Let's start with the late '90s. What brought you to Chicago from Florida?
The main thing I wanted to do was get the hell out of Florida. I'd been there for so long, I just had to get out. A guy in my class [at Full Sail] was from Chicago. He was like, "Oh man, you should move to Chicago." I got a call from a studio owner in Chicago looking for an assistant, so I packed up all my shit and drove there. I'd never been there before.
What studio was that?
It was called Studio Chicago. Most of the sessions we did there were hip-hop and pretty much all tracked to tape. I did get to work with this guy Fluffy [Keith Auerbach] — he's the guy who engineered [Ministry's] The Land of Rape and Honey and The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste. I learned a lot from him — there's one vocal processing thing I still use today, on every metal record I do.
The Al Jourgensen vocal sound?
Yeah. You take a [dbx] 160 and turn the threshold all the way off, then you turn the ratio all the way down so there's no compression at all, and then turn the output all the way up to where it distorts. Then you send it to another 160, or any other [compressor] — I usually use an [Empirical Labs] Distressor. Then I dial back a reasonable amount [of level] to tape and that's the one I use for my compression. It's cool because you talk into the mic and it sounds completely fine; but as soon as you scream, it starts to hit the output of that 160 and breaks up — to me it just sounds natural. I've recorded vocalists that had no idea I even put that on there. It's so funny too; there're so many vocalists who say, "Man, I might have to do one song a day... my voice... I hate recording." And we run through the song and every time it's like, "Dude, I sound great! This is way easier than I thought!" And I'm like, "Yeah, you sound great man!" [laughs] I don't ever say a word.
Good distorted vocals are tricky — getting them to sit with guitars and distorted bass is hard.
It is. I generally have a bit of distortion over everything; even the drums. I always use a smash mic on the drum kit — just compress the fuck out of it. That generates a little bit of distortion.
Do you strap something across your drums at mix time too?
The thing I'm really into these days is running the drum submix through Neve line input transformers.
Hitting them really hard?
Yeah. It adds this nice little top end crunch. It scoops out around 200 Hz, so it gets rid of a little bit of mud.
How did you end up at Semaphore Recording?
After Studio Chicago, I started working for a goth label. They had a built-in studio that was Pro Tools based; it was nothing fancy. The owners basically ran it into the ground. It got to the point where it was hard for me to get paid. That's when I decided that I was going to build my own place. I went in with a couple friends and built a studio called Volume. I had that for about four years until the lady who owned [the space] decided to sell the building. They offered it to us, but there was no way we could afford it. So we were scrambling, trying to find something. This was the top of the real estate boom — rent was insane everywhere, nothing was available. It's the complete opposite now — every other storefront in Chicago is available, practically free. Jeremy Lemos owned Semaphore at the time with two other guys. He does sound for Sonic Youth, Iron & Wine, Pavement — a bunch of bands. So he started touring. Elliot [Dicks] does sound for Shellac and Tortoise; he was always on the road. Scott [Adamson] does sound for Ted Leo And The Pharmacists, so he ended up moving to Brooklyn. Basically they had a studio just sitting there. Jeremy contacted me out of the blue one day and said, "I just bought this CD and it sounds really good. I wondered who tracked it andI saw it was you — good job, man!" I was like, "Cool, thanks. By the way, do you know of anybody who has a space? We're a month away from losing ours." He said, "That's funny, because I just got together with Scott and Elliot last week and we're talking about closing our studio in a month. Why don't you move in?" It was literally as easy as that. All I did was take all my sessions and move them over to this space that was already a studio.
What was the business relationship?
Everybody was responsible for certain things. Jeremy took care of paying the bills. I brought in the majority of the work — I did 90% of the gigs that were brought in; the other guys were always on the road. We had a guy, Eric [Block], who was kind of like a studio manager. His payment for managing the place was that he would get the cold call stuff. If somebody called and said, "Yo, you got some beats?" — Eric would do that gig. The studio rented out for $250 a day. We could charge anything we wanted over that and keep the difference, but we have to put at least $250 [of each session] into rent, bills and whatnot.
And why did you guys close up? Were you busy there?
Between myself and Eric we were booked almost every day. Closing the studio had absolutely nothing to do with lack of business. I've got a wife and we'd just bought a house. I can't work at a studio 15 hours a day, plus come in on my days off to fix broken mics and pay bills. Don't get me wrong — I love being in the studio more than anything. But I also like hanging out with my wife and doing normal shit that people do. [laughs] The nail in the coffin was doing this gig that wanted to go to Pachyderm [Recording Studio], but it was too much traveling. We ended up at Electrical Audio. I called around to some other studios; I also called Engine [Music Studios]. I'd done a session there a few years ago. [I talked to] the studio manager, John [Humphrey] and asked, "What are your rates now?" He's like, "The B room is $300 a day and the A room is $500 a day." I said, "So for $300 a day, I can get this totally pimped out room with a Trident 80B?" I thought, "I can get [all that] or I can spend $250 [a day] for this building that is basically falling apart. Why in the hell am I doing this to myself?"
It sounds like moving to Chicago was a great choice.
Oh yeah. Chicago is a great city. It's still really affordable, people there are great and it's centrally located. Chicago is a recording town. There are a lot of really good engineers here. I mean, Bob Weston [Tape Op #18] and Steve Albini [Tape Op #10]. [Steve's studio] Electrical Audio is amazing — it's my favorite studio to work out of. It's amazingly built, the staff is the friendliest crew I've ever met and the studio manager's a really good friend of mine. It's a great environment.
What records have you done at Electrical?
I've never done a record from beginning to end there. Usually I'll do drums or basics. I did Unearthly Trance, a Rwake record and a record for Bloodiest.
It's easy to associate Electrical with Albini and that certain type of drum sound.
The first time I worked there, I put up a couple of room mics and as soon I brought 'em up, I'm like, "Huh, there it is." [laughs] But that's not what I want. Obviously I approach it a completely different way.
It sounds like you're a spot mic guy more than a room mic guy. Your drum sounds are kind of tight and close. If there's reverb, it's reverb.
I always record room mics. Usually I'll do a stereo pair and put one [mic] three-feet out front and smash the shit out of it. But I don't go crazy with the room mics. What I've been into lately is doing a lot of stacking — using samples and all sorts of shit. The more records I do, the more stacks I start to use. The last record I did, I had five different kick and five different snare sounds all going at once. It's not like I use it as a crutch. I want a specific snare sound. I've got thousands and thousands of samples that either I've made or I've gotten from random places. These samples are like -20 dB [in the mix], so they're not loud at all compare to the original snare. This is just to add little effects. You know, at the bridge they go to half speed and you just want the snare to — "craaaaaassshhhh" — instead of trying to dial in a reverb just for the bridge, I'll take a snare sound that has a huge decay and pop that over the snare drum for that one section so it changes with the part.
Do you do a lot of synthesizing and layering on other instruments too?
I love doing that shit. Running guitars through CV [control voltage] inputs on synthesizers, running them through filters, using envelopes to create crazy sounds and shit like that. Another thing I've been doing a lot is using a vocoder on the vocals, but instead of using a synth [to control it], I'll use the guitar or bass. It creates this cool effect that kind of blends the guitar and vocals together.
What vocoders do you use?
The one I have now is an Electrix Warp Factory. It works really well. It's got the noise feature too and a lot of times I won't even use the vocoder part. I'll just dial in noise and put that underneath the whole vocal track and it adds this grit that sounds really cool. Especially if I'm doing a black metal record, it's this weird gnarl.
I figured you'd say, "I have a '70s Korg and this really rare Moog..." Nah, it's an Electrix!
[laughs] Yeah, I picked it up from a guy for $150. It works great.
You use Pro Tools as your tape deck, right?
Yeah, though I mix to tape. We have an Ampex ATR 102 1/2-inch [deck].
I imagine a lot of people listen to your records and say, "This sounds so analog."
I always get that. I just did this record for Cough. My buddy called me up and said, "I thought you weren't tracking to tape anymore! You did that Cough record to tape." We mixed to tape, but I didn't track anything to tape.
I doubt that mixing to tape made the difference he's hearing either.
Nope. Pretty much every band that calls me says, "We want to track analog." I'm like, "You're gonna need to book another day, 'cause you can't track to tape nearly as fast." At least I can't — maybe Albini can. But I can punch in and edit a lot faster on Pro Tools than tape. Bands also have to factor in $300 a reel. At the end of the day, it's miniscule. Really. Focus more on fuckin' intonating your guitar before you show up to the studio. Put fuckin' drum heads on your drums. Don't worry about me. Don't worry about tracking to tape.
You've been working steadily for about 10 years now. How has your approach to recording changed in that time?
The interaction with the musicians — I've really tried to focus on that over the course of the years. To go back to what I said before, it's so important to me to that I bro down. The band has to feel 100% comfortable and have 100% faith and trust in what I'm doing. If they don't feel that, they're always going to be doubting you and you're not going to get a good performance. I butt heads — that's gonna happen. But I've gotten to where I can read people pretty well. I try to figure out — "Okay, this is the guy who's gonna tell everybody they're playing bad. This is the guy who just doesn't give a shit. He's gonna try to get through his tracks as fast as possible so he can start drinking." I hate musicians sitting around. I don't like people in the control room with me. So I try to get everybody involved as early as possible. I try to track everything live, even if we don't plan to keep anything but the drums. That gets everybody moving. You can also see the weaknesses early on. I do two or three songs a day. So the first part of the day, we're going to do bass. I tell the other guys, "There's a comic book shop down the street." We'll have an opportunity to do the bass tracks. Then the guitar player will come back and I'll kick out bass player and so on. That way, if we spend the first two or three days doing basics — by day four, we've got at least two songs done. All the drums are tracked, the bass is tracked, the guitar, vocals — everything.
That's different from a lot of people who choose to say, "We're tracking all the drums first."
I hate doing that. I'm in song mode. I like making songs. Like I said, to me the most important thing is getting people involved. If the singer has to sit around for five or six days before he does anything, he starts getting antsy. He starts getting irritable. By the time it's ready for him to track, he's in the worst mood. Who wants to try to track then?
Indie metal records have gotten pretty hi-fi. They're big, glossy productions. A lot of your records don't follow those rules.
Definitely. I know — I mean, I listen to those records. I know sonically that other guys make really slick records. But I find myself not really wanting to listen to them much. A lot of those slick records — to me they're flat. There's no excitement to them. They're precise — you can hear every little nuance. Some of my favorite records are technically shitty-sounding records. You're not going to put a record on that has bad songs just because the snare drum sounds amazing. You're going to put on an album because you love the songs and you love that band. I run into many engineers and it seems that's the last thing they're concerned about. They're more concerned about which mic to use on the snare and so on. Who the fuck cares? My job is to make awesome records for awesome people. Recording an album should not be a bad or stressful experience. It should be a lot of fun. The band should be high-fiving each other. That's the way records should be made. If the tone suffers, then so be it. They're gonna remember that moment for the rest of their lives and it should be a positive one.
Do you visualize what you're going for in advance when you start a record?
Before I mic the first instrument, I pretty much know exactly how that record is going to sound, especially after getting demos from the band and discussing what they envision. All I'm doing is trying to get to that point. I know exactly how I want the drums and vocals to sound.
Can you pick a couple of examples?
Probably the best example is the latest Nachtmystium record [Addicts: Black Meddle, Part II]. Blake [Judd] and I talked about breaking off from the early black metal stuff and going with something a little more, for lack of a better word, poppy and accessible. We wanted to write songs. The older I get, the more I appreciate songs. So we got together, we demo'd everything and arranged all the songs. When we actually tracked it, I knew, "On this particular part of this song I want to have this dancey 808 beat; I want this synth bass line to play over this section. This middle section, I want to sound like The Jesus and Mary Chain." I knew this stuff before we even set up the first drum.
What are your current challenges? What are you trying to improve?
Mixing is always the biggest challenge for me. I feel 100% confident tracking. That part is the fun thing about making a record. Mixing is where I start to sweat. That's another reason I try to get it right early on; so there's less shit I have to do at the end. The way I prefer to mix is — I get everything up as fast as possible. I build a mix fast and then do it like sculpting. You start with this slab of marble and then chip away at it until you have whatever you're going for.
Does that mean you don't solo tracks much?
I hardly ever solo. I'll solo just to tweak and then I'm back. I don't like soloing at all. Especially when the band's present. As soon as you solo something, that's when they start asking questions. "What was that?" I'm like, "Don't worry about it." "No, no. What was that?" [laughs]
Do you have moments where you say to yourself, "Oh man, I'm fucked. Why am I even doing this"?
[laughs] I get those quite a bit. I'm really hard on myself. I'm never happy with the end result. Not that I'm unhappy with it, but I always feel like, "I could have done that better." Usually after an album's mixed I'll take it home and make sure everything's cool and then I won't listen to it again until it comes back from mastering. That's usually when I'm like, "Okay, that's not so bad." But there's still all those, "Man, why did I do that? What was I thinking?" I do that with every record. I've never once made a record where I put it on and felt like, "Oh yeah, I really nailed this one." [laughs] Never.
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Scott Evans plays in Kowloon Walled City and records loud bands in San Francisco. www.antisleep.com
