Artist Interview: Ulrich Wild – Mixing METAL in the Box
By Marsha Vdovin
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Engineer Ulrich Wild in his home studio |
I have an unfortunate tendency to try to categorize everything. Perhaps it is my attempt to cope with a chaotic world. When I do it with people, I get in trouble. Ulrich Wild is an engineer in L.A. with credits that scream METAL. Pantera, the Grammy-winning White Zombie, Powerman 5000, Deftones. I was really excited to interview him and made some very broad assumptions about how he works. He proceeded to disprove every preconception that I made about him in surprising and wonderful ways. It’s great fun to learn the different ways that people approach music and engineering.
Ulrich is from Switzerland, but has an American accent. He says that’s because he was in this country illegally for a while and purposely changed the way he speaks. He came here in the late ‘80s to escape the requisite Army service in Switzerland. Landing in San Francisco, he enrolled in a music recording school and signed up as an intern at Alpha and Omega Studios (the owner, Sandy Pearlman, claims to have come up with the term "heavy metal"). Apparently Ulrich catches on fast because they started paying him soon after that.
Did you learn on the job?
Yeah, pretty much. I was a grunt, intern/runner/gopher type, and I just was available whenever possible. I made myself useful to the studio, and became valuable to them, and just started sitting in on sessions.
Was there anyone there who was a mentor or anything?
Mark Senasac, and Ann-Maria Scott were the two people with whom I worked the most. I also assisted John Cuneberti, and Mark Needham. There were a lot of talented people around.
Did you have any music background at all?
Yeah. When I was a teenager in Switzerland, I played guitar and sang in a couple of bands. There was nothing noteworthy, other than the fact that we shared a rehearsal space with the drummer who also played in Hellhammer/Celtic Frost. Hellhammer was the first iteration of the band, and then they mutated into Celtic Frost.
Why has metal become your specialty?
When I grew up, I was listening to a lot of the new wave of British heavy metal, like Motorhead, Maiden, Priest. That's what helped me through my teenage rebellion. Then I started to like the whole '80s thing, the '80s hair-metal stuff, and then Metallica came along and just blew everything apart. Plus, at the studios where I worked, there was a heavy emphasis on rock and metal.
The odd part is that the first record that I produced on my own was actually Strung Out, a punk record. And the second record that I did on my own was Static X’s Wisconsin Death Trip. To me that was as much of a dance record as a metal record, but they went very much into the heavy-metal direction. Once you've had a little bit of success in a genre, people tend to seek you out. You get better at it, it's something that you do over and over again. Practice makes perfect, you know? But then you also get pigeonholed, and it's kind of hard to break out of it.
So I guess I got pigeonholed. [Laughs.] Not that that's a bad thing. I enjoy what I do in that musical genre.
Is there a classic record that has a sound that you try to emulate?
I'd have to say absolutely not, and I'm vehemently against it. I'm more the type of person who wants to look forward, and I certainly wouldn't want to emulate anything. I do borrow heavily or find inspiration by all sorts of classic records, much more so than the new ones, only because it keeps things more interesting.
The interesting things in music happen when you combine styles that weren't supposed to be combined, or when you let yourself be influenced by things outside of your immediate focus.
Outside your genre?
Yeah. Because there's nothing more boring than four people coming together and each of them only listens to Metallica, and they're going to write a song. You know what I mean? No dis against Metallica or anything like that--it could be any band. The interesting part is when somebody shows up and he listened to Abba, and the other three guys listen to really heavy music, and all of a sudden you have a conversation that's worth having, a musical conversation.
The other thing that plays into this is that stuff that you don't like influences you just as much, if not more so, than stuff that you do like. If you're exposed to things that are new to you that you wouldn't normally seek out, or wouldn't like but you know about them, it makes things much more interesting as well. On my days off, I listen to a lot of oldies, and very pop-y things sometimes, just to broaden the horizons and get inspired.
Let's talk about recording. What's different about recording or mixing metal as opposed to pop?
In some ways, nothing, and in other ways, everything. When I say nothing, I mean that from the standpoint of your job, of what you have to do to reach your goal. You have to dive in and find the essence of the song, the essence of the artist, the essence of the music, and bring it out and elaborate on it, or focus on it, and find what makes the song go, whether it’s the rhythmic contents, or the important melodic parts. That doesn't really change between types of music, because the song has to work as a song, and as a mix.
But as far as EQing stuff is concerned, and the technical details, it is obviously much different. You can't have the same pristine approach that you need in some pop things where the vocal is the be-all end-all of everything. In metal, the drums and the guitars have to be so powerful, and move so much air, that you need to EQ everything and make everything fit together in such a way that it all works.
Do you have a hint for EQing to get a thick metal sound while maintaining separation between instruments?
Well, I could give you dBs and frequencies and stuff, but it would really be useless. The most important thing is to know that each instrument always seems to have a part that is kind of murky sounding, and steps on other stuff that would sound good in that particular frequency band. So the idea is to clear out a little bit of murk out of each of the instruments, to make room for other instruments to shine in that particular area of the frequency spectrum. It always changes, and it depends on the tuning of the guitars. It depends on what kind of bass sound your after, if it's a clanky bass or a really round and woolly one. Also, with the drums, do you want to have a rounder tone, or you want to have a very attack-y tone?
In the end, it’s just important that in your high end, everything meshes together, like the esses, the sibilance of the vocals, and the hi-hats, and the fuzz--the hissiness of the guitars, and the hi-hats, the attack of the kick and the snare cracks. All that has to sound even and balanced so there's nothing missing. Same thing with the mid range, like the mids of the snare, the mids of the vocal, the mids of the guitars. They have to sound balanced, and the lows have to sound balanced again, too. You don't want to have weird rumbly things coming from a bad vocal take. You don't want to have the bass step all over the low end of the kick--they have to find their own place, their own frequencies that they work together in, where they can push together, and not get in each other's way. So it's really a matter of balancing out all the individual things. I guess the most important thing is to use your ears, and make it sound good.
What about signal chain? Do you have classic signal chains that you go to? Do you have some things you prefer? You have some UA hardware, right?
I'm also a big believer of using the stuff that's available in the studio at the time. Because it makes you work a little bit harder, and changes your approach ever so slightly from record to record. Your records don't end up sounding all the same because you're so set in your ways.
Now, luckily, most of the studios I work in have a lot of really good gear, including Universal Audio gear. Having said that, there are a couple of things that I pretty much always do. Like I always double-compress the vocals, to tape or to disk, with an 1176 and an LA-3A, or two 1176s.
And that gives you a sound that you like, an effect that you like?
Yeah. It smoothes out the vocals. I set up one of the 1176s that catches the real intense peaks in vocal performances, and then I have the LA-3A, or the other 1176, set as a gentler compressor that just kind of hones in everything. I end up compressing quite a bit. Then, when it comes to mixing, the vocals get compressed again.
I don't usually compress the guitars, the rhythm guitars to tape. But lead guitars and cleaner guitars, like texture guitars, they can get compressed a lot sometimes.
Do you have any favorite mikes?
You know, I can't say . . . The SM57 is probably my favorite mic. [Laughs.] It's the hammer of the music business. It's my go-to mic for the snare, top, and for the guitar sounds.
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Ulrich Wild |
Do you record to tape?
I used to record to tape, like everybody else, and have been doing it long enough that there was only tape when I started. That's how I got my chops. And I think the last record I recorded fully on tape was Breaking Benjamin, and that was like 2001 or something like that. And then after that, I started recording straight into Pro Tools, because that's the studio standard at this point, and I ended up mixing still to tape. All that has pretty much gone away now. I'm now fully digital, the whole thing. All the way down the line.
The thing about tape is that it's a flawed medium because you have hiss, and you have the bias noise It sheds over time. It sheds off your high end. It kind of is slow, and it loses your transients of the drums. Loosing the high end is a bad thing, but shaving off the transient is great. That’s why people like the drum sound off of tape.
So, back in the tape days I used to try to use as fast and as clean of a preamp as I possibly could, so I could preserve as much of the transient to put to tape, because the tape would shave it off anyway. I didn't want to diminish it more by using slower equipment. I would boost a lot of 10k onto tape, because it would get shaved off eventually, over time. Well, if you apply those same principles while recording straight to digital, it's going to sound brittle and harsh, because digital does not lose the high end over time. You don't need to boost any extra and it doesn't lose the transients, you have to get rid of the transients yourself. If you take the same sound and record it to analog and record it to digital, and you EQ'd it to sound good on analog tape, when you play it back off the digital world it'll sound brittle. But if you EQ something to make it sound good as playback from a digital recorder, and you record that onto analog, it'll sound dull coming back from the analog.
I expected you to be a hard-core tape person. You surprised me, and that's really interesting.
Yeah. You know, the thing is, until last year, when the new Intel Macs came out, and Apogee came out with their new system, I would not have actually been an advocate of mixing in the box. I remember having a conversation when I was mixing the last Opiate for the Masses CD on a big SSL, and telling everybody, "I'll never mix in the box. It's going to be consoles forever."
How do you use the UAD-1?
The UAD is completely necessary when mixing in the box. I use them in Logic Pro. The one I rely on most heavily is actually the Precision Limiter across the stereo bus to get rid of the peaks and make everything sound smooth. It's a very integral part of my sound. And the other thing that I use heavily is the Plate 140, they're my main reverbs.
Isn't that a great one?
It's a fantastic, fantastic plug-in. I also use the Dimension D like crazy.
How do you use that?
Just to widen things. Just to mono things, like maybe a vocal or a bass, just to tie it into the left and right speakers a little bit more, with the rest of the music. But also the Roland Chorus Pedal, that's my main chorus. When I'm mixing things that I didn't record, meaning I didn't run them through 1176s and LA-3As on the way to tape--or disk--I still say "tape," you know, it'll never go away--if I didn't record it that way, or if I can tell that it wasn't recorded that way, I always use the 1176 plug-ins and the LA-2 plug-ins to smooth out the vocals, mostly. Sometimes the bass as well. Often the snare goes through the ringer with those. And I do love those guitar channels, they come in really handy to really shape some guitar sounds that are kind of dull sounding. Not necessarily dull in lacking high end, but just dull boring. You know, they can jump quite to life with those plug-ins. I dig those a lot.
When you move from the analog to the digital world, your entire outlook changes. At least mine did. Whereas I used to record with really fast preamps, like GMLs and what have you, to preserve these transients on the drums, now I'm looking for slower-moving electronics, like tube gear that'll help me just shave off some of these transients. Back in the tape world, I never ran anything through a tube. I never used tube mics, I never used anything tube. But now, almost everything I record goes through a tube of some kind.
Have you tried the new Neve 88RS plug in?
Oh yeah, I love tracking on vintage Neve boards. They just have a sound that compliments drums and guitars. Whenever I want that classic sound, I reach for the Neve plug-ins. Like all the other UA powered plug-ins, the Neve emulations are fantastic. The 88RS are the real deal. If you’ve ever worked on consoles like that, you know UA is really paying attention to detail. When I need a bit of a different flavor–usually top end on drums–I strap a smooth 88RS across the insert and get crankin’. Having 1073s, 1081s and 88s all available without taxing the CPU is amazing. It's like having your own Neve sidecar on a PCI card.
The UA analog gear is the perfect compliment to digital recording.
And it is, because it sounds good. The thing about it is, now you have to make it sound good before it goes into the digital word. Whereas before, the analog world would help you out making it sound good with that tape sound.
And what about mixing? Are you taking things home to mix?
Yeah. Now I mix everything on my Logic rig at home.
Did you have any stories about your Grammy win on the White Zombie’s Astro Creep 2000 album?
That was an interesting record to make, because it's one of those hybrid records. I guess that's what I'm still looking for: the ultimate hybrid record.
Hybrid in that it's …
The way that we put the loops and the live band together. For starters, all the loops were timed to the drummer's timing. We did not grid any drums out. We didn't do any drum editing. It was all tightened to the drums, to the live feel. Which makes that record so cool. It has such a rock vibe about it, even though it is so programmed.
The way we went about it was we recorded everything to a loop that came from Charlie Clouser. They had worked out the tempo for the songs, and Charlie would provide us with a loop to SMPTE, so we would overdub--the drums and to the loop. And then drop all the drum tracks onto ADAT, and send it over to Charlie's studio, where he would start programming stuff like crazy. Crazy loops, and keyboard-y things, bass lines, crazy vocal things, and he would just go to town, and time everything to the drums, and then send it back to us--ADAT after ADAT after ADAT of stuff--and we just kept filling up tracks. We ended up with three reels of 2" for each song. We'd just keep piling the stuff together, and we ended up having to mix all these tracks. A lot the stuff just went all the way through. We'd have your standard drum setup, you know, two kicks, snares, three, four toms, overheads, room sounds and a kick and snare sample. It ended up being about 16 tracks for drums, and there'd be loops, at least one to two loops going at any given time along with the drums, plus vocals and guitars and bass and keyboard lines and bass keyboard lines and more loops and background parts. [Laughs.] It was just this huge thing. We had 72 tracks of material, and we mixed it on a 68-input board. That didn't leave much for any effects or anything, but luckily with all these tracks--with this wall of sound--there wasn't really much room for effects, so it all worked out, you know? What can I say?
Yeah, it was definitely a challenge, but it was a cool thing. That’s how I first got really started with Pro Tools. It was like the stepping stone. We liked the tightness of the drum samples that we ended up getting. The record right after that was Deftones’ Around the Fur. Terry Date ended up buying a Pro Tools rig for that record, to get some of the advantages that Pro Tools had at the time incorporated into the analog world. We did this for the longest time--record in the analog world, with Pro Tools as a slave, and bounce stuff back and forth as needed. Now it's straight into Pro Tools, or digital audio workstations in general.
Next up, Ulrich will be sharpening his ears on a Lebanese band, The Kordz, which he will be producing and mixing. Get more information on Ulrich Wild on his website.