not the same thing. I’d say 60 to 70 percent of the records I’ve been credited as a producer on, I was not a producer, I was an engineer. There are very few records that I do where the band has the time and the budget to have me produce their record.
When you say engineer, you essentially mean recording the band?
Yeah, the technical parts of recording a band: setting up microphones, balancing the sounds of mics and preamps, EQs and compression and later mixing. The producer has more to do with the big picture stuff: making sure that the players are the right players in the band, that the songs are refined and they are recording at the right studio at the right time. The producer interfaces with the label. It’s almost more management-type stuff.
So what kind of role did producers like Steve Austin and Brian McTernan have in Converge in the early days?
They were sort of the forerunners to what I do. Those were the first people I recorded with that were inside the scene. I think a lot of people my age had similar experiences where there weren’t a lot of hardcore punk insiders in the recording game so you always had to work with somebody from the outside world who was tolerant of the racket you were going to make. That’s why I took an interest in producing in the first place. We were recording with these people who didn’t like our music but just needed a paycheck. I wanted to understand the recording process more and take charge of that stuff because I really believe that no one knows what your band is supposed to sound like better than you do. If you have the technical ability to record yourself, then you should. And if you don’t, you should work with someone who understands where you’re coming from, artistically and sonically. Going back to the original question, Brian and Steve were people who had roots in the hardcore scene and put together recording studios early in their lives, so they were the people who showed me I could do this.
Were you watching and studying those guys when they were recording Converge?
To a certain extent. When Steve worked with Converge, I had already been recording for a couple years and I wasn’t at the point yet where I felt comfortable taking full control of the recording of my own band. I hold my own band to higher standards than anyone else, because it’s my own band. As much as I care about all the bands I record, I care about my band more because it’s more of a reflection of me. When we had more of a budget, we brought in Steve for When Forever Comes Crashing, but three-quarters of that record had been tracked when he came along. He mostly just tracked the vocals and did the mixing. I was actually working a day job at the time, so I wasn’t there for a lot of that. I was hoping to learn a lot more from him, but I ended up missing a lot of that. With Brian, I certainly watched what he did and studied him, but there are recording engineers who are more technical and there are recording engineers who are more artistic, and he falls in line with the more artistic engineers. He’s more like a producer who’s engineering because he has to, not because he wants to. Engineering isn’t his passion, producing is his passion, so he tries to make the recording process very transparent to the band. He just cares what a record sounds like and wants to get it done, so he wasn’t explaining a lot about what he was doing.
Where do you stand on the technical and artistic engineer division?
I’m probably in between. I’m a nerd, so I like to talk tech. I try not to get bogged down in technical things because I want the artist to focus on playing, but if people take an interest then I’m willing to share stuff. Occasionally I work with someone who is a fledgling recording engineer, and those people can be awesome to work with, and they can also be incredibly annoying. When people are asking me questions nonstop, then it gets in the way of what I’m doing.
You have a limited amount of time. Yeah, and I don’t want to train my competition either.
Since working with those two guys, you’ve done 50 to 60 records. Have you watched other producers since then?
Very little, actually. In a certain sense I wish I had gone with a more traditional route in my recording education. It was never a career I intended on having. It was just a career that I fell in to. Had I intended on having this career, then I would have had an internship. I would have worked in a commercial studio that would have a really diverse clientele. I would have gotten a chance to assist a lot of different engineers on a lot of different types of music, and I never had that. I feel like the learning I have done has gone a lot slower than what a lot of engineers have gone through. I think there’s also a positive side effect of that: since I’ve mostly had to develop on my own, I’ve developed my own style. It’s the same with my guitar playing. It took me longer to get to the point where I am, but I think what I do is more unique than what some other people do.
When you became the central producer for Converge, is that when you built your own studio?
I started recording because I had an interest in demoing my own material and I wanted to start to understand the recording process so that when I went into someone else’s studio I wouldn’t feel so lost. I’ve always had a need to understand things. When I buy something new, I take it apart to see how it works. The signal flow of a recording studio is pretty complicated and I never understood how it works, so I wanted to have a better understanding of it. This was before digital recording was so prevalent, so I bought a half-inch four track and started recording my own demos in my parents’ garage. Then friends’ bands would ask me to record their 7-inch, so I would start doing that stuff. Then I started charging ten dollars an hour and I was able to buy a little bit of equipment. Then I finished college and began working as a biomedical engineer and had a decent salary, so I was able to start accumulating equipment at a faster rate. Friends would ask me to record them, I’d get a little money, buy better gear, get a bigger space. There wasn’t a moment where I was like, I want to record Converge, so I have to build a studio. It was more like, I have a studio, I can record Converge, let’s do this here instead taking X amount of dollars and giving it to some other person who doesn’t care as much about the band as I do. How about I take that money and buy some new equipment to be able to record the band better. Starting with the No Heroes record, that’s the first time I did everything—produced, engineered, mixed—on a Converge record. That’s when I thought I finally had an ability level that was on par with anybody else who we would have gotten to work on the record. Or at least my enthusiasm and focus on the band was enough to overcome my engineering shortcomings.