If you’re careful about recording the sounds properly and you’ve got the time to really make sure that it’s played right and mixed right, it can end up sounding way better than going to a thousand dollar a day room and trying to do it in three days. Which a lot of people try and do. I tell people that you’re gonna be better off going to a small studio with someone who is into your kind of music and you’ll get a really good job. You did a little editorial in the back of your last issue and I have to say that I agree with you a hundred percent on this. The gear isn’t that important if the music is good and if you spend the time and your engineering is good. The point is, it doesn’t matter really what you’re recording on, it’s what you’re recording that matters not how you’re doing it. And it’s like the biggest lesson that you can possibly impart to anybody. You don’t need to spend a million bucks to make a good sounding recording. But people continue to just find newer and more inventive ways to waste money in the studio. Particularly when they get onto a major label. The producer has to bring a rack of pre-amps with him even if he’s recording at a studio with an API board. He’s gotta bring his own pre-amps with him from L.A. at great expense. Maybe dogs can hear the difference between these things, I can’t. So let’s get a rack of expensive compressors with us for tracking. You don’t need a rack of compressors for tracking. Save it for the mixing. I bring compressors with me, okay, but they’re just run of the mill compressors that I like using. I’m not a snob. But how much of that is habit that needs to be broken? I just think there’s a lot of time and money wasted in the studio on things, that in the long run, make no difference. I find that the most important pieces of equipment are the room, the tape machine, the time that is spent and the guy doing it. That’s all you need to record a good track. The rest of it is all bullshit. Mixing is another story, you can go crazy with mixing, but if you do that, go to a specialized mixing room where you’ve got a nice little place. You’ve got someone who specializes in mixing and has all the equipment. I’ve seen people waste money on recording and I’ve even had the opportinity to waste a bit of it myself because it seemed like that was expected of me. It sort of left a bad taste in my mouth. Did it feel like you were just puttering around and not really getting to the job? Yeah, because some of the records that I’ve spent a few months on; they’re not significantly different from the ones that I’ve done quickly. There’s a little bit of a sheen to them from just having lots of time and getting things exactly right and some of them sound pretty amazing but some of the cheaper records that I’ve done have a little more life to them. When I’m flying to other countries I don’t bring anything. I’m dealing with customs, I’m going as a tourist, I don’t want them asking a lot of questions. I deal with whatever I have and that’s really made me a much better engineer When I get there I’ll whine and complain and I’ll say, “Well, I really need another compressor or give me another mic” or whatever. And you try and get what you can but it’s just amazing to me how I’ve been forced to work in every thing from Rockfield in Wales for two months doing a record (which is a legendary studio that’s been there since the 60s Neve VR boards with flying faders, Studer A27’s, giant rooms a wonderful place) and then you’ve got like a studio I worked at called the La Cosina in Mexico City which is a basement ADAT studio and the backdoor of the control room opens to the outside and all this dust comes in. The ADATs are full of this gritty dust. I made a couple of really good sounding records at this little studio in Mexico for this band called Guillotina. I’m actually pretty happy with these records and I don’t even like ADATs that much but you know I just sort of forced myself to get used to them. I’ll come home and I’ll be scratching my head, “Going damn, why do people spend all this money recording.” There’s a lot of ways to do it. Frankly, I don’t like recording records in two days, whether it’s in two days whether it’s a small room or in a big studio. Like I said, time is one of the most important factors. What about time spent on pre-production? Do you get time to go to band’s rehearsals or sit with them and work out re-arranging anything? Yeah, I do that when I can. A lot of times it doesn’t happen. They send me a tape and I listen carefully and I make comments and I say, “You know, this one’s a little long. Do you realize this chorus goes 8 times maybe it should go six or something like that?” A lot of times that’s as far as I can go because the band is in another country. With people here in Seattle, I’ll go to their shows and go to a practice if I can. I love to have a chance to go see a band practice and just sit in the corner and be a fly on the wall with my little hand metronome and see how fast they’re playing the songs at practice and then go to a show with my little metronome. I have a little note pad and I’ll just note how fast people are playing stuff and then when they get in the studio it’s a good argument settling device. People freak out and they play everything at half speed in the studio and you can say wait a minute, here’s how fast you played it the last five times I saw you. That really saves a lot of hassle. No one’s ever mentioned that before. Really? I’ve had bands that did it for themselves and it was just wonderful. Every song, we’d just print a little bit of metronome click at the beginning and then kill it as soon as the band gets going. That’s what I do because I hate click tracks. There’s a Brazilian band that I use clicks with because they practice with them. They’re just used to it. They used to be a pop band where they did everything with MIDI and they slowly got away from that and are now more of a guitar band but they still sort of retain their habit of recording. The drummer plays really well with a click track and when he doesn’t have it he freaks out and that’s fine, because it works with them really well. It certainly makes it easy to splice the different drum takes together if I need to. 98 percent of the time I strongly discourage people from even attempting to use a click track. If the drummer is good enough to play to a click track, chances are, he doesn’t need it. It’s very true. Lots of times it’s just like a reminder thing or something like that. Yeah, maybe give it to them for like the first couple of measures of the song just to make sure that they start at the right speed and if they speed up a little, bit deal. It’s music, it’s supposed to breathe a little bit. If it slows down, that’s another story. Slowing down is the kiss of death. What can you do, you know, you just have to say, look, you’re slowing down. Sometimes you just have to accept. The chances are, you may hear it but nobody else will ever hear it. That’s true. There’s plenty of things on records. I was listening to a Zeppelin record and I heard John Bonham slowing down and I was thinking, my hearing is getting a little too good, you know? Maybe I worry about this stuff too much. There’s a big old vocal punch in on the first Zeppelin record. I heard edits on “Whole Lotta Love”. What about tape speeds? You were saying how you would never want to record at 30 if you can avoid it. Well, I’m just about to start a project where I’m gonna record at 30. It’s a pop record for these Brazilians and the guitars are gonna be a smaller part of it. It’s gonna be a lot of vocals, some keyboards, some percussion things like that. The thing with 30, it’s a love/hate relationship I have with 30 ips analog. As far as recording media, I’d rather record digital than record 30 ips analog. And I’m talking like ADAT digital, 44K digital. Anything to avoid it, because the bottom end is just too unsatisfying to me. It really frustrates the hell out me when I’m trying to get a kick drum sound and it comes back sounding like a basketball. I keep coming back to 15 ips analog for rock. There is a sound there and it’s not as good... the cymbals tend to sound more grainy, the whole thing is a little bit grainier, which is kind of hard to describe to people. Machines always have an extra octave of low end at 15 ips as opposed to 30. Now the really good modern machines the Studers and Otaris, mostly the Studers, at 30 ips they’re usually flat down to about 40 Hz which is the fundamental of low E on a bass, so at least you’re getting all the music you’re gonna get. Most of the records that we all idolize as classic rock recorded before 1973, from what I can tell from talking to the old timers that I’ve met, people didn’t really start recording at 30 until around the early 70s sometimes around 73 or 74. There’s an audible shift that you can tell in records. You can pretty much tell when people shifted from 15 to 30 because records took on a whole different sound and I’m not sure it was necessarily a change for the better. I was just reading Mix or one of those, and there’s some guy who invented some radical scheme whereby the ideal type speed is 18 ips and he’s making some sort of 1 inch, 2 track or something for an ultimate mastering machine that runs at 18 ips and has this elaborate biasing scheme of its own. It’s supposed to be the ultimate last word in analog recording. It just cracked me up. That’s kind of fun. It’s the ultimate plus no other tapedeck can read that tape. Yeah, I’m not sure if there was really any point to it. So you’re going down to Brazil to do the pop band? No, they’re flying up here. I’ve been there twice to record them and this time they’re coming here, so I’ll be entertaining some Brazilians here. It’s gonna be great. What’s the name of the band? They’re called the Titans. They’re coming up in a couple weeks. I’ve got the Quadrajets next week. It’s surprising how many foreign bands you work with. After the grunge thing I was besieged with grunge wannabees. I was besieged with Soundgarden and Melvins and Nirvana clones. I blew most of them off. I was kind of bumming, this sucks. It was alright the first time around but that’s part of the reason I started taking all these jobs overseas. Yeah. I remember you did a Blue Cheer album. That was crazy. Let’s not get into that. It’s a terrible record. You know what they did when they mastered it? What? They added reverb to it in the mastering! I was horrified when I got the record. You’ve gotta be kidding? Their manager decided to do it. This crazy German guy said it didn’t sound stadium enough. The record is dreadful, I’m so pleased that it’s impossible to find. What’s it called? It’s drenched in stadium reverb, the whole record is just drenched in reverb, it’s just astounding. Yeah, well, there’s been a couple of other records that they’ve made since then that are equally obscure. But it was one of those things that I couldn’t turn down, you know it was just like, you know, I mean, would you do it? Of course. Yeah, sure. “Sure. Okay, I don’t care what they sound like, I’ll do the record.”
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