From his days as chief engineer at LA’s famed Record Plant in the heady ’70s, Lee DeCarlo has put his definitive stamp on hit records from Aerosmith to John Lennon’s famous Double Fantasy to releases by Rancid, Zakk Wylde, Black Sabbath, and Kenny Loggins. If you ever wondered where those sounds came from, Lee takes us on a trip to find out. 

Where do you start to build your mix from? 

The bass and drums. I’ll put the bass and the drums up, and I’ll get a rough sound on the drums real quick. I don’t like to take a long time to do anything. I like to have it up and going. I just get the bass and drums so they just start to pump to where you can actually hear them breathing in and out with the tempo of the song, and as soon as I arrive at that, then I start adding the other stuff in. 

How would you do that? 

What I’ll do is put the drums and bass in a limiter and just crush the hell out of it. Then I’ll play with the release and the attack times until I can actually make that limiter pump in time with the music, so when the drummer hits the snare, it sucks down and you get a good crest on it. When he lets go of the snare, the ambience of the bass and the drums suck and shoot back up again. You can actually hear a [breathing sound] going on that was never there before. It was really there; it’s just that you’re augmenting it by using that limiter. 

Are you using individual limiters on each track, or is it just a pair of stereo limiters that you use? 

It’s usually a mono limiter, and it’s usually something like an 1176 or a Summit or something like that. It’s whatever is handy at that particular point, brought up the center. 

Do you have a method for setting levels? 

Yes, I do. I’ll have the drums around -5 (VU) with the snare drum constantly on the backbeat of the tune. From there, I’ll build everything around it. 

A lot of people that really haven’t been doing this that long think that what you do is just turn things up and add stuff on top of other stuff. So much of mixing is what you take away, either level-wise or frequency-wise. There are so many things that you have to eliminate in order to make it all sit together and work. 

What’s your approach to using EQ?

When I’m mixing I use a minimal amount, but when I’m recording I’m radical when I’m EQing. I do a lot on the recording side, but I’m just redefining what I’m doing on the mixing side. 

Do you use gates much? 

Sometimes. I may have a gate augmenting the snare, but it’s in such a weird fashion. I always use the original sound of the snare drum, but I may have a gate on it that’s so fast and has such a quick release that it sounds like somebody snapping their finger. I usually mix that in very low with just a ton of EQ on it, or use it just to send to an echo so that the snare drum doesn’t have a lot of hi-hat or other things involved with it when it goes to the chamber. 

Don’t you do something special to your delays? 

I always have people coming to me and asking, “How did you make John Lennon sound like that? What is the mojo filter that he puts on his voice?” There is no mojo filter. It’s just John Lennon with a U 87 and a 15-ips delay. That’s 133 milliseconds, or however many beats there are in the tune. I always put delays in the tempos of the songs. 

Are you timing it to the snare drum? 

Usually I’ll find out what tempo the song is in; then I’ll set my echoes so they pump. When the click happens, you get the backbeat or you get a 16th or a 32nd or a triplet or any sort of different returns for your echoes. 

Then you’re delaying the reverbs as well?

No, I very seldom delay an echo chamber. A lot of guys do, but I don’t. I much prefer to use the chamber just as it is, but I do use a lot of different reverbs. I use somewhere around four or five different reverbs on everything I do. 

How many delays would you be using? 

Probably three or four different delays; it all depends. I like little tricks with delays as well. I like to leave out the delay on maybe the last line of a phrase. Then everything has delay on it until the very last word of a sentence or during an important statement. 

How long does it take you to do a mix? 

It all depends. I can mix three songs in a day, or I can mix one song in a day. To be really comfortable, I like to take about a day to mix a song and then go away and come back and finish it the next day. If you can’t do a song a day, then you’ve got problems with the recording or problems with the band or problems with yourself. 

What level do you usually listen at? 

I like it loud. As a matter of fact, I’ll start louder and work my way down. I’m always up there, but it’s not crushing. People don’t come in and bleed from the ears, but I’m over 100 (dB SPL).

What’s your approach to panning? 

I have several different approaches. I like to pan stuff around a lot, but I like to have the effects in mono. I like having things wide, but I don’t like to have just a guitar on the right and the piano on the left. I’ve never been a big fan of that. 

What are you trying to accomplish with effects? Are you trying to make everything bigger or to push things back in the mix? 

Bigger, wider, deeper. Everything has to be bigger, always. Now, a lot of times I’ll do stuff with no effects on it whatsoever, but I don’t particularly like it. With effects you make a point about your music. Effects are makeup. It’s cosmetic surgery. I can take a very great song by a very great band and mix it with no effects on it at all, and it’ll sound good; and I can take the same song and mix it with effects, and it’ll sound fantastic! 

That’s what effects are for. It’s just makeup. 

You’re going for bigness rather than for depth, or both?

I’m going for pump, always. The better the band, the easier the pump happens. Nothing happens if the band doesn’t play it in the pocket to start with. There’s not a thing I can do to fix it if that doesn’t happen. 

Everything has to breathe. Songs have a life, and you have to develop that life within the song. Every single piece of music in the world breathes if it’s played properly. A song is about something, and the trick is to capture what it’s about and make it live. That’s why mixing’s an art and not a technology. 

Do you have a special approach to treating lead instruments? 

Yeah, sure. Bass and drums are the heartbeat, just like a human body, but the face is what everybody sees. It’s kind of like looking at a pretty girl. You see her face and her body, but what makes her run is what’s inside, so the pretty girl puts makeup on and gets a boob job. In essence, I give singers and guitar players boob jobs. 

From his mixing debut on Green Day’s Dookie to producing and mixing Rancid’s Out Come the Wolves and Life Won’t Wait to his work with the Presidents of the United States, the Goo Goo Dolls, Blink 182, the Offspring, and Beck, Jerry Finn’s distinctive sound has been loved by artists and listeners alike. Unfortunately, Jerry passed away suddenly in 2008 just after finishing Morrissey’s Years of Refusal. I wanted to keep his interview as part of the book even though it’s not current, both as a tribute to his great work and because the interview has a lot of really useful info. 

Do you usually have to work fast because of the budget? 

Not usually. I generally take about 10 to 12 days to mix a record. Some take less; some take more. Dookie I think we did in nine days. Insomniac took 11 days. 

I mixed Beck for a PBS show called Sessions at West 54th. We were supposed to only mix four songs in one day, and it went so well that we ended up mixing seven songs in ten hours, and it came out great. The stuff was recorded really well, and his band had actually just gotten off a year and a half tour, so they just nailed it so it didn’t really require any fixing. And Beck is someone who really trusts his instincts so he doesn’t sit there second-guessing himself. We just went straight for what sounded right and just nailed it. 

Before you start a mix, can you hear the final product in your head? 

Yeah, that’s actually one of the requirements for me to feel comfortable going into a record. When I’m sent rough mixes, I really need to hear where I would take it in order to feel comfortable. Sometimes the band tells you what they want and the producer tells you what he wants and the A&R guy tells you what he wants, and they’re all completely different things. That can be a bit frightening because you end up being the punching bag for their arguments. [Laughs] But I usually can hear the final mastered record from day one, and then it’s just trying to get the sound that’s in my head to come out of the speakers. 

Where are you starting your mix from? Do you start from the kick drum, the overheads…? 

Just out of habit, I probably start at the far left of the console with the kick and start working my way across. Lately, I’ve tried to put the vocal in early in order to create the mix more around that. In a lot of the punk-rock stuff you get the track slamming and then you just sort of drop the vocal on top. But for the more pop stuff, I’ve found that approach doesn’t work as well because the vocal really needs to sell the song, so I’ve been trying to discipline myself to put the vocal up early on, before I even have the bass and guitars in and kind of then carve those around the vocals. 

One thing that I do with drums, though, is try to get the room mics in early on before I start adding reverbs and stuff like that to the snare. Unfortunately, recording drums is sort of becoming a lost art. As engineers have gotten more and more dependent on samples and loops and drum machines, and with more recording being done in home studios, the thing that always suffers is the drums. 

Do you get a lot of stuff that’s done in garages or homes? 

Not so much, but I do get stuff where the band thought that going to a good studio would be all they needed, and they didn’t really think about the engineer they hired, so I’ve seen some engineers that get in over their heads. I was actually a drummer myself when I played in bands so I tend to be real anal about the drum sounds. 

After you put the drums up, where do you usually go from there? 

I’ll get the drums happening to where they have some ambience, then put the vocal up and get that to where that’s sitting right. At that point I’ll start with the bass and make sure that the kick and the bass are occupying their own territory and not fighting each other. Sometimes to my surprise I’ve nailed it and it all falls together, and then other times when I get the guitars in there, they eat up a lot of the ambience on the drums. Most of the bands I work with tend to have several tracks of very distorted guitars, and they want them all real loud, so then I have to go back to the drums and kind of adjust for that. 

How do you deal with that when you get a lot of real big, crunchy guitars? 

When every guy in the band thinks he’s the loudest, that’s when I know I’ve nailed the mix. I’ve always tried to just make it so that you don’t have to fight to hear anything. On certain parts of the song maybe I will bury something a little bit or push something a little louder for tension to kinda pull you into the next part, but overall I try to make it so you can hear everything all the time, and that generally comes through EQ. I’ll find the bite in the guitar and make sure that the snare isn’t also occupying that same range, then I’ll make sure the low end on the guitars doesn’t muddy up where the bass is sitting. I also have to keep the kick and snare really punchy to kind of cut through all the wall of guitars by multing them off and hard-compressing and gating them and sneaking them back in under everything. 

Do you find you use compression on a lot of things? 

Yeah. I’m a big compressor fan. I think that the sound of modern records today is compression. Audio purists talk about how crunchy compression and EQ are, but if you listen to one of those jazz or blues records that are done by the audiophile labels, there’s no way they could ever compete on modern radio even though they sound amazing. And unfortunately, all the phase shift and pumping and brightening that’s imparted by EQ and compression is what modern records sound like. Every time I try to be a purist and go, “You know, I’m not gonna compress that,” the band comes in and goes, “Why isn’t that compressed?” So yeah, I compress the [stereo] buss, although I’m very sparing on certain records. Dookie for Green Day had no compression on the buss at all, and the Superdrag record that I produced and mixed [Head Trip in Every Key] didn’t have any either, but if I think it’s appropriate for the music, I’ll get it on there. 

Are you compressing everything else individually as well? 

Lately what I’ve gotten into doing more is multing it off, like I said [for parallel compression]. The kick and snare I’ll put through maybe a [dbx] 160 and very lightly compress it, maybe pulling down half to 1 dB; then I’ll mult them off and go through a new [dbx] 160S and really compress those and sneak them up underneath so you’re basically hearing the character of the drum you recorded rather than this bastardized version of it. I also send all of my dry drum tracks—not the rooms or overheads, but the kick, snare, and toms—through another compressor and sneak that in to give the kit an overall sound. 

Distorted guitars I don’t compress as much because when you get a Marshall on 10, it’s so compressed already that it doesn’t really need it, but cleaner guitars or acoustic guitars, I’ll compress. I also got into doing the vocals the same way I do the kick and snare—multing it off and compressing it really hard and sneaking that under the original vocal. 

When you say “really hard,” how much do you mean? 

I would say 10 or 12 dB and at a ratio anywhere from like 4:1 to 8:1. My compression technique is something I actually learned from [engineer] Ed Cherney. He was telling me about compressing the stereo buss when I was assisting him, but I use the same technique on everything. I set the attack as slow as possible and the release as fast as possible so all the transients are getting through and the initial punch is still there, but it releases instantly when the signal drops below threshold. I think that’s a lot of the sound of my mixes. It keeps things kinda popping the whole time. Also, you can compress things a little bit more and not have it be as audible. 

Do you have an approach to panning? 

Yeah, I tend to be a fan of panning things real wide. I’ll keep electric guitars, overheads, room mics, and toms hard left and right, and hi-hat all the way to one side. There’s not a lot of filling things in between. 

The kind of bands I work with want to hit you in the head, so the panning tends to be really extreme. For the most part, they’re not really worried about having a Pink Floyd or Steely Dan style mix where everything has its own spot. Also, because radio tends to squash everything back up the middle, I’ve always found that panning it out like that makes it sound a little bit bigger on radio. If you take the stuff that’s panned out wide and make it slightly louder than it should be in stereo, when you listen in mono it really comes together. I find that helps you avoid that all snare and vocal mix thing that you hear a lot of times, and it keeps the guitars up there. 

Do you add effects as you go along, or do you get a mix up and then add them? 

I’m pretty sparing on effects. Actually, over the last year and a half or two years, I’ve gradually tried to wean myself off of any digital effects. The last six or so things I mixed, the main vocal effect was a plate reverb and a tape machine or space echo for real tape slap. 

Are you delaying the send to the plate? 

Depending on the song. Sometimes it works, but with a lot of the music I do the tempos are so fast that you don’t really need to do much delaying because you can’t really hear it. It’s like the reverb needs to speak right away and then go away. I’m a big fan of the EMT 250 on snare. That’s probably been a standard since day one on my mixes. Electric guitars tend to stay dry, and bass is always dry. 

How loud do you listen? 

Like at conversation volume, probably 85dB or so at the loudest. 

Do you usually mix by yourself, or do you have people in the studio with you? Does it matter? 

It depends. When we did the Dookie record, the whole band was so excited by the whole process (they had never made a real record in a real studio before) that they were there the whole time with their elbows up on the console. On the flip side of that, sometimes the band and/or the producer will come in the first day, and then I won’t see them again. I was doing one record where the producer actually left the country and I didn’t even know it. About four days into it, I said to the band when they came by to check the mixes, “Should we have the producer come back?” and they’re like, “Oh, he’s in England.” I guess he trusted me. 

I like to keep the band involved, and I always put their needs before my ego. I think a problem with a lot of mixers is the ego thing where when the band says, “You know that great sound you have? We want it to sound crappy.” You have to take yourself out of it and go, “Well, their name’s a lot bigger on the record than mine,” so I’ll do it and generally the band stays happy. 

Although there are a lot of pretty good engineers around these days, not many have the ability to record a 45- to 100-piece orchestra with the ease of someone who has done it a thousand times. Don Hahn can, and that’s because he actually has done it a thousand times. With an unbelievable list of credits that range from television series (such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager), to such legends as Count Basie, Barbra Streisand, Chet Atkins, Frank Sinatra, Herb Alpert, Woody Herman, Dionne Warwick, and a host of others (actually 10 pages more), Don has recorded the best of the best. Starting in New York City in 1959 and eventually becoming a VP at the famed A&R Studios there, then later at Hollywood’s A&M studios, Don has seen it all and then some. Don’s passed on now, but his orchestral technique is still the model to emulate. 

How is your approach for mixing an orchestra different from when you mix something with a rhythm section? 

The approach is totally different because there’s no rhythm section, so you shoot for a nice roomy orchestral sound and get it as big as you can get with the number of musicians you have. You start with violins, then violas if you have them, cellos, then basses. You get all that happening and then add woodwinds, French horns, trombones, trumpets, and then percussion and synthesizers. 

What happens when you have a rhythm section? 

Then the rhythm section starts first. Any time I do a rhythm section, it’s like constructing a building. That’s your foundation. If you don’t build a foundation, the building falls down. I like to shoot for a tight rhythm section that’s not too roomy. I think that comes from all the big bands that I did; Woody Herman, Count Basie, Thad and Mel, Maynard Ferguson. 

Are you building from the drums or the bass first? 

The bass is always first. Everybody relates to the bass. I can remember doing records in New York, and some of the producers would put paper over the meters. I told them, “I don’t care, just let me get the bass and I’ll balance the whole thing, and it’ll come out okay.” The only time I can get screwed personally on any date with a rhythm section is if the bass player’s late. There’s nothing to relate to because everybody relates to the bass player. If he’s not there, it doesn’t work. Now, orchestrally, the bass players can be late and it doesn’t matter because I’m balancing all the other strings and then adding brass and the percussion last. But on a record date with a rhythm section, it’s the bass player and the drummer that are the foundation, and the colors come from the keyboards and the guitars. 

What’s your approach to using effects? 

I’ll use effects to enhance what I’m doing. A lot of the records that I do are, for lack of a better term, legit records. You can’t put a room sound on a drummer on a jazz date. It doesn’t work. I’ve tried it many times, but it ends up like a pop-record rhythm section, and the music doesn’t jive with it. I don’t use a lot of effects, especially on the television shows, but I’ll use whatever I think is necessary if it’s a little dull sounding. If the record doesn’t make me bounce up and down, I’m doing something wrong.

Are you panning from the way the conductor’s looking at everybody? 

No, I do that on movies, but when I’m doing television, I do the high strings in stereo, the low strings in stereo, the synth in stereo, the brass and woodwinds in stereo, the percussion in mono, and anything else in mono. That’s a stereo room, and I pan it hard left and hard right. 

You don’t use much EQ, do you? 

I use a little bit. If you use the right microphones, hopefully you don’t have to put that much EQ on anything. 

How about compression? Aren’t you worried about somebody being out of control? 

Absolutely not. What are you going to compress in an orchestra? 

I assume on a record date it’ll be a little different? 

Oh, yeah. You might get the French horns jumping right out at you. You might have to put an LA-2A on it and squash them just a little bit, but you shouldn’t hear it. 

When you were doing the Sinatra dates, I assume it was all live. 

Sure, that’s the best way to make a record, especially with Sinatra, or Tony Bennett, or Streisand, or any major artist. That’s the way they’re used to doing it, and it’s great. I mean, you really work your butt off, but you feel like you’ve accomplished something as opposed to sitting there all day and just overdubbing synth pads. 

What problems do you have in a situation like that? 

Headphones are the biggest problem in the studio. You never have enough separate cue systems to keep everybody happy. 

Are you worried about leakage? 

No, I try to get the least amount of leakage with as much room as I can. On Streisand, we put the bass player and the drummer in one section of the room with some gobos around, she was in her own booth, three other singers were in another booth, and the whole rest of the studio was filled with great musicians. 

How has recording and mixing changed over the years? 

Well, just for some perspective, when I started there was no Fender bass and one track only, with no computers or click tracks. Every date used acoustic bass. There was no synthesizer. Bob Moog used to come up to the studio sometimes with his synthesizer that he was working on. It was like 15 feet wide with big old telephone patch cords and tubes, and he’d have us comment on his sounds. 

I think some of the problems you have now are that the younger guys don’t go into the studio and listen. You must listen to what’s going on in the studio. Don’t just go into a control room, open faders, and grab EQs. As an engineer you’re supposed to make it sound in the control room like it sounds in the studio, only better. You must listen in the room and hear what it sounds like, especially on acoustic or orchestral dates, and not be afraid to ask composers. Your composers, and especially the musicians, are your best friends because whatever they do reflects on what you’re doing. If they’re not happy, you’re not happy. Remember, the music comes first. 

There are few people that know TV sound the way Ken Hahn does.  From the beginning of the television post revolution, Hahn’s New York based Sync Sound has lead the way in television sound innovation and the industry’s entry into the digital world.  Along the way Ken has mixed everything from PeeWee’s Playhouse to concerts by Billy Joel and Pearl Jam and a host of others while picking up a slew of awards in the process (4 Emmys, a CAS award, 13 ITS Monitor awards).  

What’s the differences between mixing for television and anything else?

Ken Hahn:  Right away, the difference is that you have already got a certain restriction presented by the picture.  In other words, the picture is only so long, so if you happen to get this great idea to do something that may change the length of what you’re working on, it’s probably not possible because the picture’s already locked.  If it’s a half an hour show, that’s how long it’s going to be.  It’s something that most people coming from music can’t get over.  Like, “Wait a minute, what do you mean I can’t fix this.”  “Well, no, I’m sorry.  The picture’s locked.”   The reason why they can’t go back is just too darn expensive.  

Another major difference is that the deadlines in the TV world are a lot stricter.  I always say, if it’s in TV Guide, it’s gonna be on the air.  If they say the new so and so album’s gonna be out the first week in April but it comes out the second week, then it’s not as big a deal.  But you never hear that Barbara Walters Presents will not be seen tonight because we didn’t finish the mix.  So there is a pressure on everybody to finish stuff, which in TV seems to be bad and getting worse.

How long does it take you to do a typical mix?

Ken Hahn:  Well, it depends.  We do a couple of series here where we get a couple of days to mix for a half hour show, which ends up being about 20 something minutes of actual programming.  So we need a day to do it and a day for people to see it and to do some changes.   It ends up being about 16 to 20 hours, and that’s for a show that’s “together”.  You can do it in less, and you can certainly do it in more.  News-style shows get less time and music shows get more but I guess the answer is never enough.  

Video is now getting more like film in that they’re doing more post production on live shows.  People now actually spend time previewing things, pulling sound effects, looping lines, doing foley.  In the last five or ten years, things are much more prepared y the time it comes to the mix.  It used to be that you’d start at the beginning of the show and fly through it just to make it digestible.  But now it’s gotten as sophisticated as film post production, which can be very sophisticated.

So essentially you have a lot of elements that you have to pull together.

Ken Hahn:  Yeah, it can be as big as a major film mix; 30, 40, 50, 100 tracks, depending on what’s going on.  The average viewer now doesn’t know the difference between watching Mission Impossible on HBO and Homicide.  They know one’s a movie and they know one’s a TV show, but when they’re watching on a little TV they expect the same production value for either.     

With that amount of elements, where do you start building your mix from?

Ken Hahn:  Most television and film is narrative in nature, whether there is a narration voice-over track that’s telling the story or the dialogue is.  Dialogue is premium so most people start by making sure you can hear all the words.  It’s common practice here (Sync Sound) to do a pass mixing the dialogue, making sure that if nothing else played in the scene, the dialogue would still be seamless.   

When you turn on the TV, the reality is that you set the level by the volume of the dialogue.  You have to make sure all the words are in front and everything else is sort of window dressing.  Music plays a huge role in it, too.  What’s been nice in the last few years is stereo television, which has only been around since MTV.  Stereo music is a nice pad for things.

Do you take advantage of stereo for anything else?

Ken Hahn:  Usually stereo ambiences like birds, winds, traffic.   You can get into a lot of trouble by panning effects too much.  In film mixing, at least you know that it’s going to be played in a fairly large room that has pretty good speakers.  With TV, the listening areas run the gamut from people laying in bed listening with headsets on up to home theaters, so you have to err on the side of safety which means put all the dialogue in the middle and spread your music as much as you want left and right.  But if you start panning footsteps and all, it can really get weird because if you’re looking at a 15” TV while you mix and you pan footsteps from left to right, then the panning will be all wrong if the viewer happens to be watching on a 30” projection TV.  

Have you done much with surround?

Ken Hahn:  Music concerts, yes.   But quite frequently, if it sounds good in stereo, it’s just going to sound better in surround.  Inevitably, once you kind of get the hang of it, you know what it’s going to sound like in surround anyway.  The real battle has always been to make it sound good on the lowest common denominator, which is small speaker.

What are you using for monitoring?

Ken Hahn:  For a small reference speaker we use the staple of the industry, the Auratone, but most of our stuff is mixed on bookshelf speakers.  We’ve used the KRK’s a lot for the last five years.  That’s pretty much what we’ve determined to be like an average stereo speaker yet it also relates to your average TV.  We’ve done a tremendous amount of listening to various kinds of TV’s with built-in speakers and found that the KRK’s translate very well from those speakers.  That’s what it’s about, translating from big speakers to small speakers.

What level do you monitor at?

Ken Hahn:  I personally monitor about as low as most people would accept.  I tend to go that way because inevitably, if you get it sounding good at a low level, it just sounds that much better at higher levels.  It sort of forces you to do a lot more manual gain riding at low level because otherwise stuff just doesn’t poke through.  I’m sort of doing my own form of manual compression and I’ve found that usually works better than the other way around.    

Speaking of compression, how much do you use?  Do you compress a lot of elements?

Ken Hahn:  I’ve done various things through the years.   What’s kind of cool about the Logic (AMS/Neve Logic 2 console) that we have, which has an all digital signal path, is it gives me multiple opportunities to control the gain.  I do a little bit at almost each signal path, but I do it a number of times, some limiting, some compression, through so that it’s pretty well controlled by the time it leaves here.  Unfortunately, it’s really frustrating to pop from ABC to HBO to ESPN and get radically different levels.  

Speaking of which, how much does everything change from what you hear in the studio once it finally hits air?

Ken Hahn:  It really depends on the network.  It’s incredible what sometimes happens to stuff on the air.  It just flabbergasts me and my clients.  We’ve delivered to anybody and everybody so we pretty much have an idea what you should do at our place before it gets to them so it will sound like you wanted it to sound like in the first place.  You have to sort of put this curve on what you’re monitoring so that you know that it’ll sound fine on Viacom, for instance. I got a pretty good idea what HBO, NBC, etc. does to our stuff so you have to process the mix with that in mind.

When you’re remixing a live concert, since it’s mostly music now, how are you approaching the mix?  Where are you starting from?

Ken Hahn:  It’s usually vocals again.  I make sure that those are perfect so that it becomes an element that you can add things around.  I always clean up the tracks as much as I can because inevitably you want to get rid of rumble and thumps and noises, creaks, mic hits, etc.   Then I always start with bass and rhythm.

It sounds repetitive, but the vocal’s where the story is.  It’s so integral to the music because that’s where you’re focused so it has to be as perfect as it can be.  It can’t be sibilant, tubby, too bright, or too dull.  It has to be properly processed so that it becomes another element that you have real complete control over.  A guitar track for instance will probably be pretty consistent for the most part, but vocals inevitably are less controlled.  The person may be on or off mic.  They may be sibilant someplace, they may pop in other places.  If you don’t eliminate all those technical problems so that you can concentrate on the balance, you can really get bogged down.  

It becomes even more critical in a production dialogue track where you’ve got, for instance, three people cut between different scenes and each sounds slightly different with slightly different room tone and different levels.  Let’s say you have a woman who speaks in a whisper with a guy who mumbles and another guy who yells.  Well, if you don’t level that out properly, you can’t balance sound effects and music against it.  I think that’s the art of TV mixing.  That’s what makes the difference between people who really mix television and film for a living and anybody else.  If you look at a film mix, there are three mixers and the dialogue mixer’s considered the lead mixer.  

And you’re cleaning those things up with the automation?

Ken Hahn:  Absolutely.  Automated filters and just fader moves.  That’s one of the reasons why we got the console we did.  It’s completely dynamically automated, so you can roll in a high pass filter, zip it in and out, and the pop’s gone.  You can ride the EQ as you’re trying to cover two people with a boom mic.  If one is tubby and one is bright, you just literally ride the EQ through the scene until you get it right, so that it plays as close as consistent as possible.  It wasn’t that I was looking to get a digital console.  I was looking to get a dynamically automated console and it happened that you got one with the other.

Are you staying in the digital domain the whole time?

Ken Hahn:  Absolutely.  I’ll tell you, once you hear it this way, it’s hard to go back to analog.  What’s different about television and film, as opposed to music mixing, is the number of generations that a particular track of audio may travel.

Let’s say you recorded a location production soundtrack.  It gets transferred to some medium and gets lined up with the picture.  It now gets put into a workstation, then it probably goes back to tape of some kind.  That individual track now gets premixed to a dialogue track.  So far we’re talking like four generations already.  Then it gets mixed into probably a final mix.  That’s five passes.  Then it gets laid back to videotape.  That’s six passes and that’s probably minimal for your average show.  Most of them would go even more generations than that.   With analog, there’s just too many possibilities for phase errors, EQ problems, bias problems, noise reduction units being incompatible, especially noticeable when you mix for stereo.  I mean it gets unbelievable.  I’ve just found that the difference between analog and digital is just like night and day. 

Do you sweeten the audience much?

Ken Hahn:  Absolutely.  I tend to make concerts sound as live as possible.  I usually use a lot of the audience mics.  I feel like the audience becomes another member of the band.  The band is playing off of each other as much as they’re playing off of the audience, so let’s hear the audience.   

How do you deal with effects?  Is it at the request of the act?

Ken Hahn:  I always try to become familiar with the material  before I get to the mix so I know if there are any specific effects that are really important to the songs or to the artist.  Also, a lot of people print an effects track that either you can use or get the idea from.  But other than that, it’s to taste.  Luckily for me, people like my tastes.  

Andy Johns needs no introduction because we’ve been listening to the music that he’s been involved in for most of our lives. With credits such as Led Zeppelin, Free, Traffic, Blind Faith, the Rolling Stones, and Van Halen (to name just a few), Andy has set a standard that most mixers are still trying to live up to. 

When you’re building your mix, where do you start from? 

I don’t build mixes; I just go, “Here it is.” [Laughs heartily] Actually, I start with everything. Most of the people that listen to and tweak one instrument at a time get garbage. You’ve just got to go through it with the whole thing up, because every sound affects every other sound. 

Suppose you’re modifying a 12-string acoustic guitar that’s in the rhythm section. If you put it up by itself, you might be tempted to put more bottom on it; but the more bottom you put on it, the more bottom it covers up on something else. The same with echo. If you have the drums playing by themselves, you’ll hear the echo on them. You put the other instruments in and the echo’s gone because the holes are covered up. 

Do you have a method for setting levels? 

That’s all garbage. There was a famous engineer some years ago who said, “I can mix by just looking at the meters.” He was obviously an upstart. If you stare at meters long enough, which is what I did for the first 15 years of my career, you find they don’t mean anything. It’s what’s in your soul. You hope that your ears are working with your soul along with your objectivity, but truly you can never be sure. 

The only way that you can get a proper mix is if you have a hand in the arrangement, because if you don’t, people might play the wrong thing or play in the wrong place. How can you mix that? It’s impossible. 

The way that I really learned about music is through mixing, because if the bass part is wrong, how can you hold up the bottom end? You learn how to get the bass player to play the right parts so you can actually mix. It’s kinda backwards. 

I’ve been into other people’s control rooms where you see them working on a horn part on its own. They’re playing with delays and echos, and I’m thinking, “What are these people doing?” because when you put the rest of the tracks up, it’s totally different and they think that they can fix it by moving some faders up and down. When that happens, they’re screwed. About the only thing that should move is the melody and the occasional other part here and there in support of the melody.

Does the fact that you started on four-track affect the way you work now? 

Yes, because I learned how to balance things properly to begin with. Nowadays, because you have this luxury of the computer and virtually as many tracks as you want, you don’t think that way anymore, but it was a great learning experience having to do it that way. 

You know why Sgt. Pepper sounds so good? You know why Are You Experienced [by the Jimi Hendrix Experience] sounds so good, almost better than what we can do now? Because when you were doing the four to four [bouncing down from one four-track machine to another], you mixed as you went. There was a mix on two tracks of the second four-track machine, and you filled up the open tracks and did the same thing again. Listen to “We Love You” [by the Rolling Stones]. Listen to Sgt. Pepper. Listen to “Hole in My Shoe” by Traffic. You mixed as you went along; therefore, after you got the sounds that would fit with each other, all you had to do was adjust the melodies. 

What’s your approach to using EQ? 

You don’t get your sound out of a console; you get your sound from the room. You choose the right instruments and the right amplifiers for the track. If you have a guitar sound that’s not working with the track properly, you don’t use EQ to make it work, you choose another guitar and/or amplifier so it fits better in the track. It might take a day, and it might take four or five different setups, but in the end you don’t have to worry about EQ because you made the right acoustic choices while recording. 

With drum sounds, even though placing the mics is reasonably important, it’s the way you make the drums sound in the room. The sounds come from the instrument and not from the mixer. On rare occasions, if you run into real trouble, maybe you can get away with using a bunch of EQ, but you can fiddle for days and all you’ll do is make something that was wrong in the first place just sound different. 

How about compression? 

I use compression because it’s the only way that you can truly modify a sound. Whatever the most predominant frequency is, the more you compress it the more predominant that frequency will be. Suppose the predominant frequencies are 1k to 3kHz. Put a compressor on it, and the bottom end goes away, the top end disappears, and you’re left with “Ehhhhh.” [Makes a nasal sound] So for me, compressors can modify the sound more than anything else. If it’s a bass guitar, you put the compressor before your EQ because if you do it the other way around, you’ll lose the top and mids when the compressor emphasizes the spot that you EQ’d. If you compress it first and then add bottom, then you’re gonna hear it better. 

At what level do you listen? 

If I’m listening on small speakers, I’ve got to turn them up to where they’re at the threshold of breaking up but without any distortion, or I listen very quietly. If you turn it way down low, you can hear everything much better. If you turn it as far as it will go before the speakers freak out, then it pumps. In the middle I can’t do it. It’s just not rock ’n roll to me. 

Do you have any listening tricks? 

Obviously the idea is to make it work on all systems. You listen on the big speakers, the NS10s, out in the car, plus your own speakers; then you go home and listen again. This is a lot of work, but it’s the only way to go. 

The thing is that I don’t care how close you think you’ve got it that night, you take it home and play it back in the morning, and every time there are two or three things that you must fix. It’s never happened to me where I’ve come home and said, “That’s it.” You hear it at home and you jump back down to the studio, and sure enough, you hear what you hadn’t noticed before on all the systems there. Every system you listen on, you get more information. 

Do you listen in mono much? 

No, but I’ll tell you this: If you’ve got a fantastic stereo mix, it will work in mono as well. For example, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” [by the Rolling Stones] is a stereo mix released in mono. People don’t listen in mono anymore, but that used to be the big test. It was harder to do, and you had to be a bloody expert to make it work. In the old days we did mono mixes first and then did a quick one for stereo. We’d spend eight hours on the mono mix and half an hour on the stereo. 

When do you add effects in the mix? 

I have some standard things that I do that more or less always work. I always need a great plate like an EMT 140 and a short 25- to 32-ms delay just in back of the vocal. If it’s kind of a mid-tempo tune, then I’ll use a longer delay, which you don’t hear because it’s subliminal. It doesn’t always have to be timed to the track; sometimes it can go in the hole so you can hear it. I’ve been talked out of putting reverb on electric guitars, but Start Me Up has a gorgeous EMT 140 plate on it. Most studios you go into don’t even have one anymore. 

Do you pre-delay the plate? 

Usually but not always. In the old days, like on the Zeppelin stuff, you’ll hear very long pre-delays on vocals. You know what that was? That was a 3M tape machine, which was originally designed to do video so it had about a 9-inch gap between the heads as opposed to the 2 1/4-inch gap on a Studer or Ampex. Sometimes I’d even put it at 7 1/2 ips. Another thing we used was the old Binson Echorec (see Figure 22.1). Listen to “When the Levee Breaks.” That was me putting two M 160s [Beyer ribbon microphones] on the second floor with no other microphones at all because I wanted to get John Bonham the way he actually sounded. And it worked! Page would say that he made me do it, but he was down at the pub. [Laughs] He did bring me his Binson Echorec for the track, though. 

Do you prefer analog or digital? 

What I like is the sound that’s coming into the mixer. I don’t want it modified by some tape machine. I’ve always fought with analog. I’ve always fought with vinyl. With digital, the sound that’s coming in is what you get back. It’s much truer than any analog machine ever was. If you have to smooth out your sound with some analog machine, then you’re in trouble to start with. With analog, the noise factor is like a security blanket in that the hiss can cover up some weasely things. 

But I hate fighting a machine, and I still have to have somebody there with me to help. That’s the part of the job that pisses me off. You’ve now got to be a bloody scientist. Sometimes it makes you too clever for your own good. If you just learn the tune, then you’re in tune with the tune. You let it flow through you. Now you might listen to it years later and say, “I think I missed that one.” Or, you might go, “I wish I was that guy again. That could not be any better. Who was that man?” 

In a prime example of how people interact today via high technology, I bumped into engineer/producer/mixer extraordinaire Kevin Killen via an Internet newsgroup.  It seemed that a popular thread turned to how the bass sound on Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer  was recorded, and all manner of know-it-alls replied with the wildest of supposed methods and equipment, all of which were wrong.  Eventually the real answer (Tony Levin’s Musicman bass straight into the desk with a little compression) emerged from the real voice of authority; Kevin Killen, who not only recorded and mixed Gabriel’s seminal So, but also records by U2, Elvis Costello, Stevie Nicks, Bryan Ferry, and Patty Smith to name just a few. 

Can you hear the finished product in your head?

Kevin Killen:  In certain instances I can.   f I’m hired just to mix a project and I’m not intimately familiar with the material, I have just a general overview as to what I’d like it to sound like.  As soon as I get in the studio, that’s where I really start thinking about pushing or pulling a track one way or the other.  For stuff that I’ve recorded, I usually have a pretty clear vision of what I want and actually try to start mixing as I’m recording.  I like to work 24 track (rather than 48) so I try to make decisions based upon that.  I’m always kind of mixing in advance.  

Where do you start your mix from?

Kevin Killen:  Usually the vocal.  Maybe some of the rhythm section.  I listen to what the strengths or weaknesses are and then build the track up around that.  At some point maybe I’ll just pop the vocal out and work on some of the rhythm stuff.  I found that if I start with the vocal first I finish a lot more quickly rather than if I start from the ground up.  If you’re dealing with an artist who’s a strong storyteller, that’s going to be the main focus anyway.

Do you have a method for setting levels?

Kevin Killen:  I’ve never subscribed to the point of view that there is a method.  I just go with the flow.  I had an experience about three years ago on a Stevie Nicks record with Glyn Johns, who’s been making records since the 50’s.  We were mixing without automation and he would just push the faders up and within a minute or two he would have this great mix.  Then he would just say that he didn’t like it and pull it back down again and push it back up.  I relearned that the great art of mixing is the fact that the track will gel almost by itself if it was well performed and reasonably well recorded.  I find that the stuff that you really have to work a lot harder on is the stuff that has been isolated and really worked on.  The tracks all end up sounding like disparate elements and you have to find a way to make them bleed together.

What’s your approach to EQ?

Kevin Killen:  I would imagine that I apply EQ based on my own hearing curves, whatever that is.  I definitely hear a lot more high end than other people, maybe because my ears stick out and aren’t pinned back flat to the head like other people.  Because of that I tend not to over-exaggerate EQ.  I try to get it sounding smooth.  Most people mix in a much more aggressive fashion.   I don’t have individual instrument curves that I keep coming back to because every bass drum is different and every player is different, so I don’t have particular settings or sounds that I go for except to make it sound as musical and pleasurable as possible.

Do you have an approach to panning?

Kevin Killen:  That’s one of the things that I actually spend a lot of time on.  I will get a balance that I like then I’ll just try moving the panning around.  I might spend a couple of hours experimenting because for me that is the kind of detail that can create a lot of space in a mix.  I love to explore and create holes for instruments to sit in, but I’m not into gimmicks such as Spatializers to make the panning seem wider than the speakers.

How about compression?

Kevin Killen:  When I can get it to work, sometimes I really like it.  It’s one of those things.  I listen to other people’s mixes and go “That sounds amazing”, but when I try it I can never get it to sound the same way.  I tend to be quite modest on compression because my rationale is that you can always add more but you can never take it off.  Since it will probably be applied at a later point during mastering and broadcast, I tend to err on the side of caution.  

Since SSL’s hit the marketplace I know what a temptation it is to set up the quad buss compressor even before you start your mix.  I tried that for a while but I found out that I didn’t like the way it sounded.  What I came up with instead was almost like sidechain compression where you take a couple of groups on the console and you assign various instruments to them and use a couple of compressors across the buss and mix it in, almost as an effect, instead of using compressors across the inserts.  You actually get a sense that there is some compression yet you can ride the compression throughout the song so if there’s section where you really want to hear it, like in the chorus, you can ride the faders up.  

How about adding effects?

Kevin Killen:  If they’re tracks that I haven’t recorded, I get a quick balance with the vocal and the basic instrumentation to get a sense of the space around each instrument.  If they’ve been recorded with a lot of ambience I’ll shy away from it, but if the artist wants if to sound lush then I’ll add some.  Each situation is unique.

Do you have a standard effects setup?

Kevin Killen:  I have some effects that I’ll definitely go to but I won’t necessarily have them set up beforehand.  I really want to hear what’s on tape before I start jumping in.  What I normally request is a tape slap machine with varispeed because it’s still such a great sound.    

Do you bring your own monitors?

Kevin Killen:  I actually bring a set of English Proac Studio 100’s and a Cello amplifier and my own cabling.  Bob Ludwig at Gateway mastering hooked me up with them and I’ve been using them almost exclusively for about 3 years.  I find that when I take my stuff to mastering that it translates really well.

Is there a difference between the way English engineers approach mixing from American engineers?

Kevin Killen:  I believe that the general trend in the UK is to enhance the mixes with the appropriate effect/s and there seems to be less resistance to the notion of effects in general.  In the U.S. it seems a little more contrived, i.e. if you want to be a cool alternative band you cannot use any reverb on the vocals, etc, etc.  Personally I’m bored with that philosophy.  Every recorded instrument including the voice will have an ambience associated in the room in which it was recorded.  Therefore, I believe it’s important to highlight the inherent musical quality of the performance.  Of course an artist such as Elvis Costello likes his material to be slightly less reverberant but I used more than he ever knew because it was mixed appropriately.   I try to show reverence to the artist and the producer because when they recorded the track they had a particular philosophy in mind.  I’m just a person to help them realize that vision.  

Bernie Kirsh has certainly made his mark as one of the top engineers in the world of jazz. From virtually all of Chick Corea’s records to winning an engineering Grammy for his work on Quincy Jones’s Back on the Block, Bernie’s recordings have consistently maintained a level of excellence that few can match. Although technical know-how is all important for an engineer these days, Bernie tells us that there are other, more human requirements involved in mixing as well. 

Can you hear the final result before you start? 

It depends on whether I’ve tracked it. If it’s not something that I’ve tracked and overdubbed, then I’m discovering it as I’m mixing. Often in the jazz world, it’s much more simple because I start out wanting each individual instrument to have a pleasing quality. There’s a preconceived notion I have of what that is. If you’re talking about straight-ahead jazz, there’s a balance that’s been accepted as part of the form. In that world, the cymbals are important; the position of the bass, piano, where the horns sit, and all of that kind of stuff has been listened to for decades. It’s kind of a traditional form so it’s somewhat predefined. If you move away or want to make a variation of that, then you’re on your own. If it’s something more in the electric vein and something that I’ve worked on, then I’ll come up with a notion of where I want it to go. 

Where do you build your mix from? 

The first thing that I actually look for is the melody. After that, I’ll go for the bottom of the mix, usually the bass. I don’t necessarily go for the drums first. Before I hit the rhythm I usually try to get the melody and some sort of harmonic setup first, because I want that to be clear, and I’ll often shape the rhythm to accommodate that. That’s the simplicity of it. If it’s something that’s more hard-hitting, I’ll spend more time with the rhythm to get those guys pumping together. 

Do you have certain frequencies that you seem to come back to that need attention on certain instruments? 

Let’s say for piano (which I’ve dealt with a lot), typically what happens is that in the analog domain it loses definition and openness if it’s mixed some time after it’s been recorded, so I’ll usually boost in a couple of areas. First, up around 15k (sometimes that gets lowered down to 10 or 12, depending on the instrument), and maybe a little midrange at 3k or 5k. It depends on the instrument and setting, but that’s pretty typical. I’ll do the same thing usually with cymbals. I’ll add between 12 and 15k on cymbals pretty typically. Those are the normal areas of EQ that I find that I’m constantly using. 

The frequencies that you adjust seem to be a little different from other genres. 

With this kind of music it’s all about trying to go for more of a natural sound, for lack of a better phrase, so if there’s going to be any hype at all, it’s going to be with the loudness button (on a stereo receiver) where you get the larger bottom and accentuate the top. 

Normally, if you’re going to add anything else to a piano, for instance, you’re in the 500Hz range adding some warmth. I sometimes find that when I finally get to mastering, the mastering engineer wants to take some of the warmth out for clarity purposes with just a little notch around 200 or 300. My tendency is to go for the warmth and then sometimes take some of that back out to achieve a little more definition or clarity later, if needed. 

Do you have an approach to panning? 

No, I normally keep things wide, drums in stereo and piano open. I personally like a wide piano. I like it so that it feels like you’re sitting at the instrument. 

You do it wide, left to right? 

Yeah, wide left to right. I position everything as the player is seeing it rather than the audience, so the drums are from the drummer’s perspective, piano is from the pianist’s perspective, etc., unless there’s a leakage situation where I have to worry about the phase. If, for instance, the piano and the drums are in the same room, I have to make sure that the cymbal is appearing in the right place and isn’t smearing because of the leakage into the piano. 

Is there a certain psychology that you use when recording? 

I wouldn’t call it psychology, but it’s in the realm of human interaction. I think there are certain basic things that occur in that little microcosm called a studio, which a lot of guys don’t recognize. You’re getting into some basic human sensibilities that may not be apparent as you look at it. For instance, you have artistic creation going on. You have a guy who has come into the room who has done something that’s very, very close to who he is. It’s not PR. It’s not show. It’s something that he holds very, very dear to himself. Now he’s, for lack of a better word, open and vulnerable, and he’s not being social. 

So now you’ve got an engineer in the room whose attention isn’t on that. Often you get engineers who, through various different bits of behavior, will invalidate the artist, evaluate the artist, and not respect the frame of mind that the artist is in when wanting to make his musical statements. In other words, not looking at what the artist is doing at the moment. I think you’ll find that the best engineers, the ones that the artists want to work with, have a notion that what the artist is doing is important and is something that needs to be treated with attention and respect. When I say that, I mean not to hold it up on a pedestal, but to understand that the action is something that’s very close to the artist and not just a commodity. 

For some reason, the creative process is different in the jazz world. Guys are coming in, not necessarily to just lay down just a rhythm track, but with the idea of making music. Because of that I put a lot of attention on making the players happy with what they’re hearing and making it comfortable for them. I don’t work with a lot of engineers so I don’t see it, but from the feedback I get, a lot of the younger guys don’t recognize that element is really important. It seems like the job is really 10 percent technical. The rest of it is how you work with people and help them get what they want. 

It can be said that Nathaniel Kunkel was always meant to be an engineer. The son of session drummer extraordinaire Russ Kunkel, he grew up literally at the feet of the best that the LA music scene had to offer. 

But nepotism doesn’t mean much in this business, and Nathanial had to work hard and pay his dues just like thousands of others, working first as an assistant at Jackson Browne’s studio and then with George Massenburg. All that has paid off handsomely, as Nate is now one of the most in-demand mixers in the business, with credits that range from James Taylor, Lionel Ritchie, and Sting to Good Charlotte, Fuel, and Insane Clown Posse. 

Do you start a mix with a particular approach? 

I think I learned the best approach on how to begin a mix from Ed Cherney. Ed just sort of pushes up the faders and listens to the song. Maybe he’ll just pull the guitar down, and maybe he’ll just push up the bass and drums and vocal and listen to it. He really just spends a lot of time listening, and he really gets a feeling for where the gems of the track lie. In listening to all the stripped-down versions, he finds the little moments that can be brought to fruition in every one of the tracks. Then he does it like everyone else, where he pushes up the kick drum and checks the phase with the overheads, then puts the bass in, and so forth. Everyone kind of does it the same way, but it’s really what you are looking for out of the individual instruments. 

Can you hear the finished product in your head before you start? 

Absolutely. I could hear the final mix in my head for a lot longer than I had the skill to get it there. What happens is that when your skill lets you down you run out of time, which doesn’t really mean that you have to leave the studio, but that you no longer have the same perspective as when you had it fresh in your head. To me, the secret combo is for you to come in, have a really great idea about what you want the song to be, then have the skill set to get the tracks to that point before you lose perspective because you’re fatigued. 

So how long does it usually take you? 

I usually lose perspective in about an hour and a half or two hours. I can mix solid for about eight, but I find that I can’t do really vigorous knob-twisting after about an hour and a half into it; then I just start to chase my tail a little bit. 

What do you do after an hour and a half? Do you switch to another song? 

Yeah, unless I can do something else to break the concentration for a half hour or so. 

Where do you start your mix from? 

If the song is a consistent dynamic all the way through, like a rock song, I really don’t have a method. I just sort of push it up. If I’ve gotten a great balance on the guitars and vocals before the drums, I’ll just mute the guitars and get my drum balance a bit better, then just group it and balance it against the guitars and vocals. If I’ve gotten something really great going on, like a background blend, I’m certainly not going to whack it in order to get a better kick drum sound. Because if it’s something consistent, like a rock song, you certainly don’t get into much trouble, because you can push stuff up or down as you go along and sort of end up in the right place. 

In situations where there’s an intro where things are quieter, like an acoustic and electric guitar and a vocal before the drums kick in maybe in the chorus, you don’t want the vocal level in the chorus to change very much, but you want what’s happening between the vocal and the drums to be right. That balance is very difficult to build after you’ve built an introduction, so often I’ll go and get a drum sound and push up a vocal and get a rough blend with the band, and then I’ll go back to the intro and I’ll push up the other instruments around that admittedly loud vocal. I’ll build it so my automation brings it back to the balance that I had before, so if I have a song that will dip down dynamically once or many times, I’ll go and get the core instruments to sit exactly where I want them in the loudest place. I’d rather have the automation return it to the up part rather than the down part. 

What’s the difference for you between mixing on a console and mixing in the box? 

There’s nothing different when mixing in the box that I didn’t do when I was mixing on consoles and tape machines. It just takes me less time. I have to mix in the box. I couldn’t afford the infrastructure necessary for the sheer quantity of tracks I have to deal with in the projects that I do. 

Did you have to change your approach when you decided to mix in the box? 

I find that I’m doing it exactly the way that I used to on a console. I find that I use my console [an Avid Icon controller] a lot more like an analog console. I put the same EQ and the same compressor on every channel so I never have to go to the plugin menu. I still use all outboard vocal compressors, my Distressors, GMLs, and Alan Smarts. 

I also use tons of headroom. When was the last time you took a console that clipped at +25 and ran it at +24? You just don’t do that in analog, so why would you do that in digital? I use at least 10 or 15dB of headroom on my buss. If I’m going to print a loud version, I’ll take it out to an [TC Electronic] M6000 or something that does a really outstanding job of handling over-levels and then bring it back into Pro Tools and not change it. 

When you used to sit down at a console with a tape machine that was overbiased, you would play it and say, “Something doesn’t sound right,” and then you’d turn around and address it. How many times have we sat down behind a Pro Tools rig and said, “Ug, something’s wrong”? That’s the same thing as with a tape machine; it’s just a different toolbox. It may be the headroom or clock distribution or a variety of things, but you have to pay attention and then fix the things that are wrong. If it sounds digital, then try something different. It’s a new toolbox, but it’s really the same auditory skill set. 

Do you have any tricks that you use when mixing in a DAW? 

No. That’s frightening to say, I know. Maybe it’s because I was taught by fantastic analog engineers. So what can you really do with audio? You can store it, you can change its level, you can delay it, or you can EQ it. That’s really it. Reverbs are combinations of two. So mixing inside the box, what in the world is different about that? It’s still the same problem that we’ve been having forever—making good artistic decisions and then following through with the right toolset. So for me there’s nothing that I do within a digital workstation that I didn’t do in the analog domain before. I can do it better in some cases, but it’s not a different task. 

Do you have an effect that you keep coming back to? 

My M6000 is my effects processor of choice. It’s the single best effects processor that I have ever seen or used, but never underestimate the power of a good delay. Delays are really wonderful ways to open up mixes. Maybe it’s just a simple ping-pong or a guitar on one side with a delay on the other; they don’t have to be loud and obvious. They can be subliminal and add some groove. 

Effects in general don’t have to be obvious. The best effect to me is when you’re not really aware of it. I often have rock songs that have all kinds of things going on, but when everything is raging you don’t even hear it. All you’ll know is that it has a little more swing than it did before. That to me is the win of using effects. When you can just enhance the emotional response that people have to the music without drawing their attention to some kind of trickery. 

How much compression do you use? 

I don’t want to say. [Sheepishly] Sometimes on a vocal I may use more than 10dB. There are times when there’s singing when it’s not in compression at all, but if my limiter hits 15 or 20dB of compression and I don’t hear it, I don’t think about it for an instant more. 

Do you put a compressor across the stereo buss? 

I use very little. I find I’m using more multi-band compression on my buss as nothing more than a way to elevate my level so I have something that’s competitive for approvals, but I print almost all of my mixes without limiting. 

The truth is that I compress things enough instrument-wise, so I don’t really need to compress more on the buss. When I do compress the buss it’s maybe 2 or 3 dB. The multi-band allows me to get a more competitive level with less compression. 

Do you have any special listening tricks? 

I listen quietly as much as I can. It’s hard to check the kick drum level when it’s quiet, so certainly you have to push it up every once in a while, but I fatigue pretty quickly when listening at loud levels. I can make better emotional and timbre decisions before I fatigue. 

What’s your approach to mixing in surround? 

I guess if I were to encapsulate the rule, the things that I used to put in the middle I put everywhere now. Bass, kick drum, snare drum, lead vocal—all the stuff that has a lot of mono correlated information goes a bit to every speaker, except maybe the center. If I put something in the front, I will very rarely put it in the center and the left and the right. I will put it in the center and the surrounds if I want to pull it more into the middle of the room. If I want something off to the side of the room I’ll go Left, Right, and Right Surround so it leans to that side. 

What do you usually put in the center? 

That changes. I always put something in the center. Mostly vocal. 

How about the LFE? 

Jeff Levison from DTS told me early on, “Dude, here’s what you have to understand. The LFE is a low-frequency effects track. It’s used when you run out of low-frequency headroom in your other channels.” That was in the very beginning when I was using tons of LFE, and we’d go into these rooms with an improperly aligned sub, and the low end for the entire track would be wrong. Then I started mixing with bass management, so I only go to the 0.1 when I cannot put any more level on the main channels and I want more bass. 

One last thing. What was the most important thing that George [Massenburg] taught you? 

After about five months of working for him, he said, “You know, Nathaniel, the hard part about this gig is not getting good sounds or getting along with the artist, it’s about paying attention to every little thing that’s done every moment of the day and knowing exactly what it means.” The really great engineers know what will happen with every button in the room, and that’s why we all go so bananas when people change things. 

From designing the industry’s most heralded audio tools to engineering classics by Little Feat, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Linda Ronstadt (to name only a few), George Massenburg needs no introduction to anyone even remotely connected to the music or audio business. You can find out more about George and his GML audio gear at massenburg.com. 

Can you hear the final mix in your head before you start? 

No, I generally look for a trace of feeling and I diddle things until I get a response. Whether it’s EQing or changing arrangements, it’s got to work as a feeling. And as such, I feel that what I do is significantly different from anybody else. I don’t go into a studio to make money. [Laughs] I go in to experiment. 

Is that a collective feeling or is it singular? 

Just about any successful piece of music is not something that can be performed by one person. It’s almost always a collaboration. I can’t think of anything that only one person has done in pop music. 

When you begin to build your mix, where do you build it from? 

I always start rock and roll with drums, but very quickly I’ll get a voice in there so that the instruments are crafted to work to the texture and the dynamics of the voice. I don’t have any real rule. I actually can start just about anywhere. 

When you start with your drums, are you starting with the overheads first and building around that? 

Yeah, I generally will start with overheads. 

Room mics or overheads? 

Well, first and foremost I’m listening to the music, so I’ll start with whatever gives me the best picture of what’s going on in the room. I’ll get a fast, overall mix and while I’m figuring out the tune, I’ll start listening for problems or things to improve. The problems might range from a less-than-effective instrument amp or a mic placement to some big, funny boink somewhere that’s sticking out. I like to tune things and line up overtones. I feel that equalizers are best used when used the least. I use them mostly to get rid of tones that are somehow not flattering. I’ll most often use parametrics, sharp and subtractive, to look for the two or three biggest out-of-sorts characteristics. A snare drum, for instance, has any number of boinks that I’ll locate, and I may take them out or bring them up as I’m listening to the whole presentation, but I’ll already know what and where they are. 

Do you have an approach to using effects? 

I don’t have an approach. This is probably my biggest strength and my biggest weakness at the same time. I really try to invent everything from scratch every time I walk in. But yeah, I have basic things that I keep going to. 

When you’re beginning to set up for a mix, are there certain effects that you automatically put up?

I’ll have about eight delays set up. If I can send something into a delay, I’ll do that because it takes up a lot less room. If I can make it sound like a reverb, I’ll use it. I’ll always go with the delay instead of a reverb if I can hide it. 

Hide it meaning time it to the track?

Yeah, timing it so you don’t really hear it as blatantly. You hear richness and warmth.

And the timing is what? Eighth notes or dotted or triplets? 

It’s musical, and the timing will change. Often it’s just by feel. I just put it up and try to get something that rocks. 

What’s your approach to panning? 

I’ve got two or three different approaches, and I’m always changing it. I used to be impressed by a drummer liking what I did, so I pretty much only got a drum perspective, but I’ve gone wide and I’ve gone narrow. 

Do you have a general mixing approach? 

I want to hear something authentic. I want to hear an authentic room or an authentic performance. I want to hear authentic instruments. It’s not necessarily a sophisticated or elegant thing. It’s just authentic. In stereo I try to paint a picture that makes sense—that your brain doesn’t say, “Hey, what are you trying to put across on me?” 

How are you applying compression during the mix? 

The big difference between engineers today is the use of the compressor. At one time or another, I tried to compress everything because I was building a compressor and I wanted to see how it did on every instrument. I’m a little off compression now because there are so many people who overuse it. Everything is squeezed to death. As a result I’m backing off. When anybody goes that far out, I’ll go the opposite way as hard as I can. Generally I will pretty much always have an option to compress the mix. I’ll use my EQ, my compressor, then my converter and an M5000 to do three-band; then I can dial it up from extremely subtle to pressed ham under glass. 

I’ll always compress vocals. I may recompress vocals again during the mix. I’ll almost always have a bunch of compressors if I have to bring an element or a group of elements together like a background vocal, level them, then drop them into a pocket. 

Then I’ll do some extreme stuff like compressing a room and then gating it. Maybe I’ll compress a drum room and then gate it with the snare drum to get a real rectangular reverb. I do that a lot. Maybe I’ll add reverb to a guitar and then gate the result of that. I do that some. Boy, I wish I could give you a rule. 

What are you trying to accomplish? 

Trying to get a thrill. [Laughs] I’m almost always trying to get, as Lowell George used to call it, “decibel excursion,” which is a BS term but I love it. I try to make an instrument denser or give it some weight. Half of it’s from reverb or ambiance, and the other half is bringing that ambiance right up in your face, which is compression. 

How about monitoring? What’s your typical monitoring setup?

I monitor on a lot of different things. I might go up to the wall monitors to try to hear subsonics. I’ll go to Yamahas to hear what the idiots at the record companies are listening to. Tannoys for fun. KRKs for fun. Headphones. 

You listen on headphones? 

I listen on headphones because you can hear if you’re making a mistake. [Bassist] Jimmy Johnson taught me that. He would always find that snap in bar 30 of the sax solo, and you’d listen to it and sure enough, a tiny little snap to get rid of. For the kind of music he was doing, that was appropriate. 

What levels do you usually monitor at? 

Everything. I’ll monitor way loud to see what rocks. I’ll monitor at a nominal level to get sounds together; then I’ll monitor about 5dB over background noise to hear all the elements in focus. If a mix works at 30dB SPL, 2 dB SPL, it’ll almost always work a lot louder. 

What are you listening for down that low? 

How the instruments work together and to make sure that you don’t lose anything. If you can hear everything at that low a level, then when you turn it up you’ll have a very even balance. That’s the way to get everything in the same plane, by listening extremely low. 

Do you have any playback tricks? Do you go outside in the lounge and listen through the walls sometimes? 

All the time. I’m a big one for hallway. I hate cars. Through the control room doors is always an important thing for me, because I almost never do loud playbacks. I like listening around the corner and on a blaster. 

How many versions of a mix do you normally do? 

I believe in one mix, and I believe that either it’s right or it’s not right. I will walk out of the control room with only one mix because at that point, it’s important for you to let go of it. It doesn’t belong to you anymore. 

Do you go back often and do any touchups or remixes? 

Yeah, all the time, but I think usually we go from scratch again. Some of the best mixes I’ve done have been the fourth or fifth or sixth passes. I remember on “Shining Star” [Earth, Wind & Fire’s hit], we kept going back in the studio and tracking, and I think the more we went back in, the more we found what didn’t work. 

It seems like it’s so much easier to refine things as you go back like that. 

Oh yeah, because you know what your priorities are. You know what doesn’t work, because the first couple times you go in, you’re trying exotic EQing and delays. You go back in, and it doesn’t make any difference except for the stuff that’s right. The thing that makes a difference is vocals. I’ve spent more time than anything else trying to find how to do vocals and how they tell the story. 

What you bring to the table in the control room seems to come through. I’ve been gifted to work with great musicians, and any of the sounds that we get—any of the sounds that any of the really good cats get—it’s because of great musicians. 

Although well-known as the former owner of the premier Ocean Way Studio complex in Los Angeles, Allen is also one of the most respected engineers in the business, with credits that include film scores and records by the Goo Goo Dolls, Alanis Morissette, Brian Setzer Orchestra, Phil Collins, Natalie Cole, Trisha Yearwood, Wynonna Judd, Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, and Aretha Franklin. 

Even though he remains on the cutting edge of the latest that recording technology has to offer, Allen continually finds modern uses for many long-forgotten audio relics, proving that sound technique, good ears, and an interesting piece of gear never go out of fashion. 

Can you hear the finished mix in your head before you begin? 

It depends. I would say that if it’s a project that I’ve been working on, I’ve already put it up dozens of times, so I have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing. If it’s something I’m mixing for someone else, then I listen to their roughs and get a concept of what they have in mind. I really want to understand what they want so I can make that a part of the picture that I draw. 

Do you have a special approach to mixing or a philosophy about what you’re trying to accomplish? 

First, I like it to be fun to listen to. I’ll do whatever it takes to make it satisfying. I tend to like a little more lows or extreme highs and a lot of definition, and I like it to sound as punchy as I can make it. So much of that involves the arrangement. When the arrangement is great, then the music comes together in a very nice way. If it fights, then it becomes very difficult to fit together. Getting the arrangement right is an art in itself. 

How do you go about building a mix? Where do you normally start from? 

I would say that it really varies. Sometimes I’ll throw up everything and then after I hear how the vocal sits, I’ll look at a section and refine it. Before I do, it’s really nice to hear how it relates to the vocals; because you can spend time making the whole thing sound great, but it might not relate to the vocal in any way. I’d say that I listen to the whole thing, then go back and work on each section separately, then put it all together. 

Do you have a method for setting levels? 

Yeah. When I set up my track, I’ll set the monitor level to where I’m comfortable, and I will make it sound as impressive as I can at maybe –2 on the VU meters, because I know I’m going to come up from there. I want to make it as impressive as I possibly can at a fairly modest setting. 

This is the whole mix now. 

Yeah. I get it to where it’s really kicking; then I do my vocal track and get it all happening. Even when I do that, I probably will end up trimming the individual faders here and there. The problem, of course, is that when you trim the individual faders, the way that they drive the individual effects changes slightly. All the plates and effects sound different when they’re driven differently. That’s why I try to get everything happening in that lower level, so I have to do as little trimming as possible. I also like to keep my buss masters all the way up. This, of course, depends on the console. 

So you’re putting the whole mix up first, and then you’re adding the vocals later.

Yeah, but as I say, I will probably put the whole mix up, put the vocals in, and listen to how it all fits together before anything. Based on that, I think it’s a decision of how I’m going to make the rhythm section sound. 

And another thing: I’d say is that I’m definitely a fan of your first impression being your best impression. I like to move very quickly so no matter how complex it is, within two to three hours it’s kind of where it should be. A lot of times the music is so complex that you can’t actually hear the mix until you put all the mutes in with all the parts playing in the right place. If you just put all the faders up, then you’d have one big mess, so there’s a tremendous amount of busy work just to get it prepped so that you can play it back. 

Do you have an approach to the rhythm section in particular? 

Believe it or not, I typically bring in the overheads first because my overheads are overall drum mics. I bring them in at a good level, then I fit the snare into that, then I get the kick happening. At that point I take a look at the toms and see if they’re really adding a lot of good stuff to the drum sound. I’ll just keep them on and set them where I want and then push them for fills. If they tend to muddy things up, then I’ll set them so they’re only on for the tom fills. Obviously you can set certain ambiance and effects on the toms that you don’t want on the rest of the kit, and you can make them as big as you want that way. I hate gates. I’d much rather control every fill myself. So it’s usually overheads first, then snare, then kick, and then the toms; see how it fits; then tuck in the hat. 

Do you have an approach to EQ? 

What I would say is that I tend to like things to sound sort of natural, but I don’t care what it takes to make it sound like that. Some people get a very preconceived set of notions that you can’t do this or you can’t do that. Like Bruce Swedien said to me, he doesn’t care if you have to turn the knob around backwards; if it sounds good, it is good, assuming that you have a reference point that you can trust, of course. 

Do you add effects as you go along, or do you put the mix up and balance it and then add the effects? 

No, the effects are usually added as I go along because a lot of times I’ll work on multiple image effects on kicks and snares and stuff and tie that into the overheads so you can hear all the sounds as a single entity. Obviously that can change again when the vocals come in. Invariably, what works by itself is not going to be exactly the same when you put the vocals in. You may have to increase or decrease those effects to get your overall picture to happen. 

The other important thing is that when I’m using effects, I hate it to sound generic. I’d much prefer it almost to sound like we’re going for a room sound. You have a great natural kick and snare, plenty of attack and punch, and the ambiance surrounds it in such a way that it doesn’t sound like an absolute tin-can cheese-ball effect, but becomes more of a natural sound. Obviously, it’s relative to the music you’re doing. 

Are you trying to get something that’s more of an ambient sound? 

Yeah, there’s also a question of dryness versus liveness versus deadness with regard to monitor volume. When you turn it down, your ambiance determines how loud it sounds to you to some degree. If you’re monitoring at a loud level and it’s very dry, it can be very impressive sounding. When you turn down, it might not be quite so full- sounding, so obviously there’s a balance there. 

Do you have an approach to panning? 

Yeah, I tend to do a lot of hard panning. [Laughs] I don’t pan in much since I am really big on having things wide. There’s tremendous value in returning to mono, particularly in reverb returns. I still do a lot of comparing between mono and stereo. No matter what anybody says, if you’re in a bar, you’re going to hear one speaker. There still has to be a relevance between the stereo and mono thing. 

How much compression do you use? 

Sometimes I use our Focusrite [console] setup, which has three different stereo busses that can combine, and take a mult of the initial totally clean program, and nail it to the wall to bring up all the little ambient stuff, and just tuck that back into the main clean buss so that you can add this sustain that everybody wants without killing the attack. If I take one of my SSL limiters and do that thing that it does, of course it always suffers from a certain lack of impact, so a lot of times we want to get that sustain, particularly on a rocking track, but still want a hell of a punch. That’s a way to do that. 

Do you have a monitor setup that you usually use, and what level do you listen back at? 

I must admit that I really do enjoy our big speakers. I like to turn it up and have fun. I have no problem mixing on anything else, but I like having nice, accurate, big speakers that are fun to listen to that aren’t harsh and that don’t hurt my ears. 

Generally speaking, when I put up the mix, I’ll put it up at a fairly good level, maybe 105, and set all my track levels and get it punchy and fun-sounding; then I will probably reference on NS10s at a very modest level, just to check my balance, and go back and forth from there. The small speakers that I’m fond of now, the Genelecs 1032s, I can mix on totally without a problem, but I love my big speakers and I have so much fun. [Laughs] 

If I listen loud, it’s only for very short periods of time. It’s rare that I would ever play a track from beginning to end that loud. I might listen to 20 seconds or 30 seconds of it here and there, but when I’m actually down to really detailing the balance, I’ll monitor at a very modest level. 

Modest meaning how loud? 

I would say that at a level that we could have a conversation and you could hear every word I said. 

Do you have any listening tricks, like going to the back of the room or outside and listening through the door? 

Oh yeah, I think we all have that. You walk out to get a cup of coffee, and you’re listening to it outside in the hall, and the realization strikes you, “How could I miss that?” because it’s a different perspective. What I love is my car. I put it on in the car on the way home, and I just call in any changes that I might have, and the assistants print the updates. 

How many versions of a mix do you usually do? 

Plenty. Invariably I will do the vocal mix to where I’m totally happy with it, and then I’ll probably do a quarter and half dB up and a quarter and half dB down. I’ll print as many mixes as needed, depending on how difficult the artist is to please. Then if I need to, I’ll chop in just the part I want. If there’s a word or two, I’ll just chop those words in. I really cover myself on mixes these days. I just do not want to have to do a mix again. 

Just one look at producer/engineer/mixer Don Smith’s client list gives you an indication of his stature in the music industry. With credits that read like a who’s-who of rock and roll, Don has lent his unique expertise to projects by the Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, U2, Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan, Talking Heads, Eurythmics, the Traveling Wilburys, Roy Orbison, Iggy Pop, the Pointer Sisters, and Bonnie Raitt (and many more). Sadly, Don passed away in 2010 and was warmly remembered in a memorial attended by more than 300 people, including a video from Keith Richards. His method of working was so unique that I wanted to continue to include it even though Don spoke about working back in the console era. 

Can you hear the mix before you start? 

I can usually hear roughly what it should be. I start out with the basics of a good rough mix and then I try to tweak it from there. Sometimes, I may hear something while I’m doing it, like a tape delay on the drums, that might change the character of the mix and make it turn into a different direction. 

How do you start your mix? 

Most of the time just drums and bass and then everything else. Then there were some records that I started with lead vocal, then guitar, and the drums would be last. With somebody like Tom Petty, his vocal is so important in the mix that you have to start with the vocal. So the vocals get roughed in, and you throw guitars around it. Then I might start back in the other direction, making sure that the drums and the foundation are solid. But I like to start with the vocal and guitar because it tells me what the song is about and what it’s saying; then let everyone else support the song. 

Do you have a method for setting levels? 

Yeah, I’ll start out with the kick and bass in the –7 VU area. By the time you put everything else in, it’s +3 (VU) anyway. At least if you start that low, you have room to go higher. 

Do you have an approach to using EQ? 

Yeah, I use EQ different from some people. I don’t just use it to brighten or fatten something up; I use it to make an instrument feel better. Like on a guitar by making sure that all the strings on a guitar can be heard. Instead of just brightening up the high strings and adding mud to the low strings, I may look for a certain chord to hear more of the A string. If the D string is missing in a chord, I like to EQ and boost it way up to +8 or +10 and then just dial through the different frequencies until I hear what they’re doing to the guitar. I’m trying to make things more balanced in the way they lay with other instruments. 

Do you have a special approach to a lead instrument or vocals? 

For vocals, just make sure that the song gets across. The singer is telling a story. He’s gotta come through but not be so loud that it sounds like a Pepsi commercial. Sometimes you might want the vocal to sit back in the track more because it might make the listener listen closer. Sometimes you don’t want to understand every word. It depends on the song. It’s always different. 

Do you build a mix up with effects as you go along? 

I always build it up dry. I look at it like building a house. You’ve got to build a solid foundation first before you can put the decorations on. The same way with tracking. I very rarely use effects when I track. Just every now and again if an effect is an integral part of the track to begin with, then I’ll record that. 

What I’ve found is that if you really get it good naked, then when you dress it up, all it can do is get better. If you put on effects too early, then you might disguise something that’s not right. I don’t really have too many rules about it; I’ll just do what feels good at that moment. Sometimes you get it naked and you don’t need to put any effects on. It’s pretty cool, so just leave it alone. 

Do you have a method for adding effects? 

I usually start with the delays in time, whether it’s eighth note or quarter note or dotted value or whatever. Sometimes on the drums I’ll use delays very subtly. If you can hear them, then they’re too loud; but if you turn them off, you definitely know they’re gone. It adds a natural slap like in a room, so to speak, that maybe you won’t hear but you feel. 

And, if the drums are dragging, you can speed the delays up just a nat so the drums feel like they’re getting a lift. If they’re rushing, you can do it the other way by slowing the delays so it feels like they’re pulling the track back a bit. 

A lot of times in my mixes you won’t hear those kinds of things because they’re hidden. On the Stones’ Voodoo Lounge album, there’s a song called “Out of Tears.” There are these big piano chords that I wanted to sound not so macho and grand, so I put some Phil Spector kind of 15 IPS tape slap on it. It sounded kinda cool, so I tried some on the drums, and it sounded pretty cool there, too. By the end of it, I had it on everything, and it changed the whole song around from a big, grandiose ballad to something more intimate. It was played on a Boesendofer [grand piano], but we really wanted more of an upright, like a John Lennon “Imagine” type of sound. 

Do you use tape slap a lot? 

I use tape slap all the time. I use it more than I use digital delays. It’s a lot warmer and much more natural, and the top end doesn’t get so bright and harsh, so it blends in better. I varispeed it to the tempo or whatever feels right. I usually use a four-track with varispeed and an old mono Ampex 440 machine for vocals. The mono has a whole different sound from anything else. Sort of like the Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis slap, where it can be really loud but never gets in the way because it’s always duller yet fatter. 

On the four-track, I’ll use two channels for stereo, like for drums, and send each slap to the opposite side; then the other tracks I might use for guitars or pre-delay to a chamber or something. 

Do you have an approach to panning? 

Yeah, it’s kinda weird, though. I check my panning in mono with one speaker, believe it or not. When you pan around in mono, all of a sudden you’ll find that it’s coming through now and you’ve found the space for it. If I want to find a place for the hi-hat, for instance, sometimes I’ll go to mono and pan it around, and you’ll find that it’s really present all of a sudden, and that’s the spot. When you start to pan around on all your drum mics in mono, you’ll hear all the phase come together. When you go to stereo, it makes things a lot better. 

What level do you listen at? 

I like to listen loud on the big speakers to get started, and occasionally thereafter, and most of the time I’ll listen at about 90dB. When the mix starts to come together, it comes way down, sometimes barely audible. I turn it down way low and walk around the room to hear everything. 

I mix a lot at my house, where I can sit outside on my patio and listen. If I mix in a studio with a lounge, I’ll go in there with the control-room door shut and listen like that. I definitely get away from the middle of the speakers as much as possible. 

How much compression do you use? 

I use a lot of it. Generally, the stereo buss itself will go through a Fairchild 670. Sometimes I’ll use a Neve 33609 depending on the song. I don’t use much, only a dB or two. There’s no rule about it. I’ll start with it just on with no threshold, just to hear it. 

I may go 20:1 on an 1176 with 20dB of compression on a guitar part as an effect. In general, if it’s well recorded, I’ll do it just lightly for peaks here and there. I’ll experiment with three or four compressors on a vocal. I’ve got a mono Fairchild to Neves to maybe even a dbx 160 with 10dB of compression to make the vocal just punch through the track. 

Again, I don’t have any rules. As soon as I think I’ve got it figured out, on the next song or the next artist, it won’t work as well or at all. 

Producer/engineer Ed Stasium has made some great guitar albums, such as ones by the Ramones, the Smithereens, and Living Color, but also with the likes of Mick Jagger, Talking Heads, Soul Asylum, Motorhead, and even Gladys Knight and the Pips. In this updated interview, Ed describes how his workflow has changed since switching completely to mixing in the box.

How much is the way you work different these days? 

It’s nothing like the way I worked before. I no longer work in large facilities, so I do all my mixing in the box, and it works very well. The only thing that’s the same is my ears. 

Now I’m able to work on many projects simultaneously, and for the most part, I don’t have to worry about documentation except for a few pieces of outboard gear, so that makes any recalls fast and easy. When I was using a large- format console, a recall would take hours because I used to use a lot of outboard gear, so working in the box and having a mix come back quickly is great. 

The other thing is that I sometimes get an entire session on a flash drive now. On some projects there used to be as many as 60 reels of tape, and now you can fit all that on a 64-gig flash drive. 

Mixing is different, too. Now I’ll do my preliminary mix and send it off for the artist to hear, and I’ll get notes back or have a quick Skype chat. I’ll do a revision and send it again. There are usually two or three revisions before we’re finished.

Are you using a work surface? 

I use a [Avid] Command|8, but I only use one fader at a time. That’s the way I even worked on the large-format consoles. I never put all five of my fingers on faders; I always used groups and subgroups for that. I do use the trackball a lot. 

Has your mixing philosophy changed after moving completely to the box? 

I don’t believe that my philosophy is any different. I still try to make things sound the way I think they should sound, which is what I’ve always done, only now I’m using plugins to do it. I’ve A/B’d the sound of the stuff that I’ve done in the past on analog consoles, and my latest stuff sounds pretty good. I actually think that I’m doing the best work I’ve ever done. 

One thing that really helped is that instead of exporting my mixes using Bounce to Disk in Pro Tools, I’m now using a Dangerous Music summing buss, and the difference is remarkable. What I do is use the analog outputs of the 192 [Pro Tools I/O] and go into the Dangerous 2 Buss and take the outputs of that into a dbx 160SL compressor and then into a pair of Rupert Neve Designs 5033 Portico equalizers to do a little EQ on it, then I record it back into Pro Tools. There’s a program called Teaboy [by Teaboyaudio.com] that I use for recalls of my outboard gear if I ever need to. 

The box makes life easier in a lot of ways, but then it makes life more complicated because you can do so much more. When I mixed “Midnight Train to Georgia” [the big hit by Gladys Knight and the Pips] back when I first started, we did that on a little 16-input, 16-track console in a basement studio in New Jersey. 

I remember the tracks were really packed on that song, so I just brought things in gradually. We started off with the piano, added the guitar, and then added the Hammond. Now I’m riding every snare drum hit to make sure it cuts through, every little guitar nuance, little cymbal things, the kick in certain places, especially the vocal, and a lot of little different effect changes. 

“Midnight Train” sounds so clean. 

That was a great console, a Langevin. I’m sure the drums were only on one track or two tracks at most. The Pips were double-tracked. You know, Gladys is right up in the front. 

We didn’t use many effects on that because we didn’t have any effects. It was a little basement studio, and all we had was a live chamber that was the size of a closet that was concrete with a speaker in there and a couple of microphones. That was the reverb on that record. 

Same thing at the Power Station [now called Avatar]. I was mixing the third Ramones record, [Rocket to Russia], which was actually the first project mixed there, while we were still building the place. We had a 910 Harmonizer, a couple of Kepexes [the first noise gates], and no reverb at all. What we used for reverb on that whole record was the stairwell. 

What go-to plugins do you use? 

One of my favorite plugins that I use all the time is the Metric Halo Channel Strip. It reminds me of an SSL in some ways. I also use the Bomb Factory stuff a lot, like their LA-3A and 1176, the Focusrite Scarlett, and the McDSP plug- ins, and I’ll use some of the Joe Meek stuff occasionally. I also like Smack [the stock Pro Tools plugin] on the snare drum, and the EQP-1A I use a lot. 

For effects I enjoy the Avid ReVibe, [Audio Ease] TL Space, and the stock Pro Tools D-Verb, which really works great for old-school reverb sounds. And I really like Echo Farm. 

Do you have a specific approach when you sit down to mix? 

Unlike some other people who are specifically mixers, I’ve been fortunate that everything I produce I’ve been able to follow all the way through to the mix. I’m a “hands on” kind of producer/engineer guy. 

Where do you start to build your mix from? 

I put the vocals up first and then bring in the bass and drums. I bring up the whole kit at the same time and tweak it. I’m not one to work on the kick drum sound for two hours. 

Do you have an approach to panning? 

My mixes are kind of mono, but not really. I pan toms but not to extremes, usually between 10 and 2 o’clock. Usually I have the drums in the middle, vocals in the middle, and the solos in the middle. I do pan out the guitars, though. If there’s one guitar player, I’ll do a lot of double-tracking and have those split out on the sides. If there are two guitar players, I’ll just have one guy over on the left and one guy on the right. If there is double-tracking on any of those, I’ll split them a little bit, but I never go really wide with them. 

Do you use a lot of compressors? 

I think of compression as my friend. What I do a lot is take a snare drum and go through an LA-2, just totally com- press it, and then crank up the output so it’s totally distorted and edge it in a little bit behind the actual drum. You don’t notice the distortion on the track, but it adds a lot of tone in the snare. Actually, something I’ve done for the last 20 years is to always split out the kick drum and snare drum and take the second output into a Pultec into a dbx 160VU and into a Drawmer 201 gate; then I pretty much overemphasize the EQ and compression on that track and use it in combination with the original track. 

What monitors do you use? 

I have a 5.1 system of JBL’s LSR 4326s. I never use the NS10s anymore, but I do sometimes use my old JBL L100s. I also listen a lot to these small Advent Powered Partners computer speakers. I do all of my final tweaking on them, but I don’t listen to them sitting in the middle of the speakers; I listen with one ear to them to make sure things are right. 

How many alternate mixes do you do? 

I never do them anymore. When I used to do them, they were never used anyway. It literally takes a minute to do an adjustment these days, so there’s no need. If I have to adjust the outboard gear, it takes two minutes. 

Do you have any mixing tips or tricks? 

I like to use Sound Replacer and put the samples underneath the real drums to give them some punch. I’ll immediately record the drum samples after a song is tracked because the sound of the drums changes with each song. A really important thing is to make sure that whatever you’re recording sounds good in the first place. You’re not going to be able to fix anything that doesn’t sound good already. 

Perhaps no one else in the studio world can so aptly claim the moniker of “Godfather of Recording” as Bruce Swedien. Universally revered by his peers, Bruce has earned that respect thanks to years of stellar recordings for the cream of the musical crop. His credits could fill a book alone, but legends such as Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Oscar Peterson, Nat “King” Cole, George Benson, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Edgar Winter, and Jackie Wilson are good places to start. Then comes Bruce’s Grammy-winning projects, which include Michael Jackson’s Thriller (the biggest-selling record of all time), Bad, and Dangerous and Quincy Jones’ Back on the Block and Jook Joint. As one who has participated in the evolution of modern recording from virtually the beginning, as well as being one of its true innovators, Bruce was able to give insights on mixing from a perspective that few of us will ever have. 

Do you have a philosophy about mixing that you follow? 

The only thing I could say about that is everything that I do in music—mixing or recording or producing—is music driven. It comes from my early days in the studio with Duke Ellington and from there to Quincy. I think the key word in that philosophy is what I would prefer to call “responsibility.” From Quincy—no one has influenced me more strongly than Quincy—I’ve learned that when we go into the studio, our first thought should be that our responsibility is to the musical statement that we’re going to make and to the individuals involved, and I guess that’s really the philosophy I follow. 

Responsibility in that you want to present the music in its best light? 

To do it the best way that I possibly can. To use everything at my disposal to not necessarily re-create an unaltered acoustic event, but to present either my concept of the music or the artist’s concept of the music in the best way that I can. 

Is your concept ever opposed to the artist’s concept?

It’s funny, but I don’t ever remember running into a situation where there’s been a conflict. Maybe my concept of the sonics of the music might differ at first with the artist, but I don’t ever remember it being a serious conflict. 

Is your approach to mixing each song generally the same, then? 

No. That’s the wonderful part about it. I’ll take that a step further and I’ll say it’s never the same, and I think I have a very unique imagination. I also have another problem in that I hear sounds as colors in my mind [this is actually a neurological condition known as synesthesia]. Frequently when I’m EQing or checking the spectrum of a mix or a piece of music, if I don’t see the right colors in it I know the balance is not there. 

Can you elaborate on that? 

Well, low frequencies appear to my mind’s eye as dark colors, black or brown, and high frequencies are brighter colors. Extremely high frequencies are gold and silver. It’s funny, but that can be very distracting. It drives me crazy sometimes. 

What are you trying to do then, build a rainbow? 

No, it’s just that if I don’t experience those colors when I listen to a mix that I’m working on, I know either that there’s an element missing or that the mix values aren’t satisfying. 

How do you know what proportion of what color should be there? 

That’s instinctive. Quincy has the same problem. It’s terrible! It drives me nuts, but it’s not a quantitative thing. It’s just that if I focus on a part of the spectrum in a mix and don’t see the right colors, it bothers me. 

How do you go about getting a balance? Do you have a method? 

No, it’s purely instinctive. Another thing that I’ve learned from Quincy, but that started with my work with Duke Ellington, is to do my mixing reactively, not cerebrally. When automated mixing came along, I got really excited because I thought, “At last, here’s a way for me to preserve my first instinctive reaction to the music and the mix values that are there.” You know how frequently we’ll work and work and work on a piece of music, and we think, “Oh boy, this is great. Wouldn’t it be great if it had a little more of this or a little more of that?” Then you listen to it in the cold, gray light of dawn, and it sounds pretty bad. Well, that’s when the cerebral part of our mind takes over, pushing the reactive part to the background, so the music suffers. 

Do you start to do your mix from the very first day of tracking? 

Yes, but again I don’t think that you can say any of these thoughts is across the board. There are certain types of music that grow in the studio. You go in and start a rhythm track and think you’re gonna have one thing, and all of a sudden it does a sharp left and it ends up being something else. There are other types of music where I start the mix even before the musicians come to the studio. I’ll give you a good example of something. On Michael’s HIStory album, for the song “Smile, Charlie Chaplin,” I knew what that mix would be like two weeks before the musicians hit the studio. 

From listening to the demo? 

No. It had nothing to do with anything except what was going on in my mind, because Jeremy Lubbock, the orchestra arranger and conductor, and I had talked about that piece of music and the orchestra that we were going to use. I came up with a studio setup that I had used with the strings of the Chicago Symphony many years before at Universal, where the first violins are set up to the left of the conductor and the second violins to the right, the violas behind the first fiddles and the celli behind the second fiddles, which is a little unusual, so I had that whole mix firmly in mind long before we did it. 

So sometimes you do hear the final mix before you start. 

Sometimes, but that’s rare. 

Where do you generally build your mix from? 

It’s totally dependent on the music, but if there were a method to my approach, I would say the rhythm section. You usually try to find the motor and then build the car around it. 

Some people say they always put the bass up first…some from the snare, some the overheads….

No, I don’t think I have any set way. I think it would spoil the music to think about it that much. 

Do you have a method for panning?

I don’t think I have any approach to it. I generally do whatever works with the music that I’m doing. 

So it’s just something that hits you when you’re doing it? 

Yeah, that’s really the way it works. It’ll be an idea, whether it’s panning or a mix value or an effect or whatever, and I’ll say, “Ooh, that’s great. I’m gonna do that.” 

What level do you usually monitor at? 

That’s one area where I think I’ve relegated it to a science. For the nearfield speakers, I use Westlake BBSM8s, and I try not to exceed 85dB SPL. On the Auratones I try not to exceed 83. What I’ve found in the past few years is that I use the big speakers less and less with every project. 

Are you listening in mono on the Auratones? 

Stereo. 

Do you listen in mono much? 

Once in a while. I always check it because there are some places where mono is still used. 

I love the way you sonically layer things when you mix. How do you go about getting that? 

I have no idea. If knew, I probably couldn’t do it as well. It’s purely reactive and instinctive. I don’t have a plan. Actually, what I will do frequently when we’re layering with synths is to add some acoustics to the synth sounds. I think this helps in the layering in that the virtual direct sound of most synthesizers is not too interesting, so I’ll send the sound out to the studio and use a coincident pair of mics to blend a little bit of acoustics back with the direct sound. Of course it adds early reflections to the sound, which reverb devices can’t do. That’s the space before the onset of reverb where those early reflections occur. 

So what you’re looking for more than anything is early reflections? 

I think that’s a much overlooked part of sound because there are no reverb devices that can generate that. It’s very important. Early reflections will usually occur under 40 milliseconds. It’s a fascinating part of sound. 

When you’re adding effects, are you using mostly reverbs or delays? 

A combination. Lately, though, I have been kinda going through a phase of using less reverb. I’ve got two seven- foot-high racks full of everything. I have an EMT 250, a 252, and all the usual stuff, all of which I bought new. No one else has ever used them. It’s all in pretty good shape, too. 

Do you have any listening tricks? 

Since I moved from California [Bruce now lives in Ocala, Florida], one of the things that I miss is my time in the car. I had a Ford Bronco with an incredible sound system, and I still kinda miss that great listening environment. 

Do you do all your work at your facility now? 

No, I go wherever they’ll have me. I love it here, but my studio’s dinky. I have an older little 40-input Harrison and a 24-track. The Harrison is a wonderful desk. It’s a 32 series and the same as the one I did Thriller on. Actually, I think that’s one of the most underrated desks in the industry. It’s all spiffied up with a beautiful computer and Neve summing amps. It’s just fabulous. 

How long does it usually take you to do a mix? 

That can vary. I like to try not to do more than one song a day unless it’s a really simple project, and then I like to sleep on a mix and keep it on the desk overnight. That’s one of the advantages of having my little studio at home. 

How many versions of a mix do you do? 

Usually one. Although when I did “Billie Jean,” I did 91 mixes of that thing, and the mix that we finally ended up using was Mix 2. I had a pile of half-inch tapes to the ceiling. All along we thought, “Oh man, it’s getting better and better.” [Laughs] 

Do you have an approach to using EQ? 

I don’t think I have a philosophy about it. What I hate to see is an engineer or producer start EQing before they’ve heard the sound source. To me it’s kinda like salting and peppering your food before you’ve tasted it. I always like to listen to the sound source first, whether it’s recorded or live, and see how well it holds up without any EQ or whatever. 

That being the case, do you have to approach things differently if you’re just coming in to do the mix?

Not usually, but I’m not really crazy about working on things that other people have recorded—I gotta tell you that. I consider myself fortunate to be working, so that’s the bottom line. [Laughs] 

Do you add effects as you go? 

There are probably only two effects that I use on almost everything, and that’s the EMT 250 and the 252. I love those reverbs. There’s nothing in the industry that comes close to a 250 or a 252. 

What are you using the 252 on? 

I love the 252 on vocals with the 250 program. It’s close to a 250, but it’s kinda like a 250 after taxes. It’s wonderful, but there’s nothing like a 250. 

What do you do to make a mix special? 

I wish I knew. The best illustration of something special is when we were doing “Billie Jean,” and Quincy said, “Okay, this song has to have the most incredible drum sound that anybody has ever done, but it also has to have one element that’s different, and that’s sonic personality.” I lost a lot of sleep over that. What I ended up doing was building a drum platform and designing some special little things like a bass drum cover and a flat piece of wood that goes between the snare and the hat. And the bottom line is that there aren’t many pieces of music where you can hear the first three or four notes of the drums and immediately tell what song it is. I think that’s the case with “Billie Jean,” and that I attribute to sonic personality, but I lost a lot of sleep over that one before it was accomplished. 

Do you determine that personality before you start to record? 

Not really, but in that case I got to think about the recording setup in advance. And of course, I have quite a microphone collection that goes with me everywhere (17 anvil cases!), and that helps a little bit in that they’re not beat up. 

Are most of the projects that you do these days both tracking and mixing? 

I don’t know what’s happened, but I don’t get called to record stuff very much these days. People are driving me nuts with mixing, and I love it, but I kinda miss tracking. A lot of people think that since I moved to Florida I retired or something, but that’s the last thing I’d want to do. You know what Quincy and I say about retiring? Retiring is when you can travel around and get to do what you want. Well, I’ve been doing that all my life. I love what I do, and I’m just happy to be working, so that’s the bottom line. 

One of the most respected of the new breed of engineers, Steve Albini gained his considerable experience and reputation working primarily with underground and alternative bands. While his most famous credit remains Nirvana’s “In Utero”, Steve has worked with a diverse lineup of artists such as PJ Harvey, The Pixies, The Stooges, Cheap Trick, Silkworm, Jesus Lizard, Bush, and even the mainstream Page/Plant Walking to Clarksdale.

Do you have a standard setup when you track?

No. I get asked to do a lot of different kinds of sessions; everything from 3 piece rock bands to acoustic soloists to big sprawling acoustic ensembles to large electric groups where you have the equivalent of a couple of rock bands playing simultaneously, so I try to have an open mind about what is expected of me because I’ve been in bands myself and I know within our band our methodology was different from other bands. I want to give other bands that same freedom to develop their own vocabulary and methodology. What I do is subordinate to what they do, so there isn’t really a standard setup.

Given a three piece rock band for example, I would prefer to have them try to play live, although not necessarily all in the same room, so that they’re interacting with each other and can accommodate each other’s little changes in emphasis and timing.

Given a larger ensemble, I’ve always found that you get better results if it’s possible to set everybody up to play live. I’ve done sessions with as many as 12 or 14 band members playing simultaneously. If it’s possible to have everybody play at once, that’s the best way to do it.

Do you have standard mics that you use?

Depending upon what the music requires, there is a range of choices to start with. For example, in a drum kit if the drummer is going for an open, ambient, boomy sound, then the ambient character of the room is really important, but I’ll still have close mics on the drums because that’s a good way to get a general balance within the drum kit. On bass drum it would depend on whether there was a hole in the front head, or no front head at all or a closed front head. I normally mic both sides of the bass drum. I’ll use either a small lavaliere or a clip-on condenser to mic the beater side of the bass drum. I’ve used a Crown GLM100, Shure SM98, or a small dynamic microphone like a Beyer 201 on a little stand by the beater side of the drum. Then if it’s a closed front head, I’ll use either a large diaphragm condenser mic like a 414 or a FET 47. Normally I’d use a dynamic mic like a Beyer M88, AKG D112 or a really bassy microphone like a Beyer 380 for really murky deep rumbly sound.

If there’s a hole in the front head and there’s a lot of air coming out of that hole, you have to be careful about where the mic is positioned. I don’t have great results with the mic sticking inside the bass drum but sometimes it sounds quite good with the microphone positioned slightly in off-center in front of that hole. There I might use an RE-20 or a D-112 or a Beyer M88, or occasionally a 421. If there’s no front head at all and it’s a very short, dead, thumping kind of sound, then I would put the mic inside the mouth of the bass drum but very close to the beater and I would probably use either an RE-20 or D112. I have used other mics, like a Shure SM7 for example.

The idea is that you want to record the bass drum so when you hear it on the speakers in the control room it sounds like a bass drum. There are quite a few people who opt for a more stylized bass drum sound where the bass drum doesn’t sound like a bass drum but instead sounds like some archetype of a recorded bass drum. I’ve never had much luck with that. Trying to make it sound like something else always sounds funny to me. I want it to sound pretty much as it does in the room.

The nice thing about having a mic on the batter side as well as the front side is that you can get more attack out of the beater if you need it by balancing that mic against the front mic without having to screw the sound up with EQ. In order to get it to bite more, you don’t have to add more hi-frequency energy, which can also really exaggerate the spillage from the cymbals and stuff.

What determines what mics you use on the drum kit?

What it should sound like is determined by a conversation with the drummer. Different mics have different character. The RE-20 has a quite mid-rangy sort of popping sound if your going for a percussive bass drum sound. The D-112 has sort of a hollowed out sound and doesn’t have as much mid-range. It has more attack and deep bass. The M88 doesn’t have quite as much low energy as D-112 but it doesn’t have as much mid-range energy as the RE-20 so it’s sort of a middle ground between those two. The 421 is much harder sounding and more pointed. It has reasonable bass response but it’s a more aggressive sound. The condenser mics tend to get used when the bass drum is being played quite softly because you want to pick up the character of the resonance and character of the front skin.

There’s a lot of variations in sound in what you would call the bass drum so it’s important to have a conversation with the drummer and to listen quite closely to what the bass drum actually sounds like.

Do you try to make the sound fit into the rest of the band or just within the kit?

The presumption that I start with is that the drummer already has the sound worked out within the band. I don’t work with a lot of bands that are assembled session players. Virtually all the bands that I record are self-contained entities that communicate within themselves in their own way and work out their own problems internally, so if the drummer has got a particular sound to his kit that he likes, I take that to be a part of the innate sound of the band. If somebody doesn’t like something at any point, that’s your first clue that you have to stop and address something, but I’m not of the opinion that I can discern what is the best sound for the drum kit within a band. I always like to leave those kind of aesthetic decisions up to the band.

Another thing that I’ve noticed, when the drummer has a drum kit that has toms in it, the sort of singing resonance of the toms that goes along with the bass drum can be a big part of the bass drum sound. Trying to get rid of those rings and resonances is sort of a standard practice, but I’ve never followed that advice. I like to be able to hear the drum kit as a single instrument rather than as a collection of discrete sounds. For example, when the drummer hits the bass drum the floor tom goes “Hmmmm,” I tend to like that and believe that it’s part of the character of the drum kit.

Do you use drum tuners or change heads?

In the same way that I think it’s a good idea for the guitarist to have new strings when they go in to record, I think it’s a good idea for the drums to have new heads. We have drumheads here at the studio so we can swap them out if need be. I tend to think that Remo Ambassador heads record better than other drum heads. Whether clear or coated is sort of a performance choice, but I tend to think that they sound better, or at least are more predictable in their behavior, so I always recommend that the drummer get new heads. If he doesn’t have a preference, I would suggest Ambassadors.

If the drummer needs help tuning his drums I’m happy to help, but generally speaking, a drummer that knows his drum kit and plays regularly will have a preferred sound for his drums and I don’t want to interfere with that.

Do you ever use only two or three mics to capture the sound of the kit?

Yes I do, although it’s not a standard thing for me. I’ve done it when someone is trying to record in an idiomatic way. Some people like the sound of the drums in old Western Swing records where there’s a barely discernible drum kit in the background. Some people like the sound of the early Tamala/Motown records where there’s an overhead microphone and maybe a bass drum microphone and that’s the majority of the drum sound. When someone comes into the studio to make something that’s making reference to an archetype like that, I like to try to accommodate them rather than recording in a modern fashion and pretending that’s it’s archaic.

I have done some sessions on 8 and 16 track where it was an aesthetic choice to have a real simplistic sound to the drums where you’ll end up using only a couple of mics. I’ve found that a bass drum mic and a mic on either side of the drum kit, like one by the rack tom and one by the floor tom, is a pretty good way to get a nice even sound on the drums. Occasionally, just an overhead microphone right over the drummers’ head and a bass drum microphone will work. For some reason I’ve found that ribbon mics work better in that capacity because they have a figure 8 pattern and they tend to attenuate the spillage from the sides of the room, and they keep the high hat in particular from becoming overwhelming.

If I’m recording with microphones on either side of the drum kit, then I’ll probably use condenser mics, either Schoeps 221’s, C12’s or Sony C37’s.

Do you mic the high hat?

No. I will on rare occasion if the drummer is playing really lightly or doing a bunch of tricky stuff that he’s really proud of, but generally speaking, there’s more high-hat than you can use [from the snare mic]. If they came up with a negative microphone that you could suck it out of the record, I would put one up on the hat most of the time.

Do you use the overheads to mic the kit or just as cymbal microphones?

If the drums are being recorded in a live room with a lot of ambient sound, I tend to think that the cymbals sound better that way than with mics right up close to them. I do have overheads up over the drum kit generally just to correct balance problems with the cymbals. Like if the crash cymbal isn’t loud enough, it’s nice if there’s an overhead mic to bring it up, but I generally prefer the sound of the cymbals at a distance.

What are you using for overheads usually?

I’ve had really good luck with Coles and STC 4038 ribbon microphones. I’ve had good luck using an M/S stereo pair in front of the drum kit sort of chest high as a cymbal mic. I’ve used an AKG C-24, the Royer stereo ribbon mic, Neumann SM 2, a pair of 414’s. I’ve used any number of things for that M/S pair.

For overheads as individual mics on booms over the drum kit, I’ve had real good luck with Schoeps 221’s, and the AKG C60 using omnidirectional capsules or CK-1 cardioid capsules. I’ve used 414’s. Boy, it’s hard to think of something that I haven’t used.

Do you tailor you mic selection to the instrument?

To an extent. You can get into a mode where everything is an experiment and you never make any decisions and that tends to slow things down. I tend to make a guess as to what should work, and if it doesn’t sound like it’s doing the job, I like to capitulate immediately and put something else up rather than screwing around forcing it to work. So it’s not a long experimental process but more like a couple of rapid decisions.

How do you determine where to place the instruments in a room?

If I’m familiar with the studio like the ones we have here at Electrical Audio, I can tell if a given location is good or bad. The most important thing is the band’s comfort and their sight-lines. There’s no point in having one tiny little corner of the room where the drums sound good if the bass player can’t see that far, so I tend to avoid the bad spots rather than finding the good spots.

One really revealing thing is to walk around a room and sort of stomp and clap and holler and hear where you’re getting reinforcement from the room and hear where it sounds interesting. Wherever you find the place that you like the sound of the reflected sound is a good place to start. A lot of studios are designed to have very little reflected energy and support from the room and those can be frustrating environments to record in. Professionally designed Nashville style studios can be a real chore to make records in because the rooms don’t have any personality. I’ve found a lot of non-professionally designed studios to be more flattering acoustically.

How do you deal with leakage?

If there are a lot of instruments in the same room, you have to be careful about physically how close they are to one another, what their orientation is, and how close the mics are. If there are many sources in a room, chances are that they’re an acoustic ensemble and you’re not dealing with high volumes. If there’s bleed from one instrument to the other, it normally sounds sympathetic and nice.

So you usually use the iso rooms instead?

Yeah, normally if it’s a three piece rock band there will probably be one room that’s an isolation room that will probably have the amplifiers in it. The hardest thing to manage in terms of bleed is if you have really quiet instruments and really loud ones playing in the ensemble, like if you have a violinist playing with a rock band. Then you have to find a location for the violinist where there’s enough air around the violin to make it sound normal with a reasonable sight line so they can see what they’re doing, but you have to make sure the violin isn’t so close to the drums or amplifiers that the violin mic is overwhelmed.

Surprisingly enough, instruments like accordion, buran or frame drum or things like that are easy to deal with because you can take a small lavaliere and physically mount it to the instrument so it’s right by the sound source. You don’t need very much gain on that microphone at all and it’s not going to pick up very much bleed. It’s much harder to do with instruments like piano or acoustic guitar or mandolin because if you have the mic close to the strings on those instruments it sounds funny.

Generally speaking, if you have a large ensemble you try to put physical space between them, and then you try to put the loud instruments in one room and the quiet ones in another one if possible.

What do you use for microphone preamps?

I’ve used them all and there are very few that I’ve not been able to find a use for. We have about ten Ampex 351 modules that we’ve modified into mic preamps and I really love the way they sound, especially if you’re using a ribbon or dynamic microphone. It seems like the way they interface with those dynamic systems is just a natural match. They were similar eras of technology designed to work together.

I really love the GML mic preamps. They’re dead clean and have a lot of gain and great bass response. I also really like the John Hardy mic preamps. They’re clean, really great sounding, really reliable, and have great metering. We’ve got a lot of these Sytek mic preamps which are rather inexpensive but are on par with the others that I just mentioned. They sound different, a little crispier sounding with a little more extreme high end, but they have loads of gain and are quiet and totally reliable.

The console preamps in our Neotek consoles are also really nice. I use them far more than I use the console preamps when in other studios. The older one that we have, the Series Two, has a slightly thicker sound that’s really good for rock music and bass and drums. The newer Elite I don’t hesitate to use the preamps on anything.

How do you determine what preamps to use? Is it a preferred combination with a mic?

Generally speaking it’s more of a logistical factor. Like if I have four mics up on the guitars, I’ll want to use a four channel preamp so that they’re all in the same place. If I have three vocal mics up that we’re experimenting with, then I’d like to have them all in the same place. Again, there’s no real exhaustive search done to try to find the perfect preamp. It’s more a matter of making sure that whatever choice you make doesn’t cause problems.

What do you use on snare?

I had the hardest time with snare drum when I first started making records. When you listen to a snare when you’re sitting at the drums it can have this really explosive sound, and it can have a really subtle sound. I was never happy with the sound of snare drum on other people’s records. It didn’t sound like a snare drum to me and usually sounded like some stylized version of a snare drum, so I experimented for a long time before I found something that I was happy with.

The first thing that I found that I was happy with was using a Beyer 201 dynamic mic with a small condenser microphone like a Shure SM-98 or AKG 451 strapped to the side of it with their diaphragms aligned. I used that combination quite a bit because every time I tried something else, it wouldn’t sound right. The stock solutions like an SM57 or a 421 just never did it for me. Every time I would open the fader on one of those it would just sound wrong, so I like that combination on the top of the snare. It seems like I can vary the balance between those two and get either a crisp sound or a thick sound or a popping midrange sound. With a flexible combination of those two I could either satisfy myself or satisfy the drummer.

I did happen to find a couple of other mics that I like on snare drum. For rock drumming there’s this small tube Altec model 75 that sounds quite good. It doesn’t clip. There might be some mild distortion, but it sounds good. I’ve also used a Sony C37 which was a real shocker. I didn’t expect that one to work out but that mic sounds great on snare drum, especially on a bright but bassy, flat, funky snare drum. Those are the only mics that I’ve had good results on. I’ve occasionally used a bottom mic, but it doesn’t get used a lot.

How do you place it?

Someplace where it won’t get hit (laughs), but that’s not even the biggest problem. You want it somewhere where it’s out of the drummers’ way. You don’t want it to interfere with what he’s doing and you don’t want the drummer to be preoccupied about not hitting the microphone. Every drummer’s set is slightly different, so you try to find a place where it’s not going to pick up too much of the high hat and it’s not going to be in the way of the drummer.

It’s nice if you can get a few inches of distance between the snare drum mic and the snare drum, but you have to put it where it will go rather than making the drummer work around it.

How about toms?

For years I used AKG 451’s on small toms and AKG 414’s on big ones. Occasionally I would use 414’s on everything, but 451’s had a really great, focused attack and nice clear resonant bass. But because the matching on those mics is a little sketchy to start with and because they’d get banged up all the time, I started looking for something to replace them with. The real inspiration for this was that AKG discontinued the 451 and almost instantly those mics were being sold by equipment brokers as “vintage.” These used to be a commodity item that you could pick up for $100 and suddenly they were $500. The new reissue of the 451 is completely different and nothing like an original 451, so I had to look for something else.

I talked to a number of microphone manufacturers about commissioning them to make a microphone for me but no one was interested. What I needed was a high quality condenser microphone with a small diaphragm that was either side firing so I could place it over a tom without it sticking out in the drummers way, or with a rotating capsule like the old 451’s. Nobody had a product that was equivalent until I talked to David Josephson. I had used some of his microphones in a studio in Japan and found them to be really good general purpose condenser microphones. He thought it would be an interesting project, so over the course of about two years we went back and forth and he ended up designing a capsule that would fit on his standard head amplifier that was a side firing single membrane cardioid microphone [the e22S]. I bought a half dozen from him and he entered it into his product line.

Electric bass; do you mic or take it direct?

It’s rare that I take a direct signal on a bass guitar. Again I think that the bass player’s choice of amplifiers defines the character of his playing and the band, so I tend to try to record the bass amplifier so it sounds the same as when you listen to it in the room. I generally use a couple of microphones, one which is brighter than the other, because depending on the balance of the song you might have to increase the edginess of the bass to make it poke through more.

One mic that I use all the time is a Beyer 380 which is a very wooly and deep microphone that has a lot of super low end. It’s a figure 8 mic so it has a huge proximity effect. If you move it in close on the speaker cabinet you get all the low end you would ever want. Then I’ll generally have a condenser mic as well like a 451 or a 414 or an Audio Technica 4033 or a FET 47 or any number of things to compliment it.

I place the mics generally fairly close and in the center of the loudspeaker, but far enough away that none of the excursion of the speaker will run into the microphone.

Guitars; where are you placing the mics?

Electric guitar mikes tend to be farther away from the cabinet because if you’re really close to the speaker then the acoustic interactions with the cabinet are more localized. If you pull the mic farther away, then you get a more coherent sound from the cabinet as a whole. I have used all sorts of mics on electric guitars, but I really like ribbon mics on them. I think the 4038 sounds great and the Royer 121 sounds great. Old RCA BK-5 and 44’s sound good on small cabinets if you have to beef it up.

One mic or multiple mics?

Normally I’ll have a bright mic and dark mic on the cabinet, like a condenser and a ribbon mic. Since all the speakers in a cabinet sound different, I try to find one that’s appropriate for the ribbon mic and another one that’s appropriate for the condenser.

I don’t have a lot of luck on guitar cabinets, I have to admit. I haven’t had a lot of luck with the traditional SM57 or Sennheiser 421 or 409. I actually never even owned a 57 until recently. I had to buy one because somebody wanted it, but I had gone nearly 20 years without one.

What do you use on vocals?

That’s a real can of worms. There are as many vocal microphones and vocal styles as people singing. I know a lot of people just throw up a U 47 and call it quits. I have used a U 47 with good results, but I can’t say that it’s my #1 favorite vocal mic.

If I have a #1 favorite vocal mic, it’s probably the Josephson microphone called the 700. I’ve used that quite a bit, but even as great a microphone as it is and as much use as I get out of it, it’s not appropriate for fully 75% of the people I work with. I end up using everything from RE-20’s to old tube mics to ribbon mics. It totally depends upon the singer and the delivery. This is one area that you really can go around in circles looking for something that sounds good.

So your mic selection is based on how it makes the vocal sit in the track?

If someone’s voice is the center of attention in the music, I like to be able to just listen to that and have it be satisfying. If you’re listening to the voice by itself, it should make you think, “That sounds really great.” If that’s the center of attention, then you want to make sure that it’s a rewarding listen.

How about piano.

I’ve had really good luck with the Neumann SM 2 stereo mic over the piano. AKG C-12 and C-24’s sound great too. Those Audio Technica 4051’s are great piano mics. I’ll usually place them perpendicular to the harp, one on the long strings and one on the short strings. You have to shuffle them in and out until the stereo image sounds normal. The SM 2 I’ll put in front of the piano with the lid open sort of looking in on the strings. Same with the C-24.

How do you approach acoustic guitars?

With acoustic guitars it depends on whether there’s going to be singing simultaneously with the acoustics. If there is, then you have to try to make the mics not favor the vocal. If there’s no singing, then you can record the instrument at a distance and pick up some room sound and that’s nice. Normally I try to have a stereo image either from the audience perspective or the players perspective. The Neumann SM 2 is a great acoustic mic. Schoeps 221’s are great. I’ve used the ATM 4051 at a distance because they’re get a bit brittle if you get too close.

If you have an instrument that’s really stringy and thin sounding, a ribbon mic up close tends to make it sound a bit heftier. The same basic thing holds true for things like mandolin and banjo. With banjo you have to be careful because it’s a brittle instrument and you have to use a darker microphone.

Korn, and Marilyn Manson, producer Michael Beinhorn is no stranger to music that rocks.  But unlike many others who work in that genre, Michael approaches the music with a care and concern more usually associated with more traditional styles of acoustic music.  And as you’ll read, he’s elegantly outspoken on the current state of modern recording.

How much do you engineer?

I try to avoid it entirely. (laughs)

But you still have your fingers in it because you obviously know what you’re doing and you know the tools.

That’s hopefully what I bring to the work that I do.  To me it’s fun but there’s also an amount of responsibility.  I think if I’m going to have some sort of say in how a recording is done, then I should know a little something about what the tools can do.  I should know what kind of SPL a certain mic can stand, or what the mic can actually do, or what types of things it doesn’t marry best to.

I understand that you have a tremendous vintage microphone collection.

I’ve got a couple.  Actually more like 17.

What got you on the quest for vintage mics?

To me, if you are able to have access to them, you can’t really have enough of them (laughs).  Especially pertaining to vocalists because a different microphone will marry better to a different person’s voice.  There’s no one microphone that does every single thing.  You’re not going to take a U47 and use it on every single vocalist just because it’s your favorite mic and it works great.  That being said it’s a great workhorse mic and as tube mics go, it’s one of the best for multiple varieties of tasks.  But they all serve a different function.

For me these things are like the tools that an artist uses.  It’s like the palette, the paint and the colors.  But there are things that are being made today that are every bit as essential as those old microphones are.  I’ve been using a lot of Audio Technica stuff and I’ve found that for the functions that they serve, there really isn’t anything that I’ve heard that is comparable.  There’s a certain amount of speed in regards to transient response that you can’t get with the older stuff.  (In the old days) they weren’t thinking about how fast you could reproduce a sound; they were just concerned about capturing it, although after a while with a greater degree of accuracy.

How much preproduction do you usually do?

Whatever it takes.  It’s a broad answer but it’s a broad question.  Some bands are rehearsed and prepared and have their songs written and maybe all they need is to have a couple of arrangement alterations, but other bands may require months.  I worked with a band where their preproduction took about 7 months.  They also didn’t have any of their songs written so that was somewhat of an issue too (laughs).

When you’re doing preproduction with someone that you’ve worked with before, does it go faster or slower?

It’s not something that I have a whole lot of experience with, to be perfectly honest with you.  That’s really only happened one time and there wasn’t any difference.  Really, it has more to do with what the circumstances dictate.  Sometimes, if the band has achieved a certain amount of notoriety, they’re more likely to have more of a lackadaisical attitude about things and that just equals more time spent.

When you’re tracking, what’s the most important thing for you in terms of setting the vibe?

Making sure that the band is well rehearsed and they know their music.  You can coddle people all you want and act like a cheerleader, but at the end of the day if they don’t have their songs rehearsed there’s no amount of glad-handing that’s going to be more effective than if they know every single thing that they’re supposed to play.  If you want to make variations on that and if everyone’s OK with it then it’s cool, but if people don’t feel good about what they’re doing and have some sort of confidence then there’s no amount of cheerleading that you can do to help them.  That’s like the greatest vibe killer in the world as far as I’m concerned.

Once a song is played and done really well there’s such a sense of relief and at the same time happiness about hearing something sound so good.  That’s the thing that really makes it all move.

Do you feel that you contribute to their confidence level?

I can’t say for sure, not being able to get inside someone else’s head, but I can assure you that once someone has done something well they have to beat me down with a stick because I’m usually incredibly enthusiastic about it.

Do you usually try to track with a full band and try to keep everything?

I usually try to keep everything but the reality is that stuff, in my experience, tends to get a little more forensic and clinical.  So no matter how much we keep in the end from the actually tracking, what’s used is pretty minimal.

I don’t like to dictate to people how their records should go, but I think it should be illustrated to the individuals that I’m working with that we find a method that works.  Sometimes it involves the whole band playing but I haven’t found that to be the case unless the band has really developed some kind of ideology that really involves them playing constantly together.  Generally speaking, if you don’t have that, I haven’t found that people are going to give the type of performance that I want to put on a record.  But I’ll try everything to achieve that goal.  Lately, what I’ve done a lot is to just start out by recording the drummer.

What does the drummer play to?  The rest of the band or just like a guitar or something?

It’s really at his discretion initially.  I find that a lot of times in the bands that I seem to work with, the drummer is a fantastically good musician.  The only problem is that when you hear him on a record he’s playing like shit and the main reason is that he’s not listening to himself.  He’s listening to somebody else perform.  What that means is that he’s not listening to his own internal sense of time; he’s listening to somebody else’s.  Usually it’s one of the guitarists because they can’t hear the bass in a live situation so they gravitate to the guitar.  It’s like a natural kind of impulse.  There are very few drummers that listen to what they’re doing exclusively and use everyone else as sort of a reference.

It’s hard to explain, but I sort of go for a sense of interdependence rather than people performing independently.  The drummer, who’s the backbone of just about whatever musical endeavor that your in, is pretty much existing in his own framework and his dominance of the band from a rhythmic perspective is unsurpassed when cutting his track.

Do you have him play to a click?

Only if he wants to.  I personally would rather hear the drummer’s natural time.  Unless the drummer insists on using a click, I’m not going to make a fuss about it.  The only time that I feel that a click is necessary is when the drummer might be playing along with loops, and even then it’s something that needs to be addressed because there’s also something nice about a drummer playing out of time a little bit with a loop.

My feeling is that if you have a drummer play to click and then edit him and line him up in Protools or something like that, you might as well have gotten a drum machine to do the same thing. So why are we spending all this money tracking these drums?  You could program the whole thing and pretty much get the same exact effect.

So you don’t mind things breathing and pushing and pulling?

No, as a matter of fact I think it’s essential.  You don’t want a sloppy drum track, but at the same time if you don’t get a sense of a person’s natural groove or rhythm, you might as well get a drum machine.  For some types of records I think it’s ideal but for the type of records I’ve made it’s kind of pointless.

Is your approach in the studio the same for each artist?

I think it’s good to go in with a plan but at the same time it’s also good to expect the unexpected.  You never know when something is going to change.  You never know when someone is going to flip out and go crazy.  On this last project that I was working on they asked to do the guitars first and the bass afterwards.  I’ve never done a record like that before but what are you going to say to them,  “No, I don’t work like that.  No, it messes up my flow”? (laughs).  They wanted to work like that so I said “Fine, OK.”

What’s the hardest thing for you to do in the studio?

Mix.  I’m a shitty mixer.  In all honesty, I haven’t devoted myself to it so can’t say that with absolute certainty.  But I don’t fancy myself to be that guy.

There’s so many “specialists” these days anyway.

I’d like to eliminate the specialism of recording.  The concept of a mixer has always been “bring in a guy at the end who has a fresh perspective” or “more objective” or whatever you want to call it.  I began to realize that it’s kind of a con that the record companies do.  It’s something that they’ve come to rely upon as sort of a security blanket and it also stems from the fact that in the old days mix engineers were generally the people that recorded it.  They were referred to as “balance engineers” because everything had been recorded to taste just the way they wanted it.  At that point it was just a question of balancing everything properly.  Nowadays we can’t make a record without a “mix engineer” attached to it.  I don’t think that model will continue.  It can continue but it’s going to become irrelevant pretty soon, especially if people ever learn how to record properly.

And this is a tremendous issue, as I’m sure you’re aware and one of the reasons that you seem to have gotten in touch with me.  There are a lot of people now who have a tremendous problem with way records are made regarding the lack of quality, etc.

The reality of the situation is that traditionally when people had less to work with they were more creative.  You’re throwing a whole bunch of recording techniques at people that look easier, but deceptively so as they really aren’t.  Like digital recording is way more complicated than analog ever was.  So you have this problem right now where you have this tremendous “de-evolution” of the technique of recording where there’s not enough consideration about what goes into making a good sounding record.  On the one hand there are people who say “What difference does it make? No one really cares anyway”.  But I think the only people that don’t really care are the people at record companies who want the record done for X amount of dollars who say, “Just get the thing done.  Just do it fast and do it cheap”.  That sends a very negative message to people and takes quality control out of the picture.  Fast, cheap and good – you can only have two! (laughs).

If you really know what you are doing, you can make a good sounding recording with Protools, but it only happens like 2 times out of 100.  Most guys that are recording at home don’t realize that the internal clocking on Protools sucks.  Nowadays with the HD system, you can’t even clock it to anything else or even use outboard converters if you want to.  I want a modular recording system.  I want to be able to pick my clock and converters.  I like the Euphonix R-1 but I prefer the dB Technologies Blue converters better.  I want to clock it with a Lucid rather than the internal clock.  I want those choices but Digi isn’t giving me those choices.

The problem is that the world wants convenience.  We’ve been turned into a culture of convenience addicts, all of which is fine and good because we can expedite whatever functions we happen to be performing in our daily lives.  What it does for the quality of that function is a completely separate issue.  So the question becomes “Is faster really better or more efficient?”  Is quality such a necessary aspect in recording anymore?  The answer isn’t necessarily no, it’s more like maybe.

Some of the acts that you produce have a lot of distorted layered guitars and distorted things that some say don’t necessarily need to be recorded pristinely.

That’s the whole point of why it makes sense to do that there.  The reality of the situation is that harmonically there are immense similarities between a symphony orchestra and a band that uses multitracked multi-layered distorted guitars.  Really, from a harmonic standpoint, there’s no difference at all between the functions that these types of things serve.  They’re essentially operating in the same general frequency range.  Guitars and string sections; it’s all the same.  I believe you get the same psychological effect that you get from a group of violins that have been miked closely to pick up the grit as you do on the electric guitar.  The electric guitar is a very complex sound.  How the distortion works and what you do with it is key to being able to understand it.  Distortion is a very important thing in modern recording.  Things like how it’s dealt with, what function it serves, where it sits in the mix, how you get separation, are all important.

If you’re dealing with a band that has two guitarists, both of whom use extremely distorted sounds like in a situation like Korn, what distinguishes a record that you would make from any other record?  By being able to perceive what’s going on (between the parts on the record).  Tape compression is not your friend at this point.  It’s only going to obscure these issues.  In the meantime those issues, to me, are paramount.  I would like to make a record, and I try to with those guys, where you can hear aspects to the sound that you wouldn’t otherwise.  Unfortunately this is not a popular viewpoint owing to the fact that bands of this genre are seen as a bastard form; something like an aberration that may someday go away if we close our eyes long enough so we don’t have to deal with it anymore.  Most label people are highly dismissive.  They don’t treat it with the care that any form of art deserves.  They’re willing to shine it on as a bunch of distorted guitars by a “kid that can’t play anyhow.”  That’s the reason that I try to do it as best as I can. To try to stand away from the pack and fight mediocrity.   That’s what I care about.

Do you go for perfection or vibe?

What is perfection, first of all?  To me, perfection is the vibe.  To me, perfection is the feeling that you get when someone is giving a great performance.  The reality of the situation is this – listen to a Led Zepplin record.  Those drum tracks are pristine.  Now you listen closely to how Bonham is playing and the guy is all over the place.  He’s slowing down and speeding up.  There’s no consistency at all.  But you get the vibe that this is not someone to be trifled with and he’s holding the whole band together.   

If you want to listen to perfection and something that’s lined up to the nearest 16^th note, get a dance record.  By the way, I happen to love electronic music and it’s one of my first loves, but it’s a different type of music.  It’s a different aesthetic, so don’t make the comparison.  Don’t hold them up to the same reference.

In the 80’s people started doing everything with clicks and chopping tape like maniacs and making everything as tight as they possibly could.  While production went to a new level as far as how anal people could get about things, it also took a lot of the life out of music.

Beat Detective and Autotune do the same thing.

Again, these are tools that in the right hands you can make creative music with them.  But in the wrong hands of people who are just trying to work as quickly as they can and have no interest in things having some sort of feeling or atmosphere to them, then they’re more like a gun that’s used to kill people rather than protect them.

What advice would you give to someone starting out about how to make his or her recordings better?

I don’t think there’s any one piece of advice that you can give somebody. Most people don’t know how to record, so learn how to engineer the right way (and I don’t mean by going to a recording school). From a technical side, make sure that your source is the best that it can possibly be and make sure that whatever you’re picking it up with is the best transducer that you can possibly afford.

The reality is that there’s a chance that in spite of all this, you could make one of these crappy recordings that everyone else is making these days and wind up with a record that sells 3 or 4 million records and be riding around in a Lambourgini. But all that sort of stuff is short lived if you still don’t know how to set a microphone up.

The bottom line is this, if you’re not willing to devote yourself heart and soul to recording, you may as well not get into it. The key to me is devotion and respect for the people that are listening to what you do so you have to try to make something of lasting value.

One of the most versatile and talented engineers of our time, Ed Cherney has recorded and mixed projects for The Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan, Was, Michael Jackson, Elton John, Bob Seger, Roy Orbison, and John Mayer as well as many others. Ed has also recorded and mixed the multiple Grammy-winning Nick of Time and Luck of the Draw CD’s for Bonnie Raitt as well as engineered the Grammy-winning “Tears in Heaven” track for the Eric Clapton scored film, Rush.

Do you use the same setup every time when you track?

Yes and no. It’s evolved over the years. You have favorites for the moment and for the style of music that you’re doing. For standard rock stuff, lately I’m doing it the same way, at least for a starting point.

What is that starting point?

For overheads left and right I’ll start with a couple of Coles. Then for toms I’ve been using the Audio Technica ATM-25’s. They’re good for speed. You just set them up and go; you don’t usually even have to EQ them. On the kick I’ve been using a 421 inside fairly close for snap and a FET 47 about 2 or 3 feet out. On the snare bottom I’ve been using a 441 and for the top an ATM-23HE.

Are you miking the hat?

Yeah, with a B&K 4011. Then typically I’ll put up an 87 in omni about 10 feet in front of the drums and maybe about 6 feet high as a room mic just to have a listen to things to get it going. That’s to start. It doesn’t mean it will end up anything like that, but it will enable me to get things going as quickly as we can.

How long does it take you to tweak things?

About 10 minutes. I find that when I do it faster it works better. I get the drummer to play a little time, but not wear him out, and if it’s not right you know it right away, and sometimes you go ahead and cut the song anyway. When you have a listen, good musicians will go, “Oh yeah, my snare’s too dark,” or something like that.

When you’re placing the overheads, are you using them more like cymbal mikes or trying to capture the whole kit?

It depends. If it’s a gentle song and the drums are being atmospheric, I’m going to spot mic cymbals and rides and swells. With a rock kit I’ll try to get a pretty good balance with the overheads, yet still get the cymbals without them ripping your head off.

Is anything different from the way you started to the way it is now?

In a lot of ways it’s exactly the same and in a lot of ways it couldn’t be more different. For example, at one time you would cut a drum kit, you would have to get the sounds down when you tracked. For certain kinds of music it was really difficult to replace snare drums and kick drums. You could do it, but it wasn’t easy, so you were going for overall sound and feel. Now, a lot of times when you record drums, you’re just printing triggers. I still try to get the best sound that I can on tape, then if something isn’t right you can certainly add to it.

When you’re tracking, do you go just for a good drum track or do you try to get as much as you can?

I try to get as much as I can. I think it’s musically a lot better that way. Also, I don’t isolate a lot of instruments that much any more. I did the Rolling Stones and the amps were in the room with just a little bit of baffling, but basically open so that they could hear them. Everything was leaking into everything, but that just gave it that glue, especially when it was played well.

So leakage doesn’t bother you?

It depends on the band and what you’re trying to do. If you know that everything is going to be swinging with the drums, then you’re going to try to get it. Otherwise, you’re just laying down a template so you have to isolate things as good as you can if you know you’re going to be layering guitars and that kind of stuff.

What are you using on guitar amps?

Like pretty much everybody else, I’ve used 57’s forever, but lately I’ve been using Royer R-121’s. I’ve been liking those and the musicians I’ve been working with have been liking them too. It’s pretty much just put the fader up and they capture what’s going on with the amp. They’ve got a very sweet character.

Do you only use one mic on the cabinet?

Usually, unless it’s in stereo. Sometimes I’ll use a 414 or a large diaphragm condenser back off the cabinet if we want the room sound, but typically I’ve been putting up a 121 in front of the cabinet.

What are you using for mic preamps? How much does it matter to you?

It matters a lot. I’m still using as much Class A as I can. I’ve got a bunch of 1073’s that I use in critical situations, although I’ve used the pres on an [SSL] 9K and was really surprised how good they sounded.

Do you take bass direct or do you use an amp as well?

Again it depends, but I try to do both. If you don’t have a lot of space and you don’t have any isolation, I’ll go with a direct, depending on the player, but usually I’ll go with both with a FET 47, or something like that on the cabinet, and a DI.  I like using the Groove Tube DI, but then again it depends. If it’s an active bass, then you might want to use a DI with transformer in front of it.

Do you EQ when you record?

Heck yeah, but dipping more than anything. If something is a little dark, then it might be because 200 or 300 is building up, so you dip a little of that out and maybe add a little top. If you’re going to tape, then you might want to add a little top anyway. If you’re going to Pro Tools, then you might want to dip a little 2, 3, 4K to take the edge off it.

Are you compressing going to tape?

Not too much. Vocals, obviously. I’ll do a little peak limiting on the direct of the bass to protect the input, but not with the mic on the cabinet because usually that will relate pretty well, so I’m really not compressing a lot. I’m trying to get it as fat and clear on tape as I can.

Do you always record to tape first?

Not always. When I say tape I mean hard disc or whatever the storage medium happens to be. I just really try to fill the meters and get it on there fat and good.

What’s the hardest thing for you to record?

The human voice, because every one is different. You know what to expect from a drum kit or a guitar amp or piano, but the human voice is so personal. Even if you have a microphone that works 90% of the time, you’re always looking and you’re always guessing. And it’s the most dynamic instrument too, so it’s the most difficult instrument because it has the most variables.

Do you have a signal chain that you start with for the vocal?

It depends, because a lot of times I’ll be tracking bands where the vocalist will be out in the room with the drums. Then I’ll get stuck with that performance with a few fixes, but that means I’ll end up with an SM-7 or an RE-20 for the project.

For rock vocals I’ll use dynamic mics a lot of times like an RE-20 or SM-7. A lot of times a C-12 sounds good for a female voice. Jagger loves it too but he sounds about the same on any mic he uses. 47’s usually sound good. I’ve used the Audio Technica 4050 and I kinda like that. That’s a pretty good place to start.

You need to start somewhere just to get something going instead of scratching your head. Get something up and get people playing music, then you hear it back, see what it sounds like, and adjust from there.

Are you trying to make it fit in the track or trying to make it sound as good as possible by itself?

Pretty much fit in the track.

How concerned are you with the headphone mix? Do you do it yourself or relegate it to the assistant?

It’s critical. I’m really concerned with it so I do it myself. What I typically do is feed what I’m hearing [the stereo buss] to the headphones, and if I’m lucky enough to have a headphone mixer I’ll add some kick, snare and bass and vocal and whoever else needs more “me.” A lot of times I’ll even add the stereo buss to the stereo cue mix so I can be additive, so I’ll have the stereo buss coming up and on the console I’ll also add some kick and snare, because you have to get it up over the sound that’s in the room. I’ll sweeten the drums and that’s where I’ll usually start.

The idea is to be making music quickly with everybody hearing themselves. If I’m hearing them, then they’re hearing it. I just don’t want to spend any more time getting sounds than I have to before people are playing together with the red lights on.

Do you send a lot of effects to the phones?

I start simple. Maybe I’ll have a couple of reverbs; something short and bright and something a little longer. I might have a delay sitting there ready to go, but typically I’ll start it out pretty dry since most rock tracks are like that now anyway. If I add something, the stereo buss is feeding the headphones so they’ll get what I’m hearing. Sometimes that can be inspiring and musicians will react to it.

Was it any different recording the Stones from anyone else?

It’s a rock gig, but there’s five guys there that have been around and know what they want to hear. You’re really not allowed to screw up. Some younger guys might let you get away with something, but you’ve got to be on top of your game more so than with anyone else.

How did you approach Charlie’s drums?

It’s just a straight-ahead rock kit. The less you do the better off you are. You put some mics up and try to capture the drum kit like it’s one instrument rather than separate drums. You just get out in the room, have a listen and try to recreate that but there’s not a lot of work involved. The work is in the perception and not in the knob twisting.

How did you determine where to place everyone in the room?

I think I sat there for a day and half before I did it. I’d go out and sing a song, clap my hands and stomp around and try to create a space where everyone can see each other. I tried to get some things off-axis yet keep the room kind of open and live so people weren’t just relying on their headphones and could hear their amps and have that interplay. I tried to make sure that the line of sight was intimate, yet keep some separation. Also, I’ll ask the assistant where they usually set everything up (laughs).

Do you have a philosophy of recording?

I want to get the sounds to tape as quickly as possible, then play it back so you can talk about it. It’s real at that point. “That’s too bright. That’s too dull. That should be louder.  That should be a different part. That should be a different snare drum.” It’s easy to modify once you can hear it. I’ve been in places where you dick around a lot before you play any music and the session doesn’t move forward. You just can’t make music that way.

From Celine Dion, Carley Simon, James Taylor, Tony Bennett and Elton John to Kiss, Korn, Fuel, Foreigner and Hole, Frank Filipetti’s credits run the entire musical spectrum. Known for his fearless ability to either extensively experiment or get instant sounds as the session dictates, Frank’s old school wisdom combined with his adventuresome and modern approach continues to push the cutting edge.

Do you use the same setup every time you track?

There are certain microphones that I’ll start with based on experience and the nature of the session. For example, on a Broadway show date where we’ve got to record a whole show pretty much in a day, I will go to a pre-determined setup regardless of who the drummer is, only because we don’t have time to play around. On the other hand, on a session like Korn or Fuel where I know we have a lot more time, we’ll work with 4 or 5 different mics on every drum or instrument and try to zero in on the best one. In that particular instance, it’s less about starting with a pre-arranged setup than ascertaining where the drummer’s going and how he plays. With the guitar it would depend on how much he plays, or if he plays soft, or things like that. But if I’m going in to the session and it’s essential that it runs fast, I’ll go with what I consider the safest and not necessarily what I consider the best.

What’s your setup when you have to be safe?

Basically I’ll be looking for microphones that may not always give me the best sound but will keep me from having to worry about overloads and spillage, so I’ll go for something that I know is reliable that I know from experience will give me a good enough place to get started. 

In those particular instances, if we start with the drum kit, I’ll stay away from condensers on anything but overheads because my experience is that they break up with a hard hitter. If I’m in a session that has to move quickly, I don’t have the time to break down those mics and set something else up, so with the drum kit I’ll go with a lot of dynamics. On the snare would be a 57. Under snare would be a 57 or a 441. Toms would be either a 421 or a 57. A lot of this is amended now because Audio Technica has line of condensers that actually do take the sound pressure, so I’ve been using the AT3000 on the snare, the 5100 on the under-snare, and the ATM35 on the toms. The only problem that I have with those is that they’re high output, so on some of the older consoles like a Neve 8068, they come in a little too hot. 

Then there’s the AT4047 which is just a great general purpose mic that takes high SPL, which I’ve been using those on guitars. On Korn we used them on guitars because the standard condensers like 67’s just can’t take the level, especially if you’re miking close to the speaker.

Do you use the overheads as cymbals mics or as the basic sound of the kit?

I experiment a lot with the overheads and I’ve gone through a lot of permutations with them. I started out as a drummer and one of the things that I dislike about a lot of recordings is that the sound of the snare is coming mostly from the snare mic. As a drummer I know that the sound at the snare is not exactly what I want to hear on the track. There’s a lot of bloom around the snare, and around the bass drum as well, that I feel is essential to capturing the reality and the dynamics of the snare and bass drum in particular, so my overhead technique is to capture the overall sound of the kit and not just the cymbals. I tend to want to mic the kit so that I do get leakage of the snare, bass drum, everything into the overall sound. I want to be able to put up the overheads along with the bass drum mic and get a pretty nice sound on the kit, so my tendency is to mic a little further away from direct impact of the cymbals. 

Most engineers seem to come in with the mics coming from the front of the kit looking back towards the drummer. I put my overheads in the back near the drummer looking ahead towards the kit. I just found after years of experimentation that’s where the best sound for me is. Just above the snare looking out towards the cymbals gives me the depth and the impact that I’m looking for.

The microphones are probably a foot or so above the drummers’ head. I don’t want him banging his head or hitting them with his sticks. They’re far enough back that if he raises his sticks to hit a cymbal, his sticks might hit a mic in front of him but not one slightly behind him. Not only is it great for the snare and the cymbals but it’s great for the toms as well. What I end up having to do because of that setup is to also mic the ride cymbal separately, because the ride sometimes needs that little extra “ping” that you can’t get from miking further away. 

Are you using an X/Y or a spaced pair?

It depends on the amount of time that I have to experiment. If I have to set it up really fast just to get going, I’ll go with something resembling an ORTF for starters. I may move it up or down or in or out a bit from there, but the mic position themselves are along the lines of ORTF. I find that gives me more spread and depth than X/Y and less stuff to fool around with than M-S, although I do like M-S miking occasionally. If I do use M-S, I usually supplement it with a wider array as well.

Do you use multiple mics on the kick?

Yes. Not only multiple mics but multiple distances, which is something similar to what I do with guitars. I know that the object is to get all of your mics in phase, but I find that with guitars and the kick drum there are varying distances from the drum or the speaker that actually work in a way that’s complimentary. They can create certain comb filtering that work to your advantage and sometimes works better than doing it with an equalizer. I’ll play around with various distances on a kick drum and guitar amp because on those two instruments in particular, we’re not always looking for the most natural sound, we’re looking for impact. It’s a visceral thing that may not happen live but something that you’re trying to capture onto tape or disc, so I’ll work with multiple mikings for those instruments.

On the bass drum I generally start with a D12 (the D36 is my favorite mic but you can’t always find one) for the dynamic part, and then I’ll put a condenser on it as well with the capsules as closely aligned as possible. The condenser mic will usually be a 4047 or a 47FET or something like that. They’re generally placed just at the outside of the drum looking at the beater head, then I’ll play around with an array of two or three other mics at varying distances. Sometimes we’ll use a sympathetic beater kind of thing where you’ll have just a shell in front of the drum which vibrates to get a little more depth and bottom. Sometimes I’ll build a little tunnel out of packing blankets and mic stands and put another mic or two at the end, so there’s a lot of different things that I try, but the basic setup starts with the two mics just off the front head looking at the beater.

Do you mic the hat?

I always mic the hat. I’ve tried various things on it but it’s the one area that I’ve never been totally happy. Most recently what I’ve settled on is either a 451 with a 10dB pad, a KM84 with a pad, or a Schoeps CMC-5 with a pad, but to be perfectly honest, the hi-hat is the one instrument that you can’t really get too close to because of the low frequency information. If you get too close it tends to color the sound somewhat ,yet you can’t get too far away either because you loose the impact. 

So if you have the time to experiment, you’re going to put a lot of different mics up on the drums and see what sounds best?

Basically. On the snare I have a bunch of mics that I’ve used over the years that go from a 441 to a 57 to a B&K 4012 or an AKG 451 with a pad on it, and then there’s the newer range of mics from Audio Technica like the AE5100 and AE3000 that work well. Most of the condensers, except for the AT’s, I would only use on a jazz date or where I know the drummer isn’t a hard hitter. If I didn’t know the drummer or material, I would start off with a 57 just to be safe. I use the AT’s a lot although with certain heavy hitters, the 5100 gets overloaded but the 3000 will give the speed of a condenser but also hang in there with SPL like a 57. What’s interested me is that the 3000 is a very small side address mic that makes it easy to place within the kit. 

How many mics do you usually use on kick?

On a date where I have a lot of time to play around, I’ll use 4 or 5 mics. Like I said, I generally use both a dynamic and condenser to get the sound of both, but Audio Technica has a dual capsule mic where one capsule is dynamic while the other is condenser, so you get both in one head. 

On something I just finished we had the 47FET along with the D36 and the dual condenser AT all on the head, then I had I had a 47 and a couple of CMV-3’s and a CM51 further back off the bass drum. Again, that’s because I had a session where I had a lot of time to play.

How are you balancing all of those?

The main sound is the overheads, the bass drum mic and the snare mic. That’s my basic drum sound. Then I’ll fill it in with tom mics and these other mics around the kit. Many of them are faced at the bass drum but also pick up ambience from other drums. The most important thing is to be careful about the phase relationships because you don’t want to smear anything. My general rule of thumb is to listen to a drum with and without the additional mic. A lot of people will just add a mic or take it away to see if it’s adding something, but the bottom line is when you add a mic you’re adding 3dB to the signal so it will almost always sound a little better with it in. What I do is to make sure than when I take the mic away that my level is still the same. That gives me a much truer taste of whether that mic is adding something or not. 

I’ll just have the two mics on the snare; top and bottom with the phase swapped on the bottom, adding just enough of the bottom to add a little of the snare rattle. I don’t like the sound of just the top head by itself. I find it to be very unnatural, so I mix just a touch of that in with the overheads.

Considering that you’re getting most of your drum sound from the overheads and kick drum mic, how does that influence the placement of the rest of your drum mics?

It influences it a lot. I pretty much try to keep with an audience perspective on the drums and place the mics as if you were facing the drum kit. I tend to shy away from a full pan of the overheads across the stereo soundfield because that sounds a bit unnatural to me, unless I’m using it for an effect. One of the things that I do, because I know that my overheads are going to be so important in the overall sound, is to make sure that the distance from the snare to each overhead capsule is identical. I want to hear the snare in the center when you just listen to the overheads. When you just mic the cymbals and you solo those mics, the snare tends to shift depending upon your perspective, so I make those mics identical in distance from the snare as well as identical in distance from the cymbals that they’re miking so no mic gets a signal prior to the other one. With just the overheads up I want you to get a good idea of the kit but with the snare in the center, which is not really how the kit is since the snare is always placed slightly on one side. The bass drum is in the center, so in the best of all possible worlds, I try to make the snare right above the bass drum and I mike it accordingly.

Do you use room mics at all?

Yeah. If I’m ever thinking about surround, which I am more and more these days, I set up a set of rear overheads, and front and rear room mics. Sometimes my room mics will be high over the kit, but just as often they’ll be low to the floor. 

How do you determine that?

The sound of the room and how much metal the guy plays determines the position. Some guys are splashy cymbal players and other guys aren’t. If there’s a lot of cymbal activity and a lot of splashy metal work going on, my tendency is to go lower to the floor to get things warmer. It’s one of those things determined by the amount of time there is to play around, otherwise, I’ll just set them as best as I can.

Another thing on the drums that I tend to do if there’s a lot of cross-sticking is to slip a mic in close to the cross-stick, because I generally find that a mic coming in across the cymbals doesn’t always give me enough of the meat of the cross-stick sound. 

When you’re putting 4 or 5 mikes on a kick, do all of these go on separate tracks or do you combine them?

It depends on the session. On a Broadway date or a quick pop date, I’ll generally stick with two mics on the bass drum and maybe just put a room mic close to the floor a couple of feet out from the drums, but if I have the time to play around with it, then I’ll use the multiple mics. Generally speaking it’s a production call. If I’m producing, then what I’ll do is meld as many as I can ahead of time and just go with it. 

What I tend to do now is keep these mics on separate tracks because I tend to play around with the timing after the date is over. Visually I try to place the capsules as close together as I can, but no matter how close it looks to be, you usually don’t get it down to the sample. One sample is on the order of microns so I’ll play around with moving the later one to see what happens when I move it in time. Sometimes you’d be amazed how much of a difference that makes in the quality of the sound.

The same thing with guitar amps. I’ll have 3 or 4 mics on one guitar amp like a Marshall cabinet with the slanted front, and 3 or 4 mics on a Marshall cabinet with a straight front. If you go in after they’re recorded and you move those things, so they’re aligned to the sample, you’d be surprised how much better they sound when they’re collapsed into mono and totally phased aligned.

Do you usually mic an amp when recording electric bass?

Whenever possible I take both an amp and direct. I used to align the signals with a good digital delay, but now you can phase align in the workstation. There may be a spillage issue or crackling mics or something, so I always take a direct if they’ve got one, even if it’s an acoustic upright. 

On an electric bass I will take the direct and put at least a couple of mics on the amp and pick and choose among those as I would with a guitar amp. I generally end up with one but I’ll start out with a couple to see what I like, again depending upon the time. If I have to get it done quickly, I’ll put up a 4047 or a 47FET and mike one of the speakers on the bass cab and just go with that. On the other hand, if I have the time to play around, then I’ll go with a variety of things like a tube 47, an AT4062, the 4047 and a variety of dynamics and condensers just to see what works, then I’ll either choose one or blend a couple together to get the sound that I’m looking for.

On guitar amps, do you put the mics close together or do you mike for distance?

Again it depends how much time we have. The first thing I’ll do is try to choose the best speaker on the amp. Usually we’re using a 4 speaker cabinet like a Marshall, and generally the speakers don’t all sound the same. I try not to mike from too far away because you start to introduce phase anomalies from the different speakers coming from the cab. I tend to get as close as I can with whatever my miking scheme is. For instance, if I’m using a 4047 or something like that, they have shock mounts that keep you from getting too close, so the mic that’s farthest away from the cabinet will determine my distance, but I’ll try to get them as close as I can to the grill cloth.

I don’t have any hard and fast rules about miking the center of the speaker or side or going in directly or off the side, because I’ve found over the years that every amp and every guitar player sounds different, so I’ll try them all. I’ll put a mic right up on the cone looking right down the center, then I’ll put one looking at the center but placed where the voice coil meets the cone itself, and then I’ll just put one on the edge of the cone and then just see which one sounds the best. I do try to cluster a few mics so their capsules are as close to identical in distance from the sound source as I can get them, then I’ll put another mic about 6 to 10 inches away and play with it in-phase and out of phase to see if it’s adding anything or taking it away. Generally the 4047 is my main mic because it takes the high SPL really well but in addition it gives me both the lows and a good balance of highs, but then I’ll add a little bit of something like a 57 or a ribbon mic like an RCA BK-5 or something like that. If the 4047 is at 0VU on the console, these will be at –10 or –15 to add a little bit of crunch to it, then I might add the mic that’s off 6 or 8 inches to either scoop out a little midrange or to add something because of its phase characteristics. Then again I might not even use it all. It depends. 

How do you handle leakage?

Generally I view leakage as a positive as opposed to a negative. My view is that leakage is your friend and what makes the sound real and live and wonderful. I like the way it makes things blend with each other and fills in a little as it would in a live situation. It’s just like on the drums; I don’t mike the overheads for the cymbals, but for the overall sound that comes from around the kit.

On the other hand, one of the first questions I ask is “How much flexibility are you going to need for overdubs?” For example, on most Broadway shows that I do, having the chorus in the room with the orchestra sonically is by far the best thing to do because it sounds amazing with the leakage. You might have 30 people in the chorus but it sounds like 100 because of all the leakage. It’s big and warm and wonderful. On the other hand, if it turns out that the show will be sent to Europe and done in another language (as is the case in most shows these days), you have no choice but to isolate the chorus so they can use your basic track and add a foreign language chorus later, so I try to find out up front how much flexibility we’ll need in the overdubs. 

For example, when I was doing the Rod Stewart’s Great American Songbook album, we had everyone in the room. We then came to realize that some of the piano might be changed later so we had to isolate it, because even though it sounded great, it was going to be too obvious if you punched in a new part.

Is there a standard set of mic preamps that you use?

Again, it really comes down to a matter of time. I’ll usually go in with some preconceived notions but I’ll also play with stuff if there’s time. Many times you’re surprised how good a particular pre can sound with a certain mic on a particular instrument. On the other hand, I’ll go with whatever I have to go with. 

Generally speaking, I’m not a real snob about these kinds of things. I have pres that sound better than others, but the mic pres on the new Neves and SSLs all are good enough if I have to get a session up and running that I’m not going to complain. If it doesn’t sound good it isn’t because I’m using the console mic pres, it’s because I’m not doing my job.

What’s your philosophy about tracking?

If there’s any philosophy at all it’s that I will only go to the equalizer as a last resort. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that a change in microphones or position is worth a lot more than tweaking EQs. I have a tendency to think that if you start tweaking EQs too soon then you going to miss some obvious things, so the first thing I do is get the session sounding great flat, then I’ll make a few adjustments with an EQ. I’m not a purist in the sense that I will record with an equalizer and processing but my first instinct is to get out of my chair and go listen in the room to make sure of what I’m hearing, so I spend a lot of time listening to the actual sound of the instrument and then go into the control room and try to pick that up on the microphone. 

Do you compress when you’re recording?

Not a lot. The only time I do some EQing or compressing while recording is when I know I won’t have a chance to do it later. For example, if I’m mixing all the toms and overheads together onto a stereo kit track, I’ll do the processing then.

Whatever I want to hear I do want record with though. In other words, if I think that compression is important for the playback then I will compress in record, but for the most part I really want the sound to do what it does naturally.   

Do you have an approach to recording the voice?

If I know the singer then I have an idea ahead of time which mics I’m going to use. If I have the time, my approach is to put 4 or 5 mics in front of them and have them sing a line. It’s similar to when you have a speaker that sounds great with a certain amp and not as good with another amp. There’s a certain coupling; a synergy that happens between various stages of audio equipment that can be really special. 

It’s the same thing with a voice. There’s a synergy that happens between a mic and a voice, so the first thing I do is try a variety of mics running the gamut from a U47 to an M49 to a 251 to a C12 to one of the newer mics like a 4060. Usually you’ll eliminate all but 2 or 3 right away because there’s a connection between the harmonic content of the voice and the mic that just tends to work. Then when I’m set with the mic, I’ll start to play with preamps. 

But if someone said “You have a vocalist coming in and we have to record right now,” then I’d probably just go with my standard setup which is my 269 or one of my 47’s into a Tubetech mic pre with more than likely just a touch of 1176.

There may be no other trumpet player as respected and widely recorded as Jerry Hey.  The first call for a Hollywood recording date for more than 25 years, Jerry has not only played on thousands of recordings by just about every major artist as well as movie soundtracks too numerous to mention, but is a widely sought after arranger as well. So when it comes to what it takes to make a trumpet sound great in the studio, it’s best to get the facts straight from the master.

I understand that you have strong feelings about how people mike your horn.

I guess I have strong feelings because over the coarse of my experience, being in great situations and then being in awful situations, I’ve learned a lot.

You carry your own mics, don’t you?

I have for about 10 or 12 years.  When you go into studios like Capitol or Oceanway, they have a good microphone collection so you don’t have to worry.  But with home studios being such a big part of the recording now, a lot of times they don’t have any good mics.  It forced me to take one part of the equation and make it the same every time so that I always know that it’s not the microphone’s fault if something doesn’t sound right.

I carry 3 Royers with me now.  Before that I had a KM-54 for a while.

Why 3 Royers?

Usually in my horn section there are 2 trumpets, one trombone and one sax.  The trumpets play on one mic, and trombone and sax play on a mic each.

The Royer has become sort of a standard now. They’re almost like the new RCA 77 and much more reliable in my opinion.  If you had a great 77 that was well taken care of, it was a good microphone, but 9 times out of 10 it’s been dropped or mistreated over the years so they don’t sound that good.  Plus they can’t handle the level like the Royers do. Most of the studios now have bought Royers so I don’t have to even take them in to a lot of places.

So do you just have someone use your mics right away or do you wait to see what it sounds like?

It depends on the engineer.  For instance Bruce Swedien has a great mic collection that he bought new that no one else has ever touched, and he’s put a whole host of microphones in front of us.  We did a very high intensity tune for Michael Jackson once where he put his RCA 44 on the trumpets and I told him “Bruce, you’re the only guy that I’d ever let put that microphone in front of us”.  He said, “Wait until you hear it”.  It just sounded amazing because it was in such pristine condition. In a situation like that where a guy has world-class microphones, there’s usually not a problem.

But in situations where I’m in somebody’s home and they have little or no microphone selection and they put up something that I know doesn’t sound good, I’ll tell them I have the Royers available.  9 times out of 10 now they’ll say, “You’ve got those Royers?  Great.”

Do you have a favorite placement?

Because the Royers have a figure 8 pattern, the room is an issue in the placement.  If you’re in a smaller room with 4 horns, you can’t have the mics too far away from the trumpets at the level we play because the room becomes a factor on the back side of the mic.  So the placement can be anywhere from a foot and a half to 4 feet or so away.  We’ve done some Earth, Wind and Fire stuff where it’s been 6 feet away.  That was kind of roomy because the room was small but that was that sound that we were going for; kind of a “live” kind of sound.  So it does depend on the size of the room and how far away you are from the wall that you’re playing toward and how much slap off the wall you’re going to get.  But generally I’d say about 2 feet from the end of the trumpet bell takes most of the room away from it.

Is that directly on axis to the bell?

Yes, directly on axis.  I’m of the feeling that if you play off-axis it sounds off-axis.  I know that when you play right at somebody it’s much more present than if you turn even a few degrees away, so that same thing translates directly with the microphone.

How do determine where in the room you’re going to play?

That depends on the acoustics of the room.  In a moderate size room like Oceanway, Conway or Capitol, when you play soft it sounds like you’re playing soft and when you play loud it sounds like you’re playing loud and you can hear yourself all the time.  Almost anywhere in those rooms sounds great.  If you go into another room that has carpeting on the floor or soft walls or ceilings, the quality of sound doesn’t change that much (from soft to loud) and you feel like you have to work harder.  In a deader room it helps to be closer to a wall so you can get a little feedback from what you’re playing otherwise it’s easy to overblow and work harder than you need to work.

Do you mean play into the wall?

Not into the wall but move a step or two closer to get a little bit of feedback.  When you’re playing trumpet your effort is a factor on how much you can hear yourself so in a deader studio it makes it a lot more difficult to play and to hear everybody.  So if you move up a little closer to the glass or the wall, it can make you not work so hard.

Does that still matter if you’re wearing headphones?

We always us one sided headphones because it’s very difficult to expect the engineer to get your balance good enough with the rhythm section, and also balance the horn section the way it should be in order to play in tune with double-side phones.  That puts another cog in the link of recording when you have to make the engineer work that hard.  Also, with one headphone we can hear everyone in the room which helps keep the time and phrasing the same.

Where is the mic placed on the trombone?

Because we generally only have one trombone placement’s not that much of an issue because the mic can handle the level and he’s the only one on that microphone.  If the mic is farther back and we’re in a live enough room the trumpets will get on the back side of that mic, and even more so the one on the saxophone, because there are two of us playing loudly and only one of him.  So the bone mic is about 18 to 24 inches away from the bell.

What other mics have been used on you that have worked?

Al Schmitt loves 67’s and so do I.  I’ve seen some Coles. Allen Sides always puts KM-54’s on the trumpets and they always sound great.

Do you always play with the same guys?

If I can.  The other trumpet player is Gary Grant and we’ve played together for over 30 years.  I know what he’s going to do and he knows what I’m going to do so it’s just like a clone standing right next to you.   The saxophones have changed a bit over the years with Dan Higgins or Larry Williams or a few others that I’ve used.  Bill Reichenbach on trombone has been the guy for a very long time.  It’s understood that we go in there as a team with everyone going at it at the same level.  It makes life easier and we have a good time.

Hollywood’s Sunset Sound has not only produced a tremendous number of hit records over it’s 40 plus years in business, but an impressive number of wonderful engineers as well. There’s something about the sound that those schooled the “Sunset way” get. It’s big, fat, punchy and distinct all at once. Mark Linett is a Sunset alumnus that went on to a staff position at the famous Warner Bros. owned Amigo Studios before subsequently putting a studio in his house. You’ve heard his work many times, with engineering credits the likes of The Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, America, Ricki Lee Jones, Eric Clapton, Christopher Cross, Buckwheat Zydeco, Randy Newman, Michael McDonald, and many more. Having worked on numerous best-of compilations and remixes of famous 60’s recordings (The Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds Sessions and several Jimi Hendrix reissues, for example), Mark has the unique ability to compare the techniques of the past against those of the present.

Do you ever find that people are hiring you specifically to get that “vintage sound”?

Yeah. What I’ve discovered is that a lot of records that I do are either intentionally or unintentionally trying to sound like the records cut at Western or Sunset or Gold Star from around 66 or 67. Of course in those days of 3 and 4 track recording, leakage wasn’t something that you worried about and was actually something that contributed enormously to the sound. The players were mildly baffled at best and you had these small rooms with everyone playing at the same time, so the leakage had a tremendous amount to do with what things like the drums sounded like. It wasn’t about a mic in front of every instrument and that’s all it picked up.

Now clients want that kind of sound but still want some kind of control, so I hopefully try to isolate all the instruments in the event that if the inevitable happens and somebody wants to replace their part, it can be done. There’s a trade-off for that in terms of “playability,” but since most players are attuned to playing with headphones and the person that they’re playing with can be across the room or across the world for that matter, it’s really not so much of an issue.

As a result, lot of what we end up doing with room mics sort of emulates what that sound would have been if all that leakage would have spilled into the other mics. One of the problems with multitrack recording is we get very concerned about being able to isolate every sound, but yet have it sound really good when it’s all pushed up together, and that gets really tricky. You start to understand where they got the sound on those old records. It might have been only on 3 track, but it was pretty well soldered together using leakage to their benefit. Once headphones and multiracks came along, all that sort of went away because people wanted to have options.

On a lot of great records they had the vocal slightly baffled out in the room, but they weren’t planning on replacing them anyway.

I’ve heard all sorts of ‘60s sessions from Western and Gold Star. I did some things for Nancy Sinatra where I got to hear some out-takes from “These Boots Were Made For Walkin’” and that is a 100% live track, except for her singing. It’s just amazing. You think, “How can these guys play that well?”, and the answer is that the technology required that they either play that good or get somebody that could. Also, there weren’t a lot of guys wearing headphones in those days either.

Imagine most players trying to do that today. My personal feeling is that all this technology certainly has a place, but it’s so affected by the playing. We tend to get caught up in the technology and forget that fact. A few years ago I was hired to take a band into Studio 3 [at what’s now known as EastWest Studios] because that’s where a lot of Beach Boys records were made. The fact is that the band didn’t record anything remotely like the way that stuff was done, so it was really kind of irrelevant. Even if you did try to record the way they did, I not sure that it would work anyway because nobody can really play that way anymore.

Once not long after Pro Tools came along, I was doing a kids record where we did the basic tracks with an acoustic bass and live drums. The bass was in another room, but if you soloed it you could hear that there was a drummer on the premises, which was no surprise. I didn’t have Pro Tools at that point so they took it somewhere else to mix it. I got a call about a week later from the engineer mixing the project saying that there was something wrong with the transfers that we did. I asked him what was wrong and he said, “When I solo the bass I can hear the drums.” It never occurred to him that the two guys might have been playing at the same time in the same room. Because it’s now technically possible to do just about anything that you can imagine, everybody automatically thinks that’s what’s going on.  It’s kind of sad, really.

When you track, do you always start with the same setup?

Pretty much. I’ve been doing most of my tracking here at my studio with a house drum kit just like the old days. A lot of places that we admire from the mid-60’s had a very set way of doing things. Not that you wouldn’t experiment to a certain extent, but you developed what worked in the room. Traditionally, in the earlier days, people went to a studio as much for the engineer as the sound of the room. It was really about the sound that was coming out of the room that people wanted, so they assumed that the engineer had a lot to do with it (laughs).

At my own place, maybe 60 or 70% of the time we end up using my house kit. Whether we do use it or not, I end up miking the drums the same. That’s changed a bit over the years but not much. It’s kind of nice to work in a linear way and be able to more directly play on what you’ve done before than when you’re under the gun of the clock. Getting it good and fast is probably more important than anything else.

What’s you setup for drums then?

At this point I generally will have at least two and sometimes three mics on the kick. Usually a D112 inside, a FET47 about 2 feet back, and a big old AKG D35 for that ‘60s “oomph” for the bass drum at about 3 feet back (you have to play with the placement).

What do you use for snare?

I usually use a 57 top and bottom with the bottom out of phase. Usually a 460 on the hat. When I use tom mics, which is most of the time, I’m rather partial to Beyer M500’s. The last bunch of years I’ve been fond of a stereo ribbon mic for overheads. I was using a B & O but now I use the Royer SF-12, which is kind of a fancy version of it. I like ribbons over a live drum kit because of the silky top for the cymbals, and you can do all sorts of processing to them without it getting too stupid.

Then I always use all sorts of room mics. The last bunch of years I’ve been favoring a pair of BK5’s; one behind and one in front of the drums. Sometimes I’ll use a condenser across the room and usually 1 or 2 kind of “crummy” mics like a Reslo or an EV635 usually sitting on the floor compressed heavily. It’s amazing what you can do with a small room. In some ways if everything is properly miked with compressed room mics, you can actually get a bigger drum sound than in a big room.

How did you determine the positioning of the room mics?

Pretty much just trial and error. The nice thing about having your own room and drum kit is that you can do that, although years ago I discovered just how much the player affects the sound.

I was doing Ricki Lee Jones’ 3rd album at Amigo and Steve Gadd was going to play drums. We set the room up the night before and they brought his drums in. I figured I’d get a bit of a head start so I asked the second engineer to hit them. The second sits down and starts to hit them and it was like, “This sounds terrible.” I figured it was a rented kit and he’d come in and tune them up before the session or something. He comes in the next day and didn’t change a thing and when he hit them, it was maybe the greatest drum sound I ever heard. The simple answer is that I’ve never heard a good drummer sound bad and I’ve never heard a bad drummer sound particularly good. It’s one of those instruments where the technique of the player really matters, like most acoustic instruments. When you get electric it gets less important because the variables are much less.

You seem to do a lot with acoustic bass.

It’s very difficult to do right and if you don’t have a good player then it’s especially hard to get what you need to make it sound good. For a rock thing I usually have something pointing at the bridge. I’m fond of an Altec 639 there and then sometimes another mic up on the neck like a Beyer or an EV666. It depends on the music. Traditionally in rock sessions you would place the bass near the drums and fill in the sound from the drum mics.

What are you doing for electric guitars?

I change it around but a 57 is usually a constant. I usually use some combination of a dynamic and a condenser. The dynamic is generally crammed right up on the speaker but the condenser is back a little bit. You don’t want the condenser right on it because then all you end up with is a lot of low frequency stuff.

How about piano?

I have an upright piano that works out pretty well actually. I’ve done all kinds of things with it like a 47 up top and a ribbon on the back. Just yesterday we used a dynamic on the high end and a 47 on the low end.

If I’m in a studio with a grand piano, I tend to prefer to use a C 24 in M-S pretty well off the soundboard and out from under the top. If there are other players in the room then I’ll go with a pair of 251’s, if I can get them, over the soundboard with the piano bagged for isolation. If I was doing something orchestral, I’d just put a single spot mic on it.

What’s your approach to recording live? You obviously have to think differently about how you do it in comparison to the studio.

In some ways it’s simpler and in some ways it’s not. To start with, if it’s a reasonably successful act, they’ve got they’re miking together and they just hand you a split. Then I’ll just add a couple of things. If they’re not doing it already, I’ll want a bass amp mic because it makes a big difference. I’ll probably want an under-the-snare mic, which they’re probably not giving me. I used to use my own overhead mics, but I don’t have to do that anymore since what people carry is normally quite good. I usually have to change the kick drum mic. SM91’s seem to be the standard for live rock these days because all they want is the click of the drum, although I have used them in the studio just to get a little of that sound in there. I’ll usually go with a D112 and maybe a Beyer M160 as well to get that low end ribbon sound. If I can afford it I always try to put up a couple of mics on stage left and right to sort of have the ability to hear what it sounds like standing there. In the ideal situation where you don’t have to replace too much, they can add a really nice sound to the mix.

A lot of what I do, at least here in town [Los Angeles], is with my own rig that I’ve built and refined over the years. It shocks me sometimes how good the rough mixes sound.  First of all, you do have everyone playing together so it’s a little more obvious what it’s supposed to sound like, but another thing also happens that I firmly believe; if you force an engineer to make it sound like something on the spot, it’s much more likely to come out pretty good than if you sit down later and say “OK, let’s spend eight hours on the snare drum sound,” The toughest thing for me when going back to do the real mix is not getting it to sound better, but getting it to all stick together and get the performance vibe again.

What do you usually use for mic amps?

Here at my studio 90% of what I record goes through my old Universal Audio tube console that used to be in Studio 2 at United Western from about ‘61 to ’69. It has 610A modules and I just like the sound of that thing. I have a big API here but not very much tends to get miked through it. It’s generally just a remix console. If I’m doing a big tracking date, I may use a combination of the Universal console and maybe a few APIs and some other outboard preamps like Neves or some tube stuff like V74s or Langevins. It just depends on the session.

How about vocals?

I’m pretty much in love with a couple of 47’s. I have five or six of them but there’s one in particular that’s my vocal favorite. Of coarse it depends on the artist. I may use a 67 or even an 87 too. It goes through one of the 610 modules and then maybe into a [Fairchild] 670 or an EAR 660. I used to do a lot with an API preamp into an 1176 set at a 12 to 1 ratio, which is sort of your standard setup.

Do you EQ when you record?

No, I’ll use what I get from the mic. If I’m using the UA console then there are limited choices anyway because there’s only low and high at plus 3 or plus 6. Since I’m monitoring back through the API, I might EQ on the monitor side. What I’m always trying to do is make it sound as much like a record as possible even if it’s not complete. When I get it to a point where I like it I figure it’s going to work all the way down the line. I find that one of the toughest things to learn, and I’m still guilty of this, is when you get it to a certain point, to just stop.

What the hardest thing for you to record?

Probably acoustic bass. It’s a very problematic thing to record solo. It doesn’t record very well when you isolate it. That plus the fact that most guys don’t play that well makes it more often then not a difficult instrument. I’d rather record a standup bass in an orchestra setting because it’ll sound better and the player will probably be better too.