Who are you? Where did you come from?
Well about twelve years ago, coming into San Francisco, I was interning at Toast Studios, where the Breeders [Last Splash], R.E.M. and Neil Young did records. It was this really dumpy, small studio south of Market, but it just had the cool vintage gear. Young, cool guys owned it and worked there, and because of that they got good projects. The indie bands came there because they were cheap and then the major label bands found out about it. I interned there and learned all the gear — I had no intention of producing or recording other bands. I literally only did it because the band that I was in, and still am in now [Halou], truly had a very unusual sound and it was very frustrating to try and convey something you're hearing in your head to somebody else who's trying to help technically. Even sometimes when you'll bring in a reference, and be like, "No, no. I actually do want the guitars that high" and the guy looks at you like you're wrong, like they're not supposed to be that loud. "No, I want the vocals distorted." "But it sounds wrong! People will think I'm a bad engineer! I can't put my name on this."
Those are usually the engineers that don't have projects coming to them. They just kind of work in a place and get projects.
Exactly. I had no intention of ever doing it for other people, but after a few sessions where I clearly wasn't able to get the sound that I was trying to get with another engineer at the helm, I realized I was going to have to learn how to do this. It's the only way around it. It was a studio with a really long hallway and everybody worked with the doors open. You could hear everybody else's stuff, which was kind of odd. Whenever anybody walked from the big room they would walk by me and hear my stuff in there. I guess I fooled them into thinking that I knew what I was doing. People would walk by and they'd always ask, "Hey, what are you working on?" There were a lot of other people that knew far more than I did technically, but the studio would give projects to me even though I probably didn't deserve it, knowledge- wise or years of interning or any of that.
Well, you could make it sound good.
They were getting interns there that tell you every component of the microphone and why it's supposed to be better than this other one and I would just pick up one, pick up another and whichever one sounded good, I would use. Sometimes it would be the cheap, shitty one and I didn't know! It looked like some old, fucked up, garage microphone — turns out that's a Telefunken. I didn't realize those are supposed to be good. That's kind of how I started and then I ended up very quickly getting some good projects. Before this I had an ADAT, but I never really spent time in a real studio. I was working for Polygram at the time doing a part internship/part assistant for Verve (the jazz label). I was doing stuff for the alternative new music, but I was also an assistant for the guy in charge of Verve. I just got turned on to a lot of music during that period and got to work on some really amazing stuff at Toast. Really quickly that turned into mixing and producing and engineering stuff — I started getting offers. It would start with one guy — the normal guy who would be mixing was busy or out of town, so I'd sub in and do a good job and then quickly was getting to work with bands like Blackalicious and doing a lot of cool remix stuff for New Order or No Doubt.
How do projects like that end up in front of you?
Well, I worked really hard for that period of time. I would stay there overnight and read this stuff so that I could leapfrog above the other guys that were there. I was literally staying there overnight to learn the gear so that I knew all of it. I think the most important thing is that I used Pro Tools. All of the other recording school guys were tape-oriented guys. I had learned how to align the tape machine and use it, but all the projects that were coming through, people were wanting to use Pro Tools and here I was — the guy who didn't go to recording school but knew how to use Pro Tools. "We're going to give this gig to Count." This was early Pro Tools, so just simply knowing how to operate the computer was how I got a lot of the work. Also the guy that owned the studio, Philip Steir, was in a very good band called Consolidated. He was a really good schmoozer, so cool remixing stuff was coming his way once he stopped doing Consolidated. He did a couple of high profile remixes and he started using me to pose as engineer and mixer, and that's really how I was able to get good projects right off the bat. I heard in my head what I thought would sound cool and would do it. I think that I'm glad that I wasn't properly trained first and that I trained myself after the fact, because I think I might've gotten stuck doing things like looking at meters. I would chain three compressors together to get things to sound good and none of the other guys there would do something like that because that might've been looked down upon.
Nobody told you not to.
I just kept doing it and it sounded good. There were a couple of more experienced engineers that would come in and I'd ask them, "Hey, this isn't working. How do I get this to work?" I would play what I was working on and they would look around and they'd look at me like I was crazy.
What kind of recording projects have you worked on outside of remixing?
Blackalicious was a good one because it was my first hip-hop project to work with and I hadn't been around much until moving to California. I knew that there was good hip-hop out there, but I wasn't around it. It was a lucky thing because the Beastie Boys' manager also managed Blackalicious at the time. Money Mark was working in the big room while I was working in the little room and it turned out Blackalicious was doing a record and the manager was just sitting right there. Obviously they had been working with someone that didn't click. Blackalicious is a band — whenever people like things at a bright, sort of crisp level, they want the opposite. I love that! It's chunky as hell. They were looking for somebody that wasn't afraid. The manager just happened to be there talking about it and the studio owner was like, "You should go talk to Count."
Was that production or mixing?
It was engineering. They were producing their own stuff, because in the hip-hop world, whoever makes the beat is the producer. The recording session — you bring in a bassist or a vocalist, it's very much still the same. I'm producing this Galactic record and there's a lot of rappers on it — there are a lot of vocals and some of them are guys from Blackalicious — a lot of interesting guys. Rappers are still not used to being worked with in a studio. It's more like, "Yo, I need some cat to record me when I rap." They're not used to like, "Let's try this different delivery" or "Let's do a few more takes of that." It's a different world, but I'm lucky that I'm working with the guys that are cool — the rappers that really do try.
They seem open-minded and really, really creative.
Yeah, for sure. Even the good hip-hop — a lot of it is still not live. There's some good programming and some great rappers — but recording? The fun with guys like Blackalicious, Lyrics Born and DJ Shadow that I've been fortunate to be working with, is that these guys are all about learning the distinction between samples, programming and live performance and they're totally down to letting me do my thing and make the drums sound like they came from an old record. Blackalicious, for example, has this keyboard player, Herve Salters, who is just insane. He can play like a motherfucker, man. You record guys like that in really growly, nasty sound and it just sounds awesome. It has the vibe of an old record and it's the difference between getting that real performance, but the sound of the sample. I hear too many times where hip-hop groups will play with live musicians or try to record them and it's got to be all the way there. If it falls just a little short of sounding like hip-hop, like if the snare sounds like a rock snare, it simply kills it. As much as I love a live performance, that sound is not in the same vibe as the samples that you hear on really cool rap records. It's pointless.
How did you end up working with DJ Shadow?
We had done a couple of remixes because he needed help — actually doing a Radiohead remix. A good way to start out!
With you engineering for DJ Shadow?
Yes. Basically he used to work a certain way for ten years — his whole career — MPC and samples. Every sound comes from a sample and is meticulously placed in an interesting way. After ten years of that he'd go crazy. He's arguably made the definitive record for that style of music. All the critics and all the fans are [saying], "You've made the best record that could be made in this style." Why would you keep doing it? If you're a remotely creative, open-minded person, you'll probably want to move on after somebody said that and that's exactly what he was feeling. He needed to find somebody that was working in a different way — just technically. Luckily I had already worked with Blackalicious and Lyrics Born, and those were part of his crew. He records a lot of live stuff, but it doesn't sound like live. It sounds like the cool samples that he samples. Plus, just to set up, a lot of it was just getting him set up to work with the same setup I had, getting the new Pro Tools system and start programming beats using software samplers triggering them with a MIDI interface, just basically getting a totally new studio set up.
He's using Pro Tools then?
Yeah, Pro Tools and I got him using the Native Instruments stuff. He's using his MPC strictly to trigger beats. I remember the first time watching him do it. It was like watching a kid learn how to ride his bike. Then in about ten seconds he had already mastered it. It was just like, I was just sitting there going, "Am I really teaching DJ Shadow how to program? No, this can't be happening." Then like twenty seconds later he's amazing.
I really like The Private Press. He's just sonically amazing. His ears are probably better than anyone I've ever met, including myself, by far. He hears details that I don't even hear. I miss shit all the time that he'd be like, "Hey, there's a pop there, there's some hiss there or something." He can hear everything.
He's been doing that for years — focusing in.
There are things that I'll put in — a plug-in that might delay a sound by literally two samples and I'll forget to put on the delay compensation or something — some setting will get screwed up and I won't hear it and he can hear the samples in delay. I'll just look at him like, "I don't want to say you can't be hearing that because I know you can." I've worked with him enough. I'll turn it off. I'll make him close his eyes and I'll turn it off and he'll be like, "Yeah, it's fixed now." He's not just bullshitting. It's great working with him. The best thing, I think, about the people that I've been working with over the last three years is that we don't define roles, and I really try to make sure that that's something that doesn't happen. People have hired me in the past to mix things and I'll take out sections of the songs and add them and add synth parts or stuff and they like it. I realize that every ten times I do that maybe one time I might get a, "Hmmm, we're not too sure about that thing you did." I just tell people up front that that's going to happen. I'll just do what I think sounds good. I'm not going to get bent out of shape if you don't use my idea. We're all producing it together. It's ridiculous to think that I'm the producer and you're the band. It's your record. It's the same with mixing. Yeah, the mix credit should say, "Count" because they're not actually mixing, but to think that they somehow have no say in what their mixes sound like is kind of arrogant. But with that said, I don't let anyone in the room when I'm mixing because...
