Whether they know it or not, anyone roaming the streets of Victoria, BC, will have brushed by Scott Henderson at some point. He is easily spotted, usually clad in his ubiquitous green Minnesota North Stars jacket and baseball cap. He has worked in just about all of the record stores in Victoria (including a few which have long since disappeared), and as one might imagine, he houses a massive collection of records, with genres too numerous to mention. His aptly titled studio, S.O.S. (Sea of Shit), resides in the basement of his house on the outskirts of Victoria. The basement is basically split up into three rooms; one for recording, one for his personal collection of music, and one for the control room. The studio exists largely for Scott to document his own ideas. With that being said, a plethora of Victoria bands have called S.O.S. home for a couple of days. His close association and numerous recordings with NoMeansNo (now based in Vancouver), as well as his membership in the group, the Show Business Giants (who recently returned from a tour of Europe), Shovlhead, and his most recent project, Hissanol, have allowed Scott's music and recording acumen to flourish internationally as well as locally. If one needs further proof that the digital age has arrived, look no further than The Making of Him, the new Hissanol record released on Alternative Tentacles. His col-laborator, Andy Kerr (formerly of NoMeansNo), lives in Amsterdam. The distance between the two was easily bridged (or not so easily at times, according to Scott) with the continual exchange of R-DAT tapes through the mail. The result is a testament to everything that Scott is: composer/musician/engineer/producer/mildly psychotic and furiously creative. What follows below are mere shards of our two hour conversation which was interrupted only by the occasional exchange of a barbecue chip or two. It was terminated when the hockey highlights came on. I don't know who this Riley guy was, but he's got nothing on Scott Henderson.
What was your first studio setup?
I used to have a house on this welfare strip. The studio was called "Hole in the Wall". I had this 4 track half inch Tascam series 70 monstrosity tape machine with an old M & M board [shows me photo]. It was a British thing with a four band fixed EQ. I used to drag it all over town in this cabinet. You could barely lift the thing.
What year was that?
It was about '80 or '81. It was a great studio. You'd open the back door in the winter and this flood of water would just wash through the studio.
So it was all in one room?
Yeah. I had fruit packing for soundproofing. I didn't even have egg cartons [laughs]. I got a little 4 track PortaStudio after that... The best cassette one they made in the first few years.
Did it have any noise reduction?
It had DBX and two notch filters like all Tascams. It was a great machine and it's still being used.
Does it have the original heads on it?
I think so. The guy who has it now isn't the type to be changing them.
What were you using for mics?
Mostly crap. Whenever anyone gets started recording you have about eight mics and [takes on a holy tone] and they're all, save one, Shure SM57's. In my case it was an AKG 125. I still to this day don't know exactly what it was. I had a couple of AKG 330 mics which in those days were pretty cool. They were bulbous mics with the vents and had a couple of roll-off filters on the bottom. They were really popular for live use. I had a whole bunch of miscellaneous garbage I picked up. I never had a decent collection of mics until I moved out here [to Sea of Shit].
Any other locations of note?
Well, for a while I had a studio on the second floor of a building downtown. Basically, I had a whole corner block. The place would've made a huge night club. Red Tide [early Victoria punk band] brought in the first Fostex 8 track. It was the worst shit I've ever used in my life. It was upright reel-to-reel with the microscopic VU meters hooked up to the special board that came with it. The board was about the size of a large book and was the most amazingly hissy crap-ola. It had ?" tape running at 7? ips. All I remember is that I really wanted to throw the thing out the window. Horrible gear... it scarred me for life. I'll never use Fostex gear again. I haven't used so much as a pair of Fostex headphones since then. I always go for the Tascam stuff because it's bulletproof. It's never the best, but it runs forever. My Tascam 8-track reel-to-reel was outside for a whole winter [after being sold] in a shed open to all of the elements and it still works. I bought it back for $100. When I first bought it in 1985, that was the big step up. That was around the same time I discovered that gated reverb sounded good on drums, so there's all this gated reverb on everything from those years. I had a Yamaha REV-7. I've still got it. It's the noisiest effect in my rack by a mile.
What was the first piece of outboard gear you ever got?
When I needed an echo at my first place, I used to use this old Sony tape deck hooked up with a three speed echo. You know, slow-medium-fast. It was really noisy. I also had a Binson disk echo. It was a freakish looking thing. It had to be from the early 60's from England. It had a metal magnetized disk with heads against it. It had four playback heads and you could only turn one of them off at a time. You couldn't change the speed of the disk, but you could adjust the volume of each echo. It had a cathode tube in it for a level display. The louder the sound, the hotter the tube would get. It weighed a ton and was about two feet by one foot. Hank Marvin [of the Shadows] used to use them in the 60's. I had a Roland spring reverb that you had to severely beat in order for it to work. You really had to whack the thing.
Did you buy anything else when you jumped up to the Tascam 8-track?
When I bought that I went on a binge. I bought a Yamaha RX-5 drum machine which was a fortune then... it was $1500 or something. I got the REV-7 too. I still have the RX-5.
Any mics?
I think I bought a new 421 [Sennheiser], but I still had mostly shit. I was mixing straight to a cassette deck then.
At what point did you switch from doing friend's bands to bands you'd never heard of?
Hmmm... [thinks ponderously]
At what point did you think "I'm just going to stop recording my friends and try to make some money at this..."
Oh god, I've never thought that! [ laughter]
You know what I mean.
The first "money" thing I did was this blues guy who was a caddy at a local golf club. He hired some born-again guys who worked at a Christian music store to come in and play the bass and drums. They were good, but really bad at the same time, you know?
Any strange forms of payment for studio time?
Pigment Vehicle [frenetic Victoria band] wanted to mix their last album and they're like... "we just need a couple of days to do the mix". I know this means two weeks. They also needed to "touch up the vocals" which, for them, means write the lyrics. Jason [PV drummer/vocalist] gave me this really nice saxophone. Colin [PV bassist] built me a rock wall out in my yard. It was about two weeks of studio time, too. I've never done it for a car, but I came close once. A vocalist came in and I got a sampler and a 441 [Sennheiser mic]. She was also kind of our nanny for a while. Another band didn't have any money to pay me, so I got an amp and a bass drum mic.
Is there any gear you had in the past you wish you hadn't gotten rid of?
I had a twin manual drawbar Farfisa organ that was sort of like a Hammond. I sold it to a mod, which of course, means I didn't get paid for it. I sold my roommate my beautiful canary yellow Premier drum kit with Paiste cymbals. I must have spent about $2500 on it in 1982. He was a loans manager for CIBC [Canadian bank] and was about 3/4 deaf. I was supposed to get about $2000... I think I got $100.
Have you heard from him since?
No, he disappeared into the ozone! Later, some guy in Duncan [north of Victoria] told me, "I know that drumkit! I traded a motorbike for it!"
Is there a piece of gear you don't have that you'd love to have?
Oh god, there's always stuff...
Mics, board, monitors?
Actually, you know what I need more than anything is a new room [laughs]. To hell with the gear!
So you could have more room for records?
Well, that, and I need a higher ceiling. My studio is the kind of studio where you try to negate the room. You just don't want the room to come into it ! [laughs]... which is fine for hard rock, but if I brought a string quartet in here, things would get ugly fast. I'd love to have a spare DA88 [Tascam R-DAT 8-track]. Once they get long in the tooth like mine, there's always one that's kind of not working right.
Are you happy with the DA88's?
Yeah, they've been quite reliable. My place is as dirty as a studio should ever be, too.
Are there certain tapes that work better than others?
At first, it was like a black art getting tapes for that thing. I just use the regular Sonys... they're about $10 bucks a piece. I used to get glitches all the time, but that was because Tascam told me to get metal evaporated tapes. Then, about a year later, I called them and they said, "Did I say metal evaporated? I meant metal particle". So, I've got a whole archive of metal evaporated tapes that glitch out like crazy. The thing I worry about with digital is archiving stuff.
Is it any worse than analog tape?
Yeah, it is because if the tape crashes, it's gone completely. If the analog tape starts to deteriorate, you've still got something there.
I was just reading about a band that dug up some old 16-track analog tape that was beyond repair and they put it in the oven for three hours and fixed it.
Yeah. You can bake the tape. I've heard this fable from somewhere else. It's a prescribed ritual. You can get soggy tape to work, but you'd better run it once and copy it. I don't think I'd want to play the tape very much.
I think it was sticky...
Yeah, the tape will stick together and pull all of the oxide off [just as he says this an analog tape anecdote flashes through his brain]. This will make you shudder. When I was in Amsterdam for a vacation, John Wright [NoMeansNo drummer] and Tom Holliston [Show Business Giants] were watching my place and using the studio. Well, the sewer main broke and soaked all of the old NoMeansNo demos — stuff from around 1980. Some of the tape was salvageable, but the boxes had to go. They really stunk bad. A bunch of my records got fucked, too.
Where do you stand on analog vs. digital?
Well, that's simple. I figure if you can hear the difference between analog and digital recording, then you're not listening to the music hard enough. The thing you'll find in common with almost all analog people is the vast majority of them seem to be older and listen to either classical or jazz and consider themselves a notch above everybody else. When you boil it down, they really seem to miss the even-ordered distortion in analog. I like analog as much as the next guy, but it's just not cost effective anymore to use it. Have you ever seen the Metallica video of the making of the black album? They show them loading the reels into a van. There's about $40,000 in raw tape there. The average band just can't afford that. The cost savings of digital are enormous and you can make digital sound less digital. You just make sure there's lots of dirt in it. If cost was no object, I'd probably stick with analog. Rock music is such a moot point. Would Aphex Twin sound better on analog? I don't think so. I think the young rock n' roller guys prefer analog because they're so used to hitting the tape hard. I'd love to have a Scully 16-track 2" machine with Dolby A on it, so I could just whack it. It's like having 16 compressors built into your tape deck. You really have to learn to use an outboard compressor well with digital.
One of the myths when digital first came out was that everything would automatically sound great. Really, it's just as easy to make a bad sounding record.
Especially in the days before they realized that mastering for digital is not like mastering for vinyl. Mastering for vinyl you have to take into consideration the physical characteristics of the needle in the groove, groove distortion, and on and on. With the first CD I heard... you know, as is always the case when a new format comes out, there was nothing but wretched music. They had Marathon by Santana and a bunch of crap-ola classical. They also had this Archie Shepp/Dollar Brand record. It sounded like the piano was made out of stainless steel and the sax was a giant kazoo. It was a Denon 14-bit PCM recording. I was working at a record store at the time and everyone was standing around me smiling and I was thinking, "Wow, this sounds really awful". They all said, "Wow! No distortion!" and I said, "But it sounds like shit!". The Santana recording was excruciating... no mids or warmth at all. So, the analog people went crazy and said, "See! It sounds like shit! I told you!". I knew once they figured out how to master the stuff, it would be better. The things that are bad about digital most people I'm sure can't hear. It starts at about 20,000 cycles. Piano harmonics get sawed off. My dog might be able to hear that. I bought Colin Newman's record Not To. There's points where any extra noise just ruins it. I think for the average punter, CD is the way to go. One of the things I like [with digital] is that you don't have to compensate as the needle moves towards the middle of the fucking record. On Chairs Missing by Wire, the last song on Side 2 is a blitzkrieg of noise and I've yet to hear a record that didn't crap out. The physical limitations of analog are really frustrating sometimes.
So you think mastering is the weak link with digital?
Yes, but most of the problems were solved quite a while ago. Some companies still use analog masters for CD, but they're usually death metal or punk rock.
Do you have any recording tricks you'd like to impart?
The funny thing is I've never worked with "professional engineers", so every time I come across one, I watch what they do. I'll ask them, "Why do you do this?" and they'll say, "I dunno...".
Everybody just learns their own way I guess...
Yeah, I guess. Especially drum micing. I picked up a lot of things from John [Wright of NoMeansNo]. I don't do too many arcane things for the simple reason that I usually don't have time to experiment.
Most want it fast and good I suppose.
Most experiments don't work the way you think they're going to work. More often than not they don't work. Once I mic'd these guitar cabinets with mics all over the place and I ended up in phase hell. I had a mic under my stairs, one on an open Pignose [amp]. I read about Zappa doing the Pignose thing. All I ended up with was a big mushy sound. I used to use two mics on guitar cabinets — one jammed against the cone and one behind the cabinet with the phase flipped... lots of stuff. Nothing worked very well and then I just said, "fuck it" and stuck a 57 in front of the thing. Sometimes I'll stick a condenser mic in front if I want a little more crunch. The more basic I got, the better it sounded. You know, with a bass, I always do a DI with a mic on the cabinet. If guys want a little more dirt on their bass setup, then I'll use my Sunn amp. It's 75 watts with big Sylvania tubes. You can crank it without shaking the whole house down.
What about vocals? I noticed when Treecrusher [Victoria pop-punk band] was here, you didn't use the swank 414 mic for vocals. You just stuck them in front of a Shure SM 58... why?
I can use the 414 through my wonderful tube preamp. It's just the cleanest, most beautiful sound. I also started to discover that it was no bloody good for rock music. I didn't even use a Beta 58! Use a dynamic mic, and let 'em scream their heads off. Especially for people who have no mic technique. They'll just walk up to your $1500 414 mic and go "YAAAA!". You can hear the plates going clack-clack-clack. It's usually about 200 decibels coming out of the speakers, too.
What's the most non-rock thing you've recorded?
I did a jazz quartet one night at midnight live to DAT. It sounded great. Also, I did the incidental music for a local production of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" with a violist from the symphony.
What did you mic the viola with?
I think I used the 414. I've got a couple of AKG C-1000 mics for anything that requires any detail. Good cheap condenser mics. For drums, I'll use one of the C-1000 mics under the hi-hat and sort of pointed at the snare. I almost bought a Calrec mic — one of those 4-capsule quadraphonic ambisonic mics for $6000 bucks. I just kept thinking, "Am I going to get $6000 of use out of this thing?"
You really have to have tuned rooms if you're going to be using a swank mic like that.
Exactly. You also have to charge people for the swank mic. I'm just too nice a guy to say [assumes a snotty tone] "Oh, if you want to use the good mic, it'll cost you an extra $150".
Pull it out of the glass case...
Yeah. The difference between that and my 414 is $4500. You can buy a lot of gear for $4500. I've really gotten the most bang for my buck out of my gear. I never built a patch bay and I've yet to have a problem because of that. If you don't mind the inconvenience, you can save yourself bags of money. I'll bet I'd spend $1500 putting it together. Then there's millions of connections there just waiting to die on you. I'm not a very good solderer either. Somebody else in my studio would be lost, but that's just as well! [laughs]
That's the way you like it.
Keep 'em outta here! I spent my money on good monitor speakers [B&W 803's]. My power amp was a bit of a frill at $1400. It's a 120 watts a side Tugden AU-41 which is sitting idle right now because someone blew it up for me. I bought this Harman/Kardon monstrosity which has turned out to be a really good amp. I can hear the difference between them, though. The Tugden has a lot more refinement to it... especially for acoustic stuff. The B&W's are really clean too.
When you're record-ing solid over, say, two days, how do you avoid ear fatigue?
I don't turn it up very loud. When I get my sounds, I make sure I'm in the right ball park getting them to tape and then I turn the volume way down when I'm doing tracking. You can talk over it easy. Why listen to it loud 15 times while the band learns to play it? I hate to mix the day I track. I've had to do it lots of times. You just have to stay away from it to keep your objectivity. Otherwise, you're just brainwashed when it's time to mix. It gets terrible, especially when you're pushing 40 like me. I tell people, "Just go away and come back tomorrow and you'll have twice as good a mix".
Contact Scott @
Sea of Shit Studios
250-474-8948
