Victor's Home Cooking

Jun 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

BASSMAN VICTOR WOOTEN THRIVES IN HIS PERSONAL STUDIO

Victor Wooten is a musician's musician. Best known for his electric-bass work in the acoustic jazz fusion group Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, he is one of the premier bassists on the planet. And with his creativity and technical prowess, he has taken the instrument to new heights.

Raised in a family of musicians, Wooten has been recording since he was a kid. He toured for years with his four brothers as the Wooten Brothers, and his brother Roy, aka Future Man, is the Flecktones' percussionist. Victor's first “studio” consisted of a pair of 2-track decks that he used to overdub between. He later progressed to 4-track cassette recorders, Roland VS-880 and VS-1680 personal digital workstations, and, in his current setup, a Digidesign Pro Tools HD system with a Digidesign Control 24 console, Meyer Sound HD-1 monitors, and plenty of additional gear. Wooten has recorded several of his solo CDs at home, including his newest, Palmystery (see Fig. 1), which was released in mid-April.

Wooten's studio (see Fig. 2), which he calls VixMix, is in the basement of his house, which is located in the hills outside Nashville. The studio includes a large control room, a drum room, and a vocal booth. The quality of gear in his current setup gives him recording capabilities he'd never previously had at home. “Now, I literally don't have to leave home for any part of the process,” he says. Wooten enjoys the flexibility that his studio provides; it allows him to work on his music while remaining only a few steps away from his wife and four young kids.

Shortly before Palmystery was released, I had a chance to visit Wooten at his studio and talk to him about his CD, his outlook on recording, and a lot more (see Web Clip 1).

What did you do to set up the basement as a studio?
The first thing we did was to waterproof the concrete: the floors, the walls, the cinder-block walls, and everything. There was some kind of paste we put on the walls. I live on a hill. When you're in the studio, the right wall, by the soundboard, is underground. It's also underneath the kitchen, and I didn't want any leaks from above, so we had to do stuff to the ceiling. The good thing is that there's part of that wall that didn't have to be sound insulated, because it's underground. And then for the internal walls, we used maybe 4-inch-thick insulation. And then we doubled all the walls, so we have double drywalls, double wood, and double insulation on each wall and on the ceilings.

And the sound in there is good?
The sound in there is great. Now if the kids are jumping or bouncing a basketball, I'll hear it. But most of the time, it's me in there recording with a bass direct. It's just when I have drums or vocals or anything like that, where I may sometimes have to ask them to be quiet. The way the studio is laid out in relationship to the house works out very nicely. The drum room is under a room where there are only books, so there's really nothing going on in there most of the time. The living room, where the kids might be, is in a different part of the house. So the drum room stays pretty quiet. I also [either] triple- or quadruple-insulated the drum room — I can't remember. But when you look at the drum room, you'll notice that the ceiling is a lot lower, so we put more stuff in there.

Not that you have to worry about any neighbors nearby.
No, we don't have to worry about the neighbors; we can play all hours of the night. The drums can go all night. And the back wall of the drum room faces outdoors. So there is a window out there. If the kids are outside playing, sometimes I'll hear them through that window. But for the most part, we don't have a problem.

Did you get a professional room tuner to come in and do any special acoustic treatment?
No, I didn't. I didn't have a special guy come in at all. I had a lot of friends come over. What we did is a lot of listening. We took records that we know and just listened to them. And I had a good friend, a friend of mine named Curt Storey, who was engineering for me at the time. We went in, and he has really, really good ears. And we did do some listening to try to figure out the best place to put the mixing board. We had a few options of which way to face it, and we decided to go into the back corner, which was totally underground. The wall was very, very solid, and we put the board facing the way it is right now. But as far as having someone come in and tune it, there are a lot of those big professional steps that I skipped. I could have floated the floor — I could have done things like that, but I skipped them. Because I felt that the room is for me. I can do a record in a cathedral or a bathroom, as long as I know what it sounds like.

You generally record your bass direct, right?
For the most part, I do. And it's just because I'm old school and I don't know a lot of the high-end technical stuff. In my studio, I use a Control 24 board, and it has Focusrite preamps in the back. So most of the time I just plug straight in. A lot of the time I have an idea in my head and I want to hear it right away, so I don't feel like setting up. So I plug in, and I just start trying stuff right away. And if I like it, I keep it. I just acquired a bunch of great Radial Dis, and I've been using those lately. I've been using them on my latest stuff. On some of the new stuff that I'm doing with the Flecktones, I'm using some of the Radial Dis, too. So for the most part, I use a DI or just go straight into the board. Every once in a while, just to do something different, I'll mic an amp, but that's rare.

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I see you've got a couple of bass amps here. What's that — a B-15?
Yeah, exactly — an old Ampeg. And I've got a few other amps. But it's rare that I'll mic an amp, because I don't want to take the time to set up.

What about compression — do you use it much on your bass?
When I'm recording, I don't do much at all. On the bass, I rarely use compression.

Even in the mix?
It's rare that I do, even in the mix. A lot of times on the final mixes, we may compress [the bass] for the sound, to make it sound bigger — in case we get lucky and it gets played on the radio or something like that.