Inside Butch Vig's Home Studio

10/8/2018 INSIDE BUTCH VIG'S HOME STUDIO
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INSIDE BUTCH VIG’S HOME STUDIO

Published On July 18, 2016 | Features
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Butch Vig gives AT a sneak peek inside his ‘glorified bedroom studio’ Grunge is
Dead where Garbage wrote and recorded half their latest album. Last Name
Story: Mark Davie
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Butch Vig Portraits: Cameron Crone
Could there be a more credible flagwaver for the legitimacy of home studios than Butch Vig? This is a guy who
owned a commercial studio for 30 years and recorded Nirvana’s Nevermind at Sound City. Now he’s making records * = required field
in Dave Grohl’s garage (ignore the API console — little picture, people!) and records drums in the den of his
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Silverlake, LA home.
“It’s a glorified bedroom studio,” says Butch, describing the space he’s dubbed Grunge is Dead. Sure it has windows
overlooking Silverlake and a fairly big Pro Tools rig. “But there’s really not much soundproofing, just a few baffles on
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the walls,” continued Butch, pointing out what’s in his room. “I’ve got a couple of small guitar amps, my drum kit is
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here, there’s a piano. It’s a good writing room. We wrote and recorded a lot of the new Garbage album Strange Little WITH THE NEW ARMONÍAPLUS
Birds here, but we finished it all in a proper studio.” October 3, 2018 | 0 Comments
Oh, there it is; a proper studio. He’s talking about Billy Bush’s place, Red Razor Sounds. Billy has been engineering
Garbage records since their second album, and has been married to lead singer, Shirley Manson, since 2010. Red SSL FUSION OUTBOARD
Razor is like a home away from home for Garbage, and only five minutes from Butch’s place, in Atwater. PROCESSOR
http://www.audiotechnology.com.au/wp/index.php/inside-butch-vigs-home-studio/ 1/7
Part of the reason Butch could move away from his own commercial studio — Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin October 3, 2018 | 0 Comments
— over 12 years ago, was because of the variety of studios on hand in LA. “It’s easy to work here, there are so many
studios and so many people I know in the music business,” he explained.
The actual breakdown of recording done at Butch’s home versus Bush’s studio is unclear. Both of them quoted about
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60% of the record done at their place; let’s call it an even 50/50. MONITOR CITY TO COVER THE
BIG STAGES
It’s funny to think of a rock icon having to work around the schedules of his neighbours, but that’s exactly what Butch October 1, 2018 | 0 Comments
does. He records all his drums at home during a four-hour window in the afternoon when “I can make as much racket
as I want,” he said. “Around dinner time I have to stop. My studio has no soundproofing, it’s just a den, a rectangular
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room with dry wall that doesn’t even sound that good. You can hear the drums through the whole valley here. I’ll run LOUDSPEAKERS
into my neighbours when I’m walking my dog and they’ll say, ‘I heard you playing drums yesterday, what was the October 1, 2018 | 0 Comments
song you were working on?’ I really like my neighbours, so I keep it to that window.”
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September 26, 2018 | 0 Comments
Billy: “At the top of my two pedalboards are Audio Kitchen The Big Trees pedals, which are these great preamp
and distortion boxes. A lot of time we’ll take a soft synth, go out through The Big Trees then back in, and it will
make it sound more real.”
HOME STUDIO STYLE

While Butch’s home studio might be relatively untreated, the gear on hand isn’t exactly cobbled together. His “basic
setup” includes API and Helios preamps, Neve and Harrison EQs, Chandler EQs and preamps, and his ‘secret
weapon’ Roger Mayer RM58 solid state compressor, which “kind of f**ks the drums up.” He’s got a couple of guitar
amps, Fender and Matchless, as well as a Line6 Helix and Kemper Profiler hooked up directly to his Pro Tools rig, his
drums, soft synth controller keyboards and the upright piano that Duke likes to play. On the mic side, he has a 1959
Telefunken ELA M250 and a Cathedral Pipes U47-style tube mic. However, “Shirley just likes to grab a Shure SM58
handheld mic,” said Butch.
Butch has Grunge is Dead for the same reason most musicians have a home studio; to have a place where he can
work on his own music at leisure, and in the way he likes working. “It’s wired so I can open a session and record
anything instantly,” he said. There’s no distinction for Garbage between a demo and final master, said Butch. If
grabbing an SM58 and singing from the couch gets the vibe Shirley’s after, then he could care less about which mic
she’s using. “Once we start recording, that could turn into a master. Sometimes we get very meticulous in trying to
get a sound that fits the track. Other times we don’t care. We just turn a mic on that’s nearby and record it, even if it’s
10-feet away. We just want to get the idea down. That’s been a tradition with Garbage since the first record.”
Garbage aren’t under any pressure to make a Top 40 hit. “Even if we wrote one, it wouldn’t get played anyway,”
stated Butch. “Acknowledging that frees you up to do whatever you want.” Rather than bending over trying to
contend with the latest pop generation, Garbage decided to return to the experimental roots of their debut, where
nothing was off limits and anything could be sampled, recut and reimagined. It also meant an iterative approach to
production that works better when there are no studio overheads. “We just started hanging out and talking, telling
jokes, sometimes we’d listen to other music or watch a film,” said Butch. “Then we’d just start jamming. If it
happens, great! If not, well let’s come in tomorrow and try again.”
Butch’s clear acrylic dw kit is miked up with a pair of pose-able head Blue Hummingbird condensers overhead,
Josephson e22S side address cardioid on the toms, a Shure SM57 on snare top and a Telefunken dynamic
underneath. Room treatment courtesy of platinum and gold records, they really give the tracks some weight.
NEVERMIND, JUST HAVE FUN

While this record may not be the cultural milestone that Nevermind was, or even the first couple of Garbage records,
Strange Little Birds showcases the creativity of a true sonic mastermind in his element, surrounded by his most long-
serving collaborators.
There isn’t one mode or style to Garbage on the album, while the song Empty has all the trademarks of a Garbage hit
— slammed drums with complementary programming, eighth-note rolls, layered guitars that still punch through, big
wall of sound chorus and a simple, catchy melody — other tunes feel worlds away.
Album opener, Sometimes, alternates between modulated, tremolo noise and orchestration with a dark cinematic
quality to it. Shirley’s voice, on the other hand, is starkly dry. It’s a startling album opener, and even more ‘in your
face’ than Empty’s big rock chorus. “We wanted that juxtaposition because it felt nerve racking,” explained Butch. “It
made your brain pay attention to it. We could have put it all in the same reverb space, but we wanted Shirley’s voice
to have this otherworldly quality and be really confrontational, confessional and vulnerable. The way to do that is take
the effects off, push it way up in the listener’s face. Because then you can’t escape it.”
Empty, like a lot of songs on the record, started out as a jam to a programmed beat, but it didn’t feel right until they
humanised it. “We had the chorus so I put down a quick kick and snare pattern in Battery, but it felt stiff because it
was just a constant tempo,” said Butch. “A couple of days later, Duke and I played the song without a click track. We
did three or four takes and picked out bits that sounded good. Then I went into the Pro Tools session and looked at
the tempo of the verse, 109bpm, then I’d look at the tempo of the chorus which was 111bpm, and noticed I was
speeding the drum fills up to 115bpm. It’s okay, because it sounds good. Then I made a variable tempo map based
on our jam without a click. I re-programmed the kick and snare to the new tempo grid and went back and re-
recorded the drums over that. It was just a process to get it where the ebb and flow of the tempo felt natural.”
BUILDING WALLS OF SOUND

The chorus of Empty features the classic Garbage wall of sound, which Butch puts down to being “very layered.
There’s a lot of guitars with a specific tuning. We used a drop D, but tuned the high E string up a step to play the
inverted note at the top of the chord. You get an orchestral sound along with the keyboard parts we played.”
At other times, the heaviness of the guitars came from dynamics, juxtaposing quieter parts against a sudden onrush
of sound. While the verse and chorus for Empty came quickly, the bridge took three weeks on and off at Red Razor
to get the power they were after. Butch: “We tried stuff that pushed harder and took off, and a couple of different time
signatures, but it got really big so we decided to pull it back and drop it out. When Shirley drops down to that quiet
vocal, the guitars have to leap out and really exaggerate the dynamic. Billy has about 100 stomp boxes, so we spent
a lot of time trying to find the right amount of fuzz and how far we could push it. It’s a tendency we have with
dynamics like that, to try and really oversaturate them.”
Magnetized is another song that elevates into a wall of sound, but wasn’t as simple as pulling up a Garbage preset. It
was by far the longest birth of any song on the record, taking them a year to complete. “Steve’s initial demo was way
slower and sounded like the Jesus & Mary Chain on drugs,” recalled Butch. “Shirley heard it and immediately sang,
‘I’m Magnetized’. This glorious vocal melody that sounded like a Roy Orbison melody.
“We tried it a couple of different ways: hyped and aggressive like how we’d play it onstage, and with a string
arrangement. One day we plugged in a stomp box called a Glamour Box, which just makes noise. We’ve done that
on previous Garbage records, when in doubt just record take after take of noise and see what you come up with.
“We started getting all these weird tones out of the Glamour Box that I cut into pieces to get more of a musical sense
to it. Then when it gets to the chorus, we came up with this symphonic sound with all these fuzzed out, hyper-
sounding guitars, and a lot of keyboards. It became a lot more orchestral and cinematic and a lot less rock ’n’ roll,
which made sense.”
GARBAGE COMPRESSION
One of the not-so-secret pieces of outboard that has helped define Garbage’s sound is the Roger Mayer
RM58 compressor. Butch and Billy swear by it for drums.
Butch: “If you listen to the drums on the end of Amends, they’re hammered through the Roger Mayer,
which blows them out in a cool way. Whenever the drums get really loud, like on Empty, it’s probably
mixed in 50% on one of the buses.
“I found it when I was producing Sonic Youth’s album Dirty in New York City. The engineer, John Siket,
knew this gear broker who had a bunch of weird gear out in Brooklyn. I went out to his pad and he said,
‘You should try out this compressor, man.’ It was a $500 solid state compressor. I took it to the studio,
plugged it in, and to me, it made everything sound like early The Who records. It had this wild, but cool,
crunchy out of control sound. So I bought it. I’ve used it on so many records, but it’s got a specific sound,
so you either have to embrace it or not.”
Billy: “Roger Mayer made these compressors in the late ’60s when he was making a bunch of console
parts around New York. They’re super fast solid state compressors that admittedly don’t really sound
great. I called Roger Mayer up about it and he said, ‘Why would you want to use that?’ When you put it in
the most extreme settings, it’s got the most glorious drum sound. We scoured the planet for these things
and we’ve got three of them now, Butch has got one and I’ve got two. They’re beat to hell, the VU meters
don’t work, and it only ever works when everything’s cranked to 10. If you run it as a parallel compressor
on the kick, snare and toms, and a little bit of room mic, it creates this sound I haven’t heard on anything
else.”
ARRANGEMENT BY ADD
Even if you’re not a Garbage fan, one thing you can say about their songs is they’re rarely boring. There’s always a
new sonic element to sink your teeth into, sometimes every couple of bars. Butch: “All four of us have some ADD-ish
tendencies. We’re always saying, ‘we need something new here to keep the song building’. That goes back to the
very first Garbage record where we did tons of layering then defined the arrangements in the mix by muting and
bringing other parts in.”
That proclivity for newness can produce some pretty dense arrangements, but occasionally keeping that ADD
tendency in check is exactly what a song needs. Even Though Our Love Is Doomed was a track that went through
stages of being built up before being stripped back to its original version. Butch wrote the song and recorded a few
demo versions at home, none of which he liked. A month after he’d mentally shelved it, Shirley recommended he try
record something simpler. Butch: “The next day, I came down to my home studio. All I really had was the melody line
and some words for the chorus. I thought I needed to have a verse, so I picked up the bass and started playing a line
that became the core of the song.” 45 minutes later he had a whole song; music, lyrics, the whole lot.
It was pretty spare, but that was part of the appeal.
“Shirley loved it,” said Butch. “She heard it once and sang the vocal first time. Being a demo, we thought we’d try
add stuff to it — bigger drums, and Duke and Steve tried a few parts too. But we didn’t like them and the demo is
pretty close to the final version. There was something about it that had a spontaneity or intensity to it because it feels
like it’s holding back.”
Another way Butch keeps the arrangement from getting overcrowded while maintaining interest in the song is by
using the stereo field to create dynamic and change. Butch: “Initially, it’s good to have a space where your brain
hears the song and settles in. As the song goes on I like to hear things that move around a little, spatially. Maybe the
second verse doesn’t need a new part, maybe we just need some panning or a filter. It’s the remix mentality from the
first record; what can we do with the same parts?
“I never listen to the panning in headphones until we’re pretty much done with the mix. The nature of how
headphones isolate things to your left or right ear means you hear panned elements much sharper and you’re more
conservative with how you build effects. If you’re sitting in a room with stereo speakers they’re still blended in with
the sound of the room, so you can push up stuff crazy loud and do crazy things with them. Later, when you put the
headphones on, you think, ‘shit, that’s really loud in the left ear!’
“There are a lot of different ways you can pan things in a mix, whether it’s organically by recording it stereo, or using
outboard or plug-ins to put it in that space. There were so many layered parts on the first Garbage record that were
panned left and right. We’d pan a dry sound in the verse to the right and have another part in the left channel that
we’d filter really tiny so you could barely hear it. It was just trying to keep your brain moving, so every time a new
section of the song came up you’d get some new ear candy.”
MIX ’N’ MATCH

Over time, Garbage mixing duties have moved from a partnership between Butch and Billy, to Billy primarily mixing
with Butch helping tweak it towards the end. They’ve developed a trust that allows Butch to stay in the
songwriter/band member mode for longer. Billy: “My goal with a Garbage record is to have something that sounds
immediate, but also on subsequent listens, discover layers you haven’t heard before. The mix also has to channel the
emotion attached to the song as much as possible. I ask myself the question, ‘Am I getting the emotional response
off it I should?’”
Once everything is laid out in the session, with all his routing intact. Billy always starts with a combination of the
groove and the vocal. He’ll start with the loudest section of the song and get it to be as loud as possible, then work
the dynamics of the rest of the mix around that. “A lot of it is finding out what are the most important moments that
need to come across,” he said. “Getting the chorus to hit really hard is about getting all the melodic and harmonic
information working. I find how to approach the frequency range of all the elements of the song, which allows you to
have multiple layers of drums and kick drums, synth basses and guitar bass and all the guitar tracks. We try to figure
out where it’s going to fit ahead of time while we’re recording. Rather than just having one super saturated guitar that
takes up all the frequencies, we figure out combinations that add weight in different areas.”
Because Garbage demo recordings can filter right through to the final master, there are times when Billy has to make
things fit. Billy: “The chorus vocal of Magnetized is the one Shirley originally tracked with an SM58 on Butch’s couch.
It was in a different key and tempo to the final track, but it had the right feel to it. Besides having to make it fit into the
structure and key of the song, I also had to tonally match it with the rest of the vocals recorded with my Telefunken
ELA M251. Trying to make an SM58 sound like 251 has its challenges, but I managed to get away with it.
“Conversely, on Even Though Our Love Is Doomed Shirley wanted to take one line of one verse she sung in my
studio and try make the Telefunken sound like a 58! I would sometimes slide over into Logic and use the EQ Match
feature or just use radical EQ and compression. I had to try and find the elements that were working in the mix for the
rest of the song and make the microphone fit into that.”
Sometimes it’s not just one part Billy has to manipulate, but an entire section.
Billy: “The band want to get ideas down quickly, but invariably the tempo and key almost always changes. They write
a lot of songs from the chorus or the bridge, then write a verse much later. It might make the chorus uncomfortable
to sing, so they change it. Still, they might really like the tone of the original take so we might drop it down a whole
step and speed it up 8bpm. It’ll be a combination of Serrato or Melodyne, and sometimes cutting it by hand to get it
to the proper tempo. It’s not to say they’re lazy, it’s about keeping the magic.
“The most we time stretched something was 18bpm. They’re always relaxed and super chilled when they write, so it
tends to be a much slower tempo. I’m always speeding it up. Sometimes we’ll already be in mix mode and someone
will suggest one bpm faster, then I’ll have to Elastic Audio the entire song!
“A lot of that stuff used to be a real nightmare on tape. It’s a lot faster now, and allows the band to stay in a more
creative place for longer because they have a computer to create 65,000 takes on. It used to be, ‘Can you speed this
up 2bpm?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, okay, go to lunch and come back in an hour and see how it turned out.’”
Butch: “A lot of Garbage songs come together in the final mix. We have a tendency to record a lot more ideas than
necessary and not discard them. Once we start an idea for a song — whether it’s a jam or a demo — we just keep
adding. Most of the songs are defined by what we take out.
“It can be a stressful experience in the mix. It usually takes us two or three days to mix a track because we’re often
making the final decision of what the final arrangement is going to be. The four of us argue about all those things,
and we don’t always agree. More often than not a Garbage song has a path it goes on, and none of us are really sure
where that path is going to go until we print the final mix.”
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10/8/2018 INSIDE BUTCH VIG'S HOME STUDIO

HOME MAGAZINE NEWS FEATURES REVIEWS TUTORIALS SUBSCRIBE CONTACT