So you don't just record bands and that kind of thing here. You also make music for commercials, right? What's that all about?
Tapping into making silly money for doing commercials is such a weird thing, and so many people hate working at shitty jobs, but if you know that you're a talented musician you can make ridiculous music and get paid for it. Independent rock won't pay the rent for a place like this — We have eight employees right now, and payroll is staggering every month. Add rent and utilities and we're about $100,000 in debt, so we do scoring and sound design for commercials. I don't know what would be a tasteful way to solicit people in underground music who can produce. Todd Trainer from Shellac does stuff for us. There's Rob Crow, Araby Harrison, Jimmy LaValle, Sufjan Stevens. They're all amazing and I'd like to increase the stable of talented composers in the independent music world for this kind of thing.
What would the requirements be?
They would have to be able to write, record and produce professional sounding work on their own with quick turn-around and fire it off as MP3s.
So how did you get started doing this?
With Glen Galloway, from Soul Junk and Truman's Water. He's co-owner of the business here as well. We started working on the record of his, 1956, and we worked on that record for six months every day. Every day of the week we'd do a few hours on it. We just enjoyed working together and that was his day job, making music for commercials, and he had started using me to do that, so instead of charging $15 and hour I'd charge $50 an hour to these ad people. I was just laughing my butt off because it was so silly. I was just having fun making music and getting paid $50 an hour and that's just ludicrous. So we finished the record and kept on doing that stuff and the company he was working for was going to close so we decided to start a company of our own and we did. We needed to find a place where we could build a studio and have offices and whatnot.
What's the name of the studio? Is it going to be called Singing Serpent as well?
I don't know.
The Burning Bunker?
[laughter] The Flaming Hole? I don't know. I'm hesitant to name it. It seems like it would be cheesy. You give anything a name it's like, "This studio's called the this-that," you know?
Just makes it easier to refer to something, I suppose. Who put the flames on it?
The bikers that had it before we did. They were a custom Harley Davidson shop and the reason we got the place is because they all got thrown in jail. I think they were using it as a meth lab.
I heard about that. I heard it was also once an illegal telemarketing sweatshop.
Really? Yeah, you know it was set up for a hundred phones or something when we got here. It was a crackhouse for many years too. The windows were all broken and people would crawl in through the windows.
Some special features of the place? You've got a lot of things going on that most people don't do.
A lot of what exists and will exist in the studio will be a result of a dialogue between Bill Skibbe, myself and my brother, Jan. Bill helped design and build Steve Albini's studio [Electrical Audio] in Chicago and worked there for a long time. He also helped build John McEntire's studio, Soma, and he's working on his own now. He came here for a week and we looked at this empty shell and just figured out the best way we could make the space work. It was really good. We drew up a bunch of plans and wrote down the ideas and my brother came down from Northern California and has taken three or four months off of his job just to help and be foreman. It's a big undertaking. We've been lucky to have some really great construction people. Jason Lane is number one!
That is lucky to have a lot of folks who can help out like that. This looks like a lot of work.
Yeah. We have a 2000 square foot live room. 1200 cubic foot reverb chamber, which is about ideal. Large live iso and a small dead iso. Two control rooms that face the large performance room and two separate mixing, editing and mastering suites. They're "suites". Oooooooh! So basically we can work on four different records or projects at the same time in this building without them bothering each other, which I think is the key ingredient. It's not going to have the rehearsal space syndrome where you're practicing and if the band next door is practicing in a different key it doesn't sound good. These are Stanley brand exterior garage doors, metal doors filled with foam, very light, but they have a magnetic seal at the top and sides and a multiveined vinyl sweep at the bottom. We've taken these doors and clad each side with a layer of MDF [multiple density fiberboard]. The MDF is keyed into another seal that is a sort of vinyl strip seal, so this way there are two seals at each edge of the door. The walls we've made are of a double wall construction, two separately framed walls with three layers of drywall on each side, two layers of 5/8" and then resilient channel with 1/2" on top of the R.C. So each wall gets a door in it, each door gets two seals, and we hope and hope that it doesn't let sound through. The floors are floated and filled with sand and the slab is cut around the perimeter of the main control room so that even the bass vibrations in the concrete don't transmit through the slab into the floated floor on the sand. Almost overkill, but it's going to be fun. We have a skylight in our main room for beautiful light in the daytime, which will be nice. It's super central to downtown San Diego, we've got our own exit off the I5 freeway, 15 minutes from Mexico. As far as equipment goes, we'll be doing a lot of hard disk recording, using Vegas and SoundForge a lot. We also have the 1" 16-track for band stuff and as soon as I can afford it we'll be getting a 2" 16-track. I have a pretty massive collection of instruments, amps and bizarre effects and goodies.
Wow.
Yeah, I really think it will change things around town to have a facility and a resource like this, because as of right now, independent music has been my garage, Gar Wood's garage [Tanner, Fishwife, Hot Snakes] and Araby taking her 8-track around to different places. Gar has done so much stuff over the years and he's really good. He's really good at rock and roll. Some great drum sounds out of a two- car garage. That's why it's called the "Box". It's totally amazing what he gets out of that room. He's just been recording there so long he really knows its sound. 1" 16 and a Mackie board and a couple little effects things and he just does an amazing job. I've mastered two or three records with him and I've mastered about 15 that he's recorded. He's done some Rocket From the Crypt and Tourette's Lautrec and Freedom for Saturn and much more. His band the White Apes is fantastic. Amazing stuff. Oh, I know what I want to call the studio. "B-A-Star Studios". I can't tell if it's for real or not, but I like it. Everybody wants to be a star, right?
Sure. [laughter] You've been doing digital recording for quite a while, right? Weren't you going around and setting home computer recording systems for people?
Uh huh.
How did you get involved with hard disk recording?
Well, when I first moved to San Diego I had been recording to all analog for probably eight years or so. My first 4-track was an old reel-to-reel from the '70s. Like a Teac 2348. Neat little tape machine. Messed around with a lot of cassette 4-tracks and recorded about 25 records like that and then started working with 8-tracks. When I moved down here I went over to Zach's [Three Mile Pilot, Pinback] and he was doing some stuff with his computer and I saw it and it was crazy. Have you ever seen digital multi-tracking in the computer world?
Not really.
