How did you get into the world of recording?
Well, I apprenticed as a recording engineer while still in high school but didn’t think I had the people skills to make a career of it. A lot of studios closed after 9/11, and it didn’t seem like there were any jobs. I thought, "Fuck, I can’t figure this out." Meanwhile, my interest in recording became very granular. I wanted to know – on a component physics level – how to get the tones I liked, so I went to school for electronics. In 2005, I began working for Purple Audio, assembling new gear, and also fixing everything I could get my hands on, as well as helping refurbish old consoles. That’s how I met Gabe Roth [Tape Op #59] from Daptone. He brought in a Trident Series 65 console that got refurbished at Coral Sound (who shared the shop with Purple) and eventually installed it as the main desk at Daptone.
I was assisting Gabe back then and was the one who drove to rural Georgia to pick that console up and deliver it to you.
Crazy. Gabe would come over and bring tons of records, so that’s how I became aware of Sharon Jones, The Budos Band, and Menahan Street Band. Later on, I started doing a bunch of tech work for the Menahan guys. And after we built Diamond Mine in 2014, I would get to hang out and have a beer on the couch listening to Charles Bradley do an overdub. I thought, "This is fucking amazing." But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, and had to say things like, "Hey, this is dope but there’s a problem at 130 Hz." So, [the producer] Tommy Brenneck [Tape Op #147] realized I had good ears, and started asking me to do more and more tape op'ing and assistant engineering. That evolved organically to where I was engineering there, because the owners were four incredible musicians who had always just done it themselves. That’s pretty hard to do when you’re in the band and on the other side of the glass.
Thinking about great R&B and rock records from the '50s, '60s, and '70s, how would you describe the sound of a great record?
The idea of a transparent recording is a complete fallacy. When sound is moving through the air it’s stimulating tons of harmonic distortion and it’s touching you. This is a really rich and emotional experience, and to try and make a documentary of that is a fool’s errand. As soon as you use a transducer and convert acoustic sounds to voltage, we have already lost so much. We’ll never be able to hear all of what we were trying to capture after the signal passes through a bunch of junk and comes out some speakers, no matter how good the speakers and listening environment are. To me, a good record embraces the fact that a recording is not reality. A recording shouldn’t be transparent. We need to add back all the distortion that would have occurred in real life in some analogous, electronic way. We need to build an idealized acoustic environment inside the space of the speakers that can’t exist in real life, because real life can’t exist in those boxes. I’m always trying to maximize the emotional impact of the music being recorded. The sounds are all enhanced or degraded in such a way as to create this little immersive universe where the listener forgets who and where they are and just has feelings.
How do you approach tracking a project?
I try to get the sounds as finished as I can in the room. I’ll spend hours treating the drum kit and moving it around the room. I’ll do whatever I can to make the instruments sound like a record already in the acoustic space. Then I have all my mics that I know will translate whatever I’m hearing. I find the spots for them by covering one ear and moving my head around in that zone until I’m like, "Yeah, that’s the sound." Then I’m thinking, "What head basket design would the right mic have? What’s the right diaphragm design? Is there a network in there to slow it down but saturate the transformer? What impedance is that going to require, in terms of preamps?" Okay, so now we have an idea of our signals. If we're hitting tape, that’s going to dictate how much extra shit I run through. Then, depending on what style of music and where each instrument needs to sit in the mix, that will influence additional gear selection. And gear selection can get pretty exhausting. I’d rather roll into a studio and see a Neve 8078 console. There are 40 great sounding preamps with EQ and everything’s going through them. I love having no choices, capturing what’s there in the room, and knowing we’re already going to have an excellent soundscape because we’ve got a whole bunch of the same signal chain accumulating. The best scenarios that I’ve been in are with a producer like Leon Michels who's in the live room writing with a band, and however long they take to work it out is how much time I have to keep moving mics and turning knobs.
Speaking of turning knobs, did you help design a custom console for James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem?
Yeah. I’ve had a lot of great mentors, but a big one is the tech, John Klett, who has had James as a client for many years. He and James had conceived of a large-format 64 input custom console for the DFA studio in Williamsburg. It was a long, drawn out project with several collaborators, one of them being Malcolm Toft [Tape Op #26, #165]. I helped John with the EQ design, the backplanes, and drew a lot of the circuit boards that went into the center section, which was pretty involved because James has sort of an '80s way of working where there's a high analog channel count. He’s always got a mix up on the board, there’s a ton of outboard patched in, a lot of bypass-able insert points, and a bunch of different ways of monitoring and comparing. We tried to give him what he wanted; it was really fucking hard and I’m not sure we’ll do that again, but I’m psyched for the experience because building a console was definitely one of the things on my checklist of becoming a complete engineer.
Speaking of engineering, you started Eisen Audio which made preamps and DIY kits for the 500 Series early on. You’ve done design work for Purple Audio, AwTAC, and NonLinearAudio. What’s the coolest box you’ve worked on?
DIYRE Colour Palette [500 Series tone module] is arguably the coolest, because it’s an open source collaboration. After helping DIYRE's Peterson [Goodwyn] with the mkII redesign, and making a few [physical] plug-ins for it, it’s fun to see what the other designers come up with.
What mixing projects are you excited about right now?
I’m mixing another album for Norah Jones that’s an absolute pleasure. She’s an amazing talent. I never get tired of her voice, and she likes what I do. She wants a high level of refinement without losing the rough vibe, and she is very detail-oriented. I get tremendous feedback from her that keeps pushing the mixes to be better and better. Then sometimes other clients send emails like the one I just got while we’ve been talking. It was basically, "I like this mix, but can we go back to the rough?"
I hate those.
"The rough is your digital demo, and I had the assignment of making it sound like it was recorded at an expensive analog studio. So, that’s what I spent days doing and now we’re going to scrap it? Okay."
Tell me about working with Quincy Jones!
In 2018, Rashida Jones was producing a documentary, Quincy, for Netflix and they asked Mark Ronson and his writing partner, Andrew Wyatt, to compose an end credits song. The song was called “Keep Reachin'.” They got the idea that it would be cool to hire Quincy and Michael Jackson’s studio musicians to record it at Westlake [Recording Studios] in L.A., where they had recorded Off the Wall and Thriller. And then they also wanted to shoot the whole thing as B-roll for the documentary. God bless Mark, because he can hire anybody, but he tends to hire me. He said, "I want you to get the Bruce Swedien [Tape Op #91] sounds, nail it, and make it sound legit." I was like, "Okay, that’s a tall order but let’s do it." I’ve learned to do my homework. I get to the studio a day early to talk to the manager and the assistants and see what we need to rent. I can’t take anything for granted, even at really nice studios. Then I set up way in advance, because once Mark and whoever he’s working with walk in we’ve got 20 minutes before they want to be rolling. Even if I say, "Let’s do one for levels and test the waters," it could be “the” take.
Were you using Off the Wall or Thriller as your reference?
