Audio Pro

Ed Stasium’s career started at the age of 12 when he first laid eyes on a tape recorder. From that day he was obsessed with recording sound and has forged a very impressive career doing so, working with everyone from Mick Jagger and Freddy Mercury, to Joe Strummer and The Ramones.

Since his days recording in studios in New York City and Los Angeles, he has retreated to the snowy terrain of Durango, Colorado, USA. With a full Pro Tools HD 3 Accel system, Stasium records in the comfort of his home studio with the freedom to work in his pyjamas – should he so prefer. Stasium recently spoke to AudioPro about his new studio and his work with New York City punk band The Ramones.

As a young rocker growing up in the 70s, Stasium started recording with his own bands. After a short stint working in the shipping department at Ampeg and a record deal that lead nowhere, he found himself living in his mom’s basement, broke with a baby on the way. He soon met up with Tony Camillo and Tony Bongiovi, owners of central New Jersey’s Venture Sound studios.

Stasium left Venture Sound and found a spot at Le Studio Morin Heights in Quebec, Canada. During a freelance gig in NYC he ran into Tony Bongiovi who was just starting his new studio, Power Station (now Avatar) on West 53rd street in Manhattan. At the same time, The Ramones were looking for a new producer for their second album, Leave Home. Bongiovi hired Stasium to work on the album; this was the first of ten albums he would work on with the band over the next three decades.

The next album, Rocket to Russia, was done entirely on Neve consoles. While most of the tracking and overdubs were done at Media Sound Studio in New York, the vocals and mixing was done at Power Station, both of which had Neves.

“They were building the control room at Power Station around us while we were working on the album, so we were actually working at nights; the only thing that was completed was the control room. Rocket was actually the first project done at Power Station.

“We used the typical set up of an AKG D12 on the kick drum, Sennheiser 421s on toms, a Shure 57 on the snare, AKG 414s as overheads, Neumann U87s and 57s on guitars, an AKG 451 on the high hat and an Electrovoice RE20 on the bass amp.

“This was before the rack of 24 Pultecs was installed at Power Station, and we didn’t use any digital reverbs. The only reverb we had was in the stair well. We would put a pair of JBL 4310s in there with a couple of U87s and record the reverb return from the stair well. The outboard that we did use was an Eventide Harmonizer H910 and an Allison Research Keypex rack (noise gate).

“We all played live in the room at Media Sound with very minimal overdubs. We did double Johnny’s guitar; we used some different textures with the guitars and some acoustic guitar tracks.”

Stasium recorded with the Ramones throughout the 80s, including his role as musical director for the End of The Century album recorded by Phil Spector.

When asked how Spector’s work with the Ramones changed the dynamic of the tight-knit group, Stasium answers: “Do you have eight hours for me to explain everything? The guy would go into the bathroom and come out with a different outfit on and a different personality. Luckily we made it through the sessions. Some people in the band liked the way it came out and some hated it; Joey loved it.”

The most well documented account during the making of End of the Century is the story of Spector making the band record the opening note of Rock and Roll High School for an alleged eight hours straight. Spector paced madly around the
room screaming and cursing at Larry Levine, the engineer, making the band record the note hundreds of times.

The extravagant and, arguably, bonkers Spector gave the band a more produced sound with more instrumentation including keyboards and horns that added a more pop sound characteristic of Spector’s work in the 60s with bands like the Ronettes than the raw, punk sound of their earlier recordings.

The band never worked with Spector again and the album failed to receive the commercial success they had hoped for. For the next album Stasium was involved with, Too Tough to Die, the band enlisted their original drummer, Tommy Erdelyi as producer. With Stasium at the controls and Erdelyi lending a hand, they returned to recording songs in classic Ramones style.

Stasium’s work with the Ramones was a very organic process, which focused on getting the sounds of the instruments as they sounded live. The albums serve as proof that a good band; good songs and a creative engineer can carve deep notches into the foundation of music history, a legacy that earned the band a spot in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame.

He explains: “We were just experimenting and getting the sound of the band; I do remember when Johnny (Ramone) came in with the Sex Pistols record and said, ‘I want to sound better than this,’ but we weren’t trying to sound like anyone
else. We were just getting the power of the Ramones’ songs down on tape.”

Other recording credits for Stasium include: Living Colour’s Vivid; Motörhead’s 1916; Talking Heads 77, Mick Jagger’s Primative Cool and The Smithereens’ 11. He also worked on singles with Freddy Mercury and Joe Strummer.

With a career of recording triumphs under his belt and a distaste for the music scene in Los Angeles, Stasium retreated to Durango and built a Pro Tool’s studio that runs on version 7.4 of the HD 3 Accel system. Although initially cynical and reluctant to switch to the digital format, he is very happy with the Digidesign set up as his only form of recorder in the studio.

“I fought it for a long time, but it gives me the flexibility to work on many different projects at the same time. I continually juggle about four projects at a time, and I am able to have a two minute change over between each one. Working in this format is the best thing for me right now,” explains Stasium.

“I use Trident, Spectrasonics, Avalon, Altec and dbx preamps on the input side for recording, and I mix in Pro Tools entirely in the box using Bomb Factory, Digidesign, Eventide, Focusrite, IK Multimedia, Line 6, Massenburg, Metric Halo, Sony Oxford, and Trillium Lane Labs plugins. I run the analog outputs of Pro Tools into a Dangerous 2-Bus analogue summing mixer and run it's output to a couple of Trident EQs, and a dbx 160S compressor on the back end for the stereo master mix."

The songs and sound of The Ramones still serve as sonic templates for punk and rock n' roll bands at every level. You won’t find many bands that don’t note The Ramones as one of their influences or musicians that don’t have a worn-out Ramones tshirt in their closet. Stasium’s legacy of crafting sound continues to inspire engineers and musicians all over the globe.