The town of Vienna is known for certain businesses, such as restaurants, salons, the 17 banks that line Maple Avenue, the specialty shops on Church Street. But a different kind of business is being carried out underground — in the basement of Kevin Gutierrez's house on Brian Drive. This is the home of Assembly Line Studios, where, for 10 years, tracks with titles like "Necessary Evil" and "The Funeral Parlor's Secret" have been captured, crafted and unleashed.
Although music from genres as diverse as pop, country and punk has filtered through Gutierrez's mixers, his specialties, he said, are hard rock and heavy metal. "I grew up listening to all the heavy metal stuff — Kiss, Metallica, Slayer, Venom, Tigers of Pantang," he said. Then there was the "crazy underground stuff." He still plays guitar, drums and bass for the experimental death metal band Project: Failing Flesh.
Gutierrez, 36, said he started out freelancing at various studios, but, "Eventually, I got sick of working for other people." Recording gear had also become more affordable, so he set up a small home studio in Dale City, where he was living at the time, and began to conduct a recording session every week or two, as the opportunity arose. Business picked up quickly. Now, he said, "This is full-time and then some, trust me." Three or four bands may come through the studio in a day.
TO KEEP WORKING full-time during earlier years, he said, he took whatever recording jobs came his way. Then, in 2004, he recorded the album "As the Weird Travel On" for a heavy metal band called Deceased, which consisted of high school friends he had not seen in 15 years. "I was like, this is what I enjoy. This is what I'm best at," he said.
Gutierrez hired two engineers, Ben McCall and Katie Boyle. McCall works full-time at the studio, and Boyle is also the national program director for XM Radio's Liquid Metal station. "We three got together and said, there's so much good metal around here, and hard rock, and people just don't know how to get it slammed to tape," said Gutierrez.
"We each bring our own preferences," said McCall, who played in punk and grunge bands until he moved to Herndon from Nashville at age 19 and became more interested in programming and recording music. Gutierrez, he said, works the range from hard rock to "the really technical, death metal-type stuff. I pull in a lot of punk-type bands, screamo, emo-type stuff." Boyle brings an appetite for nu-metal and grindcore.
This does not mean they never set foot outside their comfort zones. The last album Gutierrez recorded was by local alternative country singer Amy Sullivan. "Nobody around here does this kind of music," he said. Gutierrez also brought his rock sensibilities to some of the album's drum tracks, he said, noting that playing outside one's genre can create a distinct sound.
Too often, at local clubs, he said, he hears bands that play well but sound remarkably like other, established bands. "I'm like, 'Four years ago, if you were doing this, I would have been impressed. But now, I hate it. It's been done.'"
ASIDE FROM BEING his own boss, the job has other perks for Gutierrez. He recently finished recording an album for the veteran British heavy metal band Raven, "who were my childhood heroes," he said. "I used to jump around on my bed with my badminton racquet, playing air guitar to those guys. Who would've thought, 20 years later, I'm working with them."
He and Boyle also recently mixed a song by the band Ghost Machine for the soundtrack to the movie "Saw III," although, he said, he has not yet gotten around to seeing the movie.
McCall noted that the job can afford a different perspective on people from other fields of work. Some, who are stock brokers, doctors and lawyers by day, can be found emulating their rock 'n' roll heroes by night in the studio, he said.
"They still want to be rock stars," said Gutierrez. "I think it just shows how powerful music is."
Then, of course, there are the colorful stories of veteran rockers. "It's VH1, sitting down here," said Gutierrez. "This is 'Behind the Music.'" He launched into a wild story, as recounted to him by a longtime heavy metal drummer. It will have to suffice to say the lengthy tale involved a deck of tarot cards discovered on a table sealed inside a wall; a haunted house; Salem, Mass.; the demonologist who inspected the original "Amityville Horror" house; the death of Cliff Burton, Metallica's first bass player; and, ultimately, redemption. "This is the kind of stuff you can't make up," he assured.
The engineers have their own stories, of fights between husbands and wives, fistfights between band members. "You see guys get into fights over guitar solos, what notes to sing," said Gutierrez. Such tales are familiar to "any studio person," he said.
Some musicians have to sing lying on a couch, some need all the lights out, some need the cords strung up the stairs so they can record outside. Before they record, he said, some performers have to wash their hands or take out their contacts, put in eye drops, change their pants ....
"Or take off their pants," McCall interjects. "That's why I'm glad that window doesn't go all the way down." He indicates a plate glass window between the mixing equipment and one of the band rooms.
AS WELL AS PATIENCE for personal idiosyncrasies, a recording engineer needs to have an appreciation for a musician's genre and a familiarity with his or her work. "You always want to check a band out before you record them," said McCall.
However, said Gutierrez, familiarity and appreciation are not enough. "More and more, everybody's got a laptop. Everybody's got the ability to record music," he said, noting that the skill lies in creating or recreating a sound. He equated the difference in sound production between death metal bands Entombed and Cradle of Filth to the difference between recording Mariah Carey and James Brown, and he noted that not anyone would know how to create one sound or the other.
Ultimately, he said, the quality of a recording also depends on the amount of time — and, therefore, money — that is spent on it. "Some guys might spend three months on 10 songs, and it'll sound like a national record," he said, adding that others might spend a day on three songs. Sullivan, he said, spent nearly a year on five songs, so that every note and drum beat received attention. However, no track is complete until it sounds "like something you would buy," he said, and not like a demo tape — not, one might say, like it was recorded in someone's basement.
"And therein lies the art of what we do," said McCall.
AS GUTIERREZ AND McCall discussed their craft, a local band began hauling its equipment into the studio. The band members, who looked to be around 20, hailed from Fairfax and Manassas and called themselves Prodigium.
"It's a Latin word," said lead guitarist Jonathan Henry. "It means, 'message of doom or destruction.'" He said they came to the studio because they had heard a demo cut at Assembly Line for another band, called Adversary, "and it sounded really good." They had not been impressed by their last studio experience.
While the drummer, Jesse Forrest, began setting up the drums, Gutierrez was already getting down to work. Although he had heard a previous recording of one of the band's songs, he asked to hear a track by any band that could give him an idea of the sound Prodigium wanted for this recording. "We're not copying anybody, but just to give me an idea," he told them.
"Hey, Jesse, what kind of drums are you going for?" asked Henry.
"A combo of All That Remains and As I Lay Dying."
After a quick listen to a band member's iPod, Gutierrez and Henry began laying down a preliminary "click track," making a rough recording of a song's rhythm guitar part over a metronome beat. This would orient Forrest while he pounded out the drum track, Gutierrez said. Each instrument's final track would be recorded separately, beginning with the drums, he said, noting that trying to record more than one instrument at once "gets chaotic."
"That's what we did at the last place," said Henry. "This is so much cooler."