Mixer Profile: John O’Mahony On Mixing Metric, Synthetica

GREENWICH VILLAGE: Walk into John O’Mahony’s new mix room in New York’s venerable Electric Lady Studios and you’re glimpsing into the hybrid analog/digital mind of a modern-day mixer.

Along with the Pro Tools HDX system, O’Mahony has racks stuffed with his choice analog pieces surrounding the centerpiece of the studio – his beloved Neve Genesys. And perhaps the most exciting feature is the window placed precisely between his Proac’s – looking down onto West 8th street, and dutifully preventing any lapses of sanity that so many windowless rooms have inflicted on helpless audio professionals.

For the last ten years or so, O’Mahony has led the typical engineer’s life; moving around from studio to studio, project to project. But with the recent expansion of Electric Lady, he’s found some stability – a home base room in a legendary facility that has housed some top engineers in recent years including Rich Costey, Russ Elevado and Michael Brauer.

Should he need a space for tracking and overdubbing, one of the most famous rooms in the world is just downstairs. And upstairs, a new retro-inspired tracking room has just come online, with a custom-built API 3288 (in white, no less) front and center.

He’s landed in good company at Electric Lady, but it’s been a journey getting here. O’Mahony got his start in his native Ireland, working as a tape op in a local studio in Cork. After becoming the house engineer, he quickly realized that to really get where he wanted to be, he’d have to move to a music industry town. O’Mahony moved to NYC in 1998 and began working at Chung King Studios (where we met when I began an internship there in 2000). After the typical tenure of assistantship, O’Mahony ended up working for several years as a Pro Tools engineer for legendary mixer, Andy Wallace, a job which eventually culminated in his getting a few mixes on Coldplay’s Viva La Vida.

Throughout that time, O’Mahony has always kept a foot firmly secured in the pursuit of his own career as a mixer. Over the years he’s mixed records for some incredible artists and bands, including The Cribs, Kashmir, The Submarines, Matt Pond PA, Oh Land, Emily Haines, and perhaps most significantly, Haines’ band Metric.

I actually first heard Metric because of John, who played me the first mixes he’d done on their debut record. I remember being instantly excited by it; amazing songwriting coupled with interesting arrangements that didn’t pay any attention to conventions of genre. O’Mahony has worked on every Metric album since then, including most recently mixing the score for David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis in 5.1 – co-written by the band with Howard Shore – and their latest full-length album released this week, Synthetica.

John and I have been friends now for the better part of 12 years, and get together every time we’re in the same town to talk music, business and – of course – gear. Visiting him at Electric Lady a couple weeks ago, we spoke about Metric, and his evolving role with this very modern band.

So you’ve been working with Metric since their very first record, how did that come about?

They were working at Mission Sound in Brooklyn where I had just recently done some sessions…So I met them through just being in that studio – Oliver [Straus], the owner, introduced us. They were mixing their album and Jimmy [Shaw] was going to do it himself. He was at a point where he was feeling like he needed someone who knew about engineering rather than just pushing up faders.

So he said, “Why don’t you come and mix one song with me and we’ll see what happens.” He’d started mixing the title track, “Grow Up and Blow Away” and I came in and kind of took over and patched things around different ways and set it all up. I hit a point where I didn’t want to overstep my bounds so I just got up from the console and was like, “this sounds really cool to me, so you guys take it from here and give me a call and let me know if you want me to hop on the rest of it.” So I left, they did a few things, printed it, and then they called me and asked if I’d mix three other songs. So I did, and we just stayed friends.

When I listen to that stuff now it still sounds fresh and interesting, although it is a little different from their current sound…how do they feel about it?

[I think] They think of it quite fondly…and actually “Lost Kitten”, on the current album, is a bit of a throwback to that first record.

Speaking of “Lost Kitten”, I really liked the treatment of Emily’s vocal on that, how exactly did you approach that one?

That sort of shadowy thing in the background?

Yeah, it’s really cool…

They had put it through a synth, with a bunch of filters on it and the natural distortion that came with it, then I offset it back with a little PCM-42 delay and deliberately made it mono. If I did anything stereo or set it off to the side, it always just sounded like…gimmicky…or something? By putting it behind her it didn’t distract from her, it was just this kind of thing that was lurking in the background. With effects,  I really have to think visually, thinking front-to-back as well as left and right – that’s the only way it makes sense to me.

Interestingly enough, “Lost Kitten” was actually recorded for an earlier record, and we just couldn’t get it to work. It didn’t fit with that body of songs; and so back then they actually asked me to mix it as a b-side, but then at the last minute they stopped me because they had decided it was too good. So it ended up on the “see you in three years” list. So when they decided to use it for this album, I chose this song to be the first mix, just to tie it in to the past…like “The first one we mix for this album should be the one we didn’t mix for last album.”

Nice. So you guys just finished your fourth record together – how does Metric like to work nowadays? And how do you figure into their approach?

The basic background on how they’ve been approaching stuff, at least on the last two albums is that they built their own studio in Toronto, called “Giant”. Jimmy Shaw, the guitar player and co-founder of Metric, and Sebastian Grainger, who is the drummer and singer from Death from Above 1979, bought a building together in ’06 or ’07. Out in the back there was an old garage space that they built into a studio for both of their bands to use.

So, they built up the studio and I would go up there and work on demos with them from time to time and other various things. It really got kicked in properly for [their last album] Fantasies; they had their first Pro Tools HD rig and some better gear. Jimmy recorded all of it with the help of a Canadian producer named Gavin Brown. After working on it for a while they kind of hit a point where they needed some new perspective on it, at which point they called me in.

So they came down here to Electric Lady to work with me in Studio B. We went through everything, and I made overdub suggestions, they re-sang some songs, played a lot of guitar; and put in that extra element that they thought they were missing. Again, it was me just adding my taste, the little injection that I’ve always had on their records. Then we mixed it.

Did you guys have a similar approach to Synthetica?

Well when it came time for this record it was a similar sort of situation. This time, Jimmy was going to take on a bigger responsibility, and Gavin Brown would play more of a consulting role – he would bounce ideas off of Gavin every now and then. But Jimmy would be in the studio (in Toronto) on his own most of the time with the help of a friend of ours called Liam O’Neil, who was the keyboard player in The Stills, and is now in a great band called Eight And A Half.

So Liam would be the engineer, and contribute musical opinions as well. I remember having a phone call with Jimmy where he said “I’ve been hanging with Liam in the studio and we’re having a great time, Should I just have him be the engineer?”; because they’d been trying to find someone to help “run the gear” so-to-speak. So I was like “F**k it, if you’re having fun and you’re comfortable, just go for it and see what happens.” You don’t even need to impose roles on anyone, just work with your friends, pull in the personalities of all these people you’ve met over the years…”

Because everyone can engineer nowadays…

Yeah, exactly, So I just encouraged the band to call all of us whenever we were needed in the process – be it Liam, Gavin, or myself…in situations where we would be able to shine, as opposed to having one person do everything, whether it’s suitable to their personality or not.

So they started the record with Jimmy producing and Liam engineering. This time they did all the drums at Giant as well with Toronto engineer Lenny De Rose. On the previous records they had gone to other bigger studios to do drums. They did all the basics there, and they had someone in Toronto who they would use to do editing when they needed it.

Do they do a lot of editing? Some tracks seem to be pretty locked in, while others have a looser feel…

Some of the songs are just comps of pretty solid takes. Other songs that would have to be locked in with some loops or other things would get more of an editing treatment. However, they would never edit just because they thought they had to – there was always an impetus set by the style of the song.

A modern approach without going overboard…

Exactly. Anyway, they finally hit the point at which they were like, “we’re really excited about what we have, we have tons of stuff, but we’ve hit a point where we feel like its time for a change of scenery” So they decided to come down to New York for two weeks, they brought Liam with them, and we worked in [Electric Lady] Studio A, downstairs. We did some overdubs and got a decent amount of work done. At the end of that I still felt like there was a little bit more to be done; but at that point in the process I kept my mouth shut and waited until they got to mixing, where I could really step up to the plate and shoot my mouth off a bit…and they could either embrace or dismiss any of the rants that I tend to go on. (laughs)

So during those two weeks I let the band get everything they thought they needed to do get done, without getting in the way. Then we came upstairs, into mixing land. As each song went up on the board we continued to cut guitars.

It ain’t over ‘til it’s over…

It always seems that when we get into mixing a Metric record, we end up playing a lot of guitar, and I think the reason for that is, before it comes to me, Jimmy is the producer and ends up focusing on everyone else, on the bigger picture, and he tends to neglect himself a little bit and doesn’t give himself that opportunity to just “be a guitar player”. Whatever it is about our rapport, he just stops thinking about everything else…I’ll poke him in the ribs and be like “Don’t sit down, don’t check the tuning…” just keep going and knock it out. When we start it’ll be a little bit like “oh here we go again”, and I swear after the first few minutes we end up laughing our asses off and just having a great time, like two kids, trying this pedal and that.

Things always seem to come together then; He gets to take off the producer hat and be in the band again…so my presence at the end really just enables him to get the last bit of the record together.

So how long did that final stage last?

We spent in total – overdubs and mixing – eight weeks.

Wow…

Yeah, we really worked. A bunch of the production seems to happen at the very end. And that’s the way it always seems to happen with them. We joke about it; the only way we can do it is the hard way. There has to be emotion and stress. And what’s funny is that I find that I can do my best work with the band once I’ve tired them out. Once they are at the point of really low energy then I can be like, “OK…is everybody tired of freaking out? Let’s try this…” (laughing)

Does that involve going over parts that have already existed?

Not really, I re-recorded two drum tracks from scratch here in New York, but at Brooklyn Recording. The reason we went there was because Studio A downstairs was being used by the Rolling Stones and we couldn’t get back in there, as well as some other big names that we couldn’t shift. I’d never worked there [Brooklyn Recording] before but I thought it was really cool…TONS of gear, great sounding live room, more guitar amps and guitars than I’ve ever seen at a studio in my life…not that we ended up using much of it…

What do you mean?

Well, one of the interesting things about the last two Metric records with all the guitar overdubs and stuff that we do is that the band’s gear is never here. So they will have worked on the record for 7-8 months with all of the best gear that they’ve been able to collect over the years, but of course, when they come down here planning to mix they don’t have any of it. So on two records in a row we’ve used this Japanese telecaster that just hangs on the wall here…it probably has the same set of strings on it that it did for the last record and we’ll plug it into this broken Marshall here that I nicknamed “Goliath”. Nobody else ever used it besides me…I just turn everything up all the way on it and it makes the noise from hell…when you’re not playing it just goes “ERRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!” (very loudly and dramatically) you have to put it on standby when your not playing it.

When you’re actually mixing do they have roughs they like that you need to adhere to?

Not really actually; maybe for the vibe but not the detail…Metric gives me a wide berth to do it my way…and it happens to be what they like, we seem to be on the same page.

If you play a band the first song that you’ve mixed for them and it’s not 90% correct you should probably just both walk out, shake hands, have a coffee or a beer…but don’t work together, because chemistry is everything.

Stream Metric’s brand-new album, Synthetica, below, and purchase via the band’s website on vinyl, CD or digital download.

Bo Boddie is a Grammy winning engineer/producer and composer who has worked with Santana, Everlast, Korn, Reni Lane, and many others. He just completed work on Imperial Teen’s second release on Merge Records, as well as composition work on the new ABC sitcom Don’t Trust the B@#$% in Apartment 23.

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