What were your earliest recording experiences?
My mom was an opera singer who performed with the local and metropolitan operas. She had a small reel-to-reel Wollensak, and I used to record myself with that when I was nine years old. I figured out how to go into record and fast-forward at the same time by disconnecting the capstan. I'd make recordings at extremely high speeds and slow them down to listen back to them. I'd talk into the mic and then slow it down so much I could hear the vocal cords going "clack, clack, clack." I'd stick the mic up to my heart and record it. I would take a cardboard tube, cover one end with paper, and poke a sewing needle through the end and hold it over a record. I remember ruining a bunch of my parent's vinyl LPs doing that. [laughter]
You were experimenting with some form of turntablism before it broke through!
Yeah, this was the late-1960s. I grew up in Connecticut. My dad was a civil engineer. I studied some classical piano, started on trombone, studied some drums, and played the clarinet for a little while. I used to jam. My best friend at one point was Danny [Dan] Brubeck, [jazz pianist] Dave Brubeck's son. When I was in my junior year, the town built a new high school, and the music department procured The Putney synthesizer [EMS VCS 3], the model Todd Rundgren had used. I went into school early in August, and by the end of September teachers were coming by the music room and saying, "Aren't you supposed to be in my class?" because I had never gone to class. [laughter] The school had a ReVox reel-to-reel 1/4-inch, plus the synthesizer and a microphone. I used to bounce back and forth between the tracks and use anything that was available to make songs. My mom came in one time around midnight because I hadn't come home. She was pissed. I said, "Can't I stay to do one more overdub?" She screamed, "No!" [laughter]
You were obsessed already!
I loved being in recording studios, and the only studio around was owned by a jingle guy, Don Elliott, in Weston Connecticut. Some friends of mine recorded there due to a tip from John Hammond, Sr., who had some interest in them. I was fascinated by the entire recording process. I ended up helping build a studio in the area that was on a second floor, above a meat market. It was originally a Baptist church; we had to disassemble a baptismal tank and unwrap a crucifix all wrapped in foil. That's where I cut my teeth. Then I had the opportunity to move into New York City, and when I moved into the city I used to commute back to Connecticut to do sessions. As time passed, I started getting hooked in with people in the city, and one of the places that I got hooked in with was a studio called Intergalactic Music. They had George Martin's old Neve from AIR Studios, and they had the first Fairlight [CMI synth/sampler] in Manhattan. They knew John King, of Chung King Studios fame, where a lot of rap was being done at the time. I ended up getting some work with Jam Master Jay, and I got some sessions with Hank Shocklee [Tape Op #51]. There was Spyder-D ["Rap Is Here to Stay"], Roxanne, Slick Rick, and different rap artists. One of the sessions was with The Bomb Squad [Hank Shocklee and Eric Sadler]. And we tracked "Bring the Noise" based on [Simon Harris'] "Bass (How Low Can You Go)." That was done with an [Ensoniq] Mirage 8-bit sampler – played by hand, no sequencer. It was on John's baby Neve when I was working swing shift with engineer, Steve Ett, who was also part owner in the studio. I tracked the actual music, but I didn't track the vocals on the record.
What was your relationship with Talking Heads?
I had a "band house" out in Connecticut that was essentially an eight-bedroom house that I'd rented. I was managing touring tenants, but the lease was in my name. A family friend came by and said some band needed a roadie, but the roadie had to have their own van. I was like, "Okay. But I don't have a van." They said, "The name of the band is Talking Heads," and that sounded like a totally weird name to me at the time. I offered the gig to my friend Gary, because he had a van. We had set up a small 4-track recording situation in the house, and eventually the band needed another roadie to work with Gary. I came on as a roadie, and then I ended up being a guitar tech. I did some live sound for them, and also some recording engineering in the early days. The band flew everywhere, and me and Gary drove. We're talking from Niagara to Miami to L.A. to Houston; hauls like that. And whenever we came back from being on the road, we would keep building the studio. The gear for the studio initially was actually the live sound gear for Vicki Sue Robinson, who did the hit "Turn the Beat Around," which Gloria Estefan did a remake of. Whenever Vicki Sue had a gig we couldn't record because they'd take the mixing board. [laughter] We had a Scully 16-track, 2-inch machine and we used the TEAC Model 5 audio mixer. We eventually upgraded to a Tangent console. Talking Heads split to go to Europe, and the next thing that they did was go to Compass Point Studios to record Remain in Light. I remember trying to convince my dad to give me the money to go. I was like, "If you could just get me there. They're going to do this record with Brian Eno [Tape Op #85]! It's going to be the shit." But my dad's a civil engineer, Republican, corporate guy. He replied, "Why should I give you money to go to the Bahamas?" He wouldn't do it, so I ended up not going. At that point, Gary didn't want to be involved with the Talking Heads any longer. Gary was into working with Weather Report. We'd just done a Larry Coryell record – more what Gary considered to be "upper echelon" music. Gary just said, "Screw that. I'm not going to deal with these new wave guys." It was the disco era, so the studio had carpet on the floor, acoustic tiles on the ceiling, and cloth with fiberglass behind it on the walls. The room was completely dead. It was like walking into a studio and having there be no acoustics. Like singing into a pillow! I tried recording my mom's operatic singing, and she flipped out because she was used to hearing herself in a large hall with an orchestra. It's a completely different experience from headphones and artificial reverb. She couldn't find her tuning, her center.
How did you get into film?
I had day gigs on film sets and worked my way up. In the case of Ken Burns, I've done a couple of different documentaries with him. He's a unique director in that lots of directors start with visuals, and they'll put a "slug" piece of music in to have something that they can work with. Afterwards, there's nothing you can do to satisfy them musically since they've grown accustomed to the music that's already there. It's a bit like "demo love." But Ken Burns starts with the music and then edits images to the score. In most cases at those sessions, I had three assistants, and I would give them the engineering credit and take the production credit. I always wanted to get as far away from engineering as possible. If you said, "Jeff is the best engineer in the world," I'd almost be insulted, because I do stuff that's so much deeper than just engineering. I deal with the music; I deal with performance. The producers that I admire would be ones that recognize talent, like John Hammond Sr. or George Martin. People that are completely fluent in multiple worlds. They can say something like, "Okay, second string, that's a G-natural, not a G-sharp," and, "Engineer, can you put the low end rolloff on the [Neumann] KM 84 on the clarinet," and, "Can you go to 3 minutes and 21 seconds? That'll be the second repeat of the first chorus." They are dealing with all those different worlds, understanding where we are in terms of time, in terms of key, and in terms of musicality. Wynton Marsalis would call me up and I'd pull over, put the score on the dashboard, and take out a flashlight so that he could give instructions like, "At bar number 178, we need to fix this trumpet." I studied jazz piano and took some drum lessons.
I'm not a great musician or a sight reader, but I can follow a score. So, I would generally have three people under me. One would be running a second machine, which would be a separate computer that's getting the same feed digitally, so at least there are two copies of everything for redundancy. Then I would have another who would read the score and call off markers like, "Letter B, Bar 168" Another is on a second computer, entering that information. I'm dealing with a piece of music where we might do four different takes with a couple of tag endings and it's an eight-minute song. If the musicians want to come back in and say, "Can I hear letter B from take 2?" I can't be fucking around. The third person would also type in what's said in the room when listening back, because that's how people process. If the bass player says, "Oh, that bit sounds off," or, "Hey, we got it right that time," the third assistant would write that down so we could refer back to it with precision. Here's the secret, okay? This is the crux of what I do and is partly the belief and philosophy behind what I do: The recording medium is imperfect. The medium itself and the position to the microphone and such. I look at it as if I'm doing correction for that imperfection.
What were your experiences with Spike Lee like?
In the case of Spike, it's the opposite approach of with Ken Burns, because Spike had picture that was existing, and musicians were playing to those images.
How do you approach mixing?
The day that you do a recording, the mix that you get that day is spiritually in some way more connected than any other mix that you can do. It sounds better. There's a center. There's a bead. Like the musicians get a bead that they're excited about, so does the engineer. So does the mixer. I look at it as we as human beings can create infinitely more colors than any recording medium can truly represent. In MIDI you have 127 steps, and that's it. But a classical pianist can coax so many more subtle things than 127 steps. The way that I approach recording these days, I record one-to-one, a microphone to track for every single element. I also record stereo instrument stems. That would be drums in stereo, with effects, compression, and some EQ. Those stems get summed into a mix. And that mix, I put some mastering processing on. I record multitrack, stereo stems, and also mix and master simultaneously by printing effects on the stereo tracks. What that gives me is a basis or the bead that we were on at the time. I'm constantly reacting to the music. I'm reacting to the musicians. It's an open book; I continue to adjust and I capture the live mix, and it's always the best mix. I'm talking about having heard the demo, done a whole album, doing all of the overdubs in a big studio, and then going back and doing a mix. Then coming back and doing a recall for the record company. Then, after all of that, you go back and listen to the DAT tape from the original day you did the tracks and go, "That's better." The feeling is there, but there's always something completely wrong with it as well which makes it so we can't use it. We can't use the stereo mix because the sax player was playing by accident at some point or there are some leakage issues. But what I try and do is I try and capture that moment, and I use the stereo mixes to do my editing. That is my cookie cutter guide to editing the multitrack, which is inevitably 24 or 64 tracks or whatever. But moving 64 channels around is a pain in the ass. If I match that stereo mix, and I edit the multitracks right on that same place as it was in the stereo mixes, it's quicker and easier. Where I learned editing was recording to 2-inch tape. We'd go through six reels of 2-inch tape in a session, and then we'd stay up into the evening and edit the 2-inch together to get the rhythm section totally tight. I worked with Eddy Offord one time, and he told me that the original Yes records – where it was like, "Oh, man those guys are so tight. How do they do that?" – that Yes did the songs in loops. They would play each section over and over and over again, and then they'd edit the best bits together. The Edgar Winter Group's "Frankenstein" song was done the same way, splicing right in the middle of the song itself on 2-inch.
