Mr. Hewitt
Do you listen to an equally vast selection of music?
I listen to all different kinds of things, and as I’m turned on to working on different projects, those people will in turn show me new music. I had never heard Fugazi before working with Blink, and listening to Fugazi helped me with making John’s record. When I worked with John we would really get into listening to the inner workings of The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix records which I had never listened to under a microscope like that. I had always been a casual Beatles and Jimi Hendrix listener. John and I would listen and we’d say, “How the fuck did they do that?†and dissect what was going on to try and figure out how they made Jimi’s guitar sound like it was on fire. Then he would turn me on to Aphex Twin or Autechre, The Strawbs, The Move – completely different styles of music, all in one sitting.
Obviously you’re not an in-the-box mix person.
I’ll do whatever I have to.
Right, but it’s not your preference.
No, but I have a little room at Encore Studios called the Runway when I need it. I have a Tonelux Mixer, my Pro Tools rig, all my outboard gear. I did a couple of records in there and one of them came out great.
Which record?
A band called Casket Salesmen, out of Pomona. They’re on tour right now. It’s a combination of Black Sabbath and Tool – big, loud guitars, riffs. It was really fun. In that situation the tracks were recorded really well. I have sixteen channels of Tonelux Mixer plus some effects returns so I can use my analog effects boxes. I would break the mix out into the mixer as elemental as I could so I could process the tracks individually with my outboard gear. I’d have the kick coming down one channel and snare down another and all the toms and cymbals down another pair. It’s mostly drums that were split out on the mix because there are very specific things I like to do. My Tonelux Eqs for drums are the greatest thing in the world! To be able to get out of the box and use analog processing feels really good. Once you get the into the analog domain and use a great summing box, it just puts a little more glue between the elements of the mix and a little more width and depth and height into the soundstage. There are people who have become tremendous at mixing in the box, and I have recpect for that, but I don’t want to do it because it just feels weird. Obviously, only having a small mixer over there, I have to sum stuff in the box, but I do it minimally and where it’s not going to matter as much. On Casket Salesmen, they would have six tracks for one guitar part, so I’d sum those in Pro Tools and then stick it through one of my equalizers or something to give it some more life. I think in-the-box mixing is going to become a necessary evil with the incredible shrinking record budget and I’m fortunate to have a good collection of toys to use so that I can make it slightly better than would otherwise be possible. I would be really upset if I couldn’t do that! That being said, mixing in a hybrid situation gives so many more possibilities. You can do shit in Pro Tools you can’t do on a console. There are effects in there that you can’t get anywhere else and I keep buying them. My money keeps disappearing into my iLoks, but then I get to whip out these crazy effects, some of which I’ve learned conceptually how to use from John and his modular synthesizer. Now I have digital versions of those modules in my box and I can get similar results. It expands the creative palate.
Define “heightâ€. It was interesting when you said that.
Well, I never really thought about it consciously until a friend came by the studio and listened to one of my Chili Peppers mixes. I think he may have kind of coined the term. He said, “There’s this height thing going on! It feels like things are stacked vertically on top of each other.†You know, like you get layers of instruments that you can spread out left to right and you can get something going on front to back, but there’s this thing I’ve kind of learned through different engineers’ techniques – no single person individually – how to make vertical space for instruments and for parts. With John, he creates so many different parts that have very specific frequency ranges. I don’t even know if he thinks about it this way or more like tonal ranges, but for me it works out as frequency ranges. We’ll do stuff like slow the tape machine down to half speed and overdub a guitar part and then play it back and it’ll have this ultra-high frequency thing with notes that guitars are not allowed to play! And so on Stadium I really had a lot of height to play with. There was a lot of stuff on the ground and a lot of stuff in the middle and a lot of stuff on top, but the way that we recorded them, the way that John conceived them musically, parts just layer themselves bottom to top. I listen to that record with my eyes closed and I see the instruments in three-dimensional space. I just feel like I can do this thing where I can get a spread from bottom to top and sometimes I’ll listen to a mix in retrospect and think it’s too bright. But there’s all this stuff happening up there. Of course it’s bright. It’s a bright sound and if it was dulled down you wouldn’t get the impact of that sound anymore. Luckily, the way that John conceives of his parts musically, it wasn’t necessary to do a lot of EQ carving to make those things fit. Since that record, I’ve tried to make that theory work for other bands. It really makes life easy when people conceive of and record stuff this way, so that there’s not a whole bunch of shit vying for the same frequency range. If everything is playing in the same tonal area, it’s really hard to get definition. There are some bands that don’t want the definition, and when you solo their stuff you’ll find out why. But generally I like a certain amount of fidelity in a commercial recording. By “commercial recording†I mean something that’s probably had a lot of overdubs that you need to make fit together. It’s great to work for musicians that have an ear for that kind of thing, that don’t record a bunch of parts that step on each other, that really jam up in the mix where you have to put that fader all the way up to make it work. Now this part is the loudest fucking thing in the world because has to compete with three or four other things in the same frequency range.
