Do you guys do a lot of projects together?
Yeah.
Who owns the space?
Both of us.
When you're buying equipment for the studio, do you buy it as a partnership or does one of you say, "I want to buy that. You buy the next thing."?
It works both ways. We each had a lot of gear to start with. When there are things we really need, like Pro Tools HD, the studio buys that. Then there are certain things I just want. I went to an AES show and I came back thinking, "I can't live without one of those [Chandler] TG1 limiters." So I bought the TG1. Eric is constantly buying instruments.
Tim, give us some of your history. What lead up to Cowboy Technical Services?
I started work in the eighties at Media Sound, which was on 57th Street. In those days you were an assistant and before that you were what we called a "shipper". A lot of people call them interns. You were a shipper, and then after a while you got to go in and help set up these huge sessions. Some of them would be forty to fifty piece orchestras — things like that. Then there would be rock 'n' roll going on downstairs. I became an assistant and then an engineer. Then MIDI kind of took over and tracking rooms started fading away. Jingle companies used to do demos [at studios] all the time but then they started doing them all in- house. That had been the bread and butter of the larger studios. Someone started putting up a huge building next door and that ended up closing the doors of Media Sound, because of the construction. I got out of Media and started going freelance. I met Eric [Ambel] at Media when he was with the Del Lords. Then I ended up living down the street from him. We'd stop and talk about anything but drum machines, so we thought maybe we should work together. "Man, you actually play guitar and I could move some air with this signal?" In those days a lot of people would come in to do a session and it would consist of a drum machine and four racks of synthesizers and they gave you a patch cord. I didn't really think of it too much as engineering.
Did you keep working during that period?
I did keep working. For a while I got into this place that was doing karaoke. Other than being an assistant to engineers like Mike Barbiero and Michael Brauer [Tape Op #37] at Media, karaoke was one of the best learning experiences I've ever had. A guitar player sits at home, listens to a CD and says, "Okay, what did he play there?" He can back it up, play the lick over and over and figure it out. As an engineer you don't really get to do that. However, imagine if someone gives you a Neve console, two 24-track machines, a CD player and says, "Match that drum sound. Here's a ton of vintage mics to do it with." That's basically what I did. I matched drum sounds. I did it from ten to six. If I was in the middle of a record at six o'clock, my co-worker would take over the session and I would tell him, "You better punch out at the chorus." I did that for a year. It started getting boring after a while.
Were there revelations for you too, as an engineer, trying to match sounds of different eras?
Yeah, it was really cool. I loved trying to do the old Motown stuff and then doing some '80's hit by Bon Jovi. By this time it was probably 1990 or something. There were records that I probably never would have listened to, but I did learn something. For the majority of time that I worked there, I got pigeonholed as the guy who did the drums or anything that required more than one microphone. I always loved to track a band playing — that's the exciting thing to me — so I was always better at it than most. Some of the guys knew how to program synths much better than I did. After that I was just freelancing. I worked at Studio 900 a lot, which was small, but I met Keith Richards there and I got to be a part of Main Offender. That was a lot of fun.
You got to go from mimicking The Stones' drum sound for karaoke to tracking a Stone.
I didn't tell him what I had been doing. I was just in the right place at the right time to get on the Main Offender project. I also worked with Keith when he was putting songs together and it was great. I had stations for him to play. The piano setup, a couple of guitar amps and a bass amp. He had a DAT of Charlie Watts' or Steve Jordan's drum beats and I'd play them over the speakers and he'd start playing stuff and getting riffs together. He was trying to organize the things in his head, but you had to keep up with him. He always knew if you were listening or not. When I was at Media I worked with Rickie Lee Jones doing the same thing — where she came in and had all these ideas for songs and she was trying to put them all together. There was a drum machine, so basically it was use of the drum machine as a click — that was it. She would play different instruments. When the record came out I thought, "I remember that chorus, but it didn't go with that verse." That was interesting for me. This kind of work helped when Eric and I put together our own place. We wanted a place where creativity could flow.
