Bob Breen: Okay, I'll confess first off that I know Stacey pretty well. Besides being OIART classmates in 1995/96 we also worked together at Ocean Studios for about three years and roomed together longer than that. Stacey has been the Head Technician at Chalice Studios in Hollywood, California for the past three years.

He has also started his own cable company, RED (Rapid Electron Deployment) Cables. Prior to that he was head technician at Ocean Studios Burbank after a relatively quick promotion from Assistant Technician. Before that he was an Audio Intern (teaching assistant) with me at OIART. Stacey was more than obliging in answering some very pointed and detailed questions for us.

Bob Breen: Tell us a little bit about Chalice Studios.

Stacey Dodds: Chalice was primarily designed to cater to the upper echelon of studio clientele. No expense was spared. From the state of the art control rooms, to the automated towel dispensers in the restrooms, everything here was designed from the ground up to be like a six star resort. There are three studios. Studio A is the largest, with a 96 input SSL J9000, 64 track Pro Tools HD system & more outboard gear than you could possibly imagine. Studio B has the newest Neve console, an 84 input 88R. It’s an amazing sounding console and has been very, very popular for us. Studio B also has a 64 track Pro Tools HD System & plenty of outboard gear. Studio C is a small production/writing room with a 128 input Sony Oxford OXF-R3 digital console and 72 track Pro Tools HD system. The writing room has been leased on a long term contract for the last year and a half.

It's kind of the new studio on the block isn't it? You've done really well with lots of high profile clients already. Can you tell us who some of them are?
Well, our primary client has been Walter Afanasieff, most known for producing Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Josh Groban, Santana, Savage Garden, Kenny G & Michael Bolton. Name just about any major pop artist from the 90's, and Walter was most likely involved with them, either writing a song for them, or producing for them. He is our resident client in Studio C, but just recently he has also leased Studio A to help offset his work load. He is presently working with Clay Aiken, Jessica Simpson, Eric Benet (Hally Berry's ex-husband) & the Backstreet Boys. Other clients of ours have included the Foo Fighters & Dave Grohl's side project band - Probot. We have also entertained Blink 182, AFI, Jimmy Eat World, Macy Gray, Luis Miguel, Enrique Iglesias, Gwen Stefani, Tom Jones, Wyclef Jean and a plethora of new up and coming bands.

Sounds like many of the major pop artists of this decade too. So how's it going? I hear you have Green Day coming in for a massive mix date. Did they have any special requirements?
The engineer, Doug McKean, is mixing down to a second Pro Tools rig. It’s the most unusual, yet creative way I have seen anyone mix before. He is using 24 inputs at 192 kHz, and is mixing individual stems. Once the stems are in Pro Tools, he will then mix the stems down to two tracks and print to the half inch machine. The reason he is doing this is so that it is easier for him to print different versions of his final mixes. Once the individual stem mixes are recorded in Pro Tools, he can then very easily change things to do the "vocal up", "guitar up" mixes, without changing settings on the console. This will also enable him to come back to re-mix for 5.1, without changing the tonal quality. This is also the biggest mix session we have had in here to date. We are running 80 tracks at 96 kHz from the playback system, but on a couple of songs, there are up to 96 tracks going. In addition to that, he owns quite a lot of outboard gear, so combining his equipment with ours makes the room quite impressive to look at! It’s like a kid in a candy store for any gear-head out there! Of course, having that much equipment in the room means that we had to use nearly every cable harness & mic cable we could find!

Egads. Well, let's go back to the beginning. How did you hear about OIART and what brought you here?
I had a really good friend who went to OIART in the 93-94 year, and he told me about it one day. I had a couple of friends who worked at studios in Toronto, and I was so fascinated with the equipment. I used to do a lot of live sound for friends, but I always wanted to learn more. I had originally planned to go to University to get my Physics degree, and then go to OIART, but after the first year of Physics, I realized that my heart was more into the recording side of things, so I went directly to OIART.

The Audio Intern job (at OIART, three graduates are hired each year as teaching assistants for the next school year) is coveted by a lot of students. I thought it was the coolest job I'd ever had. What do you think you did in school that made you stand out and be a good candidate? Besides being a suck up of course.
Once I realized what I wanted to do with my life, it was all I could focus on. I lived at the school as much as possible. I made sure that I gave 110% to my studies and took advantage of any extra lab time that came up and made sure that I did something with that lab. Whether it was recording something of my own, or recording my old High School Jazz Band, I always made sure I came to a lab prepared to work on something. To me, that was the best way to learn. I think that the teachers at OIART recognized that, and truly appreciated my enthusiasm. They supported me, and helped me through a lot of different situations - whether it was a time code confusion, or a suggestion on what microphone to use on a trumpet. I think that a small bond formed between myself and the staff there, and that is what helped me stand out.

Okay, so you were a suck up (just kidding)! Many students come to OIART with a very clear career goal in mind, others figure it out as they're exposed to various aspects of the audio industry. Did your goals change while you were here?
Absolutely! I had my heart set on being a recording engineer. That was all I wanted to do right through the time that I worked there as an Audio Intern. When I was younger, I was always conflicted between electronics & music. During my one year tenure as an Audio Intern, Chris Babin made me realize that there was a way for me to combine my love of music/recording with my electronics background. It was then, after he pointed out an Assistant Technician Wanted ad in a magazine, when I realized what I really wanted to do.

OIART is a recording technology school, but we don't specifically train students to be technicians who fix things. What did you learn at OIART that helped you make it as a tech?
Learning signal flow was the most eye opening experience for me. I always understood schematics, and could read them fine, but the signal flow diagrams really opened my mind up to see what was really going on in a console, or other electronic device. That helped me immensely when I started my first job as an assistant tech. I may not have known the console at the studio very well, but I learned it fast. I would take home the signal flow charts & console manual at night and study it. I had to. I was literally thrown into the deep end when the chief tech quit. I had to learn it all, or move on to another career - which was not an option at the time!

While OIART does not focus on "being a tech", they did go over a lot of important studio maintenance subjects which I still employ today. Even from the simplest task, like filling out a maintenance report correctly has stuck with me to this day.

I know the studio technicians in LA have a bit of a "secret society", and it seemed to me you were welcomed with open arms right away. You certainly didn't have the most experience and couldn't just fix everything right off the bat, yet now you're a resource to many of these guys, as they are still to you. You also got more than one job offer when you were at Ocean because other studios were clearly impressed with you. How do you think you were able to pull that off so well?
I think that we are a dying breed. There are not very many studio technicians left in LA, so we are a very tight knit group. We all know each other, and rely on each other. We can't know everything, but as a group, we are unstoppable. There isn't anything that can't be fixed in this town with the group of us working together. We have all been through the trenches, and support each other. I think I was welcomed into the group because people appreciated my thirst for knowledge. I remember when I first started working at Ocean. There was so much that I didn't know. I would always call a couple of guys in town to pick their brains. Instead of being annoyed with me, they really stopped and took time out of their busy day to help me with even the most mundane problems. Once I started to learn & grow, they even started to call me for help. The other thing that helps is that I have this unusual ability to keep my cool under tense situations. That is a very valuable asset, and people recognize that. That, more than anything, has helped me build a reputation amongst the other studios.

I used to love calling you into the studio to fix something I knew you had no clue how to fix and watching your reaction. You’d come off like you were seriously diagnosing the problem and weighing all the possible options in your mind, but I knew you were really just trying to remember another tech’s phone number! Either way, you pulled it off convincingly, and the problem always got fixed.

So how did you get your first job at Ocean?
Well, as I stated earlier, Chris B (Christoph Hodgins-Babin) was reading through a vintage gear magazine called Pro Audio Marketplace. Inside, there was a full page ad for Ocean Studios. A beautiful shot of the tracking room that looked like a giant airplane hangar. There was a listing of the gear, and a quote from Stan Katayama about how amazing the tracking room sounded. Buried at the bottom, in small print, it read "Looking for an Assistant Technician". Chris B showed me the ad, and said that I should apply for the job. I wrote out a new resume on a Friday afternoon (my resume was geared towards studios hiring engineers, instead of techs) and send it via fax that night. On Monday evening I got a phone call from California from the owner of the studio. He asked me some questions and we chatted for over an hour. I honestly don't know what I said to him that night, but he asked me to fly out to LA for a week to do an interview and just hang out to see if I would like to work there. I did, and the rest is history! Some years later, the owner of the studio told me before I was hired that a good friend of his said: "If you wanted to find good help in LA, hire someone from outside of the city." I guess Canada was far enough!

Sometimes opportunities come when we least expect them. The key is to be prepared to move up when you get your shot. What happened that you got promoted to head tech so quickly there?
Well, I had been working at Ocean for only a few short months. We had just converted the main room to a THX certified mix room and had been mixing some small movies when the chief tech decided that he wasn't into post. He was strictly a "rock n roll" kinda guy. So he quit, and left me on my own. The owner couldn't find a replacement for him right away, so I was kind of promoted. It was sink or swim at that point! Fortunately, I had been practically living at the studio, trying to learn as much about the gear and console as I could. I certainly made some mistakes, but I learned from them and moved very rapidly up the ladder. It was a classic example of being ready for a "golden opportunity"!

It was pretty lean at first huh? Tell the people how we survived as newcomers to LA, not knowing anyone or having much money for anything.
Well, not having much money to survive on certainly meant a pretty sparse social calendar. When you are in that situation, I found it was best to just totally immerse yourself into the job. Stay lots of extra hours learning what you can. If there was down time, we would hook up some cool microphone to try out, or just play with some piece of outboard gear that we hadn't used before. There was no end of things that you could do when there was down time. When the studio was busy, then we were both pretty busy - you in the control room, and me dealing with any technical problems. Over time, we developed friendships outside of the studio and we slowly emerged from the depths!

Somehow without killing each other! I always appreciated how we could blow off steam on each other and never hold a grudge.

So we always tell the classes here "look, your classmates ARE your network in the industry". I'm not sure if anyone actually believes it. I got my start in Los Angeles because you got me the assistant job at Ocean, which eventually turned into the Studio Manager job. I was your classmate, but I'd never met you before OIART.

Without saying anything nice about me, tell the students and any doubters what you learn about your classmates over the school year that makes you either confident or completely unwilling to hook them up with a job if you happen to get one first yourself.
I think that the first thing I noticed about some of my classmates was the very same enthusiasm about gear and recording that I had. We all helped each other out when we had labs, and definitely in our private lab time. I remember everyone who played instruments would just connect, and collaborate with each other. Even some of the guys who couldn't play any instruments were still a big help. It was a great bonding and learning experience, and I really learned a lot about some of my classmates. Through that, I realized that there was a select few that I would ever call on to hook them up with a job. You could just tell how helpful someone would be at work by how helpful they were in the labs.

So what were some of the challenges you faced moving over to Chalice?
Well, it is quite a different animal from Ocean. The facility is three rooms, so you have three times the amount of things that can go wrong. From the equipment to the air conditioning, the potential for trouble is much greater. Coming on board with Chalice when I did was a very strange experience. Studio A was being wired entirely by a crew. They took care of everything from building the cable harnesses to installing it and testing it. Studio B was laid out by an independent technician, but it was designed for a Neve VR. When we decided to buy the 88R, I had to change the layouts and use what I could and then build the rest. The benefit to Studio B was that it was laid out how I wanted it. Studio A was outside of my control and it was very frustrating for me at times. People do things differently, and that can be hard on you when you want something one way, but they are insistent that their way is better.

The other thing was dealing with the level of service we have to provide. As I said earlier, it’s like a six star resort. You have to be very conscious of that every single day here. We are all about service and we all pitch in - the interns, runners, tech staff and assistants. Not one of us is above cleaning the toilet, or taking out the trash, if we need to.

What are the hours like for you?
Well, most days it’s pretty much 9 - 7ish. Of course, I am always on call, and it’s not unheard of for me to get a call at 2:00am to fix something.

What's a typical day in your world look like?
There really isn't any typical day for me. Every day something new comes up that I need to deal with. There are certainly many days where not much of anything happens, so I will work on a piece of equipment that needs some attention, or deal with some other management issues from helping with invoicing or dealing with the tape stock inventory. Other days, it’s a mad house. Multiple sessions in with major set-ups and alignments that I need to deal with ASAP. Those are the most enjoyable and rewarding days. You really feel like you have accomplished something when days like that go off without a hitch. I have also been enjoying building my own projects, whether a new compressor or high end instrument cable. Lately I have been trying to build the "Best" sounding instrument cable. I know it seems ridiculous, but different cables sound different. There are some really horrible sounding guitar cables out in the market selling for way too much money. I want to try and help people realize that even the most basic thing like a guitar cable can make a difference to your recording.

So what's the most enjoyable aspect of your work as a tech?
I really enjoy the hands on aspect of being a tech. Getting deep into the equipment and nursing it back to health. There is always the design element as well. As I stated above, I really enjoy building gear and cables.

Many OIART grads really want to keep creating music even if that isn't their primary gig that earns them money. You have a home studio and also like to make music yourself. Tell us about it.
Just because I am a tech doesn't mean that I don't like to engineer. I have always enjoyed playing keyboards and writing my own songs. That is where my home studio comes in. It’s an outlet for the other creative side. I have a Digi 002 and a Mac and a few keyboard modules. I even just put a small PC system together just to have more processing power for my software synths. I love synths and crazy new sounds, and at home I can create just about anything I want. It’s amazing what you can do at home nowadays. The small project studio business is absolutely booming thanks to Pro Tools & Software Synths. The home studio also gives me a place to test out a piece of gear and really get into it without feeling like I need to cut my time short because a client is coming in. I can leave something set up for days at a time without having to worry about documenting my mixes or setups.

So you've also started a cabling company too, what prompted that?
Well, I was really a skeptic about how much of a difference you could hear in some of the really high end instrument cables. Then a producer comes in one day with a $150.00 guitar cable and says it’s the best thing he's ever heard. Well, I had to try it, and sure enough, it sounded amazing. So I was hooked. I had to build a better one. I have spent six months, and built some pretty wacky cables, but I think I have finally found the best match of connector, solder, wire and treatment to make a better sounding cable.

How do you go about figuring out what the "best" sounding cable you can make is?
You LISTEN to everything you can get your hands on. I bought pieces of wire from the most unlikely of places. I have tried all sorts of connectors. Everything makes a difference to the sound. You have to do blind A/B/X tests, where the listening panel is blind folded, and you play the same thing three different times. The first time is 'A', the second time is with a different cable and is 'B' and the third time, 'X', is either 'A' or 'B'. Once they pick what 'X' is, then I ask which one they preferred and why. The goal of this test is to determine two things. One - can the listening panel actually tell a difference between the two cables? If over 70% of the panel can guess 'X' then that proves that a sonic difference can be heard between the two cables. Two - which cable is the clear winner sonically? It’s amazing how much of difference you can hear with different wires. It’s not a "Golden Ears" experience either. Even people who do not have trained ears can hear a difference.

This was a method you picked up at Ocean when you were involved in restoring and installing a vintage NEVE console, wasn't it? How did that experience change and/or help your career?
It changed my whole outlook on how important the wiring is in a studio. Everyone falls prey to the marketing giants like Mogami & Monster Cable, and yet they are consistently some of the worst cable ever made. I too was a believer that if you were to build a studio, you should use Mogami and buy Monster Cable Instrument Cables. Everyone knows they are the "Best", right? But after my experience at Ocean, I realized how wrong I had been, and how important it is to LISTEN to everything. You have to try out different connectors. You have to try using different types of solder. All of these things really make a difference, and my experience with wiring the NEVE taught me that.

A tech has to be pretty adept at dealing with studio crises as they occur. Usually you're called in when everything is falling apart. What was your worst day ever like?
After Ocean decided that THX mixing wasn't the direction the studio should go in, we had our first Rock N Roll session come in. Now keep in mind, that only a couple of months prior to this, I was "promoted" to head tech. So, this was my first REAL session. It was for Joe Walsh and it was going to be so cool. Russell Kunkle was going to play drums and so was Vinnie Colaiuta. Russell was going to play a vintage Ludwig set with all tube mics and tube pre-amps set-up for it. Vinnie was playing a DW kit with very high end mics and Hi-Fi sounding mic pres.

They came in on a Sunday to setup. The setup was pretty intense, but the assistant on the session really knew his stuff, so it was pretty painless. They got the drum sounds and it was amazing. You could distinctly hear the different drum sets, even though they were playing the same pattern. They called it a night, and were going to start tracking the next day.

Well, we came in the next morning, and only 6 microphones were actually working. The night before, we had some sort of brown out which took out the power supply to the Langevin Mic Pre Rack (24 channels of very old, very cool tube mic pres). It also did some very bad things to the NEVE 8108 console that Ocean used to have. A lot of the inserts were actively balanced at the patchbay, and those circuits just stopped working. Also, the bussing matrix was this really strange system, where you had a central routing panel (which looked like an old fashioned McDonald’s cash register) built into the center section of the console. You accessed the bussing by pressing a button below the channel strip you wanted to bus, and then selecting the bus outputs on the central panel. Well, this also stopped working.

I had NO idea what to do to fix the problem. I kept my cool, but I was freaking out inside. I called a couple of techs that I knew, but I knew there was no way we could fix it quick enough. And sure enough, all of a sudden a six week booking was instantly condensed to two days. They pulled out that afternoon. They realized that the damage was so far gone that there was no way to get the session up and running in a timely manner. I was crushed. My boss called me into his office, and I thought for sure that this was my last day at Ocean. He said, "This is something that happens that I could never make you believe unless you lived through it yourself. Don't beat yourself up over it, just don't let it happen again". I learned a lot about that console in the coming weeks, and it didn't happen again.

I always thought you dealt with those situations particularly well. Do you have advice for OIART grads that may not be technicians, but will certainly face a rough day where nothing seems to want to work properly?
You have to keep your cool. If you are dealing with a client who is a real pain (and you will), politely leave the room and blow your top somewhere discrete. Never show the client that you are not on top of your game. If you do that, the session will ultimately fall down around you. You must always show that you are confident in yourself and the room you are working in. The clients feel that, and it puts them at ease, even when things are not going well.

Some of the problems you deal with are real, others are phantoms in the gear imagined by the client. They become a huge problem because they're freaked out about it, yet there's nothing concrete there for you to fix. Can you give an example of that? What the heck do you do when those problems come up?
This is where you have to be an amazing politician. You have to try and see the situation from the client’s perspective. If they claim something isn't working properly, and you know it is, test it anyways. Make them feel as though their problems are important to you, no matter what they may be. I remember a client at Ocean who was complaining that there wasn't any reverb coming out of the left side of his headphones. I was called down into the room to check it, and everything seemed fine. I had the singer put on his headphones, and while he was singing, I panned the right channel of the reverb send to his headphones to the left. Then I panned the left channel to the right. All of a sudden, he grinned and said that he now heard reverb in both sides of his phones. I didn't change a thing. I just made the left channel louder for him to latch onto it, and then I panned the other side back to the right.

You also oversee all the runners and assistants at Chalice. What's the key to doing one of those jobs well?
Having common sense is the most important thing ever. I know that sounds weird, because you can't teach someone to have common sense. Some people have it, some don't, but it is truly one of the most important things. Aside from that, being punctual is very high up on the list. If someone tells you to be at work at 9:00am, come in 5-10 minutes before that. So many runners and assistants I have seen show up 5 minutes late and do not think it’s a big deal. It’s really frustrating.

Also, learn as much as you can. If you are a runner, try and become close friends with the assistants. They are the ones who will be able to show you the most about a room. You never know when an assistant might call in sick, and if you have shown that you know the rooms well, you might be facing an instant promotion. Each of my runners is shown as much as possible about the rooms. They help setup and tear down sessions as this is one of the best ways to learn the patch bays and mic panels. All of the runners help with recall, this enables them to get onto a console in a real world situation and helps them learn where all of the knobs are. If they have studied the signal flow of the console, then helping with a recall will help them connect the signal flow diagram to the physical pot or switch.

As for the interns, while it may seem mundane and useless to clean toilets and take out the trash, you have to understand that management is watching your every move. If you notice a speck of dust in the corner of the room and clean it up, then, most likely, you pay attention to details. If you pay attention to details, you are likely someone who will be very detailed when you work in a control room. How well you take a food order will show how well you will document gear during a session. It may seem trivial at the time, but it’s the best way for the management to see how someone will perform once they start working in a room.

Have any advice for someone taking the OIART course who wants to excel in the studio world?
Learn as much as you can and never be afraid to ask questions. No one will think you are stupid if you ask a simple question. We will think you are stupid if you pretend like you know what’s going on, and then we find out you don't!

Lastly, how has eBay changed your life?
eBay is the gear lover’s paradise!!! I have bought and sold so many different keyboards and pieces of outboard gear that would never have been attainable shopping at pawn shops and music stores. I love it!!!

Thanks Stacey! That was amazing information. Continued success!