JP Henry experience in studio with Dream Theater in 2001

A little background, I worked at Bear Track Studios for a few years in the early 2000s and I was the assistant engineer during the tracking of Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence. Now I’ve gotten a lot of questions from some of my regular subscribers about what that experience was like. So, I figured it was time to devote a video to it and also pay homage to a bit of a mentor of mine, the main engineer on that project, Doug Oberkircher, who I think has been out of the business for quite a while now like many people from that era.

I learned so much from Doug. I worked with him before this album. We did a Spyro Gyra album together for about two or three months and a lot of random sessions here and there and then six months with Dream Theater. So by then I knew a bit about what he liked, and we had a pretty good working relationship throughout that time and learned just so much from him. He was a real master of analog recording. And this album was recorded almost entirely on 2-inch tape, pair of Studer 820s synced up together through the Focusrite studio console. Doug also lived next door to BearTracks and had a wonderful home studio. When I say home studio, it really undersells it. It was isolated floors, soundproof rooms, he had a Trident 80 series console, a 3M 2-inch tape machine (24-track), a rack of Neve 1093s, EMT 251 reverb, and I think maybe two AMS DMX delays. So, I mean, this was like a tricked-out home studio. Really fantastic. I did a lot of sessions there myself. And that studio came into play towards the end of the recording for this album, too. Doug was a real master of analog tape. And on this album in particular, in fact, on ‘Misunderstood’ in particular, a lot of really cool things were done.

I have a bunch of notes here that I just wrote from memory. Almost like a form of meditative auto writing, I just sort of closed my eyes and wrote down every memory that came back to me while listening to it. And it was a lot. It was really cool. We took a ton of notes at the time because the band did take a break in the middle and we knew we were going to have to reset up everything. God knows where those notes ended up. They might have gone to the band along with the master tapes when we were finished. They might have stayed at the studio which closed in 2006. So, if that was the case, then I’m sure they’re long gone. But it’s too bad because we did detail, not quite in the Randy Staub level of detail, which is a whole other thing. But we definitely took good enough notes to recreate a lot of those things for the guys, especially the drums and guitar setups, which were really crucial to them.

The guys came into the studio in March of 2001 with nothing written. I think this was the first time they had ever done that. They had just come off like a bit of a break from their previous tour for Scenes From A Memory and I think they just sort of reconvened at BearTracks and I’m sure they had riffs and ideas but they wanted to work on it together in the studio and the idea was to be able to record things as they were written which was great for spontaneity, which I think is something they were really aiming for, [but] it posed a bit of a challenge to Doug and I to be ready to just switch gears at the drop of a hat between rehearsal mode and recording mode. Rehearsal mode, they had Q boxes and I believe John was playing through a little Line 6 floor unit and then quickly we had to go to main amps and all that.

Drums

Probably the biggest question I get is about Mike Portnoy’s drums on that album and just how fantastic they sound. Kick drums in particular. I can tell you this. We used AKG D112s on each kick [drum] of the main set. So the session started with Mike’s purple and white monster double bass drum kit, the one he used on the previous album. Then I believe ‘Misunderstood’ might have been the next song they were working on, and that was when Mike experimented with the additional drum kit, which became the third bass drum, the second snare, there was a gong drum. So ‘Misunderstood’ was really the track that sort of spawned a lot of the experimentation, and that continued on to ‘Disappear,’ and even ‘Blind Faith’ had a little bit.

But ‘Glass Prison’ started out with Mike’s older drum set. D112s, they were the only kick drum mic that we had a pair of, so that was generally what we used for double bass. The outside, I think they were Neumann TLM170s. They’re either TLM170s or U89s, which are really similar mics. The U89s have a transformer. I think they have the same capsule otherwise. Very similar. So, if memory serves, TLM170s on the outsides, but it’s really the sound of the Focusrite ISA 110 shelving EQ, which Doug was not shy about applying liberally. When you hear that, you’ll know exactly what I mean. The low shelf and the high shelf. It’s like there might be no better example of that EQ than Portnoy’s kick drums on that album. His toms a little bit too, but of course the kick drums are a bit more front and center than the toms. And yeah, Doug was not afraid to use EQ during tracking to get what he wanted, especially that EQ, which is very natural sounding. You do extreme boosts and it really never went overboard or anything.

Mike’s custom snare drums I believe [were] his Melody Master snares from Tama. I think the metal one was already out and the maple one might have just come out at NAMM that year. So he was excited to use that, and eventually the kit had both of them on it.

One thing about Mike that I have to say – first of all, man, he was a blast. I mean, just infectious energy. I don’t know what the band was like when he wasn’t in it for that decade or so that they were on the outs or whatever, but at that time in 2001, he was the energy. He was the infectious, driving energy behind that band. And all the work he did with the fan club and everything.

Petrucci as well. I mean, they were co-producers. And I kind of saw Petrucci as the leader that brought everyone together in a way that most bands need, especially five-piece with really everyone in that band at the top of their game technically.

But yeah, Mike’s energy was just – it’s like riding a wave working with him. In terms of his drumming, the guy’s fantastic – I don’t need to tell that to anyone. But his strokes are so controlled. I don’t remember him changing drum heads. He probably changed his snare heads from time to time. I don’t really remember that happening because we would have probably had to move the mics and all that. I remember his drum tech, Jose, set up his drums, and he added the extra ones to it a few weeks in or a month in. I don’t really remember anything changing, and they always sounded fresh. He just knows how to hit them, and I think that just comes from that skill level. It’s like guitarists like Petrucci have a touch, a certain touch on the instrument that – they just know how to do it without beating the hell out of it like some other guys. So the way he plays goes a lot with that sound. And yeah, kick drums definitely the Focusrite – really very pillowy sound. That’s especially the low end on the Focusrite, very pillowy.

Before I forget, toms were 421s top only. Frankly, with that many drums, we barely had enough 421s. I think we used some from Doug’s home studio, actually. I might have even brought – I owned one or two. I might have brought them in at the time. Snares were just 57s on top and I think 57s on the bottom. If Doug used something else on the bottoms, they might have been 414s, but I don’t remember off the top of my head. And if anything, they were pretty low in the mix. The third kick drum was a little different. We used an old, a vintage AKG D12 on the inside and a 47 FET on the outside. We only had one 47 FET. Otherwise, if we had a pair, we probably would have used them on the main kicks. But that was on the third kick. The gong drum got a 421 just like the toms.

Overheads – this was interesting because we couldn’t cover the whole kit with just a pair of overheads. So Doug really liked – we had these silver 414s, a pair of them. We had a pair of those. They would have been like 414 EBs, and then we had a pair of the darker 414s, the more recent ones. So the EBs had the CK12 capsules, and they had a great top end on them. In fact, they were James LaBrie’s second choice for a microphone after the C12. And we actually used the 414 for his backing vocals just to give them a little variance. So we had two silver 414s over the kit, and we would move them depending on which side of the kit Mike was on. I guess we left one in the middle and then we moved the outside one. It was either the left one on the main kit or the right one on the smaller kit.

Guitars And Keyboards

[When] John started out, he showed up with a rectifier head. I know the three-channel rectifiers I think just came out that year, so he might have had like a brand new one. I think they debuted at NAMM that year. So, he definitely started out with the rectifier that definitely made it onto ‘Glass Prison,’ at least the rhythm tracks of ‘Glass Prison.’ And probably about a month in, his tech Mark Snyder brought him a couple of now vintage Mark IIC+ heads, the old hardwood with the wicker grills. So he switched to them. I think he did, I would say, probably almost all of his solos through those, if memory serves correct. And we had different settings on them for solos, rhythms, and cleans. I was the gopher that ran out and changed them in between different takes. So that was one thing.

He had a Mesa Heartbreaker head as well, and I think that was more vintage-y, like in-between tones. I was listening to ‘Blind Faith’ and I think he either used the Heartbreaker for some of those rhythm sounds on ‘Blind Faith’ or maybe it was one of those in-between modes on the rectifier. I can’t remember, but they were all there. In addition to having his main 4x12 miked up out in the big room, we had a pair of stereo cabinets in an ISO booth along with his Eventide and TC2290 delay and power amp so that he could always do a wet-dry thing if he wanted to – stereo/mono, mono-dry/stereo-wet. That was definitely used for some clean effects. I remember doing a real swirly thing with the Eventide, kind of a phase-y left-to-right thing going on with them. And I think all of his leads were done dry. And we had three mics on the main 4x12 for the leads: 57, RE20, and a Beyer M160. And that was his lead sound. No compression. I don’t remember Doug using compression on any of the tracking aside from vocals, and that was just an LA2A on the vocals that were done at BearTracks and probably his Summit TLA-100 at stuff done in his studio.

There were some sounds Jordan was using, some keyboard sounds that were kind of retro-y, like some of the Hammond organ sounds and Mellotron sounds on ‘Disappear’ in particular. I think we ran some of that stuff through the Fairchild compressors. We had a pair of 660 mono Fairchilds. I think some of that probably went through the Fairchild Pultecs just for a little something else of the era to add to those. That’s all I remember compression-wise happening.

John’s rectifier, was also used for some bass fuzz and keys. There was at least one keyboard solo, and I can’t remember which. I think it was one of the ones where John and Jordan either double or harmonized with each other, and we ran Jordan’s Kurzweil sound through the rectifier and miked it up. Yeah, can’t exactly pinpoint where. There’s one on ‘Blind Faith’ after the regular keyboard solo where they do some stuff together. That could be it, but from memory I can’t remember exactly what.

Basses

In terms of bass though, the eight-string bass on ‘Blind Faith’ – so they were all King’s X fans, and the idea of using an eight-string bass on the intro popped up, and John Myung didn’t have one. So, he found 30th Street Guitars in New York had one. John called them up, ordered it, paid for it over the phone. Manhattan on a weekday, parking anywhere sucks. So I drove him in, and the plan was he would just hop out of the car, grab the bass, and we’d come right back as quickly as possible. If you’ve ever gotten off the West Side Highway onto 30th Street, there’s a median and it splits, and on the left it takes you into the Lincoln Tunnel outbound and to the right takes you down 30th Street proper. Somehow I ended up on the left side, and in a panic – thank God I had an SUV, my old 4Runner – took it over the median and did not blow a tire or get a ticket thankfully. And then on 30th Street, double-parked. John ran and got the bass. It felt like a SWAT team mission. That was kind of awesome.

John Myung and I were smoking buddies on this album. We were the only two people that still smoked cigarettes back then. It was really fun hanging out with him because we’d take our little smoke breaks, and he was such a quiet dude, but I just felt honored that he liked hanging out with me, I guess. And towards the end of the project, cigarette breaks turned into having a cigar and a beer to celebrate finishing a song, that sort of thing. And I think Doug joined us a couple times too. But anyway, yeah, sweetheart of a guy.

A lot of you have asked me what I was most impressed by or what I thought was the most underrated aspect of the guys. When you have a band with five guys who are at the top of the level of technical proficiency, it’s actually a really tough question. But the two things I will say: John Myung’s contributions, the basslines he comes up with that fit with everything else going on – it’s remarkable, really. I mean, I’ve played enough bass in bands to know how tough it is to just find your pocket and not overplay, but also play enough that fans want to hear them do some cool stuff. So there’s a line there of getting the right sound and fitting it in the right place, and I was just blown away by how well he does that.

He had just gotten a bunch of Demeter gear at the time. I think that was a new thing for him, like a new endorsement. So he was using the Demeter gear along with some SWR stuff, mostly his Yamaha basses. There was an Ernie Ball five-string Stingray that John Petrucci got him. John had just switched to Ernie Ball then too. That was the first album I think he used any of those on, after using Ibanez for like a decade. So, I believe they used John’s rectifier for some of the bass fuzz. You can hear it at the end of ‘Blind Faith’ on the eight-string. I think there’s more of it on ‘Disappear’ later on. They were going for a real Radiohead kind of fuzzy thing. Other than that, I know Myung’s chorus and flanger effects came from his Eventide. I think he and John both had Eventide 4000s.

Vocals

The other underrated aspect of the band: James LaBrie’s vocal stamina. That guy can sing full power for eight hours a day. It just blew my mind. I hadn’t really worked with anybody that could do it that long, that consistently, eight hours a day, day after day. We did the vocals for the first batch of songs and then the vocals for the big 40-minute title track later on. I think the vocals for the title track were done almost entirely at Doug’s studio. We rented an AKG C12, a vintage C12. That was James’ preference. And I think if you have a really keen ear and listen very closely, you might hear a slight difference in tone between his vocals on the first five tracks and his vocals on the title track, because the only difference was that he went through a Neve 1093 at Doug’s studio and the Summit TLA-100, versus the first five tracks, which were done at BearTracks through the Focusrite console and a vintage LA2A. But it’s really subtle. I do think I can hear that difference, but again, you’re splitting hairs. They both sound great.

Actually, the lozenges that James used – I was so impressed by his vocal ability. I can’t remember their name now, but they were for opera singers in particular, and I went out and kept my little home studio stocked with them. When I worked with guys, I was like, “You need these because apparently you can sing like Superman if you take them.” Obviously, there’s a lot more going into James’ vocals than that, but I absolutely thought that was an underrated part. I love James’ voice – absolutely love it. All the vocals were recorded into PARIS, eventually transferred into Pro Tools along with everything else. And all this was synced up through timecode – the tape machines, the DAWs – all of it has to be for it all to work. Timecode is your greatest friend and the biggest pain in the butt ever. But back then you needed it.

Problem Solving On Large Sessions

There was one other big kudo I have to give Doug Oberkircher. We had two tape machines synced up – that’s 48 tracks of playback plus mic inputs. The way the Focusrite console was designed, it was not an inline console like an SSL or AMAC or whatever, and it was not a true split console; it was effectively a split console. Split consoles, like the old Neves, have a dedicated area for tape returns – your mic inputs on one side, your tape returns down the end. The Focusrite was just 72 channels; they were identical. The way we used them, again like a split console, was one side for mic inputs and the other side for tape playbacks. The problem is, when you’ve got 48 tape playbacks during tracking and you need all those mic inputs for drums in particular – but the guitars took a lot, bass – we started running out of real estate pretty fast as the songs started building and building, especially when Mike added the second drum kit. As projects go on, more stuff gets added to them.

Doug had a brilliant idea, as he often did. On the mic input channels we were basically cutting them off at the insert point. We were taking the insert send, which was half-normal on the patch bay, and using that to go directly to tape with certain things, things that didn’t need an output fader because you lose the back end. And really, that’s not so different from the way a lot of us work now, because so many mic preamps and input channels we use in our DAWs don’t have an output fader either. Maybe half of mine do, but not all of them. So we were taking the insert send and using that to go to tape. And then on the insert return – which, when you patch into the insert return, that fully broke the normal of the channel – we would have tape inputs coming back on the returns. So you were monitoring tape on the big faders and sending input to tape without a fader on the same channel. I thought that was brilliant.

And I think we might have used some of the built-in stereo effects returns; we might have used those for monitoring keyboards actually, because we had the 480 coming back on two pairs of them – the Lexicon 480 reverb, which was definitely used for monitoring. You’d put a little reverb on the snare, a little reverb on the vocals just for headphone monitoring. So we probably used the other two stereo returns for keys. I thought that was brilliant. We basically turned the Focusrite into an inline console. The only thing missing was we didn’t have a small fader to set levels to tape with. But again, I thought that was a brilliant thing by Doug.

Tape Machine Tricks, Varispeed & Flange

“Misunderstood” opened the door for so much creativity. I haven’t really kept up with the band since then, but it’s probably the most experimental song they might have ever done – between that and “Disappear.” “Misunderstood” has a lot going on. The reverse guitar solo – I don’t know where John got the idea. It’s similar to something George Harrison did decades before, but I’m not positive where Petrucci got the idea from. The way this worked was he played a guitar solo he wanted to sound reversed, but he wanted the melody to be written and played normally. We had two tape machines synced up for this. He recorded the solo normally. When we did guitar solos, we were doing them on the slave reel, the second reel. You don’t want to punch in on synced tape machines – it’s very problematic. So, I’m pretty sure we made a [stereo] submix of the rhythm tracks, printed that in sync onto the second machine, then turned off sync, used the second machine to punch in the guitar solos with the submix as reference, re-synced them and then didn’t need the submix anymore because now the guitar solos on the second machine were in time with the real rhythm tracks on the main machine. Starting with that, Petrucci wrote the solo, performed it the way he wanted melodically. Then we physically flipped the tape over on that second machine – you literally remove the reel, and when you play it back, track one is now track 24. Everything gets flipped and it’s backwards. So he relearned how to play the solo by listening to it backwards – he had to learn the melody backwards on his guitar. I think we did it section by section or line by line because it’s really challenging to do. He learned how to play it backwards, recorded it that way now on to a separate track – recorded the backwards solo forwards – then flipped the tape back to normal. Now you’re hearing the same melody that he originally recorded forwards, but with the sound of backwards tape. That was mind-blowing. I wouldn’t have known how to do that [but] Doug did. I don’t know if he’d done it before or figured it out on the spot, but I was blown away.

On that same song, on the drums underneath the guitar solo, this was really cool. This was Mike Portnoy’s idea. When they’re writing songs, Jordan Rudess maps out the tempo changes in a MIDI sequencer in Digital Performer that’s synced with the multitrack machine via time code. We transferred the click track onto tape so all the tempo changes are right where they wanted them. Also that way he could mess around on the MIDI sequencer and everything he does will still be in time with the main tracks. So the click is on tape. This is important because you need it for the reference. What we did was Mike played the drums the way he normally did and just for this one section, the guitar solo section, and later on in the outro he did this too. What you do is on the varispeed of the Studer machine, you speed it up. You have to figure out what works because the more you speed it up, the more dramatic the effect is going to be and it can be too dramatic and it can sound like the drums are falling apart. We didn’t want to quite take it that far, but you speed up the tape machine enough and Mike had to then play the part faster. That’s why the click track reference is key. So he plays the drum part faster. Then when he’s finished with the drum part, you return the tape to normal speed and now the drums are detuned and have a lag-y vibe to them. Just listen to the drums underneath the guitar solo in ‘Misunderstood’ and again in the outro. Really, really killer stuff.

We did a similar thing on ‘Disappear’, but this was not the full drum kit. It’s just when the big stereo drums come in, there’s a big cymbal wash that goes along with them. So Mike played the cymbals normally when he recorded the part. Then we went back and overdubbed more cymbals. I don’t remember if they were the same cymbals, probably different because he had like 25 of them on his kit. But the same thing: we sped up the tape. He hit just the cymbals, I think on the downbeat of each repeating segment of that part of the song. Then when you play them back at normal speed, the cymbals are detuned and have this beautiful wash to them. They sound massive, incredible. Especially on that song, they just fit so perfectly. Kudos to Portnoy for having that idea and Doug knowing how to achieve it.

Another thing on ‘Misunderstood’. It’s brief, but before the drums kick in properly, there’s this little section where Mike overdubbed his octobans and hi-hat. I think he was using his Max Stax cymbals, which were named after his son. He’s doing little fills between the octobans and the hats. What Doug did and I stood by and learned was manual tape flange – this is where the name flanger comes from. You need two machines synced up. You record them on the first machine, then transfer an exact copy in sync onto the second machine. Then you play them back at the same time. On the second machine, you lag, holding your hand on the tape flange as it’s going. On synced machines, you can’t do this too much or it will drop sync and it becomes a pain. But if you do it just enough, you get a nice natural flange effect. You have to record the output – the mix of both sounds together onto its own track of the first machine, of the non-manipulated machine. So you’ve got octobans and hi-hat on the first machine, a copy on the second machine, slowly dragging your hand on the second machine to induce the flange effect, record the output onto a spare track of the first machine. While Doug was manually doing the tape, I was doing the console blend and actually recording it using the tape remote.

There was one other effect on ‘Disappear’, where it was an all-hands-on-deck thing: Petrucci doing a feedback thing with a Boss delay pedal. He was holding a note with an EBow, manipulating the feedback on the pedal. Doug was punching it in and out of tape, and I was doing something with the faders, killing one and bringing up another. In the making-of video, Portnoy’s camcorder footage, there is a second of that. It made me crack up when I saw it because everybody had to learn their part – we probably rehearsed it.

DP/2 For Vocal Effects

Vocal effects. Doug was a big fan of the Ensoniq DP2. It was a little two-engine processor from the 90s.This was a real character digital piece. Absolutely not transparent. They were ahead of the game in simulating guitar amps. It had an instrument input in addition to line level, did guitar amp distortions and speaker simulators, really cool rotating speaker effects, and was great for lo-fi telephone effects. A lot of the vocals on the album that you hear lo-fi stuff on, we recorded that way through the DP2s. The band really didn’t want to leave stuff up to chance in the mix. They wanted to take care of all that stuff as best they could during the tracking.

Mono Drums On One Side Only

On ‘Disappear’, I just want to give them kudos for having the balls to put the drums in mono on one side only. Might not seem like a big deal these days. You’ll say, “Oh, Radiohead did that 20 years ago.” Yeah, Dream Theater did it before Radiohead by a few years. I remember Mike talking about how the drums would initially come in just on the right in mono. The keyboard was playing piano on the left, something keeping rhythm on the left. But then later on when the when the full stereo drums kick in with those overdub cymbals that I mentioned – huge – so cool. It’s a throwback to the early days of stereo when everything was recorded in mono still. So mixing in stereo was a new weird thing. That’s why I listen to some of those the stereo mixes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones from that era. And it’s like the bass is on one side, the drums are on the other. The concept of putting things down the middle really wasn’t there yet. Stereo was a fad, almost like 5.1 in a lot of ways, but of course became the norm fairly quickly.

Frantic Finish

One last thing about the title track, the big 40-minute banger at the end – that was written last and recorded after the band took about a month off in the middle. Petrucci did the G3 tour; Portnoy played with him on that tour. So the band comes back. We had to re-set up everything the way it was essentially to get the same sounds back for the drums and guitar and everything. Most of that 40-minute song was tracked the same as the rest, track to tape. The exception being at the end, they were in crunch time because they had already booked mix time with Kevin Shirley for early September, so we were frantically finishing stuff at BearTracks while they were starting to mix in the city.

At this point, having worked with Doug and gained his trust and learned so much from him really came in handy because he was doing vocals with James at his studio, Little Bear and I was back at BearTracks transferring keyboards and finishing up bass with Jordan and John while Petrucci and Portnoy were going back and forth, but mixing was obviously the priority, making sure that those first five songs were mixed the way they were happy with. I think that was the only bass track on the album to be recorded straight into Pro Tools, but I was using Doug’s sounds, running that in Pro Tools with John Myung and transferring all the orchestrated parts. I think the main reason we were doing that straight into Pro Tools was because of how many tracks it took up. We probably would have needed a third reel of tape to fit them all because he got pretty creative with his orchestration on that stuff. So all that was transferred into Pro Tools along with the analog tracks while Doug was finishing up vocals on his PARIS system in his studio.

The diehards know this story already, I’m sure: the song ‘The Great Debate’ was originally called ‘Conflict At Ground Zero’. They were literally mixing it when 9/11 happened. If you listen to the chorus, the line is still in there, “Conflict at ground zero”. They could not call it that at that particular time, so it was changed to ‘The Great Debate’. I think it might have been even after it was mixed that they changed the title. Crazy stuff.

Focusrite Studio Console Sound

Earlier we talked about the sound of the Focusrite on Portnoy’s kick drums. I want to speak in generalities because obviously the men behind the board makes all the difference in the world. The sound of the Focusrite console: pillowy low-end, big low-end, forward low-end. No matter how much you boost the top, the low end always felt a little closer to you on those boards, but they had tremendous clarity and warmth at the same time. The top was like silky top. I think Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence might be the best representation of what tracking on a Focusrite studio console sounds like. I say that because it was mixed by Kevin Shirley on the SSL 9000J, which is an incredibly transparent console, way more transparent than the Focusrite. The Focusrite was clean but warm. The SSL [is] totally different.

If you look at other albums engineered by Doug – he did Images And Words – that was tracked and mixed at BearTracks, but that was back when BearTracks had an SSL 4000, before the Focusrite. The next one that he worked on would be ‘Change Of Seasons’, probably my favorite personally. That was tracked and mixed on the Focusrite. I believe it was the only one by that band tracked and mixed entirely on the Focusrite. And I think that sounds absolutely huge – maybe too huge – but I think the low end is just massive on ‘A Change Of Seasons’.

The next one would be Metropolis Part 2: Scenes From A Memory, tracked by Doug on the Focusrite. A lot of the same drums, same room, same microphones. That was mixed by Kevin Shirley at Avatar Studios on a 4000E. In my opinion, you can hear the sound of the 4000E. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s a little crunchy, so noticeable when you compare them. Then next thing would be Six Degrees like I said was mixed on a 9000J. Then the next album Train Of Thought, which Doug engineered, recorded in Long Island. They tracked the drums at Cove City on an SSL. I remember Doug using his Neve 1093s, which he only had four of. I was there the first day because the band bought a Pro Tools HD rig for that album, and Doug didn’t have time to set it up himself. I spent a day putting it together along with a new computer for them and I delivered it to them out at Cove City Studios on their first day of tracking. Doug was using the SSL 4000 mic preamps and his Neves probably for kick and snare. Then they cut guitars, and probably bass and keys as well, at Pie Studios in Long Island. It was mixed by Kevin Shirley, I would assume at the 9000J at the Hit Factory because Kevin set up shop there for a few years.

I think it’s a great example of what Portnoy’s drums in particular sound like going through something other than the Focusrite. So that’s your comparison. Study the way his drums in particular sound on that album, which to me is more of a modern metal sound, whereas there’s a unique sound to the Focusrites. It’s pillowy, it’s not very aggressive. It doesn’t have that aggressive attack, but again, in a band with so much going on, I thought that worked really well on those albums.