In an anonymous garage on a residential street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn sits Excello Recording. It's been there for 13 years, long before the parade of hipsters crossed the BQE. It's an enigmatic space off a side street and recently, I got the chance to chill out and chat with Hugh Pool, one of Excello's owners/partners and it's chief engineer.
Tell me a little bit about the history of Excello Recording.
Excello was founded in 1992 by Dann Baker and Bruce Hathaway [Love Camp 7], Chad Swanberg [Halcion], Gil Shuster [Kenny Young and the Eggplants] and an architect named Tony Daniels [who incidentally just won an award for his eco-friendly design of the new Brooklyn Rail yard out at Coney Island]. Excello was founded on the idea that it would always be a studio for the creative projects of the partnership, and would kind of earn its day-to-day expenses by being rented out by engineers and producers and bands to record their own projects.
Does that still hold true these days, 13 years later?
It is still kind of true, but a lot of water and people have passed beneath Excello's bridge. We have continually maintained and upgraded the studio and have never advertised anywhere. We did get a website up.
Was the Calrec console here from the very beginning?
When the studio started we had a 24x16 Trident 65. It was great and a lot of records were mixed on it. We got rid of it when we really needed more inputs and when the thing was passing too much DC onto the fader rails. When ADATs and DA88s were everywhere and Pro Tools just busted out with Digi001, we bought two Lynx modules and installed them so we could lock our Studer A800 to whichever format we wanted. That sure made that 24x16 Trident feel small in a big hurry. We were looking around for a Neve or an API a few years ago and that was pretty discouraging because they were so expensive. You just never seem to find that amazing deal on gear when you are out there looking for it. But, we kept plugging away and putting out the word to different equipment brokers. We explained who we were and what we did here and some of the records that were made here, and just kinda said, "These are the parameters of what we are looking for, so if anything comes along that seems like a good value and feels like it might fit with our room, please give us a shout." About eight months later we got a call from a guy in Montreal named Milko. He said he had just purchased three Calrec consoles from the BBC and was going over to decommission them. He'd give us a call when they were shipped to his place in Canada. We said great. Another month went by and we get another call and sent our then and since departed partner Bryan Martin up to check things out. He came back with pictures and specs. It looked awesome with real beefy, all-modular construction and the specs were just ridiculous... P&G faders, Lundahl transformers, five power supplies, everything transformer balanced. It was commissioned by the BBC and built to BBC specs by AMS-owned Calrec. It has a lot of Neve feeling genealogy. It has 40 channels, eight stereo buses, six auxes, four compressors and four gates built in, plus another 18 channels in an aux mixer that go straight to the stereo bus. We love it. It has tons of headroom and EQs that are real quiet yet don't crap out when you use them aggressively.
So you were able to get a board from the BBC?
Yeah. I have heard that they regularly cycle their gear, like every ten years for something like this. I guess they can afford not to be "sentimental" about a big, lovely piece of transformer-balanced audio processing device. We, on the other hand, take great care to see that it is happy. This is for two reasons. One is that it's the responsible thing to do and the other more compelling reason is that we are still paying for it. And if it ain't happy, reliable and free of gremlins, the studio is gonna end up eating time and that will help us not in our endeavor to make the old lease payment at the first of the month.
And the visiting engineers love it too...
You bet. I have to be honest. When Bryan came back and said he had perhaps found something promising and that it was a Calrec console, I just kinda nodded my head politely and thought, "Who now and the what what." I called two friends about it, Eric Amble and Greg Gordon, and they got pretty excited on the phone and Eric gave me a brief history of the company. The Soundfield microphone, their psycho-acoustic technology and the fact that the same company owned them that owned Neve, AMS. Anyhow, I loved it by the second session I did on it and Greg Gordon, Bob Weston, Paul Kolderie and Max Hayes have all used it and had very nice things to say.
One of the other nice features of the studio is the huge tracking room. It's the type of space that has become increasingly rare in New York City. I know the Afro Pop band Antibalas came to Excello because you could accommodate their two main requirements — a 12-piece tracking session and recording to analog tape.
The main room is 40x25x17 with two skylights, plus there are two smaller rooms with tielines. I always tell people something that Daniel Lanois once said in an interview I read. To paraphrase, he said that a large physical space is not only about the sound you get, it can also be about the kind of performance it promotes. Being able to stretch out and walk around and swing your arms or a bottle of Jack can be a very good thing for the musicians while you are watching the VU meters bounce and click on the pins. That being said, it is also great to be able to stick a mic on a Starbird mic stand and crank that sucker 15 or so feet up into the top room corner and avail yourself of that woofy, explosive, bass trap kind of sound to mix in on the drum kit. Time aligning with Pro Tools has made that kind of stuff way, way easier to do. No more B output from the sync head into the delay and then tweaking it back on top of the drums. With DAWs it's 'nudge city' and a ten-year-old can do it.
Did Antibalas track with all 12 members in the big room?
Yes — they did four horns, two guitars, bass, drums, percussion, keys and voice. Actually I think that is 11, but they had two bass players that switched on and off, so that was the 12th member. We have done lots of big acoustic sessions here. Washtub groups with a saw player. Old-timey stuff with banjo, lap steel and uke[lele]. We did a big session a few years ago that was really interesting with two Aeolian pipers, vibes, two acoustic guitars, drums, Hammond Organ, upright bass and Michael Brecker playing sax. The group was called Celtic Tales. They were all such slamming musicians. We pretty much just kept our mouths shut and made sure nothing fucked up.
How did you acquire the EMT reverb plates from the Hit Factory?
We have two plates. An EMT 140, which is a tube plate with mono in/stereo out, and we have an EMT Echo Plate. It is solid state and stereo in and out. We got both plates from Richie Kessler when he closed down Platinum Island in Manhattan. He told me that he bought the EMT 140 from the original Hit Factory, which got me kind of excited. We bought a lot of gear from Richie and he has really been an encouraging force through this whole shift in the recording business that has occurred over the last four or five years. He has encouraged my wife Janie and I to hang in there. He knows how cool Excello is and sees the value of a large tracking room with analog gear in NYC. This place is so relaxed and filled with so much energy and creativity. One of our mottoes is, "Casual, but never unprofessional." If you can describe a sound with words, we can generally make it happen. Chances are it will exceed your expectations. We do it all the time.
What kind of tape machines does Excello have?
We have a Studer A800 2" 24-track, an Ampex ATR 102 1/2" 2-track, a Studer A80 1/2" 4-track and a Studer A80RC 1/4" 2-track.
All functional?
Right. Good question. This is not your first trip to the studio, is it Liz?
Right. So who does tech support when the stuff goes down?
Man, the studio got kinda lucky on that. We have on site total pro tech-ing from a gentleman named John Charette. For readers in NYC, you probably have heard of him. He started Media Sound and has worked at half a dozen studios in town as full time tech. He has also, over the years, built a pretty successful business as an amp repair, pro audio man. He runs his business out of our shop and stays on top of all our gear and gives me a little education on the side. And he's managed to keep the vintage tape machines running.
And you use Pro Tools as well?
We have a Pro Tools HD2 rig with 24 in and 24 out. We still record an awful lot to tape and then transfer to Pro Tools. Nothing is normalled or half normalled in our studio. You patch. One of the cool features of the console is that it has transformer-balanced separate outputs for each channel. You can select pre or post fader. When it comes time to transfer and you have recorded real hot to the tape machine and you need to back the level off a hair dumping to the computer, you can stay right on your channel strip. You just patch out of the "channel separate output" on that channel and hear that you are attenuating through a signal path that is not coloring the sound.
As someone who has come up in music with analog and is now mixing digitally, any word on what the difference is?
I could bore you for the next couple hours on that, but what is important is perception from a listener's standpoint I guess — I mean that's what it's all about, right? I feel that one of the main differences is that with the computer, I have the sense that one can make the mixes feel wider more easily and with tape the mixes have a tendency to sound deeper. With the computer I feel you lose subtlety from the sound source, not only low and high end, but actually little bits of ambience from the room. The result to me when you have 30 tracks going down to mix is that you have an audio program that spreads out in a panorama with a little flatter and wider feel than the same thing would have had you been doing it with a tape machine.
Since you're doing your mixing through the board and not 'in the box', you're basically committing to the mixes at that moment?
Yes, and I like it that way. As time goes on and I am doing more work with the expectation on the clients' part that the mix will be recallable, I am trying to keep my fingers off the faders and just let the mix run with computer automation. I'm doing better with it, but old habits die hard, and I often find myself doing last minute tweaks and end fades on the board. In that sense the mixes are committed for the moment. Also, if you are using outboard compression, which I do all the time, and the plate, which I use on every mix that has reverb on it — those are not absolutely recallable. I have learned to use a video camera for recalls. That's the fastest method have found.
I have seen you use some odd Bakelite microphones in sessions. Can you tell me about the thought behind that?
Well we have a very good mic locker at Excello. Neumann, AKG, Microtech Gefell, RCA, Sennheiser, etc. I feel so lucky to come to work in a place where I can plug a U67 into a Neve 1063 and an LA-2A. I mean, I used to make records with an SM57, a Mackie and an ADAT. The 4-track stuff I was doing as a teenager probably sounded more pleasing to the ear than that. Weird mics and weird techniques come in in an effort to try and capture a feeling or color, something that's relevant to the track. And when you push that fader up everybody goes, "Ahhh" and starts to get excited. You work through this stuff fast and if you are listening and capable, you are going to bring something significant to the project and you are going to build confidence and trust. You are going to help the band, you are going to help the studio and you are going to help your reputation. Who is going to lose? No one.
And I've seen you place a cassette recorder on a rigged up mic stand in front of the drums? What's that for?
Same deal, that's a crunch mic. Sometimes the built in compressors in those little cassette machines sound awesome. I actually keep headphones and batteries in my bag, so if I see a little cassette machine at a junk shop I can power it up, fool it into record and listen to the audio passed through the headphone output.
The vocals on The Compulsions records all have an underwater type of quality. Can you tell me how the vocals were recorded?
The tune I think you are talking about is "Betrayed". Incidentally, that is Jay Dee Dougherty from The Patti Smith Group playing drums on that track. With that track we wanted the vocal to be kinda tortured and drugged out. The singer's delivery was a tiny bit like "Sister Morphine" by the Stones. So it already had a character. We were just looking for a way to scootch it a little closer to the edge, but never ever make you overtly conscious of the effect. That one worked out kinda cool by re-amping the vocal through an old DOD phaser, an Echoplex and an Ampeg Reverbrocket. Wide sweep on the phaser, long delay on the Echoplex with almost no fundamental and the amp turned down kinda low so there was very little distortion. We mic'ed it up with a U67 and tweaked until we felt it was there and then recorded that as an effect to blend in with the clean vocal track.
It sounded like a Leslie speaker.
Right. We also did run the vocal through a Leslie 145 on a track. Maybe you were talking about that. But the other story was a little more interesting for dorks like me.
I know that you're a musician as well. What of your own material have you recorded at Excello?
I've recorded quite a bit here. No one has really heard much of it though. In the six years I have been a partner at Excello, I have put out three records of my stuff. One was recorded live at the Rodeo Bar here in NYC, one was recorded in the basement of my house in Greenpoint and one was recorded in a big old house up on Lake Champlain in the Adirondacks. I think I am here so much for "work" that when I want to be creative I feel like getting away from the telephone and the responsibility. It's kinda funny, but that is exactly counter to the reasoning that led me to buy into this business in 1997.
You're also a pretty active musician in the New York scene. How do you juggle the roles of musician and engineer?
I feel they work together in my life. I would not really feel satisfied doing just one. I love music. I love sound. I love writing and I love my family. I can help write the track, play the solo, cut the weird ambient feedback track or lap steel. I can record the track, mix it, produce it, whatever. I can solder the patch bays, nurse your 2- inch machine through a session when everybody is ready to throw their hands up and go home, pipe in with an idea that gets the session rolling again. I do this stuff every week. I also play the clubs in New York and the Northeast every week. People ask, "Hey Hugh. How's it going?" And I always say the same thing, "Nothing that a sack full of hundreds wouldn't fix." When you think about it, I support my wife and two kids doing what I love. I work my ass off almost every day and I've never had to have a "real" job.
