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Does a Studio Always Offer Better Results ?
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 Kingstonarea artists in unique locations .
Rogalsky spoke with Professional Sound about recording three albums 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 longlisted for the prestigious 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 …
PS : On the first and second albums , what were the locations and conditions for recording ?
Matt Rogalsky : [ 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 eightchannel 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 liveoff-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 overheads , keep the amps out of it to a large degree . There is some bleed there , but whatever bleed there is seemed to be good .
PHOTO : BENJAMIN NELSON
MATT ROGALSKY
PS : 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 .
PS : 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 .
PS : 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 advantage 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 …
PS : 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 .
PS : 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 understand 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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