The Day Job

A key element in making this all work, of course, is Scott's day job. Scott is a mastering engineer with an extremely well-developed room and monitoring system, and he spends all day listening to other people's work, both as it comes in the door and after it has hit MTV and the charts. He's a human Spectrum Analyzer with extraordinarily well-developed ears (yes, he went through the Golden Ears audio ear-training in college and swears by it), and he does critical listening for a living all day every day. So, he's got these great ears and a day-time monitoring system to die for, plus an ultra-hip client list. But he finds it a little too removed from the raw creative fun of recording and production (the grass is always greener, isn't it?).

Anyway, where the rest of us have to worry about "how good does this sound?," Scott knows. When I measured his control room, I found a terrible mid-frequency slap out around 40 milliseconds and so I got on his case a little. "C'mon, Scott," I said, "this slap pretty much screws up everything. You must have an awful time hearing stuff," to which Scott sort of guiltily replied, "Well, see, if I've got a question about anything, I just take it into Masterdisk on Monday morning and check it out on the Duntechs. But mostly I already know how it's going to sound before I play it back there." An extremely useful perspective to have.

So what's wrong with Orchard, from Scott's standpoint? Number one on his list is lack of adequate air-handling, particularly in respect to the Harrison console, which runs extremely hot and is experiencing on-going capacitor failure. It also makes the control room quite uncomfortable to work in during the summer months. Number two on his list is inadequate bathroom facilities to accommodate a whole band plus friends for a couple of days at a time. The third thing he mentioned was lack of working surfaces on which to put stuff and crude rack designs that make it unreasonably hard to get at the back of things.

Meanwhile, on the plus side, he really likes the garage acoustics, particularly for drum sounds. Because of the unfinished outer walls (a single layer of wood on studs), low frequencies simply dissipate as in a free field, while there is a nice fat bright mid and high frequency ambience. Scott feels it's a place where he can get wonderful drum sounds and full-bore live Rock'n'Roll rhythm section grooves a la Muscle Shoals. Guitar leads are a cinch, as is other amplified stuff. He also finds he can vary the sonic character a lot, with comparatively simple materials. The outside noise leakage is only a minor annoyance for most of the stuff he's recording, and the occasional busted take doesn't seem to upset anybody unduly, thanks to the really relaxed atmosphere. Scott notes, however, that "bands seem a little dubious when they first get here, and often can't believe that anything good is going to happen. That usually changes as soon as they hear the first drum sounds." He also allows as how he'd have a little trouble doing a really pristine 20-bit unplugged true-stereo acoustic guitar/vocal album. Too many cars 'n planes. One side benefit: load-in's a cinch! Where else can you back the band van into the drum booth?

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