Shane Stoneback: Music Production Career Construction with Sleigh Bells, Magic Kids & Vampire Weekend

DUMBO, BROOKLYN/CHELSEA, MANHATTAN: Shane Stoneback would be the first person to tell you that he’s a lucky son-of-a-gun. Sure this fast-emerging producer/engineer has sharp ears, sharper instincts and a marvelously open mind, but he’s also got an undeniable knack for being in the right place at just the right time.

Shane Stoneback in the right place...again.

A quick scan of his expanding discography bears that out, with some of the timeliest artists tapping him to bring new sounds, classic styles, and hybrid approaches to their projects. Vampire Weekend, the arresting joy-noise of Sleigh Bells, updated old-skool of Magic Kids, and mystery-soaked Brooklyn duo Cults, are all his latest clients, and that’s just for starters.

To handle the heavy metal, undefinable psychedelia, and everything in between, Stoneback’s dual NYC studios are seeing an enviable level of action. He often gets things started in the raw DUMBO zone he calls Treefort Studios, then crosses the river to finish at SMT Studios in Manhattan, the SSL 4000 G+/Augspurger-endowed mushroom wood dream room he shares with engineer Brian Herman.

Able to make the most out of every opportunity that comes his way, Stoneback has gone a good distance since his formative years as a tech at Battery Studios and in the machine room of audio post HQ Sound One. Settled comfy comfy behind his big board at SMT, Stoneback caught us up on his latest adventures.

You did some recording recently with Magic Kids, we hear.
Right. I went to MemphisW for about a month to a studio owned by Doug Easley. He’s worked with Cat Power, Sonic Youth, and a bunch other great groups. Previously he had a beautiful, old-school studio with three-story-high live rooms, like at Abbey Road. It was famous, but it burned down four years ago.

Now he’s set up shop in an old insurance sales office. It’s a decent studio, but he has a Neotek board that’s like a Salvador Dali painting, because the knobs are kind of melted. We did all the principal tracking there – guitar, bass, drums – and hired this whole cast of local musicians. The talent pool in Memphis is pretty amazing, and Magic Kids is a big band with a lot of members – their network is pretty extensive, and they’re only two calls away from any instrument you can think of.

Magic Kids’ keyboardist/producer Will McElroy has these elaborate, intensive arrangements in his head. In the 1970’s you would have spent six months making this record, and we spent two months. I ended up getting really sick because I spent so much time making it. I didn’t get a lot of sleep in those two months.

They’ve definitely got a style that stands out – how would you describe their sound?
There’s nine people in this band. The Magic Kids have classic songwriting sensibilities, but with modern tools used in their creation, like lots of big 808s.

That new song you produced with them, “Cry with me Baby”, has some old skool elements, but it also doesn’t sound 100% retro…
Sounding retro was a big fear. When I start with a band, if I can I spend time with them a little bit, at a rehearsal or wherever, and talk about music, or I see what’s on their iPod when they’re not looking. These guys were listening to house music when I met them, which I thought was so odd, but it kept it from being a throwback record.

Magic Kids

They didn’t want to make a cutesy throwback record – they avoided that at every turn. Some of the songs are super epic, on a level with Electric Light Orchestra songs.  Anyway, the record is coming out in August, and you better get your roller skates on for it!

OK! Or can we just hop on our bike? In the meantime back here in NYC, you’re running not one but two facilities. Let’s take it from the top with Treefort Studios in DUMBO.
Treefort is one of those loft locker spaces. I got it three years ago for a writing room and I started to build it out when one of the kids from Vampire Weekend came in. I wasn’t done with construction, but they came out and started doing drum overdubs, and I started a good relationship with those guys.

The room is great, it’s a raw inspiring environment with books, chotchkes…people seem amused out there, but it is roughing it. I don’t have proper air conditioning, and the last few days have been brutal. But then again, Treefort is a much bigger room. There’s a lot of bands in particular I work with that want to lay down core live takes with three or four band members. They’ve been touring and they have it all locked together. You also have much more options for mic placement there. Plus I have tube organs, weird keyboards, and the room is cheaper because there’s a lot lower overhead.

We couldn’t help but notice the SSL 4000 G+ here at SMT Studios in Manhattan. Why keep it separated, instead of having everything together in Treefort?
We could never build this room in that place for a bunch of different reasons. The zoning would be difficult, and I’m not sure how long that building will last because of housing development in the area. The Treefort is awesome, but it’s collapsible. I could tear it down, put it up somewhere else, and it would be the same.

So now the package is we could have a band record at Treefort, do all the overdubs, and then mix it here in a room that’s acoustically tight with a great board. Every record we’ve mixed here has, in my opinion, been my best record. I just keep on thinking it gets better in this room.

Looking around, it certainly seems like you’ve put together what would be considered a dream facility for a lot of producer/engineers today.
This room is awesome. There’s two reasons we selected this configuration. Previously we had a baby Oxford and a pair of Tannoys that are now at Treefort. At the same time, there was a series of studios closing in the city that had an SSL G and Augspurgers, and that was how all the pop hit records were being recorded. Chung King had one, Battery had one, and there’s clearly been a vacuum for that. If they’re all closing down, then clearly there’s not a line around the block for that flavor, but if they all close down, then there’s still room for one.

Brian and I both worked at Battery, and this was the combination of console and speakers that we worked on every day. Plus, I love this board and the EQ on it – you can get rough with it and it sounds really cool. Or you can do nothing, just push the faders up, and it glues everything together better than it would in your workstation. Also, to get a Neve console of the same size would have been an enormous amount of money and this console, aside from cleaning, was in pretty good shape. I think it was in Usher’s house, so it wasn’t getting abused in a commercial facility.

People need studios. Whether they need me or some other engineer, they definitely need these environments where they can come in and have all the tools. Sitting in your bedroom, making a record, you can do that once, and it sounds awesome. But every band I’ve worked with this year – Cults is a good example – love what they’ve done in Garageband. But then they want to make it bigger.

(Take a video tour of SMT Studios hosted by Shane Himself right here)

With the different things that you’re doing, do you consider yourself to be a producer, engineer or a mixer?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I feel like we’ve all become facilitators more than anything. No two things come in the door with the same ratio of requirements – some people come in with great music and no idea of how they want it to sound and they want you to hold their hand through it. Others come in with it all ready to go, and they just want you to hit “record”.  In any event, the line in the sand between producer and engineer has become very difficult to distinguish.

On the facilitator tip, I hear Derek E. Miller of Sleigh Bells is like an engineer…
The way that we met, xl recordings booked a couple of weeks at Treefort for M.I.A., so she could have some time to write and experiment. She was going to meet with a variety of people, but I believe she heard about Derek through Spike Jonze, so how awesome for him, to get cold-called from M.I.A. one day to make a song. I didn’t know who he was – he could have been Danger Mouse or this huge producer, and I could have been Steve Lillywhite for all he knew – we were both nervous around each other for a while.

Sleigh Bells -- they slay Shane

We had some time to kill, and he started talking to me about compressors and the best settings for a female vocalist. Then he started playing me the Sleigh Bells record [which would become Treats, released May 11, 2010], and I immediately loved it. I said, “Put this out right now!” He said he’d be willing to go into the studio and work on it.

Some people would have stopped him from doing what he was willing to do, like going into the red digitally. That’s “wrong”, but what he and I discovered is that initially it sounds like crap, but if you go into the red further it starts to sound better. You can crank the EQ, sweep the frequencies, and make it start screaming like a guitar distortion pedal. I started to listen to Garageband, Logic and Pro Tools overloaded, they all sounded different, and we used those like tools to get the aesthetic for that. Derek has these specific things that I don’t think anyone has brought to the table as benchmarks – I think he really did want to hurt his ears at those frequencies like 4k! Like that French electronic group Justice, the way it’s filtered it hurts when it’s turned up loud, but it still sounds really cool.

Sounds like a good schooling. What were some other surprises that came up working with Derek on the Sleigh Bells record?
He was working with these vintage drum machines from the early ‘90’s, but he hated using the rock kit on the Korg or Alesis drum machines. They didn’t sound good until we rammed the fader all the way up and just knocked every frequency up as loud as every other.

We tried a lot of guitar amps, and we settled on this Korg Toneworks which is like something for a tour bus. It sounds like crap in the best possible way. Because of the circuitry, it shaves off all these frequencies so it sits in the mix right away – you could triple or quadruple the track and it doesn’t sound muddy. It sounds like the synthesizer you wish you had!

With that record, you couldn’t really do wrong. It was like going off the deep end into some uncharted territory. I liken it to the first time someone cranked a guitar amp and someone said, “You can’t do that!” and you say, “Just give me five minutes and you’ll see what I can do.” Hopefully I won’t get asked to make a record like that again, because I wouldn’t want to repeat it. But I do pull elements from it.

On a parallel tip to all this experimentation, you told us that you’re seeing a return to a more pro studio approach in recording – what do you mean by that?
There’s definitely a slew of records coming out where people are making rock albums that don’t sound bedroomy to me. Yes, there’s a good vocal sound you can get in your bedroom because you’re recording while your roommate’s sleeping, and it’s very intimate. But there’s something about a really well-recorded vocal where people scream, go off, and get the emotion out. You don’t hear the recording, you just hear the artist, you know? I feel like that will come back.

It doesn’t have to be slick with long reverbs and all that. The Raconteurs record (Consolers of the Lonely), that sounds great. The Them Crooked Vultures record, that sounds huge: it’s really thick and sounds good quiet, but it also sounds good in here cranked up loud.

You’re getting more and more credits on projects that producers would want to get the call on – Vampire Weekend, Magic Kids, the Sleigh Bells record — why is your stock going up right now?

Vampire Weekend rocked da Treefort

Part of it is luck. So I’ve been in the right place at the right time a lot. That said I can still tell I get better at this each day. It was serendipitous that I met Vampire Weekend, and the initial job that I did for them was not exclusive knowledge – anybody could have done it. But I worked up a good working relationship. I was an assistant engineer in studios for years, so I got good at the boring parts: taking notes and backing stuff up. I’m a great Pro Tools editor, and a lot of people don’t want to deal with that. People will keep you around for that.

On the second Vampire Weekend record (Contra), I hammered home the facilitator thing. Rostam (Batmanglij) is a great keyboard player, a great arranger, and picked up the basics of engineering pretty quickly, but he still needed a facilitator to handle things on a day-to-day basis. We rented a marimba that was bigger than this table! We set it up, mic’d it and recorded it. Even if I had never done it before, I’d pretend I’d done it ten times.

— Interview by Janice Brown and David Weiss

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