This was the first multitrack record you've done in a while.
Yeah, I've gotten really into recording live to 2-track. I call it the "Tube-o-Sonic Insta-Mirror Process", since "live to 2-track" sounds boring. I take my quarter-inch mix deck, which is a beautiful old Ampex 351, and record straight to that, with everyone playing at once.
Tell me more about the 351. What was it used for, originally?
The 351 was kind of the standard professional tape deck in the late fifties, early sixties. It's just a regular tube machine that runs at fifteen ips. There were other brands, but this one was the average — the Ford of tape machines. When I bought mine I just wanted an analog mix deck, since I do all my multitracking on digital — I'd been using the original ADATs, and now I've upgraded to the HD24 — and I was just looking for something colorful to make up for the fact that my tracking medium was so plain and bland. And the 351, it's alive. Every time you listen to it, it sounds slightly different, and it gives you these beautiful degrees of saturation and distortion. By taking the same exact mix and printing it slightly louder, you can give it a whole different character.
So then you decided to bypass the digital gear completely?
Well, I wanted to try to make an entirely analog recording, but I couldn't do a multitrack recording because I didn't have the equipment. So I started thinking about my favorite recordings from the era when people couldn't multitrack. I had always been fascinated with the processes used in the mid- and late-fifties especially, like at Bradley's in Nashville — Patsy Cline — or the classic jazz recordings where you could hear the sound of the room, and that kind of electrical energy that people have when they're actually standing around playing and listening together. The thing about live to 2-track that's most special to me is that my job, when I'm mixing something like that, takes place in the exact same period of time in which the musicians are playing. So it freezes that moment as an absolutely coherent piece.
I was surprised, when I first saw you do it, that it's not like you just set everything up, press record and wait for the song to end. You're riding faders, you're adjusting effects...
It's exactly like mixing multitrack, except that whereas with multitrack you can second-guess yourself, in live to 2-track you just have to just do it, you have to just trust your ears in that moment. You do a certain amount of setting up, creating this sonic environment that you're going to be putting onto tape, and then you take things again and again. It's the way they used to do it in the olden days.
It must have taken a ton of preproduction, especially with the setups where there'd be a live combo, an orchestra, and a vocalist.
It was very complicated. They were using fewer microphones and fewer preamps, but the preparation all went into the arrangement, and the placement of the few microphones, and of course, having the musicians that were best suited for the job. I think that the reason I'm charmed by the fifties, especially, is that it was an era when musicianship and hi-fi tube technology were coming together very nicely. Multitracking wasn't standard yet, and musicians were still depending on listening to each other.
Like in those beautiful early George Jones records you played me.
Exactly. You can tell those are live vocals, you can hear that things aren't absolutely controlled, and you get a palpable sense of the depth of the music. When I'm recording to 2-track, I'm trying to transport everyone back to that era.
That's one of the things that I really like about your recordings. Even when you're multitracking, your records don't sound at all modern to me — in fact, they sound like a blast from the past, or some weird alternate past that never was.
My obsession with tape delays is probably a big part of that. Like the Echoplex — it warbles, and it distorts, and you have to be really careful with it because if you gain it up too much it'll do terrible things to the sibilance in a vocal. But I adore it, because working in digital, tape delays are a great way to put that gooey kind of analog life back in. You don't have to use a slap-back, Elvis kind of sound. In fact, I've hardly used any digital effects for years now — every effect I use I just hand-create with tape delays and spring reverbs. Just by adjusting how close or far away you put the echo or how much it's regenerating, or what the tone of the echo is, or how much you're saturating it or not, there are so many flavors... it's just endless. A trick I use a lot is to take an element and run it through the Echoplex, then print it directly back onto the HD24, and replace the original track with this analog, distorted sound.
So you're not even using it as a delay?
Yeah, I'm just using it for the character. But when I'm tracking to the digital system, I try to track with a little extra goo in there anyway. I've got a bunch of old tube preamps, which distort very smoothly and gradually, and there are levels of saturation that, to the average listener, don't sound like distortion necessarily. They just give a kind of a warmth to vocals, so that even when someone's singing quieter, somehow the bass of it comes forward in a way that's very intimate, that same kind of strange hyperintimacy you might have heard in recordings of Bobby Vinton or Johnny Mathis, things like that.
Do you think the preamp matters more than the microphone?
