Paul Stubblebine and Coast Recorders
Renovating a Classic Bill Putnam Studio
By Marsha Vdovin

Coast Recorders circa 2005
This month I had the pleasure of touring Coast Recorders and Paul Stubblebine Mastering & DVD on Mission Street in San Francisco. Coast is the only remaining studio in San Francisco that was designed by Bill Putnam. Currently co-owned by Mastering Engineer Paul Stubblebine, Coast has an illustrious history.

Mercury Records built Coast Recorders in 1969. At the time, San Francisco was the epicenter of an exploding music scene, and CBS Records wanted to have a studio in San Francisco also. Coast Recorders, the Bill Putnam company in San Francisco, had a new large studio complex on Folsom Street, and shortly after it opened, CBS Records leased most of it from Putnam. Coast still needed studios, so in 1971 they took over Mercury Recording on Mission Street and ran it (plus the one studio they had retained in the Folsom Street complex) as Coast Recorders. At that time, Bill Putnam redesigned the rooms on Mission Street.

“I think that music listening is an essential activity, and no matter how technical our side of the job is, what we are trying to create is an essential and emotional experience for people. Music has to have the ability to reach our pleasure centers inside, and I don't believe that our job is done until I get the project to reach that point”

The Folsom Street property became the Automatt, which was the home of many seminal Punk recordings in the late seventies and R&B hits in the eighties. Coast Recorders on Mission went through several owners and was bought by a couple of young engineers and renamed Toast during the 1990s. Toast hosted many great rock acts, including No Doubt, REM, Third Eye Blind, Tom Waits, Smashmouth, Black Lab, Korn and American Music Club.

Paul Stubblebine and a partner took over the property in 2002 and reclaimed the Coast Recorders name. They converted two rooms into mastering suites and renovated the gem: the Bill Putnam-designed Studio A. They completely refurbished both the AC wiring and audio harnessing, plus updated the gear.

Coast Recorders Studio A
Before visiting the new Coast, I phoned Jason Carmer, whom I interviewed for this column in July 2003. Carmer worked at Coast recently, and since he had been a big fan and frequent user of Studio A during the Toast era, I wanted to find out what he thinks of the studio now.

"I produced the Star Spangles on Capitol Records there," Carmer said. "I'm really glad they opened that room back up. It's got that great Bill Putnam sound!"

The big room (Studio A) at Coast is definitely a gem and now is equipped to record analog, digital, or both. There's a Studer 2-inch and Pro Tools, plus a rack of every UA-reissued hardware unit, and a vintage LA-2A.

The configuration of the Control Room is the same as it was in the Putnam years, but the present owners are now utilizing Genelec monitors. The room has been re-voiced by Bob Hodas and features a 60-input Neve V3 console.

The two mastering rooms were installed in the existing smaller studios. They share a common machine room, and projects can be moved back and forth between stereo or 5.1 workstations.

Stubblebine's room contains a rack of amazingly beautiful custom tube amps that tri-amp their (giant!) Magico monitors made in Oakland, California. He also uses Meyer speakers for the cCenter and two sSurrounds supported by two Bag End subs to extend their range. Two additional Bag End Sub units handle the '.1' LFE. Stubblebine has a number of workstations available for mastering, but most of the time Stubblebine uses Sonic Solutions. The facility also has a Sadie system, but for SACD (Sony's surround format) mastering work, there is a Sony Sonoma. Nuendo and Pro Tools are also available.

My first question for Paul Stubblebine is, "Do you usually stay in the digital domain for mastering?"
"Not at all," he explains. "Most of the time, I'll go out to analog. First of all, we don't have one way to approach the project. You have to listen first and determine what you want to do with it. But we often go out to analog. Usually, we can get the results we're looking for with the analog processing gear. We use the Pacific Microsonics gear to convert from digital to analog, and another to bring it back to digital."
Coast Recorders control room
Stubblebine has a beautiful piece of Universal vintage gear: The Little Dipper cleans up problematic audio and is an essential piece of gear for his mastering work.
I asked UA's resident vintage hardware expert Will Shanks about the Little Dipper. He told me that the 565 Little Dipper was introduced in 1971 as an analog filter set with the ability to do incredibly tight Qs for the purpose of fixative EQ'ing chores, such as hum and noise. The Little Dipper was commonly found in film production, but is also desired in audio because of its unique abilities. The notch filters can be used for cool phasing effects.

I also asked Stubblebine if he prefers to work with stems, as opposed to a full mix.
"When we have the chance, we prefer to work with stems," he says. "The greatest appeal of working with stems is that sometimes when you are mastering, to get the best sonics out of a recording, it may change the relationship of the vocal to the track, so it's a huge advantage to have access to the stems to work on the separate tracks to re-adjust them if necessary.

"Sometimes we'll go beyond mixing from stems. Sometimes, we'll reopen the mix. Especially these days, when so many things are done in the DAW, sometimes we'll have them bring everything in and we'll open it up in one of our workstations and tune up the mix. There's so much more we can do. For instance, if the problem is with the bass-not that it isn't that there's too little or too much but that it's the wrong shape, we can separate the bass and reshape it the way it needs to be. We don't want to remix the whole thing from scratch, but fine-tune the mix. It can end up shortening the mastering time in the end."

Does Stubblebine have a benchmark or A/B recording that he uses for comparison purposes?
"I don't A/B," he says. "I don't even A/B with another recording or with the original files very often. Because for me, the job is goal-directed. I listen to it. I imagine what it could be in order for the music to be best presented, and then I move towards that. I'm not interested in how much I'm changing it; it could be a little or a lot, but it's whatever it takes to get to that point that I've imagined. A/B'ing back to the original is just a distraction for me. I'm totally focused on getting it to where it works-getting it into the pocket. Comparing it to other recordings puts me in an analytical mode, and I'm not interested in an analytical mode. I'm a pretty experienced engineer, but when I'm doing it I'm not thinking about dBs. I am operating on a results-based level and responding to what I hear on a music-based level. My personal approach is not to A/B because it takes me out of 'my' game. However, I have listened to a lot of recordings in order to develop the internal reference that I use when I'm trying to imagine where a mastering project can go."

Does Stubblebine think that the projects that he has mastered have a signature sound?
"I want the track to be really grounded, really rooted and I'd like the vocal to feel like it's able to soar," Stubblebine explains. "I think you'll find that there's a full-range quality to my work. It does have extended low end and extended top end, and the extended low end is part of what makes it rooted and solid at same time. The other part that I'm always aiming at is that the sound of the recording doesn't make you work to listen to it. It's inviting and it presents quite naturally and comfortably. Everything that is important, you should be able to listen to without having to fight to get into it; you shouldn't need to delve deep into the mix. Ideally, when you listen to it you're not thinking of the engineering. If you are thinking of the engineering when you're listening to my work then I haven't done my job well. You should just be carried away by the music. That's the goal."

"In terms of what I bring to it sonically," he continues, "I know where to nudge it here and there in order to get it to the point where the whole thing seems to unfold in front of you and draw you in. The whole thing has a fundamentally appealing quality. I'm not generally thinking in engineering terms but in musical terms. I think that music listening is an essential activity, and no matter how technical our side of the job is, what we are trying to create is an essential and emotional experience for people. Music has to have the ability to reach our pleasure centers inside, and I don't believe that our job is done until I get the project to reach that point."

Paul Stubblebine's Mastering Studio
What would be Stubblebine's dream product from Universal Audio?
"I would like to see an analog multiband limiter. Multiband limiters have been around for several years; of course, they started in broadcast but then they got in the studio as digital processors. I have mixed feelings about them because they are often used to overdo compression. However, used with some sensitivity, a multiband limiter/compressor gives you the ability to adjust things that you can't do other ways. In particular, a nice gentle dynamic shaping of the low end can make it really lead the track in a nice way. If you could do that without affecting the mids and highs, or giving you a chance to affect the mids and highs differently, that would be in my opinion a useable tool."

How about Surround tools?
"We could use another good sSurround controller monitor. There are a few. There weren't many when I started off with surround, so that's why I'm using one I had my maintenance department build for me. I would love to see something with Universal Audio quality.

"Since UA already makes beautiful compressors and limiters, I would like to see a box that gives you complete flexibility over linking channels so that when you feel like you want your Left/Center/Right to be linked, you can link just those. When you feel like you want your Center unlinked but your Left linked to your Left Rear and your Right linked to your Right Rear, then you just link those. That would be nice.

"A surround line mixer would be great so that when we have to add reverb we can do it when our reverb returns back in analog, which means that we could use it whether we are doing SACD work or PCM work. If we had an 'in the box' surround mix, we could also use some external analog processors and bring it back into a surround summer. There's a lot interest in summing amps because of the controversy over whether mixing in the box sounds as good as mixing in the console. I don't know of one that would work well with surround."

And what about Analog vs. Digital?
"Digital gives us so many advantages in the way of working, and of course it gives us cost advantages now. I'm still waiting for digital to sound as good as analog, and by that I mean processing and storage both. It has improved over the years, but every time we see an improvement in digital sound quality, it's like there's a mountain on the other side of the valley and some haze has been cleared and we can see it more clearly, but we didn't actually get any closer to the mountain. There's still something sensual and tactile about analog technology that we're not quite getting from digital."
Paul Stubblebine

Read more about Paul Stubblebine and Coast Recorders at http://www.paulstubblebine.com.

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