In Part One of this interview (Issue 223), Barry Diament and I talked about how he started his career as a recording engineer, and his equipment and recording philosophy. We continue the conversation here with more about his record label Soundkeeper Recordings, and about gear, musicians making music together and capturing the magic, EQ not being a bad thing in mastering, and more.
FD: It seems like your fundamental approach is that you want to capture the music as it sounds. Have you changed your approach over the…
BD: Decades? I think the gear has gotten better, but once I found that mic setup, I really haven't found one that I think is truer. I think it’s really good at capturing what occurs in its presence as long as I place the musicians properly, because when you record this way, you sort of have to do the mix before the recording. Traditionally, you do the recording to multichannel and then you mix it. [With my approach], you have to decide what the recording's going to sound like before you actually press the red button.
Instead of pushing faders, I'm pushing instruments and amplifiers, or I'll say to a vocalist, “can you take a half-step to your left and come in a little closer to the mic array? Come in closer,” or, “you're drowning out the other guy; take a half step back,” until I hear the right balance. And then I push the button and don't touch anything for the rest of the session.
Barry Diament.
FD: Your recordings sound very “honest.” Especially the dynamics. When someone gets softer or louder it really has a sense of realism.
BD: Yeah; it's not just about the spatial distribution of the images and the soundstaging. I've always felt that dynamics are one of the last frontiers of getting to our goal of a recording and a system that totally gets out of the way and brings you to the performance.
BD: It was an issue when I left Atlantic and started mastering independently. It got to a point where I realized people were starting to ask me to make the records louder. In fact, one person that brought me a lot of work early on started using the phrase “balls to the wall.” I asked myself why I wanted to become a recording engineer, and weaponizing music wasn't one of the answers I came up with.
So basically, the only time I've ever used compression in my life was on a cassette for an artist who insisted on it. Other than that, I don't use any compression because like I say, dynamics are the weak link. If [dynamics are] the weak link [in a recording], why would I want to take them away? I know some people say compression adds more punch, but that's illogical to me, because dynamics are where the punch lives. It gives you the illusion of punch, but it doesn't give you real…I want the real punch. I want to feel it in my chest when it's happening the way it does at a real rock show, for example. Or when an orchestra does a forte, the horn section is really powerful, and I don't get that on a lot of recordings.
I'm optimistic now that a lot of the streaming services are using some automatic leveling. It's making the compressed stuff sound as wimpy as it really is and I think that's great.
But once I realized people were using VU meters instead of loudspeakers to evaluate my work, I had to reconsider what I was doing. And that's why I decided to just start a label, Soundkeeper Recordings. But I didn't want it to be an “audiophile” label. To me, an audiophile label is really good-sounding Tibetan bells or something that someone's going to listen to once.
Thunderstorms, locomotives, all that stuff. I want a music label. I want to appeal to people that love music and not just audiophiles. I want the fact that the recording disappears to be incidental. That’s the quest I'm on.
FD: I wanted to ask you something, because when you were talking about balancing the musicians by working on their locations from the microphones, that's like a throwback to the days of mono. I don't know if you've ever heard the Impex reissue of Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra, but it has an outtake of Sinatra having the musicians play a few bars and then giving them very specific instructions on moving the instruments even a couple of inches closer or farther back, even putting a carpet in front of the bass drum. And it kind of sounds like full circle to what you’re doing.
BD: It kind of is, right? I'm using less equipment by design, but I think in the old days, they just had less to do. There was less gear, so they had to learn how to work with that. And I think that's a good part of the reason why a lot of that stuff still has a magic to it, even if they didn't have the highest fidelity microphones to use.
FD: It’s been said many times, but the quality of the musicians playing together has been lost in a lot of today's pop music. So I really commend any label or musician who's just trying to capture the moment.
BD: And I think it's different when players are in a room together and not wearing headphones, and not having the drummer over in an isolation booth where you're looking at them through a window. Sometimes magic happens when things were done on 48 tracks and using close mics. But something else happens when you get rid of all that studio stuff and not do things for the convenience of the engineer.
For all the recordings we have of vocalists who play piano – if I'm looking at someone playing a grand piano, the person singing and playing the keyboard is not going to be in the center. They're going to be left of center as I look at them toward the stage. So that's what I want them to be when I record them. Usually, you're going to get the vocalists in the middle, and a lot of engineers will put the low end of the piano in one speaker and the high end of the piano in the other speaker.
The mastering room with Linkwitz LX521 speakers set up. Barry also uses Magnepan 3.7i speakers for mastering.
FD: That's a bold choice. Some people might not like that or even think there's something wrong with the recording.
BD: Well, I think the only reason I have a vocalist in the middle is it makes it easier for the engineer, especially if he's cutting vinyl. But I don't think things should be made easier for the engineer. I think they should be made easier for the musicians and for the listener.
When I'm working with musicians who have been in studios before, when they're working with me, it's a different scene [than what they’re used to]. They don't have headphones on. They have to listen to each other a lot harder, and they tend to…well, the first session we did for the album Equinox, everyone was playing very carefully. We came back and listened to the results, and it sounded wonderful sonically, but musically it was timid. We went back and before the [next] session I spoke to the players and I asked them to take the word “play” literally, to just let it fly. And four hours later, we had an album and it was great.
FD: How do you pick the musicians and the music for your recordings? And do you have them come into your studios, or do remote recording?
BD: It's always remote. It's always a room that is suited to the music. I've used small churches, not the long-reverb ambient type, but a couple of small churches. I've used a small auditorium. When I recorded the Cosmic American Derelicts a few years ago, it was country music so I decided I wanted to record them in a barn. Here in Connecticut, there are lots of barns, and I found one that didn’t have a dirt floor and animal stalls. At one time in the 1800s it was a dairy barn. Now, it's got a beautiful wooden floor and a brick fireplace. I only use my own studio/listening room for post-production, for basically assembling the final master and evaluating what I got.
Our first artist, Work of Art, was actually a mastering client who ended up becoming a friend. He came to me to master an album of his, and at the mastering session he asked me how much consideration I give to the final level when I master. I said, “none whatsoever.” And he stayed. He stayed because I've had people come up and say, in contrast, “how much do you usually raise the level of a tape that comes in here? We do 6 dB.” This was a big producer that asked me this. I'm not going to name him.
And I thought, that's such an absurd question, because I remember there was a Yes album I worked on at Atlantic where I had to drop the level of the playback on the reel-to-reel machine 7 dB just to avoid the meters from pinning. It was a copy of…it certainly wasn't an original tape. I had to drop the level 7 dB just to not overload the playback electronics, never mind [dealing with] the recording itself. Forget about the treble; it left town long ago at that kind of level. That wasn't one of the greatest recordings in the world, even though the music was, I think, wonderful.
When I started telling my friend Art about how I wanted to record, he volunteered his band. So we found the church deep in the woods of upstate New York. The band went up the night before to rehearse and blew the power in the church. I went up the next morning and we found there was a house several hundred feet away in the woods. One of the guys in the band had a day job as a contractor, and he had hundreds of feet of AC extension cords. in his car. So the band leader went to talk to the people in the house, and they let us connect in their kitchen and run wire through the woods all the way to the church. And we did our first session.
Then I learned that you can't record a rock band the way you would an orchestra. With my mic placement they sounded like they were in the next town. Very clear, but very far away. So a few months later, we re-recorded at the church, and that became the first release on Soundkeeper Recordings, Lift by Work of Art. To find other artists, it's word of mouth. A friend asked, “have you ever heard of Markus Schwartz?” I went to see him at a club and approached the band at a break and said, “would you guys be interested in doing a record?”
And that became Equinox (by Markus Schwartz and Lakou Brooklyn). I did another one with Markus later. Jason Vitelli was also a mastering client, and I liked his music and thought him so original that I proposed doing a recording (Confluence).
Equinox, album cover.
So I'm always on the lookout. I like all kinds of music and I want to record a full-tilt rock band. There are some tracks on Jason's record where the drums really kick. I've written to artists who I’d like to do albums for. One of my favorite bands wrote back and thanked me, but said they have other obligations right now. That’s Los Lobos. I would love to record them. They’re my favorite band in the world right now. If you can sit still when that band is playing, your heart probably wouldn't register on an EKG.
Some artists have written back saying they have exclusive agreements with their record label. I don't ask that of my artists. I just like making the recording, but I don't want to own the artist. It's also typical for a record label to take publishing on the original music and I insist that it stays with the composer a hundred percent. All I want is to own the record, but not the music. That belongs to the guy that made the music.
I am always looking for new artists. I like all kinds of music and I want to record it.
FD: There's a real art to mastering. A million things have been written about setting the levels for each track, and the sequencing of the album and things like that. But for some engineers, using EQ is like the silver bullet to Dracula. What would you say about the fact sometimes you do need some EQ?
BD: Early on in my “audiophile” days, I also wanted flat transfers of everything, thinking that I want the least alteration of the master tape. Then I got to hear master tapes and what they sounded like. When you consider the signal path, and where the microphones are placed, it’s usually not any place where you would want to put your ears during a performance. If you think about it, you don't want your ears against the grill cloth of a Marshall guitar amplifier stack. You don't want them inside of a piano. You don't want them inside the bass drum or an inch above the snare. Yet that's where the mics in typical recordings listen from.
So, you take colored mics, place them there, run ’em through countless distances of questionable cable and who knows how many switches and solder joints in a console, and monitor on glorified car speakers. To put it in a nice way, it's not surprising that most recordings need help once you listen to them on a good system. Most recordings need help. The other way I would put it is that if the recording has treble that will kill insects from 50 feet away and I can make it not hurt with EQ, then EQ is a good thing. EQ is your friend.
The best recordings, a small minority, don't need any EQ, don't need anything. They’re basically just formatted and they're on their way.
FD: How…
BD: Many of those have I done? I don't know. I would say that because of that adherence to wanting a flat transfer and a reticence to EQ, a lot of the earliest things I mastered would be so much better today, because I thought, OK, this is getting X dB of boost or cut, and I don't want to go beyond that.
I became a pro in 1975. In 1990, I finally grokked EQ, and I realized you [should] give [a recording] as much as it wants, as much as it needs, and don't look at the numbers. And then I think I did some of my best work. That was when I redid the Bob Marley catalog for Island and Tuff Gong. And I think that was the first project where I really understood how to make EQ disappear and use it effectively to serve the music.
FD: It can get tricky and complicated. When do you use a graphic equalizer? When do you use parametric? How much? How wide? I mean, I get lost in the weeds when I try to fool around with EQ on home recordings. It must take a lot of experience to do it on a professional level.
BD: Well, it took me 15 years, and I learned a lot in a one-hour conversation with Tom Colangelo. He was the designer of the Cello electronics and he very kindly shared his wisdom. I ended up applying that to how I EQ. I've been very fortunate to have met two or three, maybe more audio geniuses, true audio geniuses: Tom Colangelo, Keith Johnson, and B.J. Buchalter (of Metric Halo).
FD: We have a sort of a parallel evolution. Guys like Dave Wilson and Bill Johnson and Richard Vandersteen were so generous with their time and their knowledge when I was first starting out. And then it hit me: hey, these guys are enthusiasts just like me!
I also think the discrepancy between the high-end home audio people and the recording studio engineers has mostly disappeared. When I started out in the 1980s, both camps tended to look down upon the other – the pros thought the audiophiles were crazy and the audiophiles thought the pros listened on not-great gear.
BD: Yeah, I agree. I think it's gotten a lot better, but I always felt that there was that discrepancy between the two, and each knew something the other didn't. If they ever got together, we'd get to move forward. But happily, there were some pros who had that audiophile tendency, and I think that helped open things up.
The Metric Halo ULN-8 interface, a key element of the recording equipment used at Soundkeeper Recordings. (More information is available in Part One of this interview.)
FD: At the last AES convention, I really saw a lot of crossover, with gear like Grimm Audio speakers and Manley equipment. I don't want to start dwelling on it, but there's just so much negativity in the world today that at least in the world of audio, it seems like people are coming together more.
And oh my god, when I started working at The Absolute Sound, talk about divas back then. Well, you probably ran into a few…
BD: Oh, one or two here and there. It's better now, I think. But I stopped participating in internet audio forums. I used to do that a lot. And get people criticizing me for what I said I heard. There are people who seem to, for some reason, need to make pronouncements of universal truth. There should be a reverb on their voice when they say something because [they think] it's so important, rather than simply saying, “I listened and I don't hear it.” But that would take confidence. And then it also makes you a lot more credible to me, because they don't know what I hear or what I perceive. They’re making certain assumptions based on…I don't know what. Then I just realized, OK, some people like to argue, especially when they can hide behind a moniker and not use their real name.
FD: Why can't some people just accept the fact that you can use your ears?
BD: And if you don't hear a difference, that's fine. You don't have to hear a difference.
I feel life is too short to argue with people on the internet, when I've got music to listen to, and if I'm lucky, music to record.
FD: Your label is really focused on capturing the moment, and the sound of the performers as they created that moment. But do you ever cut and paste? Let's say you have a situation where everything's perfect except for one part. And as you noted in the previous installment, digital editing makes it easy to comp takes.
BD: I have done that. I'm okay with doing something like that. I think it was Nimbus Records that used to say, “We'll edit to save a performance, but not to create one.”
FD: Soundkeeper really is all over the spectrum, with recordings that are country-ish, instrumental, and some that are hard to categorize.
BD: Oh, thank you. The next album will be with a fellow who's an expert in Early American music, early American folk music, and I'll tell you more about him as that recording gets closer.
If you ever find yourself in Connecticut, stop by here. Five years ago, we made the move from New York to New England, and had to look at maybe 14 houses before I found one with a decent music room.
FD: That was a requirement for when I moved into my house. The realtor thought I was crazy. I had to explain to her that I needed a dedicated listening room. She thought I was from The Twilight Zone.
BD: Our realtor got used to me [going into rooms and] clapping my hands. In fact, she started clapping her hands and didn't know why, just to hear what came back from the room.
FD: A future audiophile in the making. It’s been a pleasure talking to you and reconnecting. Keep up the great work!
BD: Thank you. It was great speaking with you and fun catching up.
All images courtesy of Barry Diament.
