"Building The Perfect Beast" Memoir

I’d been an assistant at Bill Schnee’s studio for not much more than a year when Don and his crew, engineer Greg Ladanyi, and guitar player, Danny Kortchmar (all co-producers) came to Schnee Studio during the production of Don’s first solo album, “I Can’t Stand Still.” It was just a bit of recording and then a playback party.

Henley was my favorite of the Eagles, so it was quite an honor to be a part of it, even though it was really more of a party than a session. After an hour or so of playback, drinks and such overwhelmed everyone’s desire to hear more, so the rest of the evening was a laid-back hang, ending after midnight. They loved the studio, so I thought I might see them again during that album’s production, but the rest of that album ended at the studio that was at that time their home, Record One, a few minutes away in Sherman Oaks.

A year or so later the sessions for what would become “Building the Perfect Beast” began at Schnee’s. This was a different crew than the musicians I worked with at Schnee Studio. Most of the guys recording at Schnee’s were the elite session players playing on most of the pop records at the time. While some of those guys overlapped with Don’s cadre, by and large there were a different sort They were a part of the “LA Mafia.” (The musicians and engineers which centered around the productions of Peter Asher, who typically worked with Val Garay at Record One.) Record One was a built by Val, who engineered many of those albums for Asher

Val had been Asher’s engineer for many of the great albums he produced for James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt and others. I learned there had been some breakdown in the relationship between Henley, and Jackson, and Val, so here they were. The reputed story was Jackson, so angered at Val for shutting down one of his mix sessions before it was finished, he threw a microphone stand through the control room window. I’ve no idea of the truth of this story. But it seems plausible. But for whatever reason, Henley moved his project to Schnee’s, and Jackson built his own place in Santa Monica.

A large part of the production concept for this album was the marriage of drum machines with pop-rock elements. At that point, such productions were more R&B or Brit-pop. As I think back on it there weren’t any dialogs of “Hey, let’s do this.” It was just how the production evolved. Ladanyi commented on it a few times and that he liked it, but that was it.  

These were not easy sessions. The requirements of work were very high and I got yelled at on a regular basis. Technical problems or small mistakes were not tolerated, and always displayed for all to see. As tough as it was, it was a good thing for me and a seminal period of time in my career. It was either step up or get fired. As hard as it was, I will always be grateful for the demands expected of me. Fear is a great motivator and in a very short while, my game was raised significantly.

Right off the bat, changes were required for our studio. Schnee Studio had two MCI JH-16 twenty-four track recorders which were heavily modified to Bill’s own specs. They sounded great, but Greg wanted to use 3M-79 recorders without even giving the MCI a listen. So they arrived and Bill’s machines were placed in the adjoining hall.  

One of the things I learned that while these machines worked pretty well, and could punch in decently enough, they couldn’t punch out very well at all. So slow there were in fact that when overdubbing a bass guitar or drums there would be a gap in the recording. The solution was to drop leader tape on the spot for the punch-out. We’d find the spot for the punch-out, mark and cut the tape and place in a few feet of leader tape there so we’d go out of record when the leader tape passed by. Once the punch was done, I’d then reassemble the cut, and back to work we’d go. The first time Greg told me to do this, I didn’t get it. That was never the case with the MCI machines and I said so. I recall him looking at me, thinking I was nuts. “Well this is what we do” he said, so we did. I’m not sure Greg ever believed such punches were possible with the MCI but as he wanted to use the 3M79 machine, cutting the tape and using leader tape for the punch out was a regular practice.  

One other comment about this, and this is for all you young ‘uns who weren’t around during the tape era. Back in those days when 24 tracks were filled, we’d create what was known as a “slave tape.” I’d record identical SMPTE time code to track 24 of two machines, lock them together with a Lynx Synchronizer and bounce stems from the first machine to the second. After that we’d then put the master away and work on the slave. Most often that would be enough. However on occasion a second slave tape would be required. Thankfully that wasn’t often and I don’t recall that being the case for the Henley album. When it came time for mixing, two machines were brought in and the song was played from them both. One machine playing back the master parts, the second playing back the overdubs on the slave tape. All that to say, when I cut the tape for punching out, I had to be very careful with the edits so the Lynx wouldn’t lose sync when they would be played back during the mix, months later.

Despite all the hassle of making and using a slave tape there was a legitimate sonic benefit to making slave tapes. The friction of passing over the record and playback heads would cause analog tapes to shed some of their magnetic oxide. Over the long hours of overdubs, the tape would shed and by the time the mix would commence, a lot of the top end was gone. When that happened there would be a battle for the mixer to add back the top end, but not adding tape hiss. For that reason alone, a lot of engineers would make slave tapes as the master tracks didn’t have to endure the hours of playback and losing that precious top end.

Speaking of tape editing, this album had one of the most nerve wracking hours of my assisting career when making the song “Building the Perfect Beast.” Bear in mind I did all the cuts and editing. It was just what we assistants back in those days. We’d recorded the tracks on the master tape and were now working on the slave. Well as fate would have it Don came up with a new part he wanted to add to the song. Not just a new instrument mind you...but adding a whole section to the song. A bit more than mid-way through the song there’s a six bar chant, “All the way from Malibu, to the land of the talking drum…etc.” That wasn’t in the original master. Don had that idea during the overdubs. I bounced the drums to a second machine in three two bar sections and edited that back into the slave tape. Well the SMPTE time code was now ruined so we had to jam sync the code (you old farts know what that means) and re-record it. Then I had to do the same thing on the master. I was terrified thinking it would never again lock up, but amazingly it did.

Danny Kortchmar was a very integral part of creating the arrangements and production of the album. He made great demos at his house and would bring in the cassette roughs mixes he made from his Fostex 8 track. This was before MIDI or digital format of any kind, so they’d have to perform again any demo he’d made from scratch as the quality of the Fostex machine wasn’t good enough to transfer to the 2” tape.

Now with these recreations of the demos a funny thing happened somewhat regularly. When we’d begin to re-record Danny’s demos, Danny would bring in his gear and we’d start laying his parts. More than a few times Don or Greg would say, “Wait. That doesn’t sound like the demo.” Danny would sheepishly reply, “Oh...uh..I left that pedal effect (or whatever) the house.” So we’d break while Danny would drive back to his house to retrieve the pedal or whatever it was he used on the demo. After an hour or more, Danny would return with the needed piece of gear, and we’d be back at it. It was funny as this happened more often than not.

One of the great songs that Danny did bring all his gear for was for the song, “All She Wants to do is Dance.” That great fuzz guitar tone playing through the song was NOT a guitar. It was a Yamaha DX7 synth using the “Sample and Hold” patch. It was a one of those seemingly pointless patches on the synth, but Danny found a brilliant use for it. He slowed it down so it was in tempo with the song, then ran the output of it into his Marshall amp, cranked up to 10. We recorded it with an SM57 on the amp, then fed it to the room for ambiance and recorded that with a pair of Telefunken 251s. By the way, the ambience on the Linn drums is also the room at Schnee’s studio. Like the guitar and many other things for the album, we fed the drum machine back into the studio via the speakers in the room, and recorded it as a part of the sound. (Yeah...mixed together with the sound. Old school!)

The great solo on the song was synth harmonica was played by David Paich. He used the DX7 with a breath controller. The DX7 was also fed into the studio and recorded to get that great Schnee studio ambience. It was a single take...top to bottom. A freaking, amazing performance I’ll never forget.

One other interesting thing about that song. As I recall, Danny wrote it in a single night, lyrics and all. An amazing feat considering the amount of lyrics and the great story it told.

One other oddity I recall. We had an EMT 250 we were using for a reverb. Well at times during the recording of the album it began to make a very loud reverberated BANG with no notice. It was annoying as could be, but Greg loved that sound and wanted to use it in the stops of “You Can’t Make Love.” Well this machine had a mind of it’s own and we couldn’t make it happen when we wanted. So one night I was given the task of sitting in the control room running the ATR 2 track over and over, hoping the machine would make that noise. Six hours later, of course it never did, so that idea was abandoned.

“A Month of Sundays” is a bit of an oddity. Don wrote it mid-way through the album. Danny however didn’t really like it so much. He was raised in New York and the subject just wasn’t something near to his heart. He and Don ended up having a small battle over whether to have it on the album. On a break, knowing I was also from Texas, Don asked me what I thought. Well I told him it sure resonated to me and that I grew up knowing folks like the character in the song. After the break their dialog about the song began again. Danny said, “Don, I don’t really get it.” Don stopped, pointed to me and said, “Well HE does. And so do a lot of others like him.” Whether or not that moment changed Danny’s mind I don’t know. But after that afternoon there were no more conversations about the worthiness of the song.

“Sunset Grill” is and was one of my favorites on the album and was one which I actually had a small role as an engineer. We’d gone very late the night before and Greg had yet to arrive the next morning. Frustrated, Danny barked, “You record it!” So I took the Roger Linn drum machine and did what I knew Greg would want, sending it out to the room and recording it.  Greg arrived just as we finished. Listening back he grumbled, “We’ll replace that!”  But they never did.

Don wanted a bit more production on this, so they brought the great synth programmer and player, Michael Boddiker and Randy Newman for production ideas. Michael brought in ALL his gear. There was a veritable wall of synths (mostly modular Moogs) across the front of the room. He also had his Emulator II there which had the samples of the horn section stabs you hear in the chorus. Most of the production on that song was the work of Randy. I must say, Randy is one of the greatest hangs and personalities I’ve even seen. He’d recently released “I Love LA” but yet to create the score for “The Natural” and other movies we’ve all heard. He was also every bit of the genius you’d imagine. It was a wonderful week of work seeing him come up with all his great ideas. It culminated once again, with the synth solo played by David Paich. Another single take.  

For me, “Sunset Grill” is the most iconic of the songs on the album. Don’s fabulous lyrics speaks so perfectly to that decadent time in LA. The spectacular horn chart was written by Jerry Hey and recorded at Oceanway LA by Allen Sides. It was an addition they never even discussed around me until they brought it back, done. A great finish to a fantastic song.

One of the other great songs, and as far as I know was never released was a song called, “The New Money Changers” which was a stunning indictment of TV preachers. The tracking date had Jeff Porcaro, Danny, and Hawk Wolinski on keys. (The bass player I can’t recall, though it might have been Tim Drummond, who was a fixture on Don’s sessions.) The song was incredible. But as far as I know it was never finished and my thinking is Don wasn’t happy with the lyrics.

Which brings me to an observation on Don’s lyric writing. One thing I was really impressed with was Don’s dedication to great lyrics. Don was an avid reader of great literature and held himself to a very high standard with any lyric he wrote. When singing his vocals, if there wasn’t a line he’d not yet found, he’d simply let that part of the song go by and sing nothing....not even a dummy line. It seemed to me he’d never want the mediocre to supplant the best, so he’d only sing lyrics he felt were good and not get caught getting used to a second best choice. When singing “The New Money Changers” there were a lot of places with lines unsung. A few weeks would go by and he’d give it another shot with some lyrics changed, yet other spots still had nothing. As I never heard the lyrics completed my thought is that at least that was one reason why the song was never released. It certainly had everything else. The track was amazing and sounded complete. Owing to the nature of the song’s subject, that’s my suspicion, but it’s only a guess.

An interesting thing about the way they recorded their vocals...and I think the method was something I think Val Garay came up with. They used a U67 with a big foam pop filter on it.  Don would put his nose in the little hole where one could change the recording pattern of the mic and never moved from that spot. His lips were maybe an inch from the mic at most. I’ve never found that something I preferred. It seems so unnatural to me to make a singer get so close to the microphone and not allow them to move and when I tried it, I was never happy with the sound. But it was clearly no problem for Don. His brilliant vocals on the album speak for themself.  

Visitors

We had lots of visitors during these sessions. On any night there could be a veritable “whos-who” of artists and musicians dropping by. All of the Eagles except Glen Frey came by. Tim Schmidt was great. A shy man, very nice guy and respectful...even to low-life assistant engineers. Don Felder came by one night. He and I got into a long discussion of guitar tones and I found he was an encyclopedia of information on the Eagles albums. He could recall which guitar, amp, mics, compressors, etc were used on any song I mentioned.  

There was one night when Belinda Carlisle and Jane Wiedlin (from the Go-Go’s) came in for background vocals. I can’t recall exactly which song it was for but it the best part was hearing the dialog between Belinda and Jane between takes. Yeah...total Valley Girl talk.

Closing

My part of the album took almost a year. The guys would come in around 11am and work till midnight or so three weeks out of a month. By and large it was pretty much real work. There wasn’t much in the way of partying. (At least compared to sessions I’d heard of in the years before I came to LA) We ate well, but it was never on the studio bill as Don kindly took care of that himself. I saw first-hand some really great sessions and musicians during that project. As I said before, a lot was required from me. It was like a boot-camp and being on the front lines all at once. At times I hated it. At other times it was heaven for a young man who moved out to LA from Texas just a few years before. The only down-side was they moved back to Record One for mixing and the “Boys of Summer” was recorded just after they arrived there so I missed out on that.

I’m amazed how much of it I recall so clearly. A lot of it feels like it happened just last week. Of course I learned a lot about how to make an album. But I also learned a lot about human interaction, dedication to one’s craft, guts, determination, and how to handle severe stress. It took a few years for me to be able to even listen to that album. It was such a difficult process I had to have time to process all that occurred and hear it with fresh ears. Once I got past all that however, I realized what a great album it really was and how fortunate I was to have been a part of it.

Home Recording Tip 50: In music production give moments where one thing takes center stage. Let the scene change

Time for a change

This tip and the next are from a few lessons I’ve learned from Chris Lord-Alge. And one of them, rather painfully.  

Back in my LA days I worked on TV show called “The Heights.” It was about a mythical band in the Pacific Northwest and their adventures in trying to make it. I was recording and mixing the music for the show and was soon to begin mixing a subsequent album. It was pretty much rock-pop stuff, and a lot of the music was pretty good. One of the songs in the show was “How Do You Talk To An Angel” which ended up as a #1 Billboard hit.

There’s an interesting story about how the song got to be #1. As the show was on FOX, their marketing crew had previews for it running in movie theaters across the country. “How Do You Talk to an Angel” was the musical bed to the preview and theater-goers liked it so much they began cheering and clapping when it came on the screen. Soon radio stations began to get calls to have it played on the air. Well, it wasn’t long before we got a call to get a mix of it out NOW! That of course shifted everything in the mix schedule for the album. Not surprisingly, the A&R guy from the label wanted Chris to mix it. I begged the producer to give me a fair shot and let mix it as well. Then he and the A&R guy could choose which mix they preferred.   

Now if you ever find yourself in such a situation, you must remember a few things. One, the big mixer you’re competing against has a track record, so you’re already at a disadvantage.  The fact is ESPECIALLY people in the major labels rarely use only their ears to make a decision on mixes. Guys at the labels are always in jeopardy with their job, so when in doubt, they’ll take the safest choice. After all, if the song is a flop, their boss can’t accuse them of not hiring a good mixer. And what if the unknown guy’s mix was better and they used it, but it wasn’t a hit? Then they’d look like an idiot. The labels don’t care about how good a mix is. They just care if it sells. But even if it WAS a hit, the question they’d face would then be, “Why’d you spend all that money on a mix you didn’t use? All to say I knew if my mix was to be selected over Chris’ it would have to be MUCH better than his. But even that didn’t guarantee anything. So I knew the odds were against me even before I started.

Still I did get my chance. When the mix was done the A&R guy came over for a listen right after hearing Chris’ mix. He was a very fine A&R guy with a great track record, and to his credit it wasn’t just a polite, courtesy listen. He sat down with me and really paid attention to what I’d done. “This is really good,” He said. “I gotta say these mixes are a lot closer than I thought they’d be. I think yours is more musical” as he nodded approvingly.  

Well, of course in the end they picked Chris’ mix. And I gotta say his mix was better. One thing which really separated his mix from mine is what Chris did in the instrumental bridge. There was this arpeggiated electric guitar part which he really pushed and made it a feature. In my mix it wasn’t buried, but I didn’t make a big deal out of it like Chris did. There may have been other things he did better, but that was the one big comment about his mix and for sure it made his mix better than mine. He made a real moment of that section and it made a huge difference. Of course I offered to remix my mix and do the same, but the decision had already been made. Lesson learned!

Recording Tip 49: When tuning remember the doctor’s oath. DO NO HARM! Don’t overdo it

If a little bit is good, a lot more must be gooder!

Speaking of tuned vocals, over-tuning a vocal is one of my pet peeves. While tuning can be a great thing and turn a great take into a spectacular performance, we all know too well the misuses of the technology. Some may say it’s not a real performance. I disagree unless they mean a whole take with no fixes, and that rarely happens with any artist. I’ve sat for hours with a singer singing a tough phrase over and over on multiple passes and then comp five or more takes to make the final version. In my view that’s no more an honest performance than a good emotional take which needs some pitch correction in places.

I recall a country hit a few years ago which had a vocal so over-tuned I could hardly believe it was released. I couldn’t tell if she was a good singer because her vocal was tuned so hard it was unlistenable. It was a hit, but I think it would have a much longer life had the vocal not been tuned so hard. It just sounded too much like a fad, and made no sense for the genre.

Thinking of this brings to mind a story an artist friend told me about an album she did a number of years ago. Now this gal is one of the top female singers in Christian music and has won several “Vocalist of the Year” and Grammy awards. I’ve recorded her a number of times and believe me...she doesn’t need much help in the tuning department. I once recorded her singing live on a tracking session and her performance was so good it was released without a single punch or tuning. Well in this particular case her producer was one who tended to go overboard with auto-tune. She came in to hear how things were going and was horrified to hear the over-the-top the tuning which had been done. She immediately cried foul, saying she hated it. The producer, thinking on his feet said, “Wait! That’s not the right vocal. That’s for the Electronica version!” Well she knew there was not going to be such a version...she wasn’t that kind of artist. The producer mumbled a bit about the right vocal not being in that session. “Can you come back tomorrow? I’ll have it for you then.”  

We’ve all heard the T-Pain effect. When that’s the case, then, yeah...go for it. But when it’s not that kind of song sometimes a bit of sliding into a note can really carry emotion. Flat-lining the note can perhaps be more technically right, but doing too much of that can suck the life right out of the performance. Most often we don’t get to work with a killer talent like the gal in my story. But I still find it better to err on the side of doing less when tuning. You can always go back and tweak a line that isn’t right. And it’s much easier to tweak something again than it is to work backward. Once you flatline that note you can’t undo it. You have to go back and get the untuned vocal and start all over.

Recording Tip 48: Use a tuned and untuned vocal together to make an effect that no plugin can do

A good and a bad can make it great

This is another thing I came upon by accident. By now you’ve probably noticed that many of the tips I write about are from things which happened unintentionally. Sometimes a random mistake will be the best thing for the record if you’re open enough to use it. A lot of good ideas on great albums have resulted from accidents.  

I had just finished tuning a vocal and resumed mixing. I had the tuned vocal up but hadn't yet muted the untuned vocal. When I hit play, the two created a great sound together. It wasn’t something I wanted for the entire song, but it was a great sounding effect which I used for the breakdown during the bridge. This won't always work, of course. Depending upon the singer and how much tuning was done, this trick may not sound good. However, it’s sometimes worth a listen when you're searching for a vocal effect.

You know it just occurred to me...I’ve been telling you I prefer to not have anything in the session that’s not going to be in the mix. I think I should make the un-tuned vocal an exception!

Home Recording Tip 47: To create depth in a mix use high and low pass filters to make certain sounds seem farther away

Filters are often one of the least used features on a console or a plugin. Most of the time they’re thought of as something you use only when there’s a problem. But the fact is they can be one of the best tools you have.

I use them a lot when mixing something which is supposed to sound like an orchestral recording but recorded in a studio. I figured this out when mixing one of these recordings and was trying to get woodwinds to sound like they were back in the orchestra. When recorded, the mics for the woodwinds had been placed close to them and while they sounded good, they were too bright and present as compared to the strings. Adding reverb didn’t do the job. They just sounded like close mic-ed instruments with reverb as opposed to having real depth.

We judge size and distance of what we hear based on how air transmits sound waves. When a gun is fired close to us we hear lots of low and high frequencies. But put that gun fired a few hundred yards away and not only is it softer, but the low and high frequencies have dropped off. Sound effect mixers know this and that’s one way they make a gun sound close or in the distance. Roll off some bottom and top, add some verb and turn it down, and there you have it….a gunshot far away.

So....back to trying to fit the woodwind section in a mix. Since I was trying to make it sound like the listener was in the audience 100’ away from the players, I grabbed some low and high pass filters, rolled a bit of each end, put some reverb on and tweaked till I got that sense of distance I wanted.

That works well for making a studio orchestra sound better, but the fact is heavy, even unnatural filtering is one of the tricks great pop and rock mixers use all the time to give depth and clarity to a mix. If I have a song with lots of background vocals, I’ll put both high and low pass filters to help the parts come through. Sometimes I’ll do it so severely it almost sounds like they’re singing through a telephone. Same thing goes for electric or acoustic guitars. Really, you should consider everything in the mix as something which might benefit from this trick. And when you do this, pick carefully what should have this effect. Do it on too many things though and you’ll lose the contrasts and depth you’re trying to make.

Recording Tip 46: Do you prefer drums panned audience perspective, or drummer perspective?

For all you air drummers

Now this isn’t so much a tip as it is a poll of preference. But right out the gate, I’ll say I prefer the so-called “audience” perspective with drums and orchestra. That of course, assumes a traditional setup with a right handed drummer, and the orchestra arranged in the typical setting where violins are on the left, violas in the middle, and cellos and basses on the right.

Most all of my mentors placed the drums in the audience perspective and I found that was my preference as well. (Probably because that’s what I was used to.) So when recording I’ll have the mics set that way, and in mixing, even if someone recorded the drums in the drummer perspective, I swap them to my preference.

Of course at a live concert you really don’t hear the high tom far right and the floor tom far left.  The drums really sound mostly mono and the ambience of the room does most of the work making things sound wide. Still, when making a mix, we’re really not seeking to recreate reality. Reality has it’s own extra magic seeing the performers and sitting in a room with its own acoustics. Our job in mixing is to deliver as much emotional impact as possible. We need to make it larger than life since we don’t have the added dimension of the live performance. So super-wide panning of the drums is what we often do to help create that extra excitement.

Sometimes I’ve had conversations with mixers about this and the question of how to pan a stereo acoustic piano comes up. After all, what’s an audience perspective for that? I prefer to pan it as if I’m playing. I get told it’s backward from my philosophy of the drums but for me it feels best to have the piano in the player’s perspective. After all, you never see a piano on stage with the tail facing the audience. So that comparison doesn’t work. And while most often I’ll pan the piano hard left and right, there are times I’ll pan in inside a bit if it feels better. Sometimes I’ll even mix the piano totally mono depending on what kind of record it is and what role the piano has in the arrangement.

There’s no right or wrong in this. And with everything in this craft, what matters most is that the mix communicates the emotion of the song and listener can feel it. The take-away with this is to at least think about panning when setting up your mix. Have some fun with it and try something new.

Recording Tip 45: Dont be fooled by plugins that look like analog gear. The pic has nothing to do with the sound.

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled-Mark Twain

It’s really amazing how our perceptions can be influenced by what we see. A number of years ago I was working in Ocean Way LA Studio One. This is one of the legendary studios in the world, designed by the legendary Bill Putnam.

Oceanway had one of the greatest mic collections on the planet, and one of the first Focusrite Consoles in the U.S. I was recording some of the best musicians in the city and believe me, like Al Schmidt’s quote from earlier, if I couldn’t get at least decent sounds in such a circumstance, I had real problems!

That day I brought a number of outboard mic preamps which were sitting alongside the console.  I didn’t need them. The console’s mic preamps were fantastic. But I was considering purchasing a few of them, so I was having a shoot-out to see how they fared against Rupert’s creation.

The band played down a take and things were sounding very good. Although most of the mics were going through the Focusrite, a few were going through the gear I brought in. On first playback the guys came in and noticed the large pile of mic preamps. “What is all that?” the drummer asked. I told him what they were and why they were there. As the playback began the drummer looked at the mic preamps, up to the speakers, back and forth a few times. He nodded in approval and said, “YEAH! Sounds great!” Now this was a very famous and seasoned studio musician who worked with some of the greatest artists and engineers in the world. Frankly I was surprised at what I saw him doing. A large part of his impression was not what he heard, but what he saw. Back in those days the large racks of outboard gear were a bit of a rarity so it was rather impressive seeing that extra stuff piled in the room. I got many kudos that day and more gigs. So from then on I always brought as much extra gear as I could! And yeah, I kept my mouth shut when the drummer gave the compliment. If he thought I was especially brilliant for bringing that gear in, who am I to say he was wrong?

Fast forward to the DAW age. A plugin creator can make a plugin GUI look any way they want. No longer are we dealing with physical knobs, transformers and the like which caused certain gear to have been made the shape and size it was. A GUI is only made for the movements of a mouse. So as plugins were created, I found it interesting what the designers chose to do.

George Massenburg made one of the best GUI for an equalizer in my opinion. It really makes much more sense than a recreation of a physical knobs. It’s clean, simple, and easy to use. Just push up or pull down. Nothing sexy with that. And while not visually beautiful, it does the job very well. Colin McDowell at MdDSP did a very similar thing. Again, not sexy, but works great.

Many other plugin designers however have chosen vintage looks, especially when attempting to replicate vintage gear. I don’t fault them for that, except when the controls don’t work well and a game of cat and mouse begins in the attempt to get the knob where one wants it to be. But the key thing to remember is that the look of the plugin has nothing to do with how it sounds.

I bet if Waves or UA had some hacker at their company swap the GUI of their Pultec emulator with their SSL most users would not hear the difference. They’d be mixing away, convinced a great classic Pultec emulation was being applied, even though it was emulating an SSL. Which sounds NOTHING like a Pultec!

So of course what I’m getting at is we, duh...have to always listen with our ears and not our eyes. Most of us won’t have a hardware Pultec, Fairchild, or whatever lying around to compare to a plugin. And while it’s interesting to do that, what matters is which one is right. Maybe you’d pick the hardware...but maybe not. Hearing if the plugin you’ve selected sounds right for the mix is all that matters no matter what the plugin is or how it looks. That’s why blind listening tests are the best way to make evaluations. My earlier post, “Perception is Reality?” talks about this.  

Critical listening is an art and something one gets at better with practice. When the mix is done no one will know what I used, nor will they care. They want to be moved emotionally by the mix and that’s all that really matters.

Recording Tip 44: Try acoustic filters. Cut a hole in the end of a Styrofoam or paper cup and stick the tip of the mic thru it

This was something I first heard Tchad Blake did. It’s a fun thing to do and can give you an atypical sound when needed.  

Everyone has heard what a voice sounds like when you cup your hands around your mouth or hold up an old cheerleader megaphone and talk or sing. When you do that you’re hearing acoustic filtering which makes a cool sound when recording.

I’ve recorded singers using a paper like a megaphone, styrofoam cups around an SM57 for a snare...I even put a mic in the hole of a cinderblock brick in front of a kick drum. Sure, you can try to make an odd sound later with EQ, but there’s nothing quite like doing it in the moment and letting nature create the sound. And no matter how good you are with EQ, there are very few times it sounds as interesting as it does with an acoustic filter.

So when looking for a different sound, take a styrofoam cup or whatever, cut a hole in it and place it over the mic, holding it with some tape. You’ll never know how it will sound till you hear it, but I’ve found more often than not it works. You’re obviously looking for something out of the ordinary, and that is what you’ll get!

Recording Tip 43: I have a friend who put a bass cabinet face down on the floor with a KM84 under with great results

This tip has raised lots of questions, as I knew it would. I just couldn’t put enough information in a tweet, but hopefully it may have gotten a few of you to try some less typical things when recording.  

The friend of mine who did this is a very good engineer. We’ve known each other for a long time and often talk about different ways of doing things. I will say however, that while I’ve always liked his results, I’ve yet to find one of his ideas to work for me. That’s part of the nature of the recording. As you try different ways of doing things, you’ll find someone who’s recording methods line up with yours, and some just don’t. So the first lesson here is don’t fret it if some tip you learned doesn’t work when you try it. It’s no different than a musician trying to emulate some other player, but that person’s style doesn’t feel right to them when they try it. We’re all different. We come to this craft with our own musical loves and preferences that may be very different than those whose tips we wish to emulate.  

But as you’re different than me, you might find this tip to work for you, so here it is.

As best I recall, the bass cabinet was a small one. He’d tried a few normal techniques to no avail. Finally in desperation (often a good source of good ideas) he took a KM84 and placed it flat it on the studio floor. He then laid the speaker cabinet face down on the floor OVER the mic and turned up the amp till it “farted” a bit, and there was the sound. Go figure! I’d have never thought of such an idea. But it was a great sound.

So lesson #1, don’t worry if something some idea you heard doesn’t work for you. Find someone whose methods relate to what you do and follow them.  

So, lesson #2 the total contradiction to #1….Try anything! You may find something so bizarre as my friend that works for you.  Always keep looking. You just may find a wacko idea that does work.

Recording Tip 42: Caffeine later in the evening has a point of diminishing returns. I find a carbonated drink works in late hours

Coffee! The engineer’s extra assistant. It’s been in the studios for decades and thankfully now days it’s usually pretty decent. Back when I started (pre Starbucks...yes, I’m that old) good studio coffee was a rarity. (Think of a shabby office coffeemaker, styrofoam cups and powdered creamer) But we’d still drink that mud in the late hours to help us keep going.

One thing I’ve found that at a certain point there’s a kind of caffeine saturation. Especially in hours after midnight when I’ve had a few cups the coffee doesn’t help me wake up...it just begins to bother my stomach.  

I’ll usually turn to a Diet Pepsi for those hours. The carbonation wakes me up pretty well on it’s own, and the caffeine is somehow different and I don’t need the sugar. Of course other kinds of drinks can do the same thing.  Any sparkling drink would have a similar effect. I’ve tried the Five Hour energy drinks. They seem to work also, but I really wonder what’s in it!

Recording Tip 41: Thinking of mastering your project yourself? There’s a reason why the great mixers don’t.

Okay...I’ve been blessed to have many of my mixes mastered by some of the best in the world so I know the difference. My first efforts were mastered by Doug Sax who taught me the most about what mastering is, what they do and why their work is so valuable. Since then Bernie Grundman, Bob Ludwig, Howie Weinberg, Andrew Mendelson, Gavin Lurssen, Greg Calbi, Ted Jensen, George Marino, and even the late Chris Blair of Abbey Road. (Bohemian Rhapsody anyone?) all have done their best to make my mixes sound good. And let me tell you, what they do is a big deal. If you think it doesn’t matter, then ask yourself why do virtually all of the best mixers have someone master their work? You know their mixes will be as good as it gets. And if they think it’s needed, the rest of us mere mortals need it too.

Now a legit reply at this point would be, “Sure. If I had the money I’d use them. But I can’t afford it so I have to do it myself or find some local guy or gal who’s just starting out.” Fair enough. And I do get that sometimes a lesser skilled engineer can make your project sound worse. Additionally I’ve found some of those to be much more hard headed about what they think things should be than the famous guys mentioned above. (Odd that great talent and skill know better how to handle their ego. Probably because they’re more secure in who they are...something I’ve covered in a previous blog. Just remember this, one of the best reasons to have someone else master your work is you get another set of ears to evaluate it. They don’t come to it with the baggage of all the work that came with the making of the project. They don’t know any of the battles over sounds, vocal levels, etc that so often color the view of what has been done or what it should be. They just hear it for what it is and will make their judgements solely based on that. Also as the music is being heard in another room (hopefully sonically accurate and with a clean audio path) whatever flaws there may be in the mix room aren’t reinforced in mastering.

Okay. So there’s my sermon on why you should have someone else master your project. But at times I understand that simply isn’t an option. So what advice can I offer for those of you who have to master your own project? First of all, unless you’ve invested some serious time and research into the subject you probably need to forget everything you think you know about mastering. Mastering IS NOT just loading your mixes into your DAW, slapping on some EQ and mulitiband limiters till the mix is loud and squashed. That’s a sure way to make your work sound amateurish. Anybody can do that, and Lord knows the great mastering engineers don’t do that. Just as you’d dig though Pensado’s Place and other sites on the web to learn from great mixers in order to make your work sound better, so you should scour the net for good information from experienced and trusted sources on mastering before start.

Now such sites are few and far between. But there is one I can’t recommend highly enough. It’s run by a fellow in England named Ian Shepherd and his site is Production Advice. At this excellent site you’ll find tons of great articles, videos, and links covering almost anything you’d ever think of and some things you never imagined. Ian also wrote a great e-book you can purchase and perhaps the best thing of all is his Online Mastering Course which is held several times a year. I’ve taken the course, and despite that I’ve been at this a long time and been a part of hundreds of mastering session, I learned a ton from it. Best of all the course shows Ian actually mastering various songs and talking his way through what he’s doing and why….all on various DAWs that you probably already own with plugins you likely have. I can promise you it will easily be one of the best investments you’ll make. And no, I’m not compensated by Ian. But if you sign up, please let him know you heard about it from me. He’s an online buddy and I’d love for him to know.

So again, if you can hire a great mastering engineer do that. But if you can’t, begin learning what mastering is before you take a whack at it.

Recording Tip 40: When mixing better to have your faders plus or minus 10db of “0.” Insert trims if you find them far from that

This tip came from a project I mixed a few years ago, and I’m finding the problem happening pretty often these days. I was mixing a project which had been sent to one of the best guitar players on the planet for him record his parts. The tracks he recorded were mostly power/crunch guitars and they sounded great. The problem however, were that all of them were recorded at near full scale, almost totally filling up the meters. (This relates to TIP 3-4.  where I advise to only record percussive instruments that hot.)

This was a problem because I had to pull the faders almost to the bottom of the fader track in order to balance them in the mix. The reason this is a problem is at the bottom of the fader track, there’s not enough resolution to make small changes. You can easily see this on the faders with their dB marks. When the fader is near 0 the distance between dBs is fairly large. On my screen moving the fader about an inch near 0 gives about 7-8dB of gain change. But at the bottom of the fader track, an inch is maybe 15dB or more. I’m not going to get into the math of that. You can search that if you want more information. The bottom line of it all is there’s more resolution a the top half of the fader track than near the bottom. So if the fader is down near the -20 mark it’s really hard to make a small level change...and consequently, hard to get the balance of that track just right.

All to say, I needed better fader resolution for my rides. So what I did was to put a Trim plugin on those track at -20dB. That allowed me to raise up the fader so it was more like -5dB or so for a good balance. From there I could make the small rides more accurately.

Using the trim plugin in this situation will also help keep from any plugins from overloading, especially if you add a good bit of EQ. Maybe you’ve wondered why an equalizer overloads when you add EQ. If the level going in is too hot, when you add gain at certain frequencies, you’ve maxxed out the plugin. Lowering the level will also give you more room with the threshold setting if you’re compressing it. When you find tracks like this, put the trim plugin first, so the following plugins have better gain structure.

One last thing. Don’t deceive yourself that hot recording levels will make for a loud record. That will happen when you mix. Super hot recording levels are likely just to give you unintended distortion. While you may get a thrill seeing all those lit up levels, all they’re really doing is making it harder to make a great mix. Healthy recording levels are important for sure. But again, re-read TIP 3-4.

So use that Trim in and get those faders back up to where they should be. Your moves will be much more accurate, you’ll not be as likely to overload your plugins, and your mixes will sound better as a result.

Recording Tip 39: Once you have basic levels and pans, listen in mono, THEN adjust pans. One small move may help something pop thru

This is a wacky tip and a bit more advanced than some of the others. And while the end goal is to make your stereo mixes better, your mixes heard in mono will be better as well.

Of course 99% of the time your mix will be heard in stereo, but checking your mix in mono is still a good idea for a few reasons, the most obvious being that if your mix is heard in mono you want it to sound good. And if you’re lucky enough to mix a big hit it will be heard in mono a lot more than you imagine. Playback from a smart phone’s speakers or in stores at the mall are a few places where songs are heard in mono by a lot of people. While mono isn’t common, it’s not totally dead. The fact is a great mix sounds good in both mono and stereo and it’s worth your time to check it.

So that’s my little sermon on why it’s good for your mix to translate well to mono. But for this tip that’s really the icing on the cake. The point is to listen in mono so your stereo mixes sound better.  So now you may be wondering, “How do panning changes in mono help my stereo mix?”  

The reason is that mono gives another reference for hearing how your levels, pans, and eq are working. If things are fighting in mono, they’re probably fighting in stereo as well. You may not hear it so much as things are spread across the stereo image, but it’s still there.  

The idea is this. Once your mix is in good shape, hit the mono button on your monitor section and make small panning changes. (Now I’m not talking about changing your pans to mono and then listening.  I’m talking about using your monitor’s Mono button so it combines the stereo mix to mono in your speakers. If you don’t have a mono button on your monitor this tip won’t work for you. You have to have a Mono button in your monitor section to do this.)

So get your mix in good shape, preferably before you’ve begun automating the faders.  TIP 37.  By then you’ve panned all your tracks the way you want them so now hit the mono button on your monitor section and listen. Are all the tracks in a good balance? Does the mix still sound like your mix, or something dreadful?  Hopefully it’s still pretty good. If not, go back to stereo and work a bit more, checking things in mono. Once it sounds pretty good in both, then take the next step. While listening in mono, select a track and move the pan a bit.

Now I’m not talking about making big changes. In fact when I go back to stereo I might not even be able to tell it’s moved at all. The idea is to give a small bump to the panning of the track a bit and see if it pops out better while listening in mono. One thing also...while panning is mostly what I’m working on, level and eq are also something I’m paying attention to, and often I’ll make changes to those as well.  (This is also why it’s good to do this before automation. If you need to make real changes to level you won’t have to backtrack fader automation.)

When doing this I tend to focus more on tracks panned between L-C-R, but those panned hard left and right might need a change as well. It may be that panning a bit less than hard left or right is better. I’ll make my final decisions and passes in stereo, but like listening on a second set of speakers, this gives another perspective to hear relationships of the tracks.

If I hear a problem right off the bat, I may swap back and forth between mono and stereo to find it. But mostly I stay in mono for this little exercise. I’ll take a pass or two like this and once it sound good I’ll go back to stereo and see how things sit.

Almost always when I go back to stereo I find my mix is much more open and sounds better. Of course a great stereo mix is the goal, so if what I heard in mono doesn’t work as well in stereo, I’ll change it for the sake of the stereo mix. But as I said before, a great mix almost always sounds great in both stereo and mono. Check out your favorite mixer’s work. You’ll hear that’s true.

One thing you must remember when doing this. Anything panned dead to center will sound louder when listening in mono because it adds equally from both sides. So expect the bass guitar, kick, snare, and vocal, etc. to be a bit louder. If it does a little bit, that’s normal. But if it’s radically louder, you need to work some more. Listen back and forth between stereo and mono and find the place where those things sound right in both. In mono you’ll also usually lose a bit of stereo reverb so things may sound a bit drier. That’s also due to the things in mono, like the lead vocal are louder in mono, so that relationship with the reverb is different. This may sound a little odd, but with a little experience, you’ll find what works between the two and your mixes will be better.

Give this rather nutty method a shot. I bet you’ll find good results. And if nothing else, it’s a good way to hone your chops.