I'm curious about what you were doing before Nirvana and all of that. Obviously you had been recording and playing music before any of that stuff hit and how you got going into recording in the first place.
Well, I started with an electrical engineering degree and ended up working at the Navy yard in Bremerton, Washington, for 2 1/2 years. It was a pretty stupid job after college and so I decided I was going to do something else. I had a plan. I already had some recording gear but I figured I would get some more, learn how to use it and when I'm ready I'll go back to Seattle. I lived in a mobile home for a winter with just a reel to reel 4-track machine, a six channel Tapco mixer, three mics, a little cheap drumset, a Fender Twin, a bass amp, a bass and a guitar. I just recorded myself for a few months and then I moved back to Seattle and started hooking up with musicians and found myself in a couple of bands. I ended up meeting Chris Hanzsek when he was recording my band Skin Yard for the Deep Six comp, which was in '85, and I said I had a bunch of recording equipment and I was looking to work in a studio and he said he had a bunch of recording equipment and was looking to open a studio so we became partners. We then moved into the defunct Triangle recording building in June of 1986.
What did you call that studio?
Reciprocal.
Oh, yeah, the famous one.
I only owned a very minor part of the equipment so I eventually stopped being a partner and just let Chris take over. In keeping with the freelance guy that I've been ever since. It never really was my studio at all, it was really his place. I was at Reciprocal for five years — that's where I worked and it was fun. The first time I did a session at another studio, with different speakers and a different room, I almost made a complete idiot of myself.
Oh, no.
This was like 12 years ago or something. I didn't realize it, but Reciprocal was a very strange room and it had a very strange, very small control room with big weird acoustics. I was totally used to compensating for it. Once I got into a normal studio, I was just floundering. Everything sounded totally alien. Now I can pretty much go anywhere and I pretty much know what to look for and how to get my sound regardless of where the hell I am. Once you work in other rooms it makes you a much better engineer and when you come back to your studio, it'll give you a new appreciation for the improvements you can make. You'll suddenly realize weaknesses that you weren't even aware of. And you'll go, "I should put a bass trap over in that corner or I should move the speakers up over there."
You did a lot of work out of Reciprocal, but it wasn't all grunge music, right?
No, most of it was rock though. There was the occasional bar band or blues band or god knows. There were some jazz people that I knew that I recorded sometimes.
A bigger variety then?
Yeah, a little bit, for a while we had to record everybody who walked in the door when we first opened up. And then as I sort of started specializing in rock, I ended up just taking those jobs. Reciprocal closed in 1991, Chris closed it down because he had pretty much outgrown the building.
I assume you'd rather being doing rock recording.
Well, pretty much. I like variety and I like doing other things when they come up, people just don't call me with other things though. There are plenty of rock bands around here, so I have no lack of work.
What stuff have you done recently besides the Zen Guerrilla session?
I did an album for Nebula. Zen Guerrilla just got finished. I was in Portugal doing a band for the month of March and prior to that I did a record in Mexico City in September. I did a record for The Black Halos for SubPop. I got to go to Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, in November to mix a record by Elevator Through for Sub Pop. This is a band that used to be Elevator to Hell, before that they were Eric's Trip. They've got this very psychedelic record with a Syd Barrett cover on it and I mixed it and it was pretty fun. Hotrod Lunatics, RC5, Us of All were here in Seattle. Guillotina in Mexico. I got to go to Chicago in January and do a record for Thrill Jockey for a band called the Nerves. I got to work in a studio called Uber studio and made a record with no digital reverb or delay anywhere which I don't think I've had a chance to ever do before. The actual room was so good that I didn't use any reverb on anything. We just used the room for everything.
Just put extra mics up for that?
Yeah. The drums were amazing with the room mics thrown in and when we wanted room on the vocals we just put a mic back in the other end of the room and we threw a little bit of tape delay on the vocals so technically, there's no digital anything. So that album's coming out in July, I think.
How do you end up getting jobs in other countries?
All of these records I've done, a lot of them get to other countries. That's basically it. People just track me down somehow and they say, "Hey, we picked up the Accused record that you did eight years ago and we want your sound", so that's how I've ended up in nine countries other than the U.S. Sometimes I don't make a lot of money on these things, I just go for the travel and the music is interesting and it's different from what I get around here. It has to be a decent band, obviously or I wouldn't make the trouble.
Do you listen to previous albums and demo tapes and stuff before you take on any project at this point?
At least, I've got to at least hear a demo or something. It's nice if I can actually see the band pay live, it's really the best thing, I don't always get the luxury of that. It's funny, when I recorded Mudhoney, I didn't actually see the band live for like a year and a half or something after I did their first single.
No way.
I was so busy touring with Skin Yard at the time that I just never had a chance to see Mudhoney. In that time they became such a draw here that you couldn't get into their show. I still haven't seen Pearl Jam for the same reasons. I don't really care to see them in a coliseum. It's not like seeing Green River in the Ditto Tavern.
Given the stuff you're doing, you're probably not getting paid exorbitant amounts of money for production jobs.
With the kind of music I do, the money's not there...it's not that the money's not there, I'd rather not emphasize money here. I do actually get major labels from other countries. I've got two gold records from Warner Brazil on my wall and I've done a couple major label records in England and a couple in Denmark and I've done some major label records in Germany and actually the Mexican band I worked with was on Warner Mexico for a while. Here in the U.S. I pretty much got stuck with indie stuff, which is fine because the politics of the industry here are much more of a pain in the ass as we all know. In other countries, the major labels seem to act more like the indies do here. They're just smaller operations and there's not all this turnover in the personnel and you don't have somebody leaning on you in the studio, checking daily mixes or whatever. I've done major label records in countries where I never even met or spoke with anyone from a major label. The kind of music I do in general is rock and you have to realize that rock is not that big a part of the big picture. You know? Guitar rock and roll is not that big a part of the big picture in terms of the money that's made from record sales. Particularly in the last five or six years it's definitely not been getting a lot of press. I'd say most of the innovation has been happening in other genres.
You want to do the kind of work you're going to keep enjoying over the years.
You can't work 14 hours a day, six days a week, month after month, year after year on something you hate, you know what I mean? I would commit suicide if I was doing really horrible music. It's really fun when I get a band that I really like. It's a blast, I'll kill myself; I'm a total workaholic.
You want to make something really good with it.
We ended up doing a 26 hour day on the last day of the Zen Guerrilla record. We all got sick and lost a bunch of time in the middle of the project and ended up in this frenzy to try and finish it because they were on tour and had to leave town so we had to finish it and we just ended up staying up all night. We were still doing vocals at six a.m. and I was mixing and it was a frenzy and we got the damn thing done. Everybody's happy and you know, I just went home and collapsed and died for about a week. It was just like, "Okay, I'm going to work all night. We are going to do what's necessary."
Do you ever have very many things that go overtime?
Nope. Damn few. Sometimes I wish I could go overtime on a few things, you know? You have to work within the time and money that's allotted.
How long did you have for Zen Guerrilla? Like two weeks?
We had a couple of weeks, yeah, it was fun. I did a record for Watt that's gonna come out on Estrus and we think we did the whole record in about five and half days. Those guys are totally used to it; they were just like, "Okay, let's go, next thing, okay, okay, let's do the vocals. Okay, let's see...okay, guitar, okay, solos, okay get out there, let's do the solos." It's great. I've actually done bands that did the whole thing live in like a day. And sometimes it actually sounds alright.
That's one of the things I think that friends of mine in Seattle were mentioning, when you first started getting some acclaim, was that you can get a good drum sound really quickly.
I can still do that actually. You know what? That's funny because I hate my drum sounds.
Really?
In fact I hate all the records I've ever done. I hate music. I hate everybody. Fuck you all. Nah, just kidding. But really, I do get frustrated with drum sounds. I hate snare drums, I just can't ever get a damn snare drum sound that I like. Then I realize that there aren't really that many records that have a snare drum sound that I like. I don't know how anyone else does it either, you know? You always end up coming back to a 57 pointing at the damn thing and you know, I tear my hair out trying all kinds of shit and I keep coming back to the stupid 57 on the snare again and it sounds the same way it always does. I don't have the time to experiment sometimes, you know? People can't sit around there waiting for me to spend like three hours on a snare drum.
It's seems like diminishing returns sometimes too. I mean, you can frustrate the whole band and drag the project to a screeching halt trying to fine tune one little element.
Exactly, sometimes you just have to go, "Okay, we have a week to do this, let's go." You know if I have a week to do drums, that's a different story. Let's get a bunch of snare drums in here and screw around with mic'ing. What is the killer snare sound? I think most people have just given up and are now using samples these days. I'm just old fashioned, you know, I still wanna, you know, I want it to be different every record.
What record would you say have ultimate really great sounding snare sounds?
Don't ask me, I can't even tell you.
I was just wondering if you had...
It's just some gauge notion that's in my head, some ideal floating around out there that I'm trying to reach for, but...
It might not even be something that exists, you know.
You hear it on records that are like, really expensive and you go, how the hell did they get the snare drum to sound that good. I guess the best way to get a good drum sound is to have a good drummer. That seems to be the bottom line. With a really good drummer you just hang a mic over and it's amazing, no matter what he's playing. You don't get drummers like that too often. You get drummers that are just wailing on the high hat and they've got a little wimpy snare drum and cymbals all over the place and you just deal. Get rid of all high hats and see what happens. All our lives would be so much easier. 90 percent of the time I'll record the high hat on a separate track and I'll end up erasing it later. Seriously, 95 percent of the time you'll just end up using the overheads and there's already too much high hat in it anyway.
What do you always end up going to for the kick drums?
I'm pretty much a D112 guy. It's pretty much it for me. Sometimes I'll play with a 421 or an RE20 but basically I'm a D112 guy. There just is no replacement for me.
We have both. I just keep switching them back and forth and I keep leaning towards the RE20.
They're both good mics the D112 is a lot cheaper.
That's one thing I always tell people if they're looking to set up a small studio.
An RE20 would be more useful overall. Like to use it on bass. I wouldn't use the D112 on anything else, except I did use it for vocals a while ago and it was pretty weird. I had a female singer who, when she hit certain notes, there was this real sharp edge to it. We tried every mic, suddenly it was like, "Wait, what about this one." And damned if we didn't end up cutting all the vocals to the D112. Who knows if I'll ever do that again, but it worked.
