Rataj-Berard
Tessa Echeverria and Mark Haines (from left, control booth) record Andy Moore and Louka Patenaude at the Williamson Magnetic Recording studio.
A bakery is as good a place as any to record a song, and the customized, lower floor of Nature’s Bakery on Willy Street happens to be the best place in town to cut a record. An analog record that is.
Williamson Magnetic Recording Company opened its doors last November. It’s the only Madison studio cooking up analog recordings and mixes. Its back-to-the future methods are attracting a growing number of musicians drawn to a place where songs are treated as music, not information.
Jazz guitarist Louka Patenaude and I arrived there to work one frozen night last week. Stepping out of the cold and moving down into the studio was like entering the burnished hold of an antique ship. A spray of rugs arranged themselves like big playing cards across the dark hardwood floor. Lamplight set the old room aglow. Two empty chairs waited in the center of the space surrounded by a grove of stands with antique mics that looked like they could have been on loan from a museum. I would have paid an hourly rate just to sit there and read a book.
Co-owners Mark Haines and Tessa Echeverria got to know one another working side-by-side upstairs in the bakery. In the studio space they move together like surgeons in an operating room: handing one another a mic, dressing long cords, communicating telepathically, quietly focused on the next moment of the music’s need. A veteran engineer, including a long stint at Smart Studios, Haines has deep chops that are in demand beyond these parts. On the evening of our session he had just returned from Chicago, where he oversaw location recording for ’30s jazz revivalists the Fat Babies.
It seemed serendipitous that the song we were there to record was our arrangement of the Beatles’ “Mother Nature’s Son.” This recording is a prelude to the analog production of some of Louka’s original music.
Musicians like Louka get philosophical when it comes to the difference between digital and tape.
“Analog sound is like 3D compared to flat reproduction of the digital medium,” he says. “I feel like I can reach out and touch it. Real sounds traveling through the air to the microphone are rich and complex in a way that gives the listener more each time they hear it.”
Haines calls analog “emotionally convincing.” He describes a physical commitment to the format that runs parallel to the artistic one.
“I’ve always enjoyed working on a console and with tape, as opposed to using a computer. The direct physical connection to the equipment feels rewarding and immediate to my sensibilities. Looking at a computer monitor for extended periods of time is way less fun.”
Indeed, I could feel Haines’ eyes on us through the control room window as we laid down our first takes. It was reassuring. I’ll nerd-out to tell you that hearing my banjo played through a Nady RSM5 Ribbon microphone made me lose control of my saliva.
We wanted to be true to McCartney’s version of “Mother Nature” while at the same time taking liberties to emphasize the instrumental tricks we planned for the song, especially with Louka’s two-guitar parts. Some tension, of a positive sort, came from the knowledge that we invested in a single, 30-minute Ampex tape on which to record our entire three-hour session.
This keeps you on your toes and focused in ways that recording to endless, disposable, digital googlespace does not.
After a few takes, Haines and Echeverria invited us into the control room to hear what we had so far. This space was also warmly lamp-lit, accentuated by light filtering in from Willy Street through glass block windows overhead.
The twin-spooled, eight-track machine made a wonderful “whooooosssh!” when Haines punched it to life. That’s us in there!
Average age of gear at Magnetic: 31 years.
Temperature in adjacent bathroom:
About the same as outside, but Haines says “we’re working on it.”
Hardest part of analog recording:
Lifting the equipment.
First analog-recording-to-vinyl project at the studio:
Madison rock ’n’ rollers Gonzo Rongs.
