What was your first studio setup?
I used to have a house on this welfare strip. The studio was called "Hole in the Wall". I had this 4 track half inch Tascam series 70 monstrosity tape machine with an old M & M board [shows me photo]. It was a British thing with a four band fixed EQ. I used to drag it all over town in this cabinet. You could barely lift the thing.
What year was that?
It was about '80 or '81. It was a great studio. You'd open the back door in the winter and this flood of water would just wash through the studio.
So it was all in one room?
Yeah. I had fruit packing for soundproofing. I didn't even have egg cartons [laughs]. I got a little 4 track PortaStudio after that... The best cassette one they made in the first few years.
Did it have any noise reduction?
It had DBX and two notch filters like all Tascams. It was a great machine and it's still being used.
Does it have the original heads on it?
I think so. The guy who has it now isn't the type to be changing them.
What were you using for mics?
Mostly crap. Whenever anyone gets started recording you have about eight mics and [takes on a holy tone] and they're all, save one, Shure SM57's. In my case it was an AKG 125. I still to this day don't know exactly what it was. I had a couple of AKG 330 mics which in those days were pretty cool. They were bulbous mics with the vents and had a couple of roll-off filters on the bottom. They were really popular for live use. I had a whole bunch of miscellaneous garbage I picked up. I never had a decent collection of mics until I moved out here [to Sea of Shit].
Any other locations of note?
Well, for a while I had a studio on the second floor of a building downtown. Basically, I had a whole corner block. The place would've made a huge night club. Red Tide [early Victoria punk band] brought in the first Fostex 8 track. It was the worst shit I've ever used in my life. It was upright reel-to-reel with the microscopic VU meters hooked up to the special board that came with it. The board was about the size of a large book and was the most amazingly hissy crap-ola. It had ?" tape running at 7? ips. All I remember is that I really wanted to throw the thing out the window. Horrible gear... it scarred me for life. I'll never use Fostex gear again. I haven't used so much as a pair of Fostex headphones since then. I always go for the Tascam stuff because it's bulletproof. It's never the best, but it runs forever. My Tascam 8-track reel-to-reel was outside for a whole winter [after being sold] in a shed open to all of the elements and it still works. I bought it back for $100. When I first bought it in 1985, that was the big step up. That was around the same time I discovered that gated reverb sounded good on drums, so there's all this gated reverb on everything from those years. I had a Yamaha REV-7. I've still got it. It's the noisiest effect in my rack by a mile.
What was the first piece of outboard gear you ever got?
When I needed an echo at my first place, I used to use this old Sony tape deck hooked up with a three speed echo. You know, slow-medium-fast. It was really noisy. I also had a Binson disk echo. It was a freakish looking thing. It had to be from the early 60's from England. It had a metal magnetized disk with heads against it. It had four playback heads and you could only turn one of them off at a time. You couldn't change the speed of the disk, but you could adjust the volume of each echo. It had a cathode tube in it for a level display. The louder the sound, the hotter the tube would get. It weighed a ton and was about two feet by one foot. Hank Marvin [of the Shadows] used to use them in the 60's. I had a Roland spring reverb that you had to severely beat in order for it to work. You really had to whack the thing.
Did you buy anything else when you jumped up to the Tascam 8-track?
When I bought that I went on a binge. I bought a Yamaha RX-5 drum machine which was a fortune then... it was $1500 or something. I got the REV-7 too. I still have the RX-5.
Any mics?
I think I bought a new 421 [Sennheiser], but I still had mostly shit. I was mixing straight to a cassette deck then.
At what point did you switch from doing friend's bands to bands you'd never heard of?
Hmmm... [thinks ponderously]
At what point did you think "I'm just going to stop recording my friends and try to make some money at this..."
Oh god, I've never thought that! [ laughter]
You know what I mean.
The first "money" thing I did was this blues guy who was a caddy at a local golf club. He hired some born-again guys who worked at a Christian music store to come in and play the bass and drums. They were good, but really bad at the same time, you know?
Any strange forms of payment for studio time?
Pigment Vehicle [frenetic Victoria band] wanted to mix their last album and they're like... "we just need a couple of days to do the mix". I know this means two weeks. They also needed to "touch up the vocals" which, for them, means write the lyrics. Jason [PV drummer/vocalist] gave me this really nice saxophone. Colin [PV bassist] built me a rock wall out in my yard. It was about two weeks of studio time, too. I've never done it for a car, but I came close once. A vocalist came in and I got a sampler and a 441 [Sennheiser mic]. She was also kind of our nanny for a while. Another band didn't have any money to pay me, so I got an amp and a bass drum mic.
Is there any gear you had in the past you wish you hadn't gotten rid of?
I had a twin manual drawbar Farfisa organ that was sort of like a Hammond. I sold it to a mod, which of course, means I didn't get paid for it. I sold my roommate my beautiful canary yellow Premier drum kit with Paiste cymbals. I must have spent about $2500 on it in 1982. He was a loans manager for CIBC [Canadian bank] and was about 3/4 deaf. I was supposed to get about $2000... I think I got $100.
Have you heard from him since?
No, he disappeared into the ozone! Later, some guy in Duncan [north of Victoria] told me, "I know that drumkit! I traded a motorbike for it!"
Is there a piece of gear you don't have that you'd love to have?
Oh god, there's always stuff...
Mics, board, monitors?
Actually, you know what I need more than anything is a new room [laughs]. To hell with the gear!
So you could have more room for records?
