The Posies | TapeOp

For eighteen years, numerous albums, EPs, tribute tracks and even a four-CD box set of rarities, Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow have shared a passion for creating recordings, as songwriters, producer/engineers and "side-men" since their high school friendship in Bellingham, WA. The Posies may (or may not) be known for their rock/pop/vocal harmony-driven songs and sound, but a deeper look finds these men very much engrossed in the process of making sounds happen on the recordings they have been a part of. I spoke with Jon and Ken and had them regale me with some stories from these years, as well as some of their "trade secrets".

How did your first album come about?

Jon Auer: We made Failure in my house that I lived in while I was in high school — my father's house. My father was a musician and into recording, and I was very fortunate that he had me as a child. He dropped a lot of coin at one point, buying [at that time] some serious home recording equipment. I think it was a Tapco C-12 board, and a Tascam 80-8 with the dbx cards. He also had a friend who was somewhat of a high-end dealer, who dealt gear out of his house. This was all pre-eBay and the whole Internet thing, so you'd have to find people who had the connections to actually physically acquire this stuff.

Kind of like a drug dealer.

JA: Exactly. So, I got hooked on [recording gear] really, really young. I was twelve or thirteen when I had an 8-track studio in my house. Then meeting Ken, he and I [would] work on all sorts of things together, basically just hang out in the studio and do our thing. Eventually, we came around to the concept of doing The Posies from just being really into pop songs and wanting to make a real pop record. We just said, "Fuck it. We're going to do it ourselves." I play drums well enough and we both could play bass and guitar, so Ken and I set about making the record. We did it in a very odd way — I actually did the drums to a click track, but there were no instruments playing. I don't know why we didn't lay down a scratch track of a guitar or vocal or anything, but I literally played all of the drum parts singing the songs and the arrangements in my head. Ken would [also] be singing along in the control room and he'd hit the talkback and say, "Okay, I think the bridge is coming here." It was a really minimal set-up. The Tapco C-12 is a great, cool sounding console, honestly. The preamps maybe were noisy, but they actually sounded pretty good. Beyond that, I actually had one of the first sidecars they made that was a companion to the C-12. It was an eight-channel sidecar that you connected with this cable in the back. That became the playback side. I'd use the rest for effects and for preamps for recording. I had some small JBL speakers — I can't remember what exactly. I had a Lexicon PCM 42, a [Yamaha] Rev 7. We mostly used one compressor, which was an old Symetrix — I think a 150 or a CL-150 — a fast RMS compressor. That was really the sound of the heavily compressed vocals on that record. I also had a pair of Electro-Voice — I think they were 4500s. They were the mono spring reverbs with the long and short spring in them. That's really the sound of that record.

Awesome.

JA: The other thing about that record is that we needed more than eight tracks. So, we did the thing of mixing the instruments down to two tracks. But the way I did it, I had a cassette deck that had dbx on it — a Pioneer cassette deck. Since we needed eight tracks and we didn't have room to leave two tracks open, I actually mixed all the instruments down to this cassette deck, put [that sub-mix] back on the 8- track, and then we did six tracks of vocals for songs, then mixed it back to that cassette deck again, and that's what the CD is made from.

Oh my god.

JA: It's made from a cassette master. There were no DAT machines. We had a 2-track Revox, but it was broken. The mixing of that record was what I thought would be the most daunting task, although since I had already done sub-mixes of all the instruments, I didn't have many options left as far as that. One night I just said, "Screw it" and I stayed up from midnight until six in the morning and mixed the whole record in six hours — and that was that. I handed it to Ken and I said, "Hey, I just kind of got inspired to go ahead and do this." I think I mixed it on headphones. Then we made cassettes from that cassette and sold about eight hundred of them out of our backpacks in Bellingham and Seattle, where Ken was going to college before I moved down there. Without getting too maudlin or cliché, I really gotta put a shout out in there to my dad, because I don't think The Posies would have been born at all. Or they might have been born, but they wouldn't have had what essentially became a great demo tape for us — that became a record — that became what got us our deal with Geffen... so thanks Dad!

For Dear 23, I seem to remember Jon telling me years ago that you all had to put together the studio, basically. The studio had some gear, but you had to bring more gear in or something like that.

Ken Stringfellow: We worked with an existing studio, which at the time was called Crow Recording. It's now the same space, but not the same gear — called Jupiter Studios. We liked the space, but John Leckie said basically, "I'm gonna rent every piece of gear that I'm gonna use, and I'm not going to use anything that's here except the tape machine." And all of a sudden there was an API board brought in.

JA: Unfortunately we realized once we got it that there were no direct outputs from the preamps, post-EQ. You could only go out from the preamps and that kind of defeated the whole purpose of getting the API. We had to have a tech friend of ours go in and modify this API at great expense, and it took a lot of time.

KS: We wanted to stay in Seattle. It was a nice, comfortable environment, and that was the appeal for us. Leckie was willing to stay in Seattle — it didn't matter to him. He was away from home no matter what. When we had enough of a budget to basically bring at least half of a studio's worth of gear up from L.A., then he was happy.

What did you take away from working with John Leckie?

JA: The thing I got most from John Leckie was really his engineering. He was an amazing engineer. He was very fast and very intuitive, but also very thorough. As a producer, he was very into doing what we wanted to do and was very collaborative. It wasn't a case of where he came in and radically re-worked arrangements. I think he comes from more of a sound perspective and a vibe thing.

Then after Dear 23 came what had the working title of Eclipse — later known as Frosting on the Beater.

KS: Right, we did some sessions at Robert Lang Studios, which at the time had a fantastic API board, one of my favorite consoles that I've ever worked on. Craig Montgomery was recording it. He did a good job actually, and I'm sure Jon was helping, me probably not so much. I didn't get into really engineering on records much until about 1995. Craig I think did the bulk of it and I think he did a good job. We just weren't quite ready yet. We still needed to edit through our material, write a little bit more. We actually got some good things out of it, but we didn't end up using any of it.

For Frosting On The Beater you were working in several different studios...

KS: Only two different studios. We worked at what was then called Ironwood Studios, now Avast 2. At that time Ironwood had a Neve VR, and it's a very decent room, actually a very cool studio. It wasn't as well known as perhaps some studios in town, but I really enjoyed working there. We did half of the record there and half of it at Sear Sound in NY.

JA: We kind of blew our chance of being self-producers — the label was not into the idea of us producing ourselves. They said, "Well, it didn't work out" and we were like, "You're right, let's find a producer." We went through a list and we were really into this fellow, Don Fleming. I believe [Teenage Fanclub's] Bandwagonesque is the reason we were into him and we heard that he was a lot of fun. We thought, "Well geez, right now we could use a lot of fun." We were getting very serious and precious.

KS: Don kept things light in a way. He tried to keep our ambitions in a place where the music wouldn't come out overdone. He felt we should streamline our sound quite a bit, and figured it would make a lot more sense to make a record that was not quite so orchestrated [as Dear 23 was]. I totally agree with that kind of thinking, and I think the results are very good. He was good to work with from the psychology point of view. He was never in a bad mood. He tried to keep us from getting bogged down in making such a big deal or being intimidated by the scope of making a $250,000 record. Don was helpful in transporting us from point A to point B to completion. We did those two recording sessions. For mixing, we started to work at the smaller room at the Ocean Way Annex in L.A. We worked with John Hanlon, who to not slander him — we'll say that he was having some "extreme lifestyle changes." I think his work was good for the first couple days, and the two mixes that are on the record are excellent. Then after that he started having a bit of a meltdown, personal crisis, and was not happening. So we pretty much fired him. After all of that, we were left with a couple of things that weren't recorded or produced right or they weren't ready, a couple of songs that had potential, but they weren't quite there and then some stuff that's really great. Then in the fall [of '92], we went back and worked with Don again in Seattle at Ironwood, and finished the recording in five days. Then, we went to L.A. and worked with Dave Bianco to mix the remaining ten songs and he did an excellent job. We mixed all that at Larrabee West, which was on Santa Monica Blvd. It's not there anymore.

JA: One other thing — we tried recording a band version of "Coming Right Along" for that record and we ended up going back and using a 4-track demo that I did. We actually got to New York and tried to do it and Don was finally like, "You know, I don't think it's going to be better than the demo of this, so we have to get your 4-track out here." Luckily, it was one of the few tapes in my 4-track library that I had labeled so someone could find it. We brought it to Sear and we put it on the multitrack, took off the harmony I did and added Ken's harmony and I think a little organ note. Then, Dave Bianco mixed.

Amazing Disgrace to me seems like a sort of hodgepodge of stuff that was kind of culled together.

KS: We basically worked on this record all through the year of 1995. We did the bulk of the work at Bob Lang's place. It's a spacious control room with the effects island behind it, except now it's an SSL room. It has this large recording room with this fantastically high ceiling, and if you know how to rein that thing in, it's quite a boon for recording drums. It basically takes all the work out of recording drums for you, everything just sounds massive right up from the get go.

Well sure, absolutely. That's gotta help that you're catching a vibe off of the sound that you're then gonna add to...

KS: And it can get even bigger... between the control room and the main recording room, there's an intervening room that's basically like a concrete tube that's 20 feet high — so it's like an echo chamber, more or less. You can leave the door open [to that room] and have mics sort of near it, or you can have mics in it if you want like a six second reverb. It's pretty crazy. Then the main room itself is 20 feet high. It's got stone on one side. Nick Launay had pretty much cut his teeth at The Townhouse in London, the place where XTC did the Black Sea album, which he was an engineer on. That place has a crazy stone drum room that, if you do it right, it's really a big — aggressive in a very contemporary sound for 1980.

Like Black Sea!

KS: The thing is, he [Nick] knew how to deal with that room using all the dynamics of an SSL. That was the board that he worked on. So he said [to Bob Lang], "Wow what a great room, but what's this thing?" looking at the API. [We said] "Well that's a great sounding desk, you should really..." He's like, "There's no way I'm working on that. I work on SSL. That's what I know. That's what I like. I'm sorry, that's a deal breaker for me." We said, "You could get this gig, which is a good gig (our third record for a major label, the budget was quite large)...we're working here [at Bob Lang's], and that's a deal breaker for us"...and we won. So, he brought himself to work on "this piece of shit American thing", and guess what? Guess what Nick Launay now only works on?

API.

KS: Yeah, you got it! He learned to love the thing... and I'm telling you this particular API was really something special. I've still worked at the studio a number of times and it's still a great studio, but I kind of can't forgive him [Bob Lang]. He's like, "You've still got it for input modules." But, I don't know man — I miss that thing. A lot of the stuff we recorded was live — two guitars, bass and drums, and a lot of that was kept. Jon and I were out in the big room with a baffle between us. Then in some cases we were standing out in the big room and our amps were in the iso booths, and the drums were out with us. In a couple of significant cases they put Brian Young [the drummer] in the iso booth. We got pretty far along and we started mixing what we had. We went to Bad Animals, which at the time had an SSL room and then two API rooms. Nick was mixing on [an API] now and couldn't be happier. He did a lot of great mixes and then he sort of hit a wall. He just suddenly got stuck on one mix, and on the third day of mixing [this] one song and we were like, "Whoa buddy. Hey, you need to go home now." So we said, "Thanks for all your great work." He got us really close and did a great job. I think the recordings that he did are really interesting. There are a lot of overdubs, but there's a kind of ferociousness to everything that I really like. Some of the mixes he did are fantastic. I think "Song #1" is such a great mix. It's big and nice sounding, but still it's all kind of tough.

Did he just get tired?

KS: He lost focus and was homesick and just burnt out. We worked him pretty hard and he was just done. It was like two and a half months — that's a long time to do one thing. Then we called in Keith Cleversley. He came and he mixed "Throwaway" at Bad Animals. Then oddly enough, he had some issues with the drum sounds, which I don't remember at the time why, but he did with "Please Return It". We went to Avast, [another] API room, Keith set 'em up and Brian played to the existing tracks and re-cut the drums to like three of the songs. What's amazing is, and this definitely speaks to how good of a musician Brian Young is, he did "Please Return It" in one take.

Awesome!

KS: I don't think this stuff was recorded to clicks or anything like that either. Brian just has a really good sense of playing along with the song. I really don't know what the issue was, because we didn't do that for all the songs, and the songs that we didn't re-cut the drums on — I think they sound cool. I think then we de-camped to Stepping Stone and a couple more things got mixed, and then Keith Cleversley ran out of time. He was already booked to do something else. Then over the course of the summer of '95, I think Jon Auer mixed "Grant Hart" on his own at Bad Animals, and I think he and Adam Kasper mixed "Everybody's A Fucking Liar". I'd have to look on the credits to get more details than that.

Well, there's Steve Fisk and John Goodmanson.

KS: That's yet to come. Then towards the end of the year the label was like, "Any chance of squeezing one more, kind of single-y song out of you guys?" I had the song "Ontario", so we hooked up with Steve Fisk and went back to Bob Lang's — John Goodmanson engineered — and we cut that song. Then they mixed the song "Broken Record", which turned out really great. Finally, when they [the label] were kind of narrowing it down they said, "We'd like to have someone who's a real mixer mixer mix the two potential singles" ("Please Return It" and "Ontario"), which didn't get mixed in that (original) session anyway. So Brett Eliason, who was just kind of coming into his mixing career, happily took the gig. Right at the beginning of 1996 at Bad Animals he mixed "Ontario" and "Please Return It" and did again a really great job. So, it was quite an epic task, but almost about 80% of that was done on API — then there are a couple of SSL mixes.

JA: As far as the actual technical aspects of making that record, I think that might be our most accomplished. We really just went for it with Nick. This guy had so many cool tricks up his sleeve from working with really interesting acts over the years. It was the first time we had someone who wanted to use a distorted drum mic to mix in with the kit. He called it the "bollocks mic". He said, "Give me the crappiest equalizer you can find or one that you don't mind being destroyed in case it blows up from me abusing it." He would distort this mic with the preamp and equalizer and lo and behold, I realized that's how a lot of my favorite drum sounds on records were attained, was adding all that distortion. Obviously it's a fairly common thing [now], but back then I don't think it was as common or well known. We'd do all sorts of delay tricks — like instead of having to use a computer to time a delay, we'd actually tune it with an analog delay and then we'd punch in as we'd go along — totally old school. We had a couple of Mellotron parts that were really hyper fast and we'd just slow the tape down and learn the part incredibly slow, half speed, and painstakingly record it... all sorts of fun stuff. Where Frosting On The Beater was no frills, this was like the "Let's throw in the kitchen sink" kind of approach, and I think it really worked on some of the stuff.

Moving on to Success — with the major label money gone, you're back in Egg Studios and there's this kind of a paring down and getting back to the DIY kind of thing.

JA: Yeah, absolutely. It was a return to the bare bones.

But then you have that eight years of [major label] experience, so how does that change the [DIY] mindset?

JA: It gave us a lot more tricks to play with and incorporate. When we did go back and do Success at Egg, instead of just using the 16-track there, we slaved up a DA-88 and turned it into a 23-track. We started using things like the "bollocks mic" trick, albeit we'd do it with a cheap cassette deck, like a Sony mono thing on the floor underneath the drums with a towel or something over it to kill the high end. We made some fairly advanced recordings for basement recordings. One of them off that record, "Start a Life", I just think is a bizarre — it's kind of zany, actually. It's kind of a kooky recording with all of the chintzy keyboards and whatnot, but it certainly does not sound like it was recorded in the place that it was, which I think is kind of cool. It is a real testament to what you can do with very minimal tools.

When you guys came back together again for Every Kind Of Light, you recorded at Soundhouse Recording. What's the deal with that place? What do you like about Soundhouse?

JA: Soundhouse is a great little studio. Again, it's really a no frills type place. It's got plenty of good gear. It's got a great Trident console. It has an older version of Pro Tools; I think a Mix Plus system. They have enough really good mics and really good compressors, and Ken has some outboard preamps of his there.

KS: I have a [set of] Quad Eight mic pres and EQs I bought from Elliott Smith, through Larry Crane, oddly enough. JA: A friend of mine lets me use a pair of old Nakamichi microphones that were from an old, old Nakamichi cassette deck and they're just bizarre microphones, but they sound really cool for some things.

They actually came out of a deck?

JA: No. They look like a KM-184 or something like it. They're black — of course they're black. They're Nakamichis. They are just these really bizarre, odd little condensers. I can't think of the model names right now.

What would you use those on?

JA: Just aim them at weird things... aim them at an acoustic guitar, or sometimes use them to capture things off of reflective surfaces, like, aim an amp at a wall or a piece of glass and mic the glass with the Nakamichi. Just little shit like that.

KS:I have a cool [mic] that I do a lot of my vocals through that I got when I was doing a session at Ardent Studios some years ago. The engineer there — I can't remember his name and he doesn't work at Ardent anymore — was building mics.

Wow, so this is a one-of-a-kind, hand- built kind of thing?

KS: It's a some-of-a-kind and he did build a few. He sort of based it on a C-12, but it doesn't look like one. But that's the capsule, essentially. It's pretty happening.

So, basically that's what you record your vocals through most of the time, when you can?

KS: Most of the time. It has a kind of presence in the high-end, where it just pokes out a little bit up top. For some reason, it's like the world's best microphone for recording background vocals. They always fit in perfectly if recorded through that mic. Also for my lead vocals, I think it sounds very good. In fact, the lead vocal that I'm least happy with [on Every Kind of Light] was not done through that mic, and I know it's not just psychological. It's like, "It just sounds not as exciting." We would do a mic shoot-out for every vocal track, where I'd sing into like four different mics and we'd pull them up with the tracks and see what fit in best, and somehow I got fooled on that one.

Is that a typical kind of thing that you would do, or is that something you just learned to do recently — doing a mic shoot-out like that?

KS: I did it on my solo record [Soft Commands], or at least the sessions I did in Seattle and this record. I had plenty of good [mics] to choose from, and they're all a little bit different. I have a couple of those Microtech Gefell mics, the UM900 and the UMT800. I worked with the same engineer, Kip Beelman, on all the Seattle portion of my [solo] record, back-to-back with The Posies record. Kip's great! He's quick enough and organized enough that doing something like that was super easy.

JA: We also had a wonderful old Master Room spring reverb that Ken had bought off an old friend of his, for I think a hundred dollars. Boy, that was the best buy because it got used on everything. Some people call it the poor man's plate [reverb], but depending on what spring you have, I think I like it as much sometimes.

KS: I listened to Every Kind of Light the other day and for my tastes, I think sonically, it's a very good sounding record. I think we did a really good job, especially [since] our budget was medium. It wasn't miniscule and it wasn't like Geffen size, and I think we managed that very well.

What were some of those things that you were doing outside [of The Posies]? Are there any stories from other projects that you'd been working on that poke out at you?

JA: After Dear 23 and before Frosting On The Beater, I got some cool production gigs out of Sub Pop. The first record I did as far as a full 24-track production was this band from Portland called Pond. It actually did pretty well for Sub Pop and got reviewed in Rolling Stone. It got me some good work and I had a lot of fun doing it. On the strength of Frosting On The Beater, for some reason I got a call from this band from Australia called You Am I, to come to New York and mix a record for them at Sear Sound. Lee Ranaldo [of Sonic Youth] was the producer on that, and that record actually did really well. It was a number one record in Australia and I got a lot of good press off that as far as people just liking the sound of it.

When working with Big Star, or Ken your work with R. E. M., is it more sort of "stand away and let it happen"?

KS: I don't have any engineering input on the R.E.M. records. I could see what they were doing in the R.E.M. sessions with Pat McCarthy producing and Jamie Candiloro engineering. I guess I took away a lot from the environment of how R.E.M. made Reveal, in 2000. The working method of the band totally changed my life. We had some songs beforehand, but they changed a lot over the course of the recording. They also wrote songs in the studio — they kind of went every direction at once — and it made sense and it wasn't chaos. They just let stuff happen and were real spontaneous and innovative about things, and then it all got cobbled into a record that sounds like a great record. I think we [Posies] were totally over- prepared for each record that we did, demo-wise, pre- production — really worrying that it really had to be right before we got it into the studio, and made it right-er. R.E.M.'s method totally debunked that. They did some pre-production, but some of that applied and a lot of it didn't. They let it go wherever it was gonna go, and they had a good team that was able to keep it going in a direction.

JA: [With] Big Star, the main involvement there would be in the writing and the performing. That was such a fast record [In Space]. It was made so fast that there wasn't as much time to work on the sound with everybody as I would have liked. In fact, there was no time for Ken and I to be around for the mixing either, which we were really sad about. The guy who produced the record with us, Jeff Powell, was sad that we weren't going to be there either because we got along with him really well. We were really a strong creative force in the studio. We know the technical stuff probably better than, in some instances, Jody Stephens and Alex Chilton. Alex has certain things that he knows about and cares about, but he's more about the feel and the vibe and really could not be bothered by the technical details. That being said, he contributes by trying to skew things, make things a little more fucked up. At one point he had this really cheap Electro-Voice mic — some omni-directional thing from the '50s or '60s — and insisted that Jeff take down the nice condenser mic that he was using to record his voice with. Alex wouldn't even let Jeff use an SM7, but wanted to go for the full on brilliant crap sound of this microphone. It actually ended up being perfect for the job.

Is there any one particular element that you look for in a studio when choosing a place to work, whether it be gear, the room, the people — whatever?

KS: Well for me personally, the main component is human. The engineer has to be musical. The musicality seems to be a real benefit. When I did the last solo record of mine [Soft Commands], I worked at this place in Stockholm. It was a rehearsal room with a control room built in. It had a tiny Trident broadcast board, recording on Logic [and] some mics of dubious origin. The guy I worked with, Jorgen Wall, had never done a record before. He just recorded his own stuff and a couple of his friends. He's a very good drummer and plays on a lot of people's stuff over there. I just kinda liked him. Without having really any previous engineering experience that would qualify him to put your life in his hands, he did a great job and showed the patience and clarity that I think it takes to sort through performances. That organizational part is HUGE — just being able to see where the song is at when you have a stack of vocal takes. To have that perspective kind of overrides the limitations of his gear, [which] were easy to see.

Jon, you've been working on solo material as well....

JA:WhenIdomyownthing,Itendtobethekindofguy that locks myself in a room and tries to do everything himself and tries to leave as many people out of the experience as possible — you know, a very megalomaniac kind of style — Songs From The Year of Our Demise I've been working on for five years. It's a much mellower, kind of moody, cinematic affair than The Posies.

Was it all recorded at one time in one place?

JA: No, it was cobbled together, but it was worked on long enough to make sure that it sounded like one thing. It was started at a house and parts of it were recorded at a studio — some drums were — but most was recorded in a really nice rehearsal space that I have, on Digital Performer with one or two preamps, a few microphones, a few choice pieces of outboard gear. I have an old Ibanez [AD-]202 analog delay, which is just unbelievable. I tend to spend a lot of time with that and a spring reverb I have — one of the little Electro-Voices and a Fostex, believe it or not. Also, part of making that record was I had to learn how to use a hard disc recorder for the first time. I had never really gotten into Pro Tools or Digital Performer before on my own. I'd never done the editing and there's definitely a learning curve there. Of course once you get into it, you start to get faster at it as you go along, and it kind of multiplies exponentially. It was really like learning how to record again.

Jon, any interesting stories about the wacky guitar sounds that you've come up with over the years?

JA: It's less of an interesting story and more of a tale of a secret weapon. I have one amp that I've used since Frosting On The Beater almost exclusively with my stuff and with The Posies. It's just the greatest guitar amp ever, as far as I'm concerned. It's a little mid-80s Fender Super Champ. It's actually got pull knobs on it and was designed, I believe, by somebody that worked for Mesa Boogie. It's not your old standard Champ with the one volume. It has reverb, it has a distortion channel, it has mid pull pots and extra gain just like a Mesa Boogie would. I think it's a twenty-watt or fifteen-watt amplifier with a ten-inch speaker. I always get comments on "Coming Right Along", and it's literally that amplifier on almost to the point of inaudibility, with the microphone just jammed up against the speaker and a preamp up as loud as it would go. [That song] was recorded at 4 am in a house with everybody asleep — so I didn't wake anybody up, but it sounds huge. It has the secret weapon also when it comes to guitar amps, which I think is spring reverb. I just can't get enough spring reverb. It is such an integral part of what I like as far as guitar sounds. In fact, my spring tends to distort when I get a certain amount of it on there, and that's half the beautiful sound of it.

Do you have a favorite piece of gear right now?

JA: There are two that I love. One of them is a dbx 160 — the old black face with the VU meters with the little needle going back and forth. The box set that The Posies did has a lot of my 4-track demos on there. I would use that dbx 160 on everything, and it's just the greatest old school compressor. You can put really shrill things into it and come out with a lot of warmth. As far as modern stuff, I have (graciously on loan from my buddy Ken) an Avalon 737, which I think is a fantastic high-end tube preamp. I have to be honest — I was very suspect of it at first because I thought it would be too clean and totally colorless and I'm not really into things that are too clean and totally colorless. This one just sounds great. It doesn't sound transparent — it's not super colored — it just sounds good, especially when you combine it with certain things. One of them, which was a real surprise to me and I've used on almost every vocal for anything is — Pacific Pro Audio in Seattle has made these tube microphones called the PPA [LD-2ube]. It's a three hundred dollar tube microphone made in China. They give you an option to put in an Electro-Harmonix tube instead of the Chinese tube that [normally] comes with it. I can't find a better mic to record my voice at all. I've tried a TLM107 next to it, I've tried SM7 and I always come back to this cheap tube mic. It just sounds great [and] just seems to suit my voice. It makes it sound like I am right there, right in front of you basically, and I can't say that about every microphone. It's awesome.

KS: My favorite piece of gear in general is probably my Master Room spring reverb. I use it on everything. I'm also a big fan of the Lexicon 200. I mean, all the dynamic gear and stuff, that's pretty well documented. As far as something that I seek out — when a studio has a Lexicon 200 I get very excited, and I'll use that on everything, and I use the Master Room on nearly everything. Those are kind of essential parts of my life.