LITTLE BOY BLAKE

PAUL TINGEN spoke with producer/engineer Tchad Blake about his love
of binaural recordings and his old dog attitude to learning new technical tricks.

Tchad Blake has a passion for binaural recording, and records himself as he walks around Sunset Boulevard, as he visits grocery shops and even while walking through Harare in Zimbabwe -- giving new meaning to the phrase 'street music'! He'll record everything with two Sony ECM50 lavalier microphones stuck in his ears and a little Sony TCD D7 DAT recorder clipped to his belt. Afterwards he spends hours listening to this stuff, fascinated by what would bore most people to tears. What's more, these environmental binaural recordings aren't just a secret hobby, he actually transfers them on to CDs, and lots of them!

Blake maintains that he is not a technical engineer, and that he really doesn't care whether he's recording analogue or digital, 16-bit or 24-bit: "Believe me, it all sounds pretty good to me!" Any suspicion of a rather snotty attitude towards technology is dissolved when he exclaims, again with big-eyed wonder: "I love technology, but I'm also baffled by it. To me technologists are the great people of the world. The people making all this equipment are the true artists. To be able to figure all that stuff out and build it? They are geniuses."

And finally, Tchad Blake has a love of low-fi and distorted sound, and spends forever devising the craziest ways of making things sound weird. Despite his admiration for technologists, his methods are often extremely low-tech, and include placing microphones in tubes, using loads of guitar pedals instead of rack-ounted studio effects, and playing things back via guitar amps, and then miking them up again, whether binaurally or with mics stuck in tubes.

Tchad Blake is forever building and inventing things, giving him something of an aura of a mad inventor. Sitting in the lounge of Studio B in Sunset Sound Factory Studios in Hollywood -- his favourite studio in the world, where he was an assistant engineer in the '80s -- Blake remarked: "I think it's one of my strengths to be like a sound sculptor; in effect a creator with the musicians. It's a strength that I try to apply in my job. I have all sorts of other interests, like photography, and I have a little welding studio at home. I also like to do collages with paste and paper. And I like to do drawings. Give me a truckload of scrap metal from an industrial place, and I'd be scratching my head for days what to build out of it. I'm good with found objects, and I think it's the same with music. Binaural recordings are one form of using found objects. If someone comes in with a guitar part, I'm less likely to help with the actual song, and much more likely to hear that the part would sound really good if it was going through this tiny little speaker in a trashcan with a short delay over it. I'm much better at doing things like that than getting something to sound really hi-fi. I don't even know how to do that! I've tried getting fantastic sounds, and I just wasn't any good at it. It's like it goes against my natural inclinations, so I fail miserably. For years I couldn't find any mixing work because of this, and I think the reason why my approach is more accepted today is because of rap music and hip-hop, because they started using these old and crunchy sounds on their records, and deliberately putting vinyl scratch sounds on things. It's another way of working with sound collages, with found objects."

One could be forgiven for assuming that Blake's world is decidedly non-mainstream and well off the beaten path, hidden away in an unknown corner that has little relevance for the music industry at large. Well, non-mainstream and off the beaten path Blake's approach certainly is, but during the last ten years his work has become remarkably successful, and it's widely admired by artists, engineers and producers around the world. What's more, to his own amazement, recently the mainstream gave him its highest accolade, in the form of two Grammies. These were both for Sheryl Crow's The Globe Sessions, one for Best Non-Classical Recording, and the other for Best Rock Album of 1998.

Blake mixed seven of the 11 tracks on The Globe Sessions, and shared his Grammies with recording engineer Trina Shoemaker and mixer Andy Wallace. Blake talks about this event with the bemusement of the little boy in the toyshop who has just been handed the most flash and expensive toy of all: "I never thought I'd do anything that would be looked at by the Grammy organisation. I always thought my stuff is too low-fi and grungy-sounding. I'd never really thought about the Grammies, until I got nominated. And then it became exciting."

Blake's idiosyncratic and iconoclastic approach to recording is, of course, supremely relevant to the mainstream. Not only because he wins Grammies and some of the records he works on sell in respectable amounts, but also because it is hugely influential and offers inspiration to all who are trying to fight the overwhelming tide of blandness and sameness. A quick look at Blake's quality-laden credit list illustrates why this is so. Blake recorded the first three albums by Crowded House and recorded and mixed four albums by Richard Thompson (including Mirror Blue and Rumour & Sigh), Paul McCartney's Flowers in The Dirt, Elvis Costello's Brutal Youth, Los Lobos' Kiko, Suzanne Vega's 99.9F and Nine Objects Of Desire, The Pretenders' Packed, American Music Club's Mercury and T-Bone Burnett's Criminal and Talking Animals. In almost all of these cases he worked with another beacon of quality and innovation, producer Mitchell Froom.

During the last few years, Blake has started to spread his wings into independent mixing and production. He mixed Sheryl Crow's last two albums, as well as music by Bonnie Riatt, Soul Coughing and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and he produced, mixed and recorded albums by Soul Coughing, Wild Colonials, Neil Finn, The Finn Bros, plus a whole range of world music records released in the last few years by Real World, amongst them records by the Indian electric mandolin player U. Srinivas, Sardinia's number one guitarist Gesuino Deiana and the Gambian kora player Pa Bobo Jobarteh. The three mentioned Real World albums are all recorded fully binaural (for more info see Blake's website: www.binau.com).

The 44-year old American started his recording career as a teenager, capturing environmental noises with a mono cassette recorder. He was also a guitar player, but didn't enter the recording industry until the age of 25, when he became a janitor and runner at Wally Heider's studio in LA. He immediately used the studio's resources to put together a binaural system, and took it out on the road. He moved to Sunset Sound Factory in 1983, and there he met Mitchell Froom in 1986. The rest is history, Froom and Blake rapidly establishing a reputation as one of the most exciting and interesting production teams in the business.

This means that the pair get most of their calls from artists and fellow producers and engineers, and rarely from record companies. However, it's not something that Blake regrets. He explained a motto that's a reversal of the old entertainment industry adage 'don't call us, we'll call you': "There's something I learned from Mitchell, and which has become my philosophy as well: never go after projects. It is almost always artists who ask for us, and I want to keep it that way. I had a couple of meetings this year that turned out to be initiated by record companies, and when I asked them what the artist thought, they said: 'oh, the artist knows some of your work.' But I never got to talk to the artists. For me, the first meeting should always be with the artist. Our stuff is not underground or alternative anymore, but we still don't usually do the really big stuff. Artists come to us because they want something different. They usually want to pare things down. They often want to do something more simple, go back to essentials."

During the last few years Blake's profile has increased in the work he does independently of Froom, and he has also started to co-produce many projects they do together, as well as mix and record them. Examples are the recent Randy Newman record Bad Love, as well as CDs such as Cibo Matto, by Cibo Matto, Collosal Head by Los Lobos and Other Songs by Ron Sexsmith. He also produced Froom's solo album Dopamine.

Froom and Blake's experimental urges find probably their most arresting and extreme expression in the two CDs of Latin Playboys, a collective consisting of Froom & Blake and two Los Lobos members, guitarist/singer David Hidalgo and drummer Louie Perez. The two Latin Playboys CDs, Latin Playboys (1994) and Dose (1999) are composed of kitchen laboratory experiments on a portastudio; high-quality studio recordings fused with low-quality effects, and lots of binaural stuff, all pieced together in a Frankenstein-like assembly to form a musical collage that's truly bizarre, yet at the same time extremely engaging.

This is musique concrete for the '90s, initiated by David Hidalgo, who was playing around with a portastudio in his kitchen when everybody else in the house had gone to sleep. He played the tapes to Froom, who suggested that they make an album from it. Rather than try to re-record the four-track portastudio material, Froom had the brilliant idea of transferring the four-track material to 24-track, and using it as the basis for overdubs. And so Louie Perez wrote additional lyrics and overdubbed drums, Froom added some keyboard parts, and Tchad Blake had a great time adding even more distortion and chaos to the mixture, plus inserting many of his binaural (street) noises. Apparently he even played some of the four-track material through guitar amps and recorded that with microphones, in order to deteriorate the sonic quality even further!

Made on a shoe-string, the album was met by a mixture of enraptured and bewildered reviews. Whichever way, it certainly made a splash. Everyone thought it was a one-off but, five years later, and 80,000 copies and a tour (on which Blake played bass and binaural recordings) down the road, there's another Latin Playboys CD.

Slightly more song-based and accessible, Dose is as crazy and outrageous as the first CD, and made according to the same process. Only now Hildalgo had gone hi-tech because he'd installed a Tascam eight-track cassette recorder in his kitchen. Blake: "I'd say that, this time, about 50 to 60 percent of what's on the CD comes from David's cassette recorder. Once we transferred the material from the cassette to the 24-track it took about 13 days to finish the project. The most amazing thing to me was that I had a really hard time taming the bass from the Tascam. The eight-track has a lot of low end. I added a lot of binaural sounds from my library this time. I particularly love the bicycle bells on the Paula Y Fred, and on Lemon 'N Ice I used a binaural recording of a 78 record that I have, with these birds singing. On all my recordings and mixes I use a lot of guitar pedals to create distortion and other effects, like the Sansamp and The Pod, which is made by Line 6. I also have a MesaBoogie tube distortion pedal, and a Hotcake pedal, made by the ex-drummer from Split Enz. I have a huge bag full of pedals that I can bring out and experiment with when I need them. David and I have many of the same boxes, but he actually has even more! For us making a record like that is about freedom in the studio. We respond to it.

"We mess around and are the opposite of perfectionists. If something sounded strange or imperfect in the mix, everybody wanted to leave it. It's not to everybody's taste, but it's cheap to make so the cost/sales ratio is great, which is why Atlantic was prepared to release volume two."

Being an extreme example, the Latin Playboys CD is, in many ways, a blueprint for how Froom and Blake approach recording, mixing and producing. In Blake's case this consists of a love of distortion and compression, and a very dry, very upfront sound with space created by extreme panning. He claims that he's only seriously used digital reverb on a couple of records in the last ten years, and that he tried to emulate the effect of reverb in many other ways... just so long as it isn't reverb. He explained: "I use distortion and compression to create a sense of ambience, because I like records that are really 'in your face'. The reason, I suppose, is that I hated the big, washy-sounding records of the '80s, and was a huge fan of the British progressive rock albums of the '70s; bands like King Crimson, Van Der Graaf Generator and Soft Machine. The best example is probably the track Ladies Of The Road from the King Crimson album Islands. The kick drum sounds like it's in a cardboard box, and the hi-hat is just amazingly loud. Things are horribly askew on it but, had it been done in any other way, they wouldn't have been half as interesting. So I always hope that I can make records that sound as good as that!

"Records by Hatfield & The North, or Roger Waters' Music From The Body, from 1971/2, are so interesting to me sonically, I'm still enthralled by them. So I suppose subconsciously I still go for that very dry, very boxed-in sound, even as I like my records to have a lot more low end than records of that era. I may use a plate reverb sometimes, but most of the time when I put reverb up, I seem to get rid of it straightaway. I'm not against reverb, I love the things Clearmountain or Flood do with reverb, I just don't quite seem to know how to use it."

And so Blake brings in his whole arsenal of guitar pedals to create distortion, as well as his compressors like the Distressor, which he used on vocals, guitars and drums. and the ADL used on vocals. Blake: "I also have five Spectrasonic 610 compressors, which is an old '70s compressor, and I use two of them which sound really peculiar. They distort radically, and I use them a great deal on overheads. Of course, I use the LA3A and the 1176 -- most studios have them. My toolbox also contains the Electroharmonics Microsynth, which is a pedal filter, and the Ludwig Phase II synth, a pedal board with a fuzz box which sounds like frying eggs -- no low end at all! It also has what are called formant trajectories, which give you cues for wah wah and actually has a valve sound. I use the Ludwig on percussion, guitars and on drum delays. I have lots of stuff, like a low-fi podium compressor, normally used for public speaking. It's a dreadful compressor and I love using it on drums.

"I have a whole flightcase full of mechanical things. Lots of percussion -- it's always useful to have some percussion around give an edge to a track. And I have what I call 'mechanical filters': rubber or plastic hoses, metal or wooden pipes, didgeridoos, tin cans, cardboard boxes..." whatever he can lay his hands on. The most-used one is a metal pipe of about two feet long which is flexible in the middle. "For several years it found its way onto just about every album I recorded. What I do is place it in front of whatever I want to record, and place a microphone inside. It distorts, warps or filters the sound, hence the title 'mechanical filter.' Sometimes I'll add things like springs or nails for extra resonance. I have been using that approach less the last few years, because it became a little bit of a formula. But the advantage is that, when you record with these kinds of devices, your records will have a much more individual and recognisable sound than when you're working with samples or common studio effects."

This 'recognisable sound' is exactly the reason why Blake has gradually become sought-after by certain sections of the mainstream, and is now honoured by it with Grammies. There's method to his engineering madness and it is clearly bearing interesting fruits. Of course, as Blake pointed out, the advents of rap, hip-hop, and probably also grunge, have all helped make his particular and peculiar approach acceptable, and to widen the scope further than the hi-fi virtuosity of the likes of Bob Clearmountain -- a mixer whose work Blake intensely admires.

Honing in on one of his recent mainstream Grammy-winning projects, Sheryl Crow's The Globe Session, Blake elaborated on how he became involved and what he brought to Crow's third hit CD: "Sheryl came to Mitchell and I after she had been working for a long time on her second record, because she wanted some fresh ears. We ended up finishing the album with her and mixing it and recording two songs from the ground up (which, ironically, sound less like us than the rest of the album!). With The Globe Sessions the idea was always that I would mix it, because we'd had such a good experience last time.

"This time Sheryl had built her own studio in New York, Globe Studios, so she could write and record things in the studio and spend weeks there just playing and jamming. Eventually she finished the record and I had a window of three weeks, and so we mixed it, re-recorded some things and added some overdubs, and sequenced the album. After that she recorded three new songs, and re-recorded the drums on There Goes The Neigborhood. My schedule didn't allow me to mix those things, which is why they were done by Andy Wallace.

"It's hard for me to say what I brought to the mix. I don't want to downplay my part, but what Sheryl brought to me was in pretty good shape. With both of Sheryl's records she came in with pretty great arrangements and performances. Everything is there, it's very well done, and it's very easy to mix. But, like everybody, she puts more on tape than you need. A lot of times I do the same thing: you pile things up a bit and then clean it up as you go. So, in the mix, you're left with pulling things back or using things in a different way than was originally intended. That's pretty much what I did with her stuff. I think one of my strong points is the mute button. It's one of my favourite tools. It can be short mutes, just drop the bass out for (omega) a bar to give the next section extra punch. That was maybe my greatest contribution, apart from boosting the sounds and distorting and compressing them more than they already were. And I put some reverb on the vocal on Riverwide! On the beginning of There Goes The Neighborhood I added sounds taken from a trip that Sheryl, guitarist Jeff Trott, drummer Gregg Williams and I made to Brighton Beach in New York. I'd taken my little Sony video camera and had my binaural headset on, and recorded us in a bar and in the subway and walking on the beach, and pasted that into the track. The video machine has a compressor in it and so it's not truly binaural. I also did all the photographs for the inner sleeve of the record. I'd done the artwork and pics for the cover of the Girl Bros album by Wendy & Lisa, which I co-produced and mixed, and Sheryl asked me to give it a try for her album. Sadly my ideas didn't fly with the record company for the cover shots."

It's clear from Blake's admiration for technologists that he isn't a Luddite. But his emphasis on old guitar pedals, old compressors and 'mechanical effects' can easily give the impression that he's an engineer of the DIY old school, a man not too enamoured of new digital gear with computer-based inferfaces and easy access canned sounds. To some degree this is true. Blake called himself an 'old dog', weary of all the new tricks he's supposed to learn. And he loves Studio B in Sunset Sound Factory because of its '70s API desk, and Neve pre-amps and so on, and does virtually all his mixes there. All signs that seem to put him in the vintage camp.

But he said that he cares little whether he records digital or analogue, preferring, in the words of Mitchell Froom, to 'focus on the 98 percent (the music), as opposed to the two percent (the technology)'. And there are many aspects of modern, computer-based studio technology that he likes a lot. So here's where he's at: "The API has Flying Faders automation, and I love it. I would never want to go back to the old style of mixing, with all this piecemeal mixing and editing. I remember when automation first came out I was afraid it would destroy the performance of a mix. But that turned out to be totally untrue. Before automation I got bogged down in mixes I did on my own, and never got it right, but automation has totally freed me up to enjoy the music. Moreover, with all the alternate takes that record companies want these days, you have to cover yourself and use automation. Of course Flying Faders gives you only faders and mutes, but the EQ on the API is all in 2dB steps, and if you use the same outboard gear, you can get your mix back very, very close.

"People say that digital desks are the future, but I've used the Euphonix once, and I must say that I had trouble with it. I cannot hit, say, four phase buttons in an instant, and then change my mind and hit another three and at the same time hit a high-pass filter, because that also affects the phase. On all these digital desks you have to set things up and assign them and it doesn't allow you to do things on the fly. To me the interaction part is gone. It may be great for an artist/engineer at home, but I wouldn't want to worry about stuff like that when I have a band waiting in the recording area.

"Some people say that a digital console is to an analogue console what a word processor is to a typewriter, and it includes a similar learning curve. I can see the point. I need to spend more time with the Euphonix and give it more of a chance. But I've asked people who have worked with it for a long time, and they say that the things I do are not possible, or certainly not as fast, on a digitally-controlled desk. So, like I said, I'm an old dog who, at this point in the game, is not interested in learning these new tricks. It has taken me 20 years to master a regular studio with a regular console. I don't consider myself a really versatile engineer. I do what I do, and I do that well, but I'm not technical and don't have a lot of knowledge about things. I've just done it a long time and I know what I like.

"Having said that, I love Pro Tools, and all that kind of stuff that's coming out at the moment. Mitchell has just bought a system and I'm getting one too. Mitchell and I have never been the favourites of the big record companies, and we seem to make records that engineers and producers like, but that generally don't sell in huge quantities. It seems that the kind of records we like to make are increasingly difficult to make because they don't bring in big bucks. With Pro Tools, we will be able to do more stuff at home and make records more cheaply. You can record stuff in the studio and then take it home and work on it. It's the main reason for us to get Pro Tools, apart from the fact that it is becoming a standard. I've had a SADiE system for a while, and that's a brilliant machine. It made it possible for me to make these CDs based on binaural recordings very cheaply. They were all edited in my SADiE. The fact that they have introduced real-time DSP for every separate channel is great. I'm fine with the A/D converters of the SADiE. In fact I've recorded these binaural CDs simply using the A/D converters of the Sony TCD D7. I don't listen that closely to sonic quality. I mix to the SADiE, to Panasonic DAT and 15ips Dolby SR, and will listen back to what sounds best, and use that.

"The other new thing that excites me is 5.1, which I think is the greatest thing that has happened for home entertainment ever. I'm excited about any kind of surround. But what I'd love to see on DVD is a separate two channels for binaural recording, and don't butcher it with some sort of filtering. You can have two or three versions of the same record on one DVD, one in 5.1 mix and one for two speakers with some surround effect and a couple of channels with unadulterated binaural material. That would be great."

And so, Tchad Blake continues to ogle the recording world with small boy wide-eyes of wonder, and we can listen to the fruits of his labours, and view the world in a similar way, if only for a moment.