Artist Interview: Jim Gaines– Grammy-Winning Engineer for Santana Tries out the DCS Remote Pre
By Marsha Vdovin
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Engineer Jim Gaines |
Jim Gaines is a super-nice guy who's had an awesome career. He engineered during the height of the San Francisco music explosion in the early ‘70s and hasn’t stopped since. He’s best known for his ongoing work with Carlos Santana. He recently started using the new UA DCS Remote Preamp in his work, and we had a fun chat from his home in Tennessee about the DCS and about Gaines' career.
I wanted to start with your background. I'm always interested in how people become recording engineers.
Well, I go back a long way. I started back in the '60s, in Memphis, with what was a small jingle company. It became the world's largest jingle company by the end of the '60s. I started out as the snotty-nosed kid that they couldn't get rid of, doing gopher work, but I ended up being chief engineer the last four years I was there. In 1970 I moved to San Francisco to work at Wally Heider's studio, which was one of the major studios in San Francisco at the time.
Was that Hyde Street Studios?
Yes, now it’s called Hyde Street Studios. When I was there, we had three rooms going 24 hours a day. Then I got recruited to go to Seattle and open up a studio up there. They recruited me, one guy from New York, and one guy from L.A. So we went up there and I ran that studio for a while. It was called Kaye Smith Studios, which ended up becoming Bad Animals.
Then I went back to San Francisco, and I worked at the Automat. I worked for the musician Steve Miller exclusively for a couple of years, then I went back to the Plant Studios and ran that for quite a while. Then I just started doing independent stuff. I’ve just been doing this for a long time.
When did you leave San Francisco and move to Tennessee?
In 1989, I was in Memphis, doing Stevie Ray Vaughan's In Step album. While I was there, my dad was having very serious health problems, so I decided to move back, to be close to him, and just never went back. Ended up staying here for quite a while, and now I live out in the country on the Tennessee River between Memphis and Nashville. Close to Florence, Alabama, actually.
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Jim Gaines and Stevie Ray Vaughan |
Do you ever miss San Francisco?
Oh, I miss it. I'm there quite often working with Santana. We've been working together for 22 years. So I'm in San Francisco quite often.
Obviously you and Santana have a pretty synchronistic relationship. It must have been really exciting working with him so long, and then having that big Grammy-winning album a couple of years ago.
Oh, yeah. We went through some changes. My first record with him was the Shango album, and I've done pieces and parts of a lot of the albums since then. There were a couple I wasn't involved with because the producers had their own engineers, but I've always been sort of like "his guy." For a while, he was in between record deals, and we actually started a record for EMI just before they closed their doors. Carlos is a great performer, and a great guitar player. One of the best in the world, and to not have records out doesn't make any sense. Then when he and Clive Davis got together and decided to do Supernatural, it was gold. We're all very proud of Supernatural. We won like 9 or 10 Grammies and the records sold a gazillion. It was great to see guys like him make that comeback, and gain a whole new audience. That's what the neat thing is. It's nice to have a Grammy in your house, too. [Laughs]
When you come out and record with him, do you guys work at The Plant, or does he have a home studio?
No, he doesn't have a home studio. We've been working at Fantasy Studios for quite a while, but they're getting ready to go through a bunch of changes. I'm not even sure they're going to be open. Carlos is off for this year, totally, and not doing anything, because they're getting ready to come out with a "best of" record. But yeah, I don't know what we're going to do now. We've worked a little bit at Narada Michael Walden’s Tarpan Studio, but it's not quite big enough to put the whole band in. It's a small studio. I don't know what we're going to do. It's going to be a challenge. The next project's going to be a challenge out there. We'll have to see what happens.
It's sad so many studios are closing.
Yeah. Fantasy had a big room. They had two big rooms, and it really could accommodate--because when we record, we have the whole band set up, even including the horns sometimes. So it could be 10 pieces out there.
Let's talk about gear. Do you have experience with Universal Audio hardware?
Oh, are you kidding? Good Lord. Here you're talking to a guy that's been doing this since the '60s. That's all we had when I first started. When I arrived at Heider’s studio in California it was just racks of UA gear—1176s, even the old filters, and the EQs. The big knob things. We had racks of that stuff. UA was our main outboard gear, to be honest with you. I've had a lot of experience--I even go back as far as having Scott Putnam (oldest son of Bill) build me some echo chambers. When I moved up to Seattle, first thing I did was have some live chambers built, and he'd come up there in his car, and fly fish and come by the studio.
UA was our staple of gear, basically, because consoles then were all custom and didn’t have effects built in. If you really wanted to get serious you had to use a lot of outboard compressors and EQ. I grew up using this gear so I've been involved with Universal Audio for a long time.
Do you have any secrets to share? For instance, how you get that signature Santana guitar sound.
We use quite an extensive amp setup for Carlos’ guitar. We have a double amp running two cabinets, and then we have a Boogie that's going, and sometimes there'll be even another double going. What I do, especially in a lot of the pieces we're doing now, I make a stereo mix of all the amps. It goes into two 1176s, for our peaking and a tiny bit of compression. That's the final stages before it goes into the computer. Always.
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Carlos Santana and Jim Gaines |
Cool. Do you record to tape? Do you record to Pro Tools?
No. I gave that up. I'm like everybody else. I love tape, but it's just too much of a pain in the butt. It's just way too complicated. Being an old-school guy, I love the sound of audiotape, but there's a lot places that don't even have a tape machine. Or if they do, it's not working. One of the last times I used one was in Dallas, Texas. They brought it in, and it hadn't been set up in so long, I couldn't remember how to set the darn thing up. Carlos and I were probably one of the last ones to kind of give up tape. At the same time, when you're using that many tracks, we were slaving down, and all that takes forever to do. When you slave down, you’ve got your rough mixes on the slave and you can't really break stuff out. So we just got to the point, "Well, let's just go to the computer and get it over with, and just give in." So that's what we did. We're like everybody else. We're in Pro-Tools hell.
Do you find that artists have to come into the studio now more prepared, as opposed to writing the songs in the studio?
Yeah. In the old days we had more time to make records, and a lot of the artists would come in and the way it would work is there'd be X number of songs that were completed, X number that were being started, and we would finish those songs in the studio, or even in some cases write songs in the studio. A normal album took three to four months, something like that. It was 12 weeks of recording and two weeks of mixing, but it always ran over a few weeks. That was kind of normal, and we did a lot of writing. A lot of the writing actually came together with the band inside the studio. In a lot cases, if was a successful band, they were touring right up to the minute they'd go to record again.
Nowadays, the whole thing's changed. Now the record company has to hear a demo that sounds like the record, then they listen to it and they want you to do it like the demo. The whole concept's changed.
So is it less fun?
Oh, it's a lot less fun. Now, it's still fun to make music, but it's a lot more business and pressure and time-sensitive stuff that we've got to deal with now. The budgets have all been cut back, and if they tell you you have six months to make the record, soon as you start into it they say, "We want it now." Everything is sped up.
Also, as much as I love Pro Tools--I call it "Slow Tools"--in a lot of ways it slowed us down, because now we tend to make several tracks of performances and then we gotta go nitpick it, and then we gotta make it perfect. In the old days, we just recorded what you had. If you only had 24 tracks, and 48 if you used slaves, and you got the performances, you had only so much you could do, it's done. When people ask me today what the difference between the old way and new way is, I say there's only one word, "commitment." We had to commit to tape. There is no messing around. That's the difference between now and then. Nowadays people just throw stuff on tape and sort it out later. Well sometimes, when you sort it out later, you still ain't got it. Just because you got 10 tracks of material don't mean you got the performance. So that's the big difference for me.
You’ve been using the DCS remote preamp. What did you think?
First of all, the DCS is really designed for what's going on in today's market, which is home studio, small rooms, guys recording in their bedrooms, guys recording in their hotel rooms, on the road, on the bus. That's what this unit is really designed for, and to me it is great, because first of all it's a UA product, and UA to me has always brought the quality to the table, and it's definitely in this unit. There's no question about it. So whoever designed this was very smart, because they not only went for this market, but they maintained their quality level that they always have maintained all these years. I can't think of one UA product that's not a quality product. They definitely kept that intact. It's really a versatile little piece of gear.
I didn't use it for a live kind of setup. I have my little studio, and I set up it up to record with, because I wanted to hear how the preamps sound, and how these headphone things worked and so forth. I was amazed. Of the stuff that's out there, this is the cat to beat now. If anybody is caring at all about what their record sounds like, they need to check this thing out. The first day, I had done some guitar parts the day before, with my mic preamps that I normally use. The second day, I brought in the same player, same setup, and I plugged into these preamps, and man, the sound just jumped out at me. We both would just look at each other like, wow! That's the same exact thing we just did yesterday, and that's how good these preamps sounded. It was much fuller, clearer, and present; the level was the same. So the next day I did vocals the same way. We'd done vocals the day before, so I tried vocals through it just to do an A/B comparison. And wow! Vocals sounded great; again, it was like clear and more present. The next day we did backgrounds. So I did three different things, so I could do old and new tests, basically. I'm amazed. I love these preamps.
That's great to hear.
I also love the fact that, I was doing a vocal and we had to go back a couple of days later and punch in, and I had kept track of the level with the little metering--the little LED readouts, so I just got right back to level, punched in two words here, and three words there, and the level's right there. That was great. Just being able to get back. Also you can lock that stuff down, if you want to, with a lockdown button. So that was my first experience, and it was great. I tried using the cutoffs to load in, and tested all the reverbs—the reverbs are great for a little unit like that. I couldn't believe that they got like 8 or 10 reverbs in there to choose from. Most artists who do vocals want reverb. Some want a lot, some want a little. So that all worked out great. I thought that sounded really good, actually. I love this thing.
I love the fact that they’ve got the cat5 cable, because with a cat5 cable, you can get a lot of length and not lose any signal. Just having that, and having the unit in one room, and you in the other room, so you can plug in and talk back on the talkback. There are so many features that go with this thing. You can dig into this thing and go for a while. These design guys have really come up with a lot of the advanced features in here that you can use.
I'm assuming that this is what it's built for, this new market, for instance laptop guys. There are some guys who just walk around with their laptops, and they just record with that. There's no studio involved. They're just in a room--and I'm with them on the road. They'll go into a hotel room, they'll go in the back room at their gig, and they'll go on the bus. This is perfect for them guys. It has all these little features of headphone mixes, and reverbs and stuff. Damn! They just need one little piece of gear and they're in business. Not only that, they got great mic preamps instead of some of these crappy things that we have to deal with nowadays. People don't understand there's a big difference--there's a lot of young engineers out there that just don't know the difference. But once you hear the difference, it's pretty obvious that this unit is a step above what's out there right now.
Did you try the headphone section? Was the headphone mix useful at all?
Yeah. I plugged in--I have a console, and I plugged in the headphone system, and the thing works, and like I said, the reverb works great. My guitar player played on it, and he was doing this one particular thing where he makes that deep reverb kind of sound on the guitar, and I just shoved up the reverb on it and it's like, wow, this is great! The headphone system works great.
The talkback, that's a great idea that they put there--I don't think there's anything out there with that on it, actually, that works that well. And to put the talkback system on, to me, is like another step above, because you can use the talkback as an open mic, and talk to the artist at all times, if you need to. Most of these little studios don't have talkback systems. They yell through the door. I've been in a couple of these places where if you want to talk to the guy in the next room, you have to open the door and talk to him. I think the talkback mic is a big selling point.
What kind of different mics did you try with it?
I had Dynamic mikes, Shure SM57s and Sennheiser 421s. Then on vocal mikes I have some condenser mikes. I'm a Rodes endorsee guy, so I have some really good, high-quality Rodes, and I have some AKGs. Another cool thing is the 48-volt phantom ramping up and down. I don't know how many times that you flip that phantom on with the monitors open and you get this loud pop, so that's a great idea having this thing ramp up and ramp down. I've never heard anybody doing that before. That way you're not going to blow somebody's ears that's got 'phones on. That's a cool idea, a really cool idea.
Would you ever record direct from an acoustic-electric guitar?
Oh, absolutely. I didn't have a chance to try that. We were doing all electric stuff. I did a session before we got the DCS where I was doing acoustic-electric, and I was running it direct, and then miking it. This would have been perfect for that, with that stereo setup and everything, it would have been perfect. The sessions I’ve been doing were electric.
I love all this stuff. I think the design people did a great job putting this together. The one thing I'm going to say, and as I said already, is that having been using UA gear for years and years, and the quality that always comes with that gear, they have definitely maintained the quality with this thing. I love those mic preamps. If I had nothing else, I'd like the mic preamps, but having all the other stuff go with it is like cool as hell. I just think that whoever designed it did a great job for the market today, because you're going straight to what's going on today.
You can find out more about Jim Gaines on his website.