Studio .45 | TapeOp

Drive through Hartford, Connecticut, and you can't help but notice the giant blue onion sitting atop a tower in an industrial complex. The onion was a gift from Czar Nicholas to Samual Colt in exchange for 2 engraved dueling pistols during a tour of Russia. The building was originally created to house the old Colt Firearms factory. Today that space is home to artists, dancers, and a cozy, but spacious 24 track analog recording studio. The first interview was conducted with Dave Shuman, the owner, who explains the origins of Studio .45. The second allows Michael Deming, the chief engineer, to discuss some of his techniques and equipment. Together these are the gentlemen that make Studio .45 go.

DAVE SHUMAN

Did the studio get started when you and Michael met in college?

Well actually, Michael and I went to the same music school, but we went several years apart. We didn't know each other at that point. Michael had several friends, who now are great friends of mine, and each person had a certain amount of gear that by itself wasn't anything in particular. A couple people had leftovers from PA's. Two people were in a band together and one of them had a ?" 16 track machine. Someone else had a small board and some monitors. Michael had scouted the space for the studio because he was living across the hall in an apartment which is now our B studio. When he saw the space in its raw form, he thought it would make a wonderful studio. He gathered up a couple roommates to help defray the expenses and convinced a few people to drop off their unused gear there. It got wired together just like that.

What was the first board you started out using?

The first main board was a Tascam M520. Which is a 20 x 8 Tascam board that the Mackie boards now replace these days. It was a muddy sounding thing. I barely remember. It was so many studio hours ago. We would run it with a series of sidecars, depending on what we were doing. The last installation had a Hill mixer which was configurable to either 16 by 2 or 12 by 4 by 2. And that was a really good mixer. I still have it in a rack. There was also an old Audio Arts 2k, which was another 16 by 2 mixer. There was another Tascam mixer before I was involved. But usually it was used with a monitor attached to it, along with whatever could be wired for extra inputs and was available at the time. When the studio started, it didn't have much in the way of patch bays. There were cheap patch bays and Hosa, which is horrible cheap cable. It was very noisy and hissy. Michael and I would do searches for noise every time we would come in. The old patch bays would act like antennas for whatever noise they could suck in. You'd crank up your levels for testing to see what was making the most noise and figure out how to make it quieter before you'd start working.

How much engineering experience had either one of you had at this point?

I'm not really sure exactly how much Michael had. I know he had done some work at Kramer's Noise New Jersey studio with Giant Metal Insects. In a related vein, he was booking shows at a small venue in Hartford and having to be the promoter and sometimes door-person and sound person all at the same time. He had a lot of cool bands but Hartford didn't have an audience for those bands at the time. He had various friends and people in the Hartford area that would ask him to help out with the recording, production, or some engineering. I don't think he had a solid studio background before the studio came into existence. For me it had been mostly 4 track cassette-based recording with friends. One band I was in had a very elaborate 4 track setup. Two 4 tracks were used, one as a sub-mixer for the other in a permanently wired rehearsal space for recording every rehearsal. When I was in college, I ended up doing demos for people on my own 4 track. I'd spent time screwing around in the college recording studio, which wasn't very extensive. A little bit of work in smaller 16 track studios--more as a musician than as an engineer. I had read quite a bit about what it all did and as an electric bass player, I'd used amplifiers and effects units and they're all very basically the same. I mean, there's not a lot you can do with a signal at this point. There are endless ways to combine effects, but when you think about it there are things you do with volume and things you do with tone and things you do with time. I think that's about it unless I'm forgetting something. It's just those three elements.

That's an interesting way to think about it. It's an incredibly simple view that is often overlooked.

Some of your more involved guitar amps have more complicated EQs than your basic mixing boards. The basics are there. If you understand how they work, then it's the same principles. Obviously, how you process your information and how you use it is different, but your basic building blocks are the same.

How long has it been since the studio has been open?

It's been Studio .45 since March of '93, Michael had started the studio about a year earlier. At that point I became involved as the owner of the studio and the studio got a name for the first time. About a month later, we got a 2" 24 track. I think that point was the start of the studio as most people know it today. There were some interesting releases and odds and ends recorded during that first year. I think a couple are still bouncing around and have been released on 7 inches and compilations. There have been some interesting things that have had some attention paid to them.

Who were some of the more interesting bands?

G'nu Fuzz, China Pig, a band called Freak Baby, a band from Danbury called Head that was really cool but is now defunct. Except for G'nu Fuzz, probably most of those bands aren't around anymore.

Who have you been recording lately?

The Apples In Stereo. Lilys are going to be doing a big project very soon. A few Sub Pop things here and there. We're doing a group called Holler, which is a country thing. I've been recording some interesting bands like Wampeter, a cool band from Southern Connecticut called Deep Banana Blackout, and Aboriginal Bluegrass. Late summer was kind of a dead period as it always it. Usually we're always booked but right about now we're coming into almost more sessions than we can handle. Which is interesting, because we built a second room last year to handle that demand, and almost as soon as it was finished it seemed impossible to imagine how we functioned without it beforehand. Often Michael and I will be working on two different projects on the same time. There has been interest from bands that have wanted to book the whole facility. Which would be the best way to do things because there are so many different sounds, not only in gear but in rooms as well. That's probably one of our most important assets here, the sounds of the big rooms here in the former Colt Firearms factory.

MICHAEL DEMING

Would you like to clear the air about your oscilloscope and the role it plays in recording?

We use the oscilloscopes for numbers of different things. It's used for everything from setting up the tape machine to looking at the phase correlation between left and right sides. It's just a piece of test equipment used for looking at any audio signal and measuring voltage. You certainly need it to be able to set the tape machine up so that you can check that the azimuth and zenith are correct and that the phase between the outer tracks is correct. In other words, you cannot be without an oscilloscope in the studio.

In the Lilys song "Shovel into Spade Kit" there's a section that features an orchestra. I want to know how you found that piece.

We had many de Wolff records sitting around the studio. They are samplers of orchestral passages in different styles. I listened through them all and was able to find solo bits of instruments that I wanted to use in that passage. Trumpet, bass clarinet and clarinet. Those are the three instruments you hear in that passage.

No oboe?

No oboe, just trumpet, bass clarinet and clarinet. I was able to transfer that material from vinyl to half inch two track and then Varispeed the parts by using the Ampex ATR102. I would Varispeed the segments into the song the way I wanted them to appear in the piece.

Explain the Varispeed to me.

The Varispeed is the device that lets you speed up and slow down the capstan motor. So I could get the segments to come up at the right pitch and the right rhythm. It allows me to speed the tape up to match what I needed to serve my purposes. One thing that was interesting in doing that, was that I was using an old Ampex ATR102, and the Varispeed is kind of unruly so it would take a couple tries sometimes to get it exactly right. I didn't have very fine control over pitch; it was a very coarse control.

And it was all done by sound?

By ear, yeah. But it would have been easier with a more modern tape machine, with more fine control over a capstan motor.

Couldn't you have just sampled it more easily?

But the sound quality would suffer. If I used the best sampler, I would have had to sample it in real time and it would have lost a lot of sound quality; I would imagine by changing the pitch. It was simpler to put it straight from vinyl to tape, all along fully preserving the analog signal path. In the making of that record we used no digital devices at all at any time. There probably are hardly any records made these days in which there isn't one digital device. The worst thing about the record is that when it did end up going into the digital domain to be put onto a 16-bit CD for the consumer, mastering was horribly ruined. It was just handled very carelessly. A Pro-Tools sequenced version was just transferred to 1630 and used as a master and that's wrong. And that's something that none of us had any control over really. We were over budget and there was no budget to master properly. I was forced into a position where I had to sequence the record on a really crappy sounding Pro-tools system, because of monetary constraints.

What would you have done if you'd had the money to do it properly?

My half inch masters would have been taken to a real mastering house where we would have used the fanciest converter we could find to get our analog material in the digital domain. Digital compressors and EQs would have been used to make the record compete. But instead, everybody got a version that basically sounds like it has suffered from a generation loss. There's a huge difference between the sound of my two track analog masters which were mixed at 30 ips on an Ampex ATR 102, and the sound of the retail product. It's like night and day. That received a non-aggressive mastering so the CD pro doesn't sound any louder than the mix. Overall it's program material that I feel people have been afraid to handle in an aggressive manner. For instance, the other day I was putting a demo reel together for somebody, and I used a cut off of Better Can't Make Your Life Better. I was able to get my hands on a copy which had never been 'Pro-Toolsed'. It was just my half inch master through a good 20 bit A to D converter to DAT and that had been transferred digitally to CDR. Pro-Tools ruins any stereo program, because it sounds like two mono sound files; it doesn't do stereo very well. So it destroys the stereo image. The music sounds like it's coming from the speakers; all that stuff that used to sound like it was coming from outside the speakers is now stuffed back in, and that goes for the center too. Things that might be mixed up center don't have that front to back depth anymore--it gets lost. So I took this CDR copy which had never been put into Pro-Tools, took it into a good mastering house and edited it on a Studer Diaxis. With some good Valley Dynamap compression, a T.C. Electronics compressor, I was able to master that song the way it should have been mastered the first time. You know, the things that we heard come out of it were incredible. It should have been mastered with very aggressive compression and aggressive EQ. And it sounds beautiful.

The Apples (in stereo) are known for their extensive usage of home recording for their records. How did they get hooked up with Studio . 45?

Robert heard the Lilys record and liked it. That had a lot to do with why I wound up working with him. As time went on Robert started to realize the limitations of his set-up and realized that what he really wanted to hear wasn't always achievable all of the time. If he had 50 overdubs, it was going to become increasingly difficult to submix all of that material and have it still sound clear.

Especially if he's doing all of the engineering.

There's a huge difference between a ?" 8-track and Brian Wilson making Pet Sounds on an 8-track. There's a huge difference and people have to realize that.

Everybody references the recording of Sgt. Pepper's on a four track, and forgets that the Beatles weren't using a Porta One.

Yeah. The four track was probably a Scully or a Studer and it was probably a half inch four track that was aligned every minute of the day by engineers who really knew what they were doing. They treated the tape machines like we treat them here. We line them up every day. Every day an MRL is put on the machines. The entire calibration procedure is gone through every single day. I know of big commercial studios where that isn't even done these days. People use these new Studer A 827s and they align themselves. They are supposedly auto-aligning and auto-biasing and I don't particularly trust them. To me, there's too much electronics in there to have to accomplish all that. I'd rather have an old MCI machine like we have that might be a little bit harder to handle. It might be a pain to keep calibrated all the time but the sound is certainly worth the effort.

What's an MRL?

MRL is just the term used to refer to the calibration tape, but MRL is actually the company's name, Magnetic Reference Laboratory. It's a test tone tape. Everything needs a reference. We have to know that +4 is the same for everybody. We all have these calibration tapes so that everybody is on the same page as far as their calibration.

When The Apples were here recording, Robert took some of the tapes back home with him to record more overdubs on his eight track. What'd you do?

They came out here for a few weeks the first time and we recorded the basics live, which was quite a lot of fun. We set up in the main room, real old-fashioned, guitar amps and drums and everything in the same room. I gave everybody a fully discreet monitor mix so that each musician could hear the balance the way that they wanted to hear it. And then we proceeded to go through the basics. We got everything on to two inch; drums, bass, and two guitars. Then we went through and got rid of some of the original rhythm guitars. We treated them as being scratch. But there were some good performances in that first pass which were saved. Then we did as much overdubbing as we had time for in their first trip out here. I mixed a reference mix to two tracks on a ?" 8-track player, because that's the multitrack machine in Robert's studio he has two Otari 5050 ?" 8-tracks. We put SMPTE time code on one track of the 24 track and on one track of the 8-track and I mixed a stereo guide mix. That way they could take the half inch tape and continue overdubbing at home. There they were actually able to use two half inch eight track machines and do two runs of overdubs that I was able to sync to the two inch later when they came back. We synced that material up and transferred it all back to the two inch tape.

Everything they recorded you had assigned to two tracks or was made into a stereo mix?

I just made a really quick stereo guide mix onto tracks six and seven. Track eight held the SMPTE. That freed them up to overdub more on tracks one through five. They would mix that down to the second machine along with sending the SMPTE over to the other machine. This is where we ran into some problems, because Robert transferred the SMPTE without having regenerated the waveform at all and some of the SMPTE got a little squared off on top, and that presented me with some problems in syncing some things up later. But with the use of some good synchronizers like a Timeline Microlynx and a Fairlight CMX, which is basically a 24 track random editor, I was able to take things that wouldn't sync up. I put them into the Fairlight and the Fairlight would lock up instantly to the 24 track, it didn't need any lead time. On some songs, we had two half inch reels of overdubs. One of those reels would have copied time code, those gave me some problems. Those are the songs in which I have to take material from the reel with the copied time code and put it on to the Fairlight along with those few bars that wouldn't sync up of the stuff on the two inch machine. That way I could sync it all up and eventually get back to the two inch tape. When that was all done, I could submix all this stuff to stereo and we could overdub more.

What was recorded at Robert's home?

The tracks recorded at Robert's studio in Denver were some horns, guitars--he did a lot of things, piano. All the air organs were recorded in Denver. All the stuff that was done out here was the vocal comping. All the basics and the tons of guitar overdubs were done here because we have a very good amplifier room.

Have you done that kind of syncing before?

I've had plenty of experience syncing things up. I used to run sessions here where I had a half inch eight track and a half inch sixteen and I'd sync those two up to get more tracks. That was a long time ago, before synchronizers got very good, so we would typically have to leave about a minute of tape between all the songs. That's about how long it would take to achieve a good lock. This project was a little different because I was using much more modern synchronizing equipment. But that's not to say that it was without its problems, like the copied time code. Somehow the time code got reset for a number of the songs, so each bit of tape that started the songs began at zero. That was really bad, because the tape would start running backwards to chase a previous song. So I had to deal with that. A lot of stuff had to be jam synced. I would try to make it sync up on the fly and it would work after awhile. The stuff that didn't work, I was able to put into the Fairlight and just do those few bars and eventually all the material would wind up back on two inch.

There's a song recorded at Studio . 45 in which an entire Can song was recorded on one track. Apparently it's inaudible until someone points out that it's there and then you can't hear the song without noticing the Can track. Do you remember who that was?

Flying in the Can tape, I believe that was on Flowchart. That was the first record I did for them and that was about two years ago. It was just a cassette that we wild synced in. We started it up at a certain point and it just bubbles along below the level of the program. It's in "Metro Survey", I think. That's the name of the song.

Could they get into trouble for that one?

I don't think anyone's going to notice to be honest with you. We've done quite a lot of that. Wild-syncing little things in to the program. It's fun to see how that stuff will come up in a random way. Sometimes it's great, it comes up so good that you could never recreate it. It's a lot of fun to just let it happen. Sometimes it's not usable at all. And then sometimes it's very calculated and predetermined like in the Lilys song; where I sat there for hours overdubbing, marking the tape with a grease pencil, and starting the tape at a certain point... Hoping it'll run up to speed by the time I'd punch in on the two inch machine.

That's another situation where you would be using samplers if you were working in a larger studio?

I don't think it's really unique to this studio. I could do it the same way in any studio provided that they have an analog two track with a Varispeed. It's more a question of how it's typically done. Record producers and engineers these days don't really screw around too much with a two track and a Varispeed and they don't cut their multitrack up like we do. Everything is so technology driven. Producers and engineers are really macho about their technology and want to demonstrate how good their technology is. Many records produced lately are a little too technology driven. It becomes more about the capabilities of the machines than the engineer. I know engineers and producers that wouldn't dream of laying down a basic track without there being a click on one track and having the device that's generating that click also generating time code. Because they start off thinking that there will be an automated mix down. "Playing without a click? That's crazy." That's just the way records are made these days. To do a passage like the one in "Shovel Into Spade Kit", those things would have been sampled and someone would have hit a key on a keyboard to play them. I don't think it would sound quite as good. It really sounds like the de Wolff records, because that stuff is transferred through a really good mixing console straight to half inch. It's much more convincing that way without the grain of a sampler. But I think samplers are an absolute part of record production-- when you talk about any modern electronic pop music, dance music, drum and bass, hip hop, trance... anything. Would Aphex Twin make a record without a sampler? I doubt it. Would the Chemical Brothers? They're just sitting down and spewing out this stuff from their Mac-based laptop sequencers. That's all that is.

Is there a standard way that you mic drums?

Not really. I really try to do what's going to suit the music or what I think is going to suit the music. I never put a mic in front of anything until I've heard it with my own ears first. I'm definitely not one of these people that talks about these things that they always do as a matter of course. I read in audio trade magazines all the time that an engineer will be asked about what he does with compression or EQ, and he'll immediately start rattling off things that he always does. I'm always so amazed by that. I wonder how he knows he's going to use 3:1 compression and this and that EQ until he's heard what he's about to record. Or is he just in the habit of doing that no matter what it is? It's confusing to me. Basically, I really have to hear what it is that I'm going to take in with a microphone and get to tape before I start making any kind of valuable judgement on how I'm going to do it. I know the sounds of certain mics. I know their EQs and how they color sound. If I have a really bright source, I might pick a dull mic. I basically have to hear it before I decide what I'm going to put in front of it. Each piece of electronic gear colors the sound in some way, or it's designed to not color the sound at all and I'm going to pick it based on how I know it sounds.

I always figured that an engineer like Steve Albini would have all of the knobs on his board preset.

When you listen to his records you'd think that he does, because they all sound just remarkably similar. It's almost mind-boggling how he gets them to sound so similar when they're all different artists. I don't know if he has his knobs preset, but he certainly has microphones that he likes and uses. We certainly hear the sound of Coles 4038 ribbon mics all over his recordings. On the snare drum especially. I think he likes the speed of a ribbon mic. I think he doesn't like the sound of compressors too much. He seems to let the music have its full dynamic range no matter what. So I think those are some good qualities of his recordings, but I do think they sound remarkably similar. I'm always just trying to do what suits the music.

Tell me about the more unusual pieces of equipment that you use in the studio like the older microphones that were initially intended to be used in a courtroom.

We have these old dynamic omnidirectional mics that were taken out of the Illinois statehouse. They're Shures, and a friend of mine who has a studio across town bought a bunch, and has given me a few to listen to. Basically, I've been rediscovering a lot of really old dynamic microphones that don't have much gain. A lot of people don't even consider using these mics, because they're really low gain. I've been experimenting with them using really high gain microphone preamps--Telefunken V76s--and dumping that out and putting it into a really clean sounding line driver on the console. You really get to hear close up the character of some of these old microphones. These old mics have really unique EQ curves. Frequency response wasn't very good back then out of any electronic device. To get something to go 20hz to 20K was a huge feat. Some of these microphones start cutting out at 9K, so you hear all these different slopes of attenuation in the top end. Some of them are so great on certain sources. We have to hear what we're about to record and then pick a microphone. If I hear that something sounds a certain way and know that the sound of a microphone will compliment it, or add something to the music, then I'm into that. Some of these old dynamic microphones, they definitely have their use when you have a high gain mic pre and really good line amps on your console. Otherwise, they're pretty much useless compared to modern condenser mics that have tons of gain. When you can buy an AT4033 in the store for $500, there's not much use for an old 55 S or some old dynamic mic.

Which other mics have you preferred lately?

I use a lot of condensers on everything. I like to choose things that are going to add something to the sound. I'm not one who likes electronic gear of any kind just designed to measure out nicely. THD and low distortion, those things are all good, and we like our audio gear to measure out. But there's a lot of things these days that are designed for utter clarity and it just adds nothing to the sound. It's like passing the signal through nothing. It doesn't add any magic to the music, because it's not designed with that kind of passion. It's not designed by ear. It's not a case where people are listening and designing. It's a case where people are measuring out frequency response and distortion and noise and using that to design. I use a lot of mics that color the sound greatly, mics that are high quality--not noisy and very clear. I like to use Microtech Geffel UM70s. I like a 30-year-old Neumann condenser U67 that I use a lot. I use all kinds of different condenser mics. I don't use a lot of modern ones that don't color the sound very much. And I use a lot of preamps which do the same. I'm not big on API preamps, even though they are perfectly clear they have no distortion, no noise. On a lot of things they're sterile. I would never take an Audio Technica and try to record acoustic guitar with it. You may as well plug the thing straight into the board. I'm always looking for a piece of equipment to add something to the music. It's one of the reasons that I like the console in the A room here so much. It's a beautifully clear sounding board, but it adds so much. It makes everything sound more lush and bigger. You turn the EQs on, even with all the knobs centered, and it gives a broad band boost to everything. That's the kind of electronic design that I prefer.

Don't you have quite a collection of older five watt guitar amps?

We have five watt amps, ten watts, twenty, thirty. Yeah, I like to use the smaller amps. A lot of them have a lot of character. Recording them is not about the brutality of a 100-watt Marshall turned up to ten. They have really unique sounds, and you can achieve their best, most optimum sounds at a volume that you can put a beautiful condenser mic in front of and capture it all without the mic straining or the mic preamp straining. I don't record any heavy music. I don't do any metal or math rock. You would never catch me recording a band that sounds like Helmet. I'm turned off not only by the sound, but also the aggression, so I could probably never do a good job. Those small amplifiers really suit a lot of the music I record, and they have tons of different tonal quality. You can have what sounds like an orchestra of woodwinds, and it's all coming from five and ten watt guitar amps. You hear that a lot on the Lilys and Apples records, or just about any albums I've worked on. I've tried to orchestrate guitars pretty well and use all these different tones that come out of these amps. It's probably that I'm trying to make up for all the woodwinds that I don't have.

Tell me about the boards and tape machines you recently upgraded to in both of the rooms.

The studio is made up of two studios. The A studio and the B studio which are across the hall from each other. The A studio is about 3,000 square feet, and the ceilings are about 14 feet high. The main console is a Malcolm Toft. It's one of about twenty in the world, serial number three. It was a prototype. It was on the AES convention floor in 1993. David Shuman and I went there looking for consoles that year. We listened to everything from SSLs to Mackies and this console blew both of our minds. It was just exactly what we were looking for. A good old-fashioned split console with 24 balanced busses and incredible EQ and a luxurious recording desk. Malcolm Toft, who was the founder of Trident, designed it. Trident consoles have been popular since the 70's. The Trident A range was the original proprietary console designed by Toft for Trident Studios, where many great records were made. Everything from Beatles remixes to Badfinger records to T-Rex, David Bowie and Mott the Hoople were all made there. That became a really unique sound, and he's the guy who designed this console. Aside from the console, in both studios the main multi-tracks are MCI JH 24s, which are old tape machines. I personally feel that it's the next best thing to an Ampex ATR 124. It's probably one of the best sounding tape machines ever designed. The one in the B room has frequency response that extends out to 40 kilohertz, which is amazing for an analog tape machine. The one in the A room has a little more hours on it. It has great frequency response as well, but the head stack isn't quite as new so it doesn't quite go that high. But there's an extra octave of low end on these tape machines. They sound excellent.

And you had Otaris before?

We had Otaris before, and it was a more modern tape machine, but it was unanimous that the JH 24 is the way we wanted to go. The sound has much more dimension. There's an extra octave on both ends, the low end and top end frequency response. I know people say that we can't hear past twenty hertz, but that's not really true, because that extra frequency response changes the way in which we hear nearly anything. Even a tenor voice sounds different with that much air on the top and that much space below it. It's not constricted in any way. The way in which we hear that whole source is different. When you have 24 tracks of it sounding like that it's just amazing. In my opinion these machines sound better than any Studers and just about any tape machine that I've ever heard. There are tape machines that are rumored to sound as good, like Stevens and Ampex, but I've never used them. I've never used an Ampex ATR 124 although I've used Ampex ATR 102s and 104s extensively to mix down to, and those have the same electronics as the ATR 124, which is the 2" version. They all have ATR series electronics. The sound of that machine is also excellent. It's the only thing that I would even compare to the JH 24. This is why we looked long and hard to find the perfect JH 24s to put into this studio and we finally found them. The B room console is a Peter Troise custom console and it's one of a kind. It was made in 1979 and is a seriously unique console. It's a VCA console with Allison VCAs. Nine stereo on-board compressors. There's one on the main mix bus as well. The console has two mix amps which you can choose between; the original Troise mix amp and the API mix amp (which has a Neve P and G master fader and sits on a little project board mounted inside the console). There are a bunch of API discreet op amps in there. One thing that's really nice about the console is that you can put any API pinout compatible EQ in the console. So we have a smorgasbord of EQs; API 55s, Apsi's that were made in the 70s and early 80s, and the original Peter Troise parametric EQs which are really incredible and very rare. We have five of those. I'm currently looking for any API pin out compatible EQs. If someone has such a thing, call me because I'll buy them. Troise's, Angus' or Apsi's or API 550s. We need those.

I know you've got a one inch tape machine just for recording jazz.

Right. We've switched to all MCI tape machines throughout. There's a mint condition JH24 with new headstack in both rooms. In the B room we have a JH 110. In the studio overall there are three JH 110 chassis. In the A room the mixdown deck is a JH 110 with a half inch headstock on it. I can mix at 7 ?, 15, or 30 ips with no Dolby noise reduction in this studio. We try the best we can to not use digital devices whatsoever. In the B studio there are two JH110 chassis. One has a one inch eight track headstack on it and four drawers of the JH110 electronics, two channels per drawer. There's also another JH 110 chassis with another half inch headstack on it, which is used as a mix down deck. The one inch eight track deck is used for smaller sessions. It has a great sound. I plan to do a lot of experimenting with recording bass and drums at slow tape speeds and syncing that up to the two inch 24 track machines at 30 ips with no Dolby and seeing how that all works.

What do you think that's going to sound like?

I think I'll achieve fatness like you can't even believe with the bass and drums. I'm not really too concerned with having the cymbals have treble. I'm not really into having records sound overly bright and thin and one-dimensional. That's what's wrong with a lot of today's pop music, it sounds even more one-dimensional once it's gone through mastering and has been compressed so heavily. It's not like I'm going to be recording vocals and guitars on it. Those things need upper register extension. Those things need to benefit from the 40 kHz frequency response of the two inch machine at 30 ips. Whereas bass guitar can certainly be recorded at 7? ips on the one inch eight track just so that it's big and the low end extends down to 10hz. I think it'll be really good for bass. Bass is bass. Treble is treble. We have a lot of different compressors of all different types. My favorite discreet class A type compressor is a Spectra Sonic 610 of which we have three in the studio. I guess those are quite rare too. This studio has three of them. I'm happy about that. One is kind of odd and was made by a company that used to be in Connecticut called AudioArts Engineering, which got absorbed into Wheatstone. Wheatstone makes a lot of broadcast equipment, TV consoles and that sort of thing. Back in the 70s and 80s they made a compressor called the model 1200, which I really like. It's a VCA compressor with a unique sound, not to be used heavy handedly. It sounds great and I'm hoarding those. Anybody who wants to get rid of those should call me. I have six of them now, and can always use more. We also have the more common high quality like the Summit DCL 200, which has a solid state front end and a tube based gain reduction circuit and transformer balanced output. We have other hybrid compressors like the Drawmer 1960. Probably the most exciting compressor to come out in years is the Joe Meek stereo compressor, which we have. That's an optical compressor with a really unique sound.

I know you have the red Marshall that once belonged to Ace Frehley.

We do. We have an early 70s red Marshall hundred watt head with a fifty watt switch and some other strange modifications that was previously owned by Ace Frehley. I don't use it a lot myself, but other engineers and producers have come into the studio and used it. I think it has a phenomenal sound. I used it to record a group called Meisha from Pittsburgh. It was a guitar trio and an interesting context to use that amplifier, because most people who come into the studio turn it up all the way and use it as a very Marshall-esque sound. We used it to make a perfectly clean sound out of a Les Paul guitar--a very clean, non-distorted sound. The tracks really benefited from the amp because when the amp is used that clean, it has a crystalline top end. It was pretty interesting. It was a challenge to make the amp perfectly quiet. We're able to do things with ground paths in the main room. I've been able to run up to six and seven guitar amps at a time without the slightest hint of a buzz.

Isn't that something that's not very commonly done?

I've been in countless studios having a hard time getting one amp not to buzz. In this studio we have proper power conditioning. We don't yet have balanced AC, which is something that I've been shooting for. I think balanced AC power is the answer, and some studios are switching over to that. There are companies like Equitech, which are making balanced AC boxes that give you 6 outlets of balanced AC power. That does away with hum completely. But while we're still in this non-balanced AC world, you have to have proper power conditioning and be able to properly ground the amplifiers so you can have more than one on at a time without any hum. In this studio, I have the easiest time making all the amplifiers quiet. For instance, when we recorded Meisha, I recorded each player in stereo. Each player was using two amps--I had six amps going at a time for a quiet guitar trio. You know how quiet they get; from pianissimo to as loud as you can possibly imagine. Dynamic range is of the utmost importance. When we have something that's quiet, it has to seem absolutely quiet--whisper silent--and you can't have the hum of a Marshall coming in to play. There were six guitar amps, we had them silent for that recording session. The dynamic range is preserved. There is no hum on the recording

That's all done with jumper cables right?

There were a number of different methods. Sometimes on the Marshall, I'll take an automotive jumper cable, attach it to the input, walk over to a piece of electrical conduit through the wall and grind through the paint. All that's doing is getting a more discreet ground path. The idea is that you should have only one path to ground--not so many that you get loops and things. But with the power conditioning the way it is in this studio, and with me able to get one ground path going, we've been able to use many amps at once with no hum. It was important in the Meisha project especially because of the dynamics of their music and the detail of their playing. They would play through eight minute pieces flawlessly with no mistakes.

Tell me about the Sesame Street reverb unit that you've just recently acquired.

Yes, that's another thing I particularly like. We have an AKG BX 20 which is the larger model spring reverb that AKG made back in the 60's and 70's and that was pretty much a mainstay of reverb at that time. We happened to get this one from WGBH in Boston from their studio where they used it to produce Sesame Street and the Electric Company and all of those shows. Anytime you're hearing reverb in a big way on those shows, it's probably coming from this reverb box. The giant spring inside this big mahogany box. It's a two-channel device, and we just recently got the remote control for it, which is a really rare little unit called the R20. It lets you change decay time between 2 and 4.5 seconds.

Have you used it for anything yet?

I use it all the time. It's the richest spring reverb. It has tons of bass. It's in a big box, so it's acoustically beautiful. I have live reverb chambers, which I mix with that spring. The only time I ever use a digital device is when I'm looking for a bit of pre-delay or something like that to mix into one of my reverbs. At which point I'll turn on one of the Lexicons in the studio and I'll mix a bit of Lexicon in by spring or chamber. And I always print all my effects onto tape so I'm always making a reverb mix either in mono or stereo, which is made up of all these things. And I'm printing it on a track to be used later. I use it all the time, on everything. I know it's a bit archaic but I just love the sound of it so much. It has a beautiful midrange quality to it.

Studio . 45 is located at 140 Huyshope Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut 06106, (860) 727-0764.