How did you get into recording?
I was playing in a high school cover band and I was fascinated by recording. Back then I was mostly just laying down 4-track demos of my band, but my friends who wrote songs would always want to come over to my house and record. Once I got into college I was in a band with Jude Hayden, who I'm still playing with in Leisure (formerly The Bees). He had written a whole lot of songs and had done a ton of great 4-track recordings himself. I got really serious about recording in 1995. At that time I was thinking of going into the studio with my band, but then I thought I might as well invest the money into some recording equipment that I was going to hold on to.
You had some pretty good foresight in going with computer recording rather an ADAT like everyone else.
At the time ADATs were the thing to get, which involved buying a lot of hardware. You'd have to buy the mixer, the ADAT, cables, compressors, reverbs. Then a bandmate said, "Why don't you get into computer recording?" I'd never even thought of that because it really wasn't at the forefront at the time. Software Audio Workshop (SAW) was pretty much the only thing they had at the local music store for Windows. At that time Cakewalk was only MIDI and I think Cubase was around, but it wasn't for Windows. SAW actually included some really good compressors, EQs and stuff.
I imagine it was quite a change from your 4-track cassette machine.
Yeah, it was. With 4-track cassette you just kind of do the best you can because you're battling noise and the fact that you've only got four tracks. Even though SAW was only four tracks, you could bounce without losing much of anything. It really was quite a revelation. All of a sudden it was a nirvana of sound quality. I took SAW and my Turtle Beach sound card from the 4-track version to the 8-track version. I was printing all my effects because at the time PCs just weren't keeping up. Once you got eight tracks going it was a little rough.
Sometimes it would trip up the PC?
Yeah. You really had to cross your fingers, close what you could and streamline everything just to get it to chug away. But it worked really well. I have a lot of fond memories of SAW and its sound. Then I jumped over to Cakewalk and used that for a while. But that system would bundle all the audio into one big file — all of your tracks would be lumped together and that was really a pain in the rear to deal with, so that's when I jumped to Cubase and stuck with that for a long time. But now I'm a proud Reaper user.
How did you get into podcasting and co-hosting Home Recording Odyssey?
I was doing some searches on the Web because I figured there had to be a recording podcast out there. I found HRO, started listening and thought I had some input. So I emailed Andrew [Brierley, HRO creator and host]. He told me that I should do a segment, so I casually created what I thought would be a one-off segment for the show. He liked it and I think he talked to Big Al Wagner of the Project Studio Network podcast. Big Al said, "Why don't you have him co-host?" Andrew thought it was a good idea and asked me. I kind of shivered in my boots for a minute thinking about the commitment of a weekly show, but I decided to go ahead and do it.
One of the things that made HRO so enjoyable was the way you and Andrew explained things. It was billed as a show "by beginners for beginners" and you covered a lot of ground.
I love trying to help people out with recording and sharing the little knowledge I have. We would talk about recording guitar, bass, vocals, compression, etc. I think I learned as much as the listeners.
You were really good about playing "before and after" examples after you'd explained a concept, often several times, so the listener could really hear the difference.
Right. That's something I really tried to do. Years ago Recording magazine had a series of cassette tapes that explained recording concepts really clearly. They were worth their weight in gold, because they had audio examples of all this stuff. That really is where the light bulb comes on — when you hear the audio. You can talk about it until you're blue in the face, but...
Hearing a real world example makes all the difference.
Yeah, so I tried to include lots of examples in the show.
How did you develop your knowledge base in order to be able to explain recording concepts on the show?
I've read a lot of books on recording over the years. One was The Musician's Guide To Home Recording by Peter McIan and Larry Wichman. I read that book cover to cover. Plus in recording my band I learned a lot. Every time we'd get ready to record I'd get the books out and read up on how to mic an amp, for instance. You go through recording twelve songs and with every song I got a little better at doing the drums and a little better at doing the bass. On the second album we had ten more songs, so there was a lot of repetition to figure out how to do it. I also had a lot of good mentors over the years. There are some Cincinnati artists like Brian Lovely and Roger Klug who I went to with questions. You know though, you can ask questions, but many times it doesn't help you much until you actually get the experience yourself, until you get that microphone placed just right. You get better and better one piece of experience at a time. So I just recorded with my band and did a lot of studying. Before I'd do a segment (on HRO) I would go out and do some research and re-educate myself — that really helped and maybe made me seem smarter than I really was. With each segment I learned a lot myself.
What happened to HRO? Will we be hearing any more episodes?
