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Hearts and Minds Perhaps the second nicest person on the planet, Patrick Kearns shares his thoughts on Portland, recording and music in general by A. Raitano I learned of Patrick Kearns through the album review I did of The Very Foundation last month. Honestly, it blew me away. Tight and friendly, the Final Moments of Paola Mori is poppy in all the right places. Kearns, who was given the production credit in the liner notes, was born in San Francisco and moved around a bit before settling in Seattle. Fed up there, he ended up in Portland in '95 and founded Studio 13 where he recorded this black heart is gonna break under the moniker Blue Skies for Black Hearts. With help from his friends, this black heart was basically a solo effort, the songs being crafted and engineered by Kearns. Filled with the same big and bold production wizardry Paola Mori has, it has a happy, neo-British feel to it. The recording done, Patrick set out to fill in the spaces by putting together a band. This was how he met Mike Lewis, songwriter for The Very Foundation. Mike put an ad in a local rag for a guitar player and Patrick answered the call. It turns out that they had previously met at a bar and chatted each other up about music. From there, with Mike on guitar/bass, Jean Paul Ramos on drums, and Ratch Aronica on keys, a stage ready Blue Skies for Black Hearts was created. They are currently recording music for a soundtrack to an independent film. Mike, meanwhile, was looking to create his album and commissioned Kearns to produce and engineer. Tracked at Studio 13 and mixed at Jackpot!, it's 20 minutes of solid music. Facsimile, in particular, has many a magical moment on it. At one point, Mike's voice sounds as though coming through a telephone receiver. It turns out that in order to get that sound they recorded his vocals from a landline through a cell phone into a condenser microphone. I asked him why he didn't just use an EQ to get the effect and he told me, "I just wanted to take it one step farther and do it for real". Studio 13 is his playground where, outside of the aforementioned offerings, he has recorded many an EJ's alumni punk band, as well as Durango Park, the Goddamn Gentlemen, and the Exploding Hearts. It is a small room but it is what he describes as "comfortably uncomfortable." Due to his punk ascetic and DIY style his method might be considered unorthodox. He prefers creativity, character and hands-on experience to technical, schooled understanding. He tells me "Green Bullet" harmonica mics make good overheads. He is full of good information. We sat down together at MLP headquarters for a few hours and over a few golden specials I asked him some questions about being an engineer, a producer and as a musician in Portland. Did you start recording here or in Seattle? I guess you could say I got my start in Seattle. I'm not sure where the point was where it became a conscious thing. I had a four track and I'd record my own band. And a friend of mine's band liked the way that sounded so I figured I'd do a demo for them. They gave me a Replacements bootleg and I think a 57 or something. For payment? Yeah, I didn't even ask them for it. It was a really fun project. And I'm a huge Replacements fan. What did you record them on? It was a cassette four track. One made by Morantz that actually had a pretty good sound for a four-track. It was fifty bucks more than a 424 and it actually sounds quite a bit better. We had a Morantz tube stereo at home when I was growing up and I really liked that. When I saw that they made a four track I thought, oh, this has got to be cool. What were you using for microphones? I had a couple of 57's, nothing too exciting. I didn't know anything. A friend of mine built a small studio and I interned there with him. I helped him set it up and did minor bits of wiring and troubleshooting, construction, stuff like that. Did you record there? Yeah, we recorded there. I did a tiny bit of tracking there, working on other people’s stuff under his supervision. Really basic stuff. It was all rock stuff. People’s attitudes in Seattle were kind of crummy then. It wasn't fun. We would come down here to play with Portland bands and they always had a good time and didn't really care. It was just the post grunge era fallout. Everybody moved there to be a rock star. It just wasn't fun. The music was great but the people weren't fun to be around. Nobody was making any money anyway. I was having a good time two hundred and fifty miles to the south. We came down here as a band called Big Jim. I think we lasted for two years down here. Okay on the local band scene. I started recording and got Studio 13 going. You could get audio gear then for pretty good prices up in Seattle so I was able to get an analog deck. Which now you can get an analog deck for really cheap, it's scary. What do you think the effect of the dropping prices and people building studios everywhere is? A lot more people are doing recording but a whole lot less people are doing interesting stuff. You have to wade through a lot more crap a lot of the time. It's cool that everybody is out and able to do it. Jeff Salztman was telling Larry (Crane) and I about this and I really agree with this, and he dates it back to the forties and fifties, you had to be able to read charts and be a studied, skilled musicians to even step foot into a recording studio. What was your training? Was it trial by fire? Trial by fire for me. I'm not the old school. I really respect those guys but I came from more the punk rock
Is that because there is so much equipment available? Yeah, it's more readily accessible. It's easier to go pay two hundred dollars and get a cheap whatever, a compressor or effects unit, than it is to figure out how to design your own. There's a reason why those (old) units are worth a lot of money these days. There's no harm in the stuff that's coming out of guitar center. It's very cookie cutter and sometimes doesn't even do the job all that well. The old stuff, even if it doesn't do the job that well, it has it's own individual personality or character. There's something to be said about that but (the other stuff) is readily accessible and it's cheap. Do you design your own equipment at all? I wish. I have an interest in it but I'm really not smart enough to figure it out. I study it. I think that anybody who is an engineer and deals with sessions and with clients that pay money, sometimes during a session something is going to break and you have to fix it. So you learn. All these guerilla engineers like Jeff, Larry and myself, that didn't get formal training; we all have our areas of expertise. We all have gaping holes of knowledge, too. People are always amazing me. The new intern at Jackpot is teaching me stuff. He's never really operated a full on analog deck and he's teaching me stuff about pro-tools. Do you do only analog? No, I do both. I like both. For rock stuff analog is pretty cool, especially if you are retaining some kind of looseness. I think that analog complements that kind of seventies vibe, that loose playing. All the stuff you hear on the radio now, every hit, every song is just on. It's different. I listened to the radio the other day. I have been mostly listening to locally produced albums to review and it's amazing how much more interesting and how much more character the albums that we're getting have. That's the funniest thing. The irony is that the cheap stuff you can get, where the equipment has no character but people are recording in weird situations and often times less than ideal instruments and on limited budgets. This creative stuff happens to get the job done. That's just a better thing than the factory stuff they pump out for the radio. Which will probably get worse as things get more streamlined. There will always be avenues, as you've found, with the magazine, to find out about underground music and people doing it just for the love of doing it. You always have to look in a different corner. You recorded the Blue Skies For Black Hearts album by your self. What was your intention? I just hadn't been in a band and the stuff that I was writing and wanted to do, because of my own fault, I couldn't explain to anybody. I couldn't quite grasp it myself. I had this really vague idea that started out with getting together with three or four friends on Monday nights up at the recording studio. I would bring in songs and kind of arrange them and play them and put them on cassette tape, a boom box, so I could hear things. I had the studio and I had time so I would spend the day cutting drum tracks with a friend, Jean-Paul or Lu Jon. Two different guys with very similar names. So I had these drum tracks and a basic idea for a song then I would go in and overdub. Did you want to eventually form a band? Yeah, Jean Paul and I really had a fun time playing the songs. He was the drummer I finished the project with. I couldn't track my vocals so he did all the vocal tracking. We had a really good time with the songs so we wanted to put it in that format. Other things just fell into place. I got a keyboard from a guy who makes these weird vintage keyboards. My girlfriend plays keyboards and she was always asking, "Wouldn't it be fun to have a band?" All right, we have a band. I met Mike (Lewis) at a show in Portland when I was coming through town working for somebody else who lives in San Francisco. It's just an outlet for creativity for me. I bring in a rhythm and a melody and sometimes words and it gets arranged, torn apart and put back together. Do you still do the songs on the album? We do a lot of them but we haven't been doing all of them. What was it like adding all the other players to the songs that you did by your self? They were really respectful. They added their own things but everybody made this huge effort to stay true to the parts. The album was done and mixed before we ever had a practice and they looked at those as finished. Sometimes we changed it. There is trumpet all over that record. We're limited musician wise. We could use another person in the band. A lot of times we don't have a bass player, which is fine. Mike plays trumpet but it doesn't really work for him to play trumpet live. So we do the trumpet parts on the guitar. Now we just work on new songs and we basically have an album worth of new material. Are you going to be recording? We're going to be working on that soon. Hopefully in August. In your Studio? At my place, yeah. We had this big long experiment last spring with combining analog and Pro-tools.
Are you planning on engineering it? Yeah, I end up doing it by default but the band they does a little bit, especially Jean Paul. He pops in there and gets his hands dirty. If I am playing an instrument he's usually the one running whatever recording equipment that needs to be run. With the soundtrack I basically played the very first rhythm part and then I sat at the recorder the rest of the time and they played everything else. Do you record live as a band? For the soundtrack we couldn't because we put ourselves in a limited situation. We're not doing it at our place but rather at a place were we can only record one track at a time. Blue Skies is a band that likes using limitations and turning them into advantages or blessings or good things. For the soundtrack we were breaking character from the sound that we had spent six to eight months working on for this band. As soon as we got asked to do the soundtrack we knew what we were doing. We made a total break. We're using a whole different mic-pre setup, recording tape machine, everything. We can only do one track at a time so we recorded a scratch track with all of us playing then I recorded an acoustic track over that. Then we added latika, glockenspiel, and snare with brushes... How was that process, was it easy to do? It's really hard but it's really cool. I tend to push harder than they do to get things done. "That's good enough, let's get things done". They say, "No that's not good enough." They're bigger critics than me and it's probably because it's my band. That's the exact opposite of me in the studio. Often I will make somebody do something too many times because I feel more picky than the artist. How does it affect the process being not only the person engineering the band but also being the person who is guiding the band? It's pretty easy; it's one in the same. Part of the engineering is making them happy and comfortable and no stress coming at them from you or what you're doing. You're trying to get good sounds to tape and while your doing that the other thing is creating an atmosphere conducive for them to create. I think it's all important. I don't think any engineer has never done any production. There's producers out there that supposedly have never done any engineering but I found that doubtful. I bet you they have thrown in suggestions. There are a lot of people like myself who, if I'm engineering, I'm at least doing some level of producing. You have a vested interest too. If you hear something that they can do that is more attractive, you probably want to bring it up. You have to have a thick skin because they could totally reject your idea but sometimes they may be like, "Wow, I never thought of that". Do you find yourself doing that a lot? That depends. I like getting into peoples songs. I try to picture things in my head before I put it down and you just make these subconscious decisions to make it sound the way you hear it in our head. Tell me about studio 13. It's little. It's dirty. But it's really cool. It's got a vibe to it that's really comfortably uncomfortable. You can't get comfortable there because the space is small. The main room is about 21' x 16' but none of the walls are parallel. It's got some acoustic treatments that I have done over the years so it actually sounds really good for a small room. It's got a 16-track analog 1/2 deck and a crummy little Mackie board and tons of weirdo mics and effects boxes and outboard gear. It's fun to get creative there. I end up doing a lot of reamping there. Reamping? I'll run a drum overhead through a guitar amp out in the other room and mic the guitar amp. Why do you do that? Because it sounds cool. To make it interesting. I'll do weird stuff like that. It just depends on what I hear in my head and how to get it down. I always try to do preproduction with bands so I can get an idea how I want the song to sound in my head. (I like to) hear the band play it live, or hear the song on tape so I've gotten the song in my head so it starts to develop character there. What advice would you give to anyone that wants to start recording? One: jump in. Two: read as much as you can about it. Realize there are no rules. It's common sense and if you jump right in you can get something done. You may make mistakes that, as you become a more experienced engineer, you wouldn't later, but you have to make them. It's all pretty logically set up and if you sit there and think about things, and granted it will take a long time, you can learn it. You have to love it because there is so many things to hate about it: long hours, the pay's not that great, it's really stressful if you are trying to do it full time because all of a sudden you don't have a month of work. It's a weird lifestyle but I like it. I like the music. I like making it. If you're interested in putting something down on tape or on your computer, that's seventy-five percent of it right there. Patrick is ready and able to perform his recording wizardry for you at his studio or somewhere else for very reasonable prices. Reach him or Blue Skies For Black Hearts at: www.blueskiesforblackhearts.com photographs taken from band website |
aesthetic: do it yourself, get it done. Make your art somehow, anyway that you can make it. It's weird because going back in time with those guys in the fifties, forties and the attitude they had back then, the guys building those studios were very DIY. (They) created their own gear. Those guys were geniuses. There's really not people today in recording that did the thing for recording that somebody like Les Paul did. That guy did everything. He's a great guitar player; he invented all kinds of recording devices. It's arguable but he's credited with being the first person to develop multi-tracking. People were amazing. You see a different kind of amazing these days.
Marrying the two to see if it works for us and it worked. It worked quite well but we have to make adjustments. We got two songs done that way. We're not going to continue the exact process but an adaptation of it. We're going to track with the analog and bounce to Pro-tools to mix.