SoundCheck Magazine Interview with Producer Jason Carmer (spanish)

Jason Carmer – Un aliado en Diablito Records

La de Jason es la historia de un chico que desde la infancia sucumbió al encanto de la música por herencia familiar. Creció en el Nueva York y Los Ángeles de los años sesenta, entre el bullicio del punk y el hard core, géneros a los que por destino ha estado ligado. Pero no sólo eso: pegado a su fascinación por los vericuetos técnicos que hacían posible la grabación de estos sonidos ácidos. “Fui y sigo siendo un geek de primera, siempre me la pasé buscando gadgets y aparatos que me permitieran crear un sonido diferente. Mientras mi padre tocaba yo lo seguía a todas partes, incluidos los estudios de grabación y de sólo ver y moverle a las cosas, aprendí”.

Así formó su oído Jason Carmer, quien ha trabajado en las placas de artistas como Korn, Run DMC, Billy Idol, The Donnas, Live, The Peels y Los Amigos Invisibles; y hoy es el nuevo aliado en el proceso de mezcla del sello Diablito Records. Su primera intervención fue dar el toque fino al álbum de lanzamiento de la banda Candy y, so pretexto de ello, interrumpimos su labor en el estudio SIX SIX SIX para conocer los pormenores de su formación y su gusto por los proyectos de rock latino.

¿Cómo surgió tu interés por la grabación de audio?
“Mi padre tocaba en una banda, así que siempre tuve contacto con la música, los seguía a todos lados. A principios de los años sesenta les ofrecieron grabar su demo y fuimos a Los Angeles al estudio de Capitol para hacerlo, yo pegado a él como siempre. Aprendí a tocar y a los 15 años grabé mi primer disco, sin otra formación que la de ver cómo hacía las cosas la banda de mi papá”.

“El primer estudio donde grabé fue Inner Ear, que aún existe y está en el mero corazón de Washigton, DC. Hicimos muchas cosas de punk y hard core, me tocó ver esta efervescencia por el género, en definitiva ahí nació. Yo producía algunas cosas y, bueno, tan sólo tenía 16 años, no era como para tomárseme muy en serio, ¿cierto? ¡Pero ya era productor! Ese fue el comienzo. Luego me mudé a San Francisco y el primer estudio que me dio la oportunidad de trabajar ya en forma fue el Toast”.

El grueso de tu formación fue autodidacta, ¿de qué recursos te valiste para mejorar y no rezagarte conforme se dieron los cambios tecnológicos?
“No fue algo complejo porque siempre fui un clavado de la tecnología, y tuve la fortuna de estar frente a las consolas desde niño, así que fue un proceso muy natural, pero claro, sí tomé cursos de grabación de audio en la California Recording Arts. Pero la realidad es que todo lo aprendí estando en el estudio. Además, fue clave que en esa fase de inicio en Toast, tuviera el privilegio de asistir a gente como David Bianco, que grabó a músicos como Ozzy Osbourne y Mick Jagger, y que también ha trabajado con bandas como AC/DC, The White Stripes, My Chemical Romance y muchos más. Le aprendí muchísimo. Con él hice consciente el proceso de fijarme que haciendo las cosas de la manera en que ellos lo hacían, el resultado era mucho mejor al mío, y eso fue valiosísimo para mí”.

Hoy se dice que cualquiera puede hacer su propio disco. ¿En realidad es así de sencillo?
El principio es que tienes que adaptarte. En el pasado las cosas se hacían de otra manera, a mí me tocó trabajar en buenos proyectos, en estudios de primera y recibir buena paga, pero hoy es absolutamente diferente. Actualmente la base son las propuestas indie, y claro, lo puedes hacer con los recursos que tienes, tú solo, pero el asunto también es que cuando trabajas con un productor, ingenieros, vaya, con otro profesional, en general el resultado será mejor porque tienes a alguien que ve las partes con más detalle. Le tienes que invertir a tu banda y a tu proyecto para convertirlo en algo mejor, para que llegues al punto en que tu disco y tus presentaciones en vivo suenen increíble. Hay que invertir y esa es una condición que no ha cambiado aunque hoy tengas más recursos técnicos que te permiten hacer el disco en casa”.

¿Tienes alguna consola favorita?
“He aprendido que más que tener una consola o equipo favorito, la selección de estos depende siempre de la situación específica. En general mezclo con algo como esto”, y señala la consola Solid State Logic 6000G del SIX SIX SIX). “Tiene que ser un escritorio real, con este tipo de adecuaciones y una plataforma intuitiva que me facilita el trabajo y me hace sentir más cómodo. Para mí el factor determinante es que hay que darle su propio sello o sazón a cada proyecto, así que debes tener en mente que puedes valerte de una consola análoga o una digital para conseguirlo”.

“Por ejemplo, en este caso en particular con Candy, Diego Aguirre, el productor e ingeniero de grabación del álbum, usó una consola con 24 canales para cada track, que es mucha máquina. El sonido quedó increíble, además de que puedes llevar la cinta a lo digital y depurar ahí todo. Esa es mi labor en este caso, la mezcla que viene al final de todo el proceso. Es realmente más fácil cuando mezclas o editas, juegas con los ecualizadores, los loops o la velocidad. Eso grandioso y es lo que busco”.
¿Cómo surgió tu interés por las propuestas latinas?
“De entrada deben saber que trabajé muchos años en un club de salsa”, recuerda Jason entre risas, “y por obvias razones, grabé mucho ese género. Si a eso le añades que California es básicamente una extensión de México, bueno, la cosa es inevitable. Y, claro, ya no grabo ritmos como la salsa, pero es imposible no tener curiosidad por lo que tiene la cultura latina; lo cubano, por ejemplo, también es algo que permea mucho. Disfruto este tipo de ritmos como el que hacen Los Amigos Invisibles, y considero que se están haciendo cosas muy interesantes en América Latina, en especial en México. Me interesa mucho quedarme por acá y ver qué puedo hacer con los artistas de esta escena”.

“Conocí a Micky Huidobro (Molotov), conversamos y me dijo de su estudio y el sello que poseen. De inmediato me ofrecí a tomar parte del juego, a hacer cosas en conjunto porque quiero seguir descubriendo este tipo de propuestas como Candy. Supe de esta banda metiéndome a su myspace y me fascinado; y es lo que siento que hay aquí, talento que puede hacer discos de gran calidad y sacar el máximo provecho de estudios como éste”.

¿Cómo defines el sonido que buscan las bandas?
“Creo que el proceso de mezcla es una interpretación. Es un asunto completamente de feeling, donde lo único que haces es confiar en tu oído, sentirte a gusto con el sonido que estás creando. Yo escucho y reacciono a eso de manera instintiva. Esa es la guía y claro, hago partícipe de esto a la banda para saber cómo se sienten ellos. Es un asunto de afinidad y de entusiasmo mutuo”.

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Interview with Jason Carmer UA magazine

Interview: Jason Carmer

Donnas/Third Eye Blind Producer Jason Carmer Records Modern Hits with Vintage Sound

Jason Carmer & His Dog, Darla
(it helps to have a second set of ears)

We know each other socially, our paths have crossed several times but I was still a little nervous when I went to interview Jason Carmer, a record producer with 2 big records out this year, 3EB (Third Eye Blind’s) Out of the Vein and The Donnas’ Spend the Night. I drove to the studio he co-owns with 3EB singer Stephen Jenkins on the edge of San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. Once the thriving heart of dot.com madness… I found a parking space right in front of the non-descript storefront.

I was promptly greeted by Carmer and his dog Darla and entered into a cozy and inviting, Moroccan inspired chill room, then moved down the hall to the main studio.

Carmer is one of those people who grew up in the business— his father was a professional musician. They moved around a lot, coast to coast. Carmer played guitar, played in bands, picking up engineering and producing chops thru experience, working with his own bands. He later attended the College of Recording Arts but you can tell, he’s someone who has learned by doing and trying, and experimenting. His approach in the studio is instinctive, intuitive, he ‘feels’ the board, he knows his gear by touch.

“I just kind of went from being in the studio recording records with the band I was in to being the guy doing the recording. My father was a musician. I was in the studio when I was 5. In the process of learning all this stuff and making my records for the bands I was in, I got used to being in the studio.”

One of the first things you notice when you enter the studio is the Helios board that he bought from a studio in Munich. It carries a better pedigree than Carmer’s dog. ‘This’ Helios board was in the Rolling Stone Remote for years and Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and Bob Marley all recorded on it. Carmer is obsessed with the sound of classic rock recordings and believes that a lot of that comes from the gear. “The thing about Helios stuff, it’s one of the distinct sounds of classic rock. Neve is great. But Jimi Hendrix, the Who and the Stones recorded on Helios boards.”

The next thing you notice is the rack of Universal Audio gear: LA-2A, 2-610, two 1176s and an original 175 compressor. “The 175 is the most awesome, best compressor ever made. I think all my Universal gear sounds great, I’ve done total shootouts with them. Now, with the LA-2As, the new ones sound better to me. The 1176s, the old ones have a certain darkness but I like the new ones, they act the same. They sound killer, I love these things. Everything I have for a reason. There’s no dead weight around here. The 1176s are probably the best all around compressors, in my opinion. I use it on everything.”

Darla Likes the 2-610

“I just produced a song for Vanessa Carlton and the vocal always goes thru an 1176. Because it’s transparent, it reacts really well with the human voice. There’s nothing worse than crappy compression on a vocal. When you can ‘hear’ compression on a track, that’s the bottom of the barrel. I like to keep the vocal open and airy and I don’t like it to sound compressed but I also want it to be controlled. On all vocals I always use the 1176—anybody I’m working with, Vanessa, Stephen Jenkins (3EB), Run DMC, the Donnas. I always use the LA-2As on guitars. All the Donnas’ guitars went thru an 1176 and LA-2A.”

He got involved with 3EB during their second album. “I was producing a band called Black Lab for Geffen at a Studio in San Francisco called Toast (formerly Coast recorders, designed by Bill Putnam!). Third Eye Blind was recording their first record there and I think Stephen heard what I was doing and thought it sounded good. They were already doing the record with Eric Valentine and then we just kind of kept in touch. So then we did a song together for a cartoon. And ever since then we’ve been working together, that was about 1997.”

“Out of the Vein” was done entirely at the 3EB studio with the exception of the drums, which were tracked at Skywalker Sound. Carmer says that Skywalker is probably one of the best sound rooms he’s ever been in. “I’m fortunate, I’ve worked in a lot of studios, up and down both coasts and I like the more natural sounding, modern rooms. There’s a modern aesthetic in live rooms, which is really reflective—high, bright and really kind of scooped in and then a big bassy kick. Some people manage to design rooms like EQs on $100 boom boxes but I find that more neutral rooms allow you to focus more on the tonality of the instrument versus the overpowering sound of the room.”

“Out of the Vein” was tracked on Carmer’s customized Ampex 1200. It’s a 2” sixteen track machine but he’s modified it with a custom made eleven track head assembly, to give him some extra tape width. “I run the track thru a pre amp depending on what flavor or sonic quality I want, then I hit the tape machine with it. Once I build the track on tape then I transfer it into the computer and then I mix thru the Helios to 1/2 inch tape.

Why is he still recording to tape? “Analog just sounds better, They say you can do everything in Pro Tools but you take a Ricky Martin album that was made in Pro Tools and put it up against The Wall or Dark Side of the Moon and it just doesn’t sound as good.”

“I don’t compress anything with drums except for one mic. An ambient room mic like a U87 gives it some power. With Bass I use an LA-2a—I try different things. I don’t track with reverb. I like to try to suck the reverb out of the environment. I try to use early reflections. I don’t like fake sounds. I hate the sound of algorithms.”

“I think the best compressor is the vintage UA 175. It has the best sonic warmth. You can really drive it. Nothing warms up like that. I use it on guitar—you can get the biggest fattest coolest guitar sound ever. You can make a guitar sound very big, very fat, very warm whatever you put it thru it does that. I have $30,000 worth of compressors but nothing compares to the 175.”

When he’s forced by circumstance and location to record directly into the computer, Carmer has a trick. “If I ‘have to’ record straight to Pro Tools without hitting tape first, I run the guitar thru an LA-2A, not compressing, just setting the gain and the peak reduction. It really helps get rid of the unpleasantness that you get with guitars when you’re going to digital. When you go to digital with guitars, you have a problem with the high frequency. I find that just running it thru the LA-2A warms it up a bit.”

What’s next for Carmer? A move to New York in January. A new outlook. “I do feel that there has to be better music. Music can’t just be about making instant bucks. I’ve been really fortunate to work with a lot of established bands and it has been a great experience but I really want to focus on finding new talent.”

--Interview by Marsha Vdovin

Electronic Musician Magazine Interview with Jason Carmer on Recording Chuck Prophet

LET IT BLEED : RECORDING IN A SMALL MEXICO CITY STUDIO HELPED CHUCK PROPHET GET AGGRESSIVE

Fri, 01 Jan 2010

When San Francisco guitarist and singer Chuck Prophet set out to record ¡Let Freedom Ring! [Yep Roc] last spring, he assumed a change of environment, specifically Mexico City, would inspire him and add some manic energy to the album. He didn’t count on periodic power outages ruining takes at Estudio 19, the oldschool studio he picked to lay down tracks, nor a 6.4 earthquake shaking the building’s foundations. And nobody expects a pandemic.

“What I didn’t predict was that the swine flu scare would start three days after we arrived,” Prophet says. “The CNN paranoia, if you crank that stuff up to 11, makes everybody start to feel a little off. People got itchy. We put on blue masks and had a driver take us to the studio.”

Also, according to producer Greg Leisz, Prophet didn’t remember how small (roughly 12 feet by 20 feet) the high-ceiling main room was at Estudio 19. Reacting to his last record, Soap and Water, which included sections with arranged strings and a children’s choir, Prophet wanted to dial things down. The former member of ’80s L.A. cowpunk band Green on Red wanted a light touch and a raw performance. Normally, tight spaces complicate the situation. But with a few deft arrangements of equipment and a willingness to use bleed and leakage to their advantage, the musicians and engineers working on ¡Let Freedom Ring! made it sound both spacious and fully charged.

“People think isolation is the way to go,” says Jason Carmer, who engineered the album. “But getting the bleed reinforces the stereo imagery. You can hear the guitars from the perspectives of all the mics in the room. I find that the bleed gives you great depth of field.”

The whole album was recorded in one general formation in the main room to help capture a live feel. While there were some guitar overdubs later, and pedal steel and fiddle tracks were laid down separately to add extra color and tone to songs like “What Can a Mother Do,” the aim was to capture raw performances.

Electrified opener “Sonny Liston’s Blues” was a completely live take. Chuck occupied the right corner. His guitar, usually a Squier Telecaster, which he favors for its simplicity, was plugged into a pedal board and run into an amp, usually a Fender Princeton Reverb or a Vox AC30, which stayed in the main room and was recorded through a RCA 77DX ribbon mic. An Ibanez AD-80 analog delay was sometimes plugged in to provide a vintage slapback feel on some of Prophet’s solos. Baffles were then set up to cover his Neumann U 47 vocal mic (run through a GML preamp with a Urei LA-3A compressor), chosen because the rich, warm sound worked well with Prophet’s Tom Petty-esque voice.

“Both the mic and Chuck’s voice have character, so I wanted to capture that,” says Carmer. “It helped deliver the smashing, classic vocals of old records that we were looking for.”

Drummer Ernest “Boom” Carter, who played on Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” set up a borrowed ’60s Gretsch drum kit across the room, miked with a mono U 87 placed between the beater and snare that “pulled it all in,” according to Carmer, and added a spaciousness to the recording. Guitarist Tom Ayres, bassist Rusty Miller, and Leisz, who occasionally added another guitar line, squeezed in the middle of the room. Their amps were placed in the machine room or lounge, with doors left slightly ajar to capture some bleed. Everything was tracked according to its orientation, says Carmer, which meant they could capture the reflection of the space.

To accentuate the live energy in the room, lots of compression was added to the guitar tracks via Neve 1073s and UA 1176s. It really pricked up the guitar lines snaking through the rave-up “Where the Hell is Henry?”

“The general modus operandi was to go for it and be aggressive,” says Carmer. “[Compression] helped give it an authentic feel but also trash it up a bit.”

Prophet and others half-jokingly referred to the studio as a state-of-theart room from 1957, and while there’s some truth to that, the studio’s cache of vintage gear and mics added a lot of character. A vintage Ampeg SVT added powerful reverb, and Carmer especially enjoyed using Pultec EQP- 1As on kick, snare, toms, rooms, guitars, and bass. More importantly, the somewhat cramped space—from the overflowing studio to the courtyard where they’d eat tacos for lunch—gave them a sense of unity of purpose.

“There was so much chaos outside the studio that when we got in there and the power was on and we could lay down a track, there was a certain teenage energy,” Prophet says. “It reminded me of being in the studio with my first band.”

PROSOUND MAG Interview with Producer Jason Carmer

In Profile: A Recording Engineer Unafraid To Take It To 11

"I like to run everything in the red. That's where it sounds good to me. It's rock'n'roll." -Jason Carmer

Mar. 08, 2011, by Keith May

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Producer / Engineer Jason Carmer

Filed in Recording

These words can raise the hairs on the back of a purist’s neck, but if it rocks, it rocks! Jason Carmer’s work on Third Eye Blind’s back-to-back, multi-platinum smashes (their eponymous debut and “Blue,” their follow-up album), and a Grammy-nominated release for Los Amigos Invisibles, have got the purists taking notes on some of Carmer’s techniques.

John Carmer (Jason’s dad) was a musician in New York City. As a result, Jason spent his early childhood in the Big Apple.

In 1967, everything changed. Elektra offered John Carmer a development deal and the Carmers moved to California to give it a shot.

At that time, Carmer was completely surrounded by music. He recalls “they were playing all the time.”

“I would wake up and hear my dad’s band playing. I’d be trying to sleep, and hearing my dad’s band playing.”

Unfortunately, the practice and the development deal didn’t lead to a record deal and John Carmer left the band.

Carmer’s parents split up, but the remaining members of the band stuck it out and became classic rockers Blue Oyster Cult. “Sometimes, I still can’t believe that he quit that band!” Carmer muses.

Carmer picked up guitar at age 8. By age 10, he was into punk rock. By age 15, he was “really into punk rock!” Carmer moved to DC with his mother when his parents separated.

Carmer played in a hardcore band called Double O. He recalls “our second gig, we were playing with the Dead Kennedys in front of 2000 people.” He also played in a seminal punk rock outfit known as the Meatmen.

A buddy of Carmer’s let him borrow “Raw Power”, by Iggy Pop. “My buddy said the record was the essence of everything punk rock. I listened to it and I thought it was horrible because it was so raw. Two days later I realized it was incredible because it was so raw!”

Iggy Pop’s unapologetic rawness inspired Carmer to get into the studio, but ultimately, it was the combination of the rush of performing in groups and being in the studio that led Carmer to decide to be an engineer.

He says “the whole do-it-yourself, punk attitude made me do it.” Carmer took this decision seriously, and started taking classes at the College of Recording Arts. He later dropped out.

“I know Ohm’s law and all that stuff; I learned all the basics at that school. I learned how to align a tape machine. I learned the differences between the patterns on microphones.”

After leaving the College of Recording Arts, Carmer started doing live sound and landed a tour with Consolidated, a hard hitting, take no prisoners, Bay Area rock band. On that tour he met Philip Steir, drummer and future co-owner of TOAST.

After touring with Consolidated, Carmer realized that doing live sound wasn’t the right fit for him. “It’s so loud!” he says. “Also, the touring thing is hard. I’m married. I’m into being domestic. Plus, I like to be involved in the creative process.”

“Live sound engineering is mostly reinforcing the sound that’s being created, whereas in the studio you’re building it from the ground up.”

One of the reasons Carmer enjoys working with Third Eye Blind so much is that they have similar ideas about how things should sound.

He comments, “they’re really patient and they’re really into experimenting and taking their time with mic positions and sounds.”

In addition to working with Third Eye Blind and Los Amigos Invisibles, Carmer has kept busy engineering/producing projects for Run DMC with Stephen Jenkins (Third Eye Blind’s lead singer, who appears on the single off the forthcoming Run DMC LP), Billy Idol, Live, Mark Eitzel, Black Lab, Black Eyed Peas and The Donnas. He’s also remixed singles for Live, Korn, Chumbawumba, The Butthole Surfers and the Tom Tom Club.

Aside from an impressive client list, what sets Carmer apart from many engineers is that some of his techniques don’t seem to make sense until you hear them. We know that Carmer loves running tracks in the red, but there’s a reason for it.

He explains “I don’t pay much attention to how it looks. It’s music! I listen to it. It’s important to learn about normal operating levels, but to me, many things sound better when they’re on the edge.”

He adds “Also, I love digital distortion! It’s an effect. Get a little digital distortion on a kick and snare and it’s slammin’!” This is rather ironic, given that Carmer stopped doing FOH because it was too loud.

Keeping his mixes on the edge is not all that Carmer doesn’t do by the book. He says “they’re so many great mics out there that you feel obligated to use a U47 as an overhead.”

Carmer acknowledges you can get great sounds that way, but too much of a good thing can detract from the overall sound quality.

He explains “there have been times when I’ve set up 14 mics on a drum kit. But, by nature this introduces phase problems. If you feature one mic and supplement its sound with just a few others you get a purer sound.”

To reinforce that point, Carmer has been experimenting with different mics and more minimalistic setups. He explains “what I’ve been into lately is trying to center the sound of an instrument, particularly drums, around one mic. A lot of times the mic I dig is a (Shure) 57. I’ve been getting some great drum sounds that way.”

“I mess around with different amounts of compression to get the right amount of drive while still letting it breathe. But to me, a properly compressed 57 sounds great as a room mic.”

Carmer firmly believes that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Blending tracks in a mix is a very delicate business. He explains, “a lot of things sound terrible by themselves but wonderful in the mix.”

“It’s like eating salt. It doesn’t really taste good if you eat it by itself; you need to mix it in carefully. I like to have some elements that are raw and nasty and mix them in with other more refined elements.”

In spite of the fact that Carmer has punk rock roots and an impressive list of rock credentials, he’s not limited to that genre. He recently completed a jazz record with Will Bernard.

He remarks “there’s hardly any compression on it. We went for a late ‘60s Miles Davis vibe. We treated it as a live performance where it was okay to hear people cough and if somebody hit a blue note. It was very open.”

Carmer loves his role as an engineer/producer because of the opportunities for creative involvement. Nonetheless, he feels his job is to serve the music and he doesn’t take it lightly.

Carmer says, “if I’m working with an artist that I think is going to be on the radio I will try to maximize that, but I really try to zoom in on the crucial aspects of the medium in which the music is going to be heard.”

On a side note, Carmer has been doing some recording with a new, as yet unnamed, band with Joe Gore, Erica Garcia (Universal) and Joey Waronker (drummer for REM and Beck). Carmer says “Joey has a 16’ x 20’ room at his place and a couple of funky organs.

Joe and I brought some pedal boards and our laptops with Reactor and ProTools and some samples and loops.” In a voice full of joy he says “We’ve been working on some recordings which is fun! I spend so much time recording other people’s music that it’s fun to be the one who’s playing out of time and out of tune.”

Of his experiences he says “I get to work at all these great studios, but sometimes it’s great to just sit on somebody’s smelly couch.”