I’m an experienced mastering and mixing engineer.  Please feel free to look at my discography, read about my history playing music and making records, learn more about my mastering and mixing services, or contact me at tw@twwalsh.com.

This is something that Frank Padellaro and I wrote up several years ago (ca. 2002) about the process of making Blue Laws, which came out in April 2001.

TW - I know frank from way back. In high school, I played drums in a band with his brother-in-law, Gabe. He helped us out with a couple recordings, once coming out to our rehearsal space(my parents’ house) with his four-track, and another time pulling some strings to get us into a studio. I liked him from the beginning, but after the band broke up, we lost touch.

Frank - I guess I helped those guys out because I thought they were a good band, and I wanted to get on my brother-in-law’s good side, having no idea how to get on the good side of my parents-in-law. I don’t know that I thought much about Tim, except that when I took my sister to his all ages “Uncle F” shows in Billerica, she called him the cute one. I was really impressed with his drumming and wanted to steal him to play in my death metal band “Behemoth”. I don’t recall ever “losing touch” with Tim. I think he just went to college.

TW - Five or so years later, in 1999, I heard through the grapevine that he had been playing bass in the Scud Mountain Boys, and that he was fronting a band, King Radio. Their record had recently come out. I hunted it down, loved it, and went to see them the next time they played in Boston. It was a charming little reunion.

Frank - I remember Tim coming to a show (for some reason I think it was King Radio, Martin’s Folly, and Jason Hatfield at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, but I could be wrong) and giving me a CD and a cassette. He said the CD was his “serious” band that he played drums in. The cassette was just “silly” stuff that he recorded himself. I put the
disc on at work the next day [and wasn't that crazy about it.]

TW - Since last we met, I had started playing guitar and writing songs. I rarely played out and hadn’t released any material, save for a few cassettes given to friends. I gave Frank a couple of my tapes. Anyway, he liked them, we corresponded frequently through email, and when I was miraculously in the position to have a record of mine released (How We Spend Our Days on Made in Mexico), we collaborated a bit.  He played bass on “The New North American Friction” and skillfully produced and played on the title track. The bulk of the recordings on that record were of demo-quality, all recorded on my home equipment, a Tascam cassette 4-track and a Roland VS-840 digital zip-disk 8-track(16 bit). I mixed and mastered it by myself on my old Pentium 133 with a Soundblaster Live! sound card, and a pirated version of Cool Edit Pro.

Frank - So I finally get around to listing to Tim’s “Dirtbike” tape of solo material. I was looking at it more like it was going to be a job, really, so that I’d be able to email Tim and tell him something (anything?) positive about the stuff he gave me. I was absolutely blown away. Here was a guy, barely old enough to drink, that had really figured out song writing. He was better than me, I quickly realized. Way Way Way better than me. His lyrics were totally honest, and heartbreaking. It made me mad. I couldn’t believe he could be so dismissive of his material and so committed to the other. So I wrote him what I thought was a very encouraging email stressing how much I liked “Dirtbike” and how I thought he was wasting his time playing songs that weren’t as good. The next day I get back a twenty page manifesto on how dare I cut him down, and he doesn’t need this, and blah blah blah. Everything positive I said didn’t count, and every negative thing was like I stabbed him in the heart. I was like, “Oh, another artist kook….” But soon enough Tim was able to come around to the idea that he might be pretty good. I started involving Tim whenever I was going to be around people whose work I respected. Bill Janovitz, Joe Pernice. And, no surprise to me, those people had a lot of positive things to say about Tim as well. There’s something about being around people whose work you respect. They think of themselves as serious songwriters and artists. It always seems like it rubs off a little. Playing with Pernice made me feel like I should go out and make a record. So I did. Hanging out with Bill, seemed to have some kind of effect on Tim. Maybe it didn’t, but for whatever the reason, Tim seemed a little more brazen about shopping his tape. The bulk of How We Spend Our Days, to my recollection, is taken from those original Dirtbike demos with some remixing. Little Engines, for example, was the song that made me drop everything and run to the computer to tell Tim how awesome I thought he was. My main contribution to the record was in planting the seed in Tim that good recordings should be considered. I spent around twelve hours producing (just the overdubs, the basics were all done) the title track to the record, and Tim was elated and angry and pissed off and I don’t know what. He just couldn’t seem to believe anyone would spend that long recording a song. But I was proud of how much we’d done with the song given the limitations of time and gear. I think Tim came around to the idea of really taking the time to do what each song needed, instead of getting bored and demoing something else.

TW - We liked working together so much, that it only made sense to continue on the next project. Frank and I started Blue Laws in June or July of 2000. Since the last record, I had gone on tour with Pedro the Lion and Ida, and had taken a few piano lessons, so I had a lot of new ideas about arranging and writing. He had recently come into possession of a lot of studio gear, and was coming into his own as an engineer. He had some nice mics, a Macintosh g3, Mark of the Unicorn’s Audiodesk software and 2408 mkII hardware, and HHB tube compressors and mic preamps. He kindly offered to engineer and co-produce the record, so I decided i’d make the 2-hour trek each way to his house/studio in Hadley, MA for the length of the project.

Frank - I didn’t know then, and still don’t know, if I like working with Tim even a little bit. I like hanging out with Tim a lot. Working with Tim is like working with two Tims. One Tim hates his own material and resents every second that you make him work on it. The other Tim thinks he’s the greatest thing since Leonard Cohen and resents every suggestion or misstep that you make, insinuating its some kind of conspiracy to keep him from his destiny as the crown price of indie rock. The Tim that just shuts the fuck up and plays guitar was seldom seen. So my main job in the early part of producing seemed equal parts of: 1. convincing Tim that his material was good enough to be made into a record. 2. convincing Tim that I was good enough to offer anything to his material. So, as frustrating as it was, I was committed to the record because I believed so strongly in the material. Tim went through his demos and we came up with a list of songs, new and old, that were
candidates for Blue Laws. In the end, Tim wrote a number of great songs (Gullwatching, Militia) that were too good not to be on the record, and other great songs ended up in the dustbin as the result. It seems to me at least two thirds of the songs existed in some form, before we started preproduction. The first two songs we started arranging (at Tim’s house in Melrose) were Kudos and Old fashioned. Old Fashioned pretty much was recorded as we arranged it that day, Tim having just
recently radically changed the chords from the demo version I’d become used to. The final recording of Kudos bears no resemblence to the song we worked on at Tim’s house that day.

TW - After laying down a few basic tracks in the summer, we each had to take a couple months off to both focus on different things, but we reconvened in the fall, and started working at an ambitious pace. The late nights and long drives put a strain on the rest of my life, and no-doubt almost got me fired, but anything for art, right? in retrospect, the hardships were well worth it.

Frank - If Tim was in any trouble at work, then they would have taken that into account and fired him along with the other 150 poor souls who got laid off at his work this week. Tim might have taken a few days and half days over 6 months of work. As for hardships, making records, even in my smelly poor air quality basement is not too big of a hardship. Try coal mining. We laid down a few basic tracks in the summer. I wasn’t sure about anything anymore. Tim didn’t seem to know what he wanted the record to sound like. One minute he wanted to make a teenie sparse album, the next he though nobody would want to hear that. At times he told me he wanted to sound like Joe Jackson! I got kind of bummed out. I gave Tim a rough of the basics for Old Fashioned Way of Speaking, and I thought that would be the last of my involvement with Blue Laws. After a few months, Tim got back in touch with me to try and put a band together to play some shows. After a lot of stops and starts we settled on a linuep of Me, Him, Jason and Stephen. We began rehearsing at my house with mixed success. The great part was that the songs were slowly arranging themselves, without the added pressure of “making a record”. I started singing harmonies, even on songs from Tim’s old record, where they never had been before, and Tim seemed to like where that was going. For me it was just a natural extension of the playing I had been doing with Joe Pernice. Tim and I both had ups and downs about the way we played the songs as a band, but it wasn’t until we arranged “The Wages of Dying is Love” that I got an inkling of where Tim was going with his writing. I started playing this droning bass chord, Tim had a super simple guitar part, Jason barely played, and the drums were just a ride cymbal and infrequent snare. I started to fall into this awesome trance that I used to feel once in a while with the Scud Mt. Boys when things went just right. When the song finished I was changed. I felt like Tim felt the same way, but it might have been projection. I was determined to maximize those moments at shows, and Tim brought more material that fit into that mold. We learned “Oh, Sweet Sweet Danger” soon after that. Driving to a show in NYC, Tim put on the recording of the basics for Old Fashioned on the car stereo, and to my shock, there was that sound coming out of the stereo. I couldn’t believe it. Now I was gung ho to start the record. Wages and Danger came really quickly (in one night and day). It just seemed like everything spilled out onto the tape (it never seems right saying disc, so pretend it was tape). Any half assed idea Tim had for the guitar was just magic. Every tone we took 30 seconds to dial up, went to tape perfectly. I LOVED the way those songs were recorded. I couldn’t get enough of Tim or his songs.

TW - I can’t quite remember how many of the songs were written before we started, but I’m pretty sure about half were finished during the making of the record. I’d usually do a rough demo of the song on my home digital 8-track, the Roland VS-840, but many of the arrangements on Blue Laws were written right before tracking them.

Frank - The rest of the tracking was not as easy. Some stuff was just the boring necessity of getting something the way we knew it was supposed to be, other production ideas turned into minor arguments about the way Tim wanted his songs to be. To his credit, Tim was always right and I was always wrong, and when I felt really strongly about something, he always took the time to consider it, often changing his mind with a little bit of reflection. If he dug in his heels, it was always in the best interest of the record. A few things had that creepy kind of immediate karma to them (the second guitar on Lions, Tigers,
etc.) but more and more we were bogged down in vocals, or trying to fix things that we had already recorded.

TW- Frank played bass on all the songs except for “Massachusetts Militia Fight Song”. that was me. He also played the guitars on “Gullwatching”, including that great George Harrison slide part. I played the rest of the guitars, drums, piano, and organ. Frank sang some great harmony vocals, and we enlisted the help of Matthew Zapruder(2nd guitar on “O, Sweet Sweet Danger”), Ken Maiuri(2nd guitar on “Top of the Food Chain”), and David Trenholm(also of King Radio) did the startlingly beautiful orchestral arrangements on “Kudos for the Player” and “Gullwatching”. these were wonderfully executed by Mark
Turcotte(trombone), Phil Helzor(cello), and Chris Devine(violin, viola). Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet Phil and Mark, as I couldn’t make it to the studio when they were tracking. Frank did a great job of making 3 guys sound like a large orchestra.

Frank - Tim also played bass on Top of the Food Chain, through his (echhh!) Line 6 Pod. But by then we were really moving, so we kept the demo version of the bass and guitar. They sounded pretty good, and certainly had the right feel. The deadline was now this big 2 ton weigh hanging over us, so Tim and I began to divide our duties. I dealt with the increasing difficulty of Tim to get good vocal takes in my basement by having him track some vocals (and a few guitars) at home. I tracked strings, guitars, bass and some backup vocals during the weekdays, when Tim was unable to come down. We would compare tracks on Sundays or sometimes over the internet. In fact, Tim could have, and probably should have, played all of my bass parts. But I wanted to be a part of things and he graciously let me fumble my way around his record. In only a few cases did I play something I thought was special. The bass part in gullwatching is a sort of 70’s thing that I don’t think Tim
would ever have thought of. And I spent about 3 hours one night tracking that fucking George Harrison slide part (I don’t play slide) because I knew how I wanted it to sound, about 3 guitar players (all better than me) couldn’t come close to hearing what I asked for, and even thought I don’t play slide, I was going to play the goddamn slide!

TW - At some point, I found a new label to put out the record (Truckstop Records in Chicago), and we started thinking about deadlines. I think eventually we picked the end of December, which left us about 2 months to do the remaining 70% of the record. Again, ambitious pacing. I would record some vocals and guitar overdubs on the VS840, to be transferred later. This saved some time, and occasionally improved my vocal performances. All the piano tracks were recorded at the home studio of Nathan Abramson, a gracious co-worker of mine. He has a nice Steinway grand, and a Pro Tools LE Digi001 setup, so we’d bring a rough mix of the song to his computer, and I would play along on the piano. the song “Everybody Knows This Is No Fair” was recorded live, with me playing and singing at this piano. later, we’d transfer the tracks back into frank’s computer.

Frank - Mixing and mastering. NIGHTMARE!

TW - By the time it came to mix the record, we had reached a strange state of mind. It was a kind of crazed perfectionism, coupled with a loss of sonic perspective. We mixed obsessively, extensively editing the tracks and making extremely small, picky changes to EQ, compression and automation. I think it was all for the best, but we had been working in the same small room, listening on the same speakers for months. the biggest hurdle, however, was that both of us became unwilling to compromise. Not with each other, but with the music. During mixing, every task we needed to perform became painfully clear to us. we simply had no choice but to get it exactly right. The encroaching deadline fueled the fire.

Frank - I don’t think the changes we made were all that picky or perfectionistic. Some of our early mixes downright sucked. It was more of Tim and I knowing exactly how things are supposed to sound and yet being too inexperienced at mixing to do it quickly. We would make small changes and audition them on half a dozen different stereos. Then we’d try other small changes. It was a little boring, but we realistically mixed and mastered the record in something like 6 or 7 days. By Tim’s standards he should have evolved into a different life form in that amount of time. I think I was a little more pragmatic, having finished a couple of big records myself in the last few years, all of which took longer to mix at expensive studios. Hmmm, the more you pay per hour, the longer it takes to mix. By industry standards we burned through the mixing process. It all would have been okay if we hadn’t been so slammed to deliver the thing on time. Not bad for a couple of guys working mostly on Sundays with no experience and tinnitis. Although sometimes it seemed like Tim’s major contribution to the mastering process was lying on a dirty couch in my basement and moaning softly to himself. It was horrible. It was a lot of late nights and we were under a lot of pressure. I’m still blown away that it all got done. Hats off to Mark of the Unicorn for their Audio Desk software. Without mixing automation we would have been sunk. As it was, we were able to do a mix, listen to it a dozen times, go back to the computer and make one small change to one eq and audition again.

I mixed and mastered a new live album by the Bazan band. It was recorded by Matt Barnhart at Electrical Audio in Chicago on October 28, 2009. There’s sound clips and more info at Bazan’s website. It will be available for pre-order today.

It used to be that in order to make a recording, a band needed to book studio time.  Even up through the late 90’s, it was impossible to make a recording on a home computer.  Pro Tools had already been around for a while, but it required specialized, expensive hardware found only in professional recording studios.  In 1999, when I was putting together what became my first solo album, I was assembling an album from a variety of formats: cassette 4-track, 1/2″ 8-track reel-to-reel, and a Roland digital 8-track which used ZIP disks as a storage mechanism.  I mixed into a Soundblaster sound card on my PC, and wrote CDs with an expensive SCSI CD burner.  I was the only person I knew that owned a burner.  The act of creating a Red Book Audio CD was complicated and very error-prone.  The mixes I got weren’t amazing.  I owned one compressor and I’d never used a plugin.  Maybe I was just lucky, but the mixes were certainly “good enough”, and my method of writing and recording would not have been possible to implement in a recording studio situation.  I spent a lot of time learning how to engineer music because I enjoyed it and I had a natural talent for it.  I was comfortable with some of the more technical aspects of the process.  On top of it all, I never really imagined that any of my songs would ever be released, so it didn’t really matter how it turned out.  I was doing it all for fun.

Nowadays, you can purchase a complete computer recording studio for $1000…every computer comes with a built-in CD burner and you can easily create CDs with iTunes.  The effect that this has caused is that it has put a lot of talented engineers and amazing studios out of business, and that a lot of terrible sounding records are being made.  I’m all for empowering artists, and certainly, the same DIY spirit that a lot of bands have today is the same spirit that lead me to explore the possibilities of recording…but a lot of folks are attempting to release self-produced music before they have the experience to get quality results, or even to judge their results appropriately.  Often, I receive mixes to master where I hear a good band…the songs and arrangements sound great!  But a poor recording or a bad mix acts as an obstacle to enjoying the music.

Mastering is the process of polishing up a group of mixes and presenting them as a collective musical statement.  The engineer will adjust a track’s EQ and dynamics individually and within the context of the whole record.  If you’re unhappy with the mix before you send it to mastering, you’ll be unhappy with the result.  The mix is your record.  When you send a mix to the mastering engineer, you should be sending your 100% finished track. If you’re unable to tell whether a mix is any good or not, compare it to one of your favorite records within that genre.  If you still can’t tell if you have a quality mix, that’s a red flag that possibly someone else should be in charge of this aspect of the production.

Communicate with your mastering engineer.  Ask him for feedback on your mixes.  If you can’t understand his feedback, or don’t know how to actually address the problems he has brought up, that’s another red flag that you need a mixing engineer.  A mastering engineer can’t “rescue” a terrible mix.  They can bring a B+ mix up to an A-.

If you care about your music, I suggest hiring professionals to record and mix as well as master it.  It will turn out better, and you’ll be able to focus on the musical aspects of your project.  You’re creating an important document of your art.  If you’re lucky, your music will outlive you.  At the very least, you should aim to create something you’ll still want to listen to 20 years down the line.

Thom Yorke’s song stream at Stereogum

Ciao My Shining Star, a love letter to Melissa - The Songs of Mark Mulcahy, will be released on the 7th September in the UK and the 29th September in the USA via Shout! Factory.

The record will be released as a physical disc with 21 tracks on it, a further 20 tracks will be available as a download, accessible once you put the physical CD in to your computer. Or, if the album is bought from a download site (iTunes etc) all 41 tracks will be delivered in one go as the full album.

The running order for the release is as follows:

Thom Yorke - All for the Best
The National - Ashamed of the Story I Told
Michael Stipe - Everything’s Coming Undone
David Berkeley - Love’s the Only Thing That Shuts Me Up
Dinosaur Jr - The Backyard
Chris Harford  - Micon the Icon
Frank Black - Bill Jocko
Vic Chestnut - Little Man
Unbelievable Truth - Ciao My Shining Star
Butterflies of Love - I Have Patience
Chris Collingwood - Cookie Jar
Frank Turner  - The Quiet One
Rocket form the Tombs - In Pursuit of Your Happiness
Ben Kweller - Wake Up Whispering
Josh Rouse - I Woke Up in the Mayflower
The Autumn Defense - Paradise
Hayden - Happy Birthday Yesterday
Juliana Hatfield - We’re Not in Charleston Anymore
Mercury Rev - Sailors and Animals
Elvis Perkins - She Watches Over Me
Sean Watkins - A World Away From This One

Additional Digital Tracks:

The Parkway Charlies - 4:04
Winterpills - And Then?
Dumptruck - Apartment Murders
Biet and Gryphon - Be Sure
Buffalo Tom - Tom Butterflies
The Gravel Pit - Closer to the Wall
The Mericans - Country Boy
The Autumn Defense - Even Better
Lo Fine - Everywhere
AC Newman - Gigantic Transatlantic Trunk Call
Syd Straw - Hey Self Defeater
TW Walsh - I Hate to Needy Need You
School for the dead - I Just Shot Myself in the Foot Again
Laura Veirs - Mr. Mingo
Slugs - Nothing But A Silver Medal
Spouse - Pasadena Love Song
Joe Purdy - Resolution #1
The Pressure Room - Tempted
Senator - The Way That She Really Is
BP Helium - You’re the One Lee

It’s available at Amazon.