Engineers Offer Tips On Adding Wild, Wonderful and Downright Weird Sounds To Your Recordings
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by
Maureen Droney
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Tchad Blake’s Pipeline to Strange Sound
Contrarian Tchad Blake has long been recognized as a radical recordist. His extensive discography ranges from Crowded House, Los Lobos, Sheryl Crow, The Bangles and T-Bone Burnett to the soundtracks for There’s Something About Mary, Dead Man Walking and The Truth About Cats and Dogs. We found him ensconced at Sunset Sound Factory’s Studio B, where he took a break from mixing the debut release for Virgin Records’ Miranda Lee Richards to talk about some of his ventures into alternative recording.
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Often
there will be a happy accident, and I’ll get somewhere that
I hadn’t expected. I think, in the studio, your attitude is
more important than the equipment you use. |
Blake’s work with his frequent recording partner, musician/producer Mitchell Froom, on Los Lobos’ dense and impressionist Kiko became the first record where Blake was able to stretch out with recording methods. “We decided to go for the sounds that we wanted, without worrying about trying to sound like anybody else,” he recalls. “And one of the things that we did was to make a contrast between really lo-fi and hi-fi.”
Some of the techniques used by Blake on Kiko, as well as on many later projects, involved miking reflected sounds, then enhancing the signal through the use of pipes, or, as he calls them, “mechanical filters.” “I often used sound that was reflected off of boards, metal plates, glass,” he explains. “For a long time, I had a huge metal plate that we called the ‘Yucca Bone’ [named for Hollywood’s Yucca Street, where it was found] that we’d set up in front of the drums. It was about 1/4-inch thick, with a curve to it, and it acted almost like a parabolic reflector. Along with that, I had a series of pipes that were loosely tuned to different notes. I’d put them up in front of the mics and mix that in.”
Blake credits his piping inspirations to engineer/author Barry “Sherman” Keene. “He was a tech at Wally Heider’s who also taught a class where he explained that all microphone diaphragms were made in omni, and that it was the internal plumbing of a mic that made it directional. I guess I took him literally and started using plumbing to make my own patterns for microphones—and also my own filters. Instead of using electrical filtering to take off the top and low end, I’d record something through a pipe. The pipe takes off top and bottom but also creates a resonance within itself so that you get a bump at a certain frequency—basically a mechanical filter. I also used digiridoos. I’d put them up against the glass in a studio; the reflections would come off the glass through the digiridoo into the microphone, which you could move in and out for tuning.”
The advent of the SansAmp, also much used on Kiko, helped cut down on the amount of plumbing supplies and sheet metal that Blake had to carry to sessions.
“It was a big thing for me,” he admits. “I used it mainly on drums and bass. I could put the kick drum through the SansAmp, hit the Phase button and it would drop the kick drum something like an octave. It would also put this really weird top on it, this little bit of distortion. So that became my new filter.”
Other equipment Blake has used as filters includes resonators from old radios (“I put microphones on the edges and use them in front of the drums.”), reduced-frequency—okay, bad—microphones, line outs from voice recorder tape decks and esoteric compressors.
“I have a collection of really funky compressors that do nice things when you filter and EQ them. I have a couple that were used for the P.A. system in a submarine, and I have a Shure Level-Loc. It’s a mic-level compressor made for speech; it craps out with drums at any level. Take a microphone, stick it in the compressor, put it in the drum room and the thing will distort—there’s nothing you can do about it. But it’s really cool to just mix in small amounts.
“A lot of people think I’m anti-reverb,” he notes. “But that’s not true. I like to get the sound of it with compression or distortion or something else. Reverb, itself, to my ears, often takes up too much space, so I only use it when I can’t create that effect with anything else.”
Although lately Blake’s pipe collection remains mostly in storage, he always carries at least one short travel-size one with him, just in case. Then there are techniques such as putting baby guitar amps into trash cans with the lid on, and he hasn’t stopped building: A recent invention started life as a large, square, olive oil can and has morphed into a kind of spring reverb. “I put a speaker in it,” he explains. “Then coming off the speaker are a bunch of springs that attach to the sides of the can. When you put sound into the can, it makes both the springs and the can rattle. Instead of having a surface-mount transducer, the speaker actually makes the whole can shake.
“When I try these things, I try to keep it spontaneous,” he concludes, “and not to think about it too much. Often there will be a happy accident, and I’ll get somewhere that I hadn’t expected. I think, in the studio, your attitude is more important than the equipment you use.”
