Don Zientara has made a career out of recording some of the most revolutionary music of the three decades. From recording with archetypal hardcore band Minor Threat in his basement to creating a purpose-built studio in a commercial space near Washington, DC, Zientara has established Inner Ear Studios as a place where creativity rules.

Zientara has kept his finger on the pulse of the movement with his friend and long time colleague, Ian MacKaye of Dischord Records. Together the pair have help shaped the sound of the post-punk movement. Although mainstream intervention has stolen a few of the bands, the remaining musicians and producers associated with the studio continue to create brilliant recordings, which constantly push the boundaries of modern music.

He says about the early days of Inner Ear: “You have to remember the attitude of punk music at the time. It was a movement that didn’t have much credence with mainstream music, and some would say not at all. They were free to try anything they damn well pleased because no-one was paying them any attention anyway. In the words of Janis Joplin [sic], ‘Freedom is just another name for nothing left to lose.’ They had nothing left to loose by shouting as loud as they can. And it someone heard them, good. If not, then that’s the way it goes.”

Zientara stumbled into the DC punk scene by accident. He moved to the area to pursue a masters degree in painting and print making at West Virginia University. He was soon taken by the Vietnam draft, which led him to a job working with art and painting for the army in Washington DC. After his service he began working at the city’s National Gallery of Art, at first framing pictures and drawings, but then in the gallery’s recording studio. 

After five years managing a private studio, he got tired of not being behind the board and started his own business. His first studio was a rudimentary set up consisting of a porch-side control room, a low speed four-track tape recorder and Shure mixers that were essentially volume controls for the microphones.

“I had no tone controls at all. If something needed a different tone I would simply move the mic or use a different mic, which were all crappy, so it didn’t matter anyway,” he jokes.
“For reverb units I used my Fender twin reverb amp and simply routed things that needed reverb into one channel and yanked the reverb up all the way.”

The porch control room was soon moved into a furnace room in the basement of his home where summer mixing sessions were done in nothing more than a pair of underwear.

Due to publicity from recording early Dischord artists, he moved into a bigger space and built a proper studio from the ground up. Inner Ear now houses an Amek Angela Console with Mackie automation and Neve preamps, an Otari
MTR-90 24-track, two-inch tape machine and an industry standard Pro Tools set up.

The Amek board has served him well over the years and is still in place for recording. He explains: “It is a very flexible board. It has thousands of buttons on it and there are many different ways of routing things. It is an in-line board with Neve Class A discrete preamps. There are six dedicated auxes and sends, but there are ways to route another 24.”

A unique collection of microphones also helps craft the sound of recordings made at Inner Ear. “I don’t have a particular sound I want to put on the band. They have a sound they want and I just pick the mics that I deem appropriate to get the sound they are going for.”

He commonly uses Neumann’s M 149 tube mic for recording vocals, as well as a Milab VIP-50 with a rectangular diaphragm. He also uses Neumann SM 69 stereo mics for drum overheads.

“I have problems or solutions for certain sounds. I use old AKG PA mics that are neat for guitars because they have a restricted frequency range, which is the main thing people should consider when choosing a mic. These days there are broad specs for mics – 80,000 cycles down to 20,000: this is unnecessary. Mics should really focus on the mid-range area. Extremes are sexy to listen to, deep thumping bass and dog whistle-type treble sounds are good, but they not as memorable as something that has midrange shaped and sculpted to sound good.”

Some older throwback pieces used at Inner Ear include an Alesis MidiVerb 2. “It has a few programs that I use almost every mix, chorus and reverbs that I can’t do without,” he continues. He also has four compressors of his own design that are based on LA-2s optical solid-state compressors that are continually in use.

“Other weird things that I use are the SE-70 Boss box. It has some neat effects and chains of effects. I also like the Amex 9098 compressors designed by Neve, as well as ADL and Drawmer compressors and gates. I have about 20 different compressors that do certain things well. For bass I use a dbx 160 compressor because I know it works really well. Then there is the Fostex compressor that wasn’t great at the time, but it works well with kick drums and snares if you use them correctly.

“I use the board preamps a lot, but I have others like the Blue Robbie that I use on the kick drum. It has a deep rich sound and a loosened dampening factor, which is another thing that engineers should consider: the dampening factor for different preamps and amplifiers they are using.

“If you want a nice thick sound you shouldn’t use something that has tight dampening. You want something that has a roll off at the tail end of the envelope and a very quick attack to get the snap and the heft of the drum.

“The same theory applies to monitoring. I have been getting into monitoring and I have five pairs, Westlake BBSM-12s, Mackie HR824s, Yamaha NS10s and a few others that I jump between during mixing. Some have the dampening at the end where it tails off and produce a nice thick sound, but too much of a tail is too muddy.”

Zientara makes a point to know each piece of equipment intimately, re-reading the manual for each piece of gear several times. He believes that one of the problems with modern recording gear is by the time an engineer gets to know a piece of equipment it is obsolete.

“It is sad that you can’t set yourself up to do recording these days,” he goes on. “Instead, you buy into a rental programme where you are getting equipment and paying rent on it, but anything in your set up, if it is modern, is going to be obsolete in a very short time.

“Things like the Lexicon PCM-70 were extremely deep and were around for a long time. I have one, and I am still learning about it, and it still has life to it, but it has been usurped by a lot of other things.”

Aside from his collection of hand picked gear, the extremely modest Zientara cannot give a proper explanation why so many bands have been so successful after recording at Inner Ear. “People have asked that before and I will be damned if I know,” he laughs. “I suspect that it is probably my work style and how I approach things. It has always been very experimental from my end. That is what music is. When a band comes in, there are very few cookie-cutter ways to do things. I might pick a mic that I used previously on the guitar or snare, but beyond that everything is kind of new.

“I like to think that you come into a session hearing a snare drum for the first time. First you think of the best way to hear the drum in the song, how it fits with the other instruments and then you try to fit it in and see if that works, rather than recording a good sounding snare drum and hoping it works for the song. That is a backwards way of doing it.”

Years of experience as a studio owner and engineer have taught Zientara to be sceptical about the gear of the minute and choose pieces that have depth and longevity, a mind set that only further develops the recording coming out of the studio. The creativity of the musicians and producers using Inner Ear is tantamount to the inventive techniques used during the session. In his words: “Music needs to kick the world around a little bit and make it take notice.”
www.innerearstudio.com