"I graduated as an undergraduate from Brandeis, and then I did that summer in Buffalo program. In those days, Morton Feldman ran this summer thing. They'd take a handful of young composers from around the country. They had a really top-notch music ensemble there. They'd have Morton and then a couple of guest composers. Pauline was one, and Joel Chadabe was the other. We lived in the dorm together and just became really close over the summer. She encouraged me to go to Mills, and we'd see each other on the road over the years."
When Frehling got involved with Deep Listening, he started by finishing the design and construction of the space. "There were two shells that we started with. David Gamper, who is in the Deep Listening Band with Pauline, did the first part—took this old building and framed out a couple of the rooms. From there, I made a few modifications for dimensional things and non- parallelism, and treated 'em basically by ear, with diffusion and damping where required. It's one of my pet things to try and find ways to build good sounding rooms and get good absorption and diffusion with the world's cheapest materials. I got a bunch of surplus ceiling tiles. They're that compressed junk. Instead of using 'em as absorbers, I make little 2x2 blocks that have been cut off at angles. I will put them on some kind of a backing board, and then glue those little squares on. You get these patterns of oddly matched shapes. They work great, and they cost next to nothing. Then building out walls where you build boxes literally on the wall, so you have variable depth cavities. You can put a mixture of straight absorption or panel type absorption, bass traps. Pegboard becomes really handy there as a sort of resonator. There's a formula that will figure out depth. If you just think random, you'll do pretty well in general contouring of the room. If you can afford it, you can build a room that sounds good everywhere in the room. If you can't afford it, then the best you can do is work to have it sound good at the critical position. Since we were a nonprofit and had to beg for every dollar we spent, you can guess which approach we used. It works fine. It's important what the music you're doing [is]. If you're doing acoustic music, it's silly to monitor loud, because the music isn't loud. That's something I learned in the old days, when I lived in the Bay Area still and had a commercial studio. I did a lot of part-time work, freelance work. You monitored very quietly because you were there for 12 hours. You wanted to be as good at the end of the day as you were at the beginning of the day. I learned a lot from those guys. It's important to match your listening levels to the music you're recording. Consequently, you're not loading the room as much by not listening really loud and having really artificially deep bass. The standing waves don't have much amplitude. You can do a lot in simple conditions in this sort of music. You just don't want things that are bizarre. The trouble we have, and the biggest constant fight I have, and I think everybody would have this battle, is low ceilings. It's very difficult to get separation with low ceilings. A few feet makes a lot of difference, between eight and ten feet is huge. It's not enough energy loss by the time it hits the ceiling surface. So gobos and things like that become ineffective because the sound just bounces over the top."
"For equipment, we use hard disk. It's on a Mac, dual- processor G4. One of the first pieces of equipment that was donated was the old, original MOTU 2408. I was using Pro Tools at home, a Digi001. My feeling was that it had no place in a studio where you never knew what was going to come in. There was just no flexibility to it whatsoever. It does a fine job where you control the environment. There's not enough I/O of various kinds, and you can't build on that system unless you go to full- blown Pro Tools, which we couldn't afford. MOTU is really great with having boxes of all shapes and sizes. We had a 308 in there that allowed us to interface with whatever came in. That's how that got started. I think all [of these units] do about the same thing, it's just getting used to the logic, or lack thereof, of the systems. Our main converters are Metric Halo Mobile I/O. We recently got the Focusrite 428, which is four Focusrite ISA preamps, and they have an 8-channel converter card, which is damn good, especially for the price. Over the years we moved up. I got the MOTU Mark III, which is just better all around than the other ones, but I basically don't use the converters in it, I use it as kind of the traffic cop of the system. I think the first good preamp we got was the old CLM, which is from Scotland, a really nice class A, very simple but very functional. We use the dbx 586, which I think is one of the most under-rated preamps in history. It's very clean, very nice, good headroom. The EQ on it is pretty vanilla. It's not a very tube-y tube amp, but it's a real tube amp, 250 Volts across the plate. It's definitely not a character amp. The music that we do, day in and day out, is acoustic, what you hear is what you get. We've got also a big Mackie 32 input, 8 bus. Pauline had gotten that when she was doing this big opera years ago. I don't like it. In three years, I don't think I've put anything through it. I use it like this giant monitor mixer."
"We have the Meyer's HD1s. They're very good nearfields. It took a little getting used to working that close. It's quiet music, not overly loud is probably a better word. It's like anything else—you sort of refine that a little bit over time. I think later records are better than the first ones. That's the nature of the beast."
For microphones, "we started off in good shape. Pauline had a pair of B&K 4011s. I had a pair of vintage AKG 451s, and an old RE20 that I had totally rebuilt by ElectroVoice. They were really shocked to see it. This was a low serial number, and I've had it since the early '70s. The new AEA R84, the big ribbon mic, is a real gorgeous piece of work. I picked up on the Internet a Beyer 260, with the Stephen Sank DX mod. We got a pair of Audio Technica 4033s and a 4050 and 4051. I got the 4051 off some studio that was closing down in Connecticut. When we first started this, it was like running around. I even bought wire from the guy."
