A Collective Intent Sean Flora of the Alberta Music Collective talks about engineering, recording with the guys from Slint and the secret to mic'ing a drum kit. by A. Raitano I first met Sean Flora about a year and a half ago in my baby step stage into the music scene. I had never been to a studio before and the band I was in at the time decided to record at his space, the Alberta Music Collective on Alberta St. across from what used to be the Medicine Hat. I didn't know what to expect from a "real" recording studio. All the rooms I had seen up until then were either my friend's apartment living room with a four track or pictures of Abbey Road with its sanitized, operating room decor. Sean's space fell somewhere in the middle, maybe even a little closer to my friends living room. But what did I know. Since then I have recorded in places that make my friend's living room look like Abbey Road, namely my living room, but this isn't about me so I don't want to talk about it. Why did you start recording? It's the usual story. Doing four tracks and stuff at home until you said, "Wait a minute, this could be better." It just grew out of being a musician and wanting to make a record of what was being done. What were you using at the time? The very first stuff was at home; two cassette machines plugged into each other. Do a thing onto one cassette machine then play it out while playing something else onto the other one and back and forth. And this was in the early eighties, late seventies. If you don't mind my asking, how old are you? I'm thirty-five.
So you were...? I don't know, ten or eleven. And then I went to high school and setting up and getting some god awful PA for feeding all the signals from the band. Trying to record the band and get a live to two track performance. We were pretty pleased with ourselves and so forth (snicker). (laughing) This sounds great!!! But that's how you get hooked on it. Initially, before you have some great degree of "sophistication" [his quotes, not mine], you record something you have done and you play it back and you think, my god, this works. You know, you're just so pleased with it. That feeling gets sort of tattooed on your brain and you get addicted to that and you think now I can make this a little better. When you first decided to step up from the four-track what did you get? When I was in college, I changed majors, I was in film studies and in physics and linguistics and English and all these crazy different majors. I found out that I could major in recording. And as soon as I found that out I decided I was going to stop screwing around with the rest of these other things. Did you get a degree in recording? Yeah. There is a lot of disparaging of the study of recording in a formal sense and I think that's a reaction to a real occurrence and the real occurrence is that people go into these flashy recording programs, that will remain unnamed, with the idea that they are going to come out in, I don't know how long it is, six weeks, six months, even a year as fully formed producers. Which is absurd. I think people who are working in the industry have had a few experiences with these cocky kids that don't yet know that the biggest problem is not having the skills in dealing with people. They think, ok, now I'm all set, now I'm a producer. And that rubs people the wrong way and they think these recording schools don't teach anything. They can. You get out what you put in. What, then, makes a good producer if it's not technique because that is what school teaches you, essentially. I don't know what school teaches you. I think school can teach you a basic grounding in how things work. And that's something that if you are really driven and interested in recording you are going to figure out how things work without going to school. You get a deeper grounding sometimes and it's appropriate for some folks. And it was a way for me to get out of some other major that wasn't going to be of interest to me. I thought it was great, I had a great time and I met some good people. One of my roommates was Todd Brashear who was in this band called Slint. Those guys would come around, not necessarily as Slint, and we had a cassette eight-track recorder that Tascam made during that time. It had some hiss on it. It had DBX noise reduction and whatever. I also rented my room out to Will Oldham. So school afforded me the opportunity to get together with people who were doing cool stuff. That's how I got into it. Getting out of school was like, ok, now you do an internship. When I moved out here to Portland I just went around to a couple of studios. Where did you work? I was at White Horse, which was arguably the nicest studio in town. It had the giant SSL console and just a ton of good gear. It was a really well designed place. I was there for about for four and a half years. So I interned with them for a little while and they thought, this guy is doing enough work, we should pay him something, which was good. Then they got out of doing music and took a left turn and went into website development. At that point, once they stopped doing music, there was no point to keep working with them. So I freelanced after that. As a freelance would you go to other studios? Yeah. Having your own studio is not essential to being an engineer. In some ways it can be a hindrance because your overhead just skyrockets. The amount of money you have to spend to just hold on to the place is a lot. I found that it's worth it to me but probably my profit margin would be greater if I were just working in other studios. Do you ever do that? Oh, yeah. I love to. I love to work in other rooms. It's nice to have a home base and it makes it more affordable to people that are on a limited budget because in another room they're paying that room's full rate plus what they pay me. Here they pay me and a little extra to get the room. Do you have mobile gear? I have a few things that I would be able to take out. If I am going mobile I either go to another studio or somebody's home studio. Do you do live recording? For live recordings I either get individual feeds off the existing board or rent a board with decent mic-pres. I much more enjoy doing live recording than running live sound. I find running live sound, especially in a rock and roll context, to be fraught with problems. You don't have the time to fix things and make them right unless you really get people there early which they are usually not willing to do. It's actually possible to get things right in the studio and in a live setting it's possible but you are also at the mercy of whatever gear is already there unless you are going to be a guy who owns a whole rig and schucks it around. Have you ever done that sort of thing? Only a little bit. I never hung out my shingle as somebody who wanted to do that. There are places that have good and that I would like to run and that would be fine. I don't mind doing house sound in places where I understand the room, where it's well set up by somebody that understands how to set up a room, and where it's possible to make it sound really good. If it doesn't sound really good, then what's the point? What I was really happy with when I did this performance with Morgan is I just put my mix that I was listening to in the control room and piped it out to there and it sounded like the studio. It didn't sound giant and loud. What are the qualities of a good engineer, live or studio? I can answer more about studio. The ability to understand musically what the artist is trying to do and to be able to translate that onto tape. Creating an environment conducive to getting good performances. You're trying to capture those performances in the way that supports what we all want it to feel like. Do you find yourself feeling like another member of the band? That really depends on who I'm working with. I like to think that I'm contributing. I like to believe that I could contribute something. Some people will respond and say almost that, "You're like the fifth member of this band." That sort of comes up as personal rapport. If you really get along with people and you really see eye to eye. What I find is that with every artist you find what's appropriate to contribute for what they're trying to do. Some people want a whole lot of input and a whole lot of direction. It really helps them get their performance together to have outside ideas to help take it to the next place it wants to go. That Robert Cannon record was great like that, they were constantly asking for input and we would come up with ideas to do that really hadn't been thought of before on the project. And it was really collaborative, it wasn't like, "I came up with all these ideas." I had a thought and we talked about it and they had a thought and we would go and try it out. We were fully ready to just try ideas and see if it was going to work. Most of the ideas seemed to work. Some of them maybe didn't but I don't remember them because we just didn't use them. That's the nature of ideas, I guess. Exactly. Well, no, because sometimes people become very enamored by certain ideas and are convinced that they have to be that way regardless or not if it's actually working.
What do you do in a situation like that? In a situation like that you can do a couple of things. What I like to do is to give it the best shot it can get at working because if you can give it the best shot you might end up being surprised and it actually does work. Because it's very easy to have somebody come in and say, "I want to do this thing", and you roll your eyeballs and think oh that's never gonna work, but if do that then you're never going to learn to do things that might work, if you just give up on ideas and shoot them down before they happen. So I always try to give those things the best effort and if it's really not working it's generally evident to everyone. It could be anything. It could be something that doesn't sound right or it could be something that's unnatural for that particular musician to play. Do you find yourself playing on a lot of people's albums? I do. It's certainly not like I expect to but it happens. What instruments do you play? Whatever's missing. Whatever I have an idea that would be easier for me to play than try to play the musician by remote control. Bass, organ, Rhodes, piano, cello. You play the cello? I have played cello on recordings. I would not claim to be a cellist. Do you have a lot of musicians to call on if somebody wanted a particular instrument on their album? As far as cello, one of my best friends from college, we were in a rock band together, is a classical cellist and a conductor. I have to schedule with him because he lives in Whales. I really like working with people who pick things up quickly and understand what's going on musically. It's evident to them right away. I feel like I know a lot of people around that are easy to get a hold of. People in this town are so willing to help each other out on recordings. I think it's right to pay people when it's possible for their help but a lot of people are willing to do stuff for free or for very little and I think they feel good about doing that. People often get their friends to come in and play. And the other thing about this scene, people are so well connected with each other, a lot of the time they don't just know their buddy that kind of knows how to play. A lot of the time people know players who are really good and who will come in and do stuff for cheap or free and that's great. It's a tiny scene here. It's tiny but it's not tiny. I mean, it's well connected, everybody knows each other, there's not more than three degrees of separation. This is one of the great things about Portland. Do you find it to be one of the bad things about Portland, because it's sometimes hard to get people to come out and see a show because every night there is a show everywhere in town. Well, not only is there a show everywhere in town but if there is a show you want to go to there's a good chance that you are playing a show that night. That's the thing, everyone's in a band and there's no one left to be in the audience. I don't think that's a problem. I see the problem of not getting people to come out to shows. But I don't think I want to complain about the fact that there is a whole lot of music going on any given night that I could go out to of just about any type. What I really think is about time to have happen is for people who are in other cities to realize what kind of a hidden gem Portland can be as far as recording goes. There are a lot of people doing really good work in this town and I think that it should be not a whole lot of time before people start coming in from bigger scenes because it's less expensive and it's less stressful to work in this town. It seems to me that Portland is less suited to the Seattle type phenomenon. Do you think there will be a critical mass from the influx of bands from other towns? I wonder if the Seattle phenomenon happened because Seattle is actually concerned as a culture with that kind of notoriety and scensterism, if that's a word. I think that only exists in Portland to a lesser degree. I think that one of the things that marks the Portland scene is that people want to do good work, and yes they want to be heard and recognized and would like for it to be widely recognized but first priority is doing good work. I think that's what people concern themselves with. There's almost an anti-marketing thing. Putting posters up around town, putting flyers on telephone poles; that's ok. But anything greater than that... Advertising is a dirty word and promoting, marketing, all those things in this town just sounds kind of icky. I sort of feel that myself, even though I realize that if you want people to take notice of what you're doing first of all do it really well, do a lot of it and don't be afraid to tell people about it. Don't tell people stuff that is not true. Don't annoy people by harping on and on about it but don't keep it a secret. Portland doesn't need to be keeping secrets about its talents. Why didn't you record your EP here? It sort of was a matter of having to be the engineer and a producer and bass player. I really prefer to work with another engineer when I'm actually in the band because that extra person is able to have, if not an objective view, at least the appearance of an objective view. It can be their own objective view that is not involved in the personalities of the band. It's nice to have somebody that's either going to be a final arbiter or at least is going to be able to make some strong suggestions. I just find that it keeps things moving along better. I think that's one of the problems people have about recording their own stuff is when a member of the band is the engineer he doesn't actually get the authority that's needed. It's not really authority, that's not exactly what I'm talking about. What I'd like to do if we record our next batch of stuff here is to have another engineer come in here also because it's just so much easier. It's physically easier, it's mentally easier, and it's more fun. Are you comfortable having other engineers come in? Absolutely. There are two things going on here. I'm an engineer and I go and work in rooms. I work in this room and some other rooms and here's this studio and I work in here and somebody else works in here. Do you let bands bring in engineers? If the other engineer is somebody who I either know or come to know and can trust that they're not going to have a meltdown in the middle of their own project. Basically I don't want to see anybody's project not go well or fail because something doesn't work or the engineer isn't actually an engineer. What would end up happening in a case like that is I would come over here and end up helping because I so much want to see things go right. Have you ever been in that position? I haven't been in that position but I've seen other studio owners be in that position. He would run into somebody that didn't know how things work and it would create confusion, people disliking each other and they would say, gee, we're not getting anything done. And an inexperienced engineer may do something like blame the equipment which makes the studio look bad. And there's no way to recover from that. Who's work do you find inspirational? There certainly are some really well known, poplar producer/engineers who I appreciate their work but part of the problem I have is they have a stamp. There's the Daniel Lanois stamp. He's great, he's brilliant but sometimes it sounds more like his record than the record of the people [that make it]. Even the Bob Dylan Record, which is great, sounds a little more like Daniel that it sounds like Bob. I would say Eno kind of straddles that because he messes with things so much that everybody ends up getting their own sound anyway and it's not like "Oh, that's the Eno stamp." But you can go back as far Phil Spector. Stamp. It comes down to if somebody makes a great record than that record is a great record. It probably means they're good at what they do but having a stamp isn't really what I aspire to.
What would you suggest to someone who wants to start recording at home? Start. Start recording. The great thing about a four track is that it doesn't require a lot of effort to plug in and start making your ideas on it. It's not daunting. If it's sitting down there and its a whole tangle mess of cords and it's in your basement, sometimes that can be daunting and you think ahhh, this musical idea I have right now isn't that important. It depends on the wherewithal to hammer that stuff into place to make it easier to use. What sort of equipment do you suggest? This is the sort of thing sometimes I am loathe to say because you don't want to be taken too literally about this stuff. It's absolutely true that you can do really good work with really crappy equipment and you can do really crappy work with really good equipment. Everybody knows about 57's. (They) are the go to choice on guitar cabinets and snare drums. If you're really on a tight budget, if you have a pair of not destroyed 57's, fairly new, you know where they've been and they're not filled with slobber, they can be very good drum overheads. They're not too harsh and they can be a little bit crunchy. I don't own any 58's and I don't aspire to own any 58's. I don't find them really very pleasing on vocals. Which is not to say they can't be used or made to sound good. There is other stuff that is reasonably affordable, maybe a little bit more and now all these condenser mics that are coming out there, Chinese capsule built that are under two hundred bucks. There's a lot of those that are very usable. What's a good use for a condenser mic? The standard thing people use it for all the time is vocals and I would never be afraid to use a 57 as a substitute for a pushy, trashy sound. Or even as a less intimate and pristine, sometimes you want something strong and punchy. A lot of people use them (condensers) for drum overheads. It's knowing what they sound like and how they can be used to their greatest advantage. It's not whether they suck or not. Don't be afraid to use stuff wrong. A guitar cabinet can make a pretty decent microphone. A speaker and a dynamic microphone are built the same way, they're just different sizes. I'll give a little secret here. A twelve-inch cabinet can make a pretty decent kick drum mic if you set it right in front of the kick drum and hook it up to the mic input. You may have to crank up the gain a ways but it can be pretty punchy. What happens a lot is people will record either some or all of their material at home and bring it to me to mix. And they will have recorded it on their Protools setup or I've even got stuff on half-inch eight track. Just get the instruments sounding good. The microphones are extremely important but the instruments sounding good is even more important because a microphone can't do anything with a crappy sound. I'm not talking about pristine or perfect, I'm talking about sounds good to your ears. Make sure it feels good. Alberta Music Collective is at |
