What were your first recording experiences?
I started using cassette 4-tracks in high school, and after that I had a reel-to-reel 1/4-inch 4-track. I was just recording my own sound collage stuff, not necessarily songs, per se. I discovered that if you put the microphone inside a tin can and sing into that you get a certain sound. If you use the microphone as a drum stick, you get a certain sound. I was heavily influenced by The Residents' early records, which were largely about experimenting with recording. They were messing around with the tape, tracking at different speeds, and using a lot of effects. Early Devo, too, their 4-track stuff.
What was it like for you when you first started recording bands?
Nerve-wracking. As soon as I shifted over to recording with other people involved, there became this stress factor of needing to get it right. If you didn't get it right — which I didn't at first — then the band would get pissed and you'd end up going and spending money to record anyway. I was in a band called the Roofies, a '60s garage girl-band kind of thing, and we got the chance to record at The Plant in Sausalito in 2000. Our friend Billy was an intern at The Plant, so he hooked it up. I think we had to pay some ridiculously small fee, like $100 a day. We toured the room that Sly Stone worked in, and sat in the hot tub that Stevie Nicks used to sit in. It blew my mind. The Plant has the '70s dripping from it... the hot tub especially. That session gave me a shot in the arm for wanting to be involved in recording. Just seeing the Neve console in there and hearing the sounds that we got out of it. I still managed to screw that up though; I took the two-inch tape and dumped it onto my computer and mixed it myself at home. I wish that we had actually followed through and mixed it there.
When you're a band member with some recording chops, it can be both tempting and difficult to mix your own work.
One drag is that economic concerns often trump sonic or fidelity concerns. I use that as a cautionary tale now when discussing budgets with bands: for most bands the mix is not a good place to save money. I'm generally happier with records that people track on their own that I then mix, than I am with records that I record in the studio and people mix on their own.
I've heard you say that you're not as interested in making perfect albums as you are in making unique albums.
I think that the perfect albums already exist. Everyone has his or her own idea of what a perfect album is, but it's less interesting to me to try to emulate that. It's more important to create something interesting than to create something "good," because I think interesting is more universal. If art is interesting it's going to be interesting to a lot of people. If it's "good," it's only going to be interesting to people who are interested in "good" art. Maybe it's just that records that contain unique timbres and ambiences affect me more emotionally than those that sound like other records we've been listening to forever. And it's not a fidelity issue — I'm equally as uncommitted to lo-fi as I am to hi-fi. I'm not interested in a certain level of fidelity as a trademark or as a lifestyle. My role is conveying a given performance in a compelling way, rather than just exhibiting the performance with a certain specific relationship to fidelity.
Like the server who presents a platter to the restaurant patron with a particular layout and flourish.
Or maybe the "seasoner." Somebody else is the cook, but at the end I get to choose whether it's going to have paprika or sage on it. And that's going to make a huge difference, but it's not going to alter the fact that it's either lamb or tofu. It's just going to color the perception of the person eating the food.
Tell me about your membership in Beulah [Tape Op #22], and how New, Improved Recording began. It seems like those were intertwined.
They were. I started this studio in 2003, while I was the bass player in Beulah. It was the first time I was in a band that did real touring, and it opened up my horizons. I was exposed to a lot of other musicians and insular scenes around the country and the world that I hadn't seen before. We would show up in some town and people would come up and hand us their demos. I was impressed that all these kids in these towns all across the world were recording their own music. I had thought of it as being so personal to myself up until then. That was also when I started reading Tape Op and online forums, and I started thinking of it as more of a community. I was developing my skills to the point that I felt like I had something I could offer other people. Around that same time John Finkbeiner — a good friend of mine with whom I had played in bands for years — was having the same feeling, so we opened NIR together. He and I had done an internship with Myles Boisen [Tape Op #30] at Guerrilla Recording in Oakland, which had changed my idea of what was possible. We saw that Myles could make a living doing this thing and that he could achieve a high level of quality in a relatively modest situation. I knew that was the road I wanted to go down. I knew I didn't want to just go and get an internship at The Plant, or at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley — I wanted to do it myself. I knew it would be harder that way in some respects because I would be learning a lot more on the job.
And be putting a lot more of your own money into it.
When you decide "I'm going to open up a studio," people are coming in and expecting a certain level of quality because they're spending money with you. That's a different kind of pressure than being an intern or being an assistant to an engineer somewhere.
Studio ownership puts you in a spot where you have to force yourself to deliver as opposed to just helping other people along.
Being an assistant is really hard work. But when you're the only one having to answer to people, you have to get your shit together a little quicker. When the clock is ticking, you are absolutely obligated to come up with efficient solutions to problems. I think it was Steve Albini who has a quote that a recording engineer's job is really just problem-solving. I think that's a reductionist way of looking at it, but there's a huge part of the job that is problem-solving. When something isn't working right, you need to solve that problem. When something is working right, you need to solve the problem by not fucking with it. Which is something that has taken me a long time to learn: Don't fuck with something that's already right. The hard part is learning to recognize when it's right.
In addition to running NIR you've done a fair amount of tracking and mixing at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco. What was your first experience there?
As a musician. The last two Beulah records were recorded at Tiny Telephone, The Coast is Never Clear and Yoko. They weren't mixed there — they were mixed in Nashville. I got to go check out some fancy Nashville studios for the Yoko mix. The fantastic Roger Moutenout [Tape Op #20] mixed it. Hanging out with Roger and seeing how he works was really a huge influence on me.
What were the primary things that you took away from your experience with Moutenout?
I think one of the things is that he's not precious. He doesn't regard things in a white glove kind of way. He really gets his hands dirty. He's goal-oriented, not process-oriented. He doesn't care how he gets there, which I admired. It's like, "This just has to work and we'll make it work however we can." He takes the task at hand seriously and gets things done without worrying much about if he's doing things the right way, so to speak.
How did you acquire enough equipment to run a commercial studio?
It has taken a long time. For years we reinvested most of the money we were making back into gear. We made a decision a few years back to not buy gear that we weren't going to want for a really long time. So that's when we got the Millennia 8-channel HV3D and the Pro Tools HD system. Chandler gear - there's no upgrade path from Chandler; you can only go sideways from there. You can get different flavors, but you can't get anything better than a TG1 limiter.
Do you have an eventual goal, gear-wise?
I don't think anyone could possibly have that - like an end point where you stop buying gear? We're at a point with equipment now where I feel that if I can't make a good record with what we have, I should probably quit. I can't blame anything on gear anymore — I can only blame it on myself. There are pieces of gear I would love to have, but I don't think anything else is essential. Mostly I buy instruments these days, like analog synthesizers, a '60s Ludwig drum kit or an old Estey folding pump organ.
Bob Hodas helped you tune your control room. When did you decide that you needed to have the room tuned and how did you go about doing it?
Well, my mixes weren't translating. I would spend 10 hours in here mixing and I would get home and it sounded like shit. And then the mastering engineer would say, "Hmm, sounds like you're not hearing 120 Hz very well in your room," or "Boy, there's a lot of 2.5 kHz in there." So I realized I should probably do something about our monitoring. Also, I had done a lot of gear reviews over the years so there was kind of a revolving door of speakers that were coming through here for a while. We finally landed on two sets of speakers that I really love: the ADAM P22As and the Bag End M6s — that was essential. But even so, the mixes still weren't translating, so I knew it wasn't the speakers' fault anymore — it was how they were placed in the room. That's when it became clear that we needed Bob in here. He spent a day with us and it's the best $800 we've ever spent. We moved speakers around, set different calibration levels on the Dangerous Monitor ST and adjusted the on-board speaker settings a little bit.
Wait, I thought when you tune a room, I thought that was putting up all the treatment...
It could be. We didn't really need anything. This room was actually purpose-built for being a control room even before we moved in here, so for us it was speaker placement and calibration level between the subwoofer and the mains. Beyond that, you can get into acoustic treatment of the room and EQ on your monitors. If we bought a high-end stereo parametric EQ, we could get a little closer, but we're so close to flat that he said, "If you want to spend the money on it, great. If not, just learn that little bump there around 160 Hz." But also, where you stand in the room makes a big difference. No room is absolutely flat everywhere in the room. So it may be flat in the sweet spot and you move a foot back and it changes. In order to learn it, though, you need a solid starting place.
So this setup is very particular — you don't move those speakers.
Oh, no. Nobody touches them. And that's when I stopped doing monitor reviews for magazines.
