How did you get into music and engineering?
I started taking piano lessons when I was in third grade, then guitar in middle school, and eventually started playing in bands. Being of the generation where everyone had [Apple] GarageBand or a [Digidesign] Mbox, I wanted to record with the friends that I was making music with.
You had a little bit of gear as a high schooler to do some recording at home?
Yeah, the high school I went to in Coronado, California, had a satellite school program called the Coronado School of the Arts. We had all the normal high school classes and then an after-school program. They had a little computer lab that had a couple computers with [Digidesign] Pro Tools. I spent hours after school every day with my two friends, having a band and learning cover songs. We liked writing our own songs and started to learn about recording – whether it was through making demos or messing around.
Did you have an aspiration to get into music as a career someday?
Yeah, definitely. It was in that period that I got more obsessed with the idea of making records. I wanted to be Jon Brion [Tape Op #18] when I grew up.
Did you end up going to school for engineering?
I went to UCLA, and I was in the ethnomusicology program. It was great – we'd spend a quarter on the music from Africa and the next on the music of Asia. We were exposed to so many things. Also, just being in L.A. was another big part of the decision of me going there. All of the music that I was excited about seemed to be coming out of L.A., and it made sense to be around there. But when I was in that program, the only real recording classes were through the film school, where there was a studio they had built as a scoring stage for the film students. There was a decent sized room, and they had a Digidesign Control 24, and they had some good mics and instruments. There were two professors, David McKenna and Beth Sweeney, who ran beginner and advanced level courses in recording. If you passed those, you could book studio time. I took those as soon as I could. I was playing in a band back in those days and thought, "Okay. We have a studio where we can go and start making recordings." I defaulted to the producer/engineer role, and that's how it started.
You worked out of the original Tony Berg [Tape Op #121] Zeitgeist studio house, right?
Yes.
How did that happen? Was it a knock on the door, like everyone else says? [laughter]
No! [laughs] That's how Shawn [Everett, Tape Op #115] ended up meeting Tony, but I had a mutual friend from college who knew Blake [Mills]. I first became aware of him as a player, when he was touring and doing sessions with Jenny Lewis and a bunch of other bands I liked. It was right around the time that his first solo album [Blake Mills] was coming out, and we met after a show at The Echo. After that, every couple months I would check in and say, "If you need an intern, let me know." I was aware of Tony Berg and Shawn Everett's work at that time, as well. Finally, after a few months of slowly pestering Blake, I heard back from him and he said, "I'm producing a record for Sara Watkins [Sun Midnight Sun]. My friend Shawn is engineering it. We're doing it at my friend Tony's home studio in Brentwood. Come hang out." That was the holiday break of my last year at UCLA – around December 2011 – and that's the only job I've ever had since.
What was your role on Sara's record?
Just a classic intern thing. Blake was producing and Shawn was engineering, so I was picking up lunch and taking out the trash at the end of the day. But starting from the very beginning, I got to sit in a chair next to Shawn all day, watching him and attempting to follow along. To this day, he's still probably the fastest-working engineer that I've ever seen, in terms of Pro Tools chops. Blake, Shawn, and Tony were all super welcoming and encouraging. I was starting as an intern, but started to fill the role of assisting as I got more comfortable in a studio with nicer gear. That was the first time that I learned what a power supply for a tube mic was. The next big step, between getting that first real-world experience into actually doing the job, was doing a program at the Banff Centre [for Arts and Creativity] in Canada, which is a government-sponsored arts center. They have music, visual arts, dance, theater, and all kinds of residencies. To support the music programs, they'd hire a recording staff of eight to ten engineers to do sessions in the studio, as well as recording all of the live concerts. There was even a bit of location sound for film shoots, because someone would be making a documentary – doing an interview – and they would need someone to set up a lavalier mic and a boom mic.
What made you want to go there when you were already working with Tony and Shawn?
That's where Shawn did all of his schooling. I went there for six months, which is a regular term for their work-study program. Shawn was there for four years! The idea was that if I did this program, I would become much more valuable to them. It was good for them to see some advancements in my in my skillset. From the end of my time at Banff, going forward was when I started getting jobs and being the engineer on a session. The first full album that I worked on when I got back from that program was Ethan Gruska's first solo record [Slowmotionary] that Tony was producing. I think that was the first commercially released album that I had an engineering credit on. I did all of the recording, and then [Bob] Clearmountain [Tape Op #84, #129, #151] mixed it. I guess probably, partially through youthful ignorance – it was really quite a simple setup for recording that. Tony has an [AKG] C24 [stereo tube condenser mic], so it was a C24 in the middle, facing back at the piano, and then a [Neumann] U 48 for the vocals. That was it, for the majority of the record.
Nowadays, do you get pretty creative with tracking techniques or printing effects?
Yeah, although it varies from project to project. There are still some sessions that might be more of a straight ahead natural approach. I've been working on a new album with Gabriel Kahane, who I've made a couple records with. I came up to Portland to work with him at Flora [Recording & Playback], and the way we're working has lots of live effects – contact mics going to delays with amps in the room and a binaural head recording them. Ideally, whatever could have been a choice as a mix treatment we instead tried to get it happening in the room. That way we can almost hear that final product as he's tracking it.
I wanted to know a little more about your mix process these days. You work out of Sound City Studios, and you're in the room that has the Neve console. Is the Neve a big part of your mixing?
It depends. It's definitely a hybrid mixing setup; summing is usually happening in the box for automation and recall and for flexibility, to be able to use plug-ins and such – usually with a hardware insert on the mix bus so there's some compression and EQ happening with analog gear. Usually, I'll do a lot of channel-specific hardware inserts on the mix, so it's not so much building a mix on the desk that gets summed that way, but rather using the EQs and gain staging on the console with all of our outboard for the first couple passes of the mix. We're getting tones that way, and then, at a certain point, committing everything and rolling in the box from that point on.
On Blake Mills' new record, Jelly Road, how much foresight is there, in terms of how sub information or high frequencies are introduced?
A lot of the tracks started with Blake and Chris Weisman, our other main collaborator on the record, playing guitar together. Or, a lot of times, it would be with Blake singing live while tracking guitar, and then everything else is an overdub on top of that. There's a lot of experimentation as we start putting on layers, and the order in which we do those influences the others that go on next. A song like "The Light is Long" is very acoustic guitar driven, and that's doing all of the rhythmic and harmonic information in the midrange, so the bass needs to sit way below that to give a gravity to it. Percussion needs to be tambourines and cymbals that all live above that. The acoustic guitar is taking up so much space that there's not room for a full drum kit. Blake is definitely the kind of person who takes a lot of care in listening before ever making a choice. He won't grab a guitar, sit down in the control room and say, "How can I play on this?" He'll sit and listen to it a couple of times and then say, "I don't think this needs a guitar. I think what this actually needs is a synth to expand the top end."
Did you track this record to tape?
Some of it. A lot of those basic tracks, like the first couple guitars, the lead vocal, and early overdubs were done on tape. Then we would dump it into the computer; overdubs and mixing were done in Pro Tools.
There seems to be a lot of control over the length of what's going on in the low end. Are you getting pretty hands-on to control the length of those cinematic kick moments?
Yeah, it's a mix of techniques. I'm trying to get it as close to what we want in the recording, spending a lot of time getting the damping just right on specific drums, and then playing with compression in tracking. I love the SPL Transient Designer for this; it's essentially doing compression, but it doesn't sound like a compressed drum or bass. Most of the time that happens before the mix; it's part of the production process. Our mixing process is collaborative; I can spend the first half of the first day on a mix, doing some problem solving, and then Blake can come in with the clarity already figured out. Maybe there were some low mids that are cleared up in the guitar and bass so we can hear the kick better. Then he'll go in and edit, or ride the kick so that every single one is the perfect length, so that it has the right musical feel.
