In 1987, Peter bought his first cassette 4-track, "Tascam Porta Studio, like everyone. I bought the 4- track to record our band," then called Philistines. "I got a few [ShureSM]57s and a 58 - I got an AKG D112 and I said, 'Which end does the sound go into?' It's got holes on both sides. Someone said, 'Oh it doesn't matter, either side.' I used it backwards for the first several months. The next machine I bought, the first professional machine, was an Otari MX-7800, a 1" 8- track — huge, like a washing machine. In hindsight, I wish I hadn't sold it."
When they only had their cassette 4-track, the Philistines initially tried recording in a studio. Peter says, "We went and recorded with someone who had a semi-pro setup, which was actually a 1/2" 8-track, in Greenwich, CT. It wasn't good. He wasn't especially that good at what he did, maybe we just weren't that good either. We just wanted to do it ourselves. I think that's why most people learn about recording, so they can record themselves the way they want." Tarquin adds, "being control freaks, we wanted to control all aspects of what we did: the music, the recording, whatever artwork there was gonna be."
Gradually Peter became an engineer. "More and more of my friends started asking me to help them record their band, mix, this and that. One time this guy said to me, 'Why don't you become an engineer, because you're really good at this.' And I went, 'Wow, that's the strangest thing I've ever heard. That would be really fun.' It still seemed like too crazy an idea to actually pursue, and I sort of started pursuing it. When I graduated college, I took a class — Intro to Studio Production. For the lab portion, you could record whomever you wanted, so let's record my band. I think several of those songs ended up on our first record," 1990's Greenwich CT. "I had taken those classes and I just tried really hard. Booked time in the studio, was really confused, and just forced myself to figure stuff out."
"I feel like I paid my dues as an assistant engineer at big studios in New York, and that's hard work. You learn a lot, but you also take out a lot of garbage and do a lot of really embarrassing stuff, and people treat you like you're a real bozo. I wasn't an annoying assistant, I was a good assistant I think, but I definitely asked a lot of questions. You have to know how to time questions. I learned my recording skills at a Japanese studio called Daiichi Kosho, DK Studios in Manhattan, which was the old Sigma Studios. They recorded karaoke music." Tarquin explains, "it was a perfect environment to learn engineering and production. You take the most famous recording in the world, and it's an exercise in recreating the production. It isn't the most artistic thing, but in terms of purely learning the craft of engineering, that's a good way." Peter continues, "all the engineers, producers, and musicians thought of it as a total joke, but it was a great studio. It was all the best gear, but making this horrible music."
"I got an apartment in Brooklyn. Next thing I knew, I would always be recording at my parents' house in Connecticut. I said, 'Forget it, I'm just moving back home and saving all my money.' For 6 years I just saved every cent I earned. I was not a fun guy. I did not go out a lot." In 1991, "I bought an AKG 414. I bought a pair of AKG 460s. I had a little Ramsa console that I had for live use. I needed a compressor, so I bought what was available, a UREI 1176 and a pair of LA4s. I think the 1176 was 500 bucks and the LA4s were 450. That's all there was. They were used, but that wasn't like some great deal, either."
"I started working at the studio during the week, and recording people on the weekends. I was working pretty hard. There was this great thing where the more I worked, the more money I'd get, the more gear I could buy. It was this endless cycle that really, to this day, when I get paid, when I see an amount of money it always represents a different piece of gear. My belief in purchasing gear was always to save up money, and then buy really expensive good things. When you're making an assistant engineer's salary, that's hard — it takes a long time to save up. One of the first things I bought, after I had a 414, I bought these Telefunken V76 preamps. I bought a Neumann M49 microphone. This is before things cost quite as much as they do now. I remember thinking to myself, if I get these things called ADATs which are supposed to be decent quality, they're not going to have any character, like analog tape. If I create a really amazing signal path, if I have a Neumann M49 tube mic, V76 preamps, a TubeTech CL1B compressor, and an Apogee converter (at the time it was an AD1000) shouldn't I be able to record really good-sounding music? It turned out I was right, it did work."
"When ADAT's came out I bought two ADATs and got rid of the 1" 8-track. People can rag on ADATs all they want — we've made a lot of records on ADATs. In an ideal world it would be nice to use analog. We could never have made the records we made with tape machines, unless we could hire all sorts of engineers. A lot of the stuff we did when I was completely alone, or just Tarquin and I, or the three of us [with their drummer at the time, Adam Pierce] playing, no engineer. Without auto- punching, our records would not sound like they do." But not all the digital gear worked out. Peter had a bad experience with a Yamaha O2R console which he once owned. "I thought it just sounded boring."
"Years ago my parents were looking to move. They'd always be looking around at different houses, but they lived in Fairfield County, in Greenwich and Stamford, CT, and these were all really expensive houses. Whenever we'd see a sort of inexpensive, small house, I'd say, 'How can we turn this house into a studio?' Our bandmate in the Zambonis, Dave Schneider, said, 'They're giving away houses in Bridgeport,' which is where he lives. 'There's this huge old house that this sort of weird religious group is selling. You could build a studio there.' I checked it out, and it's this house. The first day we saw it, we're like, 'This is incredible,' for a price that you can get a shoebox in New York. Because it's here, I can have this house and studio that I couldn't dream of having most other places." Tarquin adds, "We've found Bridgeport to be a wonderful community."
"The house was built in 1891. It's a huge 7000 square foot Victorian house. The first floor is beautiful, it's very elegant, with nice wood floors. I thought it would make a very classy studio, a Daniel Lanois [Tape Op #37 & #127] type of deal, but we started running into all the logistical aspects. Soundproofing — we're right on Route 1, it's loud out there. The danger of theft — people could see right in those windows. It's really nice down there, we'd have to destroy it to make it a proper studio. My girlfriend, Mary Guidera of Pee Shy and now Caulfield Sisters, said, 'You should build it on the third floor in the attic, just knock everything down and build it from scratch.' My dad had liked that idea also. I was like, 'No no, that's a terrible idea. What's so cool is the first floor.' I invited a friend of mine, Carl Napa — who is a really experienced, professional engineer whose opinion I really respect — and he said, 'Why don't you do it in the attic?' I felt really bad for telling my girlfriend off for telling me to do it. She even said, 'You could knock out the attic, and you could have a 16 foot ceiling.' That is what I ended up doing. We knocked down all the walls and ripped out the floor, because you had to — it was trashed. I even consulted with a studio designer, Tatrix, paid them a few hundred dollars to come out and look at the space and tell me what I should do. Their specific design ideas didn't appeal to me, but they gave me some very valuable technical information about insulating and soundproofing. They said if they were to design it, it would have cost like 300 thousand dollars, which is like 10 times my budget."
"I remember I was sitting here with no walls and no floors, sitting on the joists, and looking at the wide open space, and saying, 'How the heck am I gonna lay this out? What's gonna be the control room and what's gonna be the live room.' The way it ended up being is absolutely the last way I expected it to be. I wanted the bathroom and the other rooms to be off of the control room. It just didn't work, no matter how I broke it up. I thought I could have a smaller control room and a really big live space. I just arrived at this. The dimensions of this control room are excellent. There is a formula where you put in the width, the length, and the height of the room and it spits out numbers in columns. You compare those columns, and if you have overlapping frequencies, you know you might have a problem in that frequency. If you put in these dimensions, it comes up perfect in the formula. It's worked out really well. I love having a really big control room. That's key to part of the experience here — a lot of room to work. So many records, after basic tracks, you do almost everything in the control room. You can sit over there in the corner, still totally be involved or not be involved. Scott Litt was here and he was walking around to every corner of the room while I cranked music. He's sitting in the corner going, 'Man, I can mix from back here — in the corner of the room.'"
"What was up here was pretty trashed, so we had to sort of do it from scratch — demolished what was up here and put in a new sub-floor, a half-inch of plywood, half- inch layer of sound board, another half inch layer of plywood. In the control room I put wall-to-wall carpeting. In the live room, I knew I couldn't afford a wood floor, so I didn't know what I was going to do. I was trying to figure out different things. I went to Home Depot, and I figured out that with a certain kind of wood floor I could afford it. I think it turned out great."
"What was hard is that when I started to do it, people warned me, 'It's going to cost twice as much as you think, and it's going to take twice as long, no matter what you think.' I thought, no, no, no. we can do it, X amount of time, X amount of money. It cost more than twice as much and took more than twice as long, more like three times, almost."
"It's, in a lot of ways, a professional studio equipment-wise. It's professional space-wise — it's big, but it is just a home. It has a very home-y low-key feeling. Bands have told me they don't feel a lot of the same stress that they might in a glossier studio, where you just feel the clock ticking. You feel the money that you're spending. Some people want to feel that. They want to go to the Hit Factory in New York and know that this is the 'big time'. When bands come here, they just relax. It feels like you're just in your house recording, but with really good equipment, and with enough space that you don't get claustrophobic. There's loads of natural daylight. I enjoy the whole Star Trek syndrome, like you're on the spaceship, no windows, you never know what time it is. I can deal with that, but other bands come and they rave about how much they like the natural light, so I think it is important to a lot of people."
