Mike Hagler | TapeOp

Chicago has always boasted great recording dens, from Bill Putnam's [ Tape Op #24 ] Universal (the forerunner of Hollywood's United Western) to the mighty Chess Studios on South Michigan Avenue. While those landmarks long ago closed shop and the major labels are gone, Chicago has never suffered for lack of studio talent — especially over the last decade or so, when the indie music scene here took off. Behind Liz Phair's rise was Brad Wood, and Steve Albini [ #87 ] made his mark not just with Nirvana's In Utero, but his own bands (Big Black, Shellac) and acts from the Pixies to Poster Children.

Engineer-producer Mike Hagler, the owner of Kingsize Sound Labs, may be lesser known but his records need little fanfare. Consider Wilco's Summerteeth, Lloyd Maines, the Wilco-Billy Bragg Mermaid Avenue discs, Neko Case's Canadian Amp, Jay Bennett, Five Style, Butterglory, Jon Langford's various projects (Mekons, Waco Brothers), Tim Easton, The Handsome Family, Heavy Duty Felt and the Pulsars. That one-time major label electronic pop band was fronted by Hagler's ex- studio partner, Dave Trumfio, and Hagler doubled as the Pulsars' studio guitarist and keyboardist. All told, it's one substantial track record for someone who came to the recording business at an age when many rockers turn in their picks and sticks for good.

"I didn't get into this until I was 32," says Hagler, now 43. "I was a parts manager at a car dealership, and like a lot of people in their twenties, I wanted to be a rock star." Now he's a studio standout. Yet to visit the Kingsize digs — located in an old Illinois Bell training facility in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood — you might think that you stumbled upon the wrong place. Talents as large as Hagler's aren't supposed to work in rooms as small as this. Measuring about 20-by-16 feet, with a 16-foot ceiling, it was once Kingsize's B room when Hagler, Trumfio and third partner Ken Sluiter rented space on the other side of the building. And while his equipment list includes a Pro Tools HD system, a Studer A80 1/4" mixdown machine, Genelec 1031 monitors and some boutique outboard gear, there aren't gobs of gadgetry blinking at you.

But Hagler likes it here, so much so that he lives in a snug, simple loft above the isolation booth. What's more, there's a disarming quality to the spartan, industrial surroundings, one that gets bands to cast off fears of stuffy studio vibe. Much like the room, Hagler's records lack gingerbread. They have a clear, focused quality — even as he draws on an adventurous palate of off-the-wall ideas coaxed from effects boxes, detuned instruments, Space Echos, digitally-twisted keyboards or whatever's lying around from a previous session.

Hagler's work also proves that the most important tools for any studio craftsman are his ears, mind and heart. After working many sessions with Mike, I've noticed some things that emerge as noteworthy constants. He is patient to the point of transcendence. He doesn't strain to leave his pee marks on a project. He personifies a musician's locked concentration as he preps a mix, which he can often do in under three hours. Though he labors hard to get it right, there is nothing labored or forced about his sound. During downtime, he noodles with crossword puzzles and is an avid reader of the New Yorker. He favors the odd combination of shorts and brown socks. His sharp sense of humor breaks up session tension. In search of new sounds or ways to improve his craft, he's a restless experimenter and perfectionist. And though he often deserves more credit than he gets for shaping the records he's worked on, I've never heard him complain about it or exhibit signs of slick self-promotion.

' By the seat of my pants'

Hagler landed his first serious recorder in 1979, a Tascam 3440 4-track reel-to-reel that predated the hugely successful Portastudio cassette decks. "I bought it from some guys who were in a Beatles cover band. I think I paid like $1,000, which wasn't a bad price back then — and I was gaga. It got a really good sound. I still have a lot of the tapes." Learning proper recording techniques meant diligent hunting for mentors and information. "There were no real pro audio shops locally at that time," Hagler says. "Music stores were all catering to guitars and drums, so it was reading articles on The Beatles, and just finding it out piecemeal — and learning it constantly by the seat of my pants. Everything I've learned is by the seat of my pants. I'm not really into reading manuals. I like to dive in, to have a piece of gear that is easy to use."

In the mid-'80s, Hagler acquired a Soundcraft 12- channel board (this becomes a refrain during our interview, as Hagler mentions this as the first in a line of pieces he could kick himself for later selling). "The recordings we did early on worked well. I just had a naturally good ear and I could pretty much work with a piece of gear until I got the most out of it. I loved to write songs, and I wanted them to sound as good as they could. So anytime I ran into someone, I asked for advice." The seminal lessons he learned — in particular from Mark Wesselhoff, a jazz fan who became an early recording partner — still show in Hagler's work. "He was not into overproduction. He stressed setting up the mics right, having the right mic preamps, no EQ."

As anyone who once sported big hair knows, such methods flew in the face of the "big production" style of many 1980's recordings. Hagler remembers hearing the big hits of the day and thinking that "it seemed daunting, like you had to have all this equipment, all these gadgets. There was a time later, when I started Kingsize, when we were gear nuts. Now we've honed it down to the pieces of gear we like and use. We still have the 2"-tape machine but I don't really have a preference."

Wait: No preference, analog versus digital?

"It depends on what the client wants. I love the depth of analog, but I love the speed of digital. And a lot of clients can't afford reels of two-inch tape. In digital, you can manipulate things in cool ways. People make great records in both formats. You have to do what feels right." Hagler says this with an open mind and easy laugh. To him, it's simply not a debate worth agonizing over, as so many recordists have and do. As he puts it, "I don't want to discourage people from making music."

The men who would be Kingsize

In 1986 Hagler was 26 and living in a dicey neighborhood on Chicago's North Side and Dave Trumfio was a high school senior and working as a salesman at Music Gallery in Highland Park. "I was living in an apartment with a guy and we just turned it into a recording studio and drove our neighbors nuts," Hagler says. "We had this long, eight-foot table and it was just covered with boards and a tape machine [a Tascam 38- A 8-track by this time] and an Echoplex — another piece of gear I shouldn't have gotten rid of. It was really bizarre. One night there was this horrible racket and there were two big Samoan brothers out in the hallway beating each other up." Trumfio lent his voice to some of Hagler's songs, and started coming by several times a week to learn the recording ropes — and so it went until Hagler got kicked out of the building and the two lost touch until 1992. In the meantime, Trumfio had taken some engineering courses at a local college and landed a position at Sea Grape Studios, where he worked on lots of house music.

"He really encouraged me to start taking [recording] seriously," Hagler recalls. "We started a band together — Larry Cash Jr., an angular noise-rock band with weird anti- pop leanings, but we had hooks, too. He was living in a rented house, and in the basementLarry Cash Jr. would practice. And that's where he would push me to work on real projects. It was called the Kingsize Sound Den."

"I kind of threw him into the fire," Trumfio recalls. "Mike's the guy that made my decision when I was really young, 18 or 19, and he was the first guy I met who had a home recording setup. He was doing these great recordings out of his apartment. So Mike pretty much inspired me, and I held him in this place where he's my mentor. He got these great sounds with a Soundcraft board, a 1/2" 8-track and an AKG 414 mic. I always thought he had awesome ears, and always trusted his ears over mine — and still do, at some level."

When it came to becoming partners, "I was intimidated at first, but something just clicked that this was what I was meant to do," Hagler says. "I was working this auto parts job and I hated it. I had a company car and benefits and I wound up quitting — without a dime in my pocket."

Trumfio: "I was like, 'We can do this, we can really start a studio. And over several meetings of drinking beer and pondering, I just grabbed him and said, 'We're doing it.'" Soon enough, the risk paid off. Hagler and Trumfio found space in the Illinois Bell Building. Trumfio's father co-signed for a $15,000 loan. They drew up soundproofing and floor plan diagrams — designs Hagler wound up executing mostly on his own after a contracting snafu. Kingsize Sound Labs opened in May 1993, three months behind schedule and just in time. Sporting a Fostex G16 16-track 1/2 ", two AKG 414s as their best mics and a rickety Biamp board, "We finished the studio, laying the carpet three hours before the first client showed up," Hagler says.

"It was a weird, seat of the pants situation — a Cinderella situation for us," Trumfio says. "There weren't as many project studios as there are now, and it was like the new school clashing with the old school. The old- school studios couldn't understand why an indie band with no money couldn't afford to pay $75 an hour and wanted the time and artistic freedom to do what they had to do. We saw the need and only a handful of people were doing it at the time, like [Brad Wood's] Idful."

Thus followed a scenario many a new studio owner can only dream about: "Right from the word go, we were doing really great bands. We did the Palace Brothers single on Drag City, stuff for the Mekons and Jon Langford, and for Stuart Moxham from the Young Marble Giants, who had a huge following." Many of the acts came to Kingsize through Trumfio's connections, including John Henderson of the Feel Good All Over label.

"In the beginning, it was me learning and watching and setting up mics and after six months, I started doing sessions," Hagler says — noting that once again, Trumfio prodded him into it. "Bands wanted to work with him, and he'd tell them, 'Oh, Mike's a really great engineer,' and I'd be sweating. I wasn't used to mic'ing up drums and to time constraints. It was nerve-wracking."

Not that Hagler had much, if any, time to look back. By the mid-1990s, Trumfio's band the Pulsars had become the subject of a heated bidding war, ultimately won by the Almo Sounds label. Soon the Pulsars were getting raves in Spin and Trouser Press. It was, in many ways, an offshoot of the music Hagler and Trumfio had done in Larry Cash Jr., but with more decidedly '80s-pop leanings. "It was not really what I was into," Hagler says of the style, "but it was great for the studio because it gave us an infusion of cash."

Kingsize soon landed a Neotek Elan, a mixer assembled just as the company was leaving Chicago. ("It had a few bugs in it, the EQ was clunky.") More improvements would come, including an MCI 24-track machine and the addition of Pro Tools. Soon, Hagler developed a reputation as one of the best Pro Tools engineers in Chicago. It was about this time that Hagler got the call to work on Summerteeth, an album Trumfio was also involved with. "I did a ton of work on that, a big chunk of that record," Hagler says. "They came in here with skeletons of songs, and a lot of that record was [fleshed out] here. I love their new record [A Ghost is Born], but Summerteeth was a lot of fun to make. I went out to L.A. with them to mix it."

Hagler also engineered on the Wilco/Billy Bragg records, Mermaid Avenue1 and Mermaid Avenue, Vol. 2, which gave life to unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics. The first volume was nominated for a 1999 Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. "What Wilco did was come here to record demos for these songs, and they were supposed to redo them in Ireland. And they said, 'Why redo them? The vibe is right, it sounds right.' There was a bit of tension between them and Billy Bragg."

Vibe is so important to Hagler that roughly four years ago, he started doing most of his work in Kingsize B because he much preferred the acoustics, even though it meant working in a much smaller space. "The biggest leap sonically [on my work] was when I started working in this room. It's very important to have a good listening environment — I can't block out too much reflection or weirdness. Originally, the A room sounded good but we started making improvements, putting up too much material, new carpet — and the room sounded dead."I recall Mike's frustration clearly as we worked on singer- songwriter Ellen Rosner record Count to Three in 2001. It was so hard for him to hear properly that on one song, "A Month of Sundays", he started shouting the f-word in time to the playback. When we were done laughing, Mike had made his case to recut the song with a radically different, steadier drum pattern (a la Small Faces). After that drum session, we finished the rest of the track — and the album — in the B room.

There, Hagler enjoys sitting at his Pro Tools station about ten feet back from the speakers, close to where his clients sit on the couch. "Why is it the rest of the band sits in the back of the room and the engineer sits up front? I try to sit in the back with the rest of the band; I want them to relax and have fun. When you go home, do you sit three feet from your stereo speakers?"

Record like Mike

The Kingsize partnership broke up amicably several years ago; Trumfio (who also continues to use the Kingsize name) and Sluiter have since relocated to the West Coast. Through it all, Hagler continues to keep a busy schedule. His philosophies of recording, mixing and mastering stem from some very simple (but not simplistic) principles.

1. There's nothing wrong with DIY. "I love homemade records. I'm really into DIY, and with mastering, I get to hear a lot of these records." An example of Hagler's DIY ethic at work is Neko Case's Canadian Amp, a "homecoming" for Hagler on several levels. Much like his demos of old, "We recorded it in her kitchen at home. It's a great, fun little record and she's hilarious. She knows what she wants and so we'd make it weird — bring out the Space Echos, the weird effects."

2. Get the money issue out of the way to make room for creativity. Though he could probably charge a lot more, Hagler maintains cheap rates — $40 an hour for cutting and mixing, $75 an hour for mastering. His work is divided equally between mastering and recording/mixing. He masters about 100 albums a year and records a half dozen from start to finish, not counting outside mix projects. "I've kept my prices lower because a lot of kids work these piddly-shit jobs and don't have the budget. And I've loved working with those kids." When he sets up a project, he asks what the budget is. "That way, if it's locked in — and they don't go over more than a few extra days — they don't have to worry about the clock ticking and we can be more playful... That way we can screw around and get some happy accidents, and you can get some very cool stuff out of that."

3. Don't work the music, play it. "It's very subconscious. I try to think less about things and be more intuitive. It's a Sherlock Holmes thing; don't fill your head with too much trivia. Sometimes I'll just follow a new course and see where that leads. It's how I pretty much work all the time." This includes the sound treatments for his room, a combination of reflective and absorbing surfaces he derived not from some computer matrix, but his head. "I just invented it!"

4. You can get by on less. "I live in my studio. I figure I'm here pretty much all the time and ever since 9/11, I figured, 'What do I need all this stuff, these material possessions for?' Everything I have here is pretty much what I need."

5. Give artists what they want. "I know a lot of guys who hate mixing and I love it. That's one thing I'm proud of: If an artist wants something, I'm happy to give them what they want. That's what they pay for." Top-notch artists, in turn, tend to give something back, as was the case on Five Style's Miniature Portraits (Sub Pop, 1999). "People still call me to this day and say, 'Wow, that's a great record.' That's the thing — when you work with really great artists, you'll make really great records. They were really talented, on top of it, and it allowed me to work at top speed."

On Mike's dream project

"I've worked with Lloyd Maines a lot on projects he produces. I'd like to work on his stuff with his hotshot players. And there's my own stuff. Now that I just got this Hammond M3 here, I can start playing again."