We interviewed Stephen [Egerton, Tape Op #12] in 1999, which certainly touched on The Blasting Room. Your studio began before Tape Op.
Yeah. We started in '94.
I'd always hear through the grapevine what was up with the studio's co-owner, Bill Stevenson [All, Descendents, Black Flag]. How did you become a part of it?
I was living in Seattle, [Washington], and playing in a band. The guy who was managing the band that I was in was also managing All. He got those guys a deal on Interscope [Records]. Stephen and Bill had done a lot of their own records, as well as other groups. They did that instead of going to the studio and spending… I don't know how much money they used to get back in the '90s. A lot!
On a major label.
Yeah. So, they were like, "We're going to open our own studio." They were living in Missouri at the time, because they were on tour nine months out of the year, and it was cheap to live out there. That's why they moved there from L.A. But they decided it was too small, and picked Fort Collins, [Colorado], to move to. Our band's manager said, "Hey, I'm moving out to Fort Collins. You want to come with me?" I was selling beer for Miller brands up in Seattle at the time.
Were you a beer rep?
A beer salesman, yeah. I had met Bill and Stephen a handful of times beforehand. They had come up and recorded [the Seattle band] Zeke, and they stayed at my house because of our manager connection. I was 23, playing in my band, and I thought, "I don't think I can do this job for the rest of my life! I'm going to go out there and try it." I moved out here and became the first intern. I had been in a studio a few times, in Tacoma, [Washington], and that lit a fire under my ass. I had bought a 4-track, recorded my band in the basement, and then got an 8-track reel-to-reel from Rob Skinner from the band Coffin Break. When I moved out there, we had an Otari MTR-90, which we still have, a Mackie [console], plus Focusrite ISA 215 and 4-channel Red 1 mic preamps. Super limited! I just soaked it up. I lived on the couch for a month before I found a place to live. I started going on tours with those guys, doing monitors and drum tech'ing.
What was the growth of the studio like?
A very slow but natural trajectory. When it started, it wasn't supposed to really be a commercial studio at all. It was supposed to be for the band to make their albums and practice. As soon as it got built, lots of bands called up, "You have a studio now? Cool!" So, we started recording. For the first three or four years, Descendents would go on tour, I would go with them, and the studio was shut down while we were on tour. When we started getting busy, Bill said, "You should stay home and work at the studio." I became the house guy around 2002. Then All and Descendents took a break, and Bill and I became studio rats. One time I worked 90 days in a row for 12 hours a day. No breaks. Our calendar used to be 12 bands a year. Each band would come in for 20 to 25 days, back-to-back, for five years. It was nutso in the mid-2000s.
Oh, my god!
We slowed down a little bit, 2010-ish, when streaming took over, budgets went away, and people started doing singles and EPs instead of albums. Our business changed from back-to-back months of bands to "one guy's going to come in for two days." We originally only had one room when we started, and then the band I was playing in built a practice room with pay from our record in '97. Then we turned that into our Studio B. All this shit is super DIY. The more we get on, each person we hire is smarter than the last. The newest guy, Jonathan Luginbill, built us two brand new studios, including the one I'm in. He's redone the whole studio! We've torn down walls, torn down the ceiling, and the floor. We make improvements gradually and get bigger. Currently we have four rooms and a fifth "editing closet."
It's handy to have a space like that.
Yeah. We even have Pro Tools computers in the office if somebody needs that. Bill and I own the place.
You bought in along the way?
Yeah, in 2012 or '13. Bill's not really into gear at all. We bought the SSL [console] because Andy Wallace [Tape Op #25] mixed the Descendents' Everything Sucks. He only mixes on an SSL, and he has no outboard gear except for a couple delays and reverbs. Bill was stoked on that. "We don't need any gear. Let's just get an SSL." We had minimal outboard gear. I got bored of that, and I would spend $30,000 of my personal money every year to fill up our racks. After a while I owned way more gear than the studio did.
Has it always been in the same building?
Always. We finally bought the building two years ago. We rent out the other half to a church, and then we have a warehouse in the back that we rent out to a PA company. We tried to move a couple of times. This building was built in 1940. It's not a dump, but it's old. We'd think, "We should get a better building," but our rent was super low! That's why we've survived for so long, because we never had to sell our souls to do shit we didn't want to do just to pay the bills.
It's such a unique studio as it's based around the careers of Descendents and All.
Yeah. When we started, it was a lot of Descendents fans who would sound like them. I don't think we've ever advertised. It's always been word of mouth. We probably recorded 75 percent of the bands that played on the Warped Tour. Nowadays, we've got younger kids, and music has changed. We have more diversified records now. Chris Beeble does most of the modern music now.
I imagine that you're not getting acoustic singer-songwriters?
Not all the time, but another guy who has worked here since 2000, Andrew Berlin, did the last two Gregory Alan Isakov records. The last one [Evening Machines] got Grammy-nominated for Best Folk Album. That's a legit singer-songwriter.
Have you shifted more into mixing?
Yeah. I've always enjoyed mixing more than recording. For the last four or five years I haven't recorded more than two or three albums a year. I'm mostly doing mixing and a lot of mastering, which I started doing in '98. When we first opened, we would send our tracks out to get mastered. Half the time we'd be like, "This sucks!" We didn't know what we were doing. We're so DIY, we thought, "If anyone's going to screw up our work, let's be the ones to screw it up." Not knowing that we should use somebody else who's better than us! I got a TC Electronic Finalizer and a [Waves] L2 [limiter] in '98. I've grown tremendously since then, but I've been mastering forever. I do a lot of mastering instead of recording.
Initially it was out of necessity, but then you became known for mastering?
Yeah. It was definitely out of necessity. People say, "Oh, he did our last record! Send it to him." I don't think I ever sucked. I always had an aversion to records that were too loud where I could hear distortion.
You'll start to hear the clipping as distortion if you're trying to make a track louder and louder.
I can't turn the volume down low enough to listen to it! But the limiters now are so much better that I can get it that loud if desired, without completely ruining it like before. When all I had was an L2 I could only get the record as loud as where I wanted the snare drum to be, because the snare would disappear if I took it too loud. Now I can mix into limiters and accommodate for all that.
Are people relaxing on the "make it louder" request?
Oh, yeah. Eight years ago, half the people would say, "Can you make it louder?" Now one in 20 ask me to turn it up, and maybe three in 20 ask me to turn it down! Some people are smarter now, or there's more knowledge. People have relaxed on the loudness quest.
I get that when I'm mixing. People will want it to be louder than how I'm mixing it. I'll say, "It'll get mastered!"
Right. I used to always deliver my mixes a little bit louder than the mix was actually at to people and say, "Look, this is the mix. It's not the master." Now that I'm older I've succumbed to it a little bit. When I'm getting close, I'll put a limiter on there to a "quasi-mastered" volume and think, "Okay, what's going to change?" I give people something that's not quite as loud as a master, but definitely way louder than I used to.
It's interesting that when you're on the quest to make mixes feel loud, aggressive, and big, you've got to keep reining it in a little bit in order to do it well.
The story of my life is reining it in. Every half an hour, "Aw, shit. It's flat now! Pull it down. I want to feel the kick drum, dammit."
Have you learned a lot about your own mixing from mastering other peoples' work?
I always have my same instincts while I'm mixing. The meat and potatoes of them haven't changed. It's still there, it's just that now I know how to adorn the mix better and get something sheenier or punchier. But I still have the same aesthetic, for the most part. I do agree with you, I'm always trying to figure out what not to do. I get all kinds of mixes, but, for the most part, I don't get too many bad ones. Occasionally, I'll have to call someone and ask, "Can you take whatever you had on the mix bus off? I can't do anything with this." They're like, "Oh, cool. This is the first time we've ever done this."
Are you still doing all your mixing on the SSL?
I stopped mixing on the SSL two or three years ago. We'd been renting the building we were in since 1994. The lady who owned it owned a furniture store here. She took off, so we took over the whole building. We expanded and built the room that I'm in right now – the mastering room – and then another studio. We had a guy named John Brandt [John H. Brandt Acoustic Designs] design this one for us. We built it ourselves, but he had legit plans as opposed to the rest of the studio. It turned out really well. After I'd been working in the mastering room here for a bit, I realized, "I don't know if I can go back into the A room." It sounds so much better to me in here, right in the sweet spot. Is it worth it to mix on the console? You know how people are now. They don't even get back after you mix it for who knows how long. When I was at the console, I used to be like, "Look dudes. We're mixing now. You have to be around. I'm going to send you a mix. You've got to get back to me."
Same here.
For the most part, people would do that. Now, hardly anybody mixes on a console. It feels like people don't give a shit, and they don't get back to me a lot of times. I was like, "I can't do that anymore." I could, but console recalls? The SSL is long in the tooth now, and we've had it repaired so many times. Finally, I said, "I'm going to see what I can do in the box." I mix hybrid now. It's taken me a little bit to get good at it, but I'm as good now – or better – than I was on the console. I get nostalgic, "Oh, I should go back to the console." I'll go in there and think, "How come the console leans half a dB to the left?"
People romanticize console mixing. They'll ask, "Aren't you doing all these little fader moves while you're printing a mix and making it really expressive?" I hated doing fader moves off tape. Even when I mix back through my console now, anything that's "changing" is in the box.
Right. We had automation on the SSL, and I automated a lot. But, still, you can automate to your heart's desire in the box. Sometimes too much.
As far as hybrid mixing, how are you doing that?
This is my mastering room, like I said. I have a little mix bus gear that I'm going through for my color. Then I have an [Inward Connections TSL-4 tube limiter] Vac Rac, some [Universal Audio] 1176s, and other gear that I'll insert on some channels. When I first started, that was the big thing. I couldn't figure out how to get vocals to be as good as they were when I just slapped an 1176 on it. In the computer, for me, I have to do five plug-ins. On the SSL I could either do none, or just an 1176, and it sounded great. Now I have to use six to make it sound the same. I started out using all these hybrid compressors; I still do it sometimes, but now I've started to figure out easier ways to make it sound similar.
Yeah. A lot of the plug-ins got better sounding.
I feel like the plug-ins have gotten way, way better in the last four or five years. It's either that, or everyone's ears are so accustomed to digital now. There are so many plug-ins now, and so many ways to do it, so if you can't get it right…
If someone can't get a mix done in the computer, even with stock plug-ins, it's usually about other deficiencies.
