Category Archives for "podcast"

My guest today is Nick Devan, a drummer, producer, mixer, and lover of old school soul music. In 2007 he started G.E.D. Soul Records with Dave Singleton, which allows him to write, record, and play drums for the label. He also owns and operates Poor Man Studio in Madison, TN.

Nick Currently performs with Magic in Threes, who are currently recording, mixing, and releasing a song every week in 2016. He also plays with DeRobert & the Half-Truths who have just added the new singer, Du'Juan Mandell.

I was first introduced to Nick a couple of years ago when I reached out through Craigslist to hire him not for his drumming skills, but for his impeccable lawn service skills! In fact I was only introduced to his music later when he called in to quit one day, saying the yard work was too tough on his wrists which he needed for his drumming.

The following week as I was begrudgingly hauling brush around my back yard I thought the least I could do was check out Nick’s music while I worked. So I texted him to ask his band name. I then cued up Magic In Threes on Spotify and it instantly became the only thing I wanted to listen to all week. I’m talking about the kind of excitement when you hear something new and feel like you’ve finally found the music you’ve been looking for! Deep funky soul grooves that sounds completely like the real deal.

Only in Nashville right? The grass is now up to my knees and the hedges out front look like fourth of July fireworks. But man I don’t care, I just don’t care, because I am chilling to a new groove called Nick Devan the grass man.

Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A - I think using what you have has gone a long way with me because you could really wait forever for the right scenario of any recording and you really just got to get it out there and do it and make the best of it. Make the best of every recording that you do, I feel like that’s how you get to where you want to be is by just starting somewhere no matter how little you know about it.

Q - Q- Share with us a recording tip, hack, or secret sauce.
A- Delay! Get a reel to reel tape machine and use it for your delay or even mixing down for that going back into ProTools, that could have a huge impact on your sound. Another one is the Auratone. Get yourself and Auratone and mix in mono and really listen to a lot of music on it.

Q -Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- Having a couple nice instruments around! I love the Rhodes that we have here. I feel like the one thing a lot of studios don’t have now is a real piano and you can get those for free! Just look at craigslist and get a free piano and get it tuned up! I personally hate digital piano. I feel like on the digital side they can do a pretty good everything except for horns and piano. That Unidyne 57 is very useful as well if you want an old school sound that sounds great into ProTools as well.

My guest today is Ben Loftis the product manager for the Harrison’s workstation products. He is also an all-around developer, and partner in the company. From its Nashville, Tennessee facilities, Harrison designs, manufactures and markets large-format, professional audio mixing consoles for international film and television production, post-production, broadcasting, sound reinforcement and music recording markets.

Harrison also makes a unique digital audio workstation, The MixBus32C, following an analog paradigm that embodies form, function, and sound. Where other DAWs might use a computer paradigm, MIXBUS grows from Harrisonʼs distinguished 40-year heritage of platinum records, such as Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Paul Simon’s Graceland, and the blockbuster film Spider-Man to name a few. MIXBUS is the first full-featured DAW with true analog style mixing.

Ben has been at Harrison for over 15 years, which puts him right in the middle of the Harrison family with some of the employees having been with the company since the very beginning in 1975. During that time he's been part of many product launches, both large and small.

Before Harrison, Ben worked at a commercial audio company called IED, where he developed custom audio software for clients as varied as NASA, Fort Knox, and Caesar's Palace.

I am super excited to be joining you from right here at the Harrison Console Factory in Nashville TN. I can’t wait to learn more about MixBus and how it can help you make your best record ever.

I came in relatively late in the Harrison company. I’ve been here about 15-16 years, which is a long time to work somewhere but short in the scheme of things. Dave Harrison was collaborating with Geoff Harnett and they were building MCI consoles. Harrison was the designer for some of later MCI console models. He also had a company called Studio Supply and he would go build studios and install these MCI consoles and tape machines. He had a really cool idea for mixing consoles that would make things go faster and smoother in the studio, it was intended to be made up of the new syncable machines you’d have not just 16 but 24-32 tracks recording at a time, so he developed the Harrison 32 Series console (he actually took the idea to Geoff Harnett). Geoff decided not to manufacture that and that irritated Dave enough that he wanted to go make it himself. He kicked off his own company, took a prototype around the world and pitched the idea in the 70’s. He really did solve a lot of problems. Harrison came up with this concept called an inline console, the basic idea being instead of having a fader for the microphone which feeds into a tape machine and comes back through another mix board, he decided you could save space and do a lot of cool tricks, share a lot of electronics, and get dual use out of your console. The inline console is basically the tape machine inserted into the middle of the console path and you can either monitor the playback from the tape machine or you can monitor the microphone in the room. You’re taking the same piece of gear and with a button push using it twice.

I can tell you from some of the better documented ones that a lot of the Queen stuff, Another One Bites the Dust, Sade’s Sweetest Taboo Album, Michael Jackson stuff, Thriller and Bad, and then you’ve got AC/DC’s Back in Black. I listen to all those records and I hear a sound. They say it’s all about the recording and it is, it’s all about the musician of course that’s more important than the gear you use, and when I listen to that selection of things, I really do hear a sound to that.

MixBus 32C

We launched a product called MixBus about 5 years ago and that was a workstation that allows you to cut, copy, paste, import and export, it has all those things in it and we customized the mixer to have our channel strip. A simplified EQ and compressor and we made and introductory level audio workstation that has all the features that you could want but it also has a Harrison mixer in it. When we came out with that it was a huge success, but there were people who said well cool, but I have to have the harrison 32C sound. People knew about that 32C EQ and wanted it to be in MixBus. We also had some longtime customers who had the 32 series console and the knew exactly where you were supposed to turn those knobs to make it happen, they kept asking us to make that 32 series EQ. We held off for several years, and now we have launched MixBus 32C and it has a modeled software emulation of that original Harrison EQ. I’m not an analog guy and don’t want to give away too many secrets, but the recreation of that EQ goes beyond the range of the knobs that these people cross. You have to think, the guys that work here went through a process that arguably no one else in this whole industry has gone through. We used to make analog consoles, and then we made a product which was a digitally controlled analog console.

Unique to the MixBus32 DAW

It is a DAW unquestionably. It is a complete workstation with midi tracks and virtual instruments and editing, importing, exporting, all those things. You can look at a DAW and realize what each DAW makes the focus, what they give the most screen space to. When you open up MixBus32 each channel module has things on it other DAWs don’t have like a phase button. You have an EQ on every channel which was intended for the purpose of mixing. When you sit down to mix, most of what you’re doing is “I need a little more thwack from the beater and I need more body on the snare.” The process of mixing is working with bringing the multiple parts together so you need to see them all at the same time. With the typical DAW you have to double click and pop open the window of an EQ plugin and then if you want to see 4 channels in a row you have to open 4 windows and it quickly starts to get really inconvenient. We’ve got compressors and gain reduction also in every channel so that you can scan your eyes across the console and see what all the compressors are doing and that saves you so much effort. We also do a little trick where if you turn one of the knobs on the EQ, it turns the EQ on and then you can click the bypass with or without the EQ.

Check Out MixBus Plugins Here!! 

Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A - We went in to record with this band, the guy that runs the studio shared it was real important to him to have us all in there playing at the same time. I know that sounds obvious, but after I just spent 10 min talking about people collaborating a whole lot, there really is a magic with playing together. I would say my favorite piece of advice is to capture the moment. We’re probably not going to be famous rock n roll stars, so what I really don’t want to do is listen to this record in 15 years and say, “Oh man, that’s awesome. I’m the bass player and I’m singing some harmonies. But that’s not really me, they auto tuned the vocal and somebody pasted over the parts I couldn’t play very well.” We’re leaving in most of the mistakes trying to capture this part in time, I think there’s honesty and integrity in that.

Q - Q- Share with us a recording tip, hack, or secret sauce.
A- I think I would have to say layer those guitars, man. Give it a couple of different tones, layer it on! You’ll never get exactly those same notes in a row and it gives it a nice big, fat sound that you can pan left and right. Although we try to recreate ourselves, it’s really him! (Just 8 times over)

Q -Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- My first thought was don’t forget to bring the rug for your drummer. But we also just came out with something really cool, that is a 32CS. Continuing the trend with the 32 series consoles, we’ve relaunched the channel strip out of that console as a rack mount box. This box gives you a mic preamp, really awesome sound. It has the high and low pass filters, a 4 band EQ, and we have 2 new cool innovations in there. There’s an insert point that you can patch a piece of gear into your channel strip and it’s moveable! You can either put it before the filters or after, it gives you a lot of tone and sculpting kind of stuff. The other cool feature we have in that box is it has a little bitty monitoring section that has a stereo input on the back so that you can blend.

Q -Share a favorite software tool for the studio
A- Oh man, I have tons of favorite software tools. Not only are they good tools, but I use them because I’m always on Mac and Windows. Although Apple makes some great tools they have a great email program that I can’t use anywhere else. When I’m swapping from computer to computer to computer all the time we use Google stuff like crazy.

My guest today is Bob Bullock, whose career started as a studio engineer in Oakland CA, training under such greats as Humberto Gatica, Reggie Dozier, Barney Perkins, Roy Haley and Roger Nichols. And he became a top engineer himself, working with many great artists like The Tubes, Art Garfunkel, Seals and Crofts, Crazy Horse, Chick Corea and REO Speedwagon.

In 1981, while working at Lionshare Recording Studio for Kenny Rogers, he was approached by legendary producer Jimmy Bowen to engineer for Warner Bros. Records in Nashville and finally moved here full time in 1984.

Bob's engineering credits extend over fifty gold and platinum albums, including Shania Twain, Reba McEntire, George Strait, Tanya Tucker, Patty Loveless, George Jones, John Anderson, Hank Williams Jr., Jimmy Buffet and Steve Wariner.

Bob has spent 40 years working with major label artists like Kenny Chesney, Loretta Lynn and Keith Urban, but in sharp contrast now enjoys working almost exclusively with independent artists from all over the world including Switzerland’s Baton Rouge, Norway’s Gunslingers and Canadian acts, Tyler Whelan and Friends of Jack.

He has also expanded his musical contribution outside the studio and now lends his teaching expertise to multiple universities including Belmont University & The Art Institute in Nashville, TN, and Troy University in Montgomery, AL.

Bob is also passionate about helping artists develop their work at a time, when the traditional artist development label no longer exists. He recently joined the team of providers at PCG Nashville - The Science of Artist Development, a company dedicated to educating and mentoring artists.

When Chick Corea came into Kendun Recorders to do the Mad Hatter record, people booked rooms for a couple of months it wasn’t like they just came in to book a session or tracking date and that was your day in, day out job for that period of time. Everybody lived together and sometimes we would just stay at hotels near the studio. In Chick Corea’s case it was kind of a cast of different musicians he had coming in and we would cut tracks one day, maybe do overdubs on another day, the only thing we didn’t do there was mix, they took the project over to Crystal Sound.

One of the guys I learned a lot from Bernie Hersh was his name. He was Chick’s regular engineer and so I assisted Bernie on some stuff, did some overdubs myself. Bernie worked with him even live so, Bernie really knew Chick’s style and sound and most of the time in those recordings, so much of it is still the musician, there’s no magic tricks. In fact we probably at the time had two AKG 414’s on the grand piano. Again when you work in an environment where you’re spending a few months recording, you have the opportunity to experiment with different things for different songs. So it’s not like there are any magic tricks, it’s just being able to try something different for this particular piece and then there are other things that contribute. We were working I believe a Harrison console that was in that studio, but we were also recording to Studer a800 analog tape machines, so all those things contribute.

                                                  Chick Corea - Mad Hatter

How do you See Recordings Sessions Contrasting Today Compared to Then ?

It really was about getting everything the way you wanted it on the front end you know through the 70s & 80s. I still work that way myself for projects I produce, I record them in commercial studios at least getting them the basic tracks down so the only real difference for me and recording music now is that we have to work more time efficiently and have to make decisions much quicker because of smaller budgets. I find myself having to do more pre-planning, more organized, more sure of what I’m going to do. There’s pros and cons to that, that’s a bit of a fight for me because you’re telling yourself that every decision you make has to be the right decision for the music and the artist. Aside from the time constraints, I really record exactly the same way I did 30 years ago with the exception of recording to generally ProTools.

Recording Art Garfunkel

The part that I played in it was really cool because I got to engineer it, but I recorded horns for the Garfunkel project Fate for Breakfast . There would be different microphones of choice for the different horns. Most of us would have the musicians standing side by side not really worried about isolation because it was a section, I was mostly worried about the musicians all being comfortable. We recorded in a larger room, but room decisions are always just song to song and project to project. I think Bill Conte was producing and I think describing what they wanted for Art Garfunkels horn section was a more controlled room. As far as mics it’s just a matter of being familiar with what the range of different microphones are. For trombone I’d probably for example a Fet47 with a pad on it, trumpets were probably more likely Norman 87s at that time also with a pad. It was generally just like here’s a go-to starting set-up and if everybody’s jumping up and down and happy then that’s great, if any one of the creative team, including me, say gee I think the trumpets sounding a little thin let me try a different microphone, then that’s what we did.

                                               Art Garfunkel - Fate for Breakfast

Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A - I had the good fortune of working under the best of the best Reggie Dozier, Barney Perkins, Roy Haley, Roger Nichols, the list goes on and on and I got to be an assistant engineer for all those people. Mostly what I got pretty consistant was you shouldn't do this unless you really love it and it’s all about working with people, you have to be a people person. Every person I just mentioned, their biggest contribution to me was they were always creating a calm environment for artists and producers.

Q - Q- Share with us a recording tip, hack, or secret sauce.
A- I learned different things from different people. Al Schmidt was very minimalist on everything and made fantastic sounding records, Roy Haley was real big on a lot of effects and reverb on his work with Simon and Garfunkel so I learned a lot of reverb tricks. From all that I realized I only reach for the gear when I think I need it. It’s all about being creative. Some of my favorite records have happened because of people that made a record that really didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t know how other people did it, they just used their own ears to come up with something that sounded good to them. In many cases those would become classic records.

Q -Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- I don’t really have any. I’m so used to working in different rooms with what they have. For recording I’m flexible. If a band approaches me to record them, I’m going to take us into a studio I think captures the vibe and maybe the sound. There’s a room here in Nashville called Ronnie’s Place. I favor that tracking room a lot because it’s an old 70s wood tracking room and drums just have a different tone.

Q -Share a favorite software tool for the studio
A- I’m a fan of the UAD plugins and also Waves, but I also use PSP plugins quite a lot it’s much smaller company out of Poland. PSP has a couple of EQ’s and delay programs that just sound a little different to me and so I use those occasionally, it seems to break things up a little bit, a little more boutique.

My guest today is Matt Boudreau, a producer, recording, mixing, and mastering engineer from San Francisco. Matt is also the host of a fantastic podcast that you should be listening to called, Working Class Audio where he interviews many top studio professionals.

His 34 year career path started out in New Mexico before moving to San Francisco in the 80s as a drummer in the bands The Sextants and Seven Day Diary, where he was first introduced to making records with great producer/engineers like Larry Hirsch, Joe Chicarelli and Gil Norton sparking his interest in recording.

In 1994 Matt began his journey to the "other side of the glass" when it came time to trade in his drum sticks for faders. And since then he has worked with a great number of artists in the studio including: Steve Earl, Brett Dennen, Matchbox 20, Shawn Colvin, the BoDeans, The Shins, Death Cab for Cutie, Tori Amos, Florence + The Machine, World Party, Thomas Dolby, The Jayhawks, Ziggy Marley, The Samples, Joan Osborne, Civil Wars, Sarah Bareilles, and George Thorogood to name just some of the credits. Wow!

And on his podcast Working Class Audio you can find all sorts of great episodes with stellar guests like: Dave Fridmann, Niko Bolas, Al Schmitt, Brian McTear, Jim Scott, Larry Crane, F Reid Shippen, Eric Valentine, Kim Rosen, Warren Huart, Joe Barresi, Michael Beinhorn, Sylvia Massey, and Vance Powell. And those are just some of the past guests.

Though we’ve only just met, I am psyched to have my “brother from another podcast” on the show today.

Working Class Audio

I think when you’re mentally present and you’re not distracted by the outside forces of money or personal strife or relationship strife. When you have control over the outside things that are very important, I think it allows you to relax in the studio and pay close attention to what’s in front of you rather than being like, oh god as soon as I get done with this session I have to go and make a credit card payment so they don’t ding my credit report. It’s small weird details like that I think that can play people and they don’t really think about it too much because it’s just a part of their day to day life. Something on the outside, some external force that is creeping into your mind as you're doing the session, I think it manifests itself through you and can affect the people in your session because you behave in a particular way. When you remove those things or have those things in check, you can be relaxed, you can be yourself, and you can get out of your own way and let things happen naturally. When that happens, I think that people get the best of you ,and you help bring out the best in others and it just becomes a reciprocal thing where everybody kind of builds up a teamwork kind of fashion that allows us to make great records

Are there Typical Routines that Allow you to get in the Mindset?

On a day to day level long ago I learned to keep a calendar. I’m kind of a late bloomer and for some of these things I think details like that. Details like that didn’t creep up into my life until I realized I had to get my shit together, so keeping a calendar and knowing what’s going on in your life, keeping your finances in order so you don’t stress about that and those are the bigger picture things. On the small detail level before a session I always think through and have conversations with the artists and say okay what is it that you’re trying to achieve? I will go through the instrumentation on paper and layout a potential mic setup just so I am mentally in the space where I get all the technical done beforehand, then when I get into the studio I have a game plan so that we can just play.

What makes a Great Mix?

The great mix is in the ear of the beholder I think because let's face it you play a mix that you think is great that you did for any other engineer, of course they are going to say, “Oh yeah, that’s cool.” Of course they aren’t going to say, “Yeah, I would have done it differently.” So if you take that element out of it and quit trying to mix for other engineers and you just mix for emotion and for what the artists wants, I think that that’s a good start. Too many times, as many of us have done, I’ve focused on the wrong things. You think oh I’m going to do this because all the other engineers are going to like this, well that’s the wrong position to be mixing from.

Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A - There’s technical advice and there’s career advice. I used to work out of this guy’s studio, and old friend Buddy Salmen in San Francisco. I used to bring bands there and record. I remember in my early days there Buddy stand by me and would making these hand gestures telling me about how I should make my mix super deep and super wide.

Q - Q- Share with us a recording tip, hack, or secret sauce.
A- I think for me concentrate on your monitoring set-up. I think that is key. I think that wherever you’re mixing, make sure your monitoring environment is dialed in. These guys I came across, the Sonar Works people, they make a room analyzing plugin combo that allows you to take a room and find out what the strengths and weakness are from an EQ perspective and it creates an inverse EQ curve that’s applied to the back end of your mix to take those anomalies out of your mix that you might be adding to your mix based on a funky room

Q -Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- I’m not a giant audio file person, but I do own a pono player. I was one of the early kickstarter people, I got a Willie Nelson signature pono player. I love bringing that in and make it so that depending on the type of music that we’re doing and the type of band I’m working with, I like it when they show up and I’ve set the mood with some music. Most of the time with rock records and americana records, you can’t go wrong with some old Stones, ya know? People come in and you’ve got that playing and you’ve got things set up and the lights are done the right way and you’ve got the room laid out, people walk in and go, “All right! Let’s go!” They get excited.

Q -Share a favorite software tool for the studio
A- One thing I really rely on in a session is Google Docs, the spreadsheet section. I’ll set up the session in a spreadsheet as far as instruments and what it's miced with, the outboard gear, all of those details and then I pull it up on my phone. So the google spreadsheet along with my phone at a session, especially when it’s just me doing all the setup becomes an indispensable tool.

My guest today is David Kalmusky, a Producer / Guitarist / Engineer / and Mixer. In 2012 David helped design and build Addiction Sound Studios in Nashville TN, along with Engineer / Studio Designer Chris Huston (whose credits include Led Zeppelin and The Who) and studio owner Jonathan Cain of Journey, Bad English, and The Babys. At Addiction Sound David and Jonathan host their shared tracking room, and individual production and mix rooms.

David is deeply involved in the local audio community, hosting Recording Academy, NAAM, and local manufacturer events. And has regularly appeared on top 10 Billboard charts, spanning several genres, including credits on 2 Billboard #1’s. David is also an expert with Pro Tools having worked with the Avid platform since its beginning. So we will dig into some great questions about that too.

His multi platinum, Grammy nominated work, includes Journey, Justin Bieber, Emerson Drive, The Fray, Shawn Mendes, Vince Gill, and John Oates, to name just a few of the hundreds of artists with which David has recorded and toured.

I have known David for years and owe a great deal of my own professional network to the connections that David has helped me create.

I got to do something cool which was co-produce with John Oates, from Hall and Oates, Christmas single with the Time Jumpers. So I got to record a Western swing with an 80s pop singer doing something really cool. It was in the month of July, 100 degrees out, and we had every room full, triple fiddles in here, Vince Gill and Paul Franklin, just every room filled.

I’m working constantly with very young people who haven’t necessarily gotten their break yet. In this town I’ve gotten to work with a young Lennon and Maisy and a very young Hunter Hayes long before he was signed, so I continue to have several people in my life like that as well. That’s the stuff I’m most excited about, the stuff that no one has heard yet and I hope that people do get to hear it. I love getting into a room with an artist who’s just found themselves and getting to make that debut record and get through that process. I think I’m valuable as a mentor and as a producer and an engineer. I don’t always get to do the record either, but anything goes, Nashville is not competitive that way. I don’t mope around going, “Well I developed material with that artist and when they got signed the label put them with another producer,” that’s life. You just stay in the game, keep your head down, and make a lot music.

Working with Jonathan Cain - Recording Journey

The John Cain story is a tremendously long one, but I’ll try to condense it into the fact that I was actually working with his daughter. We were recording vocals together and she had worked with a lot of different people and we just hit it off. He loved the vocal sound we were getting so he decided to come into the studio and check it out. Immediately we had a Bearsville connection, he recorded his first solo record in Bearsville and I explained my father’s history. We were both gearheads and talked about the mic selection for his daughter and why I chose the one I did etc, and he was like, “Man do you want to record the vocals for the Journey Eclipse record?” Kevin Shirley had gotten very, very busy and had basically asked them to record some vocals on their own, so it was just the perfect timing and the perfect Nashville environment and of course I said yes! Eventually became friends with Neal Schon and Arnel Pineda and they came to Nashville and we recorded the vocals in my little studio. The whole time I was looking for a place, John was selling his home in California so we became great friends and would talk about well maybe we should build a studio together. John is not just a rich rockstar that just spends money and has everybody do stuff for him, we would sit around and audition pre-amps together and listen to gear. He’s one of us man, he really is. He is enamoured by engineering and acoustics and the room and we built an echo chamber together. We really became such tremendous friends through making that Journey record together. I ended up taking over recording overdubs, mixing the record, and supervising the mastering of it all with Kevin Shirley’s blessing. Fast forward years later the band flew me to Tokyo and I produced Journey live at Budokan, I did four solo Neal Schon records, three or four solo projects with Jonathan. It sounds like it happened overnight, but it didn’t.

                                            Journey - Eclipse Album

Addiction Sound Studio

I found a property in Berry Hill and called John up and said, “I found a little cottage maybe we could split it.” He said no, I sold my house and studio in California, if we’re doing to do it, let's build our dream studio. We wanted an echo chamber but knew there was no room in the blueprints of this building. One day I was out back and saw the Bobcat tractor start to dig up to pour concrete and they were digging pretty deep, so I sent John a text saying “underground echochamber, speak now or forever hold your peace,” and sure enough the phone rings and he’s like, “Let’s do it!!” So we rebuilt a replica of Abbey Roads Studios echochamber. It’s totally sealed off, it has a manhole, a sewer grate lid. Eventually we want to get a submarine hatch for it.

Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A - The best advice I received is probably what we touched on a little bit.. don’t use all your gear or all your plugins. The other best advice I got was from my dad and that was to stop and listen. Use your ears, not your gear.

Q - Q- Share with us a recording tip, hack, or secret sauce.
A- Have fun and play with some weird, cool, cheap devices. Explore some weird, realtime analog things. You can get a little handheld recorder, bounce a track to it, then put it back into ProTools and line it up as close as you can with all the analog drift that doesn’t allow it to line up and use it as a double, it’s cool! Play with plugins, make your own presets. Don’t use stock reverbs, use them as a starting place and create your own sound. The coolest trick you could ever do is be unique.

Q -Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- My favorite cheap piece of gear I’ve used on every vocal I’ve put out for the past decade the $100 Orban 526A D-esser. It’s my favorite D-esser, it’s very natural and has one knob. You can generally rely on the commonality of choices and wisdom from studios. You see a lot of 1176’s and LA2A’s and they have their place for a reason.

Q -Share a favorite software tool for the studio
A- When it comes to plugins, it’s such an exciting time for audio to have the capability of doing things with look-ahead compression that is impossible to do in the analog world without actually really elaborately delaying tracks for side chain pre-emphasis. Nevertheless some tools that are in the box that are amazing for me is dynamic spectrum mapper, it’s like having a 40,000 multi-band dynamic EQ. For matching vocals and taking the bite out of a vocal, it will take it out of those moments but leave it completely untouched otherwise. The Fab Filter ProQ EQ is one of the greatest surgical and musical EQ’s like all in one thing. I put it across my two mix, it’s always on my two bus and I love it.

My guest today is Larry Crane, editor and founder of Tape Op Magazine (started in 1996). He is also owner of Portland’s Jackpot! Recording Studio (since 1997).

Larry is a freelance producer/engineer who’s worked nationwide, and is also the archivist for the Estate of Elliott Smith. His career has taken him down many paths working as a record label owner, radio station music director, DJ, record distributor in sales, freelance music journalist, book editor, and bass player playing in bands since 1984, including Elephant Factory, Vomit Launch and the Sunbirds.

He's spoken on and moderated panels about recording for TapeOpCon, SXSW, NXNW, NARAS, AES, and CMJ. And has worked with many artists including Sleater-Kinney, The Decemberists, Jenny Lewis, M. Ward, Go-Betweens, Elliott Smith, Stephen Malkmus, Quasi, David J, She & Him, Richmond Fontaine, and more.

I remember back in 1996 when my mentor Brad Jones (also a guest on the podcast in episode 34) came back from making a record out on the west coast and handed me a small xeroxed folded “zine” that he said some kid was making out of his bedroom in Portland.

It was full of interviews from the alternative side of recording, and shared the perspective of the record producer underdog. It was aptly named “TapeOp” which was traditionally the first role of a new engineer in the big old school studios. But in 1996 a Tape Op represented those of us with a four track making our own records on cassette tapes and home studios. It was the coolest thing I had seen in recording culture back then, and has never let me down in 20 years.

TapeOp Started as a "Zine"

I think people have a hard time understanding if they were raised where the internet was always around why you would xerox, staple, and mail something to people. But for people to connect back then about esoteric topics like recording at home or small recording studio stuff, that was the way you had to do it otherwise you just had no voice. When the magazine started I was doing the magazine layouts on cardboard. Using glue sticks, paper, printing things out and gluing them in place. 

How Did You Record Miss Misery by Elliott Smith?

The best thing was to get out of the way. He was this personal who had very strong musical arrangements kind of finished in his head, you just had to facilitate and get really straightforward sounds. I miced the kick, snare, overheads, done. We didn’t have very many mics for that record. I think the overhead mics are audio technica 37R’s, the kick drum an RE20, the snare was a 57. It was simple! 16 track 2in, a Mackie Console, and a Langevin c3a for the vocal. There’s a piano and we used Pro37s (small diaphragm condenser). Those are great mics $130 a piece. They don’t have a shrill top end so they record well. The thing that was amazing is when you track stuff like that and push the faders up it sounded great because the arrangements were so concise.

Lynda.com - Online Courses

This has been really cool. For years I’ve done workshops at my studio and I had happened to be in a meeting with David Franz who runs the lynda.com part of that. It was a meeting for TapeOp and I said I’d love to do something like that because I was thinking of doing some of my little bits as videos. The great thing about doing Lynda is that it’s for a school so when people watch them you get royalties. I can do concise comprehensive courses have them them up there! For the initial start they sent a 4 person crew up with a producer and a couple cameras and it was just awesome they take and edit it and finish all the stuff for it. The platform Linda is great. It’s $25 a month and you can watch every video that’s on there.

Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A - Probably to do TapeOp and go interview all these people making good records. The magazine started because I had been writing for a couple of different magazines and a local weekly and everything went defunct right about the same time. I wanted to keep doing interviews and things like that and I thought if I was going to do a music magazine they all have the same format. So I thought about doing a small zene and threw that idea at friends and they all liked it.

Q - Q- Share with us a recording tip, hack, or secret sauce.
A-I’d say just cutting things. Arranging, cutting things out, cutting frequencies out, just don’t put as much into the final mix as you think it needs.

Q -Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A-The Tama Rhythm watch is a metronome that you can tap along and figure out a bpm of something. The great thing about it is even if you’re working in ProTools, using your own metronome you can start and stop and do stuff in the middle of a song. I love having the independent metronome.

Q -Share a favorite software tool for the studio
A-Isotope RX5. I think it’s pretty amazing and once you get comfortable using it you can match room ambiences and things like that. You can reduce reverb on a track, all kinds of stuff.

My guest today is Carl Tatz, principal of the recording studio design firm Carl Tatz Design LLC. Carl has been designing award-winning studios for over a decade, driven by his acclaimed and ever-evolving Phantom Focus™ System monitor tuning protocol. (PFS for short). The Phantom Focus System is a complete monitor design protocol that optimizes the listening experience to include the speakers, the room, and the engineer into a finely tuned focal point that allows the sounds to float transparently around the speakers.

Carl’s designs extend from the modest, but breath-taking, high performance home screening room on one end of the spectrum, to the full blown home theatre palace on the other end. His designs always deliver stunningly accurate monitor systems whether for home mix studios or complete studio designs for larger studios. His promise is to always “wow” his clients regardless of the size of their project.

Some of the services Carl offers are Acoustic Design, Home Screening Rooms, Recording Studios Monitor Systems, Discrete 5.1 Listening Rooms, Room Analysis, Tuning Sound Isolation, and now ergonomic furniture design for the studio with the CTD eChair

Carl Tatz Design has been recognized professionally by the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association (CEDIA), Audio Engineering Society (AES), National Academy Of Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS), and Carl was the Former Vice-President Nashville Association Of Professional Recording Services (NAPRS).

I have heard Carl’s Phantom Focus Designed control rooms and they are something that has to be experienced to truly believed. Listening to a Carl’s PFS monitors = mind blown!

My experience was like listening to the music radiate from a wall of granite 20 feet tall. Heavy, solid, sculpted and gigantic!

PhantomFocus System™

Up until now the PhantomFocus System is a protocol. The hardware includes a pair of subwoofers, the PhantomFocus stands made by SoundAnchors, and a digital processor (most of the time I use an Ashley engine). That’s all involved; the rest is just elbow grease! It’s a two-today process for my assistant and I. The first day is setting the speakers up, we laser them in with a four-laser system to get the angle correct and position them correctly in the room. There’s a lot of pre-work that’s done prior to us showing up. If it’s a studio we haven’t designed we need to know what’s going on in that room. I need dimensions and all sorts of details so when we so up there’s not going to be any surprises.

The first day is what I call the rhythm section. We set up the monitors in the correct position relative to the modes in the room. I call it the rhythm section because if you don’t have that you’re just polishing a turd, you can’t EQ it. That’s one of my things about these self tuning boxes out now. I recommend them, they are better than nothing, but some of them will account for the speakers not being set up correctly. The physical setup of the speaker is so critical. So once that’s done, the next day I come in with speakers, subwoofers, and the approcessor and play with crossovers, slopes, and EQ and get it to lock into the PhantomFocus pocket. Once it’s there, it’s like BOOM.

Are there simple tricks to do to with a speaker to begin to get an understanding of what the possibilities are if they were to do a PhantomFocus System?

This is something I teach in my lectures! I would direct people to go to my website, go to the library and click on Acoustic Tools. There are two things there: a software program that calculates the room modes and there’s a chart called the Null-Positioning Ensemble. Those two things are extremely valuable; it’s what we use in the PhantomFocus System. One is the active software and the other one is an example that shows you where the listener and the speaker should be. The Null-Positioning ensemble is very easy to understand chart of how you should set up your monitors. It’s important that people understand that it’s not just a general idea of what you should do when you set up your speakers; it’s an exact idea.

Favorite Tips & Secrets

If you have a pair of monitors on a stand in back of a console even on a meter bridge at ear level, your monitors are going to roll of drastically at approximately 125 hz, then it will come up somewhere where the actual low end of the speaker is like 40-50hz so you’ll have this huge grand canyon of missing information. Don’t think it’s not happening with your speakers. It happens all the time. The reason why people have such a hard time with their low end is because they don’t have that information there. So you get your kick and bass to sound how you want, and with that grand canyon of missing information there you push up the bass and get your speakers to really kick. Then you take it out to the car and you have WAY too much low end. Everybody goes through that. The tweeters need to be ear height, roughly 48 inches sitting in a chair. It makes a huge difference.

“Monitors typically sound better sideways then they do upright” - Carl Tatz

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What is Imaging?

When you’re sitting in the sweet spot, it’s so intense that the speakers seem to go away. I’ve had people tell me not only does the vocal seem like it’s floating right there like there’s a center speaker, I can easily tell where it is whether it’s an upfront vocal or behind; you can really find the pocket. The other thing that happens is all your sources sound drastically different, they never sound like the speakers they sound like the recording. You can hear a difference from one bass to the other bass. Its that revealing.

What are Room Modes?

It’s based on the round trip speed of sound and it only applies to low frequencies. So it’s the time it takes to go from the back wall to the front wall and back again. It’s hard to explain, but in the modes you’re going to have dips and peaks. The dips, otherwise known as nulls, are deadly. You don’t want your speakers or your ears to be in the null. Check out the mode calculator.

Carl Tatz Auralex

It’s a good example of what we do. Check out the DreamRoom and that’s pretty close to what you can do by yourself. It’s painted walls with columns and panels. You can buy the kit and put it up yourself. It’s a rigid fiberglass product; the columns are reflective on one side, absorbent on the other. When you set them up on the wall that way it creates what we call the acoustic lens. It’s great! It gives you reflection, diffusion, and absorption on the sidewalls.

eChair

The designer is a former racecar driver. When he retired, he had broken every bone in his body and decided he was going to design the greatest task chair ever, and he did! The chair works and leans with you, it puts you in a position where you can work all day and not be fatigued. It’s not the kind of chair you want to sit down and relax in. But when you’re working in front of a console, it makes you sit upright. Your posture will benefit. It’s so good it actually comes with the PhantomFocus System now.

New PhantomFocus Monitors

I have my own speakers! It has been and still is an evolution. The PhantomFocus can work with anyone’s speakers, but it was a no brainer for me to come out with my own speaker. In order for me to do it, it had to be better than anything else out there and it is. The subwoofer is a pistonic low frequency emitter. It’s built into a quarter inch aircraft aluminum case. It has a direct drive unit that controls the bass and increases the energy. I think these things weigh 85lbs a piece. The speakers themselves have a very expensive scandinavian scan speak tweeter and morell drivers. It’s loosely based on the Dynaudio M1 speaker, which had always been my favorite.

“You don’t tune a room you tune the monitors” - Carl Tatz

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Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A - You’re worth what you charge. Once you have some skills and are pretty good at it, what you charge people will perceive that's what you’re worth.

Q - Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- PhantomFocus System

Q -Share a favorite software tool for the studio
A- I think again the room mode calculator and the null positioning ensemble.