So what was the gig you just had? Was that a Styrenes gig?
Umm, no. I also play bass in a swinging bachelor-type band. It's a nice, easy gig and I just like to play. We did a CD that just came out and that's nice too. Then, last night, we did a Styrenes session at a 24 track studio here.
No way.
We did four new songs.
Who all's in the band at this point?
Well, Mike Hudson [of the Pagans] is still singing with us. The bass player 's Al Margolis and the guitar player's a friend of mine who I'd played with his band in Germany and he came in for the week so he played guitar with us. That was piano, guitar, bass, drums and vocals.
Did you have a good time with it?
We had a great time. It was a good, hard session. One of the problems that I have leading Styrenes is that I play the piano and that means that most small studios don't have pianos. If I want to play a piano that's got any kind of tone to it I have to go to an expensive studio. That's okay. There's a 24 track here, it's a big studio, and the rate's $65 an hour including engineer. You know, we cut four songs last night and we're gonna have to redo the vocals, but essentially we're almost done. The session and tape, together, cost me about $900. It's not bad.
It should sound like a piano, not like some strange, muffled, over EQ'd thing.
Right.
Well, this conversation's mostly gonna be about the ...Different Times CD. It mentioned in the liner notes that you pulled up in the micro-bus with all this recording gear. Was that in '74?
Actually in '73.
What kind of stuff did you have back then? I think a lot of our readers can't understand that you couldn't even get 4 track cassette decks back then.
Right! At that time what I would have brought was a tube reel to reel deck, º" 7Ω ips. A cassette deck. Four small mixers. Cables. Mostly lots of microphones and cables; with all that crud you've got to patch it all. That's where it starts to get weird. We used to use Shure Vocalmasters as recording mixers and one of the advantages to that particular unit was you didn't need to have speakers plugged into it. Most PA amplifiers, if you don't have a load on it, it blows out. The Vocalmaster was always cool because you didn't need to have speakers plugged into it.
So you could just use it as a mixer.
Like you said, people forget that those things didn't exist. A board that had line outs was unusual.
Would you record a lot of stuff as a practice session and a home recording session?
What I liked to do a lot was to double-tape microphones [together] so that the band would play as if they were regularly practicing and not really pay attention to the recording and not try to worry about the sound. Then there'd be a second microphone that was essentially taped right to it. That feed would go into the recording. That way, if the singer needed to get on top of the microphone for rehearsal, he could do so without blowing up the recording.
So you would have that running to a separate mixer and have that going to your reel to reel.
You see that in older films of bands playing where they used to do that before they figured out mic splitting.
All the stuff that's been out by the Electric Eels was recorded that way.
Totally home made. Did you know any other people doing stuff like that back then?
Around that time there was another group... they were more a bunch of jazz-bo's. They called themselves Moonbeams or Moondream or something like that. They actually had a four track Ampex and I thought that was pretty cool. We bought our first four track Teac 3440 in 1975 and I think it ran us about $1700. In 1975 dollars, man that was expensive!
When you got ahold of that thing did that open up a world for you there?
Oh yeah. We did all the things that any goofy person does when they get their first 4 track. The way we ping-ponged was; I would take the four tracks and mix it down to two. We had a pretty good Tascam mixdown machine. It was a half-track with a split preamp section and came in a large, rolling, console. So we'd mix down to the 2 track and then I would take that exact same reel and put it back onto the 4 track and it would open up two more tracks. The pitch was a little funky but you could essentially get six tracks with only one reduction.
That's pretty amazing.
A lot of the stuff on the Styrenes CD was recorded like that. Some of the overdubbed stuff that's coming out on the Different Times record was done on two reel to reels or two cassettes bounced back and forth for each overdub.
You're playing it back and playing to it and mixing them together.
Mixing them together. Of course, you don't get remix capabilities!
I know later on you guys had some sessions on 1" 8 track. Was that Earthman Studios?
No. Earthman was our 4 track! The 1" 8 track was at Owl in Columbus. That was a 1" Scully... actually it was the one inch machine from Woodstock. That's a really cool way to record. Even in the 80's there was a studio here that ran 1" 8 track at 30 ips. It was really quiet, really nice. I've got some of those masters and I have no place to play them back any more. You can put the 1" tape on a 1" 16 track and they'll play back pretty good.
You gang up the channels.
I think one of the tracks on the Different Times collection says recorded at Owl and remixed at Noise New York. That's exactly what we did. That was a 1" 16 track.
I've heard you can play a 16 track 2" on a 24 track machine. You can gang up certain tracks and actually mix it.
I don't know if I would do it with the bass guitar tracks but most of the overdub tracks you can usually squeeze a little space out. The 1" 8 track... they had a homemade board and it was a little noisy. They were somewhere in between wanting to do a recording studio and wanting to do live sound. Jack of all trades, master of none sort of thing. Their mic technique was not particularly great and the studio vibe... it was hard to work there. The isolation booths didn't have glass in between them. The piano was 75 feet away from the band in a room where you can't hear or see anything.
It's not set up to be comfortable.
My overriding philosophy of recording has been that the recording process should never diminish the musicians enjoyment. It's almost a cliche' but it really happens. The musicians should just play and not pay attention to the wires and everything. That's the engineer's job to do that. Which is why so much of the stuff we recorded didn't come out good. The main reason we were there was to play and make music. It wasn't necessary to make recordings. We were playing way too loud. It's ridiculous to have a band rehearsing in a basement using the size amplifiers we did. That was part of the 70's. The idea of playing through a Fender Princeton amp would have been offensive. That's probably what we should have been doing. Instead of having Vox Super Beatles we should have had Vox Pacemakers, with one 10" speaker and 18 watts. It would have been plenty!
But no one wants to do that.
I'm playing in a band (Amoeba Raft Boy) with John Morton from the Eels. We've got small Marshalls; 25 watts. They're great. Any place you play that's big enough is gonna mic you any way and we've got the stage sound down, together, finally. It took us 25 fuckin' years. We finally don't overpower each other. We did a cut on the Cle sampler that we recorded in our rehearsal studio. The studio has a Mackie board and it's got enough sends that we recorded right to DAT and it came out okay.
That's an economical way to go. With all the gear you used to use, what kind of mics and headphones did you have?
The mics were AKG D1000's or Shure SM 57's and 58's. Around '76 or '77 Audio Technica brought in this line of battery powered condenser mics. I forget the model numbers but they were great! You couldn't phantom power them but that was okay because the boards that we had didn't have phantom power. They used to eat batteries like crazy. Boy, what a difference that made for recording the vocal track.
Just for the clarity...
Uh huh. They were cheap; just 60 or 70 bucks. If they still made them here now, I'd buy some. People ask me all the time what kind of mic you can use for cheap vocal recording and there isn't such a thing, really.
Everything's got its fault.
But the Shure SM 57 is still such a standard. We didn't bother with headphones. In the basement where we recorded the Mirrors and early Styrenes stuff I walled off a small area where I put the mixers and keyboards and sometimes I would play, walled off from the band so I could monitor a little bit. I had some Koss headphones that were so tight on your ears that it was painful. It was good for playing with the band 'cause you didn't hear the band. I used these really cheap Radio Shack mixers with no preamps.
