Mr. Hewitt
You end up with really unique sounding records when you’re in weird spaces like that.
Absolutely. Not to knock studios, because I love working in studios. Obviously a studio is a controlled environment and everything works all the time and you have everything you need in one place, but I’ve done three or four records at this point in houses and those records are the ones that stand out in my mind as being the best sounding and the most fun to make – because it’s such a casual atmosphere. You’re not thinking about the hourly rate of the studio when it gets late and you want to do another take. You’re just chilling out in a house and if you want to go swimming, there’s a pool in the backyard. If you want to eat, there’s a fridge over there. If you want to chill out you can go outside in the yard and relax. You can get away from things. You can go to your bedroom. You can do anything you want. The drum sound is unique to you and that record and that room. A house lends itself to sonic experimentation. You have different rooms to try for different vibes on different songs. From that standpoint it was rad.
Studios are great for mixing. My studio is in an old warehouse with lots of windows and natural light. When I’m in regular studios like this I feel kind of odd. They’re great, but…
When you’re in a house there’s a little bit more personality. It’s not thought out, it’s not trying to be a studio. It’s your living room, your dining room or the guest house.
You know what time of day it is.
Yeah, there are windows. You can open the windows and air it out. It doesn’t smell like a studio where dudes have been living for 18 hours a day for the last 30 years.
When you do things on tape and then do the vocals in Pro Tools, do you just transfer the tape into Pro Tools and forget about the tape?
In situations like that I’ll transfer the tape into Pro Tools as a safety, making sure everything is locked and referenced properly. Then, when it comes time to mix we go back to the master tape.
You fly the vocals back to the tape?
Yeah, we’ll fly the vocals onto a slave tape if we have the budget to have a second tape machine or if we have tracks available on the first machine. On the Blink record we did that. We had forty-eight tracks of tape and everything that was in Pro Tools went to tape.
You’re not editing the whole song then. If you do, you’re doing it…
All on tape.
Do you do much editing of the 2 inch and then lay down the code and then go to Pro Tools?
All the time – actually, another engineer friend had a really great idea that I totally copied, where he makes the assistant stripe all the blank tapes so that you have a consistent time base and you know where all your edits are going to be. You’ll know specifically where everything is so you don’t have to rely on counter times that might move around to remember where a take was. My take sheets will have the SMPTE number rather than the counter number, and I’ll even write out the song form, so that I know exactly where every part is when it comes time to edit. When I’m editing tape, I’ll dump the song into Pro Tools first to do test edits so we can make sure everything is going to work. I’ll also record the time code into Pro Tools on a track and then feed that out to a code reader. This way I can just play the edit and the Lynx tells me what piece of tape that piece of song was on.
If you cut that, then isn’t the time code useless?
Yes, but then you re-stripe it later. The initial striping is just for editing purposes so I know where everything is, because then it’s quick and I can look at the Lynx and know exactly where I need to go. It winds up making my job way easier. Especially when I’m editing between three or four reels.
So that was pretty much the same process you used for the Chili Peppers record too?
It’s different in that with Jerry, we’ll record drums first to a click and then we’ll edit the drums together on the tape and then we’ll overdub guitars and then bass and then everything else. With the Chili Peppers, the whole band was playing together and so the whole band would be edited across the tape. If the band played it well then we’d use that piece and then another piece and another piece and cut those all together. It was a bit different because you had to really think about your edit points to make sure that everyone was together and you didn’t clip anyone’s note. The tempo changes since the Chili Peppers don’t play to a click, so we always had to do test edits to make sure that everything worked together and that nothing was going to speed up or slow down all of a sudden.
Did you use Pro Tools at all on that record or was it totally analog?
Just for Anthony’s vocals, which were recorded by Andrew Scheps. There were also some assorted overdubs that happened at the end when I had the tapes doing overdubs with John. But Andrew had to do a quick piano or percussion thing at Rick’s. Everything went back to tape for the mix whenever possible.
