Counting Crows Rock the House

More than anything else, says guitarist Dave Bryson, staying out of big studios is the best way for this band to make a record: "It's so comfortable, you never feel like you're going to work. you never feel like, 'Well, one more day, another thousand dollars.' Even though it's sort of what's happening you don't have that feeling over your head, which is definitely good for the creative side of things." After a drive or two around the hills of Los Angeles, the team found a turn-of the-century mansion once owned by a US congressman. With a two-story foy-er, a large sitting room, a huge ballroom downstairs and space for the band, producer Gil Norton and engineer Bradley Cook to stay, this was the place. For the "August" sessions, Steve Thompson, in Tahoe, CA, had outfitted the studio for them. This time the band decided they wanted to buy their own gear, so Bryson got to work collecting equipment. "When you're doing a full, record, a three-month deal, it made a lot of sense to us to buy the gear, because it's damn near the same cost as renting it." Bryson explains. "It's a wash for one record, but for two it's a total bonus. So, we are proud owners of a wonderful pile of gear that's now sitting in cold storage in the Bay Area," until they make their next record.

That pile of gear is a nice combination of vintage and newer equipment that made it easy for Norton and Cook to capture the band live. "[Bryson] would ask me what I wanted, and he got me anything," Cook says. "I gave him an outrageous list like, say, a Telefunken 251, and he'd get five or six of 'em and we demo'd them to find the coolest one." Bryson pulled another rabbit out of his hat when Cook asked for a pair of Teletronix LA2As and received two that were made one right after the other. "They were the early kind, like the 540, that doesn't have the limit compress switch on the front," Cook says. "It's compressing when you're hitting 3, and it's limiting when you're hitting 10." Other compressors the team used included UREI 1176s and some ADL tube compressors.

For Bryson, who set up his own 16-track studio in Emeryville, CA, called Dancing Dog Studios, knowing what gear to get was a piece of cake. "I think there are certain pieces of gear that you need to make a record," he says. "You need a handful of these types of microphones, a handful of this and a handful of that. It's not a big mystery--if you talked to ten engineers and said, 'Give me a list of what you want to make a record,' you'd see a lot of common gear there. Each person would have a little compressor that he or she prefers and all that stuff."

For Norton, one of the things that made this album easier to produce was the fact that he brought ProTools along with him to the sessions. "Mainly because we only had one 24-track machine to do edits and things," he explains. "We really didn't have a half-inch machine, so it was another way to try things out and move things around. Especially when you do something like the Counting Crows, where we did a lot of live takes. Now and again you'd get a guitar part that was stunning on take three, but you'd end up on take nine, by which the guitar player might have gotten board or he'd lost some of his earlier flourishes. To be able to go back and listen to all the guitar parts again to where you'd gone, that was great and very fast as well."

They used ProTools not only to edit guitar parts and tracks, but also to comp vocals together from different takes. "Very few vocals were overdubs; most of them were just comped out of live performances," Norton says, "because Adam got into the vibe of it. Once Adam's in the song, then anything can happen, really. Some of the most interesting and extraordinary vocal performances we got were actually when the band was learning the songs and he was really going for things and pushing the songs along."

Indeed, Bryson remembers the day that Duritz showed up with the title track, "Recovering the Satellites." "When he brought it in, it was just him and a piano and we all flipped on the song, learned it and recorded it.

"As he was singing, he called out 'One more,' so we could have a big ending as opposed to having it fall apart," he says with a laugh. "We all kind of got attached to that moment, so we kept it."

While every bit of gear they used was a valuable find, say the engineer and producer, Bryson put the greatest emphasis on finding good microphones. He scoured the back of magazines and called vintage houses to find mics like a Telefunken U47 for Duritz's vocals, an AKG C24 stereo mic that was used on drummer Ben Mize's kit and Charlie Gillingham's piano, and various Neumann models--U87s, M49s, and M582s (which they used as the overhead drum mic). Other mics they purchased for the sessions included Sennheisrs 421s and Shure SM57s, SM7s and SM69s. According to engineer Cook, "It was a pretty great variety; I never had a want for a mic, really."

The collection of mics was perhaps more important than usual because of the recording chain Cook and Norton devised: The signal went from the mics to some top-quality preamps--mainly Brent Averill-built Neve 1084s and 1073s, as well as some API 550As and 560As--into the compressors and then directly to the back of a Studer A27 and two Neve BCM 10 sidecars. "There was no patchbay or anything," Cook explained. "It was total old-style." They had a Trident 24 on hand for playback in the control room--formerly known as the dining room--and for the band's Private Q monitoring system, which allowed each band member to control his own monitor levels.

As the gear was being delivered and set up by Cook, Bryson and crew, constuction workers were milling about making sure the house was soundproof. "The biggest problem is always the neighbors," comments Bryson. "In both houses we were real careful to make sure we soundproofed them." They double-paned many windows, took some antique windows out altogether, and then sealed the front door of the house with packing blankets and super-heavy rubber stoppers. In all, it took five days to perform the basic construction. "It's a fair amount of work," Bryson says. "It's the kind of thing that you could record your record out in the countryside and you could find a funky old house that was a mile from any other house, it would be a chep way to make a record. But to do it in an urban enviroment, which we've done both times, becomes a not so cheap way to do it."

Acoustical engineer Steve Brandon was brought in to tune the various rooms used for the project, with the control room , in particular demanding special attention--Cook described it as a box of rectangular hell. One of the first problems the team encountered was that they were not allowed to touch any of the existing walls of the mansion, so they put their heads together and band assistant Sevon Wright took a trip to a tent company, which designed and built a custom rig to create a "control room." After that was in place the crew suspended four 5x5 sheets of Owens-Corning 706 Fiberglas above the console to help contain the sound more.

Brandon's second innovation was isolation boxes for guitar and bass amps--which everyone involved now fondly called "doghouses"--so the band could be in the same room as they were tracking the songs. The plywood boxes were lined with thick Fiberglas and coated with cloth on the outside, and each also had an air duct built in the back, so between takes air conditrioning was funneled into the boxes to cool them off. "You just sat right next to them and your amp was blastinbg inside," Bryson says. "Outside it was audible, but certainly you could over it."

Next, the crew turned attention to Mize's drum kit. The problem, as is often the case in recording projects, was to find a spot where the kit could be isolated, while still allowin Mize to have eye contact and communication with the rest of the band. The two-story foyer, which had pocket doors separating it from both the control room and the main recording room, was deemed the perfect spot. Then, in order to get the best bottom end, the crew built a stage for Mize's kit that consisted of four layers of plywood and drywall. In the end it was so heavy it had t be built in four sections, just to be able to move it around.

Though the foyer was home to the majority of the drum tones found on RTS, Cook did sneak down to the house's ballroom to capture a pair of toms that appear at the end of the song "Catapult." And that ballroom, which had an inherent 6 second decay, was used to capture some natural reverb for Duritz's vocals. In addition to the ballroom, they also piped sounds into the stairwells and anywhere else that sounded interesting. "We tried to squeeze all the sounds we could out of the rooms while we were there, " says Cook.

A lot of thought also went into creating keyboardist Charlie Gillingham's setup, which was affectionately known as Charlie's World. In his space, Gillingham had a grand piano, a Mellotron, a Wurlitzer and, of course, his trusty Hammond B-3, which had its own trickery: Appaently the output from his Hammond went directly into an overdriven Echoplex and into his Leslie cabinet. As Cook explains it, Gillingham would be playing and pulling out bars and flanging the Echoflex tape with his thumb. "It's like a beautiful, meaty, gritty distortion," Bryson says. "It makes the B-3 like a whole new instument. Any weird sound you hear on our record is Charlie." As an example he points to the eerie opening of "Children In Bloom."

Three days after the last overdub had been completed, and all the band's gear had been tucked away , the neighbor hood in the Hollywood Hills returned to as normal as it gets in the Hollywood Hills. Today nearly a year after the album was completed, Bryson, Cook and Norton say they would do it again, in a heartbeat. In fact, Bryson says this of way of recording, "I think the best thing is the lack of pressure, the feeling that you're just with your buddies making music. It's just a really organic way to make a record."