What was your entry into recording?
I came up as a professional drummer through my 20s. In 1999, I got married and had kids. I was less into traveling, so I took a four-day class in New York City and became Pro Tools certified. I had no experience engineering, but I could run Pro Tools. I got a [Digidesign] Digi 001 at home. I called Jerry Marotta [Tape Op #33], who I didn't really know but I'd worked with a little bit. He had a cool, small studio he still runs in his basement called Jersville [Studio]. I always admired him as a drummer, so I called him and I asked if he needed any help with Pro Tools. He said, “I'm sitting here right now. Come over.” So, it all began. I ended up interning at his studio for about a year and a half. Just doing anything so I could hang out.
That must have been some good experience.
He had a second house that was the studio and everything was set up. It was really just for him and his projects – records he was playing on. We had an 18-mic set up on the drums that was fixed. We were doing a lot of drum tracking. And then bands were coming in – Tony Levin [Tape Op #33] was there a lot – and we were cutting rhythm sections for them. I got a lot of experience. Then, the main engineer quit one day.
In the middle of work?
No, he was cool about it. But there were definitely bookings on the calendar. One of which was Pierre Marchand, coming into town to have Tony and Jerry play on a Sarah McLachlan record [Afterglow] at Jerry's studio. Jerry asked me if I wanted to do it. I was terrified. He said, "Don't worry. You'll be fine." I did it, and the record did very well. I got a lucky break there.
You were engineering the rhythm section, but did you get to work on the whole record?
No, we just did drums and bass. I'm not even 100 percent sure how much of the Jerry tracks stuck. But that got me some credits and then I got busy after that.
With Pro Tools and being a drummer, do you feel that helped with building up your editing skills?
Definitely. I was always the go to guy for anything: [Digidesign] Beat Detective. Moving parts around. That was my forte in Pro Tools. It did help a lot with understanding rhythm and knowing how things should sound. That was a bit of a double-edged sword, I would say.
How so?
You've got to be careful about manipulating music, as I'm sure you know. I frown upon it at this point. We do it a little, of course, but it's so much more preferable to have the person replay the part.
Where did your career go after Sarah's record?
I started to get calls to work at different studios around town. Dreamland [Recording] was one of them. I was working with Joel [Bluestein], the owner there. I was working at Jerry's and a bunch of other studios in town. I had a small studio in my house called Flymax [Sound]. There was a lot of jumping around a lot of moving studios. Flymax has been in seven different spaces over 20 years. We did some cool stuff in my studio, like Bedouin Soundclash. I was still doing a bunch with Jerry for things on ABC television, and a lot of corporate gigs as well as music. I continued to play drums professionally, but it wasn't my main source of income. I rocked out at Flymax for about six years, but I finally felt it was too small. I was at a cottage on my property. Aaron Comess, [the drummer] from Spin Doctors, did a solo record there. The guys from Bad Brains were in there a bunch. But it was tight. Then Jerry was also looking for a new studio in 2008, and he went over to Dreamland, which had been closed for about seven years. Joel had kept it for his own private sessions. There's a cottage on the same property as the main studio there. Jerry asked me if I would come along to look at the cottage to be his new studio. We went over there; it was small and right on the road. But the caretaker let us in, and we're like, "What's going on in the main studio?" He says, "Nothing. Do you want to see it?" We went in there, and there was an API discrete console – one of the first Paul Wolff designs. It was off and hadn't been on in five years. Joel said anytime he turned it on, he blew up a module. There were magazines on the counter from 2001. Jerry's friends with Joel, and one of the people that helped get Dreamland off the ground in the '80s. He called and asked Joel what he would think if he and I started doing sessions there. Joel said, "You're crazy, but go for it." It's a gorgeous studio and a vintage gear paradise.
There's classic gear there.
So, we started to do that. We were bringing in friends and productions and having fun. We started giving Joel some money. He was happy. And quickly, a friend who's an engineer said, "Oh, can I bring in a record?" That happened a couple of times. Chris Coady [Tape Op #113, #168] came in and started doing records there. Fleet Foxes did some of Helplessness Blues [with Phil Ek (#29)] there. Then it was booked all the time. And I was the chief engineer, and I couldn't work there that much.
Other engineers were coming in?
Yeah; it was cool, but it got to be challenging. We did it for four years and got it off the ground. It was an incredible experience. I bailed in 2014, and Jerry totally understood.
Is Dreamland still going?
Yeah. It's killing it.
What was your path after Dreamland?
That was 2012, and I disappeared for about six months. There was a local venue in Woodstock, New York, called Colony – a gorgeous stone building. I worked out a deal with the owner where I rented the building from her and put a studio in there at the end of 2013. I was booking the shows. We did about 80 shows in 2014, and we were making live records. I put a split off the stage. Bands were paying me to come there. I'd let them keep the door, but I'd get a fee and the owner would get the bar [sales]. We did that for a while, and then, in 2015, I got recruited to move over to the Bearsville Theater and be the manager. I was also in charge of the sound, and I was the technical director. I did that for about a year. That's where I really got into mixing front of house.
You'd started doing front of house at Colony initially?
Yeah, and then I was doing it a lot. We were doing two shows a week. I also had people helping, so we were often recording it from a separate room. I was doing a lot of running back and forth. And then I got brought into the local radio station, WDST, to do all the live broadcasts. We were doing three mixes: Monitors for the stage, sound for the band, and the feed for the radio, which is really its own mix. It's so much pressure. It's crazy. It can't be the house mix, because if the guitar amp is cranking in the room, it's not going to get into the broadcast. We were doing a separate, additive mix for the broadcast.
Were you doing that all from one console? Using aux sends?
Yeah. We were using auxes and matrixes off the console. I could sit in my car outside the radio station, put on the FM radio, and listen to the broadcast. I’d have an iPad so I could mix the broadcast in the car.
That's one of the advantages of newer technology, isn't it?
It was killer.
How long were you at the Bearsville Theater?
I did it for about two years. What I realized is I don't really want to be in a bar late at night. Then I got some cool gigs doing freelance studio work and front of house. A friend of mine was the promoter for Newport Jazz Festival, so he brought me in for that and the [Newport] Folk Festival. I was in charge of one of the stages; myself and my friend, Pete Hanlon, mixed 90 percent of the bands on that stage for the festivals, unless they brought their own person.
That'd be a wonderful variety of artists!
It was a great experience. Judy Collins to The Decemberists, it was cool. I was freelancing around town doing studio sessions. A lot at my friend Darryl Jenifer's house, from Bad Brains. He has a home studio called Soldier. I also helped design and build studios. I was doing everything, but I missed having my own place. Everything was in storage. So, in 2017 I set up a small studio in Kingston, New York, to have a place, and I kept freelancing. I had a spot I could mix, and I could also do sessions as well as freelance. Then I got a bigger place at the same location. It was an old IBM complex, and I had a firehouse there for two years. We could play music with the garage doors open! There was nobody around. Then, the property was purchased by some investors who came in and they wanted four times as much rent. So, I left. A woman, Lizzie Vann, had bought the Bearsville Theater property, which has the Theater, Utopia Studios, three restaurants, as well as a number of houses and cottages.
Is this what Albert Grossman had set up years ago?
Yes. It was the renovation of the Bearsville Theater, and he'd built Utopia for Todd Rundgren as a video studio. It had been run by Bearsville throughout the '80s and '90s, then WDST, our local radio station, moved in there and made it their home until 2020. That's where we had done a lot of the live broadcasts.
I saw your photos of Utopia and I was thinking it looked like a video studio.
Yeah, it's a black box. The depth is about 40 by 45 with 32-foot ceilings, and with two-foot thick concrete walls. And a lighting grid with 250 circuits, all 20 to 50 amps. We got a bunch of the lights from Saturday Night Live. They went to LEDs. I have a lighting guy and a director working with me. They also built it with this amazing infrastructure control room and booths looking down on it. Albert had so much money at that time, and everything he did was over the top.
What a luxury to be able to step into that scenario where the infrastructure’s done.
I certainly wouldn't build it. I don't know who would! The radio station had chopped up all the control rooms into small booths, but the window was still there looking into the live room. I first rented a small room in 2022 to have a mix room after I left Kingston. There was nothing going on in the building. The owner had renovated everything and made it gorgeous. But it wasn't getting tenants, so she was approaching me and said, "Pete, come set up a studio here." I started to talk to her more about what it would take, and we negotiated a long-term lease. It's definitely a big overhead, but it's an incredible room with a beautiful sound. The curtains make it. She bought these gorgeous velvet curtains from India, and we can pull the curtains and make it live.
One of the interesting things about this new space is that you're multi-purposing it. Does that feel like a little more stability, financially?
It definitely does. The video clients can pay a lot. I have a couple of long rentals coming up for records where it'll just be music. But the video work is interesting to me. It's a new dimension in my work. I'm learning very quickly and I'm surrounding myself with people who are very experienced. We've had films come in and they take over the space. All they want is a black box that's quiet, and power. It's a big facility with commercial bathrooms and there's tons of parking, for even a truck.
I saw an overview photo and there are almost parks around it.
The owner built parks around it. There are the three restaurants and bars on the property. It feels like you're in a city, even though we're in the middle of nowhere. Going to the country to make a record is awesome, but sometimes you're in a barn in the woods.
What other kind of work do you get?
We're doing performance videos a lot now. A lot of bands, if they're up and coming and they have a record, they need something to show that they can do it live. We're doing multi-camera shoots with all 6K cameras that we purchased. We'll bring in a whole team and a lighting director. One of the things I've learned is how to record a band live in the room with everybody playing. No gobos. No overdubs. No problem.
What are some of the tricks that help isolation?
Don't worry about it! [laughter] I mean, the biggest issue is with the vocal mics having drums in them.
Yeah, totally.
So, it's all about placement and choosing the right mic. The curtains help because there's direct signal hitting the mic. We're not getting much reverb if I leave all the curtains down. It's pretty dead. I did a jazz record [Forest] with Marilyn Crispell and Harvey Sorgen. Marilyn's a great piano player, definitely on the avant-garde side. They were in the room together. I'm sure you've done a lot of this, and you know it could be a major issue: Drums in the piano.
Oh, yeah.
It ruins everything. Harvey taught me a lot. He's like, "You know what the trick is? You've got to put the drums really close to the piano."
Right? Isn't that weird? Less reverb.
Yeah. The thing with recording live is just moving it all around until it sounds good.
Do you try to move the singers away from the drums, or so their mics aren't pointing back at the drums?
Yeah. That's exactly right.
Does that ever encounter resistance, as far as stage plot for the artists and sight lines?
It hasn't. I think people want me to tell them because I do it a lot. They want to know what's the best way to do it. I've got to play with the polarity a little bit. Sometimes I'll flip it and it's better.
Are you delivering multitracks for live video shoots?
It depends. Not everybody even wants it. They just want the video, which shocks me. Because we're making a live record. I probably work too hard on the mix! I'm a tweaker, and I keep going until the deadline. Usually, I'll deliver the multitracks and the mix and they'll master it, or I'll master it with some software. Not my forte, but I will for a video.
Is it nice to transition over to an album project after doing a bunch of live video work?
That's a good question. Live is super stressful in the moment, but when it's done it's so done. There's nothing to take home. You're done. You did it. It was either cool or there were problems. I'm not sure which is more stressful. The album thing depends on who the artists are. A lot of the better artists I work with don't want stress. They do shorter days, and they make it fun, which I appreciate.
It must be amazing to be a part of Bearsville and Woodstock history.
It feels great to be walking in the footsteps of what happened here. I'm the studio manager and the chief engineer. We have a tech. We have PR. We have bookkeepers. I have people working around me. But it's a huge undertaking. It's a large facility. I feel lucky. This room was an unrealized resource, and it's zoned to be a recording studio in Woodstock – one of the only areas in Woodstock where you can legally have a recording studio. It's so cool to feel like I'm in a place that has all that legacy. It's about keeping the room working with quality projects. My intention is to engineer a lot of them, but I certainly don't expect to engineer all of them! 
