Yours, Mine, and Ours

Oct 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

           

Do you use the mic pres in the Calrec?

No, I have a Telefunken V72, I have a Summit, and I have these tube mic pres called Giltronics; they're really nice. I've got a Tube Tech stereo compressor, and I've got an [Urei] 1176 compressor.

What's your typical signal chain for recording your vocals here in your studio?

Usually it's the Royer microphone into the V72 into the 1176. And that goes directly into the Apogee converters.

FIG. 4: A blackface Fender Deluxe Reverb and a pedalboard full of effects give Sheik plenty of sonic options when he records his guitar parts.

I noticed that you had a nice pedalboard and an old Fender amp [see Fig. 4]. Is that what you use when you record your electric tracks?

Yes, generally. That's the pedalboard that I take on tour with me as well. I actually just built it about six months ago, and I've been happy with it.

You have both Yamaha NS-10Ms and M-Audio BX8 monitors.

M-Audio has been so generous in sending me microphones and speakers and bits and bops. I tend to monitor on NS-10Ms, but when I need to hear low end, I'll switch over to the BX8s.

You use a Mac as your music computer.

Yes. I have a [Digidesign Pro Tools] Mix Plus system with Apogee converters. I use Logic Pro on the front end. But I end up using Reason, and recently I've been using Ableton Live a lot. Especially in shows, like in Spring Awakening, a percentage of the music is electronic. And so almost all of that stuff is being triggered from Live so that we can mess with the tempo in real time, and mess with how it relates to what's going on.

Are you using Live in ReWire mode with Logic?

No, it's all coming off Live. I'm a Logic guy, and I don't want to say anything politically incorrect. But the reality is that for me, Logic is an amazing tool, and when I'm producing and engineering a record in my house, it's all about Logic. When I'm making music in a performance situation, whether it's triggering stems of music or whatever it is, that's what Live is all about. With Live, you can have 16 tracks of audio at full bandwidth coming off a laptop, and there aren't weird issues of the computer being able to handle it. I just think that Live's engine is more efficient in some ways.

Did you do your film scoring in Logic?

Yes. I had the editors just send me QuickTime movies of the chunks of the movie that I was scoring. It was so easy and seamless, I just hooked up another monitor. The movie comes up on the monitor, and Logic is on the main screen.

How much of White Limousine did you record here in your studio?

I did an initial version of the record here at home, but it just didn't feel right somehow. So I said to my bandmates and Kevin Killen, let's go up to Allaire Studios for a week, which is a great place.

Was Killen the producer?

He was engineer and mixer. I produced the record. The reality was I made the record myself and I was paying for it myself. Everyone involved in it was very generous and patient about getting paid and all that. But to hire a producer of the caliber that I'm used to working with, it would have been prohibitively expensive for me. And I had a vision for what the record would be. Kevin's a great producer, and Pat Leonard is a great producer, and Rupert Hine is a great producer, but for this process I had a lot of really smart people's opinions around me and I listened to them. So spending another $50,000 or $100,000 for a producer of that level was just not going to happen.