How'd you get started in recording?
I think I did what every kid did in the '70s, which was I went to Radio Shack and bought a cheesy mixer. Of course, Radio Shack has the 30-day return policy, so a month later, I returned it and got the next model up. I did that for three months in a row before the guys finally figured out that I wasn't gonna buy anything. That's how I got into recording. I got into music before that because I had played piano for many years as well as clarinet and saxophone. I listened to a lot of records and thought it'd be great to make my own records. So, once I realized that the Radio Shack recorder was a piece of crap, I saved up enough money and bought a 4 track, a spring reverb, a microphone, and that was that- -it was all downhill from there. After that, all the money I had I spent on recording gear.
Did you go to school for recording or anything?
I actually have a degree in computer music, but when I was doing that, I had enough experience recording music that I got to go on the road as a recording engineer with some really famous people like Yo-Yo Ma...
This was when you were in school?
Yup. And then on tour I got to do sound for the London Sinfonietta, LA Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco New Music Players, the Ensemble Moderne--a lot of major players. It was a big change of pace from all the rock that I'd been doing up to that point, and I got to hang out with all these classical engineers and musicians. I learned a lot because the techniques they were using were nothing like the techniques I was used to using for rock.
Can you give an example of something you learned that you could apply to recording rock stuff?
Lots of omni mics.
For the room?
Not necessarily. You do pick up a lot more of the room, but you also don't get proximity effect, so you can take an omni and stick it right up into the bridge of a violin, and you won't get this boomy sound. I just did a recording with Robert Fisher and the Willard Grant Conspiracy, and I put an omni about 8 to 12 inches from the bridge of David Michael Curry's viola, and it sounded great, it sounded like a viola. I picked up a lot of my kitchen also.
We'll get to your kitchen in a second, but the main thing I wanted to talk about is the Karate record. First of all, it sounds amazing.
Glad you like it.
In the interview you did with The Boston Phoenix, you mentioned some drum mic'ing techniques--care to elaborate, or are they top secret?
Well first of all, we did it at Salad Days, which unfortunately doesn't exist any more. The room there used to be a machine shop or something, so it had a tile floor, and the ceiling was really low in one area, and like a cathedral-style in another. We put the drums in the area with the low ceiling and got lots and lots of reverb from the area further away with the higher ceiling. It just sounded so good in the room, I thought, "What I need to do is use omnis--I don't want any proximity effect, I want everything to sound exactly like what I hear in this room". I have a bunch of Earthworks omnis and I set those up. I do this weird thing on snare drums, I don't mic the top or bottom, what I do is put an omni about a half inch from the body. I try to get it as close to the shell as possible, so I pick up more snare and less of everything else. So, depending on what kind of sound I want, I move it up and down. Further down, I get more of a crunchy, snarey sound, and if I move it up I get more of the punch.
Right, the attack.
For Gavin's snare, the mic was halfway between the hole and the bottom.
How about the kick?
For the kick, I took an Earthworks omni and stuck it way inside and just pulled it out further and further until I found the magic spot. When you find it, it's just the best sound in the world.
Where was the spot? Was it still inside the drum?
Actually no, it ended up being an inch in front of the hole.
I've never gotten anything good with the mic inside; it always sounds like "boing".
Yeah, like a basketball.
Just nothing like what the drum actually sounds like.
Yeah.
His kick drum sounds pretty amazing to begin with...
Yeah, yeah, one thing I should say is that Gavin is the most natural drummer in the world, he's fucking unbelievable. I mean that was probably the only session where I didn't tune the drums, he just started to play and it was great.
Yeah, he's awesome, we jammed with him a couple times at our house. I was playing guitar and I couldn't even hang. I just stopped. What did you have for overheads?
AKG 460B, a small diaphragm cardiod.
Right over the drums?
Yep. Directly over the center of the kit. Like this...I forget what it's called.
Coincident pair?
Yeah, that's it.
What did you use on Geoff's guitar?
An AKG C1000. That thing is one of the most underrated mics, it has the purest midrange of any small diaphragm condenser I can think of that's not an omni.
Yeah, his guitar is all about midrange.
Right, I wanted it to be the sweetest midrange in the world. We actually used a JoeMeek Meekbox as a mic pre for the super dry guitar solos to accentuate the mids even further.
How close to the amp was the mic?
Usually what I do, is put the mic halfway between the center of the cone and the rim, about half an inch from the grill. Then if I want more grit, I move it towards the rim, if I want more midrange I move it towards the center. And then, if it still has too much bite I move it back a little.
How loud were they playing? I'm assuming they played it all live...
Yep. We kept all the basics and just overdubbed vocals, and a little guitar and percussion. But everything was at a pretty reasonable level, if you listen to the drum tracks there's almost no bleed, and we didn't use any gobos or anything.
And what did you use on the bass?
We weren't that happy with the bass sound actually...
Really? That's one of my models of good bass tone...
Well, his speaker was breaking up and sounded like crap...
It doesn't sound like that at all on the record...
Well, the reason why is we took a DI and ran it through, I'm not 100% sure, but I think we ran it through a Neve mic pre with the input gain cranked, and the output gain all the way down.
It didn't distort like crazy?
With the Neves, when they distort they sound good. We still weren't that psyched about the bass sound though.
Damn...
I mean, it's a good sound, it just wasn't what we wanted.
Vocals?
We tried a ton of different mics, and eventually settled on two. One was an AKG C3000, the other was the same small diaphragm AKG we used for overheads.
How close?
Mic'd his forehead. Probably four inches away, pointing at his nose. That's what I typically do for vocals. I don't like to use pop filters, to me it doesn't sound right. And also, if you take a large diaphragm condenser and put it right up on someone's mouth, you get a proximity effect that sounds good for some people, but it just didn't sound right for Geoff Farina. Also, I used a teeny bit of compression to tape, and a little more coming off the tape. What you can hear is the room reverb kicking in. He has really good mic technique, so he would back up when he sang louder. So, the level on the tape wouldn't change that much, but you'd hear more of the room, and it just sounds so real.
As far as mixing, did you do much, if anything to it?
No, we didn't have an automated board, so we assigned people to different channels to mute things on and off. We didn't want to comp anything, I hate comping. I think analog tape sounds amazing one time but after that... So we kept everything first generation.
EQ?
None.
Awesome. Mix compression?
Nope. The thing with mix compression is, if you can't hear it, then why use it? And if you can hear it, usually what happens is the kick drum punches holes in the mix. You might not even hear it until it goes through another compressor in mastering, but then you will, and I just hate that. I can't afford a bazillion dollar mix compressor; I'll let the mastering engineer put compression on it. When John Loder mastered the record, that was one of the things I asked him, please hold off on the compression because I want it to be as dynamic as possible. I just really liked the sound of it uncompressed. He did put a bunch of limiting on, just to level it out, so it's still loud.
But even still, it's not nearly as loud as a lot of other current records.
Yeah. When you hear it on the radio next to some super duper pop record, it sounds weak, just because the level is low. But when you listen to it by itself I think it sounds really good.
It sure does. Ok, enough about them. You also worked with the Wicked Farleys recently. How was that?
Well, the Wicked Farleys are the loudest band in the world...
I know. They recorded a couple songs at my house, and literally, the whole house was shaking. It was pretty great. Did they do tons of guitar overdubs?
Tons. Guitar and bass. We ended up with about 14 tracks of guitar.
This was on 24 track?
Yep.
Did you use all of those in the mix?
Yep.
Damn. Did you have to use EQ?
We had to EQ like crazy. That's one of the few records that I've done where EQ came in really, really handy.
Cutting or boosting?
Cutting. We cut lows; we cut highs. We tried to give everything its own space, so you can still distinguish the parts. I actually wanted to go back and remix that...
You guys did that really quick, right?
Two days. We mixed the second song in like, a half- hour. The first song took maybe four hours to mix, which is still not that much time.
Not at all. Did you have to compress their vocals at all?
It doesn't sound like it, but Brodeurs' vocal was slamming the compressor. I have an HHB Classic 60 compressor, it's actually made by TL Audio — it's tube, all class A, all super-high voltage. It sounds crappy for stereo compression, but for individual tracks you can hit it so hard, and it sounds amazing.
You got a really full sound on Ken's drums.
We argued a lot during mixing. Some of the guys wanted the drums a lot lower in the mix. I wanted them even louder than they ended up. Rob was saying he wanted the drums to sound trashy...
At my house the operative word was "nasty"...
I didn't really want them to sound "trashy", but I did end up bringing up a lot of the bottom snare mic just to get it a little grittier sounding.
And gritty it is. Your desert island mic choice?
Hmm, I don't know...
The Earthworks?
Probably. A lot of people complain that they have a lot of self-noise, but because there's no proximity effect, you can put them so close to the instrument and you have all the dynamic range in the world.
And those are like $1000 a pair?
Less. I think I paid about $700 for mine. But I still think the best bang for the buck is the AKG C1000s. For 160 bucks you get the sweetest midrange in the world for a cardiod mic.
Any advice for people recording at home?
(Pause) That's a tough one...
Spend your money on...
Mic preamps. Because you can get decent mics, like the C1000s, for incredibly low prices.
And with a good mic pre you're golden.
Yeah, you're golden. The thing is, five years ago people used to rave about the Mackie mic pre's. When you listen to the In My Living Room record, some songs don't sound as pristine, as sonically true as others. And it's not just me, other people can tell too. The difference is, some songs were recorded with a Mackie, some with an Allen & Heath, and some with outboard mic pre's. The difference between the Mackie and the Allen & Heath was just night and day. And the outboard mic pre's are significantly better than the Allen & Heath, but the leap wasn't as great as it was between the A&H and the Mackie.
Your mic pre of choice?
I have a bunch of Neve and API...
Well consider me green with envy. Did you ever try running a mix through them?
I used to have a set of Aphex mic pre's, and I would send mixes through them to get that nice, even- order harmonics sound, but I haven't tried it with my Neve or API. I should give that a try.
One of the songs the Wicked Farleys recorded at my house was a cover of "96 Tears" which they wanted "extra nasty". We absolutely pounded it through an ART Dual MP. I actually thought it was a little much, but they were like "Yeah! Nasty!" If you look at it on a computer, it's not even a wave, it's like a block. Anyway, for the Living Room record, would you just have everyone set up in the living room?
Typically, if it was a whole band, I'd have the drummer set up in the living room and put everyone else in the kitchen or the front room.
What'd you record to?
Half inch 8 track. An Otari MX5050.
When you mixed the Living Room stuff, did you use any fake reverb? Like on Geoff Farina
Yeah. It's funny, because Geoff did another version of that on his solo record which was super-dry, so I asked him if I should remix mine, was there too much reverb? But he said no, he thought it sounded good. I mean, there is a lot of reverb, but I think it works with the song.
It does. But I thought maybe you were a super-purist and never used any outboard effects, in which case you would've had to have a cathedral in your house or something equally unfathomable. Anyway, our waitress is giving us the heave-ho, so I guess that's it.
Supercool