Electric Engineering | Steve Albini

Oct 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Rich Wells

             

STEVE ALBINI'S NO-NONSENSE APPROACH TO RECORDING

BONUS MATERIAL
Additional Interview With Albini
Photo Gallery With Albini

Steve Albini
Photo: Rich Markese

Over the course of his 25-plus years of studio work, punk icon and longtime recording engineer Steve Albini has recorded literally thousands of records in facilities around the world. To those who are unfamiliar with his work, he may most easily be described as the engineer who recorded the Pixies' Surfer Rosa (4AD, 1992), Nirvana's In Utero (DGC, 1993), and the Page and Plant album Walking into Clarksdale (Atlantic, 1998).

However, those are but a few bullet points on a very long list of accomplishments that contribute to Albini's renown. His first band, Big Black, along with other independent bands of the early '80s, helped string together the network of clubs and other resources, both in the United States and abroad, that created the underground culture we know today. (He also wrote widely for the underground 'zines of that era.) As a guitarist, he commands a singular sound and playing style, hair-trigger, full of treble, and instantly recognizable. For the music of Shellac of North America, Albini's current band, he grafts this guitar onto an increasingly stripped-down aesthetic and experimental arrangements, which together pleasantly upset the standard power-trio motif.

During practically every other spare minute, it would seem, he records other bands, and his regimen in the studio has remained essentially unchanged. Every recording is an entirely analog process from microphone to master tape, using the best available equipment, and with minimal gimmickry. (Although the studio is equipped with a Digidesign Pro Tools system, Albini himself doesn't use it.) The resulting albums share common aural attributes that have attracted scores of bands over the years: a naturalistic sound similar to that of the best jazz recordings, detailed and dynamic, albeit often with a more thunderous drum sound akin to that of, say, Led Zeppelin.

In 1997, with the completion of the Electrical Audio studios (electrical.com) in Chicago, Albini and his crew had created a world-class facility built to his specifications. The studio building is completely self-contained, with Albini's own living quarters located on-site, rooms available for clients to rent over the course of their projects, and a large lounge and kitchen area. The studios themselves are marvels of acoustics, flexibility in design, and thrift — the oak floorboards, for example, were reclaimed from the facade of the building itself.

The main purpose of this interview was to find out Albini's normal mode of operation in the studio for a variety of standard tasks. Although he touched on a few favored microphones for given situations, this was not the focus. You can find particular mic applications, and more, thoroughly documented on Electrical Audio's Web site.

During the course of the interview, we also touched on details of the studio's design and the building itself, both of which are, of course, integral to the overall sound of an Electrical recording. Additional text, as well as a short video tour of the studio (see Web Clip 1), can be found at emusician.com.

Fig. 1: Steve Albini uses a stereo mic in front of the kit and often mics both sides of the kick and toms.

What's the general approach of Electrical Audio?

The vast majority of the records that I make are performance-based records, where you've got a band playing their material essentially the way they would in rehearsal or live, maybe with a few overdubs. But the idea behind the studio is that you can do essentially any project here. We have 48-track analog available. We also have a Pro Tools system, and other external equipment can be strapped in very easily if necessary. We have multicore patch bays so that you can replace the multitrack machines with a Pro Tools rig just by changing one cable. Overall, it was designed to be as flexible as we could make it.

Let's start with a basic rock-band setup: drums, bass, guitar, vocals. Beginning with the drums, how do you typically mic them?

There's almost nothing that I do all the time. But normally I'll have close mics on all the drums, a stereo mic to pick up the drum kit sound as a whole, and then distant ambient mics [see Fig. 1]. The ambient mics are generally on the floor and triangulated from the seated position of the drummer, equidistant from the drum seat.

As normal practice, I combine multiple microphones for certain sounds. For example, I normally mic the top and bottom of tom-toms. I reverse the polarity of one of them because the two mics are pointed in opposite directions. But I'll sum those to one channel each, so there will be one track for the rack tom, and one track for the floor tom, for example. You just make sure the balance sounds good and then print that balance.

I'll often do that for the bass drum as well. I'll have a batter-side mic and a front-side mic, and I'll get a balance between those that sounds good and record that. I don't often use a snare drum bottom mic, but when I do, I'll do the same thing there.