Recording - May 2020 - 30

Incidents in The Sound Lab

Like the old 60s albums where the drums are all
on one side, and yet it works. Every time I try to
do that, it sounds unbalanced, and I chicken out!

The String Cheese Incident

What's in your home studio setup?

Recording and Mixing
Speaking of all-acoustic, tell me about the single
'Gone Crooked'

That one is upright bass, the drums were an old suitcase
played by Jason, along with slide guitar and the upright piano.
That song was produced by Michael, our drummer, and he
kept telling me, "less notes," and I would say, "Oh, but I can
do this," and he's like, "No! Think about the color of the song,
how much do you want to spew all over it? Just play simple
notes." I think that's what makes it special. It has its own vibe.

I would love to hear you guys do a whole album
like that or a theater run.
Wouldn't that be great!

When it's mix time, are you all involved in the
process?

We all do an initial listen to throw some ideas down, and
then the person whose song it is spends time with Dros mixing.
Then everybody comes back and gives their thoughts on things.
The final word belongs to whose song it is.

When you're tracking, do you kind of capture the
vibe on the way in and print your compression and
effects, or keep everything as clean as possible?
As clean as possible, and then we add the effects and choices.
I'm really wanting to try it the other way sometime though, tracking
with or singing into the effects, so they're built into the recording.

I live for the moments when clients let me EQ,
compress, and add effects on the way in. It makes
mixing really easy, but on the other hand, it's kind
of like you were talking about how you can't unvibe a 57, you also can't un-vibe the recording.

I have an ELP 'Hoedown'-style song with heavy rock organ.
When I go back and listen to old prog rock or say Deep Purple,
the first thing I notice is that there's like two drum mics, and the organ is super cool and distorted, and the whole mix is very narrow.
Then I listen to my song and it's wide, with reverb on the drums
and it's nice and sonically clean-should I purposely go in there
and make it sound like shit to make it sound like 1967?

You mentioned that you're really big into Universal
Audio gear. I would play around with some of the
tape plugins, or their emulation of the Thermionic
Culture Vulture tube distortion, or the Sound Toys
Decapitator plugin.
I never know how far to go to make it less clean, or if I should put
everything on one side or the other and make it sound like a garage
recording and people will love it-probably not! [laughing]
30 RECORDING May 2020

I know! I'm going through the same thing. How deep do
you go down that rabbit hole, and how deep are your pockets
going to go if you're paying someone to mix?

My interface is a Universal Audio Apollo 8. I have a UA
6176 with the 610 preamp on one side, and on the other
side is an 1176 compressor. I also have a Summit tube mic
pre. I have the Mojave tube mic and a bunch of awesome old
keyboards, old Moogs, my first digital keyboard, the Roland
D-50, a Leslie, the new Dave Smith/Tom Oberheim OB-6-it's
so creamy, it's like thick butter.

So, the drums on your album, were they recorded
somewhere else?

Yes, I did them at The Sound Lab with my band. To tie this
all back together, that's one of the primary purposes of The
Sound Lab. Next week Travis is going in there with his friend.
Billy has done something there. It's for anybody in the band.
And thankfully, Dros is there whenever we need him. I think the
idea down the road with The Sound Lab would be to start doing more collaborations and sessions with other people. I think
overall, it's going to be a great creative space.

Sounds great! Best of luck to SCI and The Sound Lab!
Thank you, Paul!

Andrew "Dros"
Liposcak
What was your journey leading to The Sound Lab?

In 1997 I started doing sound for The Greyboy Allstars, and
I've been the front of house engineer for Karl Denson since
1999. Karl plays sax for The Rolling Stones now. He's just an
amazing talent. In 2011, I was hired by Widespread Panic to
run sound. I did that for some years, and I ended up moving to
Colorado. My wife and I have a couple of kids, and we decided we wanted a little change of atmosphere. I lived in Austin
for twenty-some years, where I also engineered at Lava studios
and The Austin Recording Service after I moved from Wisconsin. When we moved out to the Denver area, String Cheese
stole me away from Widespread Panic. [laughs]

How did The Sound Lab start?

The band was rehearsing in its space in Louisville, Colorado,
and they decided they wanted to do a record there. They had
done their last record with Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads [A
Song In My Head, 2014], and they wanted to bring Jerry in
again to produce it and Eric "ET" Thorngren to engineer it
with Jerry. I was hired to make a makeshift studio out of all
my old recording gear and whatever I was able to find. I'm a
partner in a live sound company, Nomad Sound Colorado, so
I brought in tons of cables, and we had snakes running from

Recording - May 2020

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