This building is great. How did you end up here?
In the late '90s I was at Boston Scientific as a biomedical engineer. I was working on endovascular stent grafts and vena cava filters while moonlighting doing recording. I was getting really busy, recording bands from all over the country and some international stuff. Those bands would come to record with me, but we couldn't start until 5 or 6 p.m. since my studio was in an industrial park. I had to work the next day, so I couldn't record all night. In 2001, the project I was working on at my day job was cancelled. I was given the option of finding another job in the company or taking a really nice severance package. Converge had released Jane Doe that week and we felt like it was light years ahead of what we had done before. We were ready to go out on tour, to go be a real band for the first time. So I took the severance package. Right away I started looking for new places to move my studio. After a year of searching, I found this building. I bought it and gutted it. It almost ruined me financially, but I was able to build a studio here. I had Wes Lachot, who I heard about through Tape Op, do the design work. Wes and I did most of the framing together, then I did the drywall, floors and wiring and contracted the air conditioning. Then Wes came back for the finish carpentry and acoustical treatments.
Were you working during that time?
I went for a period of about eight months where I didn't record at all — no money coming in and a lot of money going out. A lot of loans and credit card debt. When I finally opened for business, I was really hurting. It was ramen noodles and dodging calls from creditors. Things have been getting better here ever since. There's been a lot of gear renovation. The client base has been radically improving.
Do you do any advertising?
No, I never have. It's been all word of mouth and I've been pretty happy with how that's treated me.
Does most of that word of mouth involve Converge?
I record a lot of people that are aware of Converge, and they know me through touring and whatnot. But I rarely solicit bands we're playing with. The solicitation of bands has always left a bad taste in my mouth when I've seen other people do it, so I just hope that people that are writing good music want to come to me.
I like the idea of that kind of engineer. You, Alex Newport, Matt Bayles — people who have spent a lot of time in the trenches in bands.
People want to record with someone they feel some kind of connection to, someone who shares their taste in music and has shared the lifestyle they live. From a communicative standpoint, I don't know how I would record a band not being a musician. I'm not a great drummer, but I know how drums are played. I know that if this drummer is struggling because he's trying to do two right-hand hits in a row, maybe if he used the bass drum instead of the last floor tom, he'd be able to get the snare and cymbal on one together. I don't think a non-musician would be able to decipher that stuff. Or I can look at someone playing a guitar part and say "You're struggling because you're fingering it that way. What if you finger it this way?" I can grab my guitar and play the part.
You haven't spent much time in other studios, right? To me, working with or being recorded by other engineers is the fastest way to learn.
That's totally correct and I would love to do more of that. But with my band, it's tough to justify giving someone else your money to do something you can do yourself. And having learned on my own, I feel like I've developed a style of my own. It's more important to me to make unique records than good sounding records.
Your room configuration is unusual — multiple small, high-end analog mixers, the [Otari] MTR-100, racks of nice outboard and a Pro Tools rig at the center of everything. What's your basic workflow?
Sometimes I track basics to the 2" 24-track, sometimes to 1" 8-track and sometimes to digital. Even when I'm doing basics to tape, I'm monitoring through Pro Tools. It's going mic pres, tape, Pro Tools, console.
Because that's what you're going to hear in the end?
Yeah. I'm hearing the conversion right when I start getting sounds. Headphone mixes all go through Pro Tools... everything. That also means that I'm ready to transfer at any time. So I can use rental reels of tape — I don't have to cut tape to do edits. We record sections of the song, I dump them and do edits in Pro Tools.
And if the band wants to take a break and you want to start working on vocals for a song...
Yeah, it's there. I rarely switch gears during drum mode to go to something else. But once drums are done, I often like to get guitars, bass and vocals set up at the same time. No one wants to sing for 10 hours a day, and you probably don't want to play guitar or bass for 10 hours, so you need to be able to bounce between people. Overdubs are almost always in Pro Tools. I don't ever want to record vocals on tape ever again for the rest of my life. Especially with hardcore, singers are usually the friend of the band that's not the musician. That means they don't have a great sense of timing, so I'm doing a lot of punching and a lot of editing with vocals. When it comes to mixing, the Pro Tools tracks are sent out individual outputs and mixed on a console. There are things that are grouped together... a lot of times if I have four or five guitar tracks — those will go in a stereo pair and there may be some group compression. I really like the Massey [L2007 plug-in] limiter on a guitar subgroup. I'll do some parallel compression on the snare drum in Pro Tools.
So you run some inserts in the box.
Yeah. I've got one [physical] fader here for snare. But in the computer — this session [Converge] I've got three mics on the snare. One mic is duped inside Pro Tools and heavily gated and compressed, and one mic is lightly compressed inside Pro Tools. They're all mixed together, then there's a little compression outside the box as well.
But it's not just summing out here for you, right? You're doing a lot of EQ and running outboard...
Oh yeah. The Tonelux EQs are awesome. I do very little EQ and compression in Pro Tools. If I'm summing something in the box and one element of the subgroup needs to be EQ'd or compressed, I do that in the box.
It sounds like you have a lot of your mix happening during tracking.
Yeah, I'm pretty heavy-handed in tracking and I agonize over getting sounds. That's probably why I mix fairly quickly. I need like two days to get the sound of the mix, and then after that I can start going song by song and making adjustments. I can mix an EP in two days and an album in three. I'm writing automation stuff as I'm tracking, and in Pro Tools I tend to have everything in the same Pro Tools session. I don't like to have a session per song.
Really? You literally run all your mixes from a single Pro Tools session?
The music I'm recording is sonically pretty consistent from song to song. When I'm recording a band that's not like that, I'll do different sessions per song. Of course I want to pay attention to each song and give each song its own treatment, and if the guitars are in different keys then yeah, you want to EQ things differently. But most of the stuff I record is not in different keys, and not in wildly different tempos. Usually a little bit of automation is enough to give each song its own character. I don't want to spend hours copying plug-in settings and changing I/O assignments. For this Converge record I'm working on, there's nine songs in one session and four songs that have their own sessions.
How do you deal with recalls?
I don't. I don't recall.
It stays up until it's done and then it's done?
Yeah. It's done. I'll make stems if time permits, but the time to make and do recalls — it's too much analog gear here. I don't want to spend hours making recall sheets. I don't have an assistant engineer and I don't want one. Once I a get a sound I'm happy with, I tend to leave it out here and do song-by-song tweaks in the computer. So during the time span of the session, everything is recallable. Two weeks later if they want to redo a song, that's a whole new mix. But if we're working on the fourth song and we want to go back to the first, it's still there because I've done all my changes in the computer.
Since you have three small mixers, you have your choice of where digital tracks end up going.
Right — there's a little bit of auditioning at the beginning of any mix. Actually, I mixed the newest Doomriders record twice. I mixed everything with drums on the Tonelux, bass on the Opamp Labs, and guitars and vocals on the [Thermionic Culture] Fat Bustard. The Bustard is the greatest guitar tracking device to sum multiple mics onto one track. Then I said, "For shits and giggles, I'm going to go the other way around." I re-patched everything and reversed it, although I kept all the EQs and stuff. I ended up liking the second version better. The way this [Bustard] distorts — when it gets a little warm fuzz it's cool, but when you get on that cusp of real distortion, it starts to get crackly. I didn't like the way the guitar sounded when driven that hard, but the drums were tracked digitally and I liked the slightly warmer sound of the drums on the Bustard.
I was surprised to hear how often you track with scratch guitars. I expected more bands to track live basics.
It's partially a sonic thing and partially a performance thing. A lot of what I'm recording is fast and technical and I'm not always recording great, trained musicians. So being able to focus on one person's performance at a time is good. From a drummer's standpoint the music tends to be really physically demanding. For a drummer to have to redo a take because the guitar player messed up is a pain in the ass.
I assume you're trying to minimize bleed too. You mentioned live guitar hampering your ability to get drum sounds later.
Yeah, room mic'ing in the context of loud guitars means that you're room mic'ing the guitars, not the drum set. If you like your overheads, cool. If you want a drier drum sound, it works. But if you want a wetter drum sound, it doesn't work here because I need to put room mics in my iso booths and leave the doors open to get a big room sound. And that leaves me with no place to isolate guitar amps.
Any drum wisdom to share?
Everything I do with regard to a drum sound keeps in mind reducing cymbals or cymbal bleed. Oftentimes there's this foam-filled flowerpot thing that I'll put over the hi-hats to suck up some of the hi-hat leakage and get it out of the room mics and overheads. Sometimes I de-ess the snare with an [Empirical Labs] Lil FrEQ. I almost always top and bottom mic toms. I group a top and bottom mic track and manually gate them with editing, then ungroup them and elongate all the fade outs on the bottom mic so it has more sustain. Then I'll duplicate the edited top mic and create my own crossover in Pro Tools with the EQ III plug-in doing a high pass on one track and a low pass on the other track. The EQs are both at the same frequency and use a 6db/octave slope. I'll elongate all the tails of the fadeouts on the one that's low-passed so you have some resonance from the tom, but not any of the brash cymbal decay in there.
Do you use triggers much?
I'll use triggers here and there, but I don't rely on them — certainly not for tone, but almost as a surrogate for compression. I hate triggers on toms though. They almost always sound like shit. If you're blending mics, [trigger] timing is off no matter what you use. apTrigga, Drumagog, MIDI, SoundReplacer... all that stuff is never accurate. The only way I've found to do it accurately is the tab-transient feature in Pro Tools, and cutting up the thing and replacing every single hit. It's a pain in the ass and I hate doing it. Actually you know what I used to do, and if the ddrum triggers didn't suck and break all the time, I would still be doing? On snare I used to record the raw signal coming off the trigger and blend the audio in with the mic. On its own it sounds like a click, but blended it adds this little bit of attack.
A lot of your records are pretty gnarly as far as mix distortion goes.
It's the cumulative effect of a lot of things. It's the sound of the instruments themselves, a little bit of the mic pre, the compressor and driving things hard in the mix. Sometimes it's compression on the mix, sometimes it's going to tape too hot. It also happens in mastering, but I feel like it sounds more natural when it happens at a lot of small stages.
So it's no accident, and it's not a volume wars thing.
My stereo has a volume knob. I know how to turn it up. But my stereo doesn't have a distortion knob. There's a certain cohesion that happens to an aggressive mix when there's a little bit of unnatural distortion happening to the entire thing. In a lot of cases it evokes the feeling of the sort of shows that we grew up going to.
Your head is caving in.
Yeah, when you're watching a hardcore band in someone's basement you're not getting a clear image of what things sound like. Your ears are overdriving. And even if you were deaf — visually, there's melee and chaos all around you. Your eyes will lead you to hear an excitement that might not fully exist sonically. On a clean recording you can't invoke that feeling. The last record I did, this band Black Breath, I was watching the meters of the mixes and they weren't really moving. [laughs] It's the most slammed mix I've ever made, but I'm kind of liking it. I'm finding that I like mastering less and less as I get better at recording. Also, if I don't compress at the mix stage then things change too much in mastering. The balances change too much.
The drums vanish.
When in doubt I push the drums a little harder than I think they should be because I know that you can limit it a little harder and they'll go away. If I'm pushing really hard, time permitting, I'll also provide the mastering guy with an uncompressed version of the mix. If he's able to get to that same result in a better way than I'm able to, then it might ultimately make for a better record, but I'm basing my mix decisions on the compressed mix.
Listening to the records you've done — Young Widows, Kruger, Torche, Converge, Doomriders, Disfear — there is no "signature sound". You wouldn't know they were recorded by the same guy.
For me it's always been important to never do the same thing twice, to make sure that each thing I do is unique — but also, doing stuff differently every time forces you to always be using your ears rather than using muscle memory. When I start a mix I try to have a pre mix conversation with the band and ask them, "What are you looking for? Can you name a few records that you like the sound of?" — not to tell me what I should be duplicating, but just some range- finding to know what you think sounds good.
Is that before the mix starts, or before you even start placing microphones?
Depending on how long we have to make the record, I might start talking about it right away. When it comes to drum sounds — yes. With guitar, I'm trying to capture the way the guitar sounds in the room, but with drums I'm not necessarily looking for an exact representation of what the drums sound like in the room.
Pick a few of your recent records. What are some examples of the differing approaches you took?
For Disfear, Uffe [Cederlund] from Entombed is in the band, so there's this connection to early '90s Swedish death metal, which is hugely influential on me. I kept that in mind during the whole process, especially with regards to guitar sound — I stressed over the guitar sound of that record [Live the Storm] endlessly. The drums are pretty mono on that record too. If you listen to those old Swedish death metal records, the toms might be panned a little bit and the ride cymbal's panned, but everything else is mono, which leaves a lot of space for guitar. I think a lot about panning when I'm mixing and when I'm listening to references that the band likes. How wide is this record, or how close and focused? The Disfear record has a really strong center channel, which is somewhat indicative of their sonic roots. Doomriders are looking for more of a blown-out, over-the-top sound, and clarity is not a primary concern of theirs. So I'm not carving out low mids to achieve clarity on the guitars like I might on some other records. When one band talks about clarity on the guitars, they might be talking about 3 kHz. When Doomriders talk about it, they're talking about 400 Hz. I'll be boosting their guitars in the same place that I'll be cutting the toms and the bass drum [as opposed to] the frequencies of the attack of the drums. Their mixes get pretty heavily compressed in lots of stages, and then I hit the tape as hard as I can because they want they whole mix to be distorted. They want to make the most meaty, overdriven, slimy record. [The record, Darkness Come Alive, was released in late September.]
The Torche record [Meanderthal] sounds almost glossy. Their tones are hairy, but the overall sound seems well behaved.
One of keys to the Torche sound is no tone. First thing you do when you pick up a guitar is turn the tone knob all the way down and leave it there. So you have this deep, rich sound, but it has a lot of overtones — this harmonic richness that isn't in most guitar sounds. It creates a lot of room for vocal presence. You don't have to boost the shit out of the cymbals in order to have air. I didn't have to mix Ricky [Smith, drums] really loud in order to get clarity from the drums, and I didn't have to over-EQ the drums because the guitars sound present when they're not super bright.
This is interesting. As much as I'm trying to get you to come up with "here is the Zen way that Kurt Ballou creates unique sounding records"... maybe a lot of it really is using your ears and responding to what the tracks tell you to do.
Yeah, I know that's kind of boring and you read that all the time in Tape Op. [laughs] When I first starting recording, I read interviews where people said that and I only half believed them. But I've come to really believe it. There are definitely some secrets out there, but it's more about experience and using your ears than it is about having any secret tricks.
If you're constantly trying new things, is that scary? You fuck up your guitar tracks and you're stuck with them.
I learned the hard way that if you're going to do something weird, do something safe as a backup. One time I decided, "I'm gonna gate the toms to tape." I put ddrum triggers on the tom shells and used the trigger signal to key the gates. I figured, "This will be totally reliable." And it wasn't. So I fucked up my friend's record. That's probably the worst example. I figure if I'm going to try something really weird like recording the snare through a vacuum cleaner hose, I'm going to put another regular mic on it too. So especially if you're recording digital and you have the track count for it, do something safe if you're guinea pigging. Or guinea pig on yourself. If you're doing it on someone else, do something that doesn't fuck with the schedule too much.
Do you get excited about the records you work on?
Absolutely. I only record people that I like, that I respect and whose music I enjoy and I would listen to if I wasn't recording it. Ten years ago I was recording just about anyone who walked in the door, but as time's gone on I've gotten more choosy.
I saw a great quote of yours in another interview, something like, "You make great records by working with great bands."
Oh yeah. Great bands make great records. Bad bands make bad records. And I feel like a lot of people who are well known in the recording world are well known because they've been lucky to work with really good bands.
That Young Widows record [Old Wounds] is one of my favorites from last year. I was stunned when I heard how it was recorded. What's the full story behind that project?
I had seen Young Widows a few times, and they were one of those few bands that sounded perfect live. It sounded almost like a record. Not like a Hollywood record, but how a Midwestern indie record should sound. So Evan [Patterson] was asking about recording with me, and I suggested we should do a live record.
So it was your idea!
[laughs] I welcomed that world of hurt upon myself. I got a mobile setup together and drove to Indiana. We set up in [a friend's] house and recorded raw drum tracks in the living room. The house is really open, so there's room mics everywhere, 60, 70 feet away in other rooms. Then we went down to the basement and [tracked] rehearsal. We set up like they were playing live. Then we did four live shows. It was a lot harder and more time-consuming than I expected — a lengthy setup, a lot of running cables and a lot of unforeseen technical problems. I definitely have new respect for front of house engineers. While the band was breaking down after each show, I bounced rough mixes to disk. We'd listen to the mix on the drive to the next show. When we got here [to Godcity] we got a whiteboard and made a matrix of what we liked from which sets. "So this song — we like the intro from the Chicago set, but we like the bridge from Cleveland," and, "Oh, this guy started beating a kid on the head with a skateboard in Boston, so we gotta get that on the record. But the mic got kicked away from the amp over here, missed a snare hit there." So the matrix was our map of what we could use, what still needed to be recorded and how it all had to fit together. When it came time to mix, I had seven different [recording] setups. Say you have a section of a live song, but it has studio overdubs and those tracks carry over as studio drums and vocals take over. How do you get that to work? I had to assemble it all later using stems. The screen looked like Tetris. It was an exorbitant amount of mixing.
When I first heard this record, I didn't know about the process. I noticed the roomy drum sounds and the applause at the end of some songs. But I never would have guessed it was done that way. It sounds like a record. The end result is cohesive.
I've got to tip my hat to Carl Saff, who mastered it. As you can probably imagine, mixing was incredibly difficult and it was done in about a day and a half, maybe two days.
No — all 15 songs?
Yeah. There's a lot of stuff that could have been better, and I knew it. Carl really found the life that was in the record and brought it out and was able to make it as consistent from song to song as it needed to be.
What was your mobile rig?
A laptop with Pro Tools LE and a Digi 002 with my Apogee converters. I had a rack of mic pres, some EQs and compressors.
What did you monitor with?
Just Ultrasone headphones. I was tracking very hands- off — just gain, a little bit of EQ. I set the EQs during rehearsal with trial and error — record a little bit then listen back.
Would you do a project like that again?
I'm not going to race out to do [live recording] again, but if it's someone that truly sounds great live... It's so rare that heavy music actually sounds good live.
Well, it's sonically ridiculous.
All these romantic ideas you read about in Tape Op about making a tunnel for the bass drum and recording the guitar through a banjo and a trash can, and a vacuum cleaner hose for the vocals... that shit doesn't work in this context. With the density of the music that I usually work on, there's very little space for nuance.
So you feel like your overall job changes on metal records as compared to, say, an indie pop record?
[Indie pop productions] require more insight as to the song and the lyrics and what kind of feeling the songwriter's trying to invoke. When you're recording a metal band, you know what feeling they're trying to evoke. [laughs] You just think, "Satan, Satan, Satan." When you're EQ'ing the bass guitar you're like "Satan, Satan, Satan." The snare drum — "Satan, Satan." It's more the technical challenge of, "How do I achieve the maximum amount of Satan?" On a more open- sounding record, there's more room for creativity and subjectivity. You can [choose to] focus on the vocals or focus on the drums. You can have a tight drum sound or an open, boom-y drum sound. You can have a variety of instrumentation. You don't have to double the guitars. There are fewer rules that you feel obliged to abide by, which makes it more fun, but also makes it a different type of challenge. With an indie record, instead of auditioning the best gear for the sound like I would on a hardcore record, I'm thinking at a higher level about auditioning the best philosophical approach for the song.
Do you think of yourself as an engineer or a producer?
I think of myself as malleable to whatever the record requires, but typically I think of myself as a recordist. I am most excited about records when I get to produce them — unfortunately that's not as often as I would like.
For you what does producing typically entail?
There's a tendency in metal and hardcore when you're writing songs, to try and use every idea that you come up with. So I think people make songs that are needlessly complex, and it becomes more about riff writing than songwriting. I'm a fan of the pop song format. Regardless of how inaccessible and unlistenable your riffs are, if you put those riffs into an accessible format, it can still have a hook and be memorable. When I'm afforded the opportunity to [produce], I try to dismantle ideas and assemble them into sensical, memorable songs. Unfortunately, a lot of times people have been crafting these progressive metal opuses for too long and aren't able to unlearn that and hear it in a different way. So it's not frequent that I get a positive response from that sort of thing.
Are you making a living now? Are you able to save any money?
I do make a living from the studio. It's self-sustaining. I live in the same building as my studio, and the studio pays the mortgage, my insurance, my car. I don't take a personal salary from the studio — whatever money I make from Converge is what I use to pay for groceries or going out.
As far as adult stuff goes — health insurance, saving money for the future...
The studio pays for my health insurance. Massachusetts has a lot of different insurance laws — it's actually kind of difficult to get insurance as an individual, but I was able to do it through the musician's union. I have a certain amount of savings. Most of that comes from band touring. Last year I did really well on our European tour, mostly due to the exchange rate. A lot of that money went to savings, and I used some of it to help my studio buy the Tonelux console.
How many records have you done over the last few years?
Probably an average of 20 to 25 a year.
And how many shows has Converge played in that time?
We usually tour about two or three months out of the year.
Are you exhausted? Do you manage to get outside, exercise or eat okay?
I definitely don't exercise enough. I don't know if that has anything to do with being a recording engineer or if it's just me. I walk my dog. I play tennis once in a while. I eat okay. Vegan cooking is my only hobby outside of recording.
Still, that is a crazy schedule. Making records is intense.
I do try to keep it to 10 hours a day. I know when you're a band recording, it's your one record a year. You can work 16 hours a day and you want to sleep on the studio floor. I'm pretty up front about the fact that I can't do that. So yeah, I get to hang out with friends, go to shows. I go on tour and that's my vacation. I don't very often have a period of time that I don't work.
Who does your booking?
I do everything. I clean the toilets. I don't want any employees. I'm not so big that I need that stuff and I don't have so much money in the budgets that I can afford to share that money with someone else. In terms of management, I don't need to give anyone 15% of what I make. If I was going about things in the Hollywood way, where you work on a record until it's done and then see what's next, maybe a manager would be good. But I have a record booked in January already. It's June now.
Plus, the beauty of DIY is that you know everything that's going on. You don't have to rely on people who you can't really trust.
Let me say this about DIY — DIY isn't anything I'm doing by choice. This is necessity and this is how I was raised. There's no one in my family that works for anyone else. When I was a kid, when I wanted a new bike, my dad said let's go to the metal yard and get some tubing, and we'll make a frame. You want a pool? Let's go rent a Bobcat. Start digging. That's the way my life has always been. You want something, you do it for yourself. You know what you want better than anyone else.
