It was a long and arduous road between my initial extreme skepticism of (how I termed it at the time) “glassless recording” and my position today as an advocate of Guerrilla Recording.

From Humble Beginnings

For me it was the mid 90′s. I had a lot of live recordings under my belt and had a pretty good understanding of the pains and solutions needed to deal with recording sans control booth. I envied the guys with the remote trucks, but by now we were well into the dying years of the music industry, and a setup like that was out of the question. The frightening loss of a static reference point seemed to drive the idea of any sort of fidelity in a glassless recording right out the window. I had a driving need to learn how to trust my setups, without the ability to really hear what was going on. Even in the rare case you could get enough headphones in a nightclub, you still weren’t hearing enough of the picture. I really needed to absolutely be able to place a mic, and set levels that would work, and that I wouldn’t be too pissed about when I got back to the studio. The limitations of 16 bit digital audio really put a strain on location recordings.

Enter the Dokken – Shadow Life project. The guys wanted to be able to record at their leisure, in a large enough room where nobody was cramped, but to still record top quality tracks, especially drums, and take said tracks to finish up later at the studio. We found a GIANT building in central Phoenix that could be had for peanuts. The space part was certainly solved, but how the hell would we be sure to get the audio, with absolutely no acoustic control and no real ability to reference tracks on the spot to a degree we were used to in the studio? We had one thing going for us – did I say the building was big? The ceilings were at least 30 feet up and the space was big enough to park and paint a few commercial airliners at a time. We had the space. Sure it had a cavernous sound to it, but because of the size and the domed construction, your regular standing waves problems weren’t really an issue.

So we got the space. We certainly got the players. Now the gear. We disassembled a Neve 5104 at the studio, stuck it in a truck and reassembled it inside the rented building. I brought in as many appropriate TT patchbays as we had ready, and then built the rest,  their cabling and ELCO96 connectors there on the spot. We brought down a Studer A-827, some amps, NS-10′s, a shitload of mics, and assorted fx and utility rackmount junk. We brought down some ADATs at some point so that George could work on some parts at home. I remember that little bit because the damn things have ELCO56 connectors on them, so I needed to make a whole new mess of snakes, using up way more of our Mogami 24pr EZ-ID than I ever cared to give up.

So we had the space, the gear, the acoustics could be somewhat dealt with, and the electricity was cleanish enough (crazy how every little damn thing works against you). At this point, any modern recording noob, worth his weight in Guitar Center receipts, would happily say “whoa dude, you got the space and you got KILLER gear, that’s all you need!” Of course I knew better and I was watching and worrying over the one thing that was going to make or break this seemingly doomed project. Enter Kelly Gray. He thought this would work and he thought he could do it. I wish I could say I had the open enough mind to give it even odds, but all I could think was “you guys are screwed”.

The Tide Begins to Shift

For the first week or so, I would drive down and poke my head in to make sure, from a purely technical perspective, things were working. There was a lot of cabling and soldering to be done, a bit of swapping out channels and modules, and just general testing and staging. I could hear Wild Mick banging away in the background and was amazed at how huge the drums could sound in a place like that, but still considered the whole endeavor doomed to failure. How would Kelly possibly be able to set decent levels, record quality levels, without a dead, quiet background? How could he make tonal decisions (remember this is the age before DAWs and the ability to chose from infinite instances of infinite FX after the fact) in such a monitoring environment? No, this was going to be a disaster, but hey, its their funeral, not mine.

Over the next week, tapes began to show up at the studio. Some were reels, some ADATs some DAT. As we put them up for analysis, they sounded AWESOME! There were a few frequencies that seemed omnipresent, but after the first time back at the studio, these were dealt with back at the rented building. As time went on I realized that Kelly had an extremely good idea of what he was hearing, a very good idea of how the space was modifying what he was hearing, and on top of that an amazingly precise idea of what he wanted to sound like. It kind of clicked as an equation, that just like at the studio, desired sound = source sound – artifacts of the recording process, assuming of course a realistic capture was desired. A modified capture was just as easy, assuming you could go from the source sound to the desired sound in the first place.

“Well, no duh!”  But that is easy from your shoes, where the absolute magnitude of unshakable belief wasn’t stacked in favor of armageddon in the first place.

OK, My Turn

George Lynch had been given an awesome practice space in Cave Creek which he used to record all sorts of instructional stuff and the occasional collaboration part. He sometimes allowed a local band, Aces & Eights, to practice there as well. They wanted an album done on the cheap and George suggested I use the space to record them. Like moths to a flame or armadillos to a busy road, I couldn’t turn it down, determined to give this glassless recording thing a REAL try. I attempted a micro duplication of Kelly’s setup, limited to what they weren’t using, and what could fit in the hatchback of an 89 Ford Explorer. This ended up being either George’s or my busted up Mackie 4 buss, a few ADATs, some Shure and AKG dynamics, a dented ass PL-20, a home made DI, and a heap of cabling.

My biggest concern was lack of adequate headphone routing. I couldn’t see how I was going to pull off that perfect headphone mix with only 2 sends and four buses, with mixed and non-uniform routing between the paths, and no isolation rooms between the performers in the first place. Learning that the drummer could play to a click, this became much less of a concern. Still, I remind you, this was before the days of DAWs and slip editing on ADATs meant a MUCH different thing than it does in REAPER. Things were tricky, but they were doable.

The next concern was something I had seen Kelly doing, but not realized the significance of at the time. He absolutely, positively, trusted his ears. Once he did a check of his path and made a reference recording, he was 100% sure, as he watched the meters, that what he intended to go on tape, was actually what went on tape. There was no way he, or I, could adequately hear what was going on as we recorded, it could only be checked after the fact. To say this was unnerving at this point would be a severe understatement. George’s practice room was an even worse, by a hell of a lot, monitoring environment than the rented building was, so it was a few trips back into Maricopa Valley to check the reference tapes at the studio before I was even 1/4 way at all happy with my capture.