Brooklyn 2.0: The New Bunker Studios Offers Next-Level Recording Experience

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN: There’s a trend afoot in Brooklyn, and it’s one of upward mobility. Where the borough was once a haven for DIYers, analog workshops and quirky private studios, some of the major players on the scene are raising the bar for their studio businesses and, consequently, for local music.

When the dust settles, a cluster of next-level recording studios will have opened in Williamsburg, including the new version of The Bunker – just launched this past weekend.

Located in a 3,000-sq. ft. industrial space in South Williamsburg, The Bunker’s new-and-improved recording studios mark a new era in NYC music in which indie artists have access to affordable multi-room tracking.

Studio A at the new Bunker features an impressive “classic studio”-style main tracking space with 25’ vaulted ceiling, two smaller isolated recording rooms and an iso booth. Wide glass windows and doors provide great sightlines throughout the space, and moveable walls make for a uniquely modular floorplan.

For even just this one aspect of The Bunker, the room is a huge addition to the recording studio spread in New York City, and most definitely in Brooklyn where facilities for large ensemble acoustic and live rock recording are few and far between. In an even more meaningful sense, however, the new Bunker opens the door to a next-level recording experience for much of its clientele.

“There are a lot of people playing really great acoustic music who can’t afford to make an acoustic record,” says The Bunker co-owner and producer/engineer John Davis. “There are just no spaces to properly record that kind of music that they can afford.”

For the most part, the rooms that are outfitted with multiple acoustic recording spaces would have been built many years ago, when that’s what making an album required. The Bunker is bringing that classic layout to a new business of mostly self-funded projects.

“Being able to build this place from scratch meant that we could offer something like the great studios built in the 70s and 80s,” says Aaron Nevezie, producer/engineer and co-owner of The Bunker, “A big, acoustically-designed room purpose-built for live tracking. And we’d also be able to offer that with a more contemporary business model so that we can still be indie-friendly.”

In the time elapsed since a ground-up room like this was built, a huge portion of the acoustic, neo-classical and jazz community has settled in Brooklyn – not to mention the well-documented population of indie rockers who also appreciate a great tracking room. The Bunker provides a convenient, neighborhood option to this new generation of artists.

“There are so many great musicians who live in the neighborhood,” says Davis. “When our friends need to do string sessions, they have to call their musicians who all live in Williamsburg to get on the train and go to Midtown, just to cut a string quartet for three times the cost it will be here.”

Cost, again, is a big factor for Davis and Nevezie, both of whom play in bands, and understand the independent artist’s business. That in mind, they carved out two studios in the new location – the main Studio A tracking rooms with large control room, priced at $750-a-day, and a nice-sized Studio B with its own tracking room, bookable for $450-a-day.

“The price-point was really important for us because we know people cannot afford much more than that,” says Davis. “It’s fun to do big records. It’s fun when there’s a budget. But most of the time, there isn’t. So we can split time between Studio A and Studio B accordingly…do a couple days in A and then a week in B, for example.”

Meanwhile clients that have been booking a day or two at one of the higher-priced rooms in Manhattan might opt to book a longer session at The Bunker. Either way, Davis and Nevezie see a demand.

“I think there’s a renaissance going on of people wanting to track live, and track to tape,” Nevezie asserts. “Bands that want to make it ‘real.’ So we can accommodate that. But also John and I both come from a jazz background as players. We got to do some cool jazz records in our previous space, but the new studio is the sort of place we can invite anybody we know of, at every level, and they’ll be super psyched to play in here.”

A Classic Room That Functions Like A Modern Room

While the Bunker’s build-out and migration has been about a year in the making, the decision to move and expand operations was apparently quite spontaneous, inspired by another exciting studio expansion across town at Studio G.

“We’d been wanting to move out of our previous space for awhile – we were just outgrowing it,” says Davis. “And talking to Joel [Hamilton] about what he was doing put the idea in our head to look around for our own new space.”

They found the new location faster than they could have imagined.

“We walked in here and couldn’t believe our eyes,” Nevezie recalls. “You just do not find this kind of space in New York… at least not two blocks from Grand Street in Williamsburg. We knew we had to jump on it. And then, we needed to find someone to help us build it.”

They consulted with Norwich, CT-based studio designer Rod Gervais on the acoustic designs, and hired a good lead carpenter for the framing, but ultimately did about 80% of the building themselves.

“We wanted it done right – high-end and pro – but we didn’t want to lose that community DIY-ness of it,” says Davis. “We wanted this to be ours, built by us.”

They based the design on rooms they’ve both loved working in, referencing Avatar Studios A and C, which also feature multiple acoustic spaces for a range of sounds.

“Another thing we were really set on was having a look that wasn’t too modern,” notes Davis. “You want it to feel like a classic room but function like a modern room.”

In Gervais, the guys found someone with a strong vision of how to best utilize the space.

“There are certain things that a studio designer, who is both an architect from a structural perspective and studio designer from an acoustics perspective, thinks about differently than we do as producers and engineers,” says Davis, “For example, originally we had envisioned the live room being even bigger and making the isolated rooms off the main room smaller, more like booths.

“As a result of Rod’s design, instead of having one live room with three booths, we have a live room with high ceilings, a live room that’s somewhat dead with medium ceilings, and another live room that’s bright with vaulted ceilings, and we have an iso booth. His thought was let’s get three unique sounding spaces and one booth so that you can really tailor the sounds. That way you’ll also have rooms that will work better for certain things, i.e. the drier 70s-like drum room, the brighter room that’s good for piano or strings, etc.”

In October, the guys moved all their gear over from the previous space, and worked long days getting the rooms into working order. Initial tracking sessions in the new room began in November and sessions have been running ever since, so far most notably with the funk band Lettuce, and jazz-pop singer Sonya Kitchell.

The response to the new studios has been positive. And perhaps most importantly, the co-owners find the rooms elevating the sound of the recordings, and the potential sound, from an engineering/mixing perspective.

“The drum sound is super fat and super punchy but we’re also getting a clarity we were always searching for in our old space,” notes Nevezie. “And now it’s just about putting out the right mics and having great musicians play, because it’s just there in the room.”

“We’ve also noticed that the material we’ve tracked here has given us so much more flexibility in terms of what we want to have going on in the mix. If we want to just have a mono overhead and a kick drum and that’s the drum sound, it really works. Or you can have the stereo mics or the stereo overheads, or close mics only…you just bring up the fader, and that’s the sound.”

That sound is something unique to this new space – a quality Nevezie and Davis aspired to in continuing that classic studio legacy. The great rooms always grew to be associated with particular sounds based on records where the acoustic space played a role.

“I just did this jazz session and it was one of those sessions where we really opened up the room,” Nevezie shares. “We had a bass player slightly gobo’d off, piano and guitar and double saxophones, and it was just incredible to hear the beauty of the bleed into the other mics. Being able to use that as the sound of the group, where you just bring up the faders and everybody sounds like they’re in a space together…it was wonderful.”

Facts, Figures, Features

The Bunker’s main tracking room corresponds with a control room that’s quite sizable as well. The board is a 26-channel Auditronics console, and with outboard gear stacked across in-wall racks, and Studer A80 and A810 tape machines in the back corner, the room provides ample space for people to sit, listen, and participate in the session.

Meanwhile Studio B is a great room of its own. With 250 or so sq. ft of tracking room featuring custom-built diffusion panels, and space enough in the control room for group writing/production sessions, this is also a notable new addition to the Brooklyn scene. When packaged with Studio A, the pair of rooms functions as an affordable facility to make a record start to finish.

From a business perspective, Davis adds: “This is important – to not be pricing yourself out of a market you’ve been in for a long time.”

Both studios feature Pro Tools HD and a colorful collection of vintage and modern audio and musical gear. [Click for a full list of gear.]

Some of the classic rooms in Manhattan may be exceedingly equipped but may also feel sterile for lack of the personal touch of a private studio. That you’ll find here in the racks of uniquely sourced outboard gear and the rooms filled with instruments – organs, synths, pianos, amps, guitars and more.

The Bunker’s 1969 Steinway M grand piano can roll anywhere in Studio A, and each studio also has its own upright piano. And there’s plenty of space and mic cabinet to explore different setups and miking techniques. Additionally, the Bunker will have natural reverb options via two echo chambers fashioned out of an old boiler room and a long fire-escape/hallway that runs behind the studio wall.

The uniqueness and utility of these new acoustic spaces may be The Bunker’s greatest offering.

“People are so used to recording in non-designed, flawed spaces and making it work,” says Nevezie. “We did, and most of our friends did for years. But when you can actually hear instruments in a properly built space, it just makes everything so much easier. It’s just that aside from the people who get to record at the big commercial studios, most people haven’t been able to experience that.

“So hopefully, with our location and rates, a lot more people will be able to walk into a great room, sit down at a Steinway and play it, and feel like a million bucks.”

For more details and to get in touch, visit www.thebunkerstudio.com.

Session Buzz: The Year in NYC Recording

GREATER NYC AREA: There have certainly been some down years in recent recording biz history, but 2011 was not one of them.

By all accounts, this was a big year for recording in NYC: There were the major mainstream Made-in-NY albums, i.e. Lady Gaga’s Born This Way (Germano Studios), John Mayer’s upcoming release (Electric Lady), Beyonce 4 (MSR, Jungle City), Sting’s latest (Sear Sound) and Tony Bennett’s Duets II (Avatar). There were the critically-anticipated indie releases, i.e. Bjork (Sear Sound, Avatar, Atlantic Sound) and Beirut (Vacation Island) and of course a ton of indie activity emanating out of Brooklyn, as well as big moves in the way of new and newly renovated high-end facilities for record production.

Drink it all in with this “Best of 2011” session highlights and studio hits:

We’ll start uptown at StadiumRed in Harlem – home to a team of engineers and producers that includes David Frost, Just Blaze, Sid “Omen” Brown, Ariel Burojow, Tom Lazarus, Joe Pedulla, Andrew Wright and mastering engineer Ricardo Gutierrez.

StadiumRed hosted Chris Brown (Jive Records) for a stretch as he worked on his Grammy-nominated record, F.A.M.E. and a future album. The single “She Ain’t You” produced by Free School was recorded in Studio A at StadiumRed, and two additional songs off his upcoming album were produced by Just Blaze. Rick Ross also worked quite a bit with Just Blaze and StadiumRed this year – his albums Self Made Volume 1 and I Love My Bitches were both produced, mixed and mastered at Stadium Red with Just Blaze producing, Andrew Wright mixing, assisted by Keith Parry, and Ricardo Gutierrez mastering.

The track “Lord Knows” off Drake’s acclaimed new album, Take Care, was produced by this same StadiumRed team – Just Blaze, Wright and Gutierrez. The choir in this song was recorded in Studio A.

Other highlights include Ariel Borujow mixing three tracks for Chiddy Bang’s (EMI) debut album Breakfast, Joe Pedulla and Andrew Everding producing and engineering the new album by rock band La Dispute (click to read our feature about this album produced with no artificial reverb) and the Grammy-nominated Mackey: Lonely Motel – Music From Slide (David Frost, producer and Tom Lazarus, engineer); Far Away: Late Nights & Early Mornings by Marsha Ambrosius (Just Blaze, producer and Andrew R Wright, engineer); and J. Cole (Keith Parry, assistant engineer).

Rufus Wainwright (Universal Music Group) tracked portions of his new album “Out of the Game” in Studio ‘A’ (Neve 8038) at Sear Sound in Midtown, with Alan O’Connell engineering and Mark Ronson producing. Sear’s own Ted Tuthill assisted on these sessions.

“During his sessions at Sear, Rufus’ new opera Prima Donna premiered at the New York City Opera,” says Sear Sound manager Roberta Findlay. “They recorded using our Studer A827 2″ 24 track with BASF 911 2″, as well as Pro Tools. Tracking and overdubs varied from piano and vocal, whole band takes (piano, bass, drums, vocals), to piano overdubs, bass overdubs, keyboard overdubs, electric guitar overdubs, choir overdubs, drum machine overdubs, and many more. Mark Ronson brought in a wide variety of his personal vintage synths.”

Sear also hosted recording sessions for Bjork’s latest Biophilia, with Damian Taylor co-producing/engineering, and Sting tracking for his latest with engineer Donal Hodgson and co-producer/arranger Rob Mathes. And Iron & Wine tracked and mixed their song “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” which can be heard in Twilight: Breaking Dawn. Tom Schick engineered with Brian Deck producing. Rob Berger wrote the arrangements. [Click for a video of this session.]

In other highlights, Joss Stone tracked new material at Sear with an all-star band (Ernie Isley on guitar, James Alexander on bass, Latimore on piano and Raymond Angry on B3 and keyboards), and Steve Greenwell engineering and co-producing with S-Curve’s Steve Greenberg. “At Joss’ s request, we built a western version of a resplendent ashram for her, to stimulate her creative juices,” says Findlay. “I believe it worked!!”

Meanwhile, mixing sessions for Regina Spektor’s anticipated new album What We Saw From The Cheap Seats went down in Studio A at The Cutting Room – with producer Mike Elizondo, and engineer Adam Hawkins, assisted by Matt Craig. The album is due out in May 2012 on Warner Bros Records.

At nearby Germano Studios – where Joan Jett & The Blackhearts have been recording this month – it’s been a huge year of pop, rock, rap and R&B. In addition to Jett, who’s been in with longtime producer Kenny Laguna, and engineer Thom Panunzio, Germano’s hosted writing and recording sessions with Ne-Yo, OneRepublic and Alexander Dexter-Jones recording with engineer Kenta Yonesaka for his The Last Unicorn album, and mixing sessions with Sony Italy artist Fiorella Mannoia with Dave O’Donnell engineering.

Highlights from the year include the recording for Lady Gaga’s Grammy-nominated Born This Way, Adele’s Grammy-nominated 21, “Moves Like Jagger” by  Maroon 5 ft. Christina Aguilera, Beyonce’s 4, and the new will.i.am album…The studio also added new Exigy subs, and launched a joint-venture into Tampico Mexico, creating RG Germano Studios Tampico.

2011 has also been an epic year of releases out of The Lodge. Mastering Engineers Emily Lazar & Joe LaPorta mastered Foo Fighters’ Wasting Light, which received six Grammy nominations including nominations for Lazar and LaPorta in “Album Of The Year” category. And the team mastered countless records released to critical acclaim, including Tuneyard’s Whokill, mastered by LaPorta, Liturgy’s Aesthethica, mastered by Heba Kadry, the Cults debut, mastered by Lazar and LaPorta, EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints, mastered by Sarah Register, and albums by Dum Dum Girls, Cold Cave and Hooray for Earth – all mastered by LaPorta.

As covered here on SonicScoop, LaPorta also mastered the huge Neutral Milk Hotel release, the band’s first (an all-vinyl complete box-set) since ’98′s classic In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Lazar and LaPorta also mastered Boy & Bear’s award-winning Moonfire, produced by Joe Chiccarelli.

For EastSide Sound and chief engineer Marc Urselli, it’s been a year of recording some of NYC’s finest avant-garde, jazz, fusion and acoustic music greats like John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Chihiro Yamanaka with Bernard Purdie, and more recently John Zorn, John Medeski and Mike Patton. Citizen Cope and Swiss crossover jazz band The Lucien Dubuis Trio have also been recording albums with Urselli at East Side Sound.

In the Fall, Broadway veteran singer Wren Marie Harrington teamed up with arranger/producer jazz wunderkind Art Bailey to record a collection of jazz and Latin infused American and world standards at EastSide with Lou Holtzman engineering and Eric Elterman assisting. Bailey, Dave Acker, Marty Confurius and Diego Lopez formed the band for this record.

Plenty of jazz, avant and orchestral sessions recorded at Avatar Studios this year, including Stanley Jordan, James Carter, Steve Reich / So Percussion, Joe Jackson with Elliot Scheiner, Esperanza Spalding with Q-Tip and Joe Ferla, Chick Corea, Zak Smith Band. One of the big, ongoing sessions of the year at Avatar was Tony Bennett’s Duets II album, produced by Phil Ramone and engineered by Dae Bennett. In March, Bennett and Sheryl Crow recorded “The Girl I Love” in Studio A.  In July, Bennett sang and recorded “How Do You Keep the Music Playing” with Aretha Franklin in Studio C, and at the end of July, he recorded “The Lady is a Tramp” with Lady Gaga in Studio A.

Other pop/rock artists recording at Avatar this year include Paul McCartney recording a Buddy Holly tribute, Ingrid Michaelson recording her upcoming album, Human Again – both with producer David Kahne and engineer Roy Hendrickson – Elvis Costello,  James McCartney, and VHS or Beta.

And Avatar’s Studio A and C were used on many a Broadway cast album, and TV and film score/soundtrack recording sessions, including: Boardwalk Empire featuring Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks with producer / engineer Stewart Lerman, and Mildred Pierce, also ft. Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, with producer Randy Poster; Louie, produced by Louie C.K. with engineer Robert Smith assisted by Bob Mallory; Glee, with producer Tommy Faragher and engineers Bryan Smith and Robert Smith; and the films  Moonrise Kingdom (the new Wes Anderson),  A Late Quartet, Friends with Kids, and So Undercover.

Across town, some of the biggest pop artists were working out of Stratosphere Sound in Chelsea, where songwriter Amanda Ghost and producer Dave McCracken were stationed much of the year working on new material with Florence and The Machine, Santigold, John Legend, the Scissor Sisters, The xx and Daniel Merriweather.

Ever the awesome rock recording studio, Stratosphere hosted several album projects this year including Canadian band Jets Overhead with producer/engineer Emery Dobyns, Japanese band The Telephones with Alex Newport, The Static Jacks with Chris Shaw, and Delta Spirit with Chris Coady. And, switching gears, both Sarah Brightman and Aaron Neville recorded at Stratosphere – both tracking vocals with Geoff Sanoff.

Finally, The Sheepdogs, a rock band from Saskatchewan, were paired with Stratosphere owner/producer Adam Schlesinger for Rolling Stone’s “Choose the Cover” contest. They worked on several songs with Adam…and they won!

BIG YEAR FOR BROOKLYN

In 2011, Manhattan saw the opening of Ann Mincieli’s impressive, golden-age-reviving Jungle City Studios, and major renovations and new rooms at the legendary Electric Lady Studios, but Brooklyn has been the real hotbed of new studio activity. Converse opened its Rubber Tracks Studio this year, and The End in Greenpoint recently opened the doors to its recording and live performance complex. And much building has been underway elsewhere…

2012 will see three new serious recording facilities open in Williamsburg – all three bigger/better versions of existing local indie favorites.

The Bunker, for one, has already held inaugural sessions at its impressive new two-room facility which features an exciting new Studio A with large live room with 25-ft ceilings and three isolated sections which can be closed off by sliding glass doors.

In one of the room’s first sessions, Bunker co-owner John Davis tracking the new record for funk band Lettuce (featuring Soulive members Eric Krasno and Neal Evans).  “I tracked all the basics live to 2″ ATR on my Studer A80, and we had drums, bass, 2 guitars, keys (B3 and clav) and one sax going down live,” Davis describes. “Additional horns were later overdubbed. It was a great, super funky party in there the whole time, with a bunch of friends hanging and generally great positive creative vibes going on.  We went for (and captured) a live, raw, authentic funk vibe.”

Meanwhile, across town on the Williamsburg/Greenpoint border, Joel Hamilton and Tony Maimone are preparing to open the new Studio G – this is one of the original recording studios in the ‘Burg now expanded into 5,000+ square feet. Studio G will house one of the city’s only commercially available Bosendorfer grand pianos (to our knowledge), and three full featured studios – a 48-input SSL 8048 “A” room, and an equally spacious Neve 5316-equipped “B” room – with ample tracking space and isolation…built by musicians for musicians. (Look out for our upcoming feature on Studio G!)

According to Hamilton, they’re booking the A room for January and beyond, but “things are already booked in super tight, so call now!”

Besides building an insane new studio, Hamilton’s been making records all year too. He worked with the electronic artist Pretty Lights tracking the band in a live-to-two-track analog scenario – all analog and vintage signal chains with no isolation. The band played live in the room together and the masters went straight to vinyl – only to ultimately be sampled by Pretty Lights (Derek Smith) for his album, I Know The Truth. It’s a production style the artist calls “analog electronica.”

Another engineer/producer with an ambitious new studio in the works for 2012 is Marc Alan Goodman who you may recognize from his “Building Strange Weather” blog here on SonicScoop. While work has been heavily underway at his studio’s new location on Graham Ave in Williamsburg, sessions have continued across the ‘hood at the existing Strange Weather Recording. Among the year’s highlights were Here We Go Magic recording overdubs for their upcoming album with producer/engineer Nigel Godrich who was over doing television sound for Radiohead.

The band Friends also recorded two singles and an upcoming full-length album at Strange Weather with co-producer/engineer Daniel Schlett. And the band Lakookala made an EP at the studio (“start-to-finish in 3 days”) with Goodman co-producing and engineering.

Over at Fluxivity, 2011 was the year that the studio’s recently-completed tracking room got a workout, with everything from full tracking with drums to guitar, vocals and all manner of overdubs. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion has been working at Fluxivity, with Spencer and engineer Brian Thorn mixing the new album. Ed Mcentee assisted.

Says Fluxivity owner Nat Priest: “This was primarily a tape-based project, mixed to the studio’s Ampex ATR 102 tape machine in the ½” stereo format. Jon Spencer and Brian Thorn used quite a few pieces of the studio’s vintage analog equalizers, compressors and delays including the 1/4″ slap machine and EMT plate reverb.”

Black Dice also made a new record in Williamsburg with Matt Boynton recording, mixing and producing at Vacation Island Recording. Free Blood (members of !!!) and Suckers also made new albums at Vacation Island with Boynton this year. And, Zach Cale is currently in the studio completing mixes for his latest EP, Hangman Letters.

A couple 2011 Vacation Island highlights were Beirut mixing their latest release The Rip Tide with engineer/producer Griffin Rodriguez, and the “Recorded for Japan” compilation which saw Ariel Pink, Kurt Vile, Chairlift and R. Stevie Moore through the studio. Boynton recorded and mixed a lot of this record, and the rest was mixed by Jorge Elbrecht. Vacation Island engineer Rob Laakso mastered the album.

Over at The Brewery Recording, also in Williamsburg, members of breakthrough rap group Odd Future tracked vocals for three songs and started mixing for their new side project The Internet, due out in early 2012. Matt Martians and Syd tha Kyd produced and Andrew Krivonos engineered on these sessions.

The Brewery reports they had 700 sessions through their one-room facility in 2011, running round the clock. Another highlight is happening currently with WZRD, the rock duo formed by Kid Cudi and producer Dot Da Genius. Noah Goldstein has been engineering these sessions.

Brooklyn producer/engineer Allen Farmelo – who you may remember designed this awesome custom console with Greenpoint designer Francois Chambard for his own studio The Farm – just finished mixing a record with noise duo Talk Normal, a project by artist/engineers Sarah Register and Andrya Ambro, with producer Christina Files.

Farmelo also produced/engineered an album for Brooklyn-based children’s musician Elska, out of Mavericks Studio in China Town and back at The Farm, and mixed/mastered two new film scores by Cinematic Orchestra, produced by band-leader Jason Swinscoe for Ninja Tune Records. “These two scores were for films from the 1920s: the Dada-ist masterpiece Entr’acte and the early city portrait called Manhatta. Both were performed live to a packed house at London’s Barbican Center this year, a beautiful night of music and film.”

And, as covered this month in the New York Times, Farmelo produced and mixed a new album by 85-year-old jazz pianist Boyd Lee Dunlop which was tracked at Soundscape in Buffalo by Jimi Calabrese, mixed at The Farm and mastered at The Magic Shop by Jessica Thompson

“An old friend and photographer met Boyd in a state-funded nursing home in Buffalo and began recording him on his cellphone and sending me MP3s and asked if this was any good,” says Farmelo.

“I was blown away by what I heard and arranged to record Boyd with bassist Sabu Adeyola and drummer Virgil Day. Buffalo has few studios, but thankfully I found a room tucked away on Buffalo’s West Side with a Steinway and amazing vintage mics and pres (RCA 77s, Neumann U47s, Neves, etc). I put  up and tracked the session in one day and mixed on the API/Studer combo here at The Farm. I aimed for a vintage sound (late 50s Atlantic Studios in particular), and feel I got it (mono is a big part of that). Jessica Thompson just nailed the mastering perfectly.”

Next, to Greenpoint where Joe McGinty’s unique Carousel Recording – with its heavenly collection of vintage synths – recently hosted Finland electronic act Husky Rescue. Led by Marko Nyberg, the group booked a week at Carousel to lay the groundwork of their next record, utilizing many of the vintage synthesizers in the studio. “They were ace analog synth programmers,” says McGinty, of Psychedelic Furs, Losers Lounge fame. “It was great to see them in action, and I learned a few things as well!

Carousel has also opened a second room to accommodate that ever-expanding keyboard collection, which we featured earlier this year. Recent additions to the collection include a Moog 15 Modular, Freeman String Symphonizer, Yamaha YC-30 organ, and Yamaha CP-70 Electric Grand Piano.

In DUMBO, Joe Lambert Mastering had a record year. First off, Chief Engineer/Owner Joe Lambert was nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Engineered Album, Classical” category for the aforementioned Lonely Motel: Music From Slide by Steven Mackey and Rinde Eckert.

And other highlights include: mastering the major label debut by Fanfarlo (Atlantic Records/Canvasback), produced by Ben H. Allen, and recorded by David Wrench, the popular Washed Out (SubPop) album Within and Without, also produced by Allen, the Atlas Sound (4AD) record Parallax, produced by Bradford Cox and Nicolas Vernhes, and the Panda Bear (Paw Tracks) album, Tomboy, produced by Noah Lennox and Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember.

Over at The Fort, engineer/producer James Bentley has been working a bit with Brooklyn-based Goodnight Records, including tracking for the new KNTRLR LP, and recording/filming an in-studio performance with the venerable Brooklyn band The Big Sleep. “There were about 40 people and a keg, it was an amazing party,” says Bentley.

OUTSIDE THE CITY

Emerging Brooklyn band Thieving Irons trekked up to The Isokon in Woodstock to make a record with engineer/producer D. James Goodwin, Nate Martinez and Josh Kaufman co-producing. “Incredible songs, deconstructed, then put back together in a left brain way,” says Goodwin of the project. “Very few cymbals, tons of space. Lots of Kaoss Pad!” Stream a track “So Long” from the album.

Goodwin also made an album up at the Isokon with art-folk group Bobby – tracked and mixed the full LP for Partisan Records.

In Jersey City, Big Blue Meenie is still going strong, and hopping with sessions all year. Highlights include Rainey Qualley mixing her EP with Tim “Rumblefish” Gilles and Matt “Dasher” Messenger (the single “Peach In My Pocket” is featured in the 2011 Sundance-winning film To.Get.Her), and Alright Jr tracking their new EP Scratching At The Ceiling with Chris “Noz” Marinaccio, Colin “Gron” Mattos, Matthew “Debris” Menafro, and Jeff “9/11″Canas, and mixing with  Gilles and Messenger.

Also six-piece NJ prog-rock band The Tea Club mixed their “Live at Progday 2011″ show with Messenger, Marinaccio and Gilles, and – most recently – the jazz-fusion oriented Dennis Haklar Project tracked new material (9 songs in 2 days) with Marinaccio engineering, assisted by Colin “Gron” Mattos.

What a year, and those are just some of the highlights! We can only imagine what 2012 will bring to NYC in the way of new recordings — and we can’t wait to hear them.

 

Made In NY: Ronin Applied Sciences

One of the most crowded booths at the year’s AES convention was also one of its smallest.

Almost everything about these few dozen square feet, nestled deep in back rows of the trade-show floor, was memorable: From the single microphone on display, to the rigid black business cards, to the perpetual queue of onlookers, and the man in the booth himself.

Dimitri Wolfwood, the slight and sharp-eyed young designer behind Ronin Applied Sciences, speaks in complete, precise paragraphs. His manner is assertive and polite at once and he carries that half-cocky, half-conciliatory attitude of a driven professional.

When I first met Wolfwood at a Tape Op afterparty, Engineers Larry Crane and Joel Hamilton introduced me to him with broad smiles and back-clapping praise. I was told he had invented a new microphone. “Oh, neat, what’s it based on?” I asked, thinking it was only natural to ask which of the erstwhile old favorites a boutique designer was trying to re-create.

“Nothing,” said Wolfwood. “It’s not based on anything. It’s a completely new design.”

 

Whether you fall under the mic’s spell or not, it’s impossible to deny that there’s something uniquely novel about each stage of the first microphone from Ronin Applied Sciences. But what first caught my eye about the Pegasus large-diaphragm condenser microphone was its power supply.

First of all, it’s enormous. And secondly, its sleek, contoured design looks somewhere between a futurist toaster and a Mac Mini. This is the tube microphone as re-designed by Steve Jobs. Most intriguing however, is what this power supply allows the mic to do.

Wolfwood designed the tube in the Ronin Pegasus to run in pentode mode, as opposed to the more conventional triode.

“Most microphones essentially run their tube in starved-plate mode,” he says, indicating that the tube is under-nourished by both current and voltage.

“That can be okay if you’re trying to force some ‘warmth’ out of the microphone. But if you put that mic up in front of a belter like an Aretha Franklin, an Alicia Keys or a Steven Tyler, things start getting a little weird.”

As he gets to talking about distortion, Wolfwood begins to light up. This is one of the key points of his design, and when he describes it, he sheds his composed self-contained manner and his voice finally becomes insistent: “Essentially, I don’t want the sound of my microphone to change with level. I want it to be what it is, and present its sonic palette in the most stable, reliable, and repeatable fashion until you actually overload the microphone.”

“In which case” he says, “I’ve designed the microphone to not overload.”

The Pegasus’ design allows it to “swing one full volt” of input power before clipping. For those who aren’t familiar with the inner workings of a microphone, that’s a tremendous amount of juice.

This fully-powered pentode and its related circuitry makes for a microphone that’s remarkably low in noise as well as total harmonic distortion. And any distortion that does remains is evenly spread across the harmonic spectrum frequency, where it’s less audible. According to Wolfwood, noticeable levels of THD should barely even set in until unusually high sound-pressure levels are reached. But, he laughs, “the capsule is more likely to fold before that happens.”

The circuitry of the microphone is so powerful, in fact, that its amplifier section does more than handle impedance conversion. Given a healthy signal, it can even deliver a full-fledged, low-impedance line-level output. This means that in many cases, the microphone could even be run without a mic preamp if desired, plugging straight into a multi-track recorder.

 

Before sound reaches the novel circuitry of the Ronin Pegasus, it hits an equally unusual large-diaphragm capsule.

“We use an ultra-low-mass 1-micron diaphragm, mounted onto a completely redesigned K47 back-plate,” says Wolfwood. “Our diaphragm reaches down just 1db at 20kHz, and stays there all the way up until 30kHz. And naturally, it’s made here in America.”

According to Wolfwood, the remarkably low mass of the capsule increases transient response and high-frequency handling, while smoothing out the bandwidth of the Pegasus’ subtle high-frequency lift.

In cardioid pattern, engineers can expect a broad, gentle 2-3 dB boost that spans from 2kHz to 12kHz, culminating with a gentle peak of 2.5 dB between 9 and 10kHz. It’s been described as “subtly M49-ish,” but Wolfwood doesn’t like to go around comparing his mics to others’.

Each of the mic’s patterns has a completely different acoustic profile. The omni-directional setting is “almost razor flat” with a slight dip at the very top, while the bi-directional pattern has a more pronounced midrange “push”.

As painstaking as his design is, there will be those engineers who roll their eyes at Wolfwood’s efforts. For years, there has been a vocal population of musicians and recordists who bemoan many of the updates that are made to improve on the specs of great-sounding classics. An obsession with the stats, they say, can lead designers to ignore the soul and the sound of a design. At times, they’ve been right.

Wolfwood is all too familiar with those types of criticisms, and insists his is “not just a paint-by-numbers design.”

When I ask him about his background and training, Dimitri Wolfwood says he admires technicians like Stephen Paul, and more personally, Tony Merrill, who he considers a true mentor.

“These were the first guys to crack open old mics and say ‘you could use some better parts in here’. They opened up microphones and asked how to make them better. A lot of guys disagreed with that at the time. Some of them still do.” As soon as those last words are out of his mouth, he hurriedly dismisses them: “But that’s not relevant to me.”

“From the very start,” he says, “I wanted to make a clean microphone that wasn’t cold. A clean microphone that wasn’t hard or sterile or boring. I think it’s a missing part of the palette. A microphone that’s clean – but beautiful. Thus far, according to the responses I’ve gotten, I’ve achieved that goal, and I’m very proud of that.”

The Ronin Applied Sciences Pegasus is distributed in New York by Ecstatic Electric Audio, and can also be purchased direct from the manufacturer at roninappliedsciences.com. It carries a list price of $4,200 and is available in a tightly limited run of 100 units.

Justin Colletti is a Brooklyn-based producer/engineer who works with uncommon artists, and a journalist who writes about music and how we make it. Visit him at www.justincolletti.com.

Beyond The Basics: Serial Skills, Simplified.

Like Parallel Compression, Serial Compression is one of those esoteric terms that seems to pop up in recording magazines from time to time. While the name might seem abstruse and academic, the process is anything but:

“Putting one compressor before another is something that was going on long before it got a fancy name that made it sound like a ‘technique’,” says Joel Hamilton, one of the four NYC engineers we asked to weigh in on the subject.

“But the idea that you can kind of mine different things out of the same signal by chaining devices with different tones or time constants is totally valid.”

Simply defined, Serial Processing is the use of two (or more) similar effects on the same audio track. Most often, you’ll encounter the term as it refers to compression, EQ, and de-essing.

In addition to Hamilton [Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Dub Trio], we talked to producer/engineer John Agnello [Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile] as well mastering engineers Randy Merrill and Scott Hull of Masterdisk, about their approach.

WHY DO IT?

“It’s like using shellac,” Hamilton continued. “You can’t buy a bucket of shellac, pour the whole thing out on your tabletop and expect it to turn out extra-glossy. But, by applying it in a dozen tiny layers, one on top of the other, you can bring the surface to a really high shine.”

“Much the same way, you can’t compress 20db with a Neve 33609 and expect it to sound like several devices each pulling back a few db.”

All of our panelists agreed – sometimes, spreading the work across more than one unit leads to better results:

“It’s well-known that in general, the shorter the signal path the better the sound quality,” said Scott Hull of Masterdisk [Miles Davis, Bruce Springsteen, The Ramones].

“That’s true, and I’ll never use more gear than what’s needed to achieve the goal. But you can’t always get what you need from one device. What you may need is the complex interaction between two.”

“I would probably never choose to put two of the same compressors or EQs inline on the same track, but I will often use two different-sounding but similar types of processors if the combined result is better than without.”

When we boiled it down for this article, it became clear that our panelists consistently cited three basic reasons for stacking their effects: Tone, Tweak Points, and Time.

TONE

“There are some pieces of gear that just have a great character and I’ll use them when that character is needed,” mastering engineer Scott Hull said.

“What might confuse engineers that use primarily digital processing, is that an analog EQ isn’t always an EQ. And an analog compressor isn’t always a compressor. Running through my compressors with no gain reduction sometimes produces very favorable results from a tone or color standpoint.”

Producer/engineer John Agnello agreed:

“I believe that when you’re in the analog world, different pieces of gear do sound different from each other, even if you’re just passing signal through them. You can patch into a Pultec and it’ll sound completely different than an API 560 before you even do anything. Sometimes you don’t want to do a ton of EQ, but you want the sound of that piece of gear.”

TWEAKABILITY

“With a Pultec,” Agnello continued, “you might just add a little bit of low end or a little bit of top-end, and still get the sound you need from it. But you may still  want to sculpt it more, so you might go into an API 560 after that and notch out or notch in a bunch of frequencies.”

“So there’s the sound quality of each piece of gear, and then there’s also the practical factor of having access to all the frequencies you want to get to. You may want the sound of a Pultec but the flexibility of a graphic EQ.”

“I’ll do that a lot on snares and vocals. I’ll usually go through a 560, and then at the end of my chain I’ll have a nice fat Pultec, or maybe a Daking, just to give it a little size on the back end – just to take that sound and make it sound 10 percent bigger at the very end.”

Hamilton had similar thoughts: “There’s a difference between boosting 3k on a Neve 1084 and boosting 3k on an SSL EQ. On an SSL, I know that frequency is going to hurt me a little. The same way, I might want to boost 8khz on a Pultec instead. So that way you can end up with a few EQs on the same source pretty quickly.”

Merrill had similar points to make: “I use multiple EQ’s in series a lot. The curve shapes and phase responses of each of my EQ’s is different. I’ve found that in some cases, several small, incremental adjustments across multiple EQ’s gets me the sound I’m looking for, as opposed to adding more EQ on one unit in the same range. Other times this isn’t the case, and I’ll do a lot of EQ with one unit. It always depends on the mix, but I’d say more often than not, I’m using multiple EQ’s.”

TIME

With compressors, there’s another crucial factor: attack and release times.

“When it comes to the ‘how’ part,” said Hull, “ I find it’s simply a matter of putting the compressors with longer attack times first in the chain and faster attack compressors and limiters later in the chain. This isn’t brain surgery.”

That kind of stacking was the first thought to come to mind for Agnello and Hamilton as well:

“As far as time constants, you could put on a very slow, low-ratio compressor first, and send that into a fast limiter that’s catching just the top of the peaks,” said Hamilton.

“That can make it feel like the track is plowing through molasses to get to the limiter. With that approach, you can take something that’s very lightweight and stringy, like an arpeggiated nylon-string guitar, and get some real heft out of it. It’s almost like adding a sense of inertia; some real weight in a mix.”

“It can help get rid of that really unencumbered and pointalistic sound that people associate with a straight up Pro Tools mix, where you have all these really spikey transients. For me, it could be a slower, gushier compressor first, like a Collins 26-1U, followed by a Neve 33609 set to a really fast attack and release.”

Agnello had a similar approach on electric guitars:

“A lot of times I’ll go with a tube compressor and put a solid state compressor on the back end, or vice versa, depending on what sounds I’m going for. If I’m having trouble getting a guitar to sit in a mix, I might put it through an LA-2A to give it a big tube action, but at the end put it through an 1176 and compress the sh*t out of it, to make it really like a brickwall.”

Of course, there are times when the opposite approach can work. When tracking an especially dynamic vocal or bass part, it can be advantageous to set up a compressor with a fast release time first in the chain. A busy and dynamic part can wreak havoc on a slowly responding compressor, allowing some peaks to go by uncompressed, while low-level parts of the performance wind up quieter still, buried in the trough of the compressor’s lazy recovery.

The classic example here would be taming a dynamic vocal with a quick tap from a fast-recovering 1176 before allowing it to pass through an LA-2A or Sta-Level set to deliver more consistent compression.

NEED FOR SPEED

Sometimes, two fast dynamic devices in a row can be handy:

According to Agnello: “If you have some nasty “S”s, sometimes one de-esser won’t do it. You’d have to hit it so hard that it’ll catch too much, giving you a lisping effect. I might give the S’s a little nudge with one de-esser, then really go for the kill with a second, trying to take out as much as I can. I like to think of it as setting up with one and knocking it down with the other.”

“I almost never use two compressors,” added mastering engineer Randy Merrill, “but I often use two limiters in series. I find at times that one particular limiter can only sound good up to a certain point. Once I get there, I’ll rely on another, different limiter to get me closer to the result I’m looking for.”

SETTING IT TO STUN

Unlike our mastering engineers Hull and Merrill, our mixers (Agnello and Hamilton and myself) felt that while stacking compressors can lead to greater transparency, that isn’t always the goal. One or more compressors in a mixer’s chain could very well be set to “stun”, ruthlessly lobbing more than a dozen db off an unsuspecting sound source.

Serial compression can still help in these cases as well. Feeding our “character compressor” a signal that’s already been cut down to a manageable dynamic range can ensure that our hardest-working box delivers an even and predictable effect, rather than jumping around in color and responsiveness due to an erratic signal.

EVERYTHING ELSE

Shane Stoneback discussed sending his plug-in reverbs to a real live chamber in our recent Cults interview. Hamilton is also a long-time proponent of searching for new sounds by stacking ambient effects:

“In general, I really love reverbs layered up. I might have six reverbs on a mix,” he said. “I could be using a spring that doesn’t even go to the main mix – it could be there just to feed a plate reverb.”

“I guess what I’m looking for is a kind of ‘custom complexity’. If the album was tracked in hotels and bedrooms, I might want to create a unifying, Motown-ish kind of signature reverb that ties everything together – you know, where everything kind of lives in this one really unique space.”

For his part, Agnello remembers a time before multi-parameter reverbs. The earliest versions of these chains of time-based effects were patched in by guys like him, using a tape-slap delay to feed a plate reverb.

“Nowadays, the pre-delays are built-in,” he said. If you have an Eventide, you can just pull up anything you want – a flange into a plate – whatever.  Of course you can explore as much as you want. The only thing holding you back there is how much gear you have at your disposal and how much time you want to spend f*ing around.”

And Agnello has spent a lot of time doing just that:

“While working on my second Dinosaur Jr. record [Without A Sound] at Electric Lady, J [Masics] would want me to put one piece of gear after another on his guitar to hear what it would sound like. ‘Put something else on it, let’s see what that does. Ok, now something else’. We’d end up with these chains of like 5 boxes in a row. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it would be ridiculous.”

“But there would be those times where it would be amazing – all of a sudden the guitar was really jumping out of the mix. We just kept listening and trying until it sounded good. I don’t think we called it anything. We were just experimenting.”

Hamilton had similar feelings about attaching terms to the things we do instinctively:

“I think the name ‘Serial EQing’ only came about because of the proliferation of internet ding-dongs talking about Parallel EQing,” he said, as I tried to avoid looking sheepishly at my feet.

“But I guess we’re stuck with the term as much as we’re stuck with anonymous internet punditry.”

As long as that’s true, we’ll be here, hoping to undo the damage by bringing a bit of clarity to all the chatter.

Now go get in tune with your instincts, and start some experiments of your own.

Justin Colletti is a Brooklyn-based producer/engineer who works with uncommon artists, and a journalist who writes about music and how we make it. Visit him at www.justincolletti.com.

On the Record: Erica Glyn “Static”

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN: Slip into the musical continuum, and you’ll find yourself streaming ahead with Erica Glyn. But exercise caution when absorbing her densely engaging new album, Static – this is an audio solider you’re dealing with, one who will sound off using any means necessary.

Even the most dedicated band member catches themselves thinking…about what would happen if they dropped democracy to pursue their own unilateral vision. With the 10 songs of Static, the Brooklyn-based Glyn has done just that: She deliberately took leave of groupthink to proclaim artistic independence, and create an adventurous nebula of trip hop, acoustic instruments, programming, distortion, alluring vocals and deadly serious hooks.

Beyond songwriting, Glyn’s deep experience as an audio engineer had no small part in producing  Static. A disciple of Bob Power, Glyn sharpened her chops working with the NYC mixmaster on projects for the likes of India.Arie, The Roots, Ozomatli, Citizen Cope, and Meshell Ndegeocello. All the better to mix it with, as Glyn consciously turned standard moves upside down to merge the enveloping tracks of Static in her home studio.

For any artist, producer, or engineer looking to bust out, Static serves as an example: If you don’t like the rules, it might be time to write your own.

Erica, you said that the making of “Static” was quite intentionally a dictatorship. How was this in contrast to your previous records, and why did you feel the need to rule Static with an iron fist?
In the past, I’ve been a part of bands where I was the leading force in it, the songwriter and the singer etc…, but there was always a mock-democracy thing happening. I always wanted to play in bands and to collaborate, but in retrospect, those mock-democracy type situations never ultimately served the music, the productions nor the effectiveness very well. I was always concerned with and/or dealing with personalities — egos — and that was ultimately a distraction from the music, but valuable learning experiences all the same.

With this project, though collaborative, at the end of the day I had veto power and didn’t worry about the work that went into a part or the person who created it, myself included. If it didn’t work for the greater good of the song, it didn’t stay. It seems like an obvious thing, but when you are trying to pacify people, self included, it can be difficult to keep focused.

And at the same time as I was being highly tyrannical, I allowed the musicians to do what they do best. I worked with people that I knew I could give guidance to, while simultaneously giving them the freedom to put themselves into it. And I think that comes across in the energy of the music. For example, Leron Thomas who played trumpet on “Animal” came in to play a part that I had written out for him. Afterwards, I asked him to play some fanfare stuff and improvise over the outro. After he did one take, he got inspired and said, “Let me do another one that’ll work with what I just put down.” And then after that he did another one that fit with the previous two takes. It was great and worked perfectly with the track and I didn’t change a thing.

It was the same with Dan Neustadt and his amazing keyboard playing and synth sounds. The intro of “Commonplace” was done in one take. I just told him I wanted the song to start with a memorable hook, and voila! There were other moments that took more crafting on my part, but that was also part of the fun for me. I’ve become pretty good at Pro Tools and have been able to utilize it more like an instrument rather than a recording device.

How else did that outlook go into planning the writing and production of this album? And did everything then go according to plan?
There was no plan. I wrote a bunch of songs in about three weeks, made demos of them and then shared them with musician/producer Brice Malahude who lives in Brussels — we would Skype and file share via FTP. He got inspired and came back at me with a ton of ideas, and I would sift through them picking out what I thought worked best. As those ideas grew, the record unfolded. I worked a bunch at home, studying my Pro Tools maps, cleaning things up, trying things out, really enjoying the process, and enjoying receiving the surprises Brice would leave for me to check out.

Besides doing what I thought would serve the music best, I didn’t have an MO. I tried to let things go where they were going to go, and not try to force anything to work or fit in any direction. If things got scrapped, then they weren’t right or weren’t good enough.

Sounds like a really efficient, but still musical approach. What were the various recording environments? How did they affect the outcomes?
A lot of the record was recorded in my home studio in Williamsburg. A bunch of it was recorded at Brice’s home studio in Brussels – not to mention the pilgrimage he made to Jarno Van Es, somewhere in the countryside of Belgium.

Other than that I worked with Blair Wells at his studio, Purple Velvet, Joel Hamilton in his studio, Studio G, Shahzad Ismaily in his studio, Rivington 66, and drums, trumpet and cello were recorded at The Bunker. Oh, and Nathan Larson sent me tracks from his home studio as well. Blair and I worked at Flux one day to record Casey Benjamin on piano. They have a beautiful Steinway there and the room sounds great.

In terms of how these studio choices affected the sound, well, I think that they all are up to snuff in terms of equipment and technology — but it’s not really about that at the end of the day, is it? I think because most everyone was on their home turf, they felt at ease and excited to play with little pressure and I think that energy — that organic energy — is captured. There was never any belaboring of parts.

How did the mix phase unfold after that?
I ended up mixing the record because I sort of had been mixing it as I was producing it. I was very aware of the sonic spread of the recordings as I was working on them. So I was thinking of instrumentation, parts, melodies etc… as well as the sonics of it. And I had a very clear idea of how things should sound, where they should be placed in the mix, what instruments should be featured when.

There’s a lot in the music – it’s crafted and if you’re not familiar with all the little details that I worked hard to create, moments within moments, well, then they would get lost in the mix. Also, instruments and sounds that traditionally might take the foreground or the background weren’t necessarily taking on their traditional roles, and leaving it in the hands of someone else just didn’t make any sense.

What song or songs are an example of how your mix fulfilled your vision?
For example, in “Commonplace,” both the keys and the electric guitar are strong forces in the verses and they sit in similar registers, so who takes the lead? For me, it’s the electric guitar, hands down. But someone else mixing it might have chosen to feature the keys.

Same with “Polar Shift:” The bouzouki Lyenn played was so beautiful and the recording is pristine, and so it would make sense perhaps to feature it, and have the synth sounds take a far back seat. But that makes no sense to me in the context of the song, the production and how I envisioned it.

Have you always been an audio engineer as well as being an artist? At what point in your career did being an engineer become important to you?
I think I’ve been becoming both simultaneously. I started working in recording studios as a teenager — I was always interested in not only making music but making records as well. I used to fall asleep as a kid listening to records – and each night I would listen to a different instrument all the way through the album. One night I would just focus in on the bass, the next night the guitar, the next the background vocals.

I guess that came naturally to me. And I never wanted to be lost in the studio — I thought from the get-go that it was important to know how things worked if I ever wanted to make a record of my own. I had to know how to communicate with the people I was working with, so that I wouldn’t be at their mercy.

You’ve had the opportunity to work with Bob Power. What are some of the lessons – large and small – you soaked up under his tutelage?
Bob is an amazing teacher. Not only does he have a wealth of knowledge, but he’s also very excited to share that knowledge. And he’s extremely patient while being expectant simultaneously.

The biggest lesson I learned from Bob — and this may seem like a no-brainer — but the biggest lesson I learned from him is to listen: To really listen to the instrument that you are recording in the room that you are recording it in. That, and a bunch of technical stuff you wouldn’t be interested in.

Oh, but we are! Maybe next time. In an earlier conversation, you were adamant that – your experience with Bob Power most unequivocally excepted — female engineers are subject to various inequalities in the workplace. What were some of your experiences that you can share about that?
I would love to share the nitty gritty of the experiences I’ve come up against, but this isn’t that kind of Website. Recording studios are very boy-centric. This is not news to anyone. I definitely have been treated extremely inappropriately, and not just by the old geezer types either, contemporaries as well.

I’ve had people tell me outright that they do not want me in the studio – I was delegated to the lounge, tech room, front office, what have you – because they didn’t want to have to change the way they talked. There was a long stretch where no one would let me graduate to the next rung, no one would let me do anything technical. Working for Bob changed that for me.

Do you have any suggestions for how some of these unfortunate attitudes can be overcome?
Unfortunate attitudes — that’s up to boys to alter. In general we too often let the subtle nuances of sexism slide under the radar, which really just reinforces them.

Other than that: don’t let other people project their insecurities on to you. And, knowledge is power. Educate yourself and just do. Learn by doing. You don’t necessarily need to work in a studio these days – there is so much you can do on your own now.

Circling back to Static, how would you characterize the final result? Why is this such a satisfying artistic statement for you? And what are you looking to do next?
This is a satisfying piece of work for me, and I think it’s because I never compromised.

Musician/Producer/Engineer Blair Wells, who contributed tremendously to the back-end of the record and who co-mixed it with me, was unbelievably relentless in allowing me to revise and hone as much as I wanted. An incredible gift. And I worked with a bunch of musicians that I totally admire and who really put themselves into the music, and for that I feel grateful as well.

As for next what’s next, I’d love to perform the record — I think it would be a really fun album to re-create live. And more production work, more music making. More writing.

– David Weiss

Behind the Release: The Book of Knots “Garden of Fainting Stars”

THE SOUND:

When told you’re about to hear a “Producer’s album,” it’s easy to imagine something like a finely-honed Swiss watch. The last thing to expect might be The Book of Knots’ critically acclaimed 2007 release, Traineater, a crumbling, over-wound, “endlessly clacking cuckoo-clock”- to borrow the words of Joel Hamilton, the Brooklyn-based producer/engineer who is also a core member of the band.

This year, Hamilton [Blakroc, Sparklehorse] has reunited with bassist and fellow Brooklyn producer Tony Maimone [Pere Ubu, Frank Black], violinist/vocalist Carla Kihlstedt and drummer/keyboardist Matthias Bossi [both of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum] to release Garden of Fainting Stars.

It’s the final installment in a trilogy of edgy, esoteric rock records that began with the band’s 2004 self-titled debut.

From the outset, The Book of Knots knew this third record would be their last. First by sea, then by land, and now by space, each album investigates the appeal of frontiers, and ultimately, the perpetual anti-climax that goes along with our never-ending urge to explore.

“What’s actually out there is never as exciting as what mankind imagines,” says Hamilton with some wistful humor. “We wanted to ask, what the hell is in us that keeps us looking over that next hill? What is that drive, what’s the purpose, and what’s kept us from just sitting in southeast Africa as an entire human race?”

If there’s a sonic thread through these releases, it may be that each one has somehow managed to play off as rickety and grandiose at once. These are records that combine raw performances on thrift-store finds with a production sensibility that favors heavy-handed mixing in search of massive sonic impact.

For Traineater, the band decided to err on the dilapidated side of the spectrum, offering a sense of gigantic, rustily-creaking musical machinery that paired well with the iconic bray of prominent special-guest Tom Waits.

Now, Garden of Fainting Stars brings back much of the anthemic heavy-metal bombast of the band’s first release.

“I think some of that [sound] comes from the subject matter itself,” says Hamilton. “The second record is all about these Midwestern doldrums; Towns that had so much promise in them, and are now just decaying into dust. Once you start talking about the high seas and aerospace test pilots, you’re bound to find some more bravado in there. I mean, you’ve seen Top Gun, right?,” he laughs.

But there’s a distinct air of melancholy, uncertainty, even dread, to go along with it. Hamilton, who can hardly go more than a minute without dropping a satisfyingly idiosyncratic visual descriptor, says their goal was to make an album that sounds like “a theater built by the set designer for the City of Lost Children.”

Although the newest album features collaborations with Blixa Bargeld [Nick Cave, Neubauten] and honorary 5^th Knot Mike Watt [Minutemen, fiREHOSE] Hamilton tells us the band has “reigned in the outside influences this time around.”

The influences that do remain are alternately strident, operatic, cacophonous, somber. If it reminds you of some of your favorite early-90s out-metal, there’s a good reason for it: Garden of Fainting Stars is slated for a June 14^th release on Ipecac Recordings, the personal imprint of metal maverick Mike Patton [Faith No More, Mr. Bungle].

THE PROCESS:

As for the recording process, “It’s absolutely the wrong-est you can get” according to Hamilton. “It’s not even cool-wrong. We’re not going for “lo-fi” as an aesthetic or sticking an sm57 in a PVC pipe. That would be a choice. This should sound like it was recorded by accident.”

The way Hamilton tells it, an important part of making a record for his own band is giving up control during the tracking process. “It’s the pursuit of getting the part down at all costs, and then dealing with the corner we’ve painted ourselves into later on. It’s running, not walking, not stepping, not thinking, absolutely running to the destination.”

This philosophy leads Book of Knots to settle on some pretty unorthodox mic placements: spinning a vocal mic around to roughly face in the direction of a drum kit, and later, angling it down a few inches to capture a guitar overdub on the other side of the room. One distant U87 room-mic stands in for duties normally filled by overheads and tom mics on their latest single, “Microgravity,” much like a single dynamic mic (the low-cost and long discontinued Electro Voice RE-11) captured every sound and overdub on the song “All Is Nothing.”

Click to stream “Microgravity” by The Book of Knots.

The approach leads to some unique sounds, not only thanks to the haphazard capture method, but also due to the ruthless mangling these sounds are subject to on the other side of the process. When it comes to mixing, Hamilton takes back nearly all the control he once relinquished for the sake of the performance: “[this method] forces the use of 7 stacked EQs and four-thousand db of compression to even hear the kick drum. But that’s a tone that you would never have gotten with a more quote-unquote standard mic setup.”

As for that RE-11? He ended up sending it through his Valhalla reverb plug-in, and then sending that effect return into Studio G’s custom-built echo chamber for an effect that makes him think of “a Motown [song] being swallowed into a vortex”.

Does this mean Hamilton is no longer allowed to complain about woefully recorded tracks sent to him to mix by his own clients? “The only time I’d even complain would be out of insecurity,” he laughs. “There are those times where you can’t make the tracks you’re given sound the way you know the band or producer was hoping for. But [for The Book Of Knots] I don’t have anyone else to answer to, so that doesn’t really matter.

“It’s not supposed to sound like a Blink 182 record,” he says with a dose of good-natured contempt. “So [if the production does end up sounding strange at times], the engineer didn’t f*k up. We just weren’t out there chasing after someone else’s aesthetic to begin with.”

Justin Colletti is a Brooklyn-based producer/engineer who works with uncommon artists, and a journalist who writes about music and how we make it. Visit him at www.justincolletti.com.

Chandler Ltd. To Release Guitar Pedals, 500 Series Pre’s

Chandler Ltd. will be releasing four new products this year, including the first in its line of guitar pedals.

Chandler founder Wade Goeke talks about his new products on Gearslutz, and touches on his guitar pedal design in an interview with Joel Hamilton on the Brooklyn-based producer/engineer’s new Good Recording Stuff blog.

According to online accounts, the new products include the Little Devil and Germanium Boost pedals, which incorporate Class A circuit design that is hand wired and constructed like all Chandler products, and offers a large amount of high quality colored gain, selection of boost range, and three feedback settings.

The Little Devil and Germanium Boost pedals were reportedly inspired by Chandler’s also-new/upcoming 500 Series Little Devil 500 Pre Amp and Germ 500 MKII Pre Amp.

Follow Chandler on Facebook for the latest news on when these new products will be available. And visit www.chandlerlimited.com for more information.

Made in New York: Anthony DeMaria Labs

NEW PALTZ, NY: Anthony DeMaria never intended to create an audio company. “In a way, it created me,” says the one-time wiz-kid turned entrepreneur.

Like many makers of boutique audio electronics, DeMaria had little formal training to start, but found himself attracted to sound, organization, and work that demanded fine manual dexterity.

“Although I didn’t have a lot of background with circuits, my father was a model-maker, and I think that influence made me comfortable working with my hands,” says DeMaria. “My first schematic was the [Teletronix] LA-2A, and I quickly found that I could turn out prototypes pretty immediately.”

From there, DeMaria would go on to streamline and expand his one-man operation, before teaming up with PreSonus to bring high-fidelity tube preamps to the masses, and then ultimately throw his chips back into the boutique world to develop a faithful recreation of the breathtakingly over-engineered, 20-tube, 14-transformer behemoth known at the Fairchild 670.

Over the decades, his sense of excitement, awe and graciousness has barely receded: “It’s just so cool that I can have a thought in my head, put it into metal, and someone will come along and say ‘what do I owe you?’ All money aside, it’s so great that out of a whole world [of gear makers] out there, they call me.”

If you ask DeMaria and his clients, it’s that eagerness to pick up the phone and interact with his customers that kept ADL selling high-end niche merchandise throughout dire economic times. ADL 670 owner and Brooklyn-based producer/engineer Joel Hamilton reminisces that “Anthony said it best when I first started to talk to him about getting a 670: ‘I’m not selling boxes, I’m cultivating relationships with engineers and users of this stuff’. That was years ago, and he’s stayed so true to that very high standard all the way.”

Back in 1987, DeMaria’s initial, successful stab at the LA-2A evolved into a product called the ADL 1000.

Although it’s been eclipsed in the press by his newer, more sensational pieces, DeMaria’s version of this classic opto circuit is what built his company, and it remains an essential backbone of his product line.

And, over 25 years DeMaria has labored to see that circuit maintain its integrity: “If I were to re-interpret one little thing, I’d have to explain why, and lose a certain crowd.”

There are challenges: “Whether you’re doing 10 or 100 you have to go though the entire parts list, make sure all the vendors still have those parts available. There are so many parts that go into any product, and if you go into production without checking that every part is still made, you’re playing Russian roulette. You could have to change your entire design if you can’t find or make a suitable replacement.”

The hardest thing, DeMaria says, are the transformers: “The sonic footprint of any good piece of tube gear is, hands down, the transformer. You have to nail that first – if you screw it up, you’ve got nothing.”

Some of the most critical elements are built in-house. “Often, the original transformers we try to duplicate are very old and there’s no documentation. You measure everything, but at the end of the day, you’re throwing a dart. You create the transformer, stick it into the original design and say ‘Okay, what’s it doing? Should we go up, down, left or right?’

“It could take a month or two and 4 or 5 versions, or it could be 8 months and 12 versions. You don’t really know until you try.”

All this experience re-engineering vintage circuits and maintaining standards in his own creations prepared DeMaria for his biggest challenge yet: if the ADL 1000 was DeMaria’s original flagship, the ADL 670 has usurped that title through sheer ballsiness and heft. With a 6RU mainframe and 4RU power supply that weigh in at a combined 84lbs, the ADL 670 is a heavy load on the back, and the wallet. This elegant giant lists at $19,000 MSRP. And it sells.

670 user and Strange Weather Studio engineer Daniel James Schlett says, “It can be subtle at times, but what it is doing cannot be done with any other units I’ve used in the past.”

“The 670 is pretty fantastic on a lot of things,” says Schlett. “It’s not a ‘blow up your room mics box’, but it does a fantastic job of imparting  great character  on a vocal or bass track while staying extremely hi-fi. It can give a singer that extra sparkle that was missing in the chain, or help pull out a performance no one in the room was ready for.”

“It’s also in constant use on the mix buss – here is where the 670 has a way of standing out and blending in all at the same time.”

Studio G‘s Hamilton agrees that the unit excels on the stereo buss, a function that’s driven the value of the original Fairchild through the roof: “I’ve used the ADL 670 on almost every single record I’ve mixed since I got it years ago. I could probably just normal it to the main mix insert point on my Neve, and save the trouble of patching it at all.”

An impressive box for sure, but is it worth over $9,000 MSRP per channel? It’s one of those unanswerable, subjective questions. Value, as always, depends on the user’s resources, needs and desires. But this much is clear: DeMaria’s 670 delivers the tone of the original, at a lower price than a vintage unit, with a new warranty and uncommon customer service.

Hamilton’s own story about his interaction with DeMaria, for example, is far from unique: “I was in the middle of doing the new Pretty Lights record, and we were printing live to two-track tape with the ADL 670 on the mix. I was running everything hot, and had the power supply in a ‘less than optimal’ position. My power supply fried. I said “Wait… Does anyone smell that? Something burning?’ And someone replied ‘smells like your wallet’.”

“Anthony drove down from his shop that morning (on a Sunday!) with a calibrated bench unit for me to continue tracking. Besides the fact that I like Anthony personally, that he goes out of his way to really make things work is just incredible and dear to my heart. Try getting that type of service from a random manufacturer. You’d need a time machine and cab fare from White Plains to make that happen with an original Fairchild 670.”

But what about the sound? The ADL has routinely passed discerning user’s tests, coming up as nearly indistinguishable from the original. To this engineer’s ears, mixes seem to take on new weight, depth, and girth when the 670 is laid over the mix buss. It’s an effect that is at once powerful, satisfying and refined. As soon as the inserts are engaged, whole productions sound as if they’ve pumped out 100 push-ups and chased them down with a couple of grass-fed cheeseburgers.

Of course, not all of DeMaria’s designs are so pie-in-the-sky. In 2006, a collaboration with PreSonus brought high-end tube audio down to earth for thousands of pro and semi-pro studios across the world.

“Economy of scale made that product possible,” says DeMaria of their creation: the ADL 600. “It’s the only way we could bring the product in at that magical $2,000 price-point. A connector that costs me a buck, might cost them a penny.”

Unlike many of his other best-selling designs, the 600 is a novel creation that takes a more indirect inspiration from vintage circuits. “We looked at tube preamps that The Beatles used, but in the end some of them had too much character. When you want to capture it pristine – this is the piece. We decided the best thing to do in a preamp like that is to give people the most open sounding pre with the most amount of gain.

“And it’s just got an enormous amount of gain,” he notes. “You’ll never outrun it. It’s a really nice-sounding preamp.”

We asked DeMaria if he learned anything from that mass-market collaboration  which has been useful at his own boutique operation, where he hand-assembles units in New Paltz, NY. “They really understood simplicity and clarity of layouts, and have a great ability to maximize the ease of manufacturing. There’s this old adage, ‘Go slow now, go fast later’. Those guys really know it.”

He’s even applied some of those concepts to his own designs, adapting the mono ADL 1000 and stereo ADL 1500 circuits to work in the same chassis, using interchangeable platform boards that allow quick fixes in-the-field. “Now, instead of a client sending me the unit, I can send a replacement board overnight in a soft-pack. I just helped a client install a power supply board over the phone in 4 minutes and helped save the session! How happy was he?”

DeMaria says that it now takes less technical aptitude to build his earlier designs, saving more time for QC and answering phones. On the flip-side, there’s an increased part count, but allowing these two units to share some elements has helped control prices and enhance uniformity across the line.

Having mastered point-for-point recreations of classic gear and super-clean mass market creations alike, DeMaria has is ears set on new horizons: “I’d love to create another branch-out company. I’ll always continue to make the traditional ADL pieces, but I also want to create products that go the other way – less expensive. Gear that disrupts the sound. I’ve already created a box to make the most pristine sound. Now I want to go in the opposite direction. It seems like musicians are shifting away from capturing pristine sounds and moving toward effecting it.

“I want to be on the ground,” he says,” See what’s going on, visit some of these studios. I’ve always been talking to musicians and studio owners. That’s where the ideas come from. So much has changed in recording, and the question becomes – how do you reconnect the dots?”

And staying in New York is a big part of that plan, according to DeMaria, who was born in Brooklyn and toys with the idea of opening an office in the borough. He tried a move to California for a while, but couldn’t “sink his teeth” into LA.

“I couldn’t see myself anywhere else,” he tells us. “I mean, where are you gonna get the best food? In Brooklyn! C’mon!”

Justin Colletti is a Brooklyn-based audio engineer and music producer who’s worked with Hotels, DeLeon, Soundpool, Team Genius and Monocle, as well as clients such as Nintendo, JDub, Blue Note Records, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Visit him at www.justincolletti.com.

The SonicScoop Year in Review: Top NYC Music Business News and Trends of 2010

THE FIVE BOROUGHS: 2010 has been busy all right. For anyone involved in New York City’s expansive business of music – producer, publisher, entrepreneur, engineer, artist, and many more – the environment remains fast-paced, ultra-competitive and constantly changing.

With 2011 looming, SonicScoop looked for the news, trends and topics that stood out to us over the past 365 days.

In audio post, it was grow or die in the uppermost echelon. The biggest facilities, including hsr|ny, Nutmeg, and Sound Lounge made serious expansions into audio and/or video:

Sound Lounge opened an ADR Stage and multiple studios.

Nutmeg Post added a strong team and facility when it soaked up Soundhound.

The big post house Mega Playground built out audio capabilities.

Northern Lights added a 5.1 audio mixing suite.

Video house Click3X reversed the trend and added their own audio suite.

Celebrating 35 years in business, hsr|ny continued to expand as a full-service video and audio post facility.

Large and mid-sized recording/tracking/mixing studios kept making capital improvements and expanding:

Premier Studios took over the 8th floor at 723 7th Avenue.

Engine Room opened up its penthouse studio.

Stadium Red expanded with a new studio for Just Blaze and a mastering suite.

Platinum Studios added Augspurgers to Studio K.

Sear Sound set up the Moog-centric Studio D.

Tainted Blue swapped out its SSL for a Euphonix (nee Avid) System 5.

And props to Electric Lady for marking its 40th Anniversary.

Converse (yes, the shoe company) has an interesting business plan for the Rubber Tracks studio it’s going to open in Williamsburg in 2011: no-cost recording.

Advanced smaller studios – independent and within larger facilities — and producer rooms also opened up at a peppy pace:

Chris Theberge’s Music Works arrived on the Upper West Side.

The former One Point Six in Williamsburg was reborn as Three Egg Studios.

Manhattan Center Studios launched The Fuse Box with Public Enemy’s Brian Hardgroove.

Avatar opened up its Studio W writing room.

Sisko’s Min-Max Studios opened up in midtown.

Marc Alan Goodman announced an ambitious new expansion for Brooklyn’s Strange Weather, then blogged about the buildout – step by step – for SonicScoop.

Guitarist Justin King moved his Vinegar Hill Sound from Portland, OR to DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Avid capped off a furious year of reinvention and new products with the release of Pro Tools 9.

Music houses and composers still had a ton of TV, film and video game work to go after and win:

Joel Beckerman of Man Made Music continued to make NYC a TV music powerhouse.

Composer Peter Nashel turned ears everywhere with his work for shows like Rubicon.

Outfits like Expansion Team scored for networks such as the Biography Channel.

Tom Salta understands how to get chosen to score for games like Prince of Persia and Red Steel 2.

Production music and synch licensing remained a solid business, especially for those who got in at the right time or had a smart approach.

NYC’s Kingsize Music was acquired by 615 Music.

And later on Warner-Chappell (NYC) bought up 615 Music.

NYC’s Videohelper released the “Scenarios” music search tool.

Jingle Punks continued to grow.

Mechanical licensing experts RightsFlow kept progressing.

One of NYC’s most controversial music business plays, peer-to-peer file sharing network Limewire, appeared to be finally finished.

Tracking, mixing and mastering at NYC’s established facilities did a relatively healthy volume of A-level and independent work throughout the year:

The Black Eyed Peas, Rivers Cuomo and Kanye West were at Germano Studios.

Neon Indian, Beach House, Matt and Kim, Bear Hands and more were mastered at The Lodge.

MSR Studios handled Kid Cudi, Evanescence and Broadway Cast recordings.

Lenny Kravitz, The Dirty Pearls, “Glee”, and Vampire Weekend were all at Avatar.

Joe Lambert Mastering worked with Moby and Ninjasonik.

New software and hardware happiness abounded:

We elected many items “Buzzworthy” at AES, from Universal Audio, Focal, SSL, Burl, Shadow Hills, Izotope, Sound Toys, Lavry Engineering, Telefunken and more.

Propellerhead released Reason 5.

NYC suffered losses when beloved people and places left us:

Recording icon Walter Sear passed away.

The great hip hop/jazz experimentalist Guru was gone before his time.

Clinton Recording Studios hosted its last session.

Brick and mortar music retail took another hit when Fat Beats shuttered its last stores.

Baseline Studios, home of Just Blaze and countless Jay-Z hits, closed.

Chung King Studios started off 2010 with a bang by suddenly vacating Varick Street.

NYC-based producers, mixers, engineers and artists became businesses in their own right:

Producer Chris Coady worked on some hugely acclaimed records this year, including Beach House Teen Dream and Delorean Subiza, as well as records with Hooray for Earth, Zola Jesus, Smith Westerns, Cold Cave.

People like Allen Farmelo developed their distinctive sound.

Choice songwriter Claude Kelly made a business of hits.

Shane Stoneback’s career took off via work with Sleigh Bells and Vampire Weekend.

Mixer Mark Saunders embraced multiple aspects of the biz from his studio at Beat 360.

Dream Theater’s Jordan Rudess took his iPad/iPhone app MorphWiz all the way to #1.

Joel Hamilton continued down an immersive production path, working on records with Blakroc, Dub Trio, The Parkington Sisters and Blakroc.

And John Agnello brought his classic production and engineering technique to new records for Kurt Vile, J Mascis, Shayna Zaid And The Catch and Dead Confederate (among others).

The studio scene got a lot more socialicious and FUN:

Flux Studios was always hosting something in the East Village, like Alto and Dangerous converging for a schooling from Fab.

Digital Music NY was one of many popular business-based meetups.

Stadium Red partied down post-CMJ.

20dot20 mixed advertising and music.

And the Connectors connected a LOT of people.

What big stories would you include? And what do you see next in 2011? Don’t be shy – leave a comment and let us know!

– Janice Brown and David Weiss

Career Engineering: Allen Farmelo on Recording Cinematic Orchestra, & That Post-Pink Floyd Sound

CHINATOWN, MANHATTAN/FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN: What headspace are you in? For a music producer/engineer/mixer like Allen Farmelo, getting your talents to that sought-after place is all about finding yourself.

In the process of doing that, of course, people will find you — that explains why one of Farmelo’s fans is an artful outfit like Cinematic Orchestra, the engrossing British jazz/electronic/soul influenced outfit led by Jason Swincoe. The ever-evolving group recently called on Farmelo to engineer their upcoming release for Ninja Tune, a project that he executed in the semi-exclusive confines of Chinatown’s intriguing Mavericks Studio.

Whether working at Mavericks or mixing/mastering at his rapidly evolving Fort Greene facility, The Farm, Farmelo’s primary angle – a sound he gravitates to that he calls “Post-Pink Floyd” – and artist-centric philosophy shows how an NYC audio pro gets on the map. As his list of credits grows (The Loom, Second Dan, Cucu Diamantes, Jonah Smith, Ian Gillan, The Cabriolets, Jesus H. Christ), so does his insight on what makes today’s music, and the business of it, tick.

You’ve been working a lot with Cinematic Orchestra the last few weeks. How would you describe that workflow?
I wouldn’t say it’s improvisational, but I would say it’s a very grand project that operates on a lot of different levels and that there’s a lot of exploration happening. Jason’s done a lot of writing beforehand, and he brings in musicians to flesh out the ideas. The writing is extremely intentional, and harmonically/melodically very plotted out. He knows the goal of those songs.

He’s an amazing producer because he manages to get people to do stuff that works for the song, without telling them what to do. Is he micromanaging? No. But is he getting the micro-details he wants out of people? Yes. So I’m watching him closely and learning from him.

Cinematic’s not like the Beatles where you have the same four members, and without one of them you’re done. Jason’s brought in people he feels will contribute to that particular song in the way he thinks it will happen best. Different singers for different songs, that kind of thing. So far it’s a bit of a different-sounding record than the previous one, and I think the lineup will reflect those changes.

So what’s it like coming into the project as an engineer? Do they let you do your thing, or is it a collaborative process?
Jason knows what he wants to hear, he is extremely good at communicating it, and he lets me achieve that. He can sometimes get right down to the gear. They were working at Livingston Studios in London, using those Coles 4038s as the overheads. He described that setup, and I did that here to get the specific sound that worked well when he tracked in England.

So sometimes he’s very specific, other times he’ll describe a vibe or metaphor to get what he’s looking for, and then the way I achieve that is up to me. Mixing the Grey Reverend record that Jason produced was a lot like that, where both Grey and Jason would articulate well what they wanted from the record. Then I sent them home, said, “Let me do this,” and then let them come back.

My first stab was good on about 70% of the material — and then fell on its face on the other! We talked about that, and they were very good at articulating what they wanted changed. So we freed up some things in the mix, found the center of the record, and let those things happen. As the record went on, I was able to take more ownership of the aesthetic. So the collaboration is very easy and open.

So is it easier to go into this project now that you’re in the same headspace? Are there traditional references to other records he’s listening to as far as the approach, or is it like you’re already aware of what he likes based on the past experience?
Jason has written amazing, amazing music that is dictating everything about what follows. The songwriting is so strong and beautiful that everybody else is just there to serve that song – including Jason. I don’t feel any references to anything outside of those songs happening at all. Instead we’re coming from the center of those songs. And when you hear them, they all have their own character, life, logic, feel, tonality and beauty that’s obvious from the get-go, even when they’re just played on acoustic guitar. You say, “That’s freakin’ beautiful. Let’s make it more beautiful.”

How do you go about taking the song further at that point?
So everything from changing a mic to subdividing a beat to figuring out how to lay a crash down is there to serve that inner logic. Jason makes sure we’re there to serve that inner logic and the inner beauty of the song, and he communicates it very easily. You have the songwriter, the vision, and the songs are giving you tons of information from that.

You don’t have to do that much to know how to get the studio to sing properly for the song, and that’s where I feel I’m trusted to make some good choices along the way. It can be something as simple as, “Wow, slow tempo – let’s raise the overheads and let the drums sing a little more,” or for more complex patterns I might think, “Let’s get things a little tighter.”

For me, setting the tone on the guitar amp is instinctively informed by the guitar pattern. Since we feel very much in tune with the music, we all kind of trust each other aesthetically and say, “OK, let’s make this happen.” There’s not a lot of discussion about this stuff. It’s kind of obvious when things are working or not, everyone’s got great ears.

The thing that’s refreshing about working with these guys is that there’s no ego to get in the way of this discussion, so it’s an aesthetic conversation at all times – a really clean and artistic conversation.

That sounds like a rewarding way to be recording. Why is this studio a fit for this band and record?
Well, Maverick’s fits any project really well, as long as you don’t need to record forty musicians here. I had thirteen here once – that worked surprisingly well. That was a big, amazing, raucous New Orleansy anti-war album. So Maverick’s can kind of do that. We did the strings for Grey Reverend’s upcoming album here – we had a quartet in the main space. I did the whole Loom record, Teeth, which was a six-piece band all playing in the room together. A lot of people come to just do drums. It’s a very versatile space, and as long as your mics are in phase, you’ll sound good. There’s really no crappy-sounding place in here. For the Cinematic record, there’s just something wonderful happening between the songs and the room sound. They match beautifully.

It feels that way. What do you think about the “open concept” (studio in the round) format here?
I’ve been on two Tape Op Conference panels with other people talking about open concept studios, so I’ve thought a lot about it. And of course the most famous reference is Lanois. The number one benefit of it is being able to speak face-to-face with the people you’re working with and not through a talkback system. The alienation of a talkback system is apparent as soon as it’s taken away. It’s so nice to pull off the headphones and talk to the person you’re speaking to.

The drawback is there’s no room for bullshit. Everyone has to be reverent to the music happening. You can’t rattle your keys, text your boyfriend, read Vogue – a lot of what normally happens in the control room can’t happen here. So if you’re not into being reverent, you have to go into the back room where there are no speakers. You’re either in or out.

I didn’t realize I was paying so much attention to what was coming out of the speakers – instead of to the musicians – until I started working in an open studio. It’s a positive for me, but not for everyone – my friend Joel Hamilton jokingly calls us a bunch of hippies that like to sit in the same room together, and he’s kind of got a point as it can be pretty touchy-feely. But the other most obvious benefit is the amount of space I have. We have one of the biggest control rooms in NYC, because we have all this space, and when we’re tracking we can subdivide it any way we want.

If we’d had a separate control room, we’d be like a lot of little studios, but instead we’re like a good midsize studio here. For a facility our size, we have a really big control room and a really big live room. They just happen to be the same space – it’s an incredible way to take advantage of small spaces.

That makes sense. What guides the gear choices here?
First and foremost, we have pairs of everything in the studio: Coles 4038’s, Royer 121’s, RCA BK 5As, Beyer M 160’s, Shure SM7’s, Elux 251s, 87s, 84s, 441s…a pair of everything. The point being that we are really ready to put up a pair of anything on any source, so we are really versatile when recording drums. We can get any flavor stereo overhead and room sound we want.

We used to have a mishmash of preamps, and then came to realize really quickly that we love API, and miss the glue/consistency of having the same preamps working off of a console. So we have 16 of the API 512s. We do have other pres – the Chandler, a pair of original 1073 Neves racked up by Brent Averil…but we have far fewer flavors then we used to, and we love it. We’re thrilled to have the same preamp on everything, because when you bring up the faders it all sits together tonally. We went through the “We could have a little of everything phase” and grew out of it.

We have a lot of really interesting compressors, and a lot of really standard standbys. We have two Purple MC77s, two 1176s, and a pair of DBX 160’s that used to belong to Johnny Cash! We have a pair of Distressors. Where we deviate is the API 2500 – I mix through that 2500 almost exclusively. I have one in my studio in Brooklyn, The Farm, and I have one here that’s always strapped onto my two buss. It reminds me not to over compress and to cascade from the individual channel compressors into that bus compressor. I work with it on all the time, so I know where I’m going to land compression-wise when it comes time to mix.

And there are other non-standard compressors here. We just got the Airfield Audio Liminator Two, which is a beautiful piece of kit, and this Gyrotek Varimu Tube Compressor is stunning – handmade in Denmark. So we have a lot of neat flavors on the compression side, and again, everything is stereo. We have two of everything, so you can run any pair of mics through any pair of pres/compressors.

Do you also mix here, or at The Farm?
I used to mix here, and then I had to mix back at my place because of a scheduling thing – this was like in 2006. So I recorded a record for Rachel Z., which featured Tony Levin, and other great musicians, and due to scheduling and some technical issues I ended up with mixes done on the console here at Mavericks, some summed in Pro Tools here, and some mixed in my room in Brooklyn. When we got to mastering, there were definitely differences – and the analog summed mixes were way better – but my mixes done at home were sounding really good. They were right up there. It was weird: I went to the news stand across the street from my Brooklyn apartment and saw that Rachel’s record was charting in Billboard, then I looked up at my window where my mix room is and said, “Wow, a new era.” So I did what everyone else did: I put together a mix room.

And now my studio, The Farm in Fort Greene, is a serious mixing situation. I have a lot of outboard gear, the Crane Song HEDD which I’m using to print my mixes off a Studer A-80 1/2” machine; a fully acoustically treated room. It’s pretty ideal and I’m doing pretty much all of my mixing there. That allows me to work within the budgets that are coming my way, allowing me to offer better deals to my clients and make a living at it.

That said, mixing here at Mavericks is a wonderful experience. We’ve got the Studer two-track, the center section of the Neotek, which is modified by Purple Audio, sounds wonderful. That console is like the mid-size luxury touring sedan with a badass racing engine in it.

We hear you’re putting together an interesting new console for The Farm. What was the concept, and how is it coming together?
The concept is to have an API Legacy console built from their amazing 7600 channel strips, which each have a 550A EQ, 225L compressor and 212L preamp along with four busses, four aux sends and infinite routing possibilities.

I realized after working on the big Vision console up at NYU’s Clive Davis school and then, days after, tracking at Mavericks with all API 512 preamps that API was a sound I could very happily commit to. But I couldn’t afford, nor did I really need, nor did I want to maintain, a full-on Legacy or Vision console.

The API 7600’s all connect to the 7800 Master Module to form a true, discrete Legacy console with as many channels you want or can afford. So I bought a pair of 7600s to try on a mix session and within about three minutes I knew I’d found my channels, and when I summed through the 7800 Master Module, I knew I’d found my console. Problem was I had to get it built.

Francois Chambard of UM Project in Greenpoint came on board, and our goal was to defy the look and feel of traditional consoles – which to my eye look like either Cold War-era military equipment, a dentist’s office, or some leather bound thing you’d expect Ron Burgundy to tell you he mixed his jazz flute on. I’m a really visual guy, and none of those inspire me, nor did I really want to spend the rest of my career behind one.

Instead we found a great blend between Francois’s sense of modern design and my own fascination with the landscape, architecture and design of Iceland. It’s going to look really different, yet it has the ergonomics of my favorite consoles all bundled together with space for over twenty-four channels, eventually. I couldn’t be happier, and Francois is a bad-ass designer. There’ll be racks and diffusors to match, I’m sure.

Sounds amaaaazing. Switching gears, let’s talk about the NYC recording scene. How would you describe what’s happening here?

There is an incredible energy around making records in NYC right now. Specifically in Brooklyn, there’s an incredibly good, positive foundation of recording happening.

Five years ago we were in distress a little bit, we were watching the big studios close. Now Avatar is still there, Sear Sound is still there – Walter RIP – they’re booked solid. Magic Shop is still there. These amazing rooms that really held close to their missions are still operating and they’re there for us to go in and use as needed. The new era is here, and we’re all relaxing into it.

The market crash happened in 2008, which was a grim year for everyone, but we got used to it. Now it’s a community of people making records. I see NYC as a place that adapted swiftly to a new model, and everyone’s got a room with an increasing amount of gear in it. Between the bigger studio and your own space, records are being made wonderfully that way. There are fewer places to get an orchestra recorded, but a hell of a lot of places for an acoustic guitar overdub!

The big loss is community. That’s not an original thought, but I do miss the community of being with a lot of people doing what you do. Writing for Tape Op helps, being on Facebook helps – when you have status updates, you feel like you’re in a conversation. I find I have to make an effort to find people who do what I do. It’s an effort, but it’s worth it.

So there’s a lot of obstacles to overcome, but musically I think NYC is bringing together the sophistication of indie, jazz and “new” classical music with the street levelness of the rock scene – now it’s almost the norm to have a string quartet on your record. I like seeing those worlds coming together. Maybe because no one can make a living at it anymore, we’ll all play on each other’s records! That cross-pollination is really exciting: Grizzly Bear and Arcade Fire used a lot of NYC string players on their last records, and you can feel a new kind of sound emerging nationally that has a particular stamp on it that, to my ears, says “Brooklyn.”

You’re from Buffalo originally, right? How did you work your way up as an engineer in the NYC studio scene?
I’m very much a self-taught guy. I had a bit of experience working at Trackmasters in Buffalo, now called Inner Machine and owned by the Goo Goo Dolls. It’s an amazing room, designed by John Storyk, and the Goo Goo Dolls are currently packing it with amazing gear. That studio is absolutely iconic in Buffalo’s music scene, and my first time in there I was playing keyboards in my highschool jazz band. We were badass that year, and then all the great players went off to college. It’s funny, I heard that recording recently and thought, “whoh, that’s amazing.”

Anyways, that first experience in a real studio had me hooked, and I soon after got a four-track and had at it. But where I really learned was in the DIY hardcore scene of the late ‘80’s. I did a record at Trackmasters in 1989 with my band RedDog7, then helped some friends make records there. I was kind of producing, but I had no idea that’s what I was doing. We made some seriously good sounding records, actually, and I was obsessed with getting good sounds – I knew guitars, amps, drums, cymbals, strings and even obsessed over sticks and picks. My head was way up in it from an early age, and I was thinking from the player to the instrument to the mic, which I now know is the right way to think.

Then we had a band house for a while, and and then this whole basement situation with the Mackie board and DAT machines. We made deals and acquired gear, recording, doing live sound and playing gigs, and then running this little DIY studio. That’s where I really cut my teeth as a recording guy, struggling to get a decent sound outside of Trackmasters. Over time in Buffalo I had the chance to become a bigger fish in a small pond, which is a nurturing environment, but that pond got too small. It was time to move on, so I came to NYC.

What’s your take on producing? You seem to have a studied approach to that role.
My philosophy of producing is that I try not to carry around any pre-ordained philosophy, but instead to generate a philosophy for the project in collaboration with the artist. I call that “guiding principles” – a very intentional guiding philosophy I try to lock in on and externalize for the project, in case we get lost.

For example, I’m doing a children’s record with the Brooklyn-based artist Shelley Kay, and we have two guiding principles. One is, “Fuck Romper Room”, and the other is “Playful Minimalism.” Fuck-Romper-Room is easy – that means that whenever we’re getting into the mamby-pamby kindergarten shit, hit the red STOP button. And “Playful Minimalism” means that when we’re confronted with a decision we ask: Is it playful? It is minimalist? Those two words show us the choice to make. Between two drum patterns for example, if one is more minimalist, that’s typically the one to go with, and the result comes back closer to our original artistic intentions to keep the production clean.

Another artist that I’m working with, the guiding principle is “Sincere Otherworldliness.” I’m putting him through the paces as a songwriter. He’s been struggling to get his sincerity out, and the otherworldliness is an outwardly-stated goal of his to create a sonic world that’s very different from reality, another world one can enter into. To bring those two together is difficult – if you’re too sincere, you can’t get it spacey and amazing, but if you’re too otherworldly, you can miss being right there with the listener, making it sincere. These principles are meant to be challenging.

In production it’s very hard to stop saying, “I like that, I don’t like that.” If that’s going on in the conversation, you’ll never get to the heart of the matter. If you get past “I like that, I don’t like that” and closer to stating what you want to achieve, something like a guiding principle starts to open up, and you have much more productive conversations about what’s happening.

In my work, that’s the best thing I can give to their project: an open, comfortable dialogue about things, but with structure instead of just being completely wide open. One of the functions of the producer is to help the artist specify what they’re doing, and not be all over the place. Not everyone is making their fifth record and bringing all that experience to the table. A lot of people are making their first or second, and I have to be intentional about my role, because if I don’t we get sloppy.

How did you get to be like that as a producer? It sounds like you’ve evolved in that role, just as an artist does with their music.
It’s not a new idea to find artistic growth as a producer, I don’t think. I have to attribute my own growth partly to Bob Power, one of my mentors. He always says it’s about getting to a place where you’re letting the music make decisions, and I know exactly what he means. That idea inspired me to ask, “Well, how do you get to that place?” Like most great ideas, it’s not complex, but it can be a real bugger to achieve. There are so many things that can get in the way, like ego, fear, imagined or real audiences, commercial pressure, well disguised self-sabotage tendencies – basically anything external to the actual crafts of writing, performing and recording music. For me, to get to that place where the music is speaking clearly requires a pretty intentional approach to how I talk about the work being done, and that’s where the guiding principles idea kind of came from.

More and more of us producers are doing the A&R job of developing artists and their material. If we don’t have record labels, who will do all the development work? It turns out to be the record producer in a lot of cases. It’s a big part of the job. So if I can obsess about a compressor as an engineer, I hope I can also obsess about the dialogue that’s going to shape decisions about the album as a producer. That’s been a big area of growth for me, to enter into dialogue about the work with more and more clarity. It’s really fucking hard work, but when it pays off it’s amazing. I even read books about collaborating, about creativity – whatever I can get my hands on that I think might help. Right now it’s where I’m focusing my professional growth.

That sounds like amazing guidance to be able to provide throughout the process…
Yes, although I should also state that all of that development of the guiding principles, and doing the artist and material development, happens long before we hit record. It’s like pre-pre-production. It goes on long before I’m getting things ready for the actual recording date. It’s more of trying to figure out what the vision of the artist is, and helping them shape it. I’ll say it again, it’s not easy. It’s not the easy path of just saying “I like this, I don’t like that.”

The other thing is the kind of music I’m working on can call for this kind of approach. I’ve more recently committed as a mixer/engineer/producer to this specific vibe within modern rock music that I call post-Pink Floyd. Don’t take that term too literally, but one day someone asked that inevitable question “what kind of music do you work on” and I just said it – “post-Pink Floyd.” What I meant by it is this thread of really innovative, beautiful, spacious, compassionate music.

Pink Floyd had incredible empathy, beautiful spaces, beautiful sounds, and brought in influences of jazz and classical without doing them overly in the music. The ideas they brought in were so involved in empathy – it wasn’t, “Let’s go shake our butts and hump each other and party all night long.” Instead, they were dealing more directly with the human condition, and I just wind up working with a lot of artists who seem to have somewhat similar goals lyrically and thematically. So it’s not really about Pink Floyd in particular, but if I had to point to a moment in rock history where this compassionate, open, spacious music began, I’d say “Dark Side of the Moon.”

Cinematic Orchestra exemplifies it. Radiohead and Sigur Ros exemplify it. Elbow’s got it. Peter Gabriel’s work with Lanois has it. In fact, Lanois seems to get it out of people in general – he got it out of Dylan, perhaps for the first time. I work with a lot of artist who seem to want to work towards the aesthetic that are embodied by those examples, even if those records aren’t particular influences. Cinematic Orchestra is an honor to work with, because I feel that they’re harmonically, musically, thematically within that realm. I think they’re masters of space and compassion, and I think the record they’re making is going to blow people away. But that post-Pink Floyd thing comes in a lot of flavors. In American bands I’d include The National, Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, Wilco does it do a degree, and especially Band of Horses. The Loom, whose record I produced, fits under that umbrella for me, even thought they sound nothing like these other bands, really. Again, it’s not really a particular sound, but a set of harmonic and thematic threads that run through the music.

It’s a hard and awful thing to have to put into the limitations of language something you feel and know so intuitively, but I guess that’s the exact challenge I’m putting on the artists I work with when trying to get positive dialogue happening about projects. In a way, post-Pink Floyd is my own kind of guiding priciple as I try to intentionally steer my career in a specific direction. I should probably work harder on clarifying that!

That sounds like an expansive genre to hang your hat on – what else is on the Post-Pink Floyd horizon for you?
I’m currently producing two records that are definitely going to carry some of that vibe. One is with Austin Donohue, who is writing some amazingly beautiful stuff, really finding his themes. He’s the Sincere Otherworldliness guy. The other is with Diana Hickman, who I think is writing some of the most innovative material I’ve heard in a while – like Joni Mitchell and Bjork go SCUBA diving together and surface with a record. Both of them are working their asses off, doing a ton of development work with me. Those will get done this winter.

I’ve also become inspired by Iceland as a place for music and making records. It’s a very sparsely populated, lovely place that just doesn’t go to war or pollute very much, and their landscape and relative remoteness lends itself to music that is really quite unique. When people settled Iceland, they didn’t colonize anybody, and it just doesn’t have this scarred past which so many other places rife with conflict have. It’s quieter. You can feel that lack of conflict and that quiet, and a sense of expansiveness in much of the music there, even when it’s erupting like a volcano.

At least that’s what my tired NYC ears hear. I just went back there in October to the Airwaves Music Festival in Reykjavik and saw amazing bands every night. I’m talking to one in particular about working together, and I really hope it starts to happen for me over there. I’m very interested in putting my foot on that other piece of land.

– Interview by Janice Brown and David Weiss

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