You came up in the traditional way, assisting in Nashville.
Well, I was primarily an intern in Nashville. I did a semester of proper interning and then engineered country demo sessions, all on tape. When you're recording Nashville session musicians, even the third- call guys are machines. That's been a blessing and curse, because when your introduction to doing sessions is people who are really phenomenal at their instruments...
I guess there are certain skills you don't foster in Nashville sessions.
You have five or six people playing — drums, bass, lap steel, acoustic and whatever. At the end of a take the drummer's played it perfectly and the rest of the guys are yelling out where their mistakes were. You have to read the chart and know whose voice it is.
"Back me up to bar 24!"
Exactly. "Go in at 36 for two." Fifteen minutes after you've done the room track, everyone's fixed their stuff and you've moved on. But I definitely didn't want to stay in Nashville. I had some experiences there that were indicative of the type of place it is, such as telling an engineer his wife was on the phone and getting yelled at — weird things like that.
After you moved to Seattle, you assisted Brendan O'Brien on a few records.
I assisted him on [Pearl Jam's] No Code and Yield, and then worked with him as an engineer here and there when he'd come out for quick things.
Can you pick a couple of good lessons from the experience?
The thing I learned from Brendan most is that he just wants to capture that moment. If he spends five extra minutes getting the snare perfect, and that's five minutes where the band would be standing around waiting, he'll sacrifice [the snare sound]. I always felt that the thing he tried to do most was not let technology bog down inspiration. He's also a freak of a guitar player — one of the best musicians I have ever seen. He has perfect pitch. He tells great stories. He's one of those dudes where you're like, "Yeah, I understand why you're successful."
You also assisted Terry Date.
I assisted on [Deftones'] Around the Fur. I have the utmost respect for Terry and I definitely learned from him.
I remember the first five seconds of that record being like, "What the fuck is with that kick drum? How is that even sonically possible?"
He does things differently than Brendan. Brendan will use samples when he needs to as a last resort. But Terry uses samples as he goes. I had never really seen that. He pushes the boundaries of EQ'ing kick drums and snare drums.
Were Seattle rock sessions different than country sessions in Nashville?
Absolutely. I got to see the ebb and flow and learn how to kick back a little bit. [On Soundgarden's Down on the Upside] Kim Thayil wouldn't play guitar until he got the crossword done [laughs]. So he, Ben Shepherd and I would sit around for the first three hours of the day — like on a Saturday, when the New York Times crossword is really hard. They'd end up calling friends to get it done before we started tracking. Adam [Kasper], the producer, rolled with it. He knew that's the way Kim liked to work. Seeing that record was a good education, even in contrast to Brendan. Brendan's about keeping momentum going. "Hey man, let's do something! We're here. We're making a record!" Brendan has tremendous enthusiasm — I wish I had that kind of personality. I'm excited about what I do, but I'm also a "sit down and get in focus" guy. Plus Brendan also has an engineer and I only have me.
Do you usually work with an assistant?
No. We have an intern who helps out at Red Room, but I'm faster than most assistants. I've wired three or four studios, including my own. It's easier for me to do it than explain. With budgets, I can't afford to pay somebody. I'd love to teach someone and have them be useful, but I don't have the resources financially.
Okay. Botch's We Are the Romans — great record or greatest record?
[laughs] Well, according to NME it was the 67th best record of the first 10 years of the century.
It's a huge leap from their first album, American Nervoso.
For all of us. Romans is a function of their growth and my growth.
You did a full remix of Nervoso for its re- release. How was it to sit down with your 10-year-old tracks?
We did Nervoso in five days. I made some fatal errors on that, based on lack of experience — like summing the snare top and bottom together, but the bottom snare was too loud. That eats at me to this day. If you know what the first song on the record's gonna be, don't record it first. The song with the too loud bottom snare is the first fucking song on Nervoso! [laughs] I want to shoot myself.
Did you have more time for Romans?
We spent about eight days recording and four days mixing. By that point I knew that Dave Knudson [guitar] was going to have all his parts in one or two takes. I knew that Dave Verellen's voice was resilient. There were a couple songs where we changed some patterns, rhythms and things. And there was the whole chanting part.
How did you do the chanting part [in "Man the Ramparts"]?
That song was recorded in three parts. For the [chanting] middle, we set up a click. If you listen you can probably hear a little faint "tick, tick" in the background. We had a big chunk of tape and they just sang it, the four of them, and we stacked it a few times. Tim [Latona] had a friend, this girl who came in and did the high stuff. I think Tim did a few tracks on his own because his pitch was better. The funniest thing was we never heard it all together until mastering because we mixed to 1/2-inch.
Oh, because of the reverb tails and all?
Right — there was no way. At the very end of that song, I ran the whole mix through a pair of Neve mic preamps on line input and was just destroying it. If you put it up on an oscilloscope, it makes a three- dimensional cube. I didn't see it when I was mixing because I was on an API, but when we took it to mastering I was like, "That is the raddest thing I've ever seen in my life!" [laughs]
It seems like that record was a takeoff point for your career.
That record was the one that got me going. Without that record I wouldn't get Isis. And without those two records, I wouldn't get Burnt by the Sun or Mastodon. And Mastodon is probably the biggest thing I'm associated with, as far as mainstream-ish production.
To me, the Isis records are sonically defined by the snare drum.
Celestial was my first record with them, and Aaron [Harris] had a Kevlar marching triple-ply snare head. It had a certain heft to it. It had some snares, but it was by no means a really snare-y sound.
Somewhat timbale-ish?
Sort of. When we got to mixing he was really worried about the kick drum being too click-y. He wouldn't let me put any attack on the kick. I wasn't doing anything extreme, but he was so wound up. So I was like, "Okay, I'm not going to get the kick drum to do what I want if you don't let me do something to it." So I started exaggerating the low end. From there — "Oh, now the guitars seem feeble. Let's exaggerate the low end on the guitars." So that whole record [Celestial] is really thick.
It sounds huge.
It's a direct result of Aaron Harris not letting me put any attack on the kick drum. It's probably one of my most compressed records as far as the 2-bus [is concerned]. I'm pretty sure I was doing like 10:1, 5 to 7 decibels of compression — just hammering. It worked. Every once in a while I'll pull that out and try it, and it's not working. I have no idea how I pulled that off all those years ago. 10:1 is certainly not something that makes it on my mix bus now! On the second record, Oceanic, there's no digital reverb on the drums at all.
I was going to ask that. How much of the drum ambiences are real?
They're all pretty much from the rooms we recorded in. For Oceanic, we were in the Fort Apache B room in Boston. It was a Neve 8068 and this gigantic, tiled room with a stage. We were up on the stage with theater curtains around the entire drum kit and B&K omni [mics] outside of the curtains — 30 feet away in this really wide room. That's the sound. Panopticon is a reaction to all the criticism. Aaron was kind of annoyed by the criticism of the timbale thing on Oceanic, so Panopticon became a lot more conventional on the snares. It was also recorded in a very dry room in Los Angeles. That's why that ambience is what it is. I'm sure there's a little bit of short plate that I added to make it breathe a little more, because the room was quite dead.
Even when the Isis stuff gets heavy, that drum ambience is still there.
I'm doing a lot of pushes on the drums as I'm mixing. In order for the drums not to be knocking-you-over-the-head loud when shit's quiet, you've gotta pull them back. In order for them to not get submerged when shit gets loud, you've gotta push them up. I could hammer everything to death and lose those dynamics — and I'm sure my records have gotten a bit less dynamic over the years — but if everything's loud all the time, there are no peaks and valleys. Isis is one of the best examples of a band that's alternately completely bombastic and then very down.
Across the Isis records there's some change, but I don't think one sounds better than the other. But you listen to Mastodon's catalog, and there is...
Improvement? I think some of that is the circumstances under which they were made. Remission was done really quickly. The weakest part of that record to me is the bass sound. The bass gear we used wasn't good. We borrowed some gear. Troy can play, but we just didn't nail it. Brann [Dailor] didn't want his drums to be as click-y or attack-y as Remission. It worked for Remission because Remission was so goddamn fast. So we went a little boomier. I landed in Atlanta, and the tape machine died the first day I got there. It was an [Ampex] MM1200. They said they had gotten the faster punch mods, but by the time I started trying to do punches I realized it just wasn't gonna work. I think we got the drums and bass done in two days. The next seven days were vocals and guitars at a different place, with an [Otari] MTR-90 so I could actually do punches. Then I had to fly home and back to mix it. So that record was made under less than ideal circumstances. Leviathan we did here in Seattle. On that level alone I'm in my comfort zone. That was tape and a little bit of Pro Tools for extra tracks.
That may be part of what I'm hearing when I say it sounds bigger.
It was a conscious decision. It turned out well, but if I could go back and revisit it I would probably just de-boom the kick a little. There are times where I think it's a bit blurry in the low end — just a little bit. We definitely fixed the bass tone problems on that record. That was the big, obvious thing that we needed to fix.
To listen to Remission by itself, you hear it and say, "This sounds great." But then you put on Leviathan and you say, "This really sounds great." Then you put on Blood Mountain, and it's like, "Wow, it sounds better again." The record starts with those amazing sounding drums.
Yeah. I can't speak for sure, but Brann's really hard to put drum samples on because he's so fast. So I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that most of it was what I actually recorded. [laughs]
