Your roots stretch back to Atlanta. I know you were playing in bands.
And a little live sound. Then Larry Turner and I decided we were going to put a studio together, one of the more naïve decisions I've ever made. It led us to a gentleman named Phil Benton, who owned a studio named Monarch Sound. It was a very small, unpretentious facility with lots of heart and people who loved to make records. Larry moved up the scale and I became more of a freelance guy. I fell into making records with anybody that would stand still and could navigate the space to a microphone. I did hundreds of free records.
Just trying to get your skills up?
Well, I wasn't worth paying anything for! I wouldn't hire myself. The only way you're gonna do anything in life is to just do it. I had the same taste that I have now, but I just didn't have any skills. I could make a pretty good record, but it would take me a year... the same thing that would take me hours now. I didn't know what the equipment's capabilities were. All those hours of making something sound bad. Then you do that hundreds of times over the years, and all of a sudden you find yourself hearing something come out of the speakers. Immediately in your head you hear what it could sound like, and you subconsciously draw on those thousands of hours of mistakes and happy accidents. Suddenly, without really realizing it, something good is coming out of the speakers. That transition from thinking about it to having it happen naturally took about 12 years.
If you weren't getting paid much, how'd you make a living?
Well, I had some close friends I had helped prior to my engineering life. I took care of them while they were struggling, so I got some help in that area. I had some girlfriends that were helping me out too. Most of my life I had five roommates. I had part of the basement, and we also rehearsed in my bedroom, so my bed was in a corner of the basement, and the rest of the basement was my workbench. I earned a living repairing equipment for a store called Atlanta Discount Music. I'd modify guitar amps and repair TV sets. I was playing in bands, and that shifted to working at Monarch.
What was your impetus to dive into the recording world?
A combination of several things. Probably abject fear at reaching an age where I felt my ability to finally make it as an artist was fading. I could feel that. When you're the oldest person in every band you're in for the last ten bands, you kind of have to evaluate where you're at in life. It was all about how I could stay in music. I wasn't a very good session player. That's why building a studio seemed like a good place to be. The psychological impediment to trying out engineering seemed insurmountable. Easing my way in the back door by building my own studio seemed like a good option, but it just morphed into something. I woke up one day and decided to go to England to work there. That didn't work out. Another day, I'm on my way to California. I've never been able to make decisions that I had 100% confidence in. All my number one records have come from the most bizarre paths. I don't think that in the 30 years of my career I've ever made a phone call or sent an email that actually got me work. I think the only thing that gets me work is to stay in the studio and crank out a record that people hear and like, look at the credits and go, "You know what? I think I want that tall ugly guy on my record! Maybe he'll screw up and do it again."
While you were still in Atlanta, what were some of the things you worked on that were more of a breakout or success for you?
Well, because I was affordable I got to do some things I maybe couldn't have done. I did some R.E.M. demos. I did some of The B-52's. I actually got paid to work with James Brown. Atlanta at that time wasn't the Atlanta of today. Early on, in the late '70s, I was doing a lot of hip-hop because there weren't any engineers that either liked or wanted to tolerate it. There was a lot of residual racism at the time. I wasn't skilled enough to know that there were certain things I shouldn't do, so just by blind luck I didn't clean things up. Back in those days, when you went to a studio you got the engineer for free. These guys were monsters, but they didn't know how to do hip-hop. They tried to clean things up. They didn't understand the energy or importance of it. I've never been one to pretend like I understood the lifestyle or lyrics, but I understood the music and what I felt when I heard it. I understood the importance of a form of music that was so accessible to so many people. Prior to hip-hop, if you didn't have a few thousand dollars, you couldn't go into a studio and work. Now, all of a sudden, for a few hundred dollars you could get a turntable and inexpensive PA system and be creating music. By the time I left Atlanta, studios were actively trying to woo the hip-hop crowd, because that was the biggest source of income, and it still is for a lot of studios. That's kind of my story. Nothing that probably is of any use in terms of a career path for someone starting out, other than just I had the most wonderful combination of stupidity, competitiveness, tenacity, and just never thought about doing anything else. I started in a city that was a great city to be poor in. It's hard to be poor in L.A., Tokyo, London, or New York; but there are some music centers around the world that you can be poor and get a good start.
So you moved to the UK briefly, before L.A.?
I wouldn't call it moving. It was more of a "test the waters" thing. In Atlanta, I had done so much free work, and sucked for so long — it takes a while for the perception of your abilities to catch up with the reality of your abilities. It just seemed like a logical choice to go to London, because all my favorite records were coming from there at that time. But, in retrospect, I realize that was kind of like the end of that movement. I came back to Atlanta. Now I had to choose between New York, Nashville, or L.A. I don't like snow. Nashville was a different place than it is now. Now it's one of my favorite places to make a record. Nashville was out, at that time, so it was Los Angeles. I got in my piece of shit car and drove out!
How'd you go about establishing yourself in Los Angeles and getting work?
Well, I met Herb Trawick. He'd never heard anything that I had done. He introduced me to Kevin Fleming at Island [Records]. Kevin had never heard anything I'd done but he trusted me, and the next thing I knew, I had the number one record in the world. That's why sometimes I feel so bad about giving career path advice. I never had a path! I've never thought about career advancement. I made a successful career happen with the help of a lot of gifted people that believed in me, combined with just outworking everybody else. The success, the hits, the fame and notoriety are all an outgrowth of the thing I truly love, just sitting in a quiet and safe room. It's like a combination of a library, the greatest museum you've ever been to, and Amoeba Records. The process of engineering is the acquisition of taste. Ultimately that's what people pay for. They don't pay for my engineering skills, my patchbay precision and clarity, or how many lava lamps I have. They want something to go out to the public that either directly affects their income, directs people to a show that affects their income, or that gives them the credibility to do an iPod commercial. That's my job!
You're busy. You mix hundreds of songs per year. What possessed you to initially start the online TV show, Pensado's Place?
Our book, The Pensado Papers, is about how the show came out, along with a lot of other information. I had a medical incident where a blood vessel in my brain leaked like a sieve. As you can imagine, it produced some results I wasn't real thrilled with. I was in the hospital for a few months. Coming out of that, I had to make some decisions about where I was going with my life. Herb Trawick was managing me as an engineer. I just felt a need at that point in my life to do a little more teaching, educating, and sharing of some things that I had worked so hard to acquire, in terms of skills. Herb figured that instead of doing it the old-school way, like a brick and mortar school, he came up with the idea of doing a show on the Internet. We wanted to do quality TV. Herb has a strong background in broadcast, plus his managerial skills, and all of that adapted really well to the process of putting a show together. We got help from some people early on, and that absorbed some of the cost. [Producer] Will Thompson was pretty much a neophyte in the space, and we grew with Will. Will does everything with social media. It evolved, little by little. When I first moved to L.A., all my friends were musicians, artists, photographers, or dancers. Over the course of time, all my friends were mix engineers. Then, at some point, they became tracking engineers and mix engineers. I never thought about the fact that all my friends were engineers, sprinkled in with a few producers, one or two songwriters, and a couple of record executives. When Herb came up with the idea to do the show, the first year was just hanging out with my friends. I saw Chris Lord-Alge, Jack Joseph Puig, Jimmy Douglas, and Joe Chiccarelli at an AES conference a couple of months before we were starting the show. I told them I was thinking of doing something on the Internet and asked for help. It was really a combination of my desire to hang out with my friends, as well as an opportunity to share some things I've learned along the way. I never thought about being the focal point for anything, or changing the world. It was just a naïve thought on my part to share some thoughts, and then have Herb come in. I was content to do it for 10 people, but Herb wasn't content unless it was 10 million.
There's a casualness to the show that's inviting.
There's a lot of work that goes into it, particularly on Herb's part, to make it feel casual. We do a four- camera shoot and live switching. It's very expensive. We film at one of the major taping facilities in L.A., and our quality is as good as NBC, but that comes at a cost. YouTube grants us a lot of liberties, in terms of the bandwidth we eat up. We've been a Top 10 show on YouTube multiple times.
In your "Into The Lair" videos we see you demonstrate techniques using plug- ins. Do you still use hardware too?
All of my gear is in storage right now. When all my contemporaries were buying cars and jewelry, I bought gear. I bought 48 channels of [API] 550 EQs for about $60 a piece in '85. I don't know how many [Neve] 1073s I've got. People were giving those things away. I've got a [Urei] LA-2A that I found in a dumpster. When transistors came in, everybody threw their tube stuff away in Atlanta. I've got a lot of gear, but I pretend like I'm a plug-in, in-the-box, kind of guy.
You pretend?
I think it sends a good message to the public. I think it gives them hope.
People are like, "Hey, I could be doing this," instead of thinking you need an SSL console to even get started mixing.
The world is divided into people who own several hundred thousand dollars worth of analog gear who, oddly enough, are proponents of analog. The other half of the world owns no analog gear, and they're staunch proponents of the digital world. I straddle both equally. I've got every plug-in ever made, and I've got every piece of gear ever made. I use things because I think they're the best for the job at hand. I just recently mixed a song with Boyz 2 Men, so I had four lead vocals that I had to put stuff on. I'm blessed that I can do that in either world. But if you're somebody that has a budget, what are you going to do?
When I'm putting 15 of the same compressors on a song, I'm thinking, "I couldn't do this in the real world." Not at my studio!
You bring up a good point. One of the biggest impediments to the digital world is excess. The ability to use everything. I think right now anyone that can't make a good-sounding record should evaluate their skill set. It's totally within the reach of everyone. There are so many DAWs and plug-ins around the Internet that are free or affordable. When you combine that with the availability of information on the Internet...
When you started working, there wasn't that kind of access.
Hell no. I became a product early on of RE/P Magazine. I had to make a lot of my own gear. I couldn't afford anything. If it weren't for a couple of cats like Ed Seay, Bill Lowery, Mike Clark, Larry Turner, and a cool cat named Tom Wright, I wouldn't be here. I spent ten years acquiring skills that today you should be able to get in six months. I never saw other people work. When I moved to L.A., I didn't know you could put something on the stereo bus. I recently had dinner with Ed Seay in Nashville, and he said, "We didn't do that! We considered it a technique that was a crutch." It just never dawned on me that you would need to do that. That's how naïve and unsophisticated I was. I truly envy my friends that were assisting for competent engineers.
The Pensado Awards event must have been a lot of work.
That's Herb! Herb is a one-man operation.
