Chris Owens has spent the last 15 years in and around Louisville, Kentucky's punk/ hardcore scene. At his wonderfully-named studio, Headbanging Kill Your Mama Music, he's made great records with some of Louisville's finest, as well as plenty of out-of- towners: Coliseum, Breather Resist, Akimbo, Engineer, Young Widows, Cloak/Dagger, Ed Gein... the list goes on. Chris also plays guitar and sings in Lords, and their latest record is called Fuck All Y'All Motherfuckers, which pretty much says it all.
When did you decide, "Okay, I'm serious about recording?"
I dropped out of my second semester of college [in 1997] to be a rock and roller. I started my first for- real studio in a commercial sense in 2001. I had this warehouse loft space that was pretty fuckin' nightmarish. It was 7-foot ceilings, no heat or air and there were no glass in the windows when I got it. But I paid forty bucks a month for it.
Forty bucks?
It wasn't worth $41. That's where the first Lords full- length, Swords, was recorded. Eventually I moved into a slightly better space. A friend of mine [Kent Obryan] got a degree in engineering, and his mom helped him buy a building. He had a nice spot, but he didn't have much in the way of equipment. I had started to accumulate some fairly nice equipment.
The first Lords EP, The House That Lords Built, was recorded on ADATs and a Peavey Mark IV '70s console. I took all that stuff over to Kent's space to do the drums. His room has 12-foot ceilings, hardwood floors — a huge difference. It's good enough to get some really cool drums. We did the drums there, and from that point he was always like, "You should move in here and we'll team up." I was reluctant to do that for a long time — if I don't have to work with somebody else or in that kind of situation I'd rather not. But eventually I ended up moving in, and it's been working out pretty well. I don't pay rent — I pay a percentage of what I charge, which is convenient for times like this when I'm on tour for a month. Then I don't have to pay anything and Kent can use my stuff for free while I'm gone.
Is that where you do most of your work?
Yeah. Actually I've never recorded anything outside of my own studio. I'd like to. I've talked to a couple of bands about going different places, but it never ends up panning out.
Your rates seem really low. Maybe that's my San Francisco perspective.
It's definitely a geographic thing. You were talking about paying $750 a month [in San Francisco] for a rehearsal space... you could own a house [in Louisville] for less than that. I've been looking into buying a building. There are places I've been looking at that are 5000-square-foot commercial buildings in industrial areas, which are selling for $80,000 or $100,000. A mortgage on that is about $680 [per month]. Staying in Louisville is the one advantage. There's not as many bands as say, in San Francisco, but I'm a day's drive from anywhere on the East Coast. Probably more than half of the business I do is bands that travel to Louisville. It's oftentimes cheaper for them to do that than it is to record somewhere in their own town.
Most of your records have a similar sonic footprint — they're dark, they're un- hyped, they sound great loud. The drums are very present, but the cymbals aren't all shitty and bright. The kick drums sound like the opposite of most kick drums that you hear in heavy music these days.
Drums are one of the things that I enjoy and have the most ideas about. They can make or break a record. To me, that's the thing that makes an album heavy the most. When I listen to a lot of modern metal recordings, sometimes it sounds cool, but I'm just like, "That's not what drums sound like." I've never heard a kick drum, when I was in a room with it, that sounded like a finger snap with sub bass. I guess I just have a different vision of when I hear a band. I think I hear a certain way. When I do a recording, I'm trying to translate that. I guess most of the bands that I do — I don't do a lot of advertising or anything — if they find me, it's because they know what they're getting into, and that's what they want.
I think if most people tried to describe your records, they'd say, "That sounds very analog."
That's hilarious, because it's...
...totally digital, right?
Completely.
And you use Samplitude [by Magix].
That's the software I use. I've used Nuendo and Pro Tools. I was more familiar with Samplitude, so I stuck with it. Sonically I didn't notice a difference. Last year I ended up getting a DDA [DMR12] console, so now I use the computer like a tape machine.
So are you mixing on the DDA?
I am. But probably most of the records that you've heard haven't been, because I just got it a year ago. I do notice a significant improvement in my mixes. I always had this trouble with low end and getting stuff deep but not muddy, you know? That's a struggle that summing outboard seems to have largely negated.
You don't have that much outboard gear.
I've got a couple [Empirical Labs] Distressors, a [Universal Audio] 1176, some [FMR] RNCs and a couple of dbx units. With guitars and bass I never compress. So if I'm doing anything, it's usually drum bus or vocals. Most of the time I'll [compress] vocals on the way in.
How about rides?
I'll usually do all the automation on the computer. I can usually set the faders at zero.
So are you just summing on the DDA? Are you using the EQs?
I'm mostly summing through it, and on occasion I'll use a little bit of the EQ. I won't use a whole lot of EQ most of the time. Mostly what I do is with drum stuff — I have a couple of different drum busses and different levels of squashing and destroying going on with them.
Your drums definitely all have a certain thing. Maybe it's the room too?
Depending on the record, some of them were done at the old space and some were done at the new space — a lot of people don't know the difference when they listen. Swords was recorded at the old space, and the room — I mean it's like this [holds up hand], you know? And it was difficult — I had to do lots of cheating and trickery. People will sometimes talk to me about the drums, "Dude, they sound huge, like this huge, explosive room!" and I'm like, "No. No."
Do you approach most records similarly? Are your mic techniques consistent?
I rarely mic stuff the same. I have the drummer come in, set up his kit, we'll tune it and I'll just listen in the room and go from there. I usually start with the drums. I'll spend a lot of time with mic selection.
Are you building mixes as you track? How different are your basics from your mixes?
When I'm getting the basic stuff, I want to get it as close to what the end product will be as I can — as close to what the band wants the mix to sound like. Especially with the limited amount of gear that I'm working with, it's extra important to do that. But I don't really mix as I go. Sometimes I compress on the way in — with vocals a lot of times, occasionally kick drum, or sometimes room mics for effect. I never EQ going in. I try to keep as pure a signal as I can and work with mic selection and mic placement to get the sound that we want.
It sounds like you generally take drums first, with headphones and scratch everything else.
Not all the time, but most of the time — probably 90 percent of the time. It's just the limitations of space and equipment that dictate that. I've done stuff live, but there are a couple smaller booths and they totally sound like shit — way too many standing waves. I always think stuff sounds better in the big room.
Do you cut guitars in there?
I do everything in the big room when I can.
Do you typically distance mic guitars?
I usually do close and room mics. That way I can at least get the room mics for the amps similar to the way I had the room mics for the drums, so that it sounds cohesive.
That's pretty cool. Controllable bleed.
Yeah, yeah.
On Akmibo's Jersey Shores I notice there's reverb on the bass, or at least room sound on the bass.
I think I had an [AKG] 414 close, and then I had a pair of Oktava MK-012s like that [makes 180 degree sign] in front of the amp and I squashed them. It was like mid-side, but I didn't run it mid-side. It gives it a little air when it's just bass.
The Akimbo session was three weeks, right?
Yeah. They did two records. They did Navigating the Bronze and Jersey Shores all together.
Was that the session where the hard drive died?
Three days into recording. I think at this point we had three drum takes that were usable, so there wasn't this mass body of work that was totally erased. But it was three pretty grueling days worth of work. Partially that was grueling because Nat [Damm] refused to do any kind of splices or punches at all.
He wanted to keep it real?
Exactly, which is awesome in concept, but we were getting like one drum take done a day. I remember one song in particular — it was an 11-minute song, and the last six minutes was this whole crazy thing on the kick drum, and he would flub one and be like, "Fuuuuuck! Start it over!" [laughs] And I'm like, "No, man! It's great, we can deal with this. We can take it from this section. There are so many ways we can fix this." I ended up taking the hard drive to this guy who does data recovery for the FBI. It was gonna be $300 for data recovery for one hard drive, guaranteed or your money back, and he couldn't [do it]. [The data] was just gone. So we started over, made sure to back everything up after every take, which should be complete common sense. After that, Nat finally broke down and allowed me to do some splicing. He listened to it and he's like, "I can't even tell." And I'm like, "That's the point, man." Of course you can't tell.
So in a way the hard drive crash helped the session.
It definitely sped things along. We became a lot more time efficient, which ultimately created a better vibe and environment for everybody — because Jon [Weisnewski] and Aaron [Walters], they're sitting around. They're doing scratch takes, but in between, Nat's recuperating for an hour and a half, and we're kind of sitting around doing nothing. We set up a shooting range in the hallway with a BB gun and beer cans, and that's what we're doing for hours a day. After the disaster we actually picked up the pace.
How about Lords? Do you like engineering your own records?
I kind of hate it — well, not all of it. Mostly I hate doing my guitars. On every Lords record, it's been me by myself in the studio. I set up some mics, go press record, go back in the other room and play, listen to it, and fucking go back and forth like this by myself until I get a sound that I think is acceptable. Drums I don't mind so much. On the last Lords record [Fuck All Y'All Motherfuckers], on my end that was fairly easy. We spent a day setting up pretty leisurely, getting sounds we thought were good. We spent a long time tracking, because I was definitely cracking the whip on Eric [McManus]. There's no digital reverb on that last Lords record at all. It's all the room.
I saw one picture, those Avenson STO-2 omni mics taped to the floor.
That's a large, large part of the mix, as far as the drums go. It's probably 50/50 — the close mics and the room mics. I told Eric, "If you miss a hit or if you've got a weak hit, I can't turn it up in the room mic if it's not there." The idea going into it was we wanted loud, natural-sounding drums. We wanted it to sound like the drums sound in that room. If you want to do that and you want to hear everything, you gotta play it that way. So there's a lot of splices and a lot of him getting a little bit aggravated at times. I was fuckin' driving him to his physical limits. I was just constantly saying, "Harder! Faster!" He can do it — I've seen him do it. It was just a matter of doing it when the mics were recording. It worked out. Ultimately that's the best part of that record in my mind.
So then guitar...
What I intended to do was one take, set up all my amps and do one track of each song. I ended up doing the exact opposite. I just couldn't get the punch. Live I have [two sets of amps that] sound different, and I switch back and forth. The main thing was that switching, the impact of going from one side and quieter to both sides and loud. It doesn't translate. I had a Magnum 8x12 and a Marshall BX 4x12 on one side, and then a Fender Bassman 2x15 and a 4x12 on the other side. So I've got sixteen 12s and two 15s. When I'm in the room and I play it, it hits you in the chest. [Recorded] it just doesn't work. So basically there's three tracks on every song, all the way through — right, left and center. And I tried to meticulously, as best as I possibly could, match them up so that it didn't sound like Ozzy. Now I pretty much hate the way the guitar sounds. I'm not happy with it. It goes back to what I said before — you have a vision of a band. The guitars bother me because it's not what I wanted it to be.
Of all your records that I've heard, Young Widows' Settle Down City jumps out. It sounds out of character for you.
Evan [Patterson] had a lot of ideas. He'd say, "I want it to sound like this, but I want to record it like this." I was like, "Well... it's probably not going to work like that. You have to decide how you feel comfortable tracking it, or if you have this idea of exactly what you want the end product to be, then we have to work to make that happen." So there was a little bit of a struggle there. He had a lot of ideas about techniques that he insisted on doing, that...
...might not have matched up to the results he was hoping to hear?
Exactly. I still think the record turned out cool. Geoff [Paton]'s drums sounded awesome. He had one of those newer Gretsch kits with a 26x14 kick. I love the big, shallow drums like that — they just sound fuckin' awesome. The drums on that were fairly effortless. They just sounded good in the room.
The vocals are pretty wild. They're so not in your face, so distant and roomy.
That's another fake mid-side. That was a pair of 414s — one figure-8 and one cardioid. I squashed them both down significantly with slightly different attack times, and panned them. It gave some space and they kind of go off like that (gestures left to right).
Was he backed way off the mic?
Not really. He was probably six to eight inches off the mic.
I guess that figure-8 mic just gets tons of room.
Yeah. He was in the big room.
It sounds like Louisville really has a community — a lot of good things, a lot of bands. Is that true? How does it manifest itself?
It's something that's changed a lot over the years. I got involved in the early '90s, and what it is now is night and day different than it was then. There are definitely some cool things right now. There are lots of bars where people in bands work at and hang out. There's, I guess, a punk economy — there's an all-ages venue called Skull Alley that's pretty awesome — you have Monkey Drive, the screenprinting place where Evan from Young Widows works, and Shirt Killer.
As a recordist, how has that scene affected your career and your work?
From a career standpoint, not that much. My friends' bands from Louisville are the ones that don't have any money. My career as a recording engineer probably started with Lords. Young Widows was a big deal. But that Ed Gein record [Judas Goats & Dieseleaters] was probably the one that sold the most.
I would not have expected that.
I think that record has sold 18,000 copies. It's the whole Hot Topic scene. That was their thing at the time — Black Market Activities distro'd to Hot Topic.
Are you working full time?
Yeah, I've been I've been recording as my sole source of income for about five years.
Do you think you'll do it forever?
Yeah. It's awesome that now I can do it somewhat as a living. Probably by most peoples' standards I'm not doing that well financially, but if I can get to the point where I have super cheap overhead, super cheap rent and all I can do is record bands and play in bands, that's awesome.
I've talked to a lot of guys, they're 30-ish and they're saying, "I just don't know. I love doing this, but I hate doing this." I have a lot of friends and peers that move on. They get to that point where they say, "I could work in a factory," or, "I could be a lawyer." I could have this nice house and all this other shit. But I don't want that. What I want to do is do the things I like doing all of the time, and never do things that I don't like doing. To me that's what's important in life. I'm 31 fuckin' years old and I just moved out of my grandparents' basement a year ago, and I moved into my best friend's house, you know? Everything that I own are amps and microphones and a shitty van that barely runs. That's everything in the world that I have. I could do a lot of other things. I just don't want to.
