Can you tell me about how you got started in the recording realm and also your recording timeline as far as bands and projects are concerned, and the gear you used along the way?
The first time I really remember recording stuff was basically just a 2-track, stereo, 1/4", old school kind of thing with a cheap ass mic. It was probably kind of a massive Dictaphone thing. It was Bryce's [Kanights, pioneering skate photographer for Thrasher magazine] — I think he got it from his dad. I was probably about 13 and that was when I was singing with Jerry's Kids. This was before the other semi-famous Jerry's Kids band.
Did you record it live?
Recorded totally live in the garage with one mic, you know, like how people did and probably still do. That was the first real recording I did, but then I did a bunch of cassette recordings boom box style — doing the boom box to boom box overdub thing and playing bass so I could listen back and figure stuff out. The first thing that we recorded professionally was at Tom Mallon's studio. I think he had a 1/2 inch 8-track or something. We went there as Free Beer and recorded a bunch of songs. Only a couple were released back then (the Not So Quiet On The Western Front compilation, 1981). We still had a whole bunch of tracks leftover that were just released a couple years ago on Alternative Tentacles.
You were playing bass with Free Beer, not singing?
Right — I switched to bass, but I started playing guitar first. But my brother was playing guitar, so we needed a bass player — so by default I became the bass player. I like bass better anyway. Soon the band broke up and everyone went their separate ways and I was on my own. I still wanted to make music, so that's when I got into the 4-track. At that time I was really into the early '80s, sort of gothy stuff like The Cure and Joy Division and things like that, and I was writing my own little songs and wanted to get them down on tape.
Was it a conscious decision to learn how to record yourself?
No. I never wanted to be behind a desk or a board, never wanted to engineer anything. It just came out of necessity. It all started pretty much with the 4-track when I was 19. I moved out of home, got a little loot and bought a Tascam PortaStudio One. I needed to record to get these little stupid songs out of my head. Also I just loved playing music — I'd been playing music already for over six years by then and had recorded in the past and been playing gigs, so it was just out of necessity really — but no, I still don't want to engineer or anything.
From the 4-track world you entered a whole new era in the late '80s early '90s. It was the early '90s when I really started getting back into recording. After I was sort of winding down from being a pro skater and wasn't traveling so much, I moved up to getting an ADAT from the 4-track — I used that 4-track forever though. I have boxes and boxes of tapes — it's really funny... So I moved to a single ADAT and I had the first 1604 (Mackie), and then I got into getting sampling gear — I got the first Emax keyboard, which is this giant monster that has about 25 seconds of sampling time on it. You saved the samples on floppy disk. You could truncate the samples internally in the Emax, which was cool, but I also had the Alesis MMT-8, which is an outboard MIDI sequencer. So you would create all the patterns and then link all the patterns to create a song. A lot of people out there are probably all, "The MMT-8, oh man, what a pain." With the Emax I would maximize the amount of sampling time that I had on that thing to the nth of a second. What, was that thing 12-bit? Sometimes it was probably 8-bit when I would lower the resolution to get more sampling time. So that was my set up for a long time — I had basses and guitars and different drum samples from records that I went digging in the crates for to find breaks, like everyone else in the hip-hop world does. Or did. I would sample whatever — horns, bass, keys, weird sounds, even more drums off my turntable stereo into the Emax, truncate them into loops, sequence them with the MMT-8 and record them onto the ADAT. Then I would layer guitars and whatever instrument was around. With the samples I could add texture and interesting sounds.
Is this the method you used on your first release, Loose Grooves & Bastard Blues?
Oh yeah, that was done this way. But a lot of it, maybe half of it, was 4-track. There are a couple songs on there from the 4-track that I put through this old stereo receiver that had this "Stereo Enhance" button — it would give it this fake kind of stereo image — anything I could do to make it sound better.
For your second release, A Little Bit Of Somethin', you upgraded your gear a bit?
I think there's still some 4-track stuff on there because it has a few tracks from Loose Grooves... on it. But yeah, I upgraded to having two ADATs — I got one of the XTs to go with my blackface. It was 20-bit, I think. So I got another Mackie 1604 and the Mixer Mixer package, which allowed me to connect my two 1604s together with a master fader and a whole load of patch cables. So then I had a semi-pro sort of set up. Back then the ADATs were an arm and a leg and now you can't even give them away. I still have mine.
So did you mix A Little Bit Of Somethin' from the ADATs through the Mackies to DAT?
Exactly. I was just thinking about how I did that. How the hell did I do that? No editing, no automatic fading, no nothing. I was sitting there making notes on mutes and panning and stuff. It was cool. I really dug it. It was hands-on and much more tangible than the whole sort of computer realm. It was cool to learn that way. Even though I didn't know what I was doing, I could hear what I liked and I would just tweak until I thought it was done. Now in retrospect there are things that I would definitely do differently. I would have had it mixed properly, for one. But Tardon [Feathered] at Mr. Toad's mastered it good though. He had a lot to deal with: 4-track, ADATs and me. One of the things that I learned from then was to get the hottest signal I could to go into the ADATs without distorting — to really try and get the best signal regardless of noise.
For your last album, Soulfood Taqueria, you went into the land of Pro Tools. What did you use and how did that change how you recorded and wrote? Was there a steep learning curve?
When I started recording the last record — seems like a long time ago now, I got a Digidesign [Digi] 001 to go with my old, original G4. I was using a Bellari single channel mic pre and the ART Dual MP set of pres directly into the 001. It took me a while to get the hang of the software and the ease of working... There are pros and cons to working with Pro Tools, though. I can get ideas down quickly, but I end up figuring out the structure through editing... which I loathe! With the ADATs I had to know what I was going to do prior — I had to have a plan as far as arrangement and structure goes. But Pro Tools is a better writing tool when you have limited time, but you end up with much less actual playing time, which sucks. The learning curve was quick because of my daily use with the Mac and applications like Photoshop and Illustrator, that have a lot of the same structure as far as key command logic and such. But I still don't know jack. Just enough to get my ideas down and document my thoughts.
Can you run a list of your gear that you are using to make recordings now?
I use an Apple 17" 1.25 GHz G4 laptop with a Digi 002 running Pro Tools 6.7. I use a Universal Audio 2-610 set of mic pres, an ART dual MP set of mic pres, a [Line 6] Pod Pro in the rack, SansAmp PSA1 rack-mounted (the Tchad Blake influence), TC Electronics M1 delay/reverb, Juno-106, The Emax, Mini-Korg, Mutron Phaser, Moogerfooger Low Pass, a bunch of old Alesis 'verbs and multi effects, a PreSonus preset compressor box, a ton of stomp boxes... Mainly everything goes through the Universal Audio 2-610 mic pre, straight from that directly into a Digi 002. The 610 pres are so much better than the Digidesign pres. Once in a while I'll use the Bass POD and then go through the 610, so I can try to get and experiment with different tones. Or I have a Boss ME 50 multi-effects foot pedal that I'll use with my guitar through the 610 again. I have the Pod Pro rack box going S/PDIF directly into the 002 to get a nice, stereo digital connection for guitar too.
Mostly you keep things simple — you use the one signal path and go with that.
Yeah, I like to keep it simple. Just get good sounds in and let it be polished when it's mixed.
You didn't go to school, you didn't read books, you didn't intern at a studio. You just kind of plugged in cables until you got the sound you wanted. So would you say that it's not as hard as people think to make a record?
Nowadays, it's cake. Obviously with the stuff you can get now super cheap and easy, you can make a record with your laptop and never even plug in a microphone or play or record a real instrument. It's out of hand. I think that the actual recording is not as big a deal as the music itself is, right? You hear songs on the radio, recorded probably by the best engineers in the best studios with the best gear, and they suck. It just doesn't matter if the song cost a million dollars to record if it sucks. It comes down to the music itself, always.
How important are "proper" sounds and "proper" recording techniques to you when you're making a record?
Obviously it's really important to get any sound you are recording to sound the best it can be — even if it's a fucked up sound. The need for something to sound really good is becoming more important to me as I gain experience. There are a couple different stages of it though. For me now it's the mixing stage. I leave it to someone else, like you. [I mixed Tommy's last four releases]. Someone who knows what they are doing and someone who has the gear. A separate set of ears really helps. It makes much more sense. You put all that time and effort into making your record — you should at least get a decent sounding piece of crap at the end. Also my approach is, "I'm one of those dudes who goes straight to tape, hard drive, whatever, with effects." Nothing is so thought through that I'll wait until the mix to add verbs or delays or whatever. I need to hear what it's going to sound like in order to get into the music — so it pulls me in. I use a lot of outboard gear and stomp boxes at the front end going in. I'll chain five boxes together to get the sound to be something different or unique, at least to me. For me sound has to have texture. It has to be tangible, like you can almost touch it. So a lot of the times it's difficult for me. I'm sitting there tweaking knobs trying to get these sounds. This is one of the reasons I don't want to engineer. I want to be able to tweak on the sounds and not worry about getting the proper level or the proper mic placement to capture the sound that I've been spacing out trying to get. When I have to stop and think about the technical side of recording it, I lose the moment and the inspiration for the sound. I like to work really fast.
If you were going to sit down and record a song today, how would you approach the session? What is the order of things you do?
The very first thing I do is think. I think about what it is that I want to do. I think about the song, the style of the song that has been going through my head. I wake up at six in the morning and lie there in bed and think about it. How am I going to approach it? Am I going to use a break beat or am I going to start with the drum machine, and how am I going to tweak the sound? What am I going to put it through to get the sound I want? I usually start with drums. Sometimes I'll have a rhythm guitar idea or a bass idea and I need to find a beat for it. But a lot of times, I'll start with drums just to inspire. I'll listen and go, "Cool, I can play to this." I'll just start playing bass along. Three fourths of what I do is improvised on the spot. I'll do a couple takes and use the best take or edit the best parts from them and then I'll usually go to a rhythm guitar or a keyboard pad. Then probably from there to some sort of melodic line. After I've got the foundation of the song and a good groove with maybe a melody line, I'll start thinking about putting texture in there, like samples or a synth patch. I'll comb through records to find something extra. No one would ever know where the sound came from because I take such small pieces and tweak them enough just for textural effect — anything, a horn, percussion, voices, whatever that I can bury in there to give the song more sonic depth. When I have everything in there I start trying to subtract and omit stuff. I've been learning this slowly. It's difficult to know what to leave out. You can add all day — 30 tracks later you're like, "No." Get your idea first and solidify it to some degree where you have the main riff and the main rhythm and melody pretty much set. Then from there keep listening and figuring out what parts are essential and strip out whatever is just filling space. I do a rough mix and take a disk in the car and listen and make notes. I use a little digital Dictaphone and record my impressions and ideas as I'm listening. I look for holes where there needs to be something filling a higher frequency or I notice that everything is midrange or that the song needs a breakdown or a shorter ending, or a bridge needs to be cut.
So you do a lot of recording and then arrange after the fact.
A lot of it is. Just so the ideas are there. It's a time issue. I don't have the time to write a song out then arrange it and then record it. I just start playing, which is fun and inspiring, but I do hate going back and having to edit everything.
You've had more live drums on recent recordings.
