A sampling of the artists Robert Musso has recorded (or mixed) gives an idea of the stratospheric world he inhabits on a daily basis — Ornette Coleman, Bootsy Collins, Buckethead, Herbie Hancock, Iggy Pop, Carlos Santana, John Zorn, Sly & Robbie, Pharoah Sanders, George Clinton, Master Musicians of Jajouka and the Dalai Lama. But these names aren't isolated high points in his life. They are part of his day job with Bill Laswell. He has worked in every major studio in NYC and intimately knows many others worldwide — from George Martin's AIR to Compass Point in the Bahamas]. Musso, in his duties as an audio engineer, has been producer Bill Laswell's right-hand man for a quarter century; but you can frequently find Musso the guitarist playing extreme avant-noise with such stellar downtown NYC improvisers as the late Sonny Sharrock or Ornette Coleman, while deftly overseeing the recording and release of DVDs of scores of these types of events through his MussoMusic digital distribution company. Robert is also an educator at the Institute of Audio Research. Musso's personal discography, as an artist and producer, includes various albums with his infamous Machine Gun ensemble, as well as many solo projects and collaborations on various labels, including his ambient Transonic series of CDs.
How did you hook up with Bill Laswell?
The first time I worked with Bill he was at RPM Studios in New York City, and the engineer he was using didn't want to work on Labor Day, 1982. My roommate was a maintenance engineer at the studio and I got the gig. I was like, "I'll work on Labor Day, no problem." They said, "There are some crazy kids that are trying to do some different types of club music. They're part of this whole downtown music scene." That's how Bill and the Material crew were described to me. What was great about that session was that in one five-hour period, we recorded Archie Shepp on saxophone and Whitney Houston singing — the first time she had ever been in a recording studio. She didn't like wearing headphones because she was used to singing in church with a choir. When she first put on headphones, it took a minute for her to get used to it. No one cared because she sounded so great. I turned Bill onto doing a "fly in" in that session. They wanted Archie to play at the beginning of the song, but he didn't hear it. So he played the solo in the middle; I think he played the end also. We recorded a couple of takes and I said, "Why don't we fly one into the intro?" I knew they were the same chords. Bill asked, "What do you mean?" I said, "Let's record his saxophone from the multitrack tape onto a piece of 1/2-inch 2-track tape," which we did. Then we rewound the multitrack tape to the beginning of the song where Bill wanted Archie to play. We played the song and put the multitrack into record and I played the 2-track — I started it at the right spot and flew his saxophone from the 2-track to the multitrack then into the beginning of the song where it never was before. I think Bill was kind of blown away by this because he had never seen anyone do that and it worked out well. That's the reason he started using me. Recording Archie Shepp and Whitney Houston and mixing the song "Memories" [written by Hugh Hopper] on Material's One Down — that was my first day in the studio with Bill.
When I first met you guys, you were working at Platinum Island, Quad, Power Station and those kinds of high-end places, mixing on SSL consoles. Later, at Greenpoint Studio, you were mixing without automation and doing a lot of tape splicing. I doubt anyone would ever imagine that anything as complex as Material's Hallucination Engine was mixed and tape-edited by hand.
Automation was there to supposedly help you make mixing the record easier, as well as to be more accurate and repeatable. The problem was that it took a lot longer to use. The computers were slow and sometimes it wouldn't work; sometimes to the point that I spent a lot of time and sweat on something and then the console would break down and I would lose the automation. It was frustrating. I said, "Let's do this the way they used to. Let's mix in pieces, take a very small portion of the song and focus on getting that section sounding great." The way we worked at Greenpoint, and continue to work to this day, is to set up the mix on the introduction to the song. We only listen to the intro and we refine the elements of the mix on the introduction to the song until the introduction is perfect. When it's perfect, we record it to 2-track. We used to record onto 1/2-inch tape. Now we record it to Pro Tools.
Then we go to the first verse and we only concentrate on the first verse, get it perfect, record that and then edit the two sections together and continue mixing that way. You do that from the beginning to the end of the song — spending a lot of time listening to sections and making sure that each part is correct, recording each section as you go along and keep editing them together. If we listen to the whole song and something is still not right in one section, we can always go back to that section and just re-mix that.
In the early '90s you were mixing from 2-inch tape to 1/2-inch through a Neve broadcast console.
Which was great, but there were a lot of limitations with tape editing. We bought our own Neve console and set up Greenpoint Studio, but this was before Pro Tools, and we did not have another console to plug into our Neve to give us extra channels. The Neve was a 32-input, 4-bus console, and we had to use the first two busses to monitor through. We only had a small amount of outboard gear. We had two dbx 160Xs, [Eventide] H910 and H3000 Harmonizers, a Lexicon PCM 41, a Korg delay and some very inexpensive reverbs. The big thing was when we got our [Akai] S1000 sampler. Besides a couple of outboard preamps, that was all the gear we had for a long time. It was really tough, especially after working at all of the great studios I was used to. Everything else we had to do manually — tapeflanging and all that kind of old school stuff — and I would sometimes bring in my Echoplex.
When you're mixing in pieces like that, do you have to make sure that the effects and everything line up properly?
Always listen to the transitions very carefully, because you want to make sure that instruments that have endedinthesectionthatyou'vejustfinishedmixing have a proper trail off. Whether it's a reverb tail, an ending to the part that they're playing without any reverb or if it's not natural, then add a little delay so that it does sound natural. Sometimes that requires not editing directly on the downbeat of the new section. Sometimes we count backwards, or we go forward, depending on what hangs over, or what starts early. You have to listen.
Over the years you've shown me some cool tricks. One is how you create your own reverb chamber out of the live room in the studio.
That was the original, old school way to do it. When I worked at Hit Factory, they used to have tape machines set up so that you could have your send go through a tape machine first, for tape delay, and have that output feed a reverb. You could have a plate reverb, or a room set up as a reverb chamber, and then have that delayed reverb signal brought back to your console. That was the big killer effect on many, many records for years. Now we have a parameter for pre-delay times before the reverb starts in all digital reverbs. It's very important because it separates the reverb from the original sound. When you do that, you're allowing the original sound to make its presence happen before the effect kicks in. You get a clearer image of the original sound because of that.
I remember an AMS reverb patch called "Ambience" that was magical.
I still use that. Ambience is a type of reverb that is not simulating a plate, or a room. In the real world you usually don't have big, ambient spaces — you have short, ambient spaces. If I want to give a little life to anything, and I don't want it to sound like there's a lot of reverb on it — even kick drums — I'll use the Ambience setting. If you put a reverb plate on a vocal it sounds like, "Oh, there's the reverb." If you put Ambience on it, it just sounds like the vocal was recorded in a bigger room without sounding like there was a room sound added to it. I still use real plate reverbs too, because nothing really sounds like a well- tuned plate. Delay your send into your echo plate and make sure you've got a good EQ on the return. It can be magic. With putting a sound back into the room, using it as a chamber and re-amping — these are variations on creating an echo chamber in your studio or recording room. Re-amping is when you take your original sound — let's say it's a snare drum — and you pump your snare drum out through some speakers in a live recording room. Make sure it sounds good coming out of the speakers — if not, you put some EQ or compression on it. Set up microphones in your recording room. Depending on how much of the room sound you want, you move the microphones either closer or further away, point them towards, or away from, the speakers — depending on what you're looking for. You can either record that to two tracks and have that available as a re-amped room sound, or just use the studio recording room as an echo or a live chamber on a send while you're mixing. It's old school. How do you get something to sound good? However you can. You can re-amp vocals and guitars, certainly bass guitars and all sorts of kick and snare drums.
I remember a pretty hip trick with [an Eventide] Harmonizer to give a bass track some edge.
If I remember correctly, you're talking about a song with an "okay" bass sound that didn't really have a top end to it. Bill wanted it to stand out more. I used an old H910 Eventide Harmonizer. What is interesting about those is you can use them in "harmonizer" mode, or you can use them in a "delay only" mode. The front of that box has four switches that add delay time to the signal that is being processed, with positive feedback and negative feedback knobs. So if you're in the "delay only" mode and you have both of those knobs up, you're feeding the delays back into itself and back into the input of the unit again. You get this kind of metallic sound, and that gives you a lot of presence and an electronic-sounding top end, especially if you have a very rubbery bass. I had it in the "harmonizer" mode — which you could still add the delays to — but with the "harmonizer" setting on 1.00, which is no harmonization. So it was going through the harmonizer section, but it wasn't harmonizing. Some people like to go through a Pultec without adding or subtracting any EQ, just because they like the sound of the box. Essentially I did the same thing with the bass.
You came up with a series of new sounds with delays and reverb textures, like when you guys did the Axiom Ambient: Lost in the Translation remixes in the early '90s.
I had to figure out some new tricks. I had three delays and an Eventide H3000 Harmonizer. A lot of that was experimenting with longer, in-time delays with a lot of repeats on them — not so many repeats that it would go out of control, but almost. A combination of that, with shorter delays with the same signal going to both delays, or having a longer delay feeding the shorter delay, and having not only the output of the long delay come back to the board, but also the short delay come back to the board — I would have lots of delays on delays feeding other delays and get a lot of polyrhythms. Sometimes I would go for a triplet feel, or a dotted eighth note feel, on the short delay, bouncing the delays off of each other at different volumes, or having one sent to the other to get those more complicated delay rhythms from an original sound. During the ambient period I also developed a setting on the H3000 that I don't think I've heard anybody use anywhere else — a combination of delays and reverbs in one setting. I figured out a way to have a very, very long, sustained setting that would not feedback, from a very simple input. So if somebody just goes, "Ha!" into the box, it would go, "Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa" for ten minutes, but it wouldn't feedback — a sound wall that almost sounded like reverb standing still. I would spend lots of time in front of the box trying different settings when Bill wasn't around and then later say, "Hey, check this out. What do you think of this?" He'd say, "Yeah, we've gotta use that one." Later on we got our TC Electronic FireworX, and I programmed many settings for that — some we're currently still using.
What kinds of instruments and weird pieces of gear do you consider secret weapons?
First of all, it's good to have working gear. It doesn't have to be vintage or weird, but it has to work well. All equipment should be well maintained. That said, we do have a tube Neumann U 47, and I love using my ADK microphones. I do have a "player's" guitar and amp collection. They're great-sounding guitars, basses and amps and I let people play them in the studio. We also like to hire Artie Smith to rent and tune drums for us — he's a secret weapon! Bill's big secret weapon is that he plays his bass through envelope pedals, but the envelope hardly ever opens when he plays. So what you've got is this gigantic bottom end. He usually plays his 1964 Fender Precision basses — one fretted and one fretless. They both have [Seymour Duncan] Quarter Pound pickups and Badass bridges on them but, besides that, they're pretty much stock. He plays through fuzz boxes, delays and sometimes a whammy pedal at a detuned setting; but most of the sound of his bass comes from the envelope pedal. He has such a fine touch that he can control the volume of his playing and not open up the envelope on the pedal. He also sometimes plays an eight-string or six-string bass and uses half-round bass strings.
Hitting Tape
Tape compression — for certain types of music, it's still the best thing in the world. We used to have custom alignments for our tape machines, depending on what kind of music we were going to record. If I was doing a rock track that really needed to get pumped up, I would add a dB and a half extra of bottom end on the tape machine equalizer during the alignment, and maybe add one dB on top. I’d use a record alignment of +6 or +9, smash the tape and see what happens. I would take my really hot rock song, record it into the tape machine, put the tape machine in repro – it would be delayed – but I would listen to the output of the tape machine, and I would see how hot I could get it before distorting. Then I would back off the level going into the tape machine until it wasn’t distorted per se, but so it had ultimate tape saturation. That would be the level that I’d use for that particular mix. On other projects it was exactly the opposite – no tape compression, go back to +3 alignment, no exaggerated top or bottom-end on the tape machine.
Every situation is different.
I know you love your Neve console and preamps.
Over the last year we probably did about 40 records, and 99% of them were recorded through Neves. There was one project that we decided to do all digital and not go through the Neve console. It was the Markus Stockhausen [son of Karlheinz Stockhausen] No Matter record [with Mark Nauseef and Kudsi Erguner]. We went through our Yamaha DM1000 digital console instead. That's a CD where the tracks were given to us to mix. They were recorded at Ztudio Zerkall in Germany. It was really an audiophile recording, and honestly that doesn't happen that often. We get stuff from all over the place, and you'd be surprised at how badly recorded some of the tracks we get to mix are. I would say a good quarter of my time is spent as a clean-up man, just going through the tracks and getting rid of the pops, clicks and distortion, or fixing some other problem. But the Stockhausen record was so well recorded, I didn't want to add any analog hiss and it did not need the warmth of the Neve console or equalizers.
What do you think of plug-ins?
I really appreciate and enjoy all of the analog simulators available now in Pro Tools, and other DAWs, as plug- ins. The Bomb Factory BF-2A that I use is so incredible, because most studios only have one or two [Universal Audio] LA-2As. Now I can use LA-2As on ten channels. I think, at one point, there were only four working Fairchild limiters on the East Coast; now I can put a Fairchild on every channel if I want to, which is a big difference in terms of availability!
Do you really accept and use these plug- in emulations the same way?
Yes, I do. Does the plug-in sound exactly like an LA-2A? No. Is it a pretty good simulation? Yes, and they're predictable — you always know what they're going to do. Just like with [hardware] Pultecs and [Universal Audio] 1176s — no two of them ever sound the same, but the plug-ins do. So even though they're not as good, that's okay because I can use 15 of them in a mix. I don't have to worry about the tubes getting too hot, overheating in the summer, or using different versions of 1176s.
Mixing Miles and Marley
Both the Miles Davis and Bob Marley remixes were very planned out. I remember spending days listening to the original multitrack reels and taking notes of possible edit points. Bill Laswell was there listening for what he wanted to use and also for possible edits, transitions and song sequences. The Marley tapes were well recorded, but the electric Miles recordings were just okay. The horns always sounded great. On some of the songs, Miles' horn was recorded on two tracks (one clean mic and one with wah wah) and the rest of the instruments were recorded on the remaining six tracks! Both projects were a lot of work, but a blast to do.
What are your thoughts on "mixing in the box" in Pro Tools?
I have mixed in the box and I don't prefer it. I have the luxury of being able to compare. When I compare mixes that are done in the box to mixes that have been done out of the box, usually the ones out of the box sound a lot better, even though they go back in eventually (to get recorded as 2-track). In our studio we have an older Neve console (with 1066, 1073 and 1084 EQs) and a Yamaha DM1000 digital console. I'll take a combination of analog and digital signals out of our converters, combine them in both consoles, and use the best of both worlds. I'll use the analog output of the Yamaha console and patch it into an aux stereo input of the Neve, and then take the output of the Neve and patch into a Neve 33609 compressor and out of the compressor back into Pro Tools. That way I can pick and choose which sounds I want to mix on the analog console and which sounds I want to mix on the digital console. It's wonderful to have that choice. Usually drums, bass and guitars are on the Neve and keyboards, vocals and effects are on the Yamaha. The way Bill and I mix, we each have our hands on the faders and we're concentrating on a very short portion of the music. We'll make moves that I'm sure could be simulated in the box — but it would be a simulation. We've tried controllers, but haven't found any fast enough yet.
You still need the tactile connection of fingers on faders.
Yes. I can make little moves without thinking about it. I could program moves into my automation in Pro Tools; but it's going to take me 10 minutes to make an exact little move that I would make without thinking about on a fader. It's just usually easier and faster out of the box, especially if you see the complexity of the moves that we make at different times to get the music to sound right.
It's part of that power of focusing on a section. That's a secret weapon right there.
It is. People still don't believe it when we tell them we mix little pieces and then put them all together. They're like, "Come on. You're pulling my leg."
I loved Greenpoint Studio. It was so wide-open; such an unusual place.
Greenpoint, from a technical standpoint, was about a half a volt away from a disaster. First of all, it was
one big, open room. There was no separate control room. We had these big foam gobos that didn't really block the sound. The room was not really built for recording. Even though it had wooden floors, an 18- foot wooden ceiling and non-parallel walls, it basically sounded like a big, open room and not a studio. In my opinion it was always tough to get anything to sound good, not only because it was not a good studio, or a real good sounding studio room, but also because you were in the same room as the instruments you were recording! It was unbelievable sometimes. Tony Williams would be thirty feet away from me playing at 115 dB, and I'm trying to get drum sounds in the same room. We started off with very limited equipment, not to mention the fact that there was no air conditioning and almost no heating. A lot of people loved that studio and thought it was the studio with the best vibe in the world. It was so cool because it was in Brooklyn. We had a Neve and we always made cool music, but from an engineering standpoint it was pretty tough. We started Greenpoint Studio around 1987 or 1988. It was originally a rehearsal space for Masabumi Kikuchi. Our first Neve board, as well as the Neumann U 47 tube microphone, were brought in by Jonas Hellborg. Bill bought a Studer 24-track and 2-track machine; I brought in some dbx 160X compressors and some digital delays. Later on Eddie Ciletti found a second Neve board for the studio.
How to Mix
My students ask me, "How do I mix?" I say, "Make yourself two different people." One is the professional mixing engineer that knows about technology and every sound that is in the audio spectrum of the song that you are mixing. You have to be able to hear everything clearly that is on tape. You have to pick them apart using your ears, your head, and your mind. Then you have to say, "Okay, let's analyze the mix. Let’s listen to each individual piece separately and really focus our concentration on what makes a good mix." Then you also have to think, "What would someone that doesn’t know anything about technology or music think?" Try imagining that they're in the next room, they hear a song and they say, "Oh, I like that song." If you have satisfied both of those perspectives, you have a good mix.
Great-sounding records were made there.
Thanks. We all did our best to make it work, no matter the situation. All those great Axiom records were recorded there — Material's Hallucination Engine, the Bob Marley Dreams Of Freedom: [Ambient Translations in Dub] record and the Miles Davis remix record [Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969-1974]. Tony Williams, and so many amazing musicians, came there to record. We figured out how to get good sounds in the room, and that's all that counts. At first it was a matter of trial and error, until we finally got to a point when it really came together. Then we stayed with what worked. We did a lot of experimentation, including different ways to monitor.
Now you're in New Jersey.
We were at 118 Greenpoint Avenue for about 12 years, and then we moved to where we are now in West Orange, New Jersey, at Orange Music Sound Studio. It takes about the same amount of time to drive to Brooklyn as it does to West Orange. We now have a great recording room that was built 35 years ago for Nick Massi from Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons. Jethro Tull's Living in the Past album was recorded there. The previous studio names were Vantone, Grand Slam and Fast Track. We also built a mix room upstairs with a Neve analog board, a Yamaha digital board and a Pro Tools rig with [Digidesign's] 192 I/O and Apogee converters.
Final thoughts?
Our real secret weapon is that we know music. We're always listening to what's going on and checking out new music from around the world. Your ears, your musical knowledge and your technical knowledge are all tools of the trade. You've got to know about music and about the genres you're working in. You've got to know how to tie in the technology with that knowledge, know what your goals are, and put it all together tastefully. Our secret weapon is that we do this well.
