Kevin Shirley  
       

Evolving Techniques for The Black Crowes
By Paul Verna

In one of the most dramatic mindset shifts since the dawn of humankind, the caveman -- renowned for his adherence to such rudimentary tools as clubs, sticks, and analog tape -- has embraced the digital audio workstation.

One specimen in particular, Kevin "the Caveman" Shirley, has used Pro Tools -- the grandaddy of workstations -- on projects by Tina Arena, The Black Crowes, Journey, Iron Maiden, and up-and-coming rock act the Healing Sixes, which features drummer Jason Bonham.

For a guy who made his mark with analog productions for the likes of Aerosmith, Rush, and the Baby Animals, the Caveman was not an instant convert to the DAW paradigm. For a long time, he had misgivings about transferring his 2-inch masters to a computer. Gradually, however, Shirley began to see his peers perform virtual miracles in the Pro Tools domain and became intrigued about the possibilities of the system. His first actual taste of editing in Pro Tools came during a session for The Black Crowes album By Your Side.

Shirley explains: "We recorded a horn section for The Black Crowes at Daniel Lanois' Kingsway studio in New Orleans, which didn't have an isolated control room. The console was in the center of the live room, so you couldn't monitor properly until after the fact. When I took the tapes to the mixing studio, I was less than happy with the results. There were time-domain problems in the horn parts and some tuning problems as well. At the time, I was reluctant to get into Pro Tools, but once I saw and heard what it could do, I was hooked. There was no turning back."

For that session, as well as some of the other early Pro Tools dates he did, Shirley hired producer/engineer/musician Pat Thrall as his operator. As much as he appreciated Thrall's tutelage, however, Shirley grew restless to get behind the computer and do his own editing, nudging and processing.
"I kept leaving grubby fingerprints on Pat's screen," recalls Shirley. "I'd say, 'There! That one there. Move that note,' and I'd point to it on the screen. And Pat would say, 'Take your finger off my screen!'"

At that point, Shirley bought himself TDM and 001 systems and got to work learning the ins and outs of Pro Tools.
His TDM rig is enclosed in a custom rack built by Vin Guttman of Woodstock, N.Y.-based Märc Inc. It features a Macintosh G3 computer, an Aardvark master clock, a Digidesign Universal Slave Driver, Rourke SCSI drives, an AIT backup unit with Retrospect, and three Digidesign 888|24 I/O units.
Shirley still cuts his basic tracks to analog tape but uses Pro Tools extensively in the editing and mixing stages. By now, most of his projects get transferred to Pro Tools after the initial tracking date, and the overdubs happen right in the computer. (Shirley particularly appreciates the ease with which Pro Tools allows him to record and comp vocals.)

For mixing, Shirley uses the workstation as his multitrack, taking discrete outputs -- usually 48 -- and sending them to a large-format console. When I caught up with him, the studio veteran was mixing an Iron Maiden live album and DVD in 5.1-channel surround at the Hit Factory's Studio 1. The project turned out to be a case study in Shirley's use of Pro Tools.

"It was a huge show," says Shirley. "They played in front of 300,000 at the Rock in Rio Festival in Brazil, and the crowd was going nuts. By going into the lead vocal track, I was able to minimize the live artifacts by doing lots of fades. Also, I was able to help the drum sound with SoundReplacer."
While such techniques were possible -- if cumbersome -- in the linear domain, the ability to see waverforms on the screen has greatly facilitated Shirley's post-production task in live projects.

"One of the most fascinating things about Pro Tools is you can look at the waveforms and see where things are happening in a live situation," he says. "You don't have to listen to hours and hours of tracks to find that one little thing you're looking for."

Besides the Iron Maiden project, Shirley has worked on live releases for Journey and Jimmy Page & The Black Crowes, always relying on Pro Tools for surgical editing of parts.

On the studio side, Shirley makes much more extensive use of the medium. For instance, on the Healing Sixes project, some songs underwent substantial revisions in the structure and arrangement -- changes that were facilitated by Pro Tools.
"After Jason recorded his drum parts, he went away to work on another project," explains Shirley. "Using his parts as the foundation, we were able to move elements around. I'd say to Doug, the singer, 'I think you can make this chorus touch more people if you change it around a bit.' So I'd do my edit and show it to him. That was a stunning example of how Pro Tools can work more as a creative tool than a nitpicky, bar-for-bar tool."

Now a complete convert to Pro Tools, Shirley routinely takes his drives with him wherever a project takes him. For the mixing of Jimmy Page & the Black Crowes' Live at the Greek, it was a Concorde flight from New York to Paris. For Tina Arena's "The Flame" (for the 2000 Sydney Olympics), sessions took place in New York, Melbourne, and Sydney, with Pro Tools acting as the common technological link among those locations. For Shirley's work with Joe Satriani, drives have flown back and forth between the guitarist's San Francisco home base and New York. In fact, Shirley and Satriani have collaborated extensively but never met in person!

A native of South Africa, Shirley emigrated to Australia, where he got his big break working with the likes of Baby Animals and Silverchair. He now resides in New York, where he roams the streets wielding a caveman's club...and a hot-swappable drive.