Those looking to kill an afternoon talking decibels and sampling great underground Minneapolis bands should look up Adam Tucker. The co-owner of Richfield-based Signaturetone Recording is as articulate as he is passionate about his craft, ready at a moment's notice to drop fresh tracks on your eager eardrums—but good luck getting a word in edgewise.
Steven Cohen
Recording maestro and audiophile Adam Tucker
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Signaturetone Recording, helmed by Tucker and local Dave Hale, hit the scene two years ago. While they didn't complete final touches on the studio until last year, the duo began tracking almost immediately upon moving into their subterranean facility on West 65th Street. Since then, they've amassed an impressive body of work across multiple genres, earning especially high praise from the metal community. The Skullcranes and 20 Dollar Love signed with Madison-based Crustacean Records, while the Crinn signed with international imprint Nuclear Blast after recording with Signaturetone.
"We wouldn't want to track with anyone else," says the Crinn's Chad White.
For all of its owners' cunning and calculation, Signaturetone Recording began after a stroke of serendipity.
"I bought some gear on eBay from a guy who happened to be local," explains Tucker. "That's how I met Dave. A couple months later he called me about starting a studio. I saw all the gear he had ready to go, and I had to jump on board."
The team rented and renovated a studio space, filling it with stacks of new and vintage analog and digital recording equipment, much of it from Hale's own collection. Reclining in the control room, it's easy to see why Tucker and Hale have earned a reputation for their warm analog sound. Rows of glowing rack-mounted gear and a mammoth tape machine surround the captain's chair at the center.
"That tape machine has been recording Minneapolis bands for at least 20 years," Tucker says. "It's nice to own a piece of local music history."
Doing it the old-fashioned way can be tricky. Whereas digital approaches allow for disk-based rapid recording and non-destructive editing, analog production involves committing a signal to analog tape and altering its quality with individual physical components. Changes cannot be undone by simply calling up saved files.
Finding the right sound using complex gear combinations can take hours or days.
"It's all a matter of chaining," says Tucker. "I'm just getting into the nooks and crannies of making this studio sing like an instrument."
He cues up a beefy drum section, explaining that its expansive reverb is a product of the room in which it was recorded and nothing more. A quality room reverb is the holy grail of many musicians and engineers.
"It sucks being a home-recording guy. You run up against a wall where you just need a bigger room," says Tucker. "I'm a home-recording guy myself. I just happen to have access to all this stuff."
We work our way through tracks by the Angle Obscure and Tucker's band the Sextons. From where I sit in the control room, the songs sound a lot like major-label productions. Tucker says competing studios and cheap home-recording setups mean Signaturetone has to make every disc sound great.
"I'm not into convincing anybody to come down that didn't like what they heard from other bands' discs," he says.
He emphasizes the challenges of analog recording and laments bands taking "shortcuts" they'll have to live with forever. While Signaturetone has and regularly uses digital equipment, that isn't what brings clients through the door.
"People are coming down because of our sound, rather than what programs we've got. It isn't about throwing down a bunch of tracks quickly and leaving; recording should be an experience."
Signaturetone's loving care and undying quest for the perfect sound are giving Minneapolis metalheads the warm fuzzies. Tucker has a knack for making the most ludicrously overdriven guitar tones manageable—coming through big and clean—on tape. The Blue Ox tune he plays for me proves as much.
"I think he can hear tones that other humans only dream of listening to," says Chad White. "He has recorded myriad genres, but his knack for metal is right up there with the best of them. The local metal community worships the guy, and rightly so."
During the course of our interview—in which Tucker at one point imagines how "interesting" it would be to play me the same tracks in chronological order—he gushes about the bands as much as their recordings. He's a proud papa who happens to be childless. He is often in awe of the "gross" musicianship his clients display and laments that Twin Cities bands, especially harder acts, lack a cohesive scene.
"I love seeing bands that work well together play together," he says.
We work our way through indie songs, country songs, even chamber songs, all of them recorded at Signaturetone. Almost without fail, Tucker rocks in his chair and assures me, "These guys are great. Really nice people."
For a guy who has proactively chased a music career for years, it is strange to hear him attribute his growing success to being in the right place at the right time.
"I can't tell if I get lucky and get all the really good bands, or if I just fall in love with all the bands I work with," he says.
