Tell me a little bit about the history of Excello Recording.
Excello was founded in 1992 by Dann Baker and Bruce Hathaway [Love Camp 7], Chad Swanberg [Halcion], Gil Shuster [Kenny Young and the Eggplants] and an architect named Tony Daniels [who incidentally just won an award for his eco-friendly design of the new Brooklyn Rail yard out at Coney Island]. Excello was founded on the idea that it would always be a studio for the creative projects of the partnership, and would kind of earn its day-to-day expenses by being rented out by engineers and producers and bands to record their own projects.
Does that still hold true these days, 13 years later?
It is still kind of true, but a lot of water and people have passed beneath Excello's bridge. We have continually maintained and upgraded the studio and have never advertised anywhere. We did get a website up.
Was the Calrec console here from the very beginning?
When the studio started we had a 24x16 Trident 65. It was great and a lot of records were mixed on it. We got rid of it when we really needed more inputs and when the thing was passing too much DC onto the fader rails. When ADATs and DA88s were everywhere and Pro Tools just busted out with Digi001, we bought two Lynx modules and installed them so we could lock our Studer A800 to whichever format we wanted. That sure made that 24x16 Trident feel small in a big hurry. We were looking around for a Neve or an API a few years ago and that was pretty discouraging because they were so expensive. You just never seem to find that amazing deal on gear when you are out there looking for it. But, we kept plugging away and putting out the word to different equipment brokers. We explained who we were and what we did here and some of the records that were made here, and just kinda said, "These are the parameters of what we are looking for, so if anything comes along that seems like a good value and feels like it might fit with our room, please give us a shout." About eight months later we got a call from a guy in Montreal named Milko. He said he had just purchased three Calrec consoles from the BBC and was going over to decommission them. He'd give us a call when they were shipped to his place in Canada. We said great. Another month went by and we get another call and sent our then and since departed partner Bryan Martin up to check things out. He came back with pictures and specs. It looked awesome with real beefy, all-modular construction and the specs were just ridiculous... P&G faders, Lundahl transformers, five power supplies, everything transformer balanced. It was commissioned by the BBC and built to BBC specs by AMS-owned Calrec. It has a lot of Neve feeling genealogy. It has 40 channels, eight stereo buses, six auxes, four compressors and four gates built in, plus another 18 channels in an aux mixer that go straight to the stereo bus. We love it. It has tons of headroom and EQs that are real quiet yet don't crap out when you use them aggressively.
So you were able to get a board from the BBC?
Yeah. I have heard that they regularly cycle their gear, like every ten years for something like this. I guess they can afford not to be "sentimental" about a big, lovely piece of transformer-balanced audio processing device. We, on the other hand, take great care to see that it is happy. This is for two reasons. One is that it's the responsible thing to do and the other more compelling reason is that we are still paying for it. And if it ain't happy, reliable and free of gremlins, the studio is gonna end up eating time and that will help us not in our endeavor to make the old lease payment at the first of the month.
And the visiting engineers love it too...
You bet. I have to be honest. When Bryan came back and said he had perhaps found something promising and that it was a Calrec console, I just kinda nodded my head politely and thought, "Who now and the what what." I called two friends about it, Eric Amble and Greg Gordon, and they got pretty excited on the phone and Eric gave me a brief history of the company. The Soundfield microphone, their psycho-acoustic technology and the fact that the same company owned them that owned Neve, AMS. Anyhow, I loved it by the second session I did on it and Greg Gordon, Bob Weston, Paul Kolderie and Max Hayes have all used it and had very nice things to say.
One of the other nice features of the studio is the huge tracking room. It's the type of space that has become increasingly rare in New York City. I know the Afro Pop band Antibalas came to Excello because you could accommodate their two main requirements — a 12-piece tracking session and recording to analog tape.
The main room is 40x25x17 with two skylights, plus there are two smaller rooms with tielines. I always tell people something that Daniel Lanois once said in an interview I read. To paraphrase, he said that a large physical space is not only about the sound you get, it can also be about the kind of performance it promotes. Being able to stretch out and walk around and swing your arms or a bottle of Jack can be a very good thing for the musicians while you are watching the VU meters bounce and click on the pins. That being said, it is also great to be able to stick a mic on a Starbird mic stand and crank that sucker 15 or so feet up into the top room corner and avail yourself of that woofy, explosive, bass trap kind of sound to mix in on the drum kit. Time aligning with Pro Tools has made that kind of stuff way, way easier to do. No more B output from the sync head into the delay and then tweaking it back on top of the drums. With DAWs it's 'nudge city' and a ten-year-old can do it.
Did Antibalas track with all 12 members in the big room?
Yes — they did four horns, two guitars, bass, drums, percussion, keys and voice. Actually I think that is 11, but they had two bass players that switched on and off, so that was the 12th member. We have done lots of big acoustic sessions here. Washtub groups with a saw player. Old-timey stuff with banjo, lap steel and uke[lele]. We did a big session a few years ago that was really interesting with two Aeolian pipers, vibes, two acoustic guitars, drums, Hammond Organ, upright bass and Michael Brecker playing sax. The group was called Celtic Tales. They were all such slamming musicians. We pretty much just kept our mouths shut and made sure nothing fucked up.
How did you acquire the EMT reverb plates from the Hit Factory?
We have two plates. An EMT 140, which is a tube plate with mono in/stereo out, and we have an EMT Echo Plate. It is solid state and stereo in and out. We got both plates from Richie Kessler when he closed down Platinum Island in Manhattan. He told me that he bought the EMT 140 from the original Hit Factory, which got me kind of excited. We bought a lot of gear from Richie and he has really been an encouraging force through this whole shift in the recording business that has occurred over the last four or five years. He has encouraged my wife Janie and I to hang in there. He knows how cool Excello is and sees the value of a large tracking room with analog gear in NYC. This place is so relaxed and filled with so much energy and creativity. One of our mottoes is, "Casual, but never unprofessional." If you can describe a sound with words, we can generally make it happen. Chances are it will exceed your expectations. We do it all the time.
What kind of tape machines does Excello have?
We have a Studer A800 2" 24-track, an Ampex ATR 102 1/2" 2-track, a Studer A80 1/2" 4-track and a Studer A80RC 1/4" 2-track.
All functional?
