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.

 

Photostory: Inside the Studio G Progress Party, AES 2011

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN: For a lot of people at this year’s AES, the action at the Javits Center was a mere appetizer for the intensive show-spawned nightlife spanning New York City.

Producers, artists, engineers and audio heads of all stripes found plenty to keep them buzzing on Friday. Many started out at the Fred Perry Artist Lounge at Stratosphere Sound, others kicked it off at an intimate gathering at Area 51, while still more got going at an energetic midtown bash at Quad Studios.

But for those in the know, all roads led to Brooklyn and the Progress Party at the new 5,000 sq. ft. home of Studio G, just off of Williamsburg’s McCarren Park.

The new facility will be home to musician/producer/engineers Joel Hamilton (Blakroc, Elvis Costello), Tony Maimone (They Might Be Giants, Bob Mould), and Jeff Hill (Rufus Wainwright), and no doubt a great many records to come. Studio G has been a Williamsburg recording destination for over a decade, and has built a reputation for its discerning staff, selective gear, and work with boundary-pushing artists like Blakroc, Matisyahu, Mike Watt and Dub Trio.

Guests arrived to find the new G in gloriously raw form as it moves closer to its opening, while like-minded Brooklyn-based sponsor Audio Power Tools and its premium brands – Burl Audio, Mojave Audio, Royer Labs, Slate Digital – lavished them with tamales and positive vibes.

But don’t take our word for it – the camera never lies!

 

 

Special thanks to Andrew Sheron for his stellar photography! Visit him at www.andrewsheron.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.

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.

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

On Air Mastering Hosts Mike Hirst for Destronauts, Amós Piñeros, The Tryptics

Julian Silva of On Air Mastering in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, reports a number of colorful sessions have recently gone through his Legendary Audio Masterpiece – and the rest of his appealing red suite.

Visitors to OAM have included Mike Hirst’s remix of Brooklyn’s deep sonic intriguers Destronauts‘ “Flight of the Dead Grizzly” (Smoke Machine Dub) from their E.P. 3 Moons (remixed and engineered at Studio G).

Assembly was also reported to be underway on Amós Piñeros’ record El final de la era, a total re-doing of the artist’s songs with the Columbian outfit Ultrageno.

The deliciously trippy propulsion of Brooklyn outfit The Tryptics were also recent visitors to On Air Mastering.

Joel Hamilton’s Immersive Path: Producing Like A Method Actor, Recording in South Africa and Dub For Disney

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN: Joel Hamilton is a hard guy to pin down. Paging through his discography, career highlights jump out from all corners of the map. Although his mixes often feature direct, powerful central elements against backdrops of wide, immersive ambience, his production style is best defined by his adaptability.

Joel works across genres to create records with unique sonic stamps. If a common thread runs through his discography, it’s the prevalence of artists with distinct, singular voices. Often referenced are the unmistakable thumbprints of Elvis Costello, Tom Waits and Marc Ribot.  He’s gone from gritty to pretty with Dub Trio, Matisyahu, Sparklehorse, Jolie Holland, and thanks to a newly released Blakroc record, he’s crossed paths with true hip-hop heavyweights like RZA and Mos Def.

We caught up with Joel by Studio G‘s Neve 5316 and found him fresh off a two-week recording stint in rural South Africa.  Already back into the swing of life as an in-demand NYC producer/engineer, he told us about tracking sessions beneath a bullet-ridden chalkboard in the Nkomazi countryside, long days in the studio with a haunting “mermaid choir,” and pumping out dub tracks for Disney.

The new Blakroc record has been doing pretty well. A lot of Rock/Hip Hop crossovers in the recent past saw Rock artists bringing in Hip Hop elements. Jay Z made some news last summer when he came to this neighborhood for a Grizzly Bear show, and made some comments about modern rap growing stale.

It’s funny you bring that up. Damon Dash had been Jay Z’s producer and partner for years and he was Executive Producer on the Blakroc sessions. If we had the idea to get RZA on a track, he was the guy who could pull out the Rolodex and make it happen. At one point, he basically named all these people and said “Me, Jay, Rick, we’re all getting out of Hip Hop.”

I was a huge Hip-Hop fan from the early days. There were parallels with Hardcore at the time. They shared this urgent “revolution now”, kind of vibe that’s common to street music. The idea with Blakroc was about going around the Hip Hop idiom in a lot of ways. It used to be so authentic, but it’s been xeroxed so many times that it barely resembles the original art form. There’s a lot of great stuff out there, but when it comes to the mass-market stuff you’d hear on the radio, it has none of the soul anymore. It’s been emasculated in a lot of ways.

Emasculated by sheer machismo?

(Laughs) Weirdly, yeah. But to me that is emasculation. If you have a real cause with some substance, that’s about as masculine as you can get. It’s that kind of genuine focused passion that gives people the strength to walk into Rwanda or go into the hood and do a needle exchange program in the early 80s. There’s a kind of power that comes when you’re there trying to do something that actually makes a difference.

Speaking of…you’ve just come back from recording in Africa with TRIAD Trust. Tell us a little about that.

At a fundamental level, TRIAD Trust is an AIDS awareness program that does medical outreach. The way it’s implemented is really genius. I’m not a complete 16-year-old utopian. The concept that you should be as destitute as the people you’re trying to help is ridiculous. But so many non-profits will have their heart in the right place, and then you walk into the office and they have marble counter-tops and the Park Avenue address, and you think “Do you really need that to save the world?”  That kind of bums me out a little bit. There was none of that at TRIAD.

When I was being introduced to them, I was shown simple point-and-shoot videos and photos that were unbelievably compelling. There was one in particular that stuck out. It was a picture of a kid playing soccer. He had a left sneaker on his right foot, and no sneaker on the other foot. The reason was as simple as this: He was right handed and wanted the sneaker on the stronger leg. What he had to work with was one sneaker, and he put it on the leg that could kick better. That just spoke volumes about the attitude over there.

There are some very modern areas in South Africa with well developed infrastructure. I saw some of your photos, and the Nkomazi region, where you were was definitely not one of them.

Absolutely. It was in the middle of nowhere, even by South African standards. Let’s put it this way: South Africa has the highest incidence of HIV and AIDS in the world, and we were in the section that has the highest incidence in South Africa. Over 50% of males won’t see their 30th birthday. It’s not that it’s “the hood”. Nobody’s smoking crack. It’s not the “bad area”. You can’t even call it “poor”. There are just no resources.

So what was the goal of this trip and these recordings? Is there an album that came out of it?

It’s not finished yet, but I have roughs that I made, literally in a hut. We wanted to challenge the notion of “album” a bit. There are some elements akin to an NPR documentary, with interviews and other real-life snippets for context. But you don’t want to take that too far into “field recording” territory. I didn’t want to drop in as the white guy and say “Alright! Now Hold Up Your Spears and Smile! *click*” (Laughs) That’s not what I was there to do.

They’re savvy kids, and they want to feel valued as artists. We do have some material that’s very traditional, but that’s just one facet of who they are. If you’re a young American, that doesn’t mean the” Star-Spangled Banner” defines who you are. These guys and girls know western music. They’d also love to make something akin to an Alicia Keys record. You’ve got to respect that too.

So what direction did you end up taking them in? More towards punching and overdubs, or more toward…

It’s different for each person. One girl named Nomvula could sing a song four times and just kill it on every pass. Any one of those takes could have been “the one.” There were other performers where we’d punch every fourth word. Either way, it would come out in a way that would establish the mood we were trying to convey. That was the most important thing.

So you’re not going in there with any specialized recording dogma. “We must follow this set of rules because we’re in Africa, trying to keep it real.”

That’s a mistake in New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, and Africa (Laughs).

I’ve heard you talk about taking a dogmatic approach to recording: “Overdubs are evil”, “Rhythm guitars must be doubled” or whatever it may be. Do you think there’s any room for that in recording process?

You’re totally baiting me so hard right now, because you know! (Laughs).  Short answer: No. I wouldn’t put my shoes on your feet and expect them to fit you just because they feel good on me.

Long answer? Maybe, if your definition of success is getting the 10 million dollar contract and having 19 Grammy-winning records in a row. If you already have that track record, and you’ve found artists who want to follow the path you’ve laid out and go through the standard industry channels, then go for it. Maybe it’ll work if you apply your formula to someone else. But the problem is, at a certain point, even that fails.

So there’s no formula, but you do have to trust your instincts. I can definitely hear bold moves in your mixes, especially with Dub Trio, but I can’t say you have an overbearing sonic stamp.

Production-wise I’m more interested in creating an environment where people can realize their vision. They filter it through me and I help them get rid of the things that they don’t need.  A lot of producers feel like they impart something through the filtration process, but I try not to. If you were draining a pot of pasta, and your colander was flaking off shards of metal into your linguini, you’d throw it out!

Do I have a sonic bull’s-eye in my mind? Yeah, sure, but it’s different for each record. I might leave something behind when making production choices, but it’s best when you don’t try to.

What have you been working on most recently? Anything we should look forward to?

The Parkington Sisters. Definitely. No one’s heard of them yet, and they’re amazing. They’re five sisters:  A string quartet and a multi-instrumentalist, with beautiful five-part harmonies.  It’s hard to compare it to anything else. If you could mute the rhythm section on Beck’s Sea Change, and just be left with the most beautiful shimmering orchestral moments and add a choir of mermaids, it might be a little like that. It’s a record that doesn’t just come out of the speakers, it occupies the room. It’s very melancholy and beautiful.

Although that’s so far removed from some of the heavier records you’ve worked on, listening to them it’s clear you’re just as comfortable with them as with anything else. What does it take to jump from style to style so effectively?

If you don’t have a concrete idea of what “a record” should sound like, you can be kind of like a method actor. I like things that live way outside of the center, so I feel like I can operate at the extremities really well whether it’s supposed to be really heart-wrenchingly beautiful or totally savage.

When I listen to my favorite records, I don’t picture a singer in the studio wearing headphones. Instead, they create their own world and hold you there. If there’s a unifying approach I have for making any record, that’s it. I want it be as if we’re creating a real, unusual physical space that you can actually visit and live in for a little while.

Speaking of unusual worlds, you just did a reggae track for Disney.

Yeah, with Matisyahu. We did a remake of the song “Circle of Life” from the Lion King soundtrack.

Wow.

Yeah. (Laughs)

It was hard to figure out at first. We were sitting around with the band, with our heads in our hands, giggling awkwardly about how incredible the original is, and trying to figure out how the hell we were going to make it cool. I think an important thing in making it work is that we barely referenced the destination or who was paying for it. All we could do was try to make something we thought was great. For a little while we weren’t sure if they were even going to use it because there’s a straight up Dub section at the end. There were a lot of moves there to make it sound a bit more sinister, with a classic Radio One/King Tubby kind of vibe.

The truth is, commerce is built into art whether you like it or not. The best way to make a record recoup is to make it good, and to do that you have to separate the money and the creative process by a thousand foot wall. So, in a way, to safeguard the investment, you have to safeguard the creative process.

You’re a new Father. Congratulations. What’s it like trying to strike a balance between work and family in a profession that insists on odd hours and “just one more take”? Do you have any rules for making it work?

Sure, I have a great one: Set a precedent with the client. If you establish that you’ll be working until 10pm and you stay until 11pm, you’re a hero. If you set no precedent, then you’re an asshole when you walk at the door, no matter what time it is. It’s crucial. So many things that happen in the studio are so easily avoided by just having one conversation over tea before walking in the control room.

It’s also good to remember that it’s pointless to do 700 takes into the same mic and the same pre, unless I hear it getting better every single time. Otherwise it’s futile, and you’ll gain more by stopping than pushing on. In the end I don’t have a firm stance on the number of tracks or takes or days.

You have a lot of great hardware here at Studio G and I know you keep your Studer and Neve in the signal path at all times. Still, you seem to have really embraced digital. You’re always working in Pro Tools, and do a fair share of processing there too. Do you ever wax poetic for the old days?

When I started out I only had 16 tracks. It’s funny to think that sounds so renegade now, like we were going 100 miles an hour without a windshield, taking the bugs in our teeth. It’s kind of bullshit to romanticize that. I don’t understand how having more colors on the palette means you have to put them all on the canvas.

There are ten million restaurants here in New York. It doesn’t mean I have to eat at all of them for lunch. Choose something! Some of the plug-ins are good too. I think about them just like you’d think of any other piece in the rack.

Speaking of the rack, are there any new toys in here you’ve been loving?

Here’s one: the Tyme Sefari. It’s a voltage-controlled sampler and delay. You can use it to create a tempo locked-delay, and then alter elements of the delay based on what’s happening in the track. I like to do a lot of analog morphing of sounds based on tempo or mood.  I might use it as a pre-delay feeding a reverb.

If you were to put a band pass filter into the side-chain of a gate, when the chord changes and you pass the threshold, it’ll a fire dancing rhythmic delay in the background, which might only come during the chorus. You don’t hear it as an “effect” so much but it can really give a track energy and movement.

So you do some things that aren’t really meant to be heard?

Definitely. Oh yeah, tons.

That’s so different than say, a Steve Albini. I remember an interview where he said the opposite: “I don’t get the idea of something that’s so quiet you don’t even hear it.  Why not mute it?”

Sure.  And some people like black and white movies. There’s something to be said for that aesthetic, but I choose a more immersive path. I’m not a documentary recordist. There are elements on most of these records that are the equivalent to the frame around the painting, or the lighting on a stage. I like the idea that you’re signing about things that are melancholy or aggressive, there are ways to give the listener emotional cues that match that.

Walking out of the studio an aluminum baseball bat leaning against the doorframe caught my eye, “The Big Boomer”, ostensibly present for giving would-be gear-thieves emotional cues to the cranium. I looked at him with a quizzical smile. Joel laughed and shrugged it off: “This neighborhood wasn’t always filled with pretty indie rock girls. That’s why.” — Justin Colletti

Find out more about Joel Hamilton at www.joelhamiltonrecording.com and Studio G HERE, and find him on the Tape Op Message Board. Also, for more information on TRIAD Trust, visit www.triadtrust.org.

Gig Alert: Candice Anitra at Southpaw This Thursday

Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Candice Anitra will play Park Slope venue Southpaw this Thursday (4/8 at 8PM), to celebrate the release of her new LP, Bark Then Bite.

Bark Then Bite was recorded over 15 days at Studio G in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with producer/engineer Joel Hamilton (Elvis Costello, Blakroc, Mos Def).

For Thursday’s show Anitra will be backed by a quintet including drummer Jason Mills (Stomp, Beetroot), percussionist Marivaldos Dos Santos (Stomp, Beetroot) and guitarist Wes Mingus (The Revelations, Wu-Tang Clan).

Tickets for Thursday’s show range from $15 – $30, with higher priced tickets including copies of the CD and/or the vinyl record. Tickets are available here.