Mr. Hewitt
A lot of the ear candy overdubs on the Chili Peppers Stadium Arcadium – is most of that John taking the tapes home?
We did almost all of John’s vocals at this house. We did a lot of treatments there and we did a handful of guitar solo things and noodle-y bits. We did all his piano parts at his house. His studio is amazing.
He’s got some big modular rig he uses for processing stuff?
Yeah, he’s got a big Doepfer modular synthesizer that he keeps adding on to and he gets the craziest sounds out of that thing. He’ll treat anything. I was just over at his house last night to throw a lead vocal through a litlle bit pf a phaser or flanger kind of thing. Any kind of wacky stuff you hear on Stadium is probably the modular synthesizer. He’s a genius with that thing.
I saw somewhere that you built a studio for Danger Mouse. Do you do studio design as well?
I dabble in it. Working with my dad, I had to put together and take apart a studio almost every single day, so I know the inner workings of that process. I’ve learned system intergration from my time with SSL, and my work as an assistand and engineer at different levels of studios taught me practical signal flow applications. I know what I like about certain rooms and I know what I don’t like about them. Having a room that is flexible electronically with all kinds of patching available everywhere it needs to be is crucial. A room needs to be comfortable and reflect the owner’s personality. It needs to function in a manner that the owner is accustomed to working.
Danger Mouse was roommates with my friend Ben Lovett and is also a good friend of Josh Klinghoffer – John’s drummer and musical partner. Danger Mouse really wanted to put a place together to do his own projects, and both Ben and Josh subsequently referred him to me after seeing what I did for Ben’s studio and John’s place. We started working on it and he gave me a budget – not a lot of money. He said he wanted to be able to do tracking, overdubs and a little bit of mixing. I kind of screwed around with the numbers and made some suggestions for workflow and equipment lists. The space he had to work with was less than ideal – an office with short ceilings above a garage with a miserable landlord. I got some construction guys that I have worked with on some other places to come in and we kind of talked about isolating the drums from the floor, building a booth, plugging the windows. I had all these ideas, some of which I read in Tape Op, some of which I found in Gearslutz – some baffles to hang on the wall, some basic corner traps. Then for the control room, I called an acoustician friend of mine and I asked him for some pointers. It came out pretty damn good. I was kind of surprised.
You helped John put his room together too, then?
Yes, John had bought a bunch of stuff before I got involved – an API console originally from the Record Plant in New York, a Fairchild 670 and a rack of 1176s and Pultecs and a 1 inch 8-track, but none of it was wired. I brought in my wiring guy and I designed a wiring system, but at the time we didn’t know if it was going to be a permanent facility at his house or not. I had patchbays and snakes made – did the whole system integration – and I went about acquiring more gear for him. We bought a 24-track, a 2-track and an incredible piano from a studio that was closing. We bought a bunch of microphones and stands and all of a sudden we got a studio! We’re now having Vincent Van Haaf and Jacques Lacroix over there modifying the control room and running all the wires under the floor, building patch panels in all the rooms and putting the equipment racks in the walls.
One thing I’m curious about is that you seem to be able to straddle doing these records like the Blink record and then John’s stuff that’s just polar opposite. One is very produced and an almost hyper-reality recording, and the other is more documentarian. Do you prefer one over the other?
I can’t say I have a preference other than that working the way I do with John is easier because there’s less shit flying around. At the same time, it’s harder because you really have to be on point and it’s a lot more work mentally. There’s a lot more legwork in setting up four microphones rather than forty. There’s a lot more patience required in positioning that one mic absolutely perfectly and making sure that the sound is actually going to work with the other instruments later whereas if you have a thousand microphones, you can make it work with anything. I think that the music and the artists that are producing it should dictate the sound. Not necessarily by saying, “I want it to sound like this,†because a lot of times when somebody says, “I want it to sound like this record,†they don’t really mean that. Perhaps they like certain elements of it, but they don’t want it to sound like that record verbatim. I think that a band like Blink-182 that’s going to be commercial and big and loud and is marketed towards kids on MTV needs to be recorded in a certain manner. You couldn’t record Blink-182 like I record John. You couldn’t record John like I record Blink-182. It just doesn’t work. There are ways of using elements from both styles of recording – both polar opposite styles. To be a fan of music and to be a fan of recording and engineering and producing, an engineer needs to be able to listen to all these sounds and see that many different approaches are valid. There are people who are like, “I never put more than four microphones on the drums. I never mic the high hat. I always put a mic here on a guitar.†I think that’s unnecessarily limiting the sonic palate. It’s like saying you’re only going to paint with the color blue. I loved being educated by engineers like Jim Scott, Michael Brauer and Elliot Scheiner and producers like Jerry, Rick and Phil, who all have completely different, yet equally valid approaches to making records. There are so many ways of making a record and so many different ideas and so many different mic’ing techniques that you’ve just got to try as many as possible. I feel like I need to try everything and I go through phases where I like a certain combination of microphones. But I’ll get bored with it and have to try something else, or I’ll spy on someone and see how they’re mic’ing something! I feel blessed that I can go from something like Blink to something like John and then to the Chili Peppers and to the Heavens and to Ben Lovett’s completely electronic chaos and be able to approach them all differently. My goal with my career is to not be pigeonholed or stamped as having a certain sound. I’d like to be known as a sonic chameleon who can bring elements from different styles of recording and production to the session – an engineer with a broad palette.
