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?
