You want to do the kind of work that you’re gonna keep enjoying over the years. You can’t work 14 hours a day, six days a week, month after month, year after year on something you hate, you know what I mean? I would commit suicide if I was doing really horrible music.

It’s really fun when I get a band that I really like. It’s a blast, I’ll kill myself; I’m a total workaholic.

You want to make something really good with it.

We ended up doing a 26 hour day on the last day of the Zen Guerrilla record. We all got sick and lost a whole bunch of time in the middle of the project and ended up in this frenzy to try and finish it because they were on tour and they had to leave town so we had to finish and we just ended up staying up all night. We were still doing vocals at six a.m. and I was mixing and it was a frenzy and we got the damn thing done. Everybody’s happy and you know, I just went home and collapsed and died for about a week. It was just like, “Okay, I’m going to work all night. We are going to do what’s necessary.”

Do you ever have very many things that go overtime?

Nope. Damn few. Sometimes I wish I could go overtime on a few things, you know? You have to work within the time and money that’s allowed.

How long did you have for Zen Guerrilla? Like two weeks?

We had a couple of weeks, yeah, it was fun. I did a record for Watt that’s gonna come out on Estrus and we think we did the whole record in about five and a half days. Those guys are totally used to it; they were just like, “Okay, let’s go, next thing, okay, okay, lets do the vocals. Okay, let’s see....okay, guitar, okay, solos, okay get out there, let’s do the solos.” It’s great. I’’ve actually done bands that did the whole thing live in like a day. And sometimes it actually sounds alright.

That’s one of the things I think that friends of mine in Seattle were mentioning, when you first started getting some acclaim, was that you can get a good drum sound really quickly.

I can still do that actually. You know what? That’s funny because I hate my drum sounds.

Really?

In fact I hate all the records that I’ve ever done. I hate music. I hate everybody. Fuck you all. Nah, just kidding. But really, I get so frustrated with drum sounds. I hate snare drums, I just can’t ever get a snare drum sound that I like. Then I realize that there aren’t really that many records that have a snare drum sound that I like. I don’t how anyone else does it either, you know? You always end up coming back to a 57 pointing at the damn thing and you know, I tear my hair out trying all kinds of shit and I keep coming back to the stupid 57 on the snare again and it sounds the same way it always does. I don’t have the time to experiment sometimes, you know? People can’t sit around there waiting for me to spend like three hours on a snare drum.

It’s seems like diminishing returns sometimes too. I mean, you can frustrate the whole band and drag the project to a screeching halt trying to fine tune one little element.

Exactly, sometimes you just have to go, “Okay, we have a week to do this, let’s go.” You know if I have a week to do drums, that’s a different story. Let’s get a bunch of snare drums in here and screw around with mic’ing. What is the killer snare sound? I think most people have just given up and are just using samples these days. I’m just old fashioned, you know, I still wanna, you know, I want it to be different every record.

What records would you say have ultimate really great snare sounds?

Don’t ask me, I can’t even tell you.

I was just wondering if you had...

It’s just some vague notion that’s in my head, some ideal floating around out there that I’m trying to reach for, but...

It might not even be something that exists, you know.

You hear it on records that are like, really expensive and you go, how the hell did they get the snare drum to sound that good. I guess the best way to get a good drum sound is to have a good drummer. That seems to be the bottom line. With a really good drummer you just hang a mic over and it’s amazing, no matter what he’s playing. You don’t get drummers like that too often. You get drummers who are just wailing on the high hat and they’ve got a little wimpy snare drum and cymbals all over the place and you just deal. Get rid of all high hats and see what happens. All of our lives would be so much easier. 90 percent of the time I’ll record the high hat on a separate track and I’ll end up erasing it later. Seriously, 95 percent of the time you’ll just end up using the overheads and there’s already too much high hat on it anyway.

What do you always end up going to for the kick drums?

I’m pretty much a D112 guy. It’s pretty much it for me. Sometimes I’ll play with a 421 or an RE20 but basically I’m a D112 guy. There just is no replacement for me.

We have both. I just keep switching them back and forth and I keep leaning towards the RE20.

They’re both good mics the D112 is a lot cheaper.

That’s one thing I aways tell people if they’re looking to set up a small studio.

An RE20 would be more useful overall. Like to use it on bass. I wouldn’t use the D112 on anything else, except I did use it for vocals a while ago which was pretty weird. I had a female singer who, when she hit certain notes, there was this real sharp edge to it. We tried every mic, suddenly it was like, “Wait, what about this one.” And damned if we didn’t end up cutting all the vocals to the D112. Who knows if I’ll ever do that again, but it worked.

I’ve started using the RE20 a lot more for vocals, depending on the singer of course.

Ben sang through that thing on all the Gruntruck records and for that matter, Chris Eckman of the Walkabouts always sings through a 421, if I remember right. You know what I use mostly as a vocal mic? I use a Beta58. I’m serious. I use a Beta 58 on almost all my vocals for this rock stuff. I was in a studio the other day where we had a beautiful Neumann U47 and we had the Beta 58 next to it and we put the singer up to the 47 ran it through a compressor, listened to it and hated it. Put him on the 58 and everybody immediately went, “Oh yeah, that’s the sound.” With certain rock voices, you get a voice that’s really loud and out of control you just need a dynamic mic, I don’t know why.

Do you take stuff around with you, like mics and outboard gear and things, when you go out to work in different studios?

When I’m here in Seattle I do. I don’t bother taking stuff on the planes with me. The only thing I carry around with me everywhere is a spectrum analyser. It’s an Audio Control 3050A. It’s made by a company up here in Seattle. It’s actually to the point that I have one here and a friend of mine is storing one for me in London, so when I go to Europe I can get him to send it to me over there and I don’t have to deal with the customs thing. Another friend of mine in Brazil has got one down there so if I go back there there’s one there I can use. When I go from room to room, let’s not even get into it, I mean speakers in rooms... you might calibrate your tape deck and have the best pre-amps in the world, but I’m sorry, the rooms and the speakers are such a tremendous variable.

As far as control rooms?

Just the control room’s acoustics and speaker frequency response and how they interact with the surface of the board and how far away it is. It’s all so radically, wildly different from studio to studio. It’s just beyond belief. I always have my analyzer with me and I just plug it into the main output of the board right into the speaker output actually, the thing that’s going to the speaker amp, so that whatever I’m hearing on the speakers including solos, in other words if I solo a channel basically, whatever’s in the speaker is in the analyzer.

Control room output, yeah.

I glance at it from time to time and I’m thinking, is there enough bottom? I’ve basically watched enough records and enough of my stuff through this analyzer that I pretty much know what a fairly balanced rock record looks like on this spectrum analyzer. I can sort of look at a kick drum and go, “Oh man, I need to scoop a little more here.” And it really saves my ass in times when I’m not quite sure what I’m hearing in the speakers. If I think it’s really bright and I look at the analyzer and it’s not, I believe the analyzer.

Exactly, it’s not gonna lie to you.

It’s really saved my ass a number of times. I use it a lot for mastering as well. It’s almost like another speaker in a way, it’s a speaker for your eyes. It’s a strange thing. I’ve been carrying it around with me everywhere for ten years and I’ve never run into any one else who does that but once I got it it was like, how did I ever live without this thing? I carry a few mics around with me because some of the budget studios around here that I work in sometimes are deficient in terms of mics. I have a couple of 421’s, I’ve got my Beta 58, I’ve got a couple of D112’s, I’ve got a couple of cheap condensers and just various oddball microphones that I’ve accumulated over the years and I just bring them and add them to whatever is compiled at the studio. I don’t have anything fancy, I’ve got an Audio Technica 4033, that’s like the one decent condenser mic I own and it’s nothing to write home about, it’s alright.

They’re good little workhorses, though.

It’s decent. I’ve used it on my own vocals sometimes and it sounds alright. I probably should have had a pair of them but, you know, whatever. I prefer a [AKG]414 and I’m not gonna buy one.