Old Town School of Folk Music

When Chicago's legendary Old Town School of Folk Music — a place that's trained the likes of Roger McGuinn, John Prine, Steve Goodman, Bonnie Koloc and more over its 50 year existence — began its multi-part album project, the Old Town School of Folk Music Songbook , the task proved a challenge right from the start. While all parties agreed such an undertaking should be home grown, Old Town had no recording studio to speak of. What's more, the only available space was a harshly lit common room — a sterile space more suitable for an AA meeting than say, drum sounds — and a converted office space to serve as a control room. Still, Old Town School Recordings and Bloodshot Records pulled it off, with the last of the four CDs released in late 2007. That's largely a testimony to the vision — and downright stubbornness — of two men: Bob Medich, Old Town's Director of Advertising and Media, and John Abbey, a New York transplant who produced and engineered the 80-plus songs that make up all four volumes.

The overriding lesson? When you seek to preserve and promote the legacy of a cherished musical institution, mic placement and recording Ps and Qs are important... but in the end, capturing the right performance in a magical context rank supreme.

Take us back to the genesis of this project.  

Medich: Well, this has a long, sordid history. It started in about 2000 with Jim Hirsch, who was Old Town's executive director at the time — he put forth the idea. Then he left and it kind of languished and I tried to start it up again another time somewhere between 2000 and 2005 with another producer, and it didn't work. But in 2005 we were recording a children's album, Wiggleworms Love You , at another studio and we kind of got on a roll. Kerry Sheehan, who is the Director of Education, said, "Maybe we should do this, and you should meet John Abbey." I had never met John — and he had worked here for years.

Abbey: I started in 2002 teaching bass and guitar. Bass is my primary instrument but I've been playing guitar long enough to do that. 

So you two meet, hit it off and decide to get started on this project in May of 2005. What was it like at the start?

A: At its original inception, it was like, "Let's do ten or twelve songs. Sort of a best of the songbook." Very simple, like a play-along thing, and we pegged it as two months. So I started getting some Old Town faculty in to record — and it was actually just going to be faculty at first. They loved the vibe... if you can call this room "having a vibe." 

Bob, were you ever concerned that John was gonna walk to this space and say, "You want me to record here ?"

M: No, no. I knew there was no space in the main building [which houses Old Town's offices, performance hall and most of its classrooms]. That wasn't going to work. But I knew this room was here next door, so we walked over here and I think we both were like, "Okay." And I had our building super change the locks — which pissed off the rest of the staff to no end because they were using this room as a classroom before. I got into a little trouble with the powers that be because we started off without a budget, too. I figured we were on a roll with the Wiggleworms record and I said, "Let's do it." And then Bloodshot Records got involved and it just snowballed.

A: The musicians loved the whole process here and so I guess there was a little bit of a buzz that started to happen. Then a friend of mine was managing Danny Barnes from the Bad Livers, and he was in town doing a show. I'm a big Bad Livers fan. I met them, we talked, we played a little bit and I just I said, "Hey I'm working on this project for Old Town. We're doing these songs — it should be interesting." Danny was the first outside person we got. I remember coming to Bob and saying, "Is it okay if people who aren't faculty contribute a track to this?" He asked who and I said, "Danny Barnes." He said, "By all means." So all of a sudden, that started to pick up the momentum. We got Barnes, Jon Langford, Robbie Fulks and Dan Zanes — I played bass with Dan Zanes for a long time.

We're in the control room right now, and it looks like it was either a very small instruction room or a storage room. There's a chalkboard and a drop ceiling with standard acoustic tiles ...

M: It was an office for a soccer club.

So how do you take a very typical, carpeted, acoustically neutral space and turn it into something that's conducive to creating this great music? A: This became the control room, for lack of a better term. It took me a couple times. I shifted stuff around trying to get a feel for the room. I'd monitor ridiculously low! I tried to bring as little of the room as possible into what I was hearing.

Were control room reflections a big problem while mixing and cutting?

A: Reflections here are ridiculous and the bass response, if I'm sitting close, it's like, "Alright gotta turn the bass up." Then I'd walk out to get a drink of water and by the time I hit the door the whole track would just be swimming in bass. It took me a while to get used to this room, knowing that I really couldn't treat it. It was temporary — but for two years, it was like, "Well, we're going to be wrapping it up pretty soon." So I just got used to monitoring fairly low and if I took a mix out I'd listen to it at home, on a computer or in a car — all these various things to see what I liked about it and where things sat. Then I could come back and make the adjustments. I got used to working with the room. By the time this finished, apart from aesthetics, balance-wise I was able to nail things pretty quickly. Out in the live room, I just close-mic'd. There are a couple of tracks where drums were cut live, guitars... basically everything. But a lot of things don't have drums so that removes the loudness element. If I was tracking guitars and vocals, I'd set people up in a semi-circle so they could see each other. I'd dedicate instrument and vocal mics for whoever was playing and singing, but it was all close-mic'd. Every session was probably an hour and a half or two hours.

One extreme is to mic every drum, every instrument, every singer — and the other is having one or two mics like in the old days, where you get a balance by asking people or instruments to move closer or further back. How did you do it?

A: It was somewhere in between. If I didn't want drums to sound that close I'd put a mic three feet in front of the kick, at waist level, and then another one equidistant above the snare. Bleed was a big factor — good and bad. Primarily good because it would force me to obsess a little less at times. Guitars bled into the vocal mics, vocals bled into the guitar mics — not obnoxiously, but if I was trying to do something with the guitar and all the sudden I picked that frequency where I'm hearing pops from the vocal in the guitar mic, it didn't sit well with the lead vocal. Some mixes are mixed to mask that. Surprisingly I used yoga mats to wall off the drums. I mean, anything that was around: Mexican blankets, four-by-four throw rugs...

It seems like you wanted to get urgency in these tracks, too. How did you approach that?

A: I wanted performances. If time and scheduling allowed I'd get one artist, one featured artist — the primary person singing — and then two or three people accompanying. If that didn't work, then I'd get that artist singing and playing — and if it stood on its own, then great, but if I felt like I wanted more then I'd bring more people in. We always worked with the best take. Out of a hundred songs, maybe there are four that have the bridge from take two and then everything else from take three. But primarily it's one take. I might grab a vocal or a line that was brilliant in a bad take and fly that in.

I notice the lack of iso booths here, and how the cutting room lends itself to getting all the musicians together in a circle. That must've had an impact on the recording.  

A: Right, absolutely. And there were no headphones. Maybe 20 or 25 percent of all these sessions people would want headphones. But for the most part, it's like they're playing as if they were rehearsing.

Were artists hard to recruit or did you find yourself with a surplus of would-be participants?

M: It changed over time though, I think. When the first volume came out in 2006, I don't think everyone in the community or the school understood the level we were playing at, so I think everybody stepped it up a little but. The line got longer outside the studio, that's for sure.

How was it decided who did what songs?

M: Some of it was self-selected and sometimes John cast stuff. My role officially was executive producer but occasionally I had a couple ideas where I was like, "This person would be cool doing this."

A: When the first list was presented, it was like a 20-song thing with names scrawled next to it. I stuck with that at first because again, the original inception was going to be 10-12 songs. If it were a non-faculty member I would send them the list of things that hadn't been done, because it started to dawn on us that if you wanna get a good performance the artist has to have some connection to the song. So, I'd email them the list and say, "Pick a couple in order of priority and then we'll go from there." I'd basically let the artist choose.

Folk music is the oldest music that's passed on, and it seems like in these performances a lot of people took to it with a fresh attitude or angle.

M: I didn't want to this to be just a recording that this school put out, but a record — something that lives and breathes and has its own personality. On some of the songs that people would play fairly straight, John would add a little something on that was complimentary or sometimes he would take it someplace else.

What were some recording defaults that were successful time and again — either recording techniques or production techniques?

A: For guitars I took the Neumann KM84 and an Oktava MK012 — though with the Oktava, I have to clarify that this guy in Connecticut [The Sound Room] would import these mics, reject all the ones that didn't meet his specs, and then tweak the ones that did. The one I have sounds better than the Neumann at times, depending on the guitar. If it was one guitar player, I'd take the acoustic guitar and record stereo with those two mics — a little "X/Y" thing every time. Sometimes I'd only use one; sometimes I'd use both depending on what we put on there. If there were two guitars then one would get the Neumann, one would get the Oktava. For vocals, it would vary between a Rode NTK — it was tube Rode, relatively old for that company — a Neumann TLM 103 (that I bought straight from a warehouse in Germany when I was on the road), a Shure KSM44, and an Audio-Technica 4033. I'd use large diaphragm mics for the drums, a Beyer M 160 for the overheads. I had a Manley mono preamp that would usually get the vocal. If that wasn't here, the vocals would go through John Hardy mic pres.

This is a small space but there's some amazing equipment. You have some Sytek [MPX-4A] preamps as well.

A: Syteks are kind of unsung. And without the luxury of six hours for each session, it was just, "Get it up. Get it good." If it sounded like the guitar and the vocal worked, then that was it.

Did you cut to tape or computer?

A: We used Pro Tools. Volume 1 I did in Digital Performer and then I started to get a little tired of, "Well, it's just like Pro Tools." If I'm gonna keep doing this, which I have no desire or intention not to, I might as well make the jump. So right before we started Volume 2, I bought the Pro Tools HD rig, and my learning curve was on Volume 2 . My intention was to mix to tape, but that just never happened. But everything was getting bussed out into a Dangerous 2-Bus and then I would take that master output and run it though a two-channel [Apogee] Rosetta 200 and back into Pro Tools for the mixes. That worked really well. 

Creatively speaking, how were the songs approached?

M: John would bring me mixes in batches of three or four — and one thing we talked about a lot was that these were fairly simple songs. There are a lot of verses in folk music, and we talked about having some sort of progression through the song, making sure there was something dynamic going on.

A: Right. That they build in some way or another, whether it comes from a more emotive progression as verses go on, or if it's the attitude and the emotion simmering through the whole thing.

M: I think for one track I said to John — well, I probably said it on more than one track -"Everything that's going to happen in this song happens in the first 30 seconds." And as a listener, for me, I wanna hear something that changes in time.

Any moments where all expectations were exceeded beyond belief?

A: I met Michael Smith because I played bass with Weavermania! a couple of times and I loved him — he was a sweet guy. He came in to do "The Dutchman," which is one of his songs and he was upset at previous recordings because people had screwed up the words or played the wrong chords. So he came in with Barbara Barrow and he was like, "I'm not feeling too good. Maybe I'll have Barbara sing it," and I was like, "Michael..." No offense to Barbara because I love her and she's phenomenal — but she had already done a song for the project. I said, "Just give it a shot. If it doesn't work, come back in a couple weeks and we'll do it again." So I set a mic up for his guitar and for his vocal and set a mic up for Barb — she was going to do background vocals and they were facing one another. And he starts playing and I was in tears in here! I don't think I've ever been that moved. And I'm, "Oh my God — I'm recording this!" It was a ridiculously great moment. Barb sang and as soon as they finished the take — one take — "Michael that's it." He's like, "I was thinking about adding..." and I was, "No." And Barb walks in the control room and before I even played it back she goes, "Take my vocals out of there. I don't even know why I bothered to sing." And not out of disgust, out of astonishment. I pulled her mic out of the mix. Every once in a while, there's a faint, faint glint of her on the chorus. But literally, the track was done. And I was just wiping tears away from my eyes.