About seven years ago, you were in L.A. and a successful producer/engineer. You started out engineering, moved into production. You did Tool's early records and things that were beginning to get some notice. How did you end up in Weed?
I think I was planning on moving, and I had already bought a Jeep because I was looking at moving to Lake Tahoe. Then on a fluke, my father introduced me to a guy, Greg Shivy, who lived in Mt. Shasta and was a railroader. We corresponded by letters and then finally, I told him, "I'm selling my house and I'm moving up." We got married and I thought I was just going to retire, but it was right when System of a Down hit — the first record — and the Powerman 5000 record hit also and the phones started ringing a lot and they were really good record opportunities. I had to make the choice of continuing to work in L.A. and for a while and I did. For nine months I stayed in L.A.
While you were married?
Yeah, newlyweds. He was up here working too. Yeah, so nine months of that and it was obvious that we had to set up something here in the Weed area. I had all the equipment at Sound City in L.A. and I had wanted to set up a studio of my own, anyway. We looked at building a studio at our place because we have a fifty- acre ranch up here, but then all of a sudden this theater became available and it is just an awesome recording space. Weed is kind of a dead, dumpy little town in the middle of nowhere but the vibe is great. The people here are really open to unusual people with colored hair and tattoos. It doesn't freak them out.
Why do you think that is the case?
There is another town up the road from Weed called Mt. Shasta City that has all the really expensive homes and some celebrities live there and they're real stuffy, so Weed tries to compete with that in a way and they're like, "We're not going to be stuffy and we're going to let the creative people come in here and we want the artists to be here." They're really supportive, actually.
People have been really nice in Mt. Shasta and Weed. People will stop and say, "Hi. How are you doin'?"
Isn't that weird? When I moved up here, I was driving my Jeep and someone cut me off and I honked my horn and I was all pissed off. I was going to chase them and then I realized, "Oh geez. I'm going to have to see this woman who cut me off every day because it's such a small community." Road rage completely ended at that point. The whole L.A. thing — I had to get rid of it. Strangers wave at you when you drive by and I'm like, "Who are they? I've never met these people before." They're just friendly. I really love it. Once I moved up here I wondered why I didn't do it so much sooner.
Do you think you were at the perfect point in your career where you could make that jump?
I think so. I was lucky enough to have had some success.
Even if you built a barn studio out on the ranch, you would still get enough projects to justify setting that up, I would imagine.
Yeah, that is where I've lucked out, and this is working because of that. It's still working. It's pretty surprising. It's actually grown quite a bit.
How many rooms are there now?
There are four studio rooms and a brand new rehearsal room. The rehearsal room is in a big, old building that we recently acquired which used to be a church. It will eventually be a second, big tracking room, much like the theater. Right now there are four working studios. There's the Neve in Studio A, which is the original console we had installed in the theater, and that's an 8038. Then we have a brand new console installed up here in Studio B in the balcony — the SSL 9080 J — it's eighty channels. Then we have a Trident 80 series in the Studio D "Toy Box." And over in Studio C we have a TAC Matchless with a Neve BCM- 10 sidecar. Everything goes through the Neve.
I figured, and you monitor it through the TAC?
Yeah. It's an alright console, too.
So, that's four rooms with a fifth one on the way. How do they all stay busy? Last year we had two rooms — the Neve and one overdub room and we got so backlogged on projects, especially with mixing, because we would start in the Neve tracking room, move over to overdubs, then come back to the Neve to mix.
But there might be new projects tracking?
Exactly. I turned away seventeen projects in the last six months of last year, so it became very obvious that we needed to get a mix room and another overdub room. Because I have such a great team here we're able to run several sessions at once. The engineers that I work with — that I really trust — they'll run the sessions and I'll come in and I'll help with the arrangements and direct the technique for recording and check the overdubs. I'm able to bounce between rooms. It's really a great system.
There is a mix being finished down here right now...
There's a mix being finished downstairs, there's overdubs happening in Studio C and an outside project in the Toy Box today, so I don't have to be involved in that at all.
They're just renting the space?
Yes, but generally it's all in-house stuff that I'm producing or that I co-produce with my staff.
