Where did this space come from?
This space was the ballroom [The Sun Room] of the hotel, in which they had a club two stories down — this is its own building. It's actually separate from the Edison Hotel. They used to snake cables up here and start doing some recordings of the jazz greats that were playing in this club. So then a company, National, back in the very early '60s, took the space over and they had the control room up high, ala Abbey Road. Then it got taken over in the '80s and they turned it into an SSL studio.
Did you have to redesign the studio?
Well, I've had two different recording studios and both of them were RF nightmares. So, I was determined to make sure the Edison worked. So I had Dave Amels come in with me and we did some tests, and we discovered that they had basically used their original cabling. They had some problems with a high and low end roll-off with their mic lines going back into the control room. So we rebuilt it. I had an engineer from Florida, Ross Alexander [Synergistic Systems], and Dave Amels rebuild the studio.
Did you keep original floors and things like that?
We used the money that we had to make it as professional as possible.
What's downstairs from it now?
There's a restaurant downstairs and a club below that.
Is there any room at the Edison to build a live chamber?
Yes there is, and it's very tempting to do that. Their plates were good, so I just left it at that — all this great stuff, like all this old keyboard stuff and all the mic stands were basically given away.
Some of the musical equipment was left behind — there's a tack piano, celeste, the vibes.
Yes, we inherited all of that great equipment and we use it all the time. I work a lot with Dave Baron [Edison Music Corp.] on his television music. A lot of it is period recording, so he hires me to make something like a '50s thing, or a '40s thing, or a '60s thing. Dave is probably the best going, in terms of being able to quickly make music that works very well on television, and he understands the market to a high degree. He is very impressive with how quick he does what he does. So, the studio has a consistent flow of that type of thing. If he's looking for a certain type of recording or a certain type of sound, he'll come to me and I'll do that for him, because a lot of times everything is done by, "It should sound like that but not be exactly like that" — and he calls me in and I have a vocabulary to help him do this.
Is that kind of fun in a way? A fun exercise?
Oh I love doing that. I just did an ELO thing that was great. The thing that Dave always reminds me is that with all the legal divisions, I shouldn't get that close to the original material. Dave was telling me he did a version of "Tax Man", for example, and they couldn't use the bass.
I see a lot of older recording equipment here. What about new gear?
I have nothing against and use a variety of new equipment. However, it seems now that due to the digital recording with Pro Tools, the companies that sell audio equipment are using misleading advertising by using such terms as "warm" and "vintage". They are now selling semi-pro equipment, which is now their clientele. The equipment on its own will not make a good recording. A good recording is made using a good engineer with good equipment.
I see that you have a lot of esoteric microphones. Could you please tell us what they are?
To start with, I have a collection of RCA 10001 microphones. It's a cardioid ribbon mic. When I had purchased the Olympic Recording console [the studio which the Stones, The Beatles and everyone else used], Keith Grant, who was responsible for Olympic Studio, had these mics and told me he would never be able to do the recordings he makes without them. They are rare and when in good shape, they are best microphones I have ever heard. I use them for a variety of reasons — in some cases, lead vocals, in other cases, "Beatle-y" sounding string sections, and many other orchestral sessions like winds, flutes, etc.
That's curious, I've never even heard of those. You don't see them too often. They didn't make many of them. [Less than 500. -LC]
It's just a great match for these 10001 microphones because the room sounds so good orchestrally. With input from Dave Amels, I have learned a great deal about using certain microphones with certain mic inputs. He has stressed the importance of this in getting good recordings.
But you plugged the right mics in. With the right inputs.
I hope so. I started out as a musician and the reason I ended up engineering was because I was always bitching about the sound of the recordings. This was a long time ago — about thirty years ago. All these guys would get pissed off at me and say, "Why don't you go ahead and do it yourself?" I had absolutely no electronics background — I just knew what I liked to hear. I used to believe that if I used a pair of inexpensive speakers, if I could beat that speaker, the recording would sound good on every type of system. Eventually over time, I learned that this was bullshit. I've also learned that the acoustics of the live room and the control room are absolutely mandatory to be able to comprehend and make an analysis of what the microphones really sound like. In my opinion, if any recording engineer makes claims that recording is easy, simply by having the right equipment — to me, it's always a struggle. In the end, when you do find things that work, the best thing to do is try to apply it with different situations. I've also, in the past few years, cut back on the amount of equipment that is in the control room. All the outside engineers that have come to the Edison and seen the console have no way to understand how I use a console that only has 26 mic inputs, and I would answer, "Why and how could you possibly need more?" Most of these engineers then, having used the Helios, come away agreeing with that philosophy. In conjunction, I use ATC speakers. They are beautiful sounding speakers, and even though they are a tad on the bright side, the mid range is very understandable. You can really hear the differences in a subtle way between recordings, especially masked sources such as detailed reverb and music that seems a bit hidden in the mix. At this point, my attitude is to do whatever it takes to make the recording as I need to hear it, and keep the technical and electrical engineers separate from the balance engineers. I have seen many situations when balance engineers have a small knowledge of electronics. There is no way that that small information could possibly beat having a fully trained electrical engineer who makes all the decisions on technical issues.
