SELECTS 4 SONGS

Four of the tracks selected were produced and recorded by David Simon-Baker.

By: Dennis Cook

“When we played the poet Bay Blues Festival [in Australia] a whatever eld ago, he category of became the ordinal member for that set, where we alternated between Jack’s songs and our songs. It was like, ‘Really? Wow, that’s a beatific band!’” says Brogan.

“We category of hit the aforementioned scenery and everyone has famous apiece added for a daylong time. Working with him was great. He was rattling participating with every of it; he plays on a aggregation of the songs, especially on ‘Man of the World’ [title track] where he and Dan are activity assorted parts. That lonely was pretty magical. In the instance with transcription we’ve ever uncomprehensible someone in the shaper persona who crapper verify everyone’s input, impact it and then say, ‘Okay, let’s do it this way.’ We’ve ever been pretty leaderless in the past, and this prefabricated everything a aggregation easier. And we had our trusty mariner Dave Simon-Baker [engineer]. I kinda can’t envisage making an ALO achievement without him at this point. He’s got a enthusiastic personality for the flat and enthusiastic field skills.”

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LEFT FOR DEAD DURING THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION,
IT'S BEING EMBRACED AGAIN BY SOME ENGINEERS
Aug 4, 2010 4:28 PM, By Blair Jackson,
Published by Mix Magazine

For San Francisco Bay Area–based engineer/producer/musician Dave Simon-Baker, whose recent work includes the latest albums by the Mother Hips (Pacific Dust), ALO (Man of the World) and Jackie Greene (Till the Light Comes), his return to using analog tape (with Pro Tools) was influenced in part by the arrival of a very special machine at the studio he calls home these days, Mission Bells in S.F.: a Studer A820 24-track that was owned by the notoriously audio-conscious Grateful Dead (and used to record their final two albums in the late ’80s). Greene, who co-owns Mission Bells with Mother Hips leader Tim Bluhm, acquired the Studer through former Dead bassist Phil Lesh, in whose band he played part-time during 2007/2008.

The machine wasn’t working when it was lugged up the stairs to the second-floor studio, but some remedial work courtesy of ex-Grateful Dead sound wizard John Cutler and, especially, Krieg Wunderlich changed that, and now, “It’s the most amazing-sounding recorder!” Simon-Baker says. “That is a special machine. I’d used the Studer A80 a lot and liked it, but I didn’t realize until I started using this A820 that it has built-in Dolby SR card slots, so we did most of the Hips record and all of Jackie’s at 15 ips with Dolby SR and it sounds great; it just kicks huge ass. The clock is so amazing on it and the sound is so rich and full.

“I had stopped using tape entirely for 12 years and it wasn’t a conscious choice—it was economics entirely. People weren’t affording it; they didn’t want to buy it. So I found myself with a roomful of hard drives, and I felt like, ‘Where? Why?’ So when the opportunity came to use this beautiful machine, I fell back in love with it. It takes a little more time because of the transferring [back and forth between it and Pro Tools] and I know there are systems where you can avoid that, but we have it set up in a way we can work well with it.”

The Hips and Greene albums were being worked on concurrently (in fact, the Hips play on much of Greene’s album and Tim Bluhm also co-produced), and as economic considerations were important in both cases, Simon-Baker was careful not to use too much tape—not a problem given his recording M.O. “We monitor through Pro Tools, but we don’t actually record to Pro Tools until it’s been on tape. Then I transfer it over when the tape is full. The masters were all on Pro Tools. Then we’d just erase the tape when we were done and we’d keep going over the same tape. The Hips record and the Jackie record were done on a total of about four reels of tape.”

Greene’s album, in particular, has a somewhat ’60s psychedelic sound, but that’s mostly because of the arrangements and instrumentation—it’s rife with Rickenbacker guitars and bass, B-3 organ, even electric sitar on two songs (backward on one). “Tape helps get some of that feeling,” Simon-Baker says, “but more is the playing and the instruments and the amps. Jackie and Tim are staunch collectors and a lot of the sound is classic guitars through classic amps—a lot of Princeton amps and that sounds fantastic; Vibrolux; Super Reverb. That gives it more of that sound than the tape. We also have nice preamps—we use a lot of Neve and API stuff, and the new Mercury M72.

“But now that I’ve had this opportunity to get back to tape, I realize the sum effects of putting all those tracks down gives it a particular way of sitting together. It’s almost like a smearing effect where everything sits in a real warm and comfortable zone, and it layers a bit more naturally. It sits in a certain way and creates more of an illusion than the clarity of digital. And I like the sound of digital.”

by: Susan Frances

ALO (Animal Liberation Orchestra) is a 4-piece band from the San Francisco/Oakland area with equal parts of folk, jazz, pop, soul, funk, and roots music. They received media attention in 2006 with their debut album on Brushfire Records entitled Fly Between Falls.

Previously, the band had released Time Expander in 2002, One Size Fits All in 1999, and ALO vs. LAG in 1998. Their recent album Roses And Clover produced by the band, Robert Carranza and Dave Simon-Baker is an upbeat record that finds joy in having a positive outlook about life, even from song titles like “All Alone” and “Empty Vessel.”

ALO live by the adage that if you’re not happy with yourself at home, you’ll never find happiness any place you go, and that’s where their roots rock meets soul-funk. They bring the uplifting vibes of funk into roots music which makes for a divine musical experience.

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By: Dennis Cook

The new album was co-produced by the band and Dave Simon-Baker (ALO, Eric Martin), who is Bluhm's partner at Mission Bells Studio in S.F.

"I was very conscious of keeping it balanced so it wasn't just me steering things but Greg, John and Paul, too. I wanted to make sure I wasn't producing it because it didn't seem appropriate. The way the Hips have always made records is not that way," says Bluhm. "That being said it was done in my studio with a lot of my equipment, so it was like the band came over and made dinner in my kitchen. The things Dave and I have learned about that room and that equipment was useful in getting the record to sound the way it does. And having the studio as a resource makes it possible to record almost constantly."

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