Pro Techniques from Hyde Street Studios

Among legendary San Francisco recording studios, perhaps none has shone so brightly over the years as Hyde Street Studios. Founded in 1969 by engineer Wally Heider, "Heider's" played host to the early days of Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills & Nash and the Grateful Dead; the ensuing 33 years have witnessed Gram Parsons, James Brown, Paul Simon, the Byrds, Herbie Hancock, the Dead Kennedys, Joe Satriani, and Merle Haggard walk through Hyde Street's hallowed doors. The 'ring of colored light' Grace Slick requested and sang under for many classic Airplane tracks is still there, and the original Heider's was the first studio to install 16-track Ampex recorders and a Quad 8 console long ago. A Pro Tools TDM system, three Digidesign audio interfaces and a CD burner handle most Hyde projects at the same location today.

"It's a great feeling to be working in the same room that may have recorded some favorite songs 30 years ago," says Hyde audio engineer Gabriel Shepard. "It's also good to be using a lot of the same gear used back then while taking full advantage of the sonic quality of Pro Tools."

Shepard has chalked up an impressive set of credits himself the past six years since joining Hyde Street. Chris Isaak, George Clinton, producer Eric Drew Feldman, the last two Cake records and a live recording of modern guitar legend Jim Campilongo at Cafe Du Nord have enjoyed this engineer's touch. Following are two of many Pro Tools tips he's picked up along the way.

Pro Technique 1 —
Using SoundReplacer as a Gate and for Creating Multiple Drum Hits
As this handy plug-in's name implies, most engineers typically use Digidesign SoundReplacer to replace recorded snare, kick and tom hits with sample- or archive-stored drum sounds. If a kick wasn't miked properly, a cymbal is bleeding excessively into the tom mics or a snare pattern lacks dynamics — or has too much — simply replace the offending sounds using this AudioSuite plug-in, right? Working occasionally this way himself, Shepard usually prefers to use SoundReplacer as a unique gate of sorts and to create layers of concurrent drum hits alongside the originals, each independently routed through the studio's mid-70s Neve 8048 console.

"It's sort of like using a gate, but like the best gate you've ever had," says Shepard, who used SoundReplacer this way on Seven Branch Prayer, the opening track of The Rocking Stone by Patrick Conway — who also happens to own the Pro Tools rig Shepard uses. "I'm using the new sounds not to replace an original snare or kick, but rather to totally isolate the alternate hits from cymbals and other drums and feed them to a nice reverb from the console while I keep the original drum dry."

Miking most snares on top with a condenser mic and a Shure SM57 on the sound hole before mixing the two down to a single snare track, Shepard finds using a standard gate is often not sufficient for isolating a snare from the rest of a kit. "The top mic typically picks up a lot of hi-hat and cymbal crashes, most of which I can remove by using a traditional gate. But sometimes that's not enough, especially if it's a really slick, polished production that calls for a lot more separation between your snare and kicks and the rest of the kit."

Hyde Street Studios engineer Gabriel Shepard
gets tips from his son Max.

Shepard typically opens up SoundReplacer on a snare track and loads in three similar sounding snares with stepped dynamic and volume levels. Working in SoundReplacer's easy-to-use dialog window, he clicks on the floppy icon and loads in the three new snares from a small collection of sample CDs and favorite disk-archived snare hits he's collected. The SoundReplacer edit window then displays a horizontal line over the original snare's waveform and, adjusting each of the three corresponding sliders next to the floppy icon, Shepard raises or lowers each sample's threshold to determine at which point each sound will be triggered. During playback when SoundReplacer then recognizes each peak at which Shepard wants the new samples to be individually triggered, a colored, corresponding vertical line pops up showing which new sample is sounding off.

"Each new sample is then triggered depending on how soft, medium, or hard the original snare drum is hitting," continues Shepard. "In SoundReplacer, I can choose whether I want to replace the original sound file with the new ones I'm triggering, as most people use SoundReplacer, or have the new snare sounds going to a completely new track. Usually I choose the latter to keep all four snares available, which is another nice thing about using SoundReplacer a little differently. I can load three completely different snare sounds to break up a snare pattern's monotony, or sometimes I'll have both the original and one of the new samples trigger at the same time on separate console channels, which sounds great. But most times I'll just route one of the new snare sounds to a separate channel on the Neve and feed it to a Lexicon 480L or [TC Electronics] M5000 reverb, and I always keep the original snare dry on its own channel."

Pro Technique 2 —
Re-Amping with Amp Farm & SansAmp
The concept of re-amplifying a recorded track through a live amp and miking/recording those results as a new track has been in practice a long time. Patented by John Cuniberti, the Re-Amp Box allows engineers to take a flat sounding, direct input (D.I.) bass track, for instance, plug it into the box's +4dB XLR input and route the 1/4-inch cable coming out the other side to a live amp in order to beef things up on the separate new track. He likes the way his Re-Amp and various physical amp simulator pedals sound for this process, as well, but finds his Bomb Factory SansAmp and Line 6 Amp Farm TDM plug-ins--besides being great ways to originally track guitars--do a better job of re-amping without him having to leave a comfy studio chair.

"I'd have to walk the length of the studio and open and close two doors to re-amp the traditional way," Shepard laughs. "There's rare occasions when the Re-Amp box is better for certain things, but both those plug-ins sound just as fine or better with all the amp and cabinet configurations each offer. Having the ability to automate them with Pro Tools is a major advantage, too, especially if I want to ramp the gain or distortion up or down or change cabinet settings during a track."

Shepard explains that Amp Farm and SansAmp are particularly great for virtually re-amping and restoring flat, lackluster DI guitars and bass tracks recorded to Pro Tools. Just as he did on Patrick Conway's track We Could Be A Wheel, he copies an original bass track to another track in Pro Tools then pulls up one or both of the amp simulation plug-ins to see which sounds best.

"I'll usually fuzz something out a little or make it sound a little more upper mid-rangey because DI bass signals are a little lacking in character," he concludes. "I also bring it up on a separate track so I can compress it differently than the original DI track, which I keep around and sometimes use together with the re-amped track. Re-amping will always be around, but it's so much easier just to work in Pro Tools with Amp Farm or SansAmp to re-amp things."