Capturing the Feel

Oct 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Maureen Droney

When you first meet him, Joe Barresi seems like a laid back kind of guy. He doesn't say much — at least until you get to know him — and when he does talk he's usually joking. It takes a while to discover how serious he is about his work. An avid gear collector who's especially known for getting great guitar sounds, Barresi sleeps, eats, and breathes recording. He's almost always in the studio working. When he's not, he's either visiting friends who are in the studio working, or he's home messing with guitars and gear. He has a passion for vintage gear, and he peppers his conversation with references to classic albums and the people who made them. But he's also a Pro Tools maven and a loyal supporter of numerous new-equipment manufacturers.

Barresi is a guitar player with a hard-rock background, yet he also studied classical guitar and music theory at the University of South Florida and piano and music at the University of Miami. Even during his school years, he was constantly developing and recording bands on the side. After graduation he headed to Los Angeles, where he became a freelance assistant engineer and worked on a variety of musical genres at several major studios.

A demo he did with producer Garth Richardson was his first big break; he went on to engineer for such well-respected producers as David Kahne, Michael Beinhorn, and Sylvia Massey Shivy. He's mixed for Hole, Monster Magnet, Anthrax, and Skunk Anansie, among many others, and has branched out into production for bands including Loudermilk, L7, Tomahawk, and the Melvins. One notable project he worked on started off as demos but later turned into the self-titled debut album by Queens of the Stone Age.

I caught up with Barresi at Hollywood's venerable Grandmaster Studios, a favorite of such luminaries as the Foo Fighters, Tool, and Ben Harper. He was there to engineer for new Arista artists The High Speed Scene. I arrived at 11 a.m. on a Sunday morning, an hour before the band was due, and squeezed my way around the vintage Neve 8028 desk into the tiny, jam-packed control room where I spoke with Barresi.

How would you describe your style as a producer?

I like to augment what the band does. I don't like to say, “You're going to come in and do it my way,” or “You've got to use my '58 Les Paul.” It's true that I own a stupid amount of outboard gear and guitars, but I like to at least start with the band's gear. I just finished working with a group from the East Coast who didn't want to bring anything out here with them. I told them it was a must that they bring at least their guitars and amp heads. That's your sound, so start there. We might not end up using it, but I have to know what you sound like as a band.

What happens when you're producing and the band wants to go down a path that you know from experience won't work? Do you let them try it?

No. That's time and money that could be spent in other ways, like getting a better vocal performance. Don't get me wrong. I'm here to make the band's record. I'm all for experimentation and creativity. But there are occasions when you have to steer the boat away from the rocks.

On this project, you're engineering but not producing. Is that difficult after you've been a producer?

Actually, it's good to sit back and look out every once in a while, just absorb and see how somebody else would approach something. It — music and sound — is all subjective anyway.

You're using a combination of analog and digital?

After recording to analog 24-track we physically dumped all the drum tracks into [Digidesign] Pro Tools and I spent a day editing a few songs. The band also has a friend with Pro Tools, so we farmed a few songs out to a real “professional Tooler.” He used Pro Tools' Beat Detective, which allows you to chop bigger sections of drums so you still retain some naturalness. It quantizes like a drum machine, but you can retain some feel.

As a producer or engineer, do you find that you have to put things “on the grid” because record companies — and the public — expect to hear that kind of perfection?

Personally, I believe that music is about feeling, and that you get no feeling from music that's completely rhythmically accurate, unless, of course, it's straight, [programmed] “dance” music. When you put on AC/DC it makes you want to rock, to get up and dance. But it's not metrically cut, it's just solidly played. I think it's your job as a producer to get that kind of performance out of people.

[Laughs.] Back in the '80s, if you weren't able to perform like that, you'd be replaced. As — supposedly — [engineer-producer] Andy Johns said to the drummer in some band, “This would be a great record for you, just not a great record with you.” It's become politically incorrect to do that now. So you “Tool” it. And a lot of people rely on what they see on the screen instead of listening.

[Engineer] Mark Dearnley, who's done four albums with AC/DC, once demonstrated something to me [on a piece of tape]. He said, “When you have a kick drum that's this wide, and the bass player plays a little behind and the guitar player plays a little ahead, you get this huge downbeat.” Lately music is so lined up that it actually seems smaller. You get these little ticks for downbeats, instead of a big fat 30 ips hit. If something is blatantly out of time, that's different. But unless it's a dance-type song, music that's metrically accurate top to bottom doesn't really excite me.

That said, some bands need to be done that way. Powerman 5000 is a band that uses a lot of programming. That's their sound. But with them, I found it worked best to put the programmed scratch tracks down on three sections of tape and have the drummer play to it three separate times. We picked the best overall performance, then maybe did some chopping and assembling in Pro Tools to tighten a few things up. We could have done just one drum take and fixed everything to a grid. But I find you get more fills, more good stuff, and a little craziness this way. You can chop the takes together and still retain some live-performance feel.

I can't tell you how many control rooms I walk by and see the engineer's head in a screen all day long. When you start looking at the screen, it's very easy to just use your eyes and forget about your ears. That's one thing good about a tape machine! The only thing you look at on it is meter level. You aren't looking at kicks and snares and timing. Nowadays, you can physically look at the waveform and say, “Okay, it's perfectly in time; it must be good.” And that justifies your job. Whereas if you actually made a decision to go with a certain take or style or feel and people said it sucked…

Then your taste would be in question.

Or your production skill, or your judgment. Phil Spector is still known for his wall of sound. He made the call: “This is what I like, this is what I'm going for.” You don't get much of that anymore. There wasn't much exciting going on in mainstream radio until the White Stripes came out.

A lot of people have said that to me.

I'm not a huge fan because I hate bands without bass players. And I think a lot of it is hype: Are they married? Nice video, whatever. But if you put that aside and listen, these guys are making records on eight tracks. There's a feel and a sound that you can't buy. And if they were produced by almost any of the producers out there right now, I guarantee the feel would have been Tooled right out of it: “You can't make a record on eight tracks, you need 96K and a huge computer rig.” I think it's a safety net for producers these days. That said, Pro Tools has definitely saved my ass in a few instances!

So it's a love-hate thing.

No, I love it. I just don't love what some people do with it. I was up until 3 a.m. last night with an Mbox — the little two-channel Digidesign interface. That and my laptop and a FireWire drive — it's a portable studio. You've got to love being able to make music or capture a moment anywhere, anytime, like that.

Who's a producer you've worked with lately, and what did you learn doing it?

Last year I worked with David Kahne. The beauty of David is commitment from day one. He makes the players commit, makes them play it again [instead of saving a take]. He'll use one overhead: You want to hear toms? Hit the cymbals less and the toms harder. He brings that dynamic back with players as opposed to separating out every freaking cymbal and tom. He also listens to music in an interesting way: by its frequency spectrum. He'll say, “It needs more high-end information,” and he'll add cymbals, or a guitar part that comes in high.

You're talking about having a point of view. Where did yours came from?

A combination of everything. There's no one really musical in my family, but both of my parents are good at singing melodies. They sing to the radio or [laughs] Italian records. I started playing guitar when I was seven. I also studied as much theory as could. I'm not a drummer, but I can play bass and I took piano lessons for a while. When I moved out here [to Los Angeles] and got a job in a studio, I realized I didn't want to get pigeonholed into one sound or style. So I started freelancing at different rooms as an assistant. The engineering aspect of my musical development came from working on so many different kinds of consoles with so many different kinds of clients.

I also got exposed to gear by reading liner notes and listening to records. “This record sounds insane, how did they do it?” Then finding out it was cut on a Helios console and buying some of that stuff. And figuring out how to work guitars and amps and pedals and creating sounds in my bedroom. You know: “Wow, this is what happens when you turn the feedback knob up all the way on a delay!”

You prefer amps to plug-ins for guitar sounds.

I love some plug-ins, especially Echo Farm; so many different delays in one plug-in is great. And Amp Farm, to me, is cool for stuff like drums and distorting a vocal, but not as a substitute for a guitar amp. It's like Pod, which I like on vocals and loops. [Pod, Amp Farm, and Echo Farm are all Line 6 products.] All of those things are very convenient, but my job is not about convenience. Just because a piece of gear is designed for one thing doesn't mean you're limited to using it for that. Sometimes you can get distortion through a mic pre on the console, or an LA2A turned on the “full Canadian” setting — everything to the right.

Full Canadian?

[Laughs.] That's something I started adopting with Garth Richardson, who's Canadian. Extreme stuff got referred to as full Canadian. An 1176 [Urei] with all the buttons in, or an LA2A with all the knobs to the right; put them on an aux send and ship some vocals or drums or bass to it, and then bring it back on a fader to add some fuzz.

What are some pieces of gear that you always have with you?

FIG. 1: Barresi likes to use Focusrite's Red 3 compressor when tracking kick and snare.

If I'm tracking, the Focusrite Red 3 compressor just for kick and snare [see Fig. 1]. I like the way it compresses on the way to tape. If I need to, for guitars I'll use a bus to a Quad 8 EQ module on the way to tape. Sometimes an API is good for that too. I've also got a pair of SSL talkback compressors that Danny Buchanan at Henson Studios built for me.

For real, the compressor from a talkback circuit?

It's just a megalimiter. He bought the cards and put it in a box. I used it on one room sound on this record. I also used a Shure Level Loc on another room sound, and [an Empirical Labs] Distressor on a couple of others. I consciously try to use different things. I might not bring any of this out for another two records. I might use something like an ADR [Compex limiter].

There are definitely pieces of gear that have given certain character to records. On the first Queens of the Stone Age project we had a crazy old ADA digital delay. I used that for all the modulation effects and delays because it crapped out really well and made all these fuzzy sounds. I remember that piece of gear as being part of the sound of that record. The next time I worked at that studio, I didn't use it because I didn't want the same sound. I used a tape delay, or an Echoplex, or a flanger, and that became the theme. That's what I do with amps, too. For the Matchbox Romance record I just finished, I brought out a Fender Tonemaster, which I haven't used in a year, and a Soldano. I brought down 20 different heads; we went through them and picked the 4 or 5 that sounded best for the particular project. And that became part of the sound of the record.

I also work with a lot of smaller companies, like Rivera Amplifiers, which I love. Rivera's really into listening to what you have to say about their products. I got an extended 4×12 there, and a subwoofer system. They custom-tweak heads, and they solicit feedback from people.

Are you still obsessed with stompboxes?

[Laughs.] Yes, Andrew Alekel, who works here, just turned me on to one made by Analog Man in New York. It's two compressors — an old Orange Squeezer and a Ross compressor built into one box. It's really amazing and it looks cool.

What's in the rack you brought for these sessions?

Coming here I knew there was enough Neve stuff, so I brought my Telefunken V76 preamps. If I want something to sound a little fatter, I'll go there. The Helios of course, just in case. Some Flickinger and Quad 8 EQ; I can use the Flickinger on anything. It sounds good on drums, guitars, and vocals. It's based on an API but is completely sweepable. That's nice if you want to get into some surgery.

The Chandler EMI limiter I used on the drum room. The room here sounds great and I knew I wanted to compress it pretty heavily, which the Chandler is good for. I'm also using a box made by Geoff Tanner, who has a workshop here. It's a pair of Neve-like preamps with 3-band EQ. The mid is selectable between 400 Hz and 3.5 kHz. And it has a ¼-inch input on the front and a ¼-inch out in the back, which is very cool. You can run it in front of a guitar amp if you want to beef up the input to your amp.

Is the Pro Tools you're using an HD system?

Yes. But I did my last record on a Mix Plus system using 888s, and it sounded fine. It's more important to know how to get the best sound out of what you're working with. I mixed the first Queens of the Stone Age record on a Soundtracks console that I monitored through the whole time I was tracking. If something sounded weird, I adjusted the mic or source placement to compensate for what I was hearing through the console VCAs. It wasn't a purist signal path by any means, but then, I wasn't making a Streisand record.

What mics do you use on guitars?

I keep going with Shure SM57s and Sennheiser MD 421s. Those are my main two on 4×12s [see Fig. 2]. I love the way up-front guitars sound with them. On a 4×12, I'll have two or three mics up on separate speakers and listen. If one sounds bad, I'll move to another speaker or move the mic. I don't EQ the individual mics or compress guitars; they're already compressed. You can just move the mic a little and get the EQ that you need. Because there are phase issues, I generally stick with close mics, but sometimes I use just a Royer R-122 set back a little bit.

FIG. 2: Barresi often sends a guitar signal through a splitter and routes it through up to six amps. He typically mics 4x12 cabinets using Shure SM57s and Sennheiser MD 421s, and routes the signals through vintage outboard processors before going to the multitrack.

 

On smaller, combo amps, I like to use a mic that has a little more personality, like the Royer R-122. Ribbons are so beautiful; their detail is amazing. I can get the Royer eight inches away, and it's still fat and natural sounding. Also, it's figure-8, so it picks up some room; that helps give it perspective.

You use ribbon mics even on distorted guitars?

Yeah. [Producer] George Drakoulious and I worked with the British band Reef. The guitar player was very '70s sounding, very “Free-ish.” The whole sound was a Watkins amp with a V76 preamp and a Royer ribbon mic. That was it. Of course, he was a great player to start with.

How many amps do you usually have set up, and what do you use to split them?

I use a Systematic Systems guitar splitter; I'll use up to six amps. I mic them all up. I don't necessarily run all six at the same time. Sometimes I only use the mics on two or three, but I can blow six amps into the room if needed.

Ideally, I like to stick with three 4×12 half stacks, or two heads and three cabinets, and run two cabs off one of the heads. I want options, because you don't always know what you're getting. When a band brings in their gear off the road, the speakers can be shot. I bring in mine, but they're all different. For instance, tighter speakers work better for certain types of music.

Tighter?

A higher-watt speaker. A 75W or 100W Celestion will be a lot more focused and tight on the low end than a 25W Celestion, which will sound more loose, but is great for certain things, like solos, where you want the speaker to react more.

The lower-wattage speaker, which is getting pushed harder, vibrates more, whereas a higher wattage speaker will barely move. So if your client's playing super, drop-tune, nu-metal chug riffs through a high-gain amp, you want the speaker to be tight and powerful and able to handle the low frequency. That kind of material through a 25W speaker will sound floppy. Then there's the Celestion Vintage 30, a hybrid designed to distort like a 25W speaker that is more a high-wattage speaker.

Seems complicated.

You've got to understand where to start. I go back and listen to records. Why does Jimmy Page or Pete Townshend sound like that? Certain eras had certain speakers: Fanes came in Hiwatts, Celestions in Marshalls, and Vox had their Bulldogs. They all had their sound.

And you mix and match.

I have a Sound City cabinet with Fane speakers, a Hiwatt cab with a 75W Celestion — which is great for tight sounds — and some Marshall cabs with different speakers. I have them customized so I know which character cab will do what with which amp — usually! On this last record I ended up using a Soldano and a 25W Celestion cabinet, which I thought would never sound great for tight rhythm, but it was amazing. Whatever works, right? On that particular project we ended up using a combo of Marshall, Soldano, and Rivera.

Sounds like painting a picture.

I'm a guitar player. It keeps me going to work every day, I'll tell you that.

Do you use room mics on guitars much?

Occasionally I'll blend in the room, compressed through the different things I mentioned before.

Are your room mics in omni?

FIG. 3: When recording drums, Barresi sometimes uses a pair of figure-8 mics in a Blumlein configuration (angled 90 degrees apart) to get stereo room sounds that emphasize the sides and rear.

Sometimes, and sometimes in a figure-8 because you can notch out areas. Omni is good if the room is great. If there's a problematic area, say near glass, I'd go cardioid to get rid of reflections from the rear, or figure-8 and turn it the other way [dead side toward the glass.] That's also good on drums. Or, you can use a pair of figure-8s in front of the drums in a Blumlein setup. That can sound amazing. You can pretty much notch out the drum kit and just get the sides and rear for a very natural room sound and a great stereo spread [see Fig. 3].

Blumlein?

It's like XY recording using a pair of figure-8 microphones to reject the center and pick up the sides.

Where'd you learn that?

Reading books. I'm a big fan of the library and used bookstores for old audio books. My current favorite is Modern Recording Techniques, published in 1970 when a modern compressor was a Pye limiter. Also, when I worked with Mark Dearnley, he always got great room sounds using mic configurations like M-S and figure-8 pairs. M-S is great because you can mess with it later. You set your figure-8 and cardioid level when recording, then when you're mixing you can mult the figure-8 at the console, put one side of it out of phase, and add it back in for as much stereo as you want. It's cool, but not as natural sounding as a Blumlein.

You don't see people doing those kinds of things much, they just throw up any room mic. But there's a lot of information out there about how to do different things. You just have to look for it.

Parting thought?

Yeah. I ran Beat Detective on “Back in Black” the other day, and I'm happy to tell you it speeds up in the choruses!

---

Maureen Droney, whose engineering credits include projects for Carlos Santana, George Benson, John Hiatt, Whitney Houston, and Aretha Franklin, is the Los Angeles editor for Mix.

JOE BARRESI SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

Matchbook Romance, Stories and Alibis (Epitaph, 2003); producer, engineer, mixer

Pennywise, Land of the Free? (Epitaph, 2001); producer, engineer, mixer

Powerman 5000, Transform (DreamWorks, 2003); producer, engineer

Queens of the Stone Age, Queens of the Stone Age (Loose Groove, 1998); coproducer, engineer, mixer

Rancid, “Fall Back Down” and “Start Now” from Indestructible (Warner Bros., 2003); mixer

Skunk Anansie, Stoosh (Epic, 1997); mixerTomahawk, Mit Gas (Ipecac, 2003); producer, engineer, mixer

Turbonegro, Scandinavian Leather (Burning Heart, 2003); mixer