

For microphones, "we started off in good shape. Pauline had a pair of B&K 4011s. I had a pair of vintage AKG 451s, and an old RE20 that I had totally rebuilt by ElectroVoice. They were really shocked to see it. This was a low serial number, and I've had it since the early '70s. The new AEA R84, the big ribbon mic, is a real gorgeous piece of work. I picked up on the Internet a Beyer 260, with the Stephen Sank DX mod. We got a pair of Audio Technica 4033s and a 4050 and 4051. I got the 4051 off some studio that was closing down in Connecticut. When we first started this, it was like running around. I even bought wire from the guy."

"I just picked up one of those Studio Project stereo mics. For ease of use and versatility, that's been pretty good. They're the guys that make those Chinese made condenser mics. They came out with the stereo version, which is two of their multi pattern mics, one on top of the other, like an old AKG. What's nice about 'em is you can rotate the capsules, and they're both multi pattern. I like MS recording. For some things, if you're doing live performances in the gallery, even Blumlein. If you just want to stick up and get the murky stereo field, it gets a lot of space in it. For documenting a live performance, it's sometimes the way to go. It's not a Neumann, but as I often tell people, neither is our room. I think it was a European thing to make the ORTF and the different things—this is 90 degrees but this is 120 degrees, and 8 millimeters instead of 11 millimeters. Eukh. Every time I go out into the tracking room, I forget my little millimeter ruler. Somehow I've left it home—it's not in my back pocket. It doesn't matter. You put the mics up there, and you can hear when they sort of click in, right. It just goes, 'Ah, that's it.' It doesn't matter what the measurements are."

"Altiverb, which is really wonderful - I thought that plug-in was the coolest plug-in to ever come out. That's a company called Audio Ease in the Netherlands. It was the first convolution reverb that was available as a plug-in. Sony makes a $10,000 box that does it. The impulse response in each room is modeled. It's only presets, because it's literally pulling up a specific room. It is as if you were talking in that room. To capture a room's response, you do it by using some loud impulse sound like a starter pistol, but better than that are sine wave sweeps. You do the whole spectrum. You do that several times and you lay them all on top of each other and your signal-to-noise goes way up because it cancels out the noise and your signal keeps getting reinforced. Altiverb sucks up CPU energy in a hurry. It treats what you put into it as it would in that room. It's pretty damn remarkable—it's so different from regular reverb. It just sounds different—you use it differently. It's the best glue for a mix I've ever seen, and you don't even notice it's there half the time, unless you wanna take it into a big concert hall or something. They did a bunch of odd things, like a garbage can. One of 'em was that they did the environment of a washing machine. Opened the washing machine up, put the mic in there, ran the sine waves through it. When I did a punk thing, there are all the normal tricks to the vocalist where you really wanna rough it up—you sort of get the radio EQing where you chop off the top and bottom and you compress the crap out of it and you put a little distortion on it. That all sounded kind of trite. Then I stumbled upon this, and, 'Whoa! That's the sound!' And everyone, 'Yeah, that's the sound.' It's just unique. You don't have to EQ it, because by plugging in that box, all those anomalies are naturally there, and so it does this really weird thing, and it was just a wonderful thing. Sometimes the obvious and the well used isn't the thing, or you get tired of it. It's gets too well used and you get tired of hearing it."

"Pauline and I are working on some solo pieces with Altiverb now where she literally plays against the rooms live. Instead of the reverb being a kind of sugarcoating on the thing, she's going to play against that room, and as the room changes, her playing will change accordingly. It's a little difficult to do because there's some latency, and it's not an instantaneous change when it has to load each one in. You don't have to do it continuously. You do 5-minute segments of each one and knit it all together later. We haven't figured that part out yet. We're trying different things and playing with the idea. When she's in town for any length of time, we usually get a segment in where we'll do something recording in Altiverb looking to make a project out of it."

Frehling had largely stopped engineering before he got involved with Deep Listening. "There were a couple of reasons I did this: one to do the in-house projects, but two as a training facility for younger people that want to come in. I'm really quite inviting of young people that want to come in and do a kind of apprenticeship. I thought it was like that build it and they will come baseball movie. That really hasn't worked out. Partly it's getting the word out that it's there. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is. You can learn a lot out of books, but recording you just sort of learn by doing it."

At the studio, "we do a fair amount of stuff that comes up through Deep Listening Space or the Foundation. We have artists in residence things. Part of that is to do something in the studio, which they can choose to do or not do. We have recorded several duets with Pauline and one of her generational colleagues. We just did Anthony Braxton. Through that community of new music, people know we exist and just have faith that I know what I'm doing. They come up and just record independent projects. Occasionally by word of mouth people know there's a studio there. We've done some rock 'n' roll things. We've done some nice jazz releases that have worked out well. We're near Woodstock, there's a bunch of studios on the other side of the river. People would come in and they just are not comfortable in them. They're mostly rock 'n' roll oriented places and jazz guys feel less comfortable. I've done a nice Chicago-based sax player, they just weren't happy with what they were getting, and I solved some problems for 'em, and they said, 'Go ahead and mix it.' It's mostly word of mouth, because we really haven't advertised."