Steve Griggs - Reviews

Studio Sciences - Part 2

By Jason West (Earshot Jazz, December, 1998)

In the second part of this series, Jason West talks to three producers and engineers about their role in the recording of jazz albums.

A number of steps must be taken before making a studio recording. An artist must compose, orchestrate, hire musicians, rehears, perform if possible, select a studio, and at that point choose an engineer and producer. All of these steps are integral to the process of recording music, none less so than the teamwork between the engineer and producer. In jazz it's not unusual for the artist also to produce, and thereby to make final artistic decisions. Three of the four musicians featured in last month's first part of this feature produced their own music; for this month's issue I spoke with Chuck Bergeron to get a closer look at the job.

At the producer's elbow, busily manipulating a myriad of buttons and dials, sits the recording engineer. The engineer is the person everyone depends on to capture the right sounds and get them onto tape. However, this is more easily said that done. Microphones are instruments in their own right, and the technology available today has, if anything, made an engineer's job more complex. Luckily, was able to speak with four of Seattle's most-respected music engineers - Joe Hadlock, Dave Raynor, John Nelson and Doug Haire - and to get some of their thoughts on the job.

Bear Creek Studios is undoubtedly one of the most aesthetically pleasing recording studios in the world. One can't escape the natural beauty of a big wooden barn surrounded by pasture and forest, and who would want to? Joe and Mannie Hadlock built Bear Creek in 1977 at a time when there were only a few middle-to-high - end studies in the Seattle area. Today there are about a dozen such places to record and, for many musicians, Bear Creek - with Joe on the artistic end, and Mannie on the business end - tops the list. Charlie Haden, Ginger Baker, Wayne Horvitz, and Bill Frisell have recorded at Bar Creek, and most recently, Joe engineered a record for Steve Griggs and Elvin Jones.

Jason West: I know from talking to jazz musicians that sound is very important. It's their voice and they want to have it right. How much time did you spend on the Elvin Jones/Steve Griggs recording getting the sound right? And how much time in general do you spend on that?

Joe Hadlock: There are different approaches to jazz recording and for that project, Steve chose to make it like a live performance, an honest, live performance where all of the musicians are in the same room, in close proximity so they can see each other, and all of their performances are recorded live without going back and fixing things. In that kind of an instance, the most important thing for me is to get the players to be comfortable so they can hear each other and see each other and get an inspired performance. As far as getting the sounds, I think we spent probably three or four hours setting up before we were able to record. Of course they were all real anxious. That "getting sounds time" is an anxious time because everybody wants to play, but you have to take the time to get the sounds right.

My approach to that was very minimalist in terms of microphones and everything because I'd listened a lot to the old jazz recordings, and they didn't have a lot of technology in those days. They didn't have a lot of microphones and big mixing boards and everything. They use a few great microphones. And to this day, they are still trying to make microphones that sound as good as some of the ones that were made in Germany in the fifties and sixties. And Steve wanted to go for the classic jazz sound so I used kind of a minimalistic set up like they might have recorded in the fifties or sixties.

Although... we wanted to get Elvin Jones' drums right, so we set up a lot of mikes to try out contemporary miking techniques, and it didn't take long - especially with Keiko, who is his wife and drum tech - listening along with us. We listened to some close mikes on the drums, the way that a lot of modern jazz and rock is recorded, and immediately settled on the old mikes, two old mikes on the drums: a Neumann U-67 tube condenser mike that was six feet out in front of the drums, and a stereo AKG c-24 tube mike overhead. These are rare, antique microphones and they're two of my favorite pieces of equipment. I brought those mikes up and Keiko said, "That's his sound." We were getting ready to worry a lot about it, and do a lot of tweaking and compressing and equalizing. Basically I used no equalization, just those two mikes on the drums through some old Neve microphone pre-amps, which were made in the sixties and seventies, and to this day are recognized as the best microphone pre-amps ever made.

Steve wanted me to do a list of this whole session and how I mike it up because I used a mike from the forties for his sax - one of those big ones that Sinatra used to sing into, an RCA ribbon mike that has this wonderful rich tone - and an old ribbon mike on the trumpet. We used almost all old stuff, and that's a very different way of recording a jazz group than the option which I gave Steve, of putting people in different rooms so that if somebody made a mistake we could go back and correct it. They decided to all be together and play live and let the spirit of the performance be the important thing instead of the technological perfection.

When Jim Knapp was here recording his big band, he had the drums in one room and the horns in another room and the bass in another room, giving them the opportunity to overdub, and they got a great sound, too. There they used a dozen mikes on the drums and tweaked them for a long time with EQ and stuff to get them to sound a certain way, and that's also a totally valid way. But I think my favorite jazz recordings of all time are some of those Ella Fitzgerald big band recordings, the songbook albums. I think the quality of those recordings stands up today as some of the best ever.

Steve and I listened to some John Coltrane recordings and other things and decided how we wanted the record to sound, and go for that approach. The Elvin Jones session was really fun. He's a great guy, very gracious and hard working, you know; he didn't want to stop. Keiko's job was to say when he was done, or he would have played all night. He looked like he was nineteen when he was playing; he just had that glow about him. I'll never be that cool. He was really cool!

JW: How has the technology that's available now changed recording?

JH: More and more is being done on computers. Computers can do almost anything you can think of. You can take a sax solo from one take and drop it into another take that has a different tempo. You can time-stretch, time-compress.

JW: It seems like that would happen a lot, recording rock, but does it happen in jazz?

JH: Very little. It doesn't happen in jazz that often because I think jazz musicians are more conscious of the importance of a group playing together. That's what jazz is, it's interaction, and I like humans interacting more than computers interacting. You know, it's not honest or dishonest; there's no right or wrong way to make music.

JW: I know that jazz is a kind of minority music in that it's not a big seller like pop or rock music, and that Seattle, in particular, is not a big jazz recording town, although it's full of good players. Do you feel comfortable recording jazz, given that you've got a lot of other types of music that you record here?

JH: It's becoming my favorite music to record because it's not loud. I'm getting tired of loud. I seem to have more in common with the people, and they make use of this facility really well, with its large room and lots of old mikes. Jazz projects are satisfying because they are pretty live and happen quickly, I don't have the patience to sit all day and do one guitar part for one song. I like to work fast and have a lot going on - instant gratification - basically hearing the song, hearing the music.

JW: How much of engineering is doing what the artist and producer wants, and how much is adding some of your own thoughts and opinions?

JH: People rely on the engineer to interpret the music his way, and different engineers have different styles. My style is minimalistic. The more I do it, the less I do, the less equalization, fewer mikes. I have an assistant with me, and we'll put up a microphone that I know is a great microphone for a certain instrument and we'll just start moving it around and listen, until we get a place where it sounds good. A lot of young engineers are real anxious to use all the dials and knobs and equalizers and compressors. In rock music that's a log of what you do - you're manufacturing with the audio technology. But I'm a naturalist. I used very little equalization on the Steve Griggs record because I think you can get the sound right by putting the mike in the right spot...and also by having the right acoustical environment. So that's my style. I try to make the players feel comfortable, and make sure they have a good time, because when people come to a recording studio, I think the quality of the experience is often all they get out of it, in reality. You can't plan on making money recording music.