I first learned about your work via Lankum. You got connected with them doing sound for a television show?
Yeah, it was called The Parlour. It was shot upstairs in [Dublin music venue] Whelan's, in a room that's called Parlour Bar, with mainly Irish music. That first event with Lankum [then known as Lynched] was a three-part show; it was a live band, then an interview with [presenter] Danny Carroll, who conducted it with two industry people, and then they included previously-shot footage from the main venue in Whelan's with Lankum and Sleaford Mods. The broadcast itself was a pre-recorded show with some post-production.
Were they interested in not sounding like a traditional folk group?
Yeah, exactly. I manipulated the low end of that track, and the band initially got a little bit apprehensive, saying, "What did you do? It's too much." I invited them out to my mix room; we played around with the track for a while, and then everyone was in agreement that it sounded great. I wasn't after destroying the track. We seemed to have a bit of a rapport and were chatting. They were telling me about how difficult they were experiencing being on the road, because of different engineers and traveling around Europe with instruments that are Irish. A lot of the engineers they came up against would have never seen or heard any of these instruments. They did not know if any processing needed to be done to them or what way to mic them. Because they were playing so many instruments, and had so many live microphones on the stage, they were experiencing a huge amount of feedback issues. I had a bit of live engineer engineering experience with bands from a decade previous and I said I'd go and see if I could help them out. Initially it was supposed to be short term – I was going to set up things for them and make it a bit streamlined. But it kept developing and growing over the months and subsequent years that I worked with them. I started to add a few contact mics to some of the lower frequency instruments, and I was ultimately able to run them into lower octave manipulators. They signed with Rough Trade and recorded their album [Between the Earth and Sky] in a different studio. They were having a bit of a difficult time getting a sound that they liked out of those mixes, so they got the stems and brought them to me. The process for the rest of that record was a combination of me re-amping and re-recording different elements. For instance, for the uilleann pipe drone on the start of the first track on that album, "What Will We Do When We Have No Money?", I rented out a church in Dublin City Centre for the day, went in with some speakers, and re-amped it out extremely loudly into the church and recorded it. I then sent out a lower octave into the same church and captured that. Then I sent another distorted version into the church and captured that, and then combined it all again in the computer. There was a lot of that manipulation of the source sound going on. Coming towards the end of the album being mixed, Ian [Lynch] from Lankum was writing a new song and the band thought the album was missing another original number. We decided to track that, and that was "The Granite Gaze." That was recorded in my project studio, which is called Guerilla Studios – a very rough and ready space under a train line in an arched red brick tunnel.
What type of mix set up did you have at that point? Did you have a console?
I had an AMEK TAC Scorpion desk that I was tracking in on, and I had Universal Audio converters. When they asked me to mix the album, I bought a Neve 8816 summing mixer, so I was running everything out of the computer into the summing mixer and then tracking it back into the computer through the Universal Audio card.
Did higher profile work start coming in?
Prior to Lankum, I was embedded within the underground noise rock, to psychedelic rock, to the improv jazz scene.
Any favorite projects from then?
Yeah, I enjoyed a band called The Jimmy Cake and their record Tough Love. The three members of the Jimmy Cake that were on that record are brothers of Cormac [MacDiarmada] from Lankum. It's quite a small scene in Ireland. Before I moved to Dublin I was in the Cork School of Music, which is a conservatory for orchestral musicians. I was there to up my game on arranging skills and notating.
Did you have a primary instrument?
Electric bass and piano. They had an amazing studio, and I made a lot of use of it while I was there. Obviously, there were lots of orchestral players, so I was recording a lot of strings, brass, horns, and experimenting with their frequency range and manipulating them. Because I had been a bass player for decades, I was extremely interested in manipulating the low end of all the acoustic instruments. Within orchestral, acoustic, or folk-based genres, there are generally no bass frequencies. Obviously, that's not 100 percent accurate, but if the lowest instrument was an acoustic guitar, there's quite an area of the frequency spectrum that's left unused. I had been experimenting with low octave shifts and messing with different sample rates to get in lower frequency energy.
Do you export something in a different sample rate to lower the pitch?
Exactly – similar to what you'd do with a tape machine. If I halve the speed, everything drops down an octave. If I export at twice the sample rate and bring it back into the same project without changing the sample rate, it'll be an octave lower. Because of that, extra artifacts are created. It doesn't just sound like a pitch shift; it sounds a bit otherworldly. I had done a little bit of experimentation with that. As soon as I heard that Lankum track [for The Parlour], I thought it'd be prime for doing something similar; especially since it was acoustic guitar or accordion, fiddle, and vocals – a huge area of the frequency spectrum that's unoccupied. Those instruments are all upper-mid clashing frequency instruments.
What other tools were you using to create low end?
I was using my own octave pedals, and then DAW pitch shifters like Waves' SoundShifter or [Devious Machines'] Pitch Monster. There are quite a few of them. When I was at conservatory, they had an "early music" room, with clavichords, dulcimers, and all these instruments. They also had quite an extensive percussion section. That would have been the first time I became acquainted with orchestral bass drum and timpani drums. I had a lot of fun with the orchestral bass drum. It took me quite a while to find out how to get a good tone out of them, because my initial reaction was to hit it as hard as I physically could, thinking I'd get all the low end I wanted. But I found that by hitting it as lightly as possible, and mic'ing it as close as possible, I was able to achieve what I wanted to get out of the instrument. A lot of the time, with recording audio the opposite of your initial thought is how to get the best tone. Another classic one is electric guitar players with 15 distortion pedals, five amplifiers, and massive 4x10 speaker cabs. If you strip it back to a tiny Fender Champ with a 6-inch cone and no distortion, you'll get a better heavy tone. They're awesome. As soon as I used one, I was like, "Ah, that's the trick."
Are close microphones something you do with other folk instruments now?
In live scenarios, closer is generally better. But within the studio I can exploit proximity effect to my best ability by putting the condenser mic as close as, or well up to, the sweet spot on a source to get extra sustain, as well as doubling of frequencies down there.
Are there any mics you like for how the proximity effect behaves?
It depends on the instrument. I'm getting a lot of good results out of a Flea 47; they're awesome. The studio I've been working in for the past week has one. It also has vintage [Neumann U] 67s and 87s, as well as quite an abundance of condenser microphones. I even had a Neumann CMV 563 up against it; it's winning every battle, hands down. I'll also sometimes use a combination of a dynamic microphone with a condenser, something like an [Electro-Voice] RE20 or a Sennheiser MD 441. Or a combination of a ribbon microphone with a condenser microphone. It changes from source to source and project to project; whatever sounds best.
It seems you're also moving from studio to studio for tracking.
Yeah, quite a bit. I do a lot of traveling around. Hellfire [Studio, Dublin] is my home-away-from home, at the moment.
What do you bring to a session at another studio?
Generally, I will bring a bunch of items that might work with the band. Whether it's distortion pedals, octave pedals, or a collection of microphones that will work. When I start a project, I'll invest some of the upfront money in something that I think will work well, whether it's an instrument or a piece of equipment. I will travel with my best dynamic microphones. Most studios have a series of amazing condensers, but sometimes they're a little bit light on having much more than a couple of [Shure SM]57s and [beyerdynamic M] 201s.
You'll bring the RE20 and your 441?
Exactly, and I have a lot of old beyerdynamic microphones that I'm enjoying at the moment.
Do you vary the preamps for dynamic versus condenser mics? Or do you find they work somewhat interchangeably?
Somewhat interchangeably, but, again, it's depending on the source and the project. With a dynamic or ribbon microphone, I might use a [Triton Audio] FetHead to bump up the gain a bit. Or, if there are some high gain preamps like APIs, I might put the ribbon to that, so I'm not gained too high. I'm a big fan of Neve preamps. I know it's probably a very standard opinion to have. I got the [Neve] 1073OPX [eight-channel preamp] recently. I was traveling and working in a studio, and I couldn't believe how much gain I was able to get out of them without any hiss coming up. I decided I needed those.
When you use an octave pedal under an acoustic instrument, where in the chain do you go out of the preamps? Is it through a re-amp, and then back in?
Depending on the studio, a lot will have direct outs of channels. I can track it in clean and then take the direct out into a chain of things and back in. As I track it back in, I need more EQ and manipulation after the fact to the octave pedal. The harmonic content of some instruments – harmoniums, accordions, uilleann pipes – they have so much information going on that the pedal will have a nervous breakdown and make up different chords. It's whatever way the chip is reading the harmonics. It gets confused.
It's not what they were designed for. Have you also got tricks for the high end, once you've got the low sitting where you want it?
Yeah, I end up putting a smiley face [EQ] on the mix instead of where most people put a frown face! Once I get the midrange solid – midrange is always the most difficult area to get – then I can batten out the low until it's not too cloudy. That also leaves the upper extremities to be able to push elements into. Again, that's due to going back to the acoustic instruments versus a drum kit having cymbals up in the high end. There's a lot of space, even though I know low end and ultra-high end takes up a lot of space in a mix. But if I'm sparing with it I can still add it in to create some weird psychedelic effects.
Do you use the sorts of trickery that you do with lows to get the highs as well?
Yeah, it's similar trickery. I'm exploiting reverbs in that same capacity, tuning the reverb weirdly, or using shimmer reverbs and different plates. A combination of plug-ins and some outboard gear. Hellfire's got a couple of tape echoes, and I have a [Roland Space Echo RE-]501 that I love. I'm manipulating and destroying them, I suppose.
Are you EQ'ing the sends or returns on these?
When I'm bringing it back in, then I'm taking out everything I don't want. A lot of what I do in the high end is subliminal – you would only notice it if it's muted.
Can you recreate that live?
Yeah, I'm able to. I have it easier creating the low end manipulation, but with a small bit on so many instruments it works. Like an Electro-Harmonix POG pedal; the filter sweeps on those are pretty cool.
Where in Ireland is your studio?
I've been in Dublin for the past ten years.
Do you have a control room and live room, or is it all one room?
