We ran part one of this interview in Tape Op #8. In case you missed it, Don discussed all the events in his life that led him into the recording studio and left us hanging at the point where he was about to begin work on the first REM records. Thanks for waiting, and here we go...
Here's the atmosphere when this band comes on the scene: their immediate successful influence band was B-52's. And their initial gigs were party gigs, just like B-52's. The way that Stipe got the lyrical content that he did get into these records was that nobody could hear it or gave a shit, not because they had big meetings about what it was going to be. Their lack of knowing what each other was doing was a big part of the success. Mitch and I recognized that that was one of the strengths, and that if we began changing elemental things about them to make them sound more like they were from Memphis, then we would lose the more interesting, but perhaps more commercial, aspects of their party band. The label didn't necessarily understand this, they just said, "Well, here's a band that people seem to like." Despite how cool people perceive IRS as being, they spent a lot of money on the Alarm. And they put a lot of pressure on us to deliver Thompson Twin-like singles for them because that's what was hot. We were looking at an era, where almost especially in hip, college scenes, it was almost all British, almost all drum machines, almost all synthesizer. Guitars were dead. As a matter of fact, REM was scared to death of any kind of vague distortion on a guitar at all. We [the producers] had come from the house of the Holy Grail of distorted guitar-land. Guitar sounds to us were boxes turned up loud. It wasn't this clean thing. So we had to work hard to get guitar sounds we could stand, that we felt like did something, that meant anything, that wouldn't also make them [REM] go "Oh, I heard some distortion, people are going to think that we're a hair band!" or whatever label people were using back then.
Did his playing make your job easier though? Lots of arpeggiation — did you sit there and go, "Roger McGuinn, OK, lemme think of the Byrds records, how they were recorded"?
Maybe, but Byrds records have lots more classic guitar sounds that we were allowed to have, especially on that first album.
A lot more compression too.
Maybe so, but we got the compressors working very hard on those records. But what we tried to do was use them playing almost everything, the basic parts. I played bass on "Perfect Circle" or because Mike Mills was playing piano, and it just needed a real plain sort of bass part. So "Perfect Circle" is Mills and Bill Berry, one's playing a tack piano, and the other one's playing the regular Yamaha piano, both at the same time, real close together, I just had one mic on them.
So most of the songs were done live?
No, not necessarily. I always try to make everybody play together, and then I use whatever sounds I can. Typically, if bands already know their songs, they play better all together. If they're hearing the singing, then they know where they are and they don't have to count. That's a big thing, trying to get the guys to sing.
Were REM comfortable in the studio at this point [during the Murmur sessions]?
Not really, they didn't know much about it. What happened is that IRS signed them, said, "OK, now you don't want to make these backwoods records anymore," you know, they're in California. They knew that Mitch Easter, he's probably in the Klan or something [laughter]. So they encouraged the band to work with some guy from Boston, relatively well known guy, Steve "something-or-other". He took them in the studio and made them do the typical thing of beating them to death, made them do 800 takes of a song, told them that Bill sucked, that Bill couldn't possibly play on the record, that they'd have to replace him. He produced these not very good recordings, very modern by 1981 standards, which meant it sounded like the Cars. Which is not horrible, just not exactly what we had in mind. I mean, our records are kind of close, they're not real ambient, they're kind of simple. The ambiance that is there is live, and then we had one EMT plate that we used a lot. It was like, slap delay, my favorite, 151 ms with a 440 machine going, [tape] slapping. So anyway, REM had this horrible experience with these guys, and said "please let us try some songs with Mitch." At which point, Mitch had never been in a real studio, and they IRS said, "well, OK, but you can't record in his garage, you've got to go to a real studio." So Mitch called me up and asked me if I was interested and willing to help and I said sure. So we went to Charlotte and recorded "Catapult" and "Pilgrimage". The guitar amp on "Pilgrimage" was some sort of solid state amp that just happened to be there, because he didn't bring an amp. It was some little Casino amp, one 12". The guitar sounded great, as good as he ever sounded, before he discovered that yes, you can turn it up. We continually encouraged them to turn it up, and they were pretty open to things, but they would also let you know if they were worried about something, and we'd work around it. They always had a certain kind of fanatical following, even when it was tiny. But nobody thought at the time that this band was going to be the next big thing. There was a lot of pressure at the time, the Police were big, U2 kind of big too. I have always tried to protect what is good about a band, and just kind of softening the things that aren't as good.
So how about the story about Michael singing through a handheld mic out in the stairs. You know, too shy to sing in front of you guys, that sort of thing.
It's not so much that. We did, without asking him, simply set him up in the stairwell. Where nobody could see him. He was definitely using really nice mics, though he might have done one song or something that we gave him a handheld mic for, but I don't remember. Typically we used a FET-47 on him for the whole thing.
Was there a particular reason you set him up in the stairwell?
I personally liked singing in the stairwell a lot. I liked the way it sounded, because it's got a little bit boxy sound, a slight sort of bedroom clank to it, so it wasn't totally dead. And you could turn the lights off, nobody could see you. Now it's got a glass door, so you can peek in there. But at the time, there were two doors between the stairs and the studio.
Did you do that with everybody?
Not everybody, but a lot of singers. To avoid that fishbowl effect. He was pretty secretive and a bit shy. Plus, I'm also the kind of person who is not interested in seeing lyrics. I want to have to hear what's going on, I don't want to be given the opportunity to say, "oh that's not what he's really saying." It's not a judgemental thing, it's to avoid thinking about whether the singer is articulate enough, because that doesn't matter. And so much of Stipe's writing was sound-oriented anyway. And as a singer myself, I'd been given an earful of "You're not articulate enough, you fucking shit," my whole life and I would say stuff like, "Well, what is Mick Jagger saying here you asshole?" I was tired of small-minded, idiot producers. I learned most of what not to do from guys [that were] producing me.
It was all over articles for years, though, about how inarticulate he was, as if they'd never heard a guy where you can't understand anything. Which is of course bullshit.
Yeah. And many of our favorite songs became hits because people were obsessed trying to figure out what they were talking about. I wasn't even being that conscious about that. We were mostly like, "Mike, you can sing anything you want to. I'm not going to tell you what to sing. You tell me when you feel like it's good enough, I'll tell you if you're more out of tune than you need to be." It was kind of that simple.
Did you and him have an immediate bond because you were both singers?
Not really. On the whole, they kind of just looked at me as the technical guy anyway. Because they didn't know me as well as they had known Mitch, and they didn't know me musically and they knew Mitch musically. I had records on Warner Brothers with bands that played in coliseums, so I was like the enemy anyway.
Did they ever show any attitude to you? Act standoffish?
No, they were fine, it was no big deal. But I was just sort of Mitch's friend that Mitch wanted to help on this. They didn't know anything about what I had done, really. But they were good, I tried a few things. On one of those records, I did this real sophisticated vocal arrangement for something and we actually recorded it and listened to it, before we all said, "Well, this is too much for you guys." They were relatively patient.
Alright, let's jump ahead to after it comes out. It was starting to make a difference right from the get-go.
Well, the band had huge critical success and a very heavy, diehard serious cult following. The Rolling Stone response to Murmur was very strong, but it still didn't sell many records. I mean, it sold maybe 100,000 in the first year. And college radio wasn't very organized, with no real charts for it. And I wish it was still like that, only regional charts.
So did your phone just start ringing at this point? Did your standing in the industry immediately go up, was the industry hip to the critical acclaim coming in, or was it still indifferent to that?
Yes, that stuff helped a lot. The problem was that those people didn't really understand why REM was successful. They thought it was just about being obscure and not playing the guitar very well.
Did you get points on that record?
Not much, I think Mitch and I split 3 points, which is actually pretty decent. We didn't get much of an advance. The budget for the first record was slightly under $15,000 and the second was not much more.
Wow. How long did it take you?
We did our typical kind of 21 day sort of thing on the first one and a few days less on the second.
What kind of days were we talking? Eight hours, twelve?
I never work less than twelve. Probably fourteen, typically.
OK, here's a big thing, is ear fatigue a myth?
If you don't listen too loud, you don't get ear fatigue. If you're standing in front of loud amps, or mixing at a level that a lot of people mix at, then, yeah it's a real thing. Absolutely.
I've come around to mixing at real low levels. Because you see what jumps out.
You've got to check it out at high volumes every once in a while, to check for squeaks, pops, and noises you don't hear. But your blending should always be done at kind of low levels.
When you mixed those records, were the songs mixed at the same time?
I prefer to record and mix as I go when I'm in a situation where I can do that. I think you stay focused that way.
Was it an intense mixing experience, with tons of mixes on each song?
We would get mixes up, and once everybody was happy with them, we did it. I think it's very important that the band is there for mixing. You have to defend your decisions to them at that point, if one guy says, "turn me up," you have to explain why he's at the right volume already. And also, sometimes they're right. Sometimes you're concentrating on one particular aspect, and yes indeed, the bass is not quite up loud enough. So you say "thanks, man," and fix it. Or you get to the third bar, and they say "oh, that part is not supposed to be there," and you wouldn't know that, and if they're not there at the time, you have to go back and redo the whole damn thing. So I like having the band around, I almost insist that they are. Unless they completely agree that, when I'm happy with the mixes, they're done.
Well, you know, a lot of bands don't stay for the mixing, obviously. But it's good when a band at least knows the fundamental idea of recording.
Part of what my job is as a producer is to kick the fuckers out of the nest. I'm not interested in doing records for them and perpetuating a career I don't even like. I'm interested in them learning everything they can from me.
That's the most frustrating thing we run into, that so many of these people don't know the basics. And I didn't either, but I tried to listen and learn instead of talk and learn. I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon, but some of these young bands come in, don't know anything, and just start going off and it ends up becoming distracting and taking us away from what we have to do.
Extremely distracting, but it's the real thing. You guys are in a tough position, because until you get a gold record on your wall, they won't shut up.
One more thing on the REM stuff, when you recorded it, is there anything that really stands out, or any secrets or anything? I mean there's a mythology about Murmur, and I think it's funny when you say there's not a lot of ambiance on that record, because most people would think that everything was miced twenty-five feet away on that record.
Some things are. Ambiance was the wrong word. It's still kind of a close record. We're not real far away from the drums on that record. We don't have a lot of big, cracking room around them. They're still pretty compact, kind of deep. We were looking for... an alternative way to fill the spectral area where there was no fuzz. Or bass. So what that did was it opened up this darker snare drum area that we could use. A lot of these songs have boxy, sorta Memphis snare drums on them, because they cut up, they filled the spectral area out nicely without covering anything up. Those drum sounds won't make it through big fuzz guitar sounds.
Those records inspired an entire sound. What do you think the essence of that sound was?
I believe you, but it's hard for me to see it that way. Peter was not interested in being a lead guitar player, which is probably the key to his more inventive style. Since he didn't know many chords, he'd make up these arpeggiated things, but he'd listened to lots of records and was real musical, so he had all this stuff swimming around in his head.
Did you use a lot of close micing with 57's?
Hard to remember. I'm not one of those guys who just sets up an amp and does a whole record. We messed around with different things. And Mitch too was hugely involved in these guitar sounds.
Was the Rickenbacker one of the biggest aspects of that sound?
Well, the single-coil sound of the Rickenbacker is a real thing. The pickups are very low output, very smooth. Which can cause an amp with peaks in it to have really peaky notes. [We used] lots of fast limiting to even these things out with under-compression after the fact. Like take [Urei]1176 [compressor]'s and run the two mix separate and just push them up under the whole mix. So you're not taking the stuff off the top, you're just bringing everything that is soft up. You've still got more transient than if you were beating it all down here, but you've got an ultra-compressed mix with really fast release times under everything so that the cymbals ring out a little bit more, everything rings out a little bit more. But the top isn't crushed down.
So what amp were you using at that point? Did you introduce him to the Vox
AC30?
We used a lot of different things. Probably we introduced him to the AC30... I brought in one I'd had forever.
But he was conscious not to overdrive it. We've found the Rickenbacker to be thin a lot of times, how do you combat that?
A lot of what you're doing when you're trying to get cleanish guitar sounds and still have some power to them is you've got to have those compressors working overtime. But you've got to be careful with the attack times, because you can't take all the attack away. So one of the things that we would do is under-compression. You take your microphone and you split it into two signals. You have one without any compression coming up on a fader and then you have one with lots of fast attack and fast release on the fader right beside it. And then you assign both of those faders to one track. What you end up with is a fuller version that still has all the peaks.
The bass on those records is quite good too.
Yeah, the first album was pretty much a direct bass sound. He was playing a Rick then too.
Did you 1176 that as it came through?
Oh, I'm sure. We had lots of compressors. I may have been using something different on that one.
Why go direct?
I go direct almost exclusively just because I'm too lazy to set it up. It depends very specifically on what I want to do. On this other record I did bass entirely through a Twin Reverb. 10's are better for bass than 12's. So with Mike, one of the discussions we had before Reckoning was that he wanted a bass sound that was more like his live sound. So I went to see him play in this little pizza place in Greensboro, right before we went in. And we started that record without Mitch. I was in there first about three or four days doing initial setup. So for Reckoning, we set up his bass amp in this long tube, a gobo-built tube. It was about twelve feet long, completely isolated with four 12" speakers out at the end, and I miced him maybe six or seven feet out into the tube.
Do you remember what mic you used?
It would have been a large diaphragm mic of some sort. Could have been an AKG.
So after the success of those records, what kind of changes have you made [in your production style]?
Well, in some ways those records were successful, but those were not the kind of records that most major labels liked. They would say, "Oh, this band could sound real good if they got a real producer." Because they were different sounding records for the time. And most people I guess just assumed that there wasn't quite as much technique and forethought going into how those records sounded.
Do you think it had anything to do with the South?
Of course it did. There is still a gigantic Southern prejudice. It is unprecedented. It's different now then it was back then. At the time it was more of an LA-New York-Nashville thing. And LA and New York were bowing down to London anyway. We realized that everything grew better in a petri dish of isolation. Out of LA you got Toto, which was extremely successful and extremely technically brilliant, and who fucking cares? Those guys could really play but I could never even make myself listen to that stuff on the radio.
How quick did IRS let you know that you would do Reckoning? Were they happy with Murmur?
Well, they came back and said, OK, it's time to make another one. Remember, the band had the leverage to get us in the first place. They did what the label asked them to do by trying out the other producer, but the label ultimately let them have their way. The critical success helped, but that didn't really carry over much to us.
Were you aware of how that jangle-pop thing began to formulate? Because in the mid-eighties, it was everything.
We knew those bands were there already. They just didn't have record deals, didn't have hits. Those guitars were still there, they didn't come out of thin air.
Do you feel that Reckoning was a continuation of Murmur or more of a departure? Did the fact that they were on the road have anything to do with it?
Well, yeah, Mills had a more specific idea of what he wanted to sound like. They hadn't had the same casual atmosphere in which to write their songs, so they were a little more nervous about the material. That record got great reviews, there wasn't a sophomore reaction, and it sold more than Murmur.
So the Smithereens were the next big project, right?
Yeah, they were on Enigma, with a ten thousand dollar budget. They had already got started on some tapes with Jim Ball at the record plant. They tricked me into agreeing to make the record by, well, Pat was working at Folk City and Marti and I were playing there and he had a photographer show up to take the picture of me signing the contract that I had not agreed to sign. The whole band was there. No one at Enigma really liked them, except this one guy. And they did really well. That was a great record, a ten-day record. That's all Fender amps, at the Record Plant so it was through a nice API console. And those APR tape recorders, very good sounding. As if that matters, right?
Was Green Thoughts the next one after that?
Green Thoughts we made at Capitol B.
Now how was it to work in there? I mean, oh man...
It was cool, it was good. I don't have a collector's mentality about recording at different studios... what it boils down to is get this thing on tape efficiently and with as little technical interference with the performance as you possibly can. Do all your technical interference as quietly and as unobtrusively as you can so the artist feels like you've done nothing. If the artist can come in and play and thinks they're great and that they sound great, and that you're just sat there and picked your teeth, then you've done a perfect job, because they're going to be the most relaxed, the most confident, and they're going to have the fire from having that confidence and feeling like they're God. If you get in there and you beat them down, and act like everything is a big deal, then they're just going to get bummed out and feel like they suck.
It's about making the atmosphere and the environment of the session.
And some people respond to different things. Some people like to have their chocolate and their brandy and a little rug, and some people like to feel like they're in a bedroom to make a record.
I think a lot of local studio people get caught up on, "everything has to be done just like this," with the technical aspect.
The technical aspect is so liquid. There are a million different ways to get the thing on tape in a useful fashion. There is no absolutely right way to do anything. It's very specific to the specific singer, guitar amp, or just the atmosphere of that day. The barometric pressure has a huge influence on the way a microphone sounds. And that's not something you can control with air conditioning. There are things that work better than others, or things that you have faith in that you're never going to work without. But this whole thing of, "you've got to stand on this spot in front of this mic to sound like Big Joe Turner," is not apropos to every singer. It's not even apropos to Big Joe Turner, every time he sang. There are incredible sounding Little Richard records that were made with two mics. The saxophone player stood inside the door to play his background part and turned towards the door to play the solo. And those records sound really good... You have to do that on four track when you're trying to make these big records. The Beatles things were a lot of guys playing at the same time. One of the bad things about modern recording is that everything is so isolated that people aren't paying attention to the nature of the interaction. And there is a difference in the way things sound when you're eight feet away and when you're four inches away. If you just record the guy four inches away and turn him up and down, it doesn't sound the same. For example, on old Beatles records, the way the drums sounded when there was singing and when there wasn't singing. Because you would have live vocal tracks and when John would quit singing, the drum leakage would come up because of the compression. So lots of times I'll fake that with ducking or undercompression so the vocal can be loud, the drums actually kind of duck a bit when the singing is happening — you'll have like an ambient mic that ducks a bit and then the singing stops and it fills back in.
Spector records were the same way, when they start singing everything drops down, and then when there's an instrumental passage, everything comes up. You hear the piano start to pound...
Well, a lot of that is just the overall compression. Slow program compression. Another thing that I tried to get everybody to do is do a song live to two track. That's some of the most fun I had on REM records; those B-sides were all live to two track. Or sometimes we would record binaural, using a binaural head that I'd make just using a box, I don't carry a real binaural head around. I use a tape box and make one. Everybody was positioned around the room to have the right perspective. Lots of times it would be live to two track with a live mix. Like Marshall Crenshaw and his "Steel Strings". That's all live, except for Mitch's guitar, up in a big concrete room in a warehouse. And I'm singing my backup part at the console as I mix it...
Did you ever learn drum machine programming, that sort of thing?
I've always owned drum machines, because they're practical. I always used Dr. Rhythms as weird drum machines in their early days. I bought a Drumulator when it first came out, because it had a really good sound. It is still one of the few drum machines that actually sounds kind of like recordings of drums. Recordings are not pumped up at all, they're very kind of plain. So you can fake it pretty well with one of those.
Have you done a lot of your and Marti Jones' solo stuff at home?
Marti's records have been mostly expensive real records. Her last record we did a lot of singing, and we actually did most of that recording at home. The drums were all recorded at this church in Charlotte, using the Reflection mobile unit. But most of the rest of it was done in studios.
What is your home setup like?
It's just ADATs and a Mackie, just like everybody else has. I use a FET-47, an old U-47, but a FET. I have a 4050 which is very good for a lot of things. I use a Drawmer which I like because it's a real fuzzy mic preamp. Compressors...
We don't know much about compression, we're more coloration guys. When we turn on the Joe Meek, we can hear what it does. When we turn on the DBX 160's, we can hear that. So nowadays, do you work out of Reflection mainly?
This year I've made a record in New York, tracked it there and mixed it at Reflection. Also made one at Reflection and my house and mixed it at Reflection. Their basic setup is two rooms and the church. I made one record late last year in the church. They have one big room, A, with a Neve and your choice of 48 analog or 48 digital, but it's the Sony digital systems. The tape recorders can move to either room. And then they have a smaller room, C, that I also like, mostly for jazz stuff. Good pianos in both rooms, a B-3, vibes, all that stuff. There's a Sony console, a 3000, which is actually the best console ever made, but nobody knows it or gives a shit.
So when you walk into a studio, do you have a rack of stuff that you take?
I take a few things around. Two things that I like to have is a couple 1176's, which studios often have, and then I bought those distressors, the EL8's, just because not everybody has those. To do some of the drum sound things I like to do you need something that is really fast, on attack and release. They have added benefit of doing the LA2A really well, and doing a respectable Fairchild. But the two things I always take are a Roland 3000 delay line, and I always set it to 151 ms, with the filter in. And I take a PCM60, because its short room, nobody else has that short room and I like that sound.
Do you take any mics with you?
Depends on where I'm going. Usually not, I mean I don't own a big rack of esoteric microphones. Typically I can do pretty much the techniques I need to do as long as they have mics that can do figure-8, and omni. I'm a big fan of omni, I typically keep most mics in omni. And most mics that do omni also will also do figure-8. You need figure-8 for a few plumbline-style techniques, because of your phase. You've got to be very conscious when you're micing of phase planes and making sure that you can see your image through whatever it is you need to see it through. A little added benefit of digital is that you can slow tracks down, like on an ADAT, you can take your close mics and slow them down until they're in a phase plane with your overheads.
One thing that, when you read MIX and they interview people who work in the bigger studios like you do, is they kind of become elitist with that equipment, where I can't relate to it. But you, being someone who has worked in huge studios, you still have a positive view towards smaller studios.
Well, the great thing about the technology of starting with these little four track cassette decks, or actually with the Teac 3340, it was a real revolution for Chris and Mitch and me, all of us, was that it allowed us to do much better sounding recording at home than we'd ever been able to do. We could afford these tape recorders. We couldn't afford a Scully and keep it working. I bought a Teac and one of those little boxes that had four inputs and two outputs and four switches, left, right, and center. Pan pots should be eliminated anyway, you should just be dealing with left-right-center. You can sit there and obsess about stuff that doesn't matter with panpots. One of the best things about panpots is that you can take something that's fully panned and, just by bringing it slightly in, you can actually make it seem like it's dropping back and out. Panpots are definitely useful, you can take things that are lined up and sometimes expose them, but as soon as you hit the mono switch your blend might not be very good. But if you're dealing with things where it takes that to expose the part, then there may be another issue with the part that needs to be dealt with. I keep a pair of little Auratones stacked, so you just hit the minis and it's got the mono sound immediately. It's like you have that whole different perspective on the mono blend, so you hear what that TV/boom box thing is going to be. And also, always check the blend from a different room, because that tells you so much more about where your vocals are riding. Leave the room, stand outside, and if something is sticking out too much or not enough, you can easily tell it. But everything sounds a little bit different on every speaker, so you can't mix for every speaker.
Is the [Yamaha] NS-10 the best bet for speakers?
I wouldn't mix a record on NS-10's if somebody paid me an extra million dollars. I just don't like them. Never thought they sounded good. They got famous because [Bob] Clearmountain used them for a year, and he quit using them right away. I love Genelecs, I like the 01's. In general, a two-way is better than a three-way. The fewer crossovers, the less you're trying to guess what is going on with the phase. There is a series of JBL's that I used to mix on that sound very good with certain amps. The best thing about Genelecs is that they sound good and they're powered, which means they sound the same, so your damping factor doesn't change, and the damping factor of the amplifier into the speakers is really the key on what's going on in the low end. The main thing is just getting used to something. If I had gotten used to NS-10's...I have a lot of friends who have made very good sounding records on NS-10's. But the few times I have been listening to things on NS-10's, it has been very hard to tell what is going on in the middle. I think the middle on NS-10's is very colorful, and because of that I don't relate to them.
It's all a matter of getting used to something and using it. The rooms all sound a little bit different. Nearfields are more important. If a room has good well-tuned big speakers, that's good to check your deep bass, to make sure you're not overdoing something down low, and to check for noise. But anything that you're used to at low volumes, and especially something that rounds off all the extremes and allows you to hear what is going on in the midrange is really helpful. So, basically, I'm not a snob about any of the equipment. There are certain things that are difficult to do without a very nice piece of equipment. But if somebody put me on a desert island and said I had to make this record with all 635A's I think I'd make a pretty good sounding record. It's still more about music than it is about sound.
Do you find the Mackie to be useful?
Mackies are incredible. It's phenomenal that they can make something that costs $1000 and is totally clean, the EQ's don't ring, and it's an incredibly useful, workable piece of equipment. The good thing about the particular sound of that 11K shelf that they have in there is that it doesn't ring. You can use a lot of it. The Neve is much ringier in the top end, because of the nature of the feedback loop in the EQ section, and can get kind of obnoxious. Whatever Mackie has done on this shelf, you can use a lot of it and it doesn't ring. It actually sounds very good with those Coles [4038's], which you have to use a lot; you have to turn it all the way up. If you made 11K as your center of a broadband width on the top of the Neve, and made it a shelf and turned it all the way up, it would ring like hell, it would not be as good sounding as the Mackie.
You probably don't use the preamps much on there.
I wouldn't be able to say. I don't cut anything on there at all, so I wouldn't have any judgement of the preamps.
I think they're pretty decent actually. We've cut with them. The thing that brought it home to us was, we were reading an article about Lou Reed recording his last album, and his engineer was talking about preamps. And they had Neves and Manleys and Mackies. And he said the Mackie came in third place every time, but he couldn't believe how close it was. It was a close third. The gap was a lot smaller than he thought it would be, and those Manleys are like $2000 a channel.
Manleys and Neves are real different, like apples and oranges. The biggest problem with the Manley is that it doesn't load up with every tape recorder and every console well. I use Manleys a lot, and the Manley compressors are really good. But the preamp has a certain load that it works well into. Neves people like because there is a certain butchness to the way they sound, and that butchness is slightly colored. They're over-engineered with discrete electronics, as are the Manleys.
So talk about the Pat [from Smithereens] record.
We recorded it on two inch, and I did all my editing that way. It's a bit quicker than the digital Sony, because that's like video editing in that you do it with copying and SMPTE sync. So two-inch editing, state-of-the-art 1970, we go in there and wack it apart and glue it back together. Then we immediately dumped the stuff to digital as we would get tracks that we liked. I made ADAT copies of that and we did all the guitars and the singing at my house. Then went back and laid all the stuff onto the Sony digital.
Now, when you do vocals at your house, how do you do that?
In the basement; I'm in the same room as the singer. I'm recording pretty clean, a little compression.
Was it a conscious decision to jump all around?
Well, we just didn't want to waste a bunch of money at the studio for that stuff. Real expensive musicians, the two guys were really expensive, so a bunch of the money was spent on them. So instead of spending $1500 a day in the studio, we just went back to the house for a week.
So who takes care of the editing? The assembly of it?
Well, his record is pretty complicated. We have a lot of cross-fades and a lot of sectional things. But I assembled it all there just to see how things worked, but I reassembled in mastering. The way I master, I master almost everything with Greg Calbi. I've probably done fifty albums with him. He uses Sonic Solutions, so we do pretty much all our analog moves going in to that. And we try different converters. We may use a different converter for every song going in, A to D, depending on what we want it to sound like. Because they all have slightly different characteristics, and you want to bring something out... And here's the thing that bothers me about this anti-digital stuff: people are making all these judgements about what stuff sounds like as if digital can't replicate it. Listening to CD's, which are as about as unsophisticated digital technology as exists, it still sounds pretty good. But if you're making some critical judgements about the top end of digital while listening to a CD, you're an idiot. Because if you're claiming to hear some difference about your analog recording while listening to a CD, then the subjectivity has become ridiculous. Every digital tape recorder out there sounds better at the fringes, including ADAT, than CD's. But all the converters sound a bit different, as do the players. There are lots of differences out there. As long as you're willing to listen to a CD, then you should not be anti-digital.
But don't you think the fringes is where people prefer analog, because the fringes are rounded slightly?
No. In theory, here's what is happening: Analog goes on forever no matter how far down it gets. Digital, because of memory being so expensive when they developed it, they just picked twenty thousand cycles and cut it off. The truth of the matter is that the stuff that is really going on is gone by 12K anyway. Musically, the residual aspects of these things are so arbitrary, particularly with vinyl recordings. The cartridges all sound so different, and so do the preamps. There are a huge number of variables there that are more consistent with digital. I think a lot of the initial problem with digital is that people were applying analog recording techniques. And especially re-EQ styles to it that brought out a harshness that was not just in digital, it would have been in analog if you actually got back what you put down. And there are a lot of deaf engineers who listen to things too loud, which is why things have gotten brighter and brighter.
How did Connie Francis get that overdriven sound?
Well, listen to Aretha's records. Those mics and tube preamps get into high levels of distortion, bringing out lots of high end. Which is one of the good things about the Drawmers, that it doesn't have very much headroom, so you can get that stuff.
Do you think we can pull the Altecs that far?
Sure, they were probably using those.
You were talking about going to Greg Calbi for mastering. But we have to send stuff away for that, and a lot of times it comes back and people complain it doesn't sound the same. Is there anything that you can recommend for this process? Anything we could tell the mastering engineer?
No, I mean you are at the mercy of whoever is making your copy. You just have to get a relationship with someone you trust. Mastering is very important, because listeners equate volume with quality. If your CD plays back 6 dB's quieter than the new U2 CD, it doesn't matter about the million dollars they spent to record it, it's that it is playing back 6 dB's louder, more than any other single element in the recording chain. So it's worth the extra money. If you're not using esoteric, loud A to D converters, you're going to be about 6 dB's down from where all the other, "real" records are. And 6 dB's is a lot.
Another thing that kills me is the compression aspect. We're very much more about creative compression than we are about limiting. And this one record we did, the mastering engineer just killed everything we did because he went on top and compressed the whole fucker, knocked out everything with too much compression. So the last thing that we did, we sent it to a good guy, and said, "Look, we've compressed it the way we want it. If you need to limit it at one point, fine, but we've done it creatively, so don't do it." And he didn't, said, fine he doesn't have to do that. And it made his job easier too. But you have to say that now, we found out. Just tell them not to do this.
Well, in the old days, where you made vinyl, it was a real technical job above and beyond any sonic changes you might want to make to the record. There's always that last opportunity to change the EQ a bit, add a little compression, even add a little echo. But the big job they had was creating that very technical analog mother, which then turned into stampers, and they made records out of that. Which is itself very technical. Greg's training came from that, as did mine. So what we have now is, people think mastering is where you go in and fuck with the record. And while you're at it you make the 1630 with the ID's on it. And you have a lot of horribly underqualified people doing that, who simply have Sonic SoundTools or something. The only way that you can really protect yourself is make sure that you don't have them press anything up until you've OK'd it. We used to always do that with everything. You'd have test pressings and you'd go back and fix stuff. CDR's don't sound quite the same. The biggest problem you'll have with CDR's is that they'll often be slightly brighter and usually maybe not quite as loud. I usually just listen to DAT's and let somebody else do quality control with the manufacturing. Although CDR's have gotten a lot more consistent.
But the more I think about it, people are judging your studio or your engineering ability when so much of what we're talking about with mastering and manufacturing can eliminate or contribute to the sound of what you've done. That's a lot of people that can fuck it up, that your reputation is based on. It's scary.
A big big problem in the eighties was judging mixes by cassette. And I've spent a lot of my life trying not to do remixes because the guy was judging by cassette. Especially when you get people who are unfamiliar about what the process really is and they're nervous about it and it's the most money they've ever spent in their life on anything and they're second-guessing everything anyway. It's very difficult when they're judging it all by cassette. At least now most record companies have DAT's and you can tell much better how it's mixed. For a while, people were listening to 15 ips, and the only problem with that is they we're quite bright enough.
Well, alright, anything else you like to add?
Mitch and I have been drug-free throughout our entire lives. I'm serious.
What did Michael smell like?
He smelled like garlic.
