Billy Barnett | TapeOp

Billy Barnett has been making records for 35 years. His studio, Gung-Ho, opened in 1985 and is known for a hundred miles in any direction from Eugene, Oregon, as the best place to make a record. Bill oozes with excitement and enthusiasm about recording and the musicians he has had the good fortune to work with. He bounces from location recordings of classical orchestras, in-studio live 15-piece jazz bands, and punk rock projects, sometimes within the same week. His body of work is not only diverse, but is also deep. Bill has made hundreds of great records, including a double platinum record for punk/swing gurus The Cherry Poppin' Daddies, five albums for Zimbabwean musical activist Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited, and four albums for Leisure King Records and countless independent labels. He has the uncanny ability to hone into a vibe and create albums that are tailored to be sonically unique for every artist he works with. Gung-Ho Studio is a large two-story converted garage behind Bill's 100-year old farmhouse that prioritizes comfort, sound and artsy vibe over recording magazine cover aesthetics. It contains an arsenal of vintage mics, preamps, and compressors alongside the best of modern analog and digital equipment.

How did you get started?

I grew up in Cleveland in a musical family. I heard a lot of R&B, jazz, classical and hillbilly music. I was ten when the Beatles came on Ed Sullivan and from that moment on I was doomed. In the early '70s I got a hold of a Teac 3340 and started up a 4-track studio in my apartment in Cleveland. This was a tiny place — just the upstairs of a 1920's bungalow. It had a biker bar next door that had fistfights and breaking bottles and occasional gunshots. Very sketchy, but I recorded a lot of records there. When the old studio in town, where Grand Funk had recorded, relocated and was abandoned I would go in there in the middle of the night and take acoustic tile and building materials.

Any formal training?

No. But I wish I didn't flunk out of electronics in the local community college. [laughs] I'm laughing, but it's not funny. In the old days, an engineer was really an engineer, but I don't know what we are now. To say that we're engineers, for most of us, is a really generous use of the term. If John Lennon came to me and asked, "I want you to build something to make my voice go #$%@!&#, can you build me something by tomorrow?" I couldn't.

What makes Gung-Ho Studio work as a business?

The main thing is that I have a good rapport with my clients. I get involved on a musical level. Low overhead because the studio is at my home. Constant re-investing and upgrades to keep myself interested and so my repeat clients keep seeing new stuff.

I know you and the studio are always busy. What seals the deal when talking with a prospective client?

When they come over and see the studio and we talk about their music, they usually dig the place. It's rural and peaceful, but only ten minutes from Eugene. It's professional and comfortable but not intimidating, I hope.

What is the most fun piece of equipment in your studio?

[sighs and looks lost] I think that the Gates Level Devil is always an adventure. I really like it because it is a bizarre concept in a compressor. Mine is a little broken, and I am afraid to fix it because it has a harmonic distortion that is really cool. It enhances the high end... like a super-crushed 1176. I really like the Gates family of products. The SA39 is a great mono compressor if you have seven available rack spaces. When I first got it, it was just a disaster. One of those eBay purchases gone wrong. It was just a giant distortion box, so I recorded all the vocals for The White Hot Odyssey's new album through it. Then I had it fixed.

When I was here the other day I overheard a young guy asking you for an intern position. What do you look for in someone you would consider for an internship or second engineer job?

I usually don't have the budget for a second engineer. For interns, first they have to be good with people. It's good if they are a musician. They should have an affinity for the studio process, although they will mainly be making coffee and running errands. They need to be helpful, but keep a low profile. One great thing about working by myself is that the staff here never outnumbers the talent. I am very careful about changing the chemistry between myself and the artist.

Classical recording is a part of your work. How much of that do you do? How is that different from recording a rock band?

I record about 20 live concerts a year between the Eugene Symphony Orchestra, Oregon Bach Festival, and the Oregon Festival of American Music. Eighty percent of what you hear in those recordings comes from the main [Schoeps] stereo mic pair, although I may have a dozen spot mics on an orchestra. You have to be careful with the spots not to fuck up the speed of sound with the speed of light and distort the sense of depth in the image.

So, what stuff do you bring down to the concert hall for the location recordings?

I try to use really clean mics and preamps; Schoeps mics, Neumann KM84s and Millennia preamps. I wouldn't haul the Neve or Telefunken preamps or old tube mics; they are just too susceptible to problems or noise.

And you aren't doing any limiting?

No. Dynamics are intact — that's the nature of classical recording. In classical recording, the lion's share of it is happening at -14 dB, just so you have headroom for the five- second crescendo.

Are there elements of classical recording you bring into, say, an indie rock band's record?

Sure. Not just the technicalities of mic placement or room sound. It comes back to the fact that it is all music. Performance, composition, etc. You can get fantastic ideas from Beethoven and Mozart. I think about arrangements and song structure and try to make suggestions to the bands that make the song better.

What albums do you view as the pinnacle of recorded music?

Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, The Beethoven Late String Quartets on Deutsche Grammophon, Revolver, Beggars Banquet, Axis: Bold As Love, Gillian Welch's Revival, Tom Waits' Mule Variations, In Utero, The Duets of Ella Fitzgerald and Louie Armstrong, Ray Charles and Betty Carter. Motown put out a string of some of the greatest music of the '60s, one song after another. This shit was done in a low ceiling basement with a dirt floor. You don't have to have a John Storyk-designed studio to make a good record. I have to say that all this stuff [points to racks of gear] is secondary. A lot of our discussion about gear is laughable, really. It's so much more important what the idea in the middle of the musical composition is.

Then, in the end, who hears all the subtle differences between 1176 and the LA-2A?

Everybody hears it. They don't know what it is or what caused it. Every time you run the music through something you're giving it a vibe. Hopefully you're making the choice because it's adding vibe in a musical way — you're not just compressing because you think you should compress. Music goes way back — we have genetic memory about music. It's really important to human beings. Our communication, expression, our need to make something beautiful, that's what all this gear we use serves. I have a wide variety of microphones and preamps and they all do a very different thing. Part of my job is to know when to use the Telefunken preamp with the [AKG] C-24 or the Neve preamp with the U-47 or vice versa, and not burden the client with that decision. I try and talk to them about the music, and keep the rest of this shit in my head.

What are common mistakes you're hearing from home recordists and young engineers?

Too much compression, done seemingly at random. There is a time and place to do something whacked out, but it seems like I hear a lot of over-engineering in a really heavy-handed way. I don't have a voice-from-on-high attitude about home recordings because there is the idiot savant stuff that kicks in where somebody does something so wrong that it's great. Or somebody just plain does it simply and directly because they don't have all the fancy tools, and you get this pure thing that is really nice.

One thing I hear a lot is too much high end. A lot of people are afraid to roll off high end like they do with extra low end.

Yeah, bad EQ-ing. Also, a little too much of the all-in-a-box digital thing gets on my nerves. There is a plastic quality that digital has. It's hard for me to define. A slight hollowness and lack of impact. There is shit going on that digital is not getting. I'm really a fan of analog, possibly because the extended frequency response. My tape machines zero out up into 30 or 40 kHz.

How do you compensate then, knowing your analog recording will end up on a CD?

I listen to the playback of the mix thru an A/D converter so I know what the conversion is doing to the signal.

How are you using Pro Tools?

I tend to slave to the 2" machine. Almost everything hits tape first before it goes into that vacant purple void. It's a fabulous editing tool that is easily misused — I probably misuse it as much as everybody else, and it's an inescapable reality of modern recording. For anyone who has done a lot of razor editing it's an absolute dream. I love it.

You have boatloads of vintage equipment. Why do you buy vintage over modern equivalents?

I'd rather have the real thing, wouldn't you? The thing about collecting old vocal mics is they all have different personalities. For me to have a [Neumann] 47, 48 and 49 and a [AKG] C-24 to choose from is great. There will be some maintenance from time to time on old gear, but I guarantee the craftsmanship on this old gear is at least as good, if not better, than on the best modern stuff.

Then why do I see all this new stuff in your studio alongside the vintage pieces?

Okay, in all fairness, hats off to the Putnams for doing the Universal Audio reissues. BLUE does fantastic work. Geoff Daking does great stuff, which I own some of. I have some Summit EQs that are knockoffs of the Pultec EQs I have. The Summits are very good, but the Pultecs have a little something extra that is hard to describe, a little more poop and guts, probably distortion and noisy carbon pots.

Are you finding that's universal with the vintage equipment over modern?

It seems like it to me. There's something about all those transformers and tubes. There are like 11 tubes and several transformers in the Gates SA-39 compressor. That's a lot of shit for just one channel, but it sounds really good and really big. The Telefunken V76s and V72s sound enormous. The old stuff just kind of has a vibration, like an animal ready to leap out at you. The Neve 1084s were really expensive, even when I got them in '97, and I have never regretted them for one minute. They get used all the time, and when they are the right thing they are fantastic.

Your work with the Cherry Poppin' Daddies went double platinum. How has your relationship with that band changed over the years?

Well, we made five albums together, so we were on a pretty good wavelength already. The platinum record was a compilation of all the swing stuff that we recorded over the years. The big single, "Zoot Suit Riot", was recorded as part of a shopping demo. It was recorded in a big hurry and I mixed it in like an hour or two. It was not taken seriously at all, and then it became a huge radio hit. There is a lesson there. It's such a shame that they are pigeonholed as a swing band because they are so much more than that.

Did it become a better business proposition for you when the Cherry Poppin' Daddies got signed to Universal?

Yeah. It was better for me, but worse for the band. We did a follow-up album, which lasted a year and a half nonstop for me, all funded by Universal. The label kept calling in and telling us to change this or that. They were obsessed with having a single and sent us off on one wild goose chase after another. One song had like four or five producers on it, including Tony Visconti [ Tape Op #29 ]. He was a gas to work with. They were just being record company schmoes. Then the label wound up ripping off the band in a backhanded way by not promoting the record. It was really an eye opener. It's unfortunate because it's a really good record. But, it was a great year and a half working on the music with Steve [Perry]. We got to go to New York and record Dewey Redmond's tenor sax track at Walter Sear's place, which is my favorite studio. We mixed most of it at Ocean Way, which is my other favorite studio, with Jack Joseph Puig. Jack was great and his room is just incredible — it's like an electronic hash den.

What are you doing with those guys now?

I just finished the White Hot Odyssey album, which has the singer [Steve Perry] and guitar player [Jason Moss] from the Daddies. It's being released on Jive/Zomba Records. It is a '70s and '80s New York Dolls kind of album, just fun and stupid guitar glam rock. We wanted it to sound like vinyl, all midrangey and forward with sibilant stuff. Punchy low mids but not giant bottom.

What did you do to get that vinyl midrangey sound? I know you didn't use a DAW plug-in.

They chose their guitars and amps carefully, mostly old Gibson guitars with Marshall and Hiwatt amps. I was using ribbons on the guitars, [RCA] 44s, Coles or Royers. I used the Neve preamps recorded thru the 1950's high output compressors — they are electrifying.

Aren't some of the Daddies players in the Visible Men?

Yeah. Dustin Lanker, the keyboard player and Dan Schmid on bass. We just finished their second album for Leisure King Records, which is Annabelle Garcia and Scott McLean's label. It's a very sonically adventurous album, with filtered pianos and lots of Stylophone.

What's a Stylophone?

It's a crazy little toy synthesizer from the sixties that David Bowie used on "Space Oddity". You play it with a little plastic stylus, which has a conductive metal tip. It has an optical wah-wah in it, which is triggered by the light in the room. Tony Visconti helped us score one by emailing David Bowie. Bowie emailed Tony back a website. Steve bought three of them and I ended up with one for the studio.

How do you interact with such a large persona as Thomas Mapfumo?

He is very dignified, sure of himself, definitely the authority figure. At first, I couldn't tell the difference between a great take and a not-so-great take because it was all so mind-blowing to me. Now I know when he is happy and how to work with him, keep him on the mic and everything. Communication stuff, you know, his English is pretty good, but my Shona is practically nonexistent and all the lyrics are in Shona. When he wants to do something again, even when we are ready to print a mix, he always makes it better. I have to keep his mic, preamp, and compressor set up and ready to go right 'til we're done with the album. A lot of Thomas' records get banned in Zimbabwe immediately. Thomas was the musical voice of the revolution when Mugabe was leading the revolt against Ian Smith and Rhodesia back in the '80s. His music is very politically potent because it blends traditional Shona mbira music, which is like a calling forth of the ancestral spirits, with modern political issues: AIDS, equality, government and corruption. So he criticizes Mugabe's government and gets in trouble. It's a little dicey for him back there.

What are the sessions like for you?

This music is really, really exciting to record. The record we did with Mapfumo and Wadada Leo Smith was like 20 people playing live. Two drum sets, three guitars, three mbiras, two basses, horns, percussion, Wadada's electric trumpet, the girl background singers, and Thomas' lead vocal. We used every mic, every inch of space and every piece of gear in the studio. I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming. I built this place specifically to be able to do a live recording like this, which is my absolute favorite way to record.

What does Thomas' vocal chain typically consist of?

U-47 with the 67 capsule.

Was the mic modified?

Yeah, it was set up by Martins [Saulespurens] at BLUE Mics so that I could have a 47 or a 67 head on it.

Pre and limiter?

I use a Neve 1084 and an 1176.

Why the 1176 over, say, the LA-2A or the Gates?

I like the edge I'm getting on the 1176. It's flattering to his voice. The LA-2A is too smooth, but I use those on the mbiras.

First time you had an mbira in the studio, how did you approach recording it?

Just listen to them. In the Blacks Unlimited case they were electrified and running out of Roland Jazz Chorus amps, so you mic them like an electric guitar. These mbiras are big thumb pianos stuffed into giant hollow gourds to increase the resonance, and some of them have bottle caps nailed loosely on them. The bottle caps create a distortion, which I guess, to them, is like running the mbira thru a Marshall. They have crazy overtones that kick in, and when you have three or four people playing them that is when you start hearing the ancestors. All that ghostly stuff makes a very dense fabric.