Recording April 2022 - 38

Living in
the
The Wolf Bros.
Live in
song
Colorado
Do you have a favorite vocal mic?
I've got a project coming up where I'm playing live with a
symphony orchestra, and I might try using one of my large
diaphragm tube condenser mics-the old guys, because
you get a really warm low end from those. Or I might get a
reasonable facsimile of the old ones that you just don't dare
take on the road as they're just too delicate to travel with. Live
I am using a Sennheiser e 935.
What do you use for monitoring on stage?
I'm using a whisper of footlight monitor, but Wolf Bros. play
pretty quietly on stage, and I like to go on what I'm hearing back
from the room. In-ear monitors have never really worked for me.
They're just really deeply unsatisfying. When I'm playing with
Dead & Company, I like to use two Bose towers, and we put them
behind me. For some reason, I can't tell you why, they don't feed
back. We keep them at a reasonable level, and Dead & Company
doesn't play that loud on stage anyway. It adds a little definition
to what I'm getting back from the house, which is all I need.
Tamalpais Research Institute (T.R.I.) is a
hybrid studio/live broadcast venue. Has
your work there informed your live work?
Oh yeah! There's a lot of back and forth. They are different
regiments, but there's a lot of cross-pollination that goes on.
I remember when you demoed the
Meyer Sound Constellation system
at T.R.I. a few years back.
I should probably explain the Constellation system. It's an
array of eighty 4 " speakers in a soffit around the front, back
and sides of the studio room, along with a couple dozen full
range microphones that hang down into the room. They hear
everything that's happening in the room and, through signal
processing, play it back to sound like rooms that we've shot the
response characteristics of. What we did was, we went and
shot the response characteristics of various venues, and then
we programmed them into the system so that we could have
[the sounds of] the Concertgebouw or Carnegie Hall. You can
turn the lights down, bring up Grace Cathedral, and it sounds
like you're there in a cathedral. It's really kind of jaw-dropping.
I remember, it was incredible and clear
no matter where you were standing in the
space. You had the drummer start playing
a groove to the slap-back, and it turned
into the groove of 'West L.A. Fade Away'.
In a lot of the rooms, we shot the response characteristics from the
stage, and the balcony presents a parabolic reflective surface. So,
you get a hard slapback echo, but with the Constellation system, we
can tune that hard echo and have the leeway to bring it forward or
back a couple hundred milliseconds. If you tune it to a rhythmic interval,
that slapback just reinforces the groove like crazy, like 'West
L.A. Fade Away', and it'll also keep the players in time.
Another great thing about that is, if a player's hearing any
sort of delay on their instrument, they're going to tend to play
less. And if you're a producer, that's gotta be music to your
ears. [laughter]
I've always been curious about your
original home studio where the Grateful
Dead recorded Blues for Allah. How the
hell did you guys fit everybody in there?
[Lots of laughter] It was a shoehorn job for sure! Phil was of the
opinion at the time that his rig had to be enormously loud-he's
still of that opinion, I think. So, we put his speakers underneath,
[the studio] in the garage. And of course, the neighbors had a
little something to say about that, but we worked it out with them.
38 RECORDING April 2022
Recording April 2022

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