Goddamn dude, you do a lot of records.
Yeah. The last four years, I've done a hundred records a year. That's either mastering, mixing, or full production.
That's insane. You're one of the go-to recording engineers for Bay Area punk and hardcore. How did that evolve?
I would say it's a "right place, right time" type of scenario. I've been doing this in the area for over 12 years, and when I started — with a [Digidesign] Mbox and a PC in my parents' garage — the peninsula between South San Francisco and Mountain View was full of punk kids playing music, and there wasn't anyone doing DIY recording. Maybe there were people doing what I do now, a mid-level kind of studio, but there was nobody doing the real low-level thing in their house. I was in a band that was part of a bigger community, and I think it was just a no-brainer. "Jack's recording over at his house. Let's go there." Some of those people who were part of that are still making music, and got bigger. Bands like Loma Prieta or Deafheaven. They get some recognition, and you just assume they'll go to the next step. But a lot of those people have kept coming back.
That's the best.
It is, because it's always better the second time. Or the third or fourth.
You do a lot of one-day sessions, right? I've seen a lot of "recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jack Shirley on..." and a single calendar date.
It's never completed in one day. They might have just tracked in a day, then I mixed and mastered later.
It's heartening to hear that! From a distance I'm like, "What the fuck? How does he do this?"
[laughs] That's just the band glossing over credits. I almost never mix the same day. It's very, very rare.
Well, for short sessions — say a band wants to track eight or ten songs in a day, what's the dynamic?
Almost every session that I do is live. Right there, that knocks off tons of time and painful shit. The band loads in. We figure out whether they're all going to be in the live room with the amps, or if it will be drums in the live room, amps in the iso booth, and people in here [the control room]. Those are the main choices. If it takes us two hours to set up and get mics checked, and the band has a half-hour worth of material, and they're well practiced, it's very conceivable that they could be done with their live takes in a couple hours. Then the bulk of the recording is done. Then we can do some vocals. I'm very much for the human error, the mistakes, and all that. I work quickly, but I spend a fair amount of time getting tones right. And because we're going to tape, I'm doing all my processing in the front-end. That speeds everything up.
I noticed you have mics on stands ready to go in your live room. That kind of thing is very different than working in someone else's room, where everything gets put away at the end of each session.
Every time I've been to another studio it takes forever to do anything, even with me engineering. Nothing's in the same room, none of the mics are around. I've been told that I work very quickly. There are things I just do to everything: I know that when the drummer hits as hard as she can, I want to get a couple of dB of compression. There's stuff that I do as a default. If, in the moment, it doesn't work I'll just bypass it. But, over the years, when I'm mixing similar styles of music, I find that I'm making a lot of the same moves.
Always adding 3 kHz to the kick drum?
Exactly. I love my [AKG] D12 on bass drum, but I know that it needs to go through the Pultec set a certain way for it to sound like I want. I want all this to go to tape very well-EQ'd so that I don't have to raise my noise floor. That's how I like to work, but it does save a bunch of time. When the band walks in to hear their take I want it to sound like the record's going to sound. Anytime anybody says, "But in the mix that'll be different, right?" I say, "Don't assume anything's going to be different. If it doesn't sound right to you right this second, tell me and we'll fix that." But I work fast, and I think musicians end up working fast as a result. Everyone's always surprised at how smooth and quickly things go. I don't ever use the computer when we're tracking. I don't know if that speeds things up, but it does give me great peace of mind, because I know that everything's going to work. I know that when I hit record on the tape machine that it's going to record without failure, unless the power goes out. I wouldn't bet any amount of money that my high-end Pro Tools system would do that.
Do you have to switch from "tracking mode" to "mixing mode"?
Kind of. This board isn't inline, so I have to use it as a split console. But I have enough inputs, so I can use 16 ins and monitor those 16 channels. And as soon as the live takes are done, I'll usually break down almost everything I set up. Then I have 24-channels open for the tape returns so I can start mixing. I'd still say 80% of my processing is done on the front-end. I might get into some surgical EQ [while mixing]. That's another thing I have to buy analog versions of now. I have two [Urei 565] Little Dippers [equalizers] on the way.
That's kind of funny, in the digital age. Surgical EQ is so easy with a plug-in.
I know! I started out digital, and I totally appreciate what it's capable of. I use it to my full advantage when the situation calls for it. But the more I use the analog equipment, the more I love it. And the more I understand what it must have been like for an all- analog guy in the '80s, when all this digital gear showed up and he might have been, "What the fuck is this? This is the new way?"
I can imagine looking at a little beige 1988 Macintosh, then looking across the room at your enormous, beautiful, Swiss-made tape machine, and saying, "Oh, hell no."
I had a MIDI controller propped up in the corner for ten years. Nobody ever said, "We should put keys on our record." The first week that my Hammond [organ] was here, it made it onto three records. [laughs] When the piano showed up it was like, "Oh dude! We should put piano on this record!" Bands who would never want spacey delay shit, they look at these tape echoes and they say, "We should put that on the recording." There's something about it. They don't care where it came from if they want delay. They don't even understand how a tape delay works. But they're excited by it. And when I get my EMT plate reverb tomorrow, I can walk people into the kitchen and say, "That's a reverb."
These days a lot of people probably have no idea what a plate reverb is!
Oh, dude. Half the people who walk in here ask me what that is [points at tape deck], because they've never seen a tape machine. Admittedly, when I went to go pick that up from the guy I bought it from, I had never seen a tape machine in real life.
Really?
I mean, I had the little one [1/4-inch, 2-track]. But I had never seen a 2-inch tape machine. I went to get it and it's like, "Whoa, this thing weighs 400 pounds!" But that's how it is when you have your own studio and all you ever do is work by yourself. If you want to learn how to use something, you have to go get one. That's why a lot of gear went in and out over the years — I was figuring out my tastes.
You also master a lot of your own recordings.
Probably ninety percent. Maybe more.
I've been getting more of that lately. "Can you master this too?" I don't love it, but it's increasingly common. And it's totally normal for you.
It came out of necessity. When you work with punk rock kids they're not going to spend $500 to master their $500 recording. They may not even know what mastering is. And, admittedly, I was really bad at it when I first started. I tried a lot of stupid techniques, mostly with my own band. But I feel like I've gotten pretty good at it, to the point now where I do a lot of just mastering. I say on my website, "I'm not a mastering engineer, and this is not a mastering studio." And it's cheap because of that. I just charge my regular hourly rate. I can't do the same kind of tricks that some places do, because I don't have the equipment.
Mastering is a fairly advanced art, at this point.
Absolutely. But for my own recordings the "mastering" won't be anything more than a little bit of fine-tuning EQ, and that's basically all I'm doing. The bulk of the work is done in the mix. By the time it's done it needs a few dB of volume and some surgical EQ to carve out a couple of spots, and that's it. I run it through the Massey Limiter, or the UAD Cambridge EQ, or the UAD Dangerous BAX EQ — that thing's badass.
So you're not trying to be super competitively loud?
No. I try to keep it reasonable, depending on the project. Kurt [Ballou, Tape Op #76] ruined it for all of us with [Converge's] Jane Doe. [laughs] But the more I upgrade this gear, the easier it gets to make loud recordings.
Is that the gear, or is that you?
Well, for instance — I was passive summing for a really long time. When I got to active summing, it was like, "Oh wow, this is great." Now I've got amplifiers [on the] channel. So when I push my kick drum up, it's getting saturated on its own. The passive summing is infinite headroom. It sounds cool, but it's not doing any squishiness.
So you feel like getting some saturation or compression on each individual channel is important.
Hell, yes. It's like tape. Not to the same extent, but, yes; I have my Pro Tools outputs calibrated hot so that I can clip the API console before the Pro Tools output will clip.
It's kind of ironic to buy a world-class console that was designed for wicked high headroom, then do your best to crush its inputs.
[laughs] Not crushing. Just enough to round it off. And I leave plenty of headroom on the master bus. But I'm pretty liberal when it's time to go to the 2-track tape at the end. And anything that comes off of that is flat — not in a brick wall way, but in the tape way. When you look at digital [waveforms], there are spikes everywhere. Tracks that come off the tape machine, even if it's moderately hitting tape — it's flat, and that's a beautiful thing. Especially if you're trying to do mastering. When I get music that I didn't mix, that machine [points at tape deck] is part of my mastering chain, because it does the work of a limiter without sounding like it. There're no stray transients anywhere. All I have to do is raise my fader and most of my loudness is already handled. There were times when I didn't have the gear to saturate sounds in a nice, musical way, and I didn't have the know-how to EQ something so it easily could be loud. And people were like, "I want my recording to be louder than Jane Doe," And I'd say, "Alright. We'll try! Let's see what happens!" And those recordings sound fucking terrible. But you know, you learn. [laughs] I've found that the more analog my situation has gotten, the easier it is — it just does the sound that you are trying to do, all by itself. The same way that a film photo can get blown out, in a beautiful way. The tape is magic. Yes, I absolutely can emulate it in the computer, but it takes ten steps to do what I can do, just by pushing a fader up a little bit further.
