Dream Gig: Travis Harrison Records Guided By Voices Heroes at Serious Business

SoHo, Manhattan: Travis Harrison — record producer, engineer, founder of Serious Business Records & Studio and Guided By Voices super-fan — met late era GBV guitarist Doug Gillard when his band, The Unsacred Hearts, shared a bill with Gillard at Piano’s.

Harrison gushed about GBV, Gillard dug The Unsacred Hearts, and they stayed in touch. Later on, Harrison inquired about future prospects for Lifeguards, the Gillard and Robert Pollard GBV side-project whose one and only release, Mist King Urth, came out in ’02.

“I was a huge fan of the first Lifeguards album,” says Harrison, “I buy everything that Bob [Pollard] puts out. After I met Doug, Bob had been in touch to tell him if he wanted to produce the music and find a label, he’d be into doing another Lifeguards record. That’s when I swooped in and pitched Doug: I have a studio, a label, the [recording] skill-set and I’m a huge fan. Let’s do this! I expected to get no response.”

Of course, Gillard did respond and the new Lifeguards record, due out February 15 on Serious Business / Ernest Jenning Record Co., was engineered by none other than Harrison. Scroll down to stream “Product Head,” the album’s single released on 7″ in advance of the record. And read on for an interview about the recording and production of Lifeguard’s Waving At The Astronauts by this Guided By Voices super-fan…

Awesome that you got to engineer this record at Serious Business! So tell me about how it all came together.

The way they worked on this project is that Doug wrote the instrumentals and recorded them at home in Garage Band and then sent them to Bob who then created the melodies and lyrics on top of these instrumentals. It’s just one of the many ways that Bob works.

Doug’s GarageBand demos were pretty fully fleshed out — he recorded most of the guitars, and bass and other little sonic treatments. Then he brought it to me and at my studio, I salvaged any less than ideally recorded stuff, but we also tracked drums, bass, re-tracked any guitar that I could get him to re-track and then we recorded Bob’s vocals.

What were your first impressions of the material? Were you so psyched?!

First of all, I was just in awe. As far as Doug’s instrumentals go, the shit’s amazing. He’s a great guitar player, and has an amazing musical mind that always goes somewhere you don’t expect. He’s awesome. But I didn’t actually hear these tracks as songs beyond instrumentals until Bob was actually in the studio, at the microphone. He drove in from Dayton in May to do his vocals. And that was just amazing. The guy is a genius! Obviously I’m a huge fan, but just to see him work and see how completely natural and instinctual it is, I was blown away.

Wow, very cool! And I know you’re a drummer — did you by any chance get to play on the record?

Yes, I played on five songs and Doug played on the rest. He’s a great drummer, he basically plays everything, but it was obviously a crazy honor for me to play drums on this record. There were some parts that were really fast, that either exceeded his technical ability or that he thought I’d have a good groove for – that’s the stuff I got a shot at.

And what was your goal in the studio – what aspects were you re-recording or adding, and how did you approach the recording?

It was very important to me to make it sound as un-GarageBand-y as possible. We didn’t want it to sound homemade at all. And Bob’s vision for the record was like “ARENA ROCK.” He’s known for lo-fi, but we were consciously not going for that. Doug was the producer, so he really called all the shots. He called for a lot of really heavy compression on drums.

On one song in particular, “Nobody’s Milk,” Doug had done the original drum track on a drum machine and it was incredible but it wasn’t totally in time and he’d used the GarageBand compressor at 10 to really squash it. It was really clean but insanely compressed and I begged to redo them.

It took a ton of work to match his exact part because it was very intricate, but to achieve the compression, I used the API 2500 bus compressor as the first stage and then after that, the Fatso pretty much demolishing it in parallel. And I really favored the compressed side and went for this ultra squashed sound to simulate his Garage Band demo. That was my goal throughout the whole project, to please Doug and Bob as much as I could. I willingly and gladly checked my ego at the door!

In that process, do you feel like you learned from them? From following their instincts?

Of course, although this way of working — taking a fully fleshed out Garage Band demo and turning that into the record — is incredibly tedious. So it was a matter of enjoying the tedium of that. I spent an insane amount of time on my own editing, beat-by-beat, that ultra compressed drum track because I didn’t want Doug to hear really anything different from his version. I just wanted it to be real drums instead of these samples.

But do you feel you came up with something new and different in the process — something cool you wouldn’t have come up with otherwise?

Yes, but you know Doug was the producer and this is what he wanted to hear. And when he heard it, he (and Bob) loved it.  But the way these guys work…and I should separate them, because Doug is more of a meticulous craftsman. But at the same time, he does kind of bang it out. He’s not going to do 30 takes of something. Where Bob does ONE take.

Tell me about that! What was it like recording Bob’s vocals on this?

I had a [Shure] SM7 set up in the studio. The SM7 is my favorite mic, especially for a singer like Bob. I was really excited. My thinking was to record Bob onto two tracks simultaneously.  One track was just about capturing him with very little compression — an SM7 to a Great River mic pre to a distressor at 2:1 (but barely touching it) — and then on the other track, I hit him with an 1176 at 4:1 with the super-spitty setting (the fastest release and the slowest attack). And that’s the track I ended up using for most of the final mixes.

Also, for every track, I printed either Space Echo or Echoplex live. Bob would step up to the mic and say “Alright man, this one is arena rock!” or “This one’s Elvis!” or “psychedelic” and between the Echoplex and the Space Echo, I was able to get what I wanted. I would print that live so there were certain freak-outs in sections — wild, completely tasteless effects stuff.

Bob basically sang the record in sequence. He stepped up and sang the first song all the way through, he listened to it played back over headphones and then moved on. Couple tunes, he’d punch in a word here and there. He did Side A, then we took a break, had a couple tall, cold ones, and then move onto Side B. It was incredible. I’d always heard he was first-take-jake, and he really was. And he was in wonderful voice too. As good as I’ve ever heard him sound.

Stream “Product Head” off Lifeguards’ upcoming album Waving At The Astronauts, also now available as a single on 7″ vinyl:
LIFEGUARDS – Product Head by seriousbusiness

Awesome. And he was digging what he was hearing?

Yeah, I was giving him Space Echo on his headphones. Monitoring off my Soundcraft Ghost, I was recording the output of the Space Echo back into Pro Tools, and I knew he wanted to hear a lot of it, so I gave it to him and made it long, made it do stuff! I tried to provide him with something he was really feeling.

And that was the vocal chain throughout?

Yeah, this was a bang-it-out situation. He did the whole 10-song record in four hours, and two of the hours we were just screwing around. The thing about Bob is he doesn’t like to spend a lot of time in the studio, but he works really hard. He wakes up every morning and writes. He’d worked hard on these tunes and had practiced them a lot at home. He was on point.

And you mixed the record as well? What was the focus there?

Yes, Doug and I mixed the record together. And he’s into hearing stuff pretty bright. He doesn’t want to hear a ton of kick drum. He has a specific way that he hears records, coming from this late 70s, post-punk place, and the end result is awesome.

We worked very quickly. I mix in Pro Tools, but not in the box. I spread it out on the Ghost as much as I can and try to use as much outboard as I can, but I also keep it as recallable as possible. So I would sit at the desk and get the mix up for a few hours and then when it came time to mixdown, Doug sat at the desk and I would hit record, and he would do all kinds of cool shit!

He ended up using the console in very obviously un-Pro Tools-like ways. Like, panning sweeps on Bob’s lead vocal and on the guitar solos. Expressive moves that you wouldn’t do in Pro Tools.

And I really encouraged Doug to do this because there’s a character to all that GBV music that’s the exact opposite of Pro Tools. In the back of my mind through the whole project, I kept in mind the essential character of the GBV recordings that people love so much, and they’re on 4 track or on ADAT made in a garage somewhere.

How would you describe that “un-Pro Tools” quality? Just totally unpolished and lo-fi, or what?

Well the entire GBV and Robert Pollard’s solo oeuvre is about as varied as you can imagine. He’s obviously famous for being the king of lo-fi. You have certain records, like Vampire On Titus, which just sounds like the shittiest possible thing you can imagine. 4-track and whoa…you can barely hear the vocals! It takes like 8 listens to realize how amazing the songs are.

On the other hand, they made records with Ric Ocasek and Rob Schnapf for TVT, and those are glossy and way more hi-fi. The Rob Schnapf record sounds incredible. It’s a huge guitar record, lots of compression but modern sounding. So they run the gamut.

But the quality I’m talking about is… this thing we all get into when we make records with Pro Tools — even when you’re not trying to make polished sounding music, you polish your mixes because you can do anything you want. You have all these shades of subtlety…all these things you can do in Pro Tools, where when you’re working with this big beast of a board and you’re just trying to get something done, you make mistakes and the mistakes becomes the essential character of the music.

Do you feel you had to hold yourself back from the way you usually engineer records at all to capture that?

Yes, somewhat. But in this case, a lot of times there just wasn’t any time to do things that I should have done. Like getting the drum mics perfectly in phase, or creating musically perfect EQ relationships between all the overdubs — all the things we do as mix engineers. We just did it fast. And that speed is an essential part of the GBV aesthetic. Bob does not ponder the music.

Awesome, well congrats! Now, fill us in on Serious Business — it’s a studio and a record label — how long have you been around?

I started the Serious Business studio in Long Island City with my good buddy, Andy Ross, who’s now the guitar player in OK Go. We had a G4 with Pro Tools and the audacity to put an ad on Craigslist advertising as a studio, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

We moved from there to a big loft in Williamsburg and then partnered up in a collective-type fashion — an engineer friend of mine, Halsey Quemere, brought a tape machine (a Sony MCI, acquired from Jimmy Douglass) into the fold, and then I felt we needed a more proper studio space, so we found the SoHo location. Last year, I hooked up with [producer/engineer] Shannon Ferguson (of Longwave, etc.) and with him came this great influx of cool gear.

And the label? You guys are actually putting out the Lifeguards release, yes?

Yes, I started the label awhile back as an outlet for my own bands, and my friends’ bands, and though it tends to take a back seat to other (paying) gigs, it’s continued as a total labor of love. Artists like Benji Cossa, Higgins, Rocketship Park, etc. it is all music I love. The binding theme of the label is Class A songwriting.

For Lifeguards’ Waving At The Astronauts, Serious Business is partnering with Ernest Jenning to put it out. I did the A&R and recording and production and layout of the artwork, and Ernest Jenning is doing the promotion and distribution, etc.

And you’re also doing a podcast for BreakThru Radio — it’s cool! Tell us about that!

BreakThru Radio produces a ton of original content — including a few in-studio sessions with bands. The main property is a show called “Live Studio,” where the band comes in, plays a set, and talks to the host Maya MacDonald, a college radio-style interview. I started recording the lion’s share of those last year at Serious Business, and after awhile, I convinced them to give me my own show!

My show is the same kind of format, but way less formal — there’s drinking, silly craziness and lots of potty-mouth. My vision for that show is to create an atmosphere of what it’s really like when bands come into the studio to record with me. So far I haven’t gotten fired, which is a miracle!

Tune in every Monday morning for a new installment of Serious Business Music Live on BreakThru Radio Check out Serious Business, the studio, at www.seriousbusinessmusic.com and the label, at www.seriousbusinessrecords.com. And pick up the Lifeguards single “Product Head on iTunes.

Nuthouse Recording: Tom Beaujour’s “Bonhamtastic” Hoboken Studio

HOBOKEN, NJ: Tom Beaujour brought Nuthouse Recording into the world for many of the same reasons anyone builds a studio: 1) to record his own band, 2) to collaborate with other bands and 3) to enhance his abilities to do both. But Beaujour, formerly the Editor of Revolver and now Editor at Guitar Aficionado, is not your typical engineer/studio owner. Nope.

“I’ve seen so many bands and styles come and go in almost 20 years in the music press,” says Beaujour. “And my experience there informs my work in the studio in that I’m able to help advise bands on recording and overall sonic direction as well as track arrangement and best presentation. I’ve been in an office surrounded by piles of CDs and music critics and I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.”

As an engineer and producer with this unique perspective and a love of recording, Beaujour’s taken Nuthouse from pet project to legitimate full-blown studio. In the three years Nuthouse has been up-and-running out of the old Wonder Bread Factory on 8th Street in Hoboken, it has become a go-to studio for its “Bonhamtastically-big” live room by NJ-based rock producer/engineer Machine (Lamb of God, Cobra Starship, Four Year Strong) and a growing list of band-clients including Nada Surf, Those Mockingbirds, Mutiny Within and Scale the Summit.

Here, we speak with Beaujour about building Nuthouse, balancing music journalism and production careers, and engineering for clients with disparate notions of good sound and fidelity.

So Nuthouse started as your home studio. Tell us about how it grew from there!

Yes, I started recording with my band, True Love, years ago in my basement in Hoboken, and after awhile, other bands started coming down. Matthew [Caws] from Nada Surf came in to do some extra guitar tracking and it came out really well and they were happy with it. That was when I decided I should try and do this for other bands. I figured even if I don’t know what I’m doing, maybe I have good taste, and taste is probably ¾ of the battle, right?

I found a two-room setup in Union City and moved the studio in there. That’s when I really started buying more gear and getting more serious about recording and production. I didn’t want to build in that space though, figuring I was going to have to move soon anyway. So I moved again.

That’s when you moved into your current space?

Yes, I found this space about 4 years ago. And the first year of building and assembling this studio was probably the worst experience of my life!

Whoa, why? What happened?

I guess it’s a common experience that building a studio always ends up being more expensive and more complicated than you think it’s going to be. The floor I moved into in this warehouse building hadn’t been used in maybe 20 years. There was basically no power. There was a pigeon nest in the pipes. It was just totally raw. I ended up working with these shady contractors. I had a terrible experience with my first console purchase. All my stuff was under tarps for 6 months. It was the full nightmare.

Oh man, that’s awful! But you somehow managed to convert this raw space into a proper, isolated control room and live room?

Yeah, I built double walls that don’t touch and built a control room that I floated on those U-boats. But it’s a modern-day studio in that I didn’t bother floating everything. You’re just never, in this day and age, going to make that money back and it just doesn’t seem to matter all that much to my clients. At least so far it hasn’t been a problem.

Did you build the studio with other people in mind? Both artists you’re working with and potentially outside engineer/producers?

Yes, not so much to book it out constantly, but definitely with the goal of getting other people in here. For example, Machine or his engineer, William Putney, book the room to track drums. Drums for the Chiodos record were tracked here.

So it must be a pretty awesome sounding drum room?

It is a really good sounding drum room. I’ve got treatment on the walls, but the ceilings are like 14-foot. There’s one area where I hung some clouds, to create a dead drum area. Machine has been tracking the drums right in the middle of the room.

It’s big enough that you get really good room mic sound — it’s live enough that you can get all that goodness without [it being too boomy.] I really like what I capture in the far stereo mics. It’s just a really good drum room.

…which there’s definitely a shortage of those these days…

Yeah, that’s why when I saw the space, I knew I was doing something crazy, but I really loved the idea of having a great drum room.

And you have a pretty impressive equipment collection — did that just grow organically?

It has been a gradual process of me acquiring gear, but also, when Revolver got sold a few years ago, they threw me a little ‘thank you’ gift, which I immediately invested into the studio! I bought six channels from Brent Averill and then some API gear. I have the now-discontinued-but-totally-awesome Universal Audio 2108. And then, I bought this Neve console which turned out to be such a nightmare — it was in terrible shape and after pulling it apart and having it recapped and worked on, I ultimately had to get rid of it.

When that console left the building, I felt that I really couldn’t get another vintage console. I’m not at the studio all the time but when I am, I want to know that my equipment’s going to work! So I bought a used SSL AWS 900 from Vintage King. It’s the most money I’ve ever spent on anything in my life and I’m totally happy with it.

So there’s a happy ending!?

Yes! I’m sure it’s a common studio story — there’s a happy ending but I ended up spending way more money than I thought I’d have to to get there. Having a console feels like a luxury, but the AWS-900 is a really cool unit and being able to flip the faders from analog console to DAW controller is awesome. And I really like the mic pre’s.

Awesome. And you somehow manage to balance work as a magazine editor with a career in recording and production. Tell us about that — are there benefits to doing both?

What I like about the balance is that I don’t have to do every job that comes through the door at the studio. I’m not recording terrible bands! So it keeps recording a pure pursuit for me. Also the budgets just seem so small for records right now that I don’t know if I’d put myself in the position where the studio was my main career. Right now, it’s a good balance, and my work as a music critic/writer/editor totally informs the work in the studio! I find I can really help bands a lot because of my experience.

Like in what ways?

I sit in an office with piles of CDs so my perspective can be helpful. You don’t have that much time when you’re a young person in a band. You only have so many shots.

I’ll see a band making an obvious mistake and be able to advise them — I can say put the band name on the album cover and don’t worry about being too obvious, make that song the lead track. I’ll also be the first one to tell bands to master their records loud, because I’ve seen people obviously paying less attention to a record because it wasn’t as loud as the thing before it.

So, I can help the band with the recording and arrangements, as well as the ‘after-purchase care,’ where they’re like ‘what should we do?’ I can give them some advice — it doesn’t guarantee success but it’s helpful.

Awesome, geez that’s a great bonus of working with you! Now, let’s talk about a couple recent recording projects you’ve done at Nuthouse — you recently worked on Nada Surf’s new covers record, If I Had a Hi-Fi?

Yeah, I mixed one track and did a ton of engineering on that record, and then I also co-produced, engineered and mixed three Japanese bonus tracks, two of which I just found out are coming out as a 7-inch as well.

I’ve also been doing a bunch of stuff with Spin Magazine — they do these live performances in their offices. I got recommended when Phoenix was coming in to play. I put together a mobile unit — my Digi 003, API pre’s, some good mics and my laptop — and then I mix it back at my studio. I’ve done those sessions with Phoenix and Silversun Pickups.

Oh and my favorite band of all time (ever!) is Guided By Voices and Robert Pollard is currently scoring this documentary on Pete Rose [1492], and we’re going to be doing the string session here at Nuthouse! Bob Pollard is the man. To be able to work on a project he’s involved in is amazing.

And tell me about Trumpeter Swan – you recently worked on that record?

Yes, I mixed that album. Drew Patrizi, who is Trumpeter Swan, had been working on this project for like three years. There were so many layers of sounds so we spent a long time going through everything. It was a heavily involved mixing job and a really good learning experience.

There’s definitely something happening in music right now, which can be challenging to engineers, or at least I find it challenging. It’s the effect of the “blog rock” movement on the notion of what “sounding good” means. If you look at the mixing choices made on a Deerhunter record, for example, vs. a metal record these days — where everything’s triggered and pristine and precise — the aesthetic is so different.

Trumpeter Swan was one of the first times I was confronted with this idea of having to make things that were recorded hi-fi to sound lo-fi. On some level, you’re being asked to make stuff sound a lot smaller and less good. And you almost have to re-train yourself — it’s like you’re doing things the opposite way of how you’d do them if you were making a Steeley Dan record!

It’s hard for one engineer to be able to produce the expected sounds for all the different spectrums right now. Like if you’re recording an emo record and then you’re recording a band from Williamsburg… you have to understand the different sonic directions really well. That’s another thing about being in the music press — I hear all this stuff and understand how a band is going to want their record to sound for one context and audience vs. another.

Yeah, I don’t know if bands and engineers had to have as many of those conversations in the past — maybe it used to be more obvious what needed to be done to make it “sound good” at the mixing stage?

Well, that just means very different things to different people. I think about the different notions of fidelity all the time. Sometimes when I listen to a record, I really can’t tell whether it sounds like it does because it was all done by the band on their own with a shitty mic and an Mbox, or whether it was mixed to sound that way. But definitely a lot of that “blog rock” music has a very definable texture to it. And at the same time, if a different kind of rock band came into the studio and you started mixing it that way, they would murder you. So I think it’s an interesting time to be doing this!

For more on Nuthouse Recording, visit www.nuthouserecording.com.