You have a pretty focused stylistic niche. Why?
When I started making records it wasn't because I turned on the radio and liked what I heard. I started making records because I was listening to old records and they sounded great. It's not really an agenda or an angle as much as it is just kind of being honest with ourselves. In articles, people say, "Aren't you just doing something that's been done before?" or "Isn't this some kind of retro fad?" First, we're not making enough money for it to be called a fad, that's for sure. We're just trying to be tasteful and try to make the kind of records that sound good and feel good. If they sound old, that's great — I dig old records. It's just hard not to read into it more than that and try to put some kind of politics behind it. But the truth is we dig old records, so we're going to try to make old records.
Can you tell me about your studio?
We built the studio in an old house in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We're not really open to the public. We do some recordings for people, either because they offer us a bunch of money to do it or because they're friends of friends. Luckily we're able to get by that way, because it's still a rough time for recording studios. We've done some stuff for Mark Ronson [Tape Op #105], who's a kind of a DJ/producer. He just did this record with Amy Winehouse as the singer, and we did a lot of tracks for him for that. We did a couple commercials. But for the most part we do our own thing. We finally got to the point where we're doing enough business to where if somebody calls and says, "I want to record my rock band, and it's a shitty band but I can give you $200," I can say, "No." My partner Neal Sugarman and I wear a lot of hats. One day we're dealing with layout of artwork and dealing with paying rent and collecting from a distributor, arranging a string section and booking shows and going on tour. We're doing everything and there are only two of us. And playing — I kind of started playing bass guitar because the bass guitar player that I was using before was too busy and I just wanted someone to be in the background. It's definitely kind of hard to produce yourself sometimes, but with the bass it's not as hard as being a singer or something like that.
The liner notes for Dap Dippin' with... say that was recorded "in Duke's basement." Is that the same place, before it found a name?
"Duke" was Duke Amayo, who is lead singer from Antibalas. In Williamsburg, he used to have a place called Afrospot, named after a Nigerian club. Upstairs, we'd have shows and concerts, and he would have kung fu classes and everything else you could imagine, and then in the basement they built a recording studio. It was a real low-ceiling, concrete, fucked up basement. So we recorded Dap Dippin'... in there, and I'm not real happy with how that record sounds. I don't mind the roughness, but there's a certain narrowness and midranginess to the sound just because of that basement, you know? I mean, you have 6 1/2 foot ceilings and concrete floors and stone walls — there's only so much you can do to try to open up the sound.
Especially considering that drums are a big part of your sound.
The basement definitely was not the best place to record drums. I think one of the things I learned was to kind of let instruments blend themselves as much as possible. If I have a horn section, I'm going to use one mic. If the trumpet player is too loud, I'm going to tell him to back up. That's just how we do it, and it just comes out to be a more natural blend. And I find the same thing with drums, too. I use very few mics on drums, usually one or two mics, sometimes three, very rarely four, but I never close mic the set. The thing about mic'ing it a little further away from it is you can get a much more natural sound, but it's also much more challenging in a room that doesn't sound good. If you're recording drums, I would say that 90% of the sound is the drummer, first of all. If you have a great drummer, they're going to sound great. That's a huge part of the sound, and then after that, you gotta have a good sounding drum set — not necessarily an expensive drum set or a vintage drum set — it can be a $20 drum set from the pawnshop — but if you tune it right and muffle it right and whoever is playing it has the right touch... The point is to get all that stuff happening before you put up a mic. And then once you put up a mic you can try fifty different mics, and once you find the best sounding mic, you can try a thousand different positions. Lately I've been really into getting a mic and putting it on the ground two to three feet back, between the hi-hat and the bass drum — about two feet away and to the side of the bass drum, pointed up at the snare from underneath. That's most of the sound that we have on this record. The best bass drum sound I get is when I don't put a mic on it, you know? It sounds more natural. I used a lot of real trashy microphones. I had this Akai mic — just a Dictaphone mic with a quarter-inch end on it, and I used that for most of the bass drum stuff for the last few years. And I had a lot of Radio Shack microphones, too.
Are you still using them?
On this record [Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, Naturally], not so much. I got a couple of nice mics that are sounding really good right now. I definitely have much better gear now than I did five or six years ago, and I think that helps a lot. More than anything I think it's just kind of like a learning curve. Every recording session we do, I learn something — of my approach to recording, one is just not to trust anything but your ears and not be biased by what usually works, what's supposed to work, what somebody told you or what the magazine said works. Sometimes you spend a long time doing something really clever and you really want it to work — that's not just recording, that's musically too. Sometimes I'll do some real complicated horn arrangement or something, I'll really think I've masterminded something out, and I'll be up three nights in a row working on it and have this huge chart, and somebody will say, "Hey, wouldn't it be better if the horns just went, 'BLAP! HARUMPH! WAP!'?" I think a real big part of being able to wear those different hats and being able to make records that I want to listen to is to have a little perspective to stop and say, "You're right. You know what? Your idea is better. It's simpler, you didn't spend all night on it, you didn't invest what I invested into it, but it's going to sound better."
It sounds like you have the same philosophy for both composition and engineering.
It's definitely the same stuff.
So what's the second part of your technique?
One of the things about tracking a lot of instruments live and never having more than one track of drums is the sounds that you get — if the trumpet is too loud, there's nothing you can do about it later. You can't really "fix it in the mix," as they say. I record to tape as opposed to Pro Tools or whatever, and we actually do a lot of splicing and flying things in and stuff with the tape machine. But the general approach is that I'm not going to be smarter when we mix this record than I am the day we cut it, you know? Instead of having an attitude like, "Well, let's open that up and put it on another track." I'm not really about that. I'm like, "Look, if it sounds better, let's record over the other thing. If it doesn't sound better, let's not record it." For the most part, we try to come into the studio with a musical idea. The idea of "Let's do 64 tracks and put each note on a different track and record the solo five times and we'll put it together later — and we'll paste it and fly it around and if it's not good, I'll copy it from the other verse" — instead of that approach I go in there with musicians that are going to play a great fucking solo when I hit record. You hit record, they bring the goods and that's the record. All the greatest drum tracks I've recorded have been because I had great drummers playing great things. I've definitely learned a lot about mic'ing and getting things to sound better, but I really gotta give the credit where the credit is due.
