Greg Thompson in the spotlight part 1
Posted on December 17, 2007
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Greg Thompson has been a pro audio engineer for about 15 years. He cites his first love as making rock records. He’s worked with artists like 50 Cent, Iggy Pop, Norah Jones, The Killers, Pink, Sherryl Crow, and more than a careers worth of others.
“I’m the chief engineer at Kampo in Greenwich Village. I work regularly as a crew member on ABC’s Good Morning America, on the Record Plant Remote truck, and I freelance when I can. I spent a long time at the now defunct NYC Hit Factory, but we don’t like to talk about that.”
Audiotechnews found Greg a funny, friendly and likeable guy, more than willing to share a few stories and some experience. So much so, that we took advantage of his good nature, got him drunk and REALLY got him talking.
(The drunk bit is not true).
ATN: You’ve worked with a massively eclectic array of artists now, but there must have been times in your career when you’ve thought ‘How am I meant to record this?’
So tell us about them! 
“Well, I got to spend quite a few years assisting many other engineers at many levels of the industry so I got to see all sorts of methods used on all sorts of instruments for all sorts of genres. Many engineers brought an attitude of “this is the only way to record ________” and I sort of saw through their bull, because i’d seen plenty of situations where that method either didn’t work, or there was an alternate that worked just as well. I spent time with engineers who’d spend an hour on each instrument swapping mics out and wearing out musicians, and guys who got killer sounds in no time flat and worked seamlessly and invisibly with the flow of the musicians. I worked with guys who wouldn’t accept microphone substitutions when they were asking for some pretty esoteric mics in large numbers, and folks who could roll with the situation and whatever was available from the mic locker.”
“Due to the way I work with most artists (on video shoots and television related situations) there are many constraints on what I can do to change the setup. Mostly I deal with bands in a TV shoot or video shoot where there is very short turnaround between soundcheck and live performance on TV, or a video shoot where the budget for remixing is minimal, so I can’t spend much time dickering with mic choice and placement during soundcheck, and find ways to make the best of the situation. The best thing I can do is contact the bands production manager, get a feel for how easygoing their staff and band are, and look at their tech rider and see what mics of theirs I can substitute if I feel it’s going to cause a problem for me.”
“Many bands come through with a fixed touring setup that I can’t change much or the band will get cranky. Some bands will have mic endorsements and carry all their own mics and I have to deal with what they give me with minimal substitutions. More often than not, that leads to me having to deal with at least 1 element in the mix that is simply mic’ed with the wrong tool for the job.”
“Sometimes I get to choose the mics, and there are some goto mics that I’ve come to rely heavily on that will never leave me painted into a corner in any situation. They are rarely perfect for every situation, but its a catch-22 if I get too specialized in mic choices and placements. Sometimes it works out great, sometimes it works out awful.
I also have to deal with some lousy tastes in amp settings, tones and drum tunings and often I can’t voice those opinions because I haven’t heard the tones in context of a performance. Maybe that fizzed guitar is just right for the song, maybe that ringing snare is just the right thing for the band’s sound. I don’t know until after I’ve heard soundcheck. And then when soundcheck is done, all the sounds are locked in, because the monitors and ear mixes are dialed in and swapping out mics and changing tones will lead to angering monitor mixers and artists alike. Many monitor mixers I deal with are touring with the band and have a relationship that they must maintain with the artist and my screwing with them by changing out their favorite vocal mic or guitar mic or whatever will bother the artists, so it’s better for them to leave things and work around any issues on my end.”
“Generally I record everything flat/no eq directly to disk, and then apply all processing in the mix. This is partially because some of the work I do is mixed by other people, and I don’t get much time to work on getting sounds before soundcheck. For this reason I use effects and eq and compression on the tape output side of things because it frees me up in case my initial decisions were misguided. That’s not to say I don’t put eq and compression and verb and delay on the instruments as I’m getting sounds, I just don’t route those into the record path.”
ATN: Have they become career highlights for you because you worked through and delivered a successful product?
“Mm.. Hard to pick any one particular band or situation. I’m always proud when I do something for a live show or something that’s meant to be short lived like a broadcast or webstream and winds up on an album, enshrined forever. Occasionally I’ll even get credited for it too. That’s happened several times, and I’ve only found out about most of those things by being vain and tossing my name in a search engine.”
“But lets see who some of the coolest bands were:
I loved working with Evanescence as they were young and full of vigor and loved being in the studio and totally embraced the situation we were in (live mix, no multitrack for remixing) and soundchecked tons for me to dial in sounds and they wound up using that performance as a B side for an import single.
I did a shoot with Pink where no monitors had been ordered, and I was told that they could all work with in-ear monitors. Normally, Pink only wears 1 ear monitor and relies on the sound of the monitors and band for the rest. However I had the drums and guitars in isolation (we were doing a video shoot in a small recording studio) and it simply wasn’t working out for her electric band setup. She wasn’t comfortable with wearing her buds in both ears, so she said “strike it all, lets perform a couple of songs acoustic”. We reset for an acoustic performance and she sang AMAZING on 2 or 3 songs, and showcased her vocal talent a million times better than if she had just played her single with the full band.”
ATN: Do you have any particular gear that you consider puts the ‘Greg Thompson stamp’ on things? Whether its a particular mic/pre-amp for a kick drum, outboard effects or plugins?
“No. I believe that gear comes in 2 types - priceless and worthless. An original C-12 or U-47 may be as close to “priceless” as microphones get, but if it starts crackling midway through a recording, then it has just become “worthless” to me. I’ll take 10 working SM-57s over 1 “touchy” U-47. Also, because I do a ton of live band on a stage or in the same room, I never get to use something like a 47 or a C-12 because their pickup pattern is too wide for me to get a usable vocal or acoustic guitar sound. So in that situation, mics like that are worthless to me.”
“A crackly Neve preamp is worthless to me, while a clean preamp built into whatever desk I’m working on (whether it be a Mackie or Soundcraft or Allen and Heath or an SSL) capturing the recording is priceless. For that reason I often don’t request or use outboard preamplifiers. Adding outboard on the tracking side of the shows I do only increases the chances of failure in situations where there is little or no chance for a second take. I’ll take a slightly less amazing sounding preamp over a great one that craps out on me.”
“I’m not particular about must-haves. I don’t consider myself a gear snob, but the gear I work with has to do what I want it to do.
I like my mics to be pretty directional, as I don’t get much isolation on stage and I need as much help from the mics so I can bring up the things that are getting drowned out by the things that are too loud. I also like to use compressors quite a bit, and compression tends to bring up the bleed, so it’s better if I can start out with less in the source material. I like Distressors and 1176s as they have widely variable attack and release times that I can adjust to suit a variety of sources. I like the Waves C4 a whole lot on vocals when mix time comes around as it helps a lot with compensating for proximity effect on singers who don’t stay on-mic, or when they go from dark tones verses to screaming choruses. I just bought a BSS 4 band compressor to do the same thing in situations where I’m not monitoring through a DAW system with the Waves bundle. I also have to say I’m a fan of my Ampeg SVX plugin from IK. Makes any bass DI sound like a correctly mic’ed bass amp. I have to roll some of the bottom end out of their presets, but it makes most DI bass tracks much more workable in a remix situation.”
“I’ll always take a 58 as a vocal mic. Some singers sound better on other mics, but more often than not they 58 won’t do me wrong. For a while I went in search of a good all-around vocal mic that would do the job bettter than a 58 and didn’t come up with any clear winners. I prefer the SM-58 to the Beta in most circumstances.
I like the beyer M-88TG on distorted guitars and in general I prefer dynamic mics to condensers on electric guitars. They sound more like what we expect guitars to sound like and pick up less of the trebly hash that large diaphragm condensers are prone to reproducing. They also overload less easily (see trebly hash in the previous sentence)
I prefer a sennheiser 602 on kick but I’ve had great results with D-12, D-112, 421, and Shure 91.”
“I’ll try any other mic on snare, but a 57 works all the time. Those clip on sennheiser 604’s sound quite good on toms and are low profile and have less parts to fail on them than some of the other clip ons.
I like SM-81s on hat and overheads, but also like 452 and 460. I’ll use 414s for overheads as well cause they look nice on camera. The 414 picks up more of the overall kit which can be good, but if there’s a lot of bleed from the drummers wedge and nearby amps, it can be problematic. I don’t like my overheads to be placed too closely to the cymbals or else it tends to sound unnatural, but sometimes the stage volume is so loud, there’s no other way to get any separation on them.
I prefer non-bassy mics on bass amps, since the last thing I need out of their rig is more low end. Generally there’s plenty there to start with. A 421 or an m-88 have a nice presence peak that compliments the finger or pick noise without picking up overwhelming amounts of bottom end. The last thing I want on a bass guitar cabinet is a purpose built bass drum mic.
I prefer piano to be a midi module if the stage volume is anything above minimal, as the bleed into the piano tends to botch up the mix. Generally directors prefer the piano lid be fully closed, which is pretty much the worst way mic a piano, which is why I’d take a midi module over that sound that I have to hack at with parametric eq, and then have to deal with bleed of the drums and bass on top of it.”
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