Engineer Elliot Scheiner
Interview Excerpt
With his work having achieved tremendous commercial success, Elliot Scheiner has also attained something far more elusive in the music business – the unanimous respect of his peers. Indeed, if you want a mix that’s not only a work of art, but a piece of soul that exactly translates an artist’s intentions, then Elliot’s your man. With a shelf full of industry awards (5 Grammy’s, 4 Surround Music Awards, Surround Pioneer Award, Tech Awards Hall Of Fame and too many total award nominations to count) from The Eagles, Beck, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Sting, John Fogerty, Van Morrison, Toto, Queen, Faith Hill, Lenny Kravitz, Natalie Cole, Doobie Brothers, Aerosmith, Phil Collins, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand and many, many others, Elliot has long been recognized for his pristine mixes.
Elliot’s recent pioneering work in 5.1 surround sound has made him perhaps the most in-demand mixer in the genre. Besides his superb work on the surround mixes for the Eagles' Hell Freezes Over, he's done 5.1 remix projects for, among others, Faith Hill, Sting, Beck, Steely Dan, Donald Fagan, Flaming Lips, Phish and REM, as well at that surround pièce de résistance, Queen's A Night At the Opera. His expertise in the field of surround sound led him to work with Panasonic Automotive Systems to develop the first 5.1 channel DVD-Audio system for the car available in North America. The result was dubbed ELS Surround to signify his involvement and debuted in Acura's 2004 TL.
How did you get started in the business?
Elliot Scheiner: I was a drummer and I hacked around in a bunch of different bands until I just didn't want to do it any more. My uncle was a trombone player who was a studio musician in New York City and really good friends with Phil Ramone (legendary producer of Billy Joel, Ray Charles, Rod Stewart, Paul Simon, Elton John, and many more). He knew that I wanted to get into this business, so one day he brought me up to meet Phil. Phil hired me on the spot and I never looked back.
You started at a great place (A&R Studios in NYC, which Phil owned).
Elliot Scheiner: Oh, it was the best. It was maybe the best studio in the country back in 1967 and one of the better ones in the world.
You started as an assistant, right?
Elliot Scheiner: Yeah, they would generally start you as an assistant and I was basically like an assistant to an assistant until I learned what was going on. Obviously the technology was minimal then so you really had to know what mikes to use on what occasions and where to place them and the rest would come at a later date. But the main thing was just how to set up the room for each engineer.
Was this in the days of 8 track?
Elliot Scheiner: 8 track had just come in and I remember them talking about how wonderful it was, but most people were still primarily using 4 track at the time. The majority of dates done at A&R were 4 track dates. I remember Phil making records with Burt Bacharach and Dionnne Warwick and all of those were 4 track dates.
How were the tracks usually split out?
Elliot Scheiner: Track 1 would contain horns and strings, track 2 would be the lead vocal, 3 would be the rhythm section and 4 would be background vocals. If there were no background vocals, they would put the strings on 1 and the horns on 4.
When did you start to engineer on your own?
Elliot Scheiner: I don't remember exactly how long but it was definitely within a year. I was assisting Phil and he was doing a Jimmy Smith date at night. I don't remember how many nights we were working on this record but he called me and said "I'm going to be late. You're going to have to start this date".
That was my first shot at engineering, but I think it was pretty much that way for most guys. You ended up being thrown right into the fire because someone was going to be late or couldn't make it or was sick. That's how I started and that's how pretty much all of the guys I know started.
So did they trust you to be a first engineer after that?
Elliot Scheiner: I went back and forth, but at that point the office knew that I could do some small dates so they started throwing me voice-overs for radio and TV commercials. Eventually I ended up doing advertising and then it moved on like that. Something would develop into another thing.
The way it worked back then was that everybody was a staff engineer so the only way that you really made money was when you left one position and moved to another. The theory behind it was that if you left one studio you'd carry the clientele over to another studio. I would say that in most cases it worked that way but most clients at A&R weren't interested in following an engineer. They were in staying at that studio because it was such a great sounding place and it was so service oriented that they were willing to work with someone else that they hadn't worked with before just to remain there.
It was a different philosophy back then.
Elliot Scheiner: Yeah it was. Here all of a sudden I would inherit somebody's clients that had moved onto another studio just because he'd gone, so that's how you ended up becoming an engineer. There were a lot of staff engineers that would just float around from studio to studio. It was a lot easier to do it back then obviously.
What was your first hit?
Elliot Scheiner: "Moondance" (Van Morrison's seminal hit album). I don't even know if there were any singles off the record because in those days it was just about getting FM radio play. Pop music got the singles airplay; the Frankie Valle and the Four Seasons, and all the Motown stuff. Artists like Van Morrison were more album oriented so what they did was more oriented towards album radio, so it would be hard for me to determine what was a huge hit singles-wise.
Let's talk about mixing. Isn't that mostly what you do these days?
Elliot Scheiner: Oddly enough, I've been tracking lately but I'd have to say that overall the majority of my work is mixing.
Do you have a philosophy about mixing?
Elliot Scheiner: I’ve always believed that if someone has recorded all this information, then they want it to be heard, so my philosophy is to be able to hear everything that was recorded. It's not about burying everything in there and getting a wall of sound. I've never been into that whole concept. It was more about whatever part was played, if it was the subtleties of a drummer playing off beats on the snare drum next to the backbeat, obviously he wants that heard. So I always want to make sure that everything that's in that record gets heard.
If you were able to accomplish hearing every single instrument in the mix, that was a huge achievement. Granted, maybe there wasn't as much information when I started as there is now. I myself have come across files that have been a hundred and some odd tracks, so it's not as easy to do that today.
I have to admit that the way some people record things today is a bit peculiar. All of a sudden you'll be dealing with 7 or 8 different mics on the same instrument. Like, for example, an acoustic guitar will all of a sudden have 7 different viewpoints of where this guitar's being recorded. It's mind boggling that you have to go and make a determination and listen to every single channel to decide which one you want to use. And if you pick the wrong ones they come back at you and say, "Oh, we had a different combination" or "It doesn't sound quite right to us", but they don't tell you what they did! So granted, it is a little more difficult to deal with those issues today, but I still take the same approach with every mix.
If you have a hundred tracks, will you try to have them all heard? Or do you go in and do some subtractive mixing?
Elliot Scheiner: Well, it depends if that's necessary. I don't usually get those kind of calls where they say "Here's a hundred tracks. Delete what you want." It's usually not about that. And I have to say that I'll usually get between 24 and 48 tracks in most cases and hardly ever am I given the liberty to take some of them out. I mean if something is glaringly bad I'll do that, but to make a judgment call as to whether background vocals should be in here or there, I generally don't do that. I just assume that whatever an artist and producer sends me is kind of written in stone. They've recorded it, and unless they tell me otherwise, I usually don't do subtractive mixing.
Do you usually work on your own?
Elliot Scheiner: If I'm working at home I'm usually working on my own.
How often do you work at home?
Elliot Scheiner: It happens quite a bit because a lot of people don't want to pay to mix in a commercial studio for financial reasons. I just finished a project last week that was very low budget. The artist and producer live in California and they sent me the files. I was able to do it at a low figure because I could do it when I wanted to and I wasn't spending anybody's money except my own.
How long does it take you to do a mix on average?
Elliot Scheiner: Depending on how complicated it is, it usually takes anywhere from 3 hours to a day.
3 hours is really fast!
Elliot Scheiner: Yeah, well a lot of time you just get a vibe and a feel for something and it just comes together. Then you look at it and say "How much am I actually going to improve this mix." I mean if it feels great and sounds great I'm a little reluctant to beat it into the ground.
For me it's still about a vibe and if I can get things to sound good and have a vibe, that's all I really care about. I still put Al Schmitt on a pedestal. Look at how quickly he gets things done. He can do three songs in a day and they'll be perfect and amazing sounding and have the right vibe. So it's not like it can't be done. Some people say that you can't get a mix in a short time and that's just not true and Al's my proof.
Where do you usually start your mix from?
Elliot Scheiner: Out of force of habit, if there's a rhythm section I'll usually start with the drums and then move to the bass and just work it up. Once the rhythm section is set I'll move on to everything else and end with vocals.
How much EQ do you use?
Elliot Scheiner: I can't say that there are any rules for that. I can't say that I've ever mixed anything that Al has recorded, but if I did I probably wouldn't have any on it. With some of the stuff done by some of the younger kids, I get it and go, "What were they listening to when they recorded this." So in some cases I use drastic amounts where I'll be double compressing and double EQing; all kinds of stuff in order to get something to sound good. I never did that until maybe the last 5 years. Obviously those mixes are the ones that take a day or more.
When you're setting up a mix, do you always have a certain set of outboard gear, like a couple of reverbs and delays, ready to use or do you patch it as you go?
Elliot Scheiner: Usually I don't start out with any reverbs. I'm not one for processing. I'd like to believe that music can survive without reverbs and without delays and without effects. Obviously when it's called for I'll use it, but the stuff I do is pretty dry. The 70's were a pretty dry time and then the 80's effects became overused. There was just tons of reverb on everything.
Most of your Steely Dan stuff is pretty dry, isn't it?
Elliot Scheiner: It's pretty much dry. What we used were plates usually
Real short ones?
Elliot Scheiner: Not necessarily. In the days when I was working at A&R, we had no remotes on any of our plates there. Phil wanted to make changing them difficult because he tuned them himself and he really didn't want anybody to screw with them. There would be at least 4 plates in every room. Some of them might be a little shorter than another but generally they were in the 2 to 2 1/2 second area. There was always an analog tape pre-delay, usually at 15 ips, going into the plates. The plates were tuned so brilliantly that it didn't become a noticeable effect. It was just a part of the instrument or part of the music. You could actually have a fair amount on an instrument and you just wouldn't notice it.
Would you have any advice for someone that's just starting to mix?
Elliot Scheiner: I would say that you have to believe in yourself. You can't second guess what you're doing. I've always been of the mind that if I can make myself happy listening to a mix, then hopefully the people that are employing me will be just as happy.
I don't try to guess what someone might want. If there's someone there in the room with me when I start a mix I know that sooner or later I'm going to hear whether they hate it or they love it.
But generally I try to mix for myself. At this point in my career I know that if people are calling me they like what I do. Just remember that what we do is to convey the artist's feelings and make it as musical as possible without harming it.
“Just got the book yesterday..
love it... seems even hotter than the first. Got a lot of relavent thoughts and views for the now times.. great job... best of luck with it. And once again, thanks for including me in such an important work”
Jimmy Douglass
Award-winning, multi-platinum engineer and mixer
This book gave me exactly the introduction to mixing I was hoping for. Great examples and eye-opening (ear-opening?) interviews with industry legends gave me instant experience and a solid knowledge base from which to draw. Every beginning mixer - heck, ever producer should read this.
David
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