So let's talk a little history. How did you get here? You've now built two major recording studios for yourself to work in. The first was up in the Bay Area. That one came out of your first band's record deal, called T-Ride?
[laughter] Yes. Yes, it was.
That was in the early nineties.
Yes, I think that album came out in '91. The whole history is that I started out as a drummer. I started off playing very young and there were not many folks to play with. I wanted to play songs. Solo drums are not very fun. So, I started to learn other instruments. I learned guitar and a little bass, started to figure out how to record stuff so I could actually play songs. I started off with just two home cassette decks and a little mixer I bought at Radio Shack. I would record music on one cassette deck, plug it into my mixer, plug an instrument in, blend them together and record it to the other cassette deck. Just go back and forth until you had all the parts and could not hear the first thing you recorded anymore. I then made the giant leap to a Tascam 244 PortaStudio and used that for a long time. Recorded demos for bands at school and recorded my own music and spent a couple years working on that. I never really did the thing of interning at another studio. I briefly did that for a while but just wasn't interested. I really wanted to learn to do things my own way and getting people coffee and doughnuts was not helping me, so I just bypassed that whole thing. I just put the hours in myself making a lot of really bad recordings for a long time and just experimenting to come up with methods and an approach that worked for me and made sense.
It is a logical leap that you would want to work in a room that you built, unlike some producers that can just jump around.
I don't know how they do it. I can't bounce around studios. I have a complete loss of perspective and it can make things very difficult. I have done it at times as long as I can finish it at my own place and mix in a familiar environment then I'll survive. So there has been a long progression of studios. The first one was in a friend's parent's garage and then after that it was in a small little office space and then to another office space. After that was when the band actually got a record deal. The early studios were built to do demos for ourselves and we would record other stuff to pay the bills. We signed with a record company that agreed to give us the budget and improve the equipment in our studio so we could record it ourselves. I bought a vintage 8038 Neve console that had 32 1081s. I was 19 years old at the time. People said that Neves were great so I bought one — never used one before. Probably the smartest purchase I have ever made in my life without knowing it. I bought an Ampex MM1200 and a Studer 800 MKIII. The two machines that I still use today. Bought a U47 tube mic... just a handful of high-end stuff.
Those are some good decisions. You still use all the same stuff today save for the Neve console.
I still have and use all those pieces. With the exception of the tape machines, everything has gone up in value.
Absolutely. So that was in Mountain View?
When we got the record deal we moved out of the office space and into our own space. We actually built a place from scratch, invested some real money in making a nice studio. That was in East Palo Alto. We finished off the album there and had that place for a couple years. The band then had to go on tour. The studio didn't function well without me there to run it so we ended up closing the studio and putting all the gear in storage for about a year. Finished off touring. We started the process of making another record and ultimately didn't finish it, but set up the studio again in Redwood City. That was one of the best locations, the one just previous to this. It was very utilitarian. No frills. Just threw up a couple of walls and called it a control room and started recording shit. It was messy and smelly, but we made great sounding recordings there. All of the first round of records that helped move things along — the first Third Eye Blind record, the first two Smashmouth records — were all done in that studio. I was there for quite a while from 1994 to 2000.
Looks like you have been doing a lot of work around here.
We just did a huge cleaning and overhaul on this place. I've been acquiring some new stuff so I had to reconfigure how all these racks were and try to get everything situated in a way that was going to be manageable.
You have a design scheme in here where these racks behind the console can be moved around, out into the live room near the drums if need be. You like having your pres near the instruments?
Yeah. That's still gonna happen with these racks. Leaving them really modular with an open structure has been really great. I can just swap stuff and I don't have to re-solder anything. It is all on these Elco connectors.
So do you still like moving your mic pres out by the drum kit for tracking? Were you noticing losses?
Yeah. That's an idea that people have had for a long time. I think the first Neve console that was built like that was for Air studios in Montserrat. The console eventually ended up at A&M studios. That was the first one that they did where the actual preamplifier was in the sound room with the musicians. That was built in the late seventies.
It makes sense, sending balanced line level back. It's going to be less susceptible to losses and interference.
Yeah, because of the higher impedances — running long, long distances of cable. The type of signal that is traveling through the cable is more susceptible to the capacitance of the wires. It is definitely a noticeable difference. We've got a good 40 or 50 feet by the time it gets to the console. Then you put another 20-foot cable on there. That's 60 feet of mic cable before it hits a preamp. It is very noticeable. I got these about a year ago [pointing to the satellite Neve pres], but since then they have now come out with satellite mic pre version of the mic pre that is in the 1073, the full Class A ones.
What else have you been building in here? I see you put in a hardwood floor. It is so much liver in here than before. What did it used to be?
Just carpet. It was really dead when I first moved in here. They had the floor completely deadened. The ceiling completely deadened and curtains available on every wall. It was the biggest, driest room.
What is the history of this room?
It was turned into a recording studio in 1967 [Crystal Sound]. It was built by Andrew Berliner, a really brilliant engineer and designer of studio equipment. He built the console and custom electronics for all the tape machines. He built most all the equipment that was used in the studio from scratch. The studio very quickly got a reputation for being one of the best sounding facilities in L.A. and it recorded just about any of the top entertainers of its day from the late sixties through the seventies — all kinds of artists: Stevie Wonder, the Doors, Jackson 5, Barbara Streisand, James Taylor and War.
It is a huge room. What are the dimensions?
It is about 45 feet and almost 70 feet across. The ceiling is 17 feet high.
Was it affiliated with any labels?
No. They were very independent.
Have you gone back and listened to any of those records now that you know they were done here?
Yeah. Absolutely. I have listened to Songs in the Key of Life and Talking Book, the Stevie Wonder records. Some of them you can distinctly hear the sound of this room on the recordings. On Talking Book, "Big Brother", there is a bunch of percussion on that song that sounds so much like this room, so much like how they had it treated, this big dry room. A lot of the horn sounds too. It really sounds like this room on Songs in the Key of Life.
In an old Tape Op interview with John Fischbach [Tape Op #21], who used to run this room, he talks about the horn sounds and how they faced them against the wall. It must have been this wall here.
Yeah. He came here and told that same story.
What a trip. Let's look at some of the toys you have lying around here. You are amassing quite a cool collection of stuff.
I started collecting stuff about ten years ago and anybody that does this knows it's an addiction. You don't stop. There are probably thirty some guitar amps, maybe twenty guitars, ten basses, a Yamaha grand piano, all kinds of drums sets — huge variety of kicks and snares, maybe three or four different sets of toms, stacks of cymbals — piles of guitar pedals. Tons and tons of stuff to play with. Synthesizers, Mini-Moog, Micro-Moog, Prophet 5, Korg MS20, Clavinet. Just tons of stuff.
You have an amazing collection of upright pianos in here.
Yeah. Actually, those aren't mine. Those are on loan from Jon Brion [Tape Op #18]. That Ivers & Pond piano is the best sounding piano I have ever heard in my life. It's amazing.
I know you love fuzz pedals. Any new stomp boxes?
Umm. Let's see. The last thing that I got that has been used on everything is this Boss parametric EQ pedal, to be able to dial in and get the crunch just right on distorted guitars, to fiddle with the character of the guitar before it hits the amp.
You like to EQ guitars in this way rather than at the console.
Well, this changes the way the amp responds. It changes the way it distorts. Hard to find though. They don't make it anymore.
How about microphones? You got a lot of classics as well as quirky ones. I remember you got a great distorted high-hat sound on our record, on "Wasted Days". What mic was that?
That was an RCA 77, an old ribbon mic. Let's see. Lately, I have been into these old AKG D19s, a real popular overhead mic that the Beatles were into. It's a dynamic mic, just a trashy, really bright sounding dynamic mic. I have been really into these old Western or Northern Electric 633As. They're called "salt-shaker" mics. They are the brightest dynamic mic I have ever heard. You can put it up next to a 251 and the ELAM sounds dull compared to this. It's crazy. It's amazing on snare drums. SM7 on vocals wins most of the time. I've been really into Sony C37As. I've been into these little ECM50s, a little Sony lavaliere mic. I hang it on the batter side of the kick drum. There is a pair of U67s, a U47 tube, a 251. I have really been into figure 8 patterns lately for some reason. I am really excited about figure 8 mic'ing for drums. What I have been doing is putting a Coles [4038] on either side of the drum kit and putting the crash cymbals a lot higher, above the mics. So the front of the mic looks down and picks up the high hat, the toms, and the snare drum. The backside of the mic, on ribbon mics, usually has a slightly brighter, silkier sound. So that looks up at the crash cymbal. So you have one of these on each side. The separation is as good as if you overdubbed the left side of the kit and right side separately. It is so dramatically wide, because the node of the pattern is looking across the drum kit. It picks up nothing right here (pointing to the opposite side of the kit), so it picks up none of the crash cymbal, very little of the ride cymbal, and tons of stuff below it. It has changed my whole mic'ing life. It is amazing. I'll never go back and do it the other way.
