How long have you been doing the live recording with Ani?
About a year and a half now. I put the rig together with Andrew Gilchrist — he had the initial design. We had a rehearsal day, all the gear showed up and we put it together in a day.
How did you come to be doing this?
I guess I got into recording like a lot of people: you have a band in high school and you just start doing the home recording thing. Then I went to school for it, started at UMass, did their recording program. It was a music school, very conservatory-style classical, and I just wasn't into it, so I ended up finishing at Emerson in Boston. What I did there a lot was I worked at the radio station, at [W]ERS, and I did a lot of live broadcasts. ERS was great because it had every form of music coming in: a cappella, metal, hip-hop, klezmer, Celtic. It was a tightly formatted station, but all these different shows had bands coming in. It was similar to this [live recording] because you had time restraints — it had to be up by such-and-such a time, and there's no going back and doing another take. That was all live to 2-track though, to DAT. After that I did a lot of assisting, like at Fort Apache. I met Kristin Hersh there, who was working with Ethan Allen, who used to be at Kingsway, which is how I got connected with New Orleans. I moved there for Kingsway, and then [Daniel] Lanois [Tape Op #37] sold it, so that didn't happen. I ended up spending some time at American Sector, which merged with Boiler Room to make Piety Street. I never got involved at Piety. I ended up getting involved with the Truck Farm, which Andrew [Gilchrist] [#12] was an initial partner in. So then Righteous Babe was looking for somebody specific to do this live recording, because before that they would pass it off to the monitor engineer, or the PA tech. They might just trigger the ADATs and not even look at it.
Yeah, I remember when I talked to Ani and Andrew about that [Tape Op issue #12] they described the resulting tapes as sixteen tracks of useless line hum and hiss.
No one was even monitoring it. Yeah, so they decided it was something they wanted to pay more attention and care to, and it wasn't happening by having someone else do double duty. My job at the time was not recording related, but I was spending as much time as possible at the Truck Farm, which is how I got to know Andrew. He suggested me for the live recording, and they brought me on, and it's worked out.
Do you record all the shows?
All the US tours, and Canadian. I won't go to, for example, Australia, because we don't bring any production there. It's very expensive to go there — they bring only who they have to. We might start doing European recording. We don't often do festivals either — that's another situation where it's somebody else's show. You're playing by their rules, using their gear. I rely on our production to get my feed, and we rent the same PA every time. It has a splitter box that has isolation transformers — it goes three ways: front of house, monitors, and myself. I have a totally clean signal coming in.
So that box is just off to the side of the stage?
It's in its own roadcase, with the amp racks and the EQs. I live pretty close to it — I'm actually positioned right behind the monitor engineer. And that's another challenge of producing in a live environment — you're not in a controlled environment for listening. I'm doing everything on headphones. But the mixes I'm doing during the show are rough mixes anyways. The important thing is to get clean tracks to Pro Tools.
Maybe this would be a good time to describe the signal flow of the whole system.
You've got to keep the rig small. It's already two road racks, about five feet high. The way it works is: my split comes in. First they go to the mic pres. I've got a couple of Universal Audio 6176s. One I use on her voice, the other — I've been going back and forth — sometimes I put her guitar through it, sometimes the bass DI. I've also got an API 3124, which is a four mic pre strip. I have a mixer mounted too — the TLA M3 Tube Tracker. That thing sounds great — it's got plenty of headroom when you're doing live because if you clip, well, that's it. That's more of an issue with going to Pro Tools, but I use an Apogee AD-8000 converter, and that's nice because it has those soft limiters on it, which save the day. I've gone to sound check and forgotten to turn that on, and it's just clipping like crazy.
Does that show you when the soft limiting is kicking in?
Yeah, the 8000 does that. When you start to clip, there's a meter that shows you, zero to nine, how far into the red you're going, which is great. So, anyways, everything's going into the mic pres, and I've got some compressors, a Distressor... oh, and a couple of Joemeek boxes.
Pres or compressors?
The Meeks are mic pres/compressors, but I don't use the compressors in them — they're very noisy. So I use them on lesser-important things, like her wah pedal, which she'll use on maybe two songs, momentarily. So from the mic pres, it goes right into the AD-8000. From the 8000, it goes two different places. It comes out lightpipe into the computer, via the [Digidesign] 001, and then there's a separate card, which sends analog out to the mixer.
The Apogee has analog outs?
You have to have the separate card, but yeah. So it's eight analog outs to the mixer, and then from the mixer, I have a digital out. That's a cool thing about that TLA board, you have a digital out and you can set the sample rate, the bit depth, you can go S/PDIF out, lightpipe, or AES. I go AES out, directly into the CD recorder, an HHB. So that's the rough mix, going straight to CD. And at the same time Pro Tools is recording the separate tracks.
What are your headphones plugged into?
The mixer or the CD player, I go back and forth — or the 8000 has a headphone jack, if I need to check something there. So, in terms of the instrumentation, the lineup is: I have her voice, I have her guitar pickup, she has two amplifiers, her wah pedal, and then I only take the direct bass, because that's all I have room for, I can't take the amp.
Where do you take the bass from?
Well, he splits it. The bass goes to a DI box, he takes the thru and sends it to the amp, and then there's the direct out that goes into the [splitter] box.
So the signal has hit his front end, to deal with the high impedance pickup?
Yes, it has. And then I have two audience mics that only I get. They go into the snake and out of the splitter, but they don't go through the loom. There's a separate pair of XLRs that send me those microphones. And those audience mics play a key role, more than you might imagine, in terms of bringing the whole mix together. 'Cause I'm not using any effects, and the audience mics provide a very nice reverb.
Where do you place the audience mics?
It depends. Sometimes we're in a club that holds 800 people, and then the other day we were at Red Rocks, which holds 10,000. So I'll place them where I think they're gonna sound alright and then play with that during soundcheck. I have to be very wary of the sidefills and the PA. I don't want to put it right in front of the sidefills — it's gonna get blasted! But I do want to capture a lot of the sound of the PA, the reflection, I don't want to just be getting the audience, because I like to use it as a room reverb.
In a smaller hall are they hanging from a rig near the ceiling?
They're always on the stage. I just point them straight out. The height will vary depending on where the audience is in relation to the stage, because I don't want to get any conversation, which can happen. Especially in a club setting there's apt to be more conversation going on — people are drinking and, "Yap, yap, yap" and then you're hearing the conversation as loud as the performance, which is no good. So I'll angle them too, depending on the venue.
Do you always use the same mics?
Yeah, they're Audix SCX1s, condensers. I used to also put a mic right in front of her guitar on her vocal mic stand, which was a wild card experimental mic. Because yeah, it's pointed at her guitar, but she's moving around, the wedges are right there blasting. So it ended up being kind of an ambient mic.
The guitar sound comes from the pickup mostly?
Yes. It works out really well, and the audience mics wetten or saturate things, helping that real harsh, direct pickup sound.
And is that also hitting some kind of front end before it hits you, some kind of high impedance guitar pre?
It's a wireless system.
So the raw piezo pickup has already been buffered by the time you get the signal.
Yes. I'm running it into a mic pre, but she uses six different guitars that are drastically different. She's got three standard acoustics, a tenor (which is a four string) and two baritones. Now, because I don't have six channels to spare, before it gets to the mic pre, those six individual lines run to a balanced passive switcher. I'll get the set list and Ani puts the numbers of the guitars next to each song. That switcher then just sends a mono output into the API pre. But as a result, it all winds up going through the same strip on the mixer, so that's all the EQ'ing I have for the live mixing. So I don't mess with the EQs too much during the show.
Any other patching that happens? Do you run, say, the Distressor going into Pro Tools?
Yes, things are getting compressed to tape. I've got the 610 and 1176 linked [on the UA 6176] on her vocal, so it's getting compressed. It is important to control the levels to some extent. I'm not destroying the dynamics by any means, but her dynamics are all over the place. She'll be playing something very soft and sweet and then she'll just lay into that guitar like a baseball bat. The way she plays, she actually superglues on fake nails, and then wraps them in electric tape to reinforce it, and she'll still break them off. So otherwise, [without compression] I'd run into headroom issues, and things would start clipping like mad. But I also like the sound of those devices.
