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Sansano was born
in the Bronx (N.Y.), but his formative years were spent in New Jersey,
where he played keyboards in a succession of mostly new wave-ish bands
in high school. He went to the Berklee College of Music (in Boston) on
a musician’s track (performance, theory, composition, etc.) but ended
up in the engineering program. “As I was finishing up an arranging
degree at Berklee, I realized there was still something missing, and I
found myself being more attracted to the studio and all the trappings
of the studio, and that’s where I found myself being really comfortable,”
he says. “But it’s not like I was very technical or anything.
And I’m still not. When it comes to the actual construction of equipment
or maintenance and knowing how to change a capacitor, I can’t help
you with that, I’m afraid. But I like using the technology creatively,
and that’s kind of what got me interested in getting studio experience.
It was like a big instrument to me.
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Nick
Sansano at Capri Digital Studios in Italy (click for larger image)
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“My first job
out of Berklee was at Newbury Sound in Boston,” he
continues. “I had recorded demos there with bands I was in and as
I was finishing up at Berklee, they were looking for some assistants,
so I would go over there and work there a couple of days a week. I moved
on to doing sessions very quickly. I don’t think it’s because
I was particularly good, but circumstance always seemed to follow me.
At Newbury, they needed people to do sessions, and they were simple sessions,
and I did them. Then, when I moved back to New York, I worked at a studio
called Eras Sound, on 54th Street between First and Second Avenue. It
was two big rooms, and it was a very popular studio in the disco era.
This guy, Boris Midney, who owned the studio, produced all these dance
classics. I wasn’t involved with that, but they needed people to
do other kinds of sessions, so I did that.”
From there, Sansano moved to Greene Street Recording (in Manhattan), and
that became his home base for a number of years. “That was a great
studio,” he recalls. “The whole hip hop thing exploded down
there, along with lots of other things. That’s where I started to
get involved with the Bomb Squad, who produced all the Public Enemy stuff,
and Ice Cube and Bell Biv DeVoe. I engineered and mixed on Fear of a Black
Planet, It Takes a Nation of Millions, AmerikKka’s Most Wanted, some
Run-DMC stuff, Slick Rick, 3rd Bass.”
Did Sansano know that these projects would be so important and influential?
“Not initially,” he says, “because it was a very comfortable
situation. The Bomb Squad, before they were officially the Bomb Squad,
would come in and work on a lot of Def Jam R&B-type stuff, so we all
knew each other really well. But they never would bring Public Enemy stuff
to Greene Street at first. They would do all that at a place in Long Island.
Then they started to bring it down to Greene Street, and that’s when
I started to get a lot of those sessions and started a real relationship
with the production team. We had all sorts of celebrities and political
activists coming down to check it out—people like George Clinton,
Africa Bombaataa, Spike Lee. That’s when I knew something was going
on there.”
REC
NOTES | NEXT
Reprinted with
permission from 
Magazine, November, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved
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