Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
By the end of ’81, Simon wanted to expand, and he found a pretty large space on 48th Street where we built a room. We didn’t know a whole lot about what we were doing, but somehow we came up with something. The recording area was 40 by 50 with, at that point, two iso rooms and an MCI console. We could fit a reasonably large group of people in there, and it was very inexpensive.
Peter [Asher] was producing The Pirates of Penzance, and he was looking for a reasonably priced recording space to put the whole cast in. He booked Right Track and asked for the chief engineer, moi, to do the project. He did bring his own engineer from L.A., Niko Bolas, just in case I wasn’t any good. But, after two weeks, he was able to send Niko home. From that point on, it was amazing. He took me to England with him to mix the film soundtrack, and he recommended me on several other projects. A year later, he called me about doing a James Taylor album. But first, I had to do a demo to make sure it was okay with James. So, James’ band traipsed over to Right Track one afternoon before their gig at Radio City Music Hall. I guess I did okay, because two months later, I was on my way to Montserrat with Peter and James for the That’s Why I’m Here album.
Once you decided to engineer, you had good luck.
For 10 years, I was trying to get songs to Peter Asher; suddenly, I’m traveling around the world working with him.
But did you ever sell him a song?
No. Previously, my whole life was writing songs, but once I decided to engineer I never looked back. It obviously wasn’t my calling and engineering was. And, basically, through Simon’s and Peter’s belief in me, I got my career started.
You were an early proponent of digital recording.
It’s funny about my digital journey. Around ’85, during That’s Why I’m Here, we were asked by Sony to try their new digital multitrack, which I didn’t mind as long as I could double bus. So on the tracking sessions we had a Sony 3324 and a Studer A800, and the Studer just blew it away. I didn’t like the digital at all, and for the next few years, I was very anti-digital.
What changed your mind?
In 1990, Allen Sides came to visit me at Right Track. We had a long talk, and I think we both had a sort of epiphany. I was remarking that I didn’t go home and play my recordings anymore, now that they were on CD instead of vinyl, because I didn’t really like the way they sounded. And I started thinking that maybe the approach I was taking in making them was wrong. With CDs being 80 or 90 percent of the market, instead of complaining, I should be using it to my advantage. I needed somehow to be mixing my records so that, whatever it was that digital was doing to the sound, I could at least hear it before it got to mastering. I mean, we’d be sitting in the studio playing half-inch mixes going, “Wow, this is great.” And then you’d get a CD ref back from the pressing plant and say, “What happened?”
Now, granted, the filters and the A/D converters at the time were pretty poor. But I decided that I should mix to a digital format, and, instead of listening to the console out, I should monitor after the signal was converted to digital through the machine. That way, if digital does add harshness, or take away some warmth, or dry up the ambience, I could compensate for that before I finalized the mix.
So, that’s what I did, with a Sony 2-track DASH machine that my good friend David Smith at Sony Classical got me. And, when we took the project to mastering, Ted Jensen was able to go direct into the 1630. When I got the CD back, for the first time in years my mix sounded like what I’d heard in the studio. From that point on, I mixed everything digitally.
__
Reprinted with permission from
Magazine, March, 2001© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
