This was the first multitrack record you've done in a while.
Yeah, I've gotten really into recording live to 2-track. I call it the "Tube-o-Sonic Insta-Mirror Process", since "live to 2-track" sounds boring. I take my quarter-inch mix deck, which is a beautiful old Ampex 351, and record straight to that, with everyone playing at once.
Tell me more about the 351. What was it used for, originally?
The 351 was kind of the standard professional tape deck in the late fifties, early sixties. It's just a regular tube machine that runs at fifteen ips. There were other brands, but this one was the average — the Ford of tape machines. When I bought mine I just wanted an analog mix deck, since I do all my multitracking on digital — I'd been using the original ADATs, and now I've upgraded to the HD24 — and I was just looking for something colorful to make up for the fact that my tracking medium was so plain and bland. And the 351, it's alive. Every time you listen to it, it sounds slightly different, and it gives you these beautiful degrees of saturation and distortion. By taking the same exact mix and printing it slightly louder, you can give it a whole different character.
So then you decided to bypass the digital gear completely?
Well, I wanted to try to make an entirely analog recording, but I couldn't do a multitrack recording because I didn't have the equipment. So I started thinking about my favorite recordings from the era when people couldn't multitrack. I had always been fascinated with the processes used in the mid- and late-fifties especially, like at Bradley's in Nashville — Patsy Cline — or the classic jazz recordings where you could hear the sound of the room, and that kind of electrical energy that people have when they're actually standing around playing and listening together. The thing about live to 2-track that's most special to me is that my job, when I'm mixing something like that, takes place in the exact same period of time in which the musicians are playing. So it freezes that moment as an absolutely coherent piece.
I was surprised, when I first saw you do it, that it's not like you just set everything up, press record and wait for the song to end. You're riding faders, you're adjusting effects...
It's exactly like mixing multitrack, except that whereas with multitrack you can second-guess yourself, in live to 2-track you just have to just do it, you have to just trust your ears in that moment. You do a certain amount of setting up, creating this sonic environment that you're going to be putting onto tape, and then you take things again and again. It's the way they used to do it in the olden days.
It must have taken a ton of preproduction, especially with the setups where there'd be a live combo, an orchestra, and a vocalist.
It was very complicated. They were using fewer microphones and fewer preamps, but the preparation all went into the arrangement, and the placement of the few microphones, and of course, having the musicians that were best suited for the job. I think that the reason I'm charmed by the fifties, especially, is that it was an era when musicianship and hi-fi tube technology were coming together very nicely. Multitracking wasn't standard yet, and musicians were still depending on listening to each other.
Like in those beautiful early George Jones records you played me.
Exactly. You can tell those are live vocals, you can hear that things aren't absolutely controlled, and you get a palpable sense of the depth of the music. When I'm recording to 2-track, I'm trying to transport everyone back to that era.
That's one of the things that I really like about your recordings. Even when you're multitracking, your records don't sound at all modern to me — in fact, they sound like a blast from the past, or some weird alternate past that never was.
My obsession with tape delays is probably a big part of that. Like the Echoplex — it warbles, and it distorts, and you have to be really careful with it because if you gain it up too much it'll do terrible things to the sibilance in a vocal. But I adore it, because working in digital, tape delays are a great way to put that gooey kind of analog life back in. You don't have to use a slap-back, Elvis kind of sound. In fact, I've hardly used any digital effects for years now — every effect I use I just hand-create with tape delays and spring reverbs. Just by adjusting how close or far away you put the echo or how much it's regenerating, or what the tone of the echo is, or how much you're saturating it or not, there are so many flavors... it's just endless. A trick I use a lot is to take an element and run it through the Echoplex, then print it directly back onto the HD24, and replace the original track with this analog, distorted sound.
So you're not even using it as a delay?
Yeah, I'm just using it for the character. But when I'm tracking to the digital system, I try to track with a little extra goo in there anyway. I've got a bunch of old tube preamps, which distort very smoothly and gradually, and there are levels of saturation that, to the average listener, don't sound like distortion necessarily. They just give a kind of a warmth to vocals, so that even when someone's singing quieter, somehow the bass of it comes forward in a way that's very intimate, that same kind of strange hyperintimacy you might have heard in recordings of Bobby Vinton or Johnny Mathis, things like that.
Do you think the preamp matters more than the microphone?
They're all part of the same instrument, in the same way that an electric guitar and an amplifier are part of the same instrument. One microphone might sound terrible with an exquisite preamp, but through a cheaper one it sounds perfect.
What's the mostly unlikely chain you've found that really works?
Well, as far as unlikely goes you're usually talking about really cheap, stupid microphones. I can pretty much say that the most unlikely sound I've ever gotten is through a tiny Silvertone microphone, which is one of my very favorites. I've used it on vocals, on drums, even on the upright bass.
What preamp did you use?
I've had really good luck with cheap microphones and my Drawmer 1960 compressor. It's a hybrid of IC- based preamps and some tube gain stages, and I love it. It's just so easy to use, and so flexible — you can utterly squash things to hell, you can completely distort stuff, but you can also get a really nice, pristine sound. It was the center of my whole system when I first started recording. And it's the very best for all those weird, old microphones that apparently have no fidelity, like the Shure 55, which is the Elvis mic, or that Buck Rogers-looking EV 664.
Why use those mics?
Well, if you've tried to make your acoustic guitar or electric guitar or drums have the same sonic qualities that you hear in the room by using proper-sounding microphones, what you have is a nice, semi-realistic representation of the sound that just gets denser as you pile more and more things on there. So if you use something that actually gives you a less realistic presentation of the sound for the vocal, it can just cut through better. Now, I'm not talking about the really tiny, distorted, tinny-sounding voices...
"I'm singing to you from 1925!"
Yeah. Although I love that kind of stuff, too, but the Silvertone, when it's gained up properly, there is a realism to the sound that is bizarre, it freaks me out how right it sounds, because if you just listen to it all by itself you think, "Oh my God, that's so weird sounding." Quite often, people will just put up what they think is their best microphone for a vocal, and then they'll just EQ the shit out of it to try to make it have that sort of narrow sound, and this is just a different approach that's, uh, less expensive. It's more fun because you can have more of the things for less money, and you don't have to fetishize something that costs a ton. There are so many cheap pieces of junk that are truly musical and alive.
Like your Maze.
Oh, the Maze! The Maze, it's a black spring reverb unit with one knob, and it's just the darkest, creepiest- sounding reverb I've ever heard in my life. They were going to throw it in the garbage at the local community radio station.
In general, you don't tend to have the stuff that's the most expensive or famous, you have things that kind of fell by the wayside.
Yeah, like my Shure and Oktava ribbon mics. I guess the exceptions are the 1176s, which aren't the most expensive thing at all, actually they're kind of common, but they're sort of up to a certain standard that everyone thinks is good. I have two of those, and I have this Studer 169.
But still, it's a ten-channel board. It's not a giant console.
It's more like the kind of thing you'd use for broadcast or for recording an orchestra, where you'd be going directly onto two tracks — it doesn't come with individual channel outputs. But I had my tech, Andy Barrett, build me a box, which tapped each of the channels so I could use them as individual preamps. Half of the microphone preamps I needed to track the basics for the Okkervil record I got off the Studer. And then, when it came time to mix, I kept most of the crucial stuff — drums, acoustic guitar, and the vocals, and the electric piano — in the Studer, and then I had my Mackie 1604 working as a sidecar. I took the output from the Mackie and I put it into the two line input channels on the Studer, so I used the Studer as my master stereo mix.
You've made some great-sounding records on just the Mackie, though.
