Canadian Musician - November/December 2018 | Page 59

RECORDING
Matt Rogalsky is an associate professor in the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University in
Kingston, ON, where he teaches sound art as well as various courses on recording, mixing, and
post-production. He is also a location recordist with Memory Device, often recording Kingston-area
artists in unique locations.
Does a Studio Always Offer
Better Results?
Q&A with Engineer Matt Rogalsky
M
att Rogalsky recorded three al-
bums with popular indie rock
duo PS I Love You: 2010’s Meet Me
at the Muster Station, 2012’s Death
Dreams, and 2014’s For Those Who Stay. The first
two, which were both long-listed for the Polaris
Music Prize, were recorded in acoustically-poor
jam spaces, while the third was recorded in The
Tragically Hip’s Bathouse Recording Studio. Based
on those experiences and considering the cost,
did a professional studio offer a significantly better
end result than a DIY approach? Let’s find out…
CM: On the first and second albums, what
were the locations and conditions for
recording?
MR: [For Meet Me at the Muster Station] they had
one room in this gigantic building as a jam space
and it was basically just a concrete cube with
very little in the way of windows and very poor
air conditioning and very poor heating in the
winters, so it was extremely rough and ready…
I had a very basic setup with just an
eight-channel interface, but they’re just a duo,
so it was pretty stripped down and easy to do
live-off-the-floor with a very minimal setup.
Everything is close-miked and so the space is
almost – I wouldn’t say irrelevant, because it’s
very relevant for the drum sound, but it’s easier
to record loud music in a bad space.
[For Death Dreams,] this other jam space is
much better than the concrete room. It’s still
junky, but in a good way. It’s just littered with
band equipment and it’s under a peaked ceiling,
which is pretty low. The room soaks up more
sound than the concrete block, but it’s still rough
and ready and we’re close-miking everything.
We’d typically do a first round of stuff live-off-
the-floor with the drums and the amps all in the
same room. Honestly, I was always amazed at
the separation I could get between the two… I
found that I was able to, even with drum over-
heads, keep the amps out of it to a large degree.
There is some bleed there, but whatever bleed
there is seemed to be good.
W W W. C A N A D I A N M U S I C I A N . CO M

CM: What was your rig like on those two
albums?
MR: It was pretty simple. I have a 16-channel
Focusrite rig, but then I’ve been favouring this
Audient [iD22 audio interface and ASP008
eight-channel mic preamplifier] because I just
think they’re pretty amazing quality, at their
price point especially. I think if you measure it
up against anything, it’s pretty great gear. So
it was one or the other rig, but I’ve been using
pretty typical mics on drums – [Sennheiser
MD] 421s on toms and I’ve got this JTS kick
mic, which I think is a knockoff of one of the
Shure kick mics, but it serves me well. There is
another Sennheiser, I think an e602, as a kick-
in mic. I think at that time I was using some
ribbon mics as overheads, which I’d got in
Germany. They were kind of a no-name brand,
but they’re very much like the Fathead mics.
Also your typical [Shure SM57] on a snare and
for guitars.
CM: Were you adding acoustic treatments
to the rooms?
MR: No, we really didn’t. I set up the band
symmetrically with all the amps facing the
drum kit and just pointed the mics away from
each other and got pretty good separation. If
you’ve ever heard PS I Love You live, it’s really
loud. I find at that volume, it seemed easier to
get good results and keep things separated. I
always had a couple of omni room mics set up
way over on the sides of the room to fill in the
sound for the live bed tracks.
CM: For the third album at the Bathouse,
was that a pretty typical studio set up?
MR: It was. There was a drum room and we
were able to isolate amps and everything and
do that really nicely. We definitely took advan-
tage of their nice old gear, the API stuff and
so on, and they have a lot of outboard gear,
which was fun to work with because most of
the stuff I do is in-the-box…
CM: When you compare the final results,
would you say that the studio offered a
significantly better final product than the
more makeshift approach?
MR: I think that it was great to have the
experience of taking time and hanging out at
the Bathouse, but I think if you go and listen
to those three albums, the third one that was
made at the Bathouse is not appreciably better
in terms of the sounds that we got or the
mixes. I think that we did good work there, but
I was surprised to realize how much we got
out of a minimal setup and a very inexpensive
production process for the first two. You’ll
hear a difference in sound, but if you were
to give those three to somebody and ask
them to identify the one that was done at
the Bathouse, it might be hard to pick it out.
CM: What are the main tips you’d give
for recording a loud band in an
acoustically poor space?
MR: Understanding how to get the most
out of what you have and positioning
things in the room so that they interfere
with each other as little as possible once
you’ve oriented the mics – that’s been my
tactic. It is just to make the best out of
whatever situation I’m in and just under-
stand the limitations of whatever I have at
hand…
I tend to over-mic so I have lots of options
afterwards, so in addition to sticking typical
close mics on drums and amps, I’ll always have
a few extra mics to get the room sound and
get some other perspectives on the drums,
like a mono kit mic. But having four mics on
the guitar amp was not unusual, just so that
later there would be a wide choice of different
colours and being able to pan all those sounds
around and get a big guitar sound. So over-
miking is not a bad strategy if you’re working
fast and in a raw space.
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