by Dave Polster
Adam Boose is the owner and chief engineer of Cauliflower Audio, a full-service mastering studio in Cleveland, Ohio. Cauliflower Audio has mastered albums for many national and local artists, including Los Lobos, Dawes, Conor Oberst, The Drums, Brent Kirby and His Luck, Ray Flanagan and the Authorities, and many others. Adam’s new studio facility is located in the 78th Street Studios in Cleveland. Adam took time out of his busy schedule to talk with Dave Polster on behalf of CAPO-The Cleveland Audio Professionals Outreach.
DP: You recently managed to move your professional mastering
operation from your home to the 78th Street Studios. Do you feel that has
affected your workflow or activity at all?
AB: Yes, absolutely. I think anyone who works from home kind
of knows the pitfalls you can fall into, with the refrigerator being 10 feet
away from you, and the cats, and people stopping by, etc. And being somewhat of
an undisciplined person, it's nice to work from home, but just in terms of
practicality, I think being in the studio, being right across the hall from
Well Made Music and Clint [a full-service vinyl mastering studio], makes things
so much easier when I'm mastering for vinyl. Going to a particular place to
work everyday, having a bigger room where I can have 4 or 5 people sit in with
me is nice. The size of the room is more inviting for people. Honestly, I
didn't use to like attended sessions, but I do now because there is an
immediate feedback. You can gauge what their expectations are, etc.
DP: Did you have any attended sessions when you were working
out of your house?
AB: Yes, a handful. They were usually pretty uncomfortable,
just because it was a smaller room. It was a dedicated studio that I built out.
It was a room within a room; it was a nice little room! I would say the biggest
benefit of moving into a bigger space is that the room is a little more
predictable in terms of how things are going to translate outside. When I was
working in the house, I had to work a lot harder. I would have to test things
out on multiple systems. The speakers that I have now, the B&W 804 NautilusSeries, are built to spread out.
DP: They need room to breath almost.
AB: Right. And I was right on top of them in the other room.
Every aspect of the new space is amazing. It's contributed to doing better
work. I am more relaxed! When I get in I can now focus strictly on work, or at
least in theory.
DP: That’s awesome! You mentioned you received a new piece
of hardware for mid-side encoding/decoding and that you had a part in its planning.
What's the deal with that?
AB: Yes, it is the Avenson Mid-Side R. I was one of the
first guys that bought their half rack space mid-side box (Avenson Mid-Side) a few years ago and I
really liked it. I used it pretty much all the time, but there were a few
things about it that were a little inflexible.
DP: And this new box rectifies a lot of those issues, right?
It does! I met the owner,
Brad Avenson at an AES convention a couple of years ago. Really cool guy.
Avenson's main tech is my friend Dave McDonald, whom I've also done some
mastering work. We have all kept in touch. I told him some of the workarounds I
came up with for the old unit. He reached out about a year ago and said they were
developing a new hardware unit that was going to be the deluxe version of their
mid-side unit. They had some ideas already and I made some suggestions, such as adding the option of muting the mid-side. It's pretty important, especially for things like
vinyl mastering. If you want to hear just the side you can hear how much rumble is
going on down there [in the low frequencies] and you know what you may or may
not have to address. They added stepped switches in place of knobs, which makes
recalling easier. There is a hi-pass on the side channel with more usable
frequencies. It was a handful of things. I've been using it for about two weeks
now and I'm in love with it!
DP: Is it for sale or do you have a prototype?
AB: I have serial number 003, so I would think it's in
production now. They are great guys as well!
 |
| Adam Boose, chief engineer, Cauliflower Audio. |
DP: So when listening to a mix that you plan to master are there
any telltale signs that the project might be difficult to work on? Or do you
have any tips for mixing engineers prepping their songs for mastering?
AB: I think a lot of the time its almost a knee-jerk reaction for me. I
will put something on and usually instantly tell if a track hasn't been
mastered. It might sound a little inconsistent. And, you know, every mix is
completely different. Some mixes are closer to being a final product than
others.
Everybody has their own ways of working and people get comfortable with how they mix.
Everybody has their own ways of working and people get comfortable with how they mix.
DP: Are there any glaring issues you come across frequently? If
you were to give an overall tip to mixing engineers what would that be? Is
there anything that happens more often than not?
AB: Actually, yes! Overheads for drums. I don't know what it is,
if it's cheap overhead mics, or improper placement, or bad cymbals, etc. but
something that is impossible for me to fix is cymbals that are too loud or
hashy or have too many overtones. That's probably the thing I will request mix
revisions for the most. There are tricks I've been learning lately to fix that
and I used to multi-band compress the hi-end a bit, but if crash and ride
cymbals are too loud in the mix and they are eating up the guitars and other
harmonic content, it's always going to be hashy. Inconsistent low-end for me is
a lot easier to manage. It's easier to compress or EQ.
DP: And you aren't usually effecting other aspects of the mix
typically.
AB: Right.
DP: But with hi-hats and other cymbals, that is right in the
same frequency range of other things, like guitars, vocals, etc.
AB: Right. Especially if a job is going to vinyl, you will just
have a shitty sounding record. It's going to sound like shit. I can only do so
much. It comes to guys like you and Clint at Well Made, and you guys can only
do so much. Vinyl is not very forgiving on the hi-end. When I started cutting
vinyl is when I really started paying attention to the hi-end more and that's
why I'm a little spazzy about hi-end.
DP: Usually the cymbals seem to be the determining factor of a
"bright" mix or a "dark" mix.
AB: Yeah, and everything else too. If things haven't been
compressed enough, like instruments in the mix, I can usually take care of that
stuff. I can usually bring stuff out a little bit, tuck vocals in, adjust the spectral
balance of the mix.
*At this point Dave pauses briefly to pet Adam's cat.*
DP: Prior to starting Cauliflower Audio you worked at Iron Mountain in Pittsburgh digitizing master tapes for classic recordings. Do you
have any fun stories from that point in your career?
AB: I do. I saw a post on Tape-Op's classified from Garrett
Haines at Treelady Studios, which is a recording and mastering studio in
Pittsburgh, and they were looking for a studio guy. At that time in my life I
was working in Cleveland at A-to-Z Audio, a duplication place. I was looking to
expand into more professional recording services so I met Garrett and saw his
operation and kind of geeked out over his stuff. For whatever reason, it didn't
work out. He was looking for more of a studio assistant, and I had always been
more interested in mastering. A few months later I got an email from a manager
at Iron Mountain and he said he got my name from Garrett and invited me out. So
I went out, and it's this underground facility, like literally it is in a mine
that is heavily secured with armed guards and it is literally inside of a
mountain.
DP: They deal with classified data, right?
AB: Yeah, they mostly do digitization of paper documents. But
the division I worked in was more geared towards the entertainment industry.
So, the first day I walked in there were pallets of KISS 24-track master tapes.
When I was 5, I was obsessed with KISS. I still have all the vinyl from when I
was a kid. So when I walked in and saw that, live tapes from the late 70's, it
was like this is what I grew up on!
DP: “This is perfect. This'll be a good job!”
AB: Yeah! So the guy I was replacing trained me for half a day
and then left. I was pretty much one of two audio guys there, so I had to learn
a lot in a very short period of time.
DP: A lot of that involved tape machines and things like that.
Did you have a lot of experience with that prior to this or did you have to
learn on the job?
AB: In college I learned how to splice tape, but as far as
professional equipment, availability had been scarce. They had 24-track Studer
machines, a fleet of Ampex ATR-100 series machines. Vintage digital tape
machines, DAT machines, ADAT machines, virtually anything you could need to
archive with. It was a very fortuitous situation for me to walk into. It was an
amazing experience! Everything that I've wound up falling into has made what
I'm doing now make sense. So I think, just as a word of advice to people who
are trying to do audio stuff - I don't think any piece of experience you have
is too small. You never know how it will help you. When I went to school for
recording I didn't know I would be a mastering engineer, I just knew that I
wanted to be involved in recording. It just so happens that opportunities come
up and if you keep an open mind you might end up having a cool gig. Working
with tapes for Bon Jovi, Extreme, and so many more, it was amazing to see
studio notes from those sessions. We would come across old vinyl cutting master
tapes that had the notes for everything. It was a really incredible experience.
 |
| Cauliflower Audio recently moved into a new suite at the 78th Street Studios on Cleveland's westside. |
The coolest thing I got to do involved Universal when they
had to digitize thousands of assets in a four-month period. This effort was
taking place in London, New York City, Los Angeles, and Pennsylvania. I ended
up being in charge of developing the protocol and workflow for the whole
project because I had been the one doing it with my manager. I ended up flying
to London for a few weeks and training guys who were from Abbey Road Studios
and the BBC, and I'm in my mid-thirties showing them how to use this software.
I met some of the most amazing people over there. I had never been to London.
And then a few months later I was able to go to LA and train a few people over
there. I think a lot of people hated me by the time I left because they had
worked on so many things and I was just like this kid from the middle of the Midwest
telling them what to do. It was an amazing experience and I am very thankful to
those guys. My beard went gray during that project and at the time I was freaking out, but it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
DP: That's so cool! You clearly have a good amount of analog
equipment in your studio. Do you tend to make more decisions using the analog
or digital tools at your disposal?
AB: I try to use analog as much as possible. It's easier for me
to get to the sounds in my head with the analog gear. I am always pleasantly
surprised with just twiddling around with the knobs, sweeping through
frequencies, etc. I learn new things all the time using the analog gear. It's
how I develop new techniques, by playing around and making stuff too loud.
Like, cranking the gain up on an analog EQ, sometimes it makes cool stuff. So
part of it is that, part of it is an asinine belief that analog is better. “Tape
is cool, analog is cool, etc.” I prefer to work in the analog realm. That's not
to say it sounds better, it's just my personal preference. I tend to get cooler
results with the analog gear. With limiting and spectral editing,
de-ess'ing, multi-band compression, I'll do that in the computer. So it's really a
combination of both.
DP: Was there anything specific that inspired you to start a
path in mastering versus recording?
AB: I grew up in Oberlin, Ohio and there is a mastering studio out
there called Acoustik Musik and the head engineer is Thomas Bethel. This was
right after I graduated college and my mom brought home a flyer advertising his
business and I was looking for an internship. I met Tom and saw his studio and
interned with him for a brief period of time and then started working at A-to-Z
audio and kind of wormed my way into the mastering room there. I've always been
more of a private and shy guy, so mixing and mastering were always more
interesting to me. It is great for someone who is creative but socially
apprehensive. It just seemed that my life headed in that direction. After I
worked at A-to-Z I started getting the itch to go somewhere else, and then that
job at Iron Mountain opened up, and while I was at Iron Mountain I wanted to
buy more gear and start my own studio. A few years later I met Clint Holley [of Well Made Music] and I
was interested in learning more about mastering for vinyl. We hit it off and he
bought a second lathe and asked if I wanted to cut a few records a week and by
that point I had enough clients of my own at Cauliflower that I was able to
leave Iron Mountain, and my life has exploded since then.
DP: Last but not least, your band, Golden Street of Paradise,
just released a new single. What's going on in the GSOP world?
AB: I'm glad you asked! Myk Porter, my band mate, and I have
been recording a record for about the past year and it's almost completed and
we plan on shopping it around. It's a fucking great record. I can say this. I
feel like as I've gotten older I am more comfortable knowing what I'm good at
and what I'm not. I know what I'm not good at. It's a pretty good record. We're
going to start the process of getting it on vinyl, sending it to Gotta Groove Records and having them pressed up. Maybe we can get a distribution deal.
DP: Is the album more or less finished?
AB: It's all recorded. We've been doing last minute editing with my old boss from Iron Mountain, Rae DiLeo, who was the programmer for the band
Filter. He has a pretty interesting history of his own. He worked in Lenny
Kravitz's studio in New Jersey and has worked with Henry Rollins and other cool
stuff. It has a sort of industrial underpinning and I knew that Rae came up in
that world in the 90's and I thought it would be great if he mixed the record.
He has a particular sound. He did so much better than we could've done. After
trying to record and mix my own projects, I said never again. If I'm involved
in a musical project creatively, I want nothing to do with the production
because it takes you out of it and isn't as fun. Brian Straw (of Survival Kit
here in Cleveland) recorded the drums and a friend of Myk's recorded the
guitars and then we are shipping it off to Rae. 6 of the songs are mixed, we
have 3 more left and it should be done by March.
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