James Whitten
If you’re into Louisiana hardcore, you’re into James Whitten. Thou, Eyehategod, The Pallbearers, SLOWHOLE, BRAT—he’s engineered and mixed them all, from an album or two to nearly entire multi-decade catalogs. Whitten can’t be pigeon-holed to a single genre, however. He’s worked on funk, dance, rock, pop, and ska albums, and some of the first artists he ever recorded in a professional studio setting were signed to Cash Money Records. A few of his other notable credits include A Wilhelm Scream, Special Interest, Suplecs, High On Fire, Streetlight Manifesto, HiGH, Rāde, BAD OPERATION, and Joystick. That resume piqued my interest enough to carry me over the Crescent City Connection to Whitten’s brand new spot for HighTower Recording Studio, which took over the equally infamous Word Of Mouth Studio’s location in Algiers. He’s settled in nicely, with five drum sets, eight basses, nine guitars, 35 amps, 70+ microphones, 80+ pedals, and more analog preamps and processing equipment than you could play through in a year. We talked about the value of being a considerate neighbor, touring on the road for a decade, and how bands used to have budgets.
How many years was HighTower operating out of your last location, at Fountainbleau?
It would have been nine years last September in the real spot, maybe 13 years total. I was in a smaller room, like a normal practice room for a couple years, recording bands. I was the loudest person in the building, so I had the least amount of problems in that space. But even then, I couldn’t record an acoustic album there unless someone was willing to work early morning weekdays. The maintenance guy who took care of the building for 20-something years, he lived there, raised his daughter there until she was about 11, and moved out when Roland [Von Kurnatowski] sold the building. So my recording studio had been his apartment, more or less, which was technically a three bedroom, two full bath, 2,900 square feet and some change. I spent nine years constantly building it out.
What’s changed now that your studio has moved to Algiers?
It’s busier. As of right now, I was trying to not work in July and August—that’s not happening. I’m booked ‘til the end of the year… I do corporate audio too. I do about 10 shows a year where I travel and pretty much just manage at this point, which is nice, because I used to run a console for 10 hours a day in a room and then not want to come back and do this. It used to kill my soul.
Top: HighTower Recording at Fountainbleau (RIP)
Bottom: The new spot in Algiers
@hightowerrecording
So do you intentionally try to strike a balance then, between engineering in the studio and working on other types of projects?
It just happens. When Katrina hit, I moved to California and then I tour managed and traveled with bands for seven or eight years. I was basically touring 300 days a year. I had toured with my own bands (mainly The Ghostwood). And whenever you get out of the van in California, it’s just incredible, so I moved to Oakland with some money I had saved up from having a real job for a minute and everything kinda worked out. I was in a band with Bryan Funck of Thou, cause we all moved out there together, along with Darin Acosta, who’s an old friend of ours, and Jonathan West. We all lived in this house and within two or three months, we had started this band with Matt [Leonard], who got me into touring and said, “You want to go on Warped Tour?” So in 2006, I went as a stage guy, met this dude Ray Picard who production managed for Thirty Seconds to Mars and Rob Zombie, some giganto arena amphitheatre bands, but also managed his friends’ smaller punk band from the Northeast, A Wilhelm Scream, and I’ve now toured with them for about 14 years, probably did about 700 shows with them.
Whoa. So are they the band you’re most heavily associated with, after Thou?
Yeah, Bryan Funck and I went to high school together [at Jesuit] and all of the first stuff we recorded with Thou was in Oakland. I got to record in that apartment because we knew the other four apartments in the building and would be like, “We’re gonna be real loud on this Saturday from here to here,” and they’d be like, “That’s fine!”
Being affable to your neighbors and easy to work with has its perks!
It does. To rewind, before all of this, back in 1998, ‘99, I worked at Festival [Studios], kind of as an intern, but basically I got to do a lot of Cash Money stuff, where I engineered ‘cause the main engineer didn’t really want to deal with them, ‘cause it was fucking loud and he just didn’t want to do it all day long. So he’d go to the Starbucks a block or two away and say, “Beep me if you have any problems.” So that was the first time I worked in a real studio. There was a Studer two inch [24-track] tape machine (either an A 100 or A 827) and an MCI [JH-]636 board tape machine. Mannie Fresh, Lil Wayne—all those dudes were there but way before it was, like, them. They were already a known entity around here, though. These were the first recordings for the Universal deal, I believe. We did Turk’s Young & Thuggin’ and then some stuff that wound up being on Baller Blockin’. So, yeah, I was a doofy 18-year-old kid, and that was the first thing I did. I was an intern but I caught on quick to the tape machine. I assisted them, which, for a hip-hop session meant I’d mostly plug in a mic and sit in the back of the room while they worked.
Do you remember anything else about the gear they used?
Basically, the setup—and I remember it fondly—was, I want to say we gave Mannie Fresh, like, ten tracks. The [E-mu] SP-1200 was the beat machine and he had a Roland keyboard that was hooked up to a [E-mu] Mo’Phatt and an E-mu Proteus, or something like that. And then this is the part the other engineers didn’t like: They’d put the track up on the mains, these giant 215 Tannoys, big ass speakers, almost as loud as it could go, and then they’d loop for two hours, so the dudes could write. They’d occasionally be like, “Start that over!” But the rest was just looping, so you’re basically a steward to these dudes for hours.
What a wild first recording experience.
Before that, I recorded local bands on four tracks, eight tracks, then eventually I had a little vocal system. But that was definitely the first time being in a real studio, with what was also local stuff, but ended up being gigantic. Mack 10 was there, from West Side Connection, that was almost like his own thing, and they were up and coming. That was crazy to me. That dude was just in the room the whole time. So, yeah, that’s how I got into recording.
The part of that story that makes me the most envious is how much time the artists were allotted to be creative. Nowadays, bands usually come into the studio with exactly what they want, desperately trying not to deviate, ‘cause studio time is like gold.
It depends. Everyone’s different. It does come down to budget and timing. If you’re trying to record eight songs in two days, there’s no room to deviate from anything outside of, “Hey, let me get a couple rips of that solo.” But I think it’s hard to compare anything now to what was going on 20 years ago, because the first couple larger bands I toured with were still around in the CD era when bands made money. You got signed to a label and you made real money. There was a band I toured with and they straight-up signed their first record deal, and everyone went home with $150,000 that day and they had half a million dollars to make a record. For a Southern California band on a major label, that’s not unheard of. It was not even that unusual back then. That was kind of a mid-level contract. The biggest recording budgets I’m seeing nowadays are 30, 40 grand and that’s for well-known bands that I’ve been able to get involved with, and it’s pretty rare.
Why do we still do it?!
Oh, playing music is crazy, I think New Orleans is also kind of crazy with this. I grew up in the punk scene here and then, moving to California, worked with a bunch of bands that were very working class: A Wilhelm Scream, Streetlight Manifesto, they were all making livings (or close to it) from the band, but they all have to go nonstop. They can’t just decide to not do a summer tour. To be in a band out there, you have to commit. You have to pay for a real space. No one has a space where everyone’s chipping in $35 a month. It’s more like $150 per person, every month, to just be in the band. When you think about bands that made it from here: Thou, PEARS, BRAT—those bands all went and toured immediately and they’re always working. It’s not one EP every two years or a tour once a year. I think PEARS did like 200 shows their first year as a band and only six of them were in New Orleans. That’s why they took off. They’re also a great band. But no matter how great a band you are, if you’re just playing 12 shows a year around New Orleans, there’s only so far you’re going to go.
How different do you feel a recording should be from the live sound of a band? What’s your philosophy on layering five guitars in the studio?
I like that more than most people do. My favorite setup—and it’s not always available, based on time or how people want to do stuff—is: I like a band to record live, they’re in the room with the drums, even if there’s a click track, put down the scratch guitar, and then I like to do individual tracks, only because I get to sculpt the tones that way, or sculpt textures is more how I think of it. You know Matt Seferian? He’s from the band Pope. He’s the other half of this situation now, since we [HighTower] moved into this place. We talk about gear and I realize, with the gear, it’s more about tones to me, textures, and how things fit together. Matt looks at preamps and says, “These have a little more treble than these,” and I think, “those are snappier.” Over the years, I’ve gotten different preamps and EQs from a bunch of different places and I don’t go through a shit ton of gear. With A Wilhelm Scream, we spent 32 days recording five songs on one record. We were doing everything. We were flipping tubes and amps. It was minutiae and it almost felt crazy but it was never wrong. Because of that, I got to see what a lot of it did. No band doesn’t benefit from more time. With the last Thou record, we took a lot of the guitars and re-amped them, we took the DI and would add another texture to the chorus. That’s a lot of what Umbilical was, textured. Everything is too distorted and slightly reverbed.
The sheer volume of equipment here is really impressive.
Part of why I’ve got so much shit is because everything is set up. Once you have drums done and scratch guitars, we can start doing vocals. I have it ready for that. We can jump around. As much as I set it up like that, bands don’t usually work like that. It’s usually, “I’m doing my bass. Let me finish out my bass tracks.” Whereas I feel like you get the best performances out of the dude who does two takes and takes a rest. Vocals and drums are the ones that benefit from that the most. There’s no drummer who sounds as good on the seventh hour as he does on the first hour. That’s how we do the Big Garden, the thing I worked on last week. It’s got three guitar players so they recorded drums and then the bass all the way through, then I’ve got three cabinets in here and three cabinets in the other room and we just bring in a bunch of pedals in and every song is different. Another question you have to ask when people come in is: “That’s your amp. Is it your amp because that’s what you can afford or is it your dream amp?” and it’s wild ‘cause I have people who come in here and still want to use their whatever ‘cause it’s familiar to them.
What’s your dream amp?
It’s probably the Bogner Uberschall [Mk2 tube head] combined with a Mesa Boogie [Oversized] 4×12 cabinet with Eminence DV-77 speakers. That would complete the dream amp combo.
What was the first piece of equipment you set up in the new studio space?
Honestly, the second day we had the place, I did a vocal session with Bryan Funck for an Emma Ruth Rundle record, so I needed these monitors. I had a little universal audio thing I used to travel with so I could mix in hotel rooms sometimes. So basically I did a session on this little table when there was no real gear here yet. It’s hard to say, cause I feel like this is all one collective spaceship. I’ve had these Trio6 Focals [monitors] for a long time, for tracking. They’re real fun. They’re not the craziest, most accurate. They are accurate, it’s just, I know what’s going on with them. They’ve got beryllium in them so you gotta send them back if you break them. It’s a big deal. They’re super toxic. Don’t break them! It’s kinda crazy, right? They do feel snappy. You don’t need a subwoofer for them.
So do you have very different sounding monitors at home?
The speakers I have at home are a pair of ATCs that are much more neutral. Not nearly as fun. But they tell me when things don’t sound right, immediately, without doubt. I do tend to take mixes into the car, still. I’ll Dropbox and play them in the car through my phone, or I have a CD player in my car, so I’ll burn CDs of what I’m working on because I’ve never gotten rid of the car. It’s a Honda. It’s never gonna die. I’m just gonna drive it forever.
Having a tank of a Honda feels like the opposite of most of your equipment.
Oh, it is. The nice stuff is always built crazy. That’s one of the things I’ve noticed about getting into nicer gear, that it’s generally built way better, it’s more rugged but something like this [Universal Audio] Manley Massive Passive [EQ] is literally worth more than my car, without a doubt. But it’s tubes, so it’s built as well as it can be. But because it’s tubes, it’s still temperamental and weird.
What’s your favorite piece of analog gear in your racks?
The Chandler [Limited LTD-1 mic pre/EQ], literally the thing labeled number one. They’re a company out of Iowa. It’s a guy who painstakingly has made copies of some of the Abbey Road gear and he has an official Abbey Road sign-off and he makes them. It’s a Neve console, essentially, so you open it up and there’s a ton of Neve parts inside, so it’s basically a Neve channel strip where they just put different output transformers. It sounds great. That’s another thing I noticed: The better gear, it doesn’t lose value. Cheaper gear loses value. Digital gear loses value all the time.
It sounds like you really know the ins and outs of every piece of equipment here.
Anything you need to make a rock record, I’ve got. Over the last few days, I worked with a band called The King’s Cannons. They came and did a real quick and dirty seven songs in two days, all of it was live, we kept the drums and like 90% of the bass, we punched in extra bass, and then we did, real quick, solo guitar with one amp, and another guitar with one other amp.
So you’re not opposed to an occasional quick and dirty recording session.
It’s about what you’re going for. Some people care more about documenting where they are as a band than making a product they give a fuck about selling. Not even in a bad way. There’s a band I used to do, every couple years, they’d hit me up. They don’t really play shows—once every two years, maybe. But they come and they spend five days making a record that they’ve all been rehearsing for the last three years. They’re tight as hell. They finish it every time. They have five CDs in a Dropbox link and that’s where they live and they just make the records for themselves.
For more info, check out @hightowerrecording on Instagram.
Top photo by Sabrina Stone
