Last time I talked to you I think you said you were building a studio.
Well, I've been looking at places around [Los Angeles]. I've been trying to find an old room. L.A.'s the perfect place 'cause there're so many failed studios here from like 1975. I've looked at some crazy old places.
Like a [Fleetwood Mac] Rumours-era type studio?
Actually, for [the Revolution Smile] record we tracked where they made Rumours, at Sound City. It's fantastic. It's in Van Nuys, in the middle of nowhere. It's one of the best sounding drum rooms on the planet. They haven't changed a thing since they built the thing in the early '70s. Nirvana tracked "Smells Like Teen Spirit" there, all the Tom Petty records were done there, Heaven Tonight by Cheap Trick was done there, REO Speedwagon. It's crazy. It's not a hard sell to get people out there to record.
So what would you want to do if/when you get a room together? Would it just be a place where you could mess around, or would you want to do sessions there?
You've just gotta have a room. It's killing me. I had a room for almost 13 years in New York and it got torn down. You just need a place to go and have fun. Sometimes when you're making a record you just want to put the brakes on, give everyone a chance to go regroup. Or the singer can't sing, he's freaking out. You know, when you're locked down in all these expensive studios, the clock's ticking. I had a classic situation the other day. I was working on a record and the singer was complaining. Usually I try to make the studio feel like it's your bedroom — I'll spend like a day just tricking it out so that it feels like a fun place to be. I hate going into a studio that feels like a dentist's office. But with this singer it was the first time I've ever been confronted with someone who was like, "It feels like a bedroom, man. I want it to feel like a studio."
Was there any kind of defining moment that made you decide to get deeper into recording?
I was playing in all these bands that were touring and going to "recording studios" to make recordings. My second band, we saved up all our money to go make a recording. And I just remember fighting with the engineer, saying, "Take the reverb off the snare, it sounds weird. It's not what we want," and him just saying, "Shut up, kid, you don't know what you're talking about." At that point, I kind of promised myself that I'd never go back into a studio until I knew how to operate everything myself. That was kind of a defining moment for me.
Would you say that recording the Barkmarket stuff is how you really learned to engineer?
Sort of. I was the house engineer at Harold Dessau in New York. I was their house engineer for about 5 or 6 years. It was kind of like an 8 and 16-track place, but they had a Neumann 87 and a couple good compressors, a Teletronix LA-3A, and a good wood room, which was kind of the key. So I always went in there with the approach that we were making a record, even if somebody thought we were making a demo. And I eventually wound up bringing a lot of people in there to make records, but it was not a professional studio. I didn't even know what a second engineer was until I had one assisting me. I was laughing hysterically. 'Cause you record your own music your whole life and then go to a professional studio and suddenly have this Second doing everything for you — it's so easy. I was like, "I don't have to plug the mic in? This is awesome." One of my first "professional" jobs was when I was hired to mix a record by this band Trouble, this kind of wild heavy metal band that sounded like Sweet or something. They flew me out to California and I had to ask a friend of mine, Greg Gordon, how to align a tape machine. I remember sitting in the hotel on the phone with him writing down how to align a tape machine, 'cause I had no idea how to do it. Still to this today I don't know how. You can probably tell if you listen to any Barkmarket records.
Working on the Red Hot Chili Peppers' One Hot Minute is kind of what took you to a whole new level as an engineer. You met the producer of that record [and owner of American Recordings] Rick Rubin, when he signed Barkmarket. But how did you come to start engineering records for him?
Rick is really talented at picking out people who can make records. He heard the records that I made on my own and was like, "Why don't you make records with me?"
What did he hear that you'd done?
[The Barkmarket album] Vegas Throat. Rick just has mad skills. It's ridiculous. He's got the ears of a 13 year-old boy. He hears everything the way you would hear it if you were hearing it for the first time, every time. He's amazing like that. He's usually doing three or four albums simultaneously, just jumping from studio to studio, from the second he wakes up until 4:00 in the morning.
When you were working with Rubin, did he give you a lot of latitude as an engineer?
His thing is that you either get where he's coming from and you continue to work with him, or you just don't get called to come back. If a sound is close but not what he wants, he'll give you direction. But for the most part, you just have to keep making it great, and then if you make something great, he'll always have something to say about it. If it's not great, he'll just say do it all over. [laughs] I haven't really done as much work with him as people think. After the Chili Peppers' record, which took a year, we didn't do a record together for about five years. And then I came in and mixed the first System of a Down record. Sylvia Massy [Tape Op #63] [Shivy] had engineered it with Rick. I think they had just gotten... it was insane how much work they did on that record. Everybody was just like, "Aaagh!" That happens a lot in the studio — you work on something for five months and just finally say, "Somebody else just please take this off my hands." It's actually kind of an easy thing to do, to just kind of come in at the end of the process and go, "That, that and that — boom." And even the band will often say, "Okay, fine," 'cause they're so fed up with it. That's the art: To keep your perspective in the studio. You have to find ways to trick yourself into doing it.
How do you do it?
I do it by not engineering, so I'm not as involved in getting the sounds as much as I was when I was a lot younger. I'll just work with really good engineers — Greg Fildelman and Greg Gordon are two guys I work with a lot — and they know the kind of things I'm going for. We'll hang out together, but I'm not dialing up sounds. So it frees you to think about the playing and the performance and the sonics and that kind of stuff. The song is way more important than the guitar tone, unfortunately for the geeks. For the geek in me, it's much easier to sit around all day playing with a guitar tone than it is to put together a great song.
Even though you're now a producer, I think many people still regard you as an incredible engineer, because of your work in the past. Do you feel like the uniqueness of the sounds that you've gotten over the years has been lost because you're using an engineer, instead of doing it yourself? If so, does that matter to you?
No, because I don't think that's what people want from records at all. They're not looking for me to go in and put my unique sonic spin on it. They're looking for me to help them figure out what their spin is. Producing is a totally different job. If I was making a record for myself I'd probably get way different tones than I would for someone who's trying to make a record for a major label, or even for an indie or whomever. What I'm trying to do when I work with a band is to figure out what they're going for and help them get there, not getting them where I am.
How do you reconcile the desires of major label reps — who usually want hits — with your own aesthetic and approach? That's not to say that your approach and theirs are mutually exclusive, but I can't see them being the same every time. Surely you must get calls from A&R people asking you to make things sound a certain way.
You'd be surprised how much that doesn't happen. That's the art of the job: You're kind of the communicator between the band and what they're going for, and what the audience is going to respond to. And you have to do that, unfortunately, through the filter of people who work at record labels and radio. I've found that in dealing with everyone — the band, the manager, the publicist, A&R, and the president of the label, if you're lucky — as long as you make it great, everyone's excited. I only take on projects that I think can be great, that have something about them that's already great. I just totally believe that if you make something awesome, people will get it. You know, Air managed to make a huge impact on people, but if you'd brought that to a major label, they would've been like, "What the hell is this background music?" But they make phenomenal records. Sigur Rós — phenomenal records, records that impact people and have a life of their own. I'm always trying to push it toward that kind of thing. That's why I've never taken on a band that I'm just not attracted to at all. I can't see squeezing out an album of, you know, 7-string guitars and Cookie Monster vocals. Even the System of a Down record — I heard that record as like a Dead Kennedys record. That's what I heard when I first listened to that.
So you don't ever feel compromised, like it's your aesthetic versus the aesthetic of the label, or that there's a mandate from the label about the sound of a record.
Usually what happens in that case is that you get fired. If you're not making a record that they think they can sell, you're off the project. Labels have no sympathy. But like I've been saying, if you make stuff that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, most people are going to get that. I only take records where I like the music. 'Cause I'm gonna have to sit and listen to it all day long, 12 hours a day, for 3 or 4 months. At Harold Dessau I spent years sitting in a room listening to horrible music played by people who had no chance of going anywhere, asking me, "So what do you think? Do we have a shot?" [laughs] I just can't do that anymore. But it is an art dealing with the big record companies. I've come across so many actual music lovers, some of the more old school people working at labels, and some of the older A&R guys — the people who've overseen all of our favorite records. And if you're lucky enough to work with those people, there's plenty that they can teach you. You can't always say, "Labels are dumb, and A&R people are idiots." That's not the case. Rick Rubin is a great example. He was the first record company president that I ever met and the guy could care less what radio people think. His attitude is, "If it's great, it's gonna work." End of story. He's not saying, "Is it right? Is it now? Is it today's sound?" 'Cause if you try to make a record with today's sound, by the time you get it out "today's sound" is yesterday. So you need to try to make a record that sounds timeless and great, always. Otherwise, you're gonna have a dated record before it even comes out.
So how do you make a timeless record?
For me, I think it comes down to not using a lot of effects, and not using the current, trendy sound effect approach. Like digital reverb in the '80s — everybody was screaming that you had to use it to make stuff sound great. Or now with AutoTune on vocals.
What's your opinion on analog versus hard-disk recording? Do you use digital?
I use my ears. [laughs] If something sounds better coming off the computer I'll slam it to tape and see if sounds better coming off of tape. Everything usually hits tape at some point throughout the life of the record. I'll usually track basics on analog and then dump it all in the computer. Some records it's all analog, some records it's all on the computer. It depends on the band, really. The thing is, analog recording colors the sound in a way that's a lot more pleasing to the ear than digital recording. Digital recording might sound more glossy, or brighter, or some people may hear it as "better." I was just talking to this tech today about Pro Tools HD, and I asked, "How does it sound," and he said, "Oh, a lot better," and I said, "What does 'better' mean?" Your version of better and my version of better can be two totally different things. To me, an answering machine distorted and turned up to 10 sounds awesome. That's a great sound to me. A perfectly pristine, super-bright, plenty-of-overtones ride cymbal with rivets — I could care less about that sometimes. Most of the time I'm more concerned with a warm, crunchy, gurgling intestinal sound — and that usually comes from analog. I love home recording. My approach is, "Let's use the demo on the record, or let's make the demo the whole record, if it sounds cool." I've recorded in a 48-track studio through a 4-track Tascam mic pre, just to get that sound, 'cause I knew that was the sound I wanted. But, generally, analog colors the sounds in a way that's really great and digital colors it in a way that I don't think is that great. And analog is a lot more idiot-proof than digital recording. With digital recording, the problem — and I just ran through this on a record — is that with analog, if you record quietly, all you're doing is adding hiss. With digital, if you record quietly, you're getting a 4-bit recording, as opposed to a 24-bit recording. The quieter you record, the less actual sound you're recording. You have to record all the way to the top to get the most out of the actual recording. So if you record things quietly — because you're not paying attention and watching the singer accidentally set fire to the lounge curtains, while the bass player's rocking out, getting the best take of his life — it's gonna sound shitty. And there's no way to make it sound better.
I think most people gravitate to digital for its editing capabilities.
It's hard, because it's so easy to do it with a computer. But I couldn't imagine editing on Pro Tools having not edited tape for years. I've come across this with people who learn Pro Tools instead of learning analog recording. They don't really know how to put a record together or how to construct the recording. In a professional context, the way that you approach recording with a computer is great — if you know how to record. One of the problems with Pro Tools is that you've got a lot bands who can't play, who would never have gotten record deals, or even had a shot at being a musician, 25 years ago. You're really pulling the wool over the audience's eyes if you're making a record into this incredible thing on Pro Tools, and the band can't play a note.
You blame over-EQing for many bad sounding records. When tracking, do you strive to not have to touch the EQ when you eventually start mixing?
