Do you own this house?
Yeah, I've owned this house for ten years. I started out renting it because there was a space in the back that I could put a small studio in.
So when you were looking for houses, you were looking for a bigger space that you could set up a studio in.
Yeah.
What happened to the old basement? Do you just use it as storage now?
There's a jackfield on the wall in the main room and I separated the old room into two rooms so there's two feeds to two separate speaker rooms. I have a Marshall cabinet and I'm going to get a little Sun [bass] cabinet, a 4-speaker one which sounds great. Those go down there and that's my isolation. It's not beautiful, but for basic tracks I tend to close-mic those instruments anyway.
How did you build the big room?
I was going to build one big room in there and I talked to an acoustics guy and he gave me the absolute longest length given my width and height that I could work in for the least amount of standing waves. I went with his acoustics idea. I found out that if you're not building a really multi-sided room, to stay with a pretty strict rectangular shape. The reason being is, and I didn't know this, that if you create a very limited frequency standing wave, that it's a lot easier to handle and deal with then if you tilt a wall slightly and create a band of standing waves in a certain frequency area. So let's say you've got a standing wave that's sitting at 100 Hz and then you cock your long wall a couple of degrees then all of a sudden you have a multitude of standing waves from 90-110 Hz. So I did that and I talked to RPG and their idea was absorption on the walls and diffusion on the ceiling, which I wasn't into. It seemed like I would waste my time doing a large room and then kill the reflections on the walls because we don't hear things that way. I'm not killing them because I did the opposite thing-some hanging panels on the ceiling to break up the ceiling-to-floor reflections and diffusion on both of the long walls. You've heard it — it's a very live room. You can hear it on [Clutch's] "Jam Room" really.
The wood helps.
The drum sound is huge and the wood helps. I used Hudson Industries' floating floor system which is the same one they used when they redid the Kennedy Center so the floor is completely floating.
On little rubber pucks?
Yeah. And the floor is pushed up against the foam against the walls so the walls don't touch the floor. The ceiling is a grid hung down from the real ceiling so that the ceiling isn't connected to the ceiling joists. It was kind of labor intensive.
Did you do most of it yourself?
I didn't do any of it myself. What I did myself was I went out and did lots of audio/video installations and worked really hard and paid carpenters a third of what I was making to be good carpenters. I'm kind of a perfectionist and I'm also ADD, so those two combinations work really badly together. It means that I try to do things too quickly, I screw them up and complain about them later. The cool thing is that when someone else makes a mistake, you don't really notice it.
And you can complain about it.
You can complain and make them fix it. I contracted it myself, I did most of the design with the guy and I found people for $20/hr to do the work.
And how long did it all take? Soup to nuts?
A year.
What would you have if you had an unlimited amount of money to spend on gear?
I would combine Pro Tools with... a... Neve, no, I might prefer an API...
I like API.
It's a little snappier than Neve and it's nice... API combined with having the Pro Tools right there to do editing and I guess a 2" tape machine with Dolby SR. I think the funny thing is that when people think of 2" recording, they think of a Studer and a Neve console. When they think of ADATs they think of an ADAT and a Mackie board with a couple of Alesis compressors or something and so they're not really hearing what can be achieved.
So you would go to 2"? You'd do 2" and then transfer it into Pro Tools...?
Well, or keep it on the 2" and use Pro Tools to move stuff around. I would have that ability. I might keep my ADATs and mix and match. You can almost have a 2" 16-track and just track the drums and bass to it and then call it a day. I like digital vocals and guitars better.
You like recording distorted guitars with digital?
Guitars and drums are what I like analog for.
For the bass too?
Bass, I can go either way, it depends.
Because it gets a little more snap. For the kind of money you're talking about, the new Sony board is 56-inputs, touch-fader automation, 4-band EQ where the top and bottom can be shelves or filters or bells, and dynamics on every channel, and it's $17,000.
It's true.
It's just going to be a matter of making sure that there are processors that emulate some of the things that we've liked before. I mean, no one's rushing off to do online editing anymore. Avid's got the fidelity-it's there. C'mon, I don't want to be a dinosaur.
There are actually people who are really adamant about analog tape and now it doesn't make as much sense to be wary of the technology. Digital has gotten to a point where it works and sounds decent.
The same people were screaming about samplers...It's amazing — I saw some interview show where Tom Petty and all these old guys were talking about how much they hate samplers and new technology. Aren't they going to look back...? They're like "parents" age and they're talking the way that their parents talked about their music.
Well, we're all afraid of a lot of new technology, too much, too fast, to a certain degree. In terms of financing, don't you think, "Oh, I'm gonna buy something and then it's going to be obsolete."
Yeah, that's one point of view. I'm also talking about the people who are afraid of the technology because 20 rap groups abuse a sampler and make records that are like, one loop. Then everyone says the sampler is bad. That's the same as one guy playing guitar feedback for an hour and that proves to you that the guitar and amplifier are bad. [laughter] It's funny when I read the articles. I had an [Tascam] MS-16 when Clutch first came here and then I got the 16- bit ADATs. I thought that the ADATs sounded like CDs which isn't exactly what I want but the 16-track sounded like cassette tape which I didn't want either and that was with dbx noise reduction which I hate.
But you said before that you don't like hiss... you had to use something.
