Home Grown Gavin Hammond Sean Beavan is one of the busiest mixers/producers in the dark world of rock. As a result, he rarely gets to hear himself think. Which is why he started 8mm with his wife, Juliette. And using a deceptively simple but powerful recording setup, they’ve made a strangely lovely album. Here’s how… t’s winter and the nights are drawing in. Hell, it might even rain. friend was always the bass player, I finally quit and bought a bass Time to stock up on movies and popcorn – or whatever else myself and loved it. Then I got a little too good at it, forgot what Igets you through the night – and leave the beach-life behind. it was that I liked about music, and finally quit the bass just to And what better way to celebrate the season than with some remember. I can now balance musicality with writing an honest suitably dark and pensive music. and memorable song. Doona dwellers of the world unite and say hello to Hollywood GH: How did you get into mixing? indie outfit 8mm – a husband and wife team who combine the SB: I mixed live sound for a living in Cleveland back when I met spookiness of David Lynch with the thoughtfulness of Portishead Trent [Reznor] and he and I played in rival bands and worked in and the sonic density of an industrial metal act on E. the same studio. He took me on the road with Nine Inch Nails Sean Beavan kicked off the 8mm project with his wife Juliette and I mixed front of house for him from 1989 to 1996. after years of mixing and/or producing the likes of Unwritten Then I mixed Manson’s Antichrist Superstar and went on Law, NIN, Marilyn Manson, No Doubt, Slayer, Guns N’ Roses, the road to mix front of house for that tour. I got off the road System Of A Down, Rancid, Depeche Mode, Pantera, and gawd permanently in 1997. knows who else. It doesn’t take long chatting with Sean to realise GH: So where is your studio now and what equipment are you he: a) knows what he hell he is talking about and b) has a pretty using? drool-worthy home studio. SB: We have a house with a studio in the backyard in Laurel 8mm is currently gigging around LA, London and Chile, and Canyon in the Hollywood hills. It’s an old hippy neighbourhood has licensed its song Nobody Does It Better from their debut EP (the Doors, Joni Mitchell, and Crosby, Stills and Nash used to Opener to the soundtrack for Mr & Mrs Smith, starring Brad Pitt live there) where all the neighbours meet every morning at Lily’s and Angelina Jolie. They’re also about to start work on a full- Coffee Shop in the Canyon country store (‘the place where the length album. creatures meet’). It’s lovely really. I have a ProTools Mix Plus system (24 ins and outs) and an old 8mm – Lock ‘n’ Load Neve 20-channel board with 1073 mic pre EQs. I use ProTools Gavin Hammond: How did you get started in audio? because it’s how I think now. I use it mostly as a tape machine Sean Beavan: I’d been singing in bands for years. My best for everything but drums. I record into it and mix with it. Everything goes in through the Neves or my Chandler mic pres or my Evil Twin tube DI. I mix the outputs of ProTools through the Neve console and my Alan Smart C1 bus compressor. I like that analogue/digital combination. ProTools is great for its ease of editing and the options it affords me as a writer – plus at 24-bit/48k it sounds great. Or great enough… I always monitor through ProTools so I know it will sound exactly the same when I play it back. I monitor through Yamaha NS-10s with a subwoofer, and to be honest its just because I always have. The only outboard gear I have is an Eventide H3000 and a Lexicon Primetime delay. I use mostly foot pedals and an Access Virus for the external filters. The Neve is my favourite preamp. I just love the upper harmonic distortion. It just sounds exciting to me. I seem to use the same cheap toys over again. I use an old Line6 POD for a lot of guitars. Not necessarily AT|72 cause it sounds great, but because it doesn’t. It lets me hear a whole lot of choices right away, and can make me go for things I never would have thought of. Say I’ve written a really pretty arpeggiated guitar pattern and my normal choice would be to plug my Gretsch into my [Fender] blackface Deluxe Reverb and get a gorgeous guitar sound. So I grab my Tele and plug in the Pod and play the part down just to remember it and it’s all distorted with tremolo, but it sounds awesome and I throw some reverb on it and now I can’t hear it any other way. Serendipity is a powerful tool. GH: How did the 8mm project begin and what were you trying to do musically – given that it’s a lot less heavy than the stuff you usually do? SB: Maybe the impetus was 9/11! The industry slowed down a bit and I started thinking about what was important. I began to feel like I needed to do something musically artistic and sonically unique, and flex my chops as an individual engineer and mixer. I imagined that it would involve more music for television and film. It seemed like all the cool stuff was being done for those mediums and all the ‘same old same old’ was being done by the music industry. GH: Had you and your wife Juliette been working together long prior to 8mm? SB: Not at all! I was actually working with a Chicago- based band called Kill Hannah, and during the final days of recording the album we found ourselves in need of a female vocal to finish off a couple of songs. I was having no luck finding anyone available when in walked my wife Juliette to drop off a sweater for me. I had an idea. I walked her over to the microphone and described and sang the part I wanted her to sing. I’d never heard her sing before, she’d never even expressed an interest, which was probably one of the reasons I’d married her, to be honest. Anyway, when she started singing, Critter (my engineer) and I couldn’t believe how great she sounded on mic. She did a fantastic job and when we played it back for the band and John Rubeli (their A&R man) everyone loved it. They actually had her sing on a few more things. I immediately went home and wrote and recorded Never Enough and gave her a CD of it so she could come up with lyrics and melody. She came back with a song that made me cry. We’ve been writing and recording ever since. About a year or so. GH: So now that you’re writing more, how do you go about getting inspiration for an 8mm track? SB: First off, Juliette and I talked about the kind of record we wanted to do, and decided that it should be a record recognised by the feel and ambience that it creates so that it immediately takes you to an emotional place as soon as you hear it. We both loved David Lynch soundtracks and decided our music should make you feel the way his movies make you feel. Like you’re seeing something you shouldn’t be seeing, but you can’t look away. I also wanted to do music that grooved like Portishead’s Dummy but used more natural instruments (not sampled) and sounded instrumentally more like it was written by Antonio Carlos Jobim than an electronica producer. Songs that aren’t just notes fulfilling a role in space, but lyrics and melodies that draw you in and can rip your heart out. GH: Sounds compelling! How do you make a start on such a track? SB: For drum grooves I usually start with a guitar track with a melody idea and I play it to a click. Then I play the drums until I find something that moves me and feels like a motif: a pattern that’s instantly recognisable. It involves a lot of playing, recording and tweaking of the sounds. Sometimes I just use one mic. My favorite is a Royer 121 positioned near the knee of the kick foot. The front side of the mic addresses the top third of the side of the snare drum and the back side of the mic is facing the kick but up a little higher than it. By rotating the mic I can pick up more snare or kick. I compress the hell out of it with a Chandler Limited 2, which is similar to a Neve 2254 with more attack and release variables. I sometimes use a fairly fast attack and a fairly quick release but I just move it around until it sounds right. Sometimes I think it’s going to sound best with a slow attack of say 10ms and a release of 300ms but it actually ends up sounding best with a super fast attack and a 20ms release. Of course, you have to listen to this compressed signal in the headphones so you hit the cymbals and hat at the appropriate volume, or else the track will be all cymbals.