AH: In one of our first conversations many years ago, you told me you had a business degree.
I have a degree in Recording Arts & Sciences and Business Administration from Middle Tennessee State University. I started school as an Electrical Engineering major, then an Accounting major, and realized early on I'd rather be interested and poor than secure and bored.
AH: What was it that got you into music from this side of the glass?
I'd always done music as a kid, like singing at church and being in bands, but I never really considered it as a career. It seemed super interesting, and I was going to go for it, so I quit school and moved down here.
AH: Where were you living before Nashville?
I grew up in Fair Haven, New Jersey, south of New York City.
AH: Had you made records for your bands in studios?
Nope. High school was the only time I was in bands. I'd done musical theater and church singing performances – but not recording.
AH: Were there certain albums listened to and identified as recordings that were made in a studio?
I really got addicted to, and started to pay attention to, albums like Heartbeat City by The Cars – I knew every note of that – and [AC/DC's] Back in Black. Also tons of '80s pop, like all the Peter Wolf pop music, the David Foster productions for Earth, Wind & Fire, all the albums by Chicago. As I look back now, I see that I gravitated towards great songs and really great production, but I didn't realize that at the time.
AH: That wasn't inspiring you to be a music producer?
My parents used to say, "Music is an avocation, not a vocation!" Until the Grammys started showing up, I guess.
AH: How many Grammys do you have now?
I've mixed ten Grammy Award winning records. A Grammy and four dollars gets you a latte at Starbucks. Don't tell The Recording Academy I said that.
AH: When you won your first Grammy, what did your parents actually say?
I remember the conversation with my dad was like, "Do a lot of people get those?" I said, "No, not a lot." He's like, "That's a pretty big deal isn't it?" I said, "Yeah, I suppose it is." I think that's when it clicked for him that this wasn't just fooling around with music, but an actual job.
AH: Are you picking and choosing the artists you work with?
I guess everybody does, to a certain extent. In the music business, as you know, it's more like they pick you. I've had a really weird career arc where it's been a lot of genre-hopping. I grew up on New York City music. I saw the Beastie Boys when they were a punk band. There were all kinds of great music, hip-hop, and all of that culture. When I moved down to Nashville, it was country or Christian. I was like, "Okay, wow." I didn't even know what Christian music was, because we didn't really have it growing up. And country music? Country music to me was Johnny Cash and John Denver. I jumped into the Christian music scene because it included rock music, pop, hip-hop, and all these different genres.
AH: It's interesting that people even consider Christian music a genre.
It's very strange. But it let me work on diverse genres of music.
AH: Why did you choose Nashville over New York? New York has a vibrant music scene.
Not so much a vibrant studio scene, does it? I came down here and had to go to school and work full-time to put myself through. MTSU was the only school I could afford. I had the single-mindedness of, "Okay, I'm going to put my head down and work my ass off." I looked up, it was six years later, and I was living in Nashville. I did school, and then internships. I almost didn't graduate because I was working in studios. It's like, "Okay, I can work on this record – or I can sit in class and do a synopsis of a Mix Magazine article." No thanks. MTSU was great – there were a couple of great teachers, like John Hill. Nobody wanted to be in the [school] studio from midnight until eight in the morning, so I got free run of the place.
AH: Were you recording bands?
Anything. I was experimenting. I started interning, and then I had an intern-to-assistant opportunity – one of those crazy moments. The engineer was mixing this song, and they were locking 32-track digital – which was Nashville's crazy-ass format – Mitsubishi machines. Sony digital didn't hit here until later. One really popular producer decided he was going to use two 32-track Mitsubishi machines – locking those, plus TASCAM DA-88s, two 2-inch machines, and video – and they couldn't get them locked. They all went to lunch in frustration. I stayed, and when they got back they were locked. That's when I went from intern to paid assistant, because they were going to another studio the next day, and they were like, "You're coming. Let's go."
AH: How did you go from being an assistant to getting your own engineering and mixing gigs?
I fell into it. The first thing I ever mixed was this Christian hip-hop project. They only had the money for three songs with the real mixer, and the producer was going to mix the rest. They had to run one of these [pointing to his SSL console]. I said, "Why don't you let me mix it? If you hate it when you get in here, you're going to have to do it anyway. I can show you how to run the board. But if you like it, so much the better." I ended up mixing the rest of that record, did another record, and the next thing I knew, I was a mixer.
AH: Looking at your discography today, it's all over the map. You've worked on so many projects within all genres. At what point did you become F. Reid Shippen, mixer and producer – versus F. Reid Shippen, engineer for Christian music?
A lot of the people I was working with were super talented. One of them early on was Charlie Peacock. Everybody knows him now as the guy behind The Civil Wars and Switchfoot, but back in the day he was a Christian artist and writer. He's an incredibly wise, thoughtful, and amazing human being. We were all working together, and in that crew happened to be my mentor, Tommy Sims, an amazing bass player and producer – he's done everything from Bruce Springsteen to Michael McDonald. Jay Joyce, who was a guitar player and had a local band called Iodine with Chris Feinstein and Brad Pemberton – they did their thing. But Jay now is a guy who's done everything from Patty Griffin's Flaming Red record to the last Eric Church record. He's an insanely talented guy. Chris passed away unfortunately, but Brad's the drummer in Ryan Adams' band. There was this whole community of people, which is really the best part about Nashville.
AH: Due to my ignorance of Christian music, I had this misunderstanding that there's this well-defined boundary called Christian music, and nothing ever travels outside it. What you're really saying is that you worked on Christian music, but the community of Nashville is boundless?
Yeah. The opportunity came out of that. The cream rises to the top. In Christian music, there was this big popular band called White Heart, produced by Brown Bannister. He's got 14 Grammys – one of the nicest, most-talented producers I've ever known. He worked with Amy Grant and did all her records. White Heart had Tommy Sims. Chris McHugh was the drummer, who went on to be a massive session player and music director for Keith Urban for ten years. All these insane players were circling around. We all got to know each other through that, and the sphere started to expand. The people I was hanging out with started to get into R&B, and then along came Jonny Lang, Marc Broussard, and all that R&B-type music.
AH: Were you tracking and mixing, or were you focused only on mixing?
I started doing everything, but there was a period where I focused exclusively on mixing, because there was so much mix work coming my way. That was a period when I did stupid things, like selling my [Neumann] U 47, because I didn't track. I wish I could get that one mic back. I was pretty hardcore mixing for a long time. Now I'm also doing some tracking, because what broke me into country music after almost 20 years in Nashville was Jay Joyce saying, "Hey, I'm doing this record for a band called Little Big Town. Do you want to record it?" We did the record in three days. That was the album that took them from, "This band might be over," to one of the biggest bands in country music, period. I did that, and Eric Church, and all of a sudden, I'm swimming in country music.
AH: You did everything in three days?
About eighty percent, including most of the vocals. It's a Nashville thing. With Little Big Town, the players were great, and the singers are all world-class. The way country music works is different than everywhere else that people track. What's happening now is country is turning into pop. They're realizing that doing it the old-school tracking way is important. This Brett Eldredge record I'm working on now – it's very common for us to go into the studio and walk out two days later with seven songs. You have all the drums, all the bass, all the guitars, all the keyboards, and – since Brett's a great singer – most of the lead vocals, because he sang it while it went down. The producer takes it home, maybe fixes some of the vocals or puts some background vocals on, maybe takes some of the demo programming and spiffs it up, and edits some of the tracks. He might add an overdub or two and then send it to me to mix. It's blazingly fast. If somebody said, "Hey look, we have to do this record from start to finish," and it's somebody like that, we could literally do the entire record in three weeks, from the very first note recorded to the very last mix – without a problem. The quality of players in this town is scary. It's fascinating to watch them play and be like, "They played an entire song and didn't screw up at all." It's never wrong. Every once in a while, someone makes a mistake because they're trying something; but, otherwise, they're scary good that way.
MR: You've talked about Christian music. When I'm flipping through the radio dial, there's a recognizable sound to that CCM music. Is it the radio station, or do they all have that vocal sound?
They all have it. That's probably my fault.
MR: Are you willing to talk about where that sound comes from?
I think it's giving them what they want. Genres gravitate toward different sonic spectrums automatically. That's what CCM gravitates toward. I've never actually thought about that a ton. People actually say that. They say, "Oh, I know instantly that's a Christian song." So do I. I don't know why, but it totally is. It's so identifiable. I think it has more to do with the end result of Christian music. It's not necessarily the song, per se. In a lot of genres, the end result is, "I have something to say, and here's a song I'm going to say it with. I want to communicate it as emotionally as possible." In Christian music, the thing they're saying is a more global thing, overall. They're talking about God, obviously – something bigger than the actual content of a song. One of my favorite Christian records of all time is Lauryn Hill's solo record [The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill]. That record is insane. But when you really dig into the content, and what she's talking about, honestly, it's a Christian record. She grew up in the church. That's where she's coming from. I think country music allows more of that because Christianity is a bit more prevalent down here than in the north or the west. There was a famous interview recently, where Luke Bryan said, "You know what I like to do? I like to hang out with my friends, drink beer, fish, and drive around on my farm. And that's what I write songs about." I thought, "Okay, I get that." It's like East Coast hip-hop, which is some of my favorite music. They grew up in a completely different system, with a completely different context, and that's what they wrote about. You always end up writing what you know – most of the time anyway. Nashville is very famous for being a songwriter town. Country music is the business of songwriting. Songwriting is huge in country music. A lot of other genres – you're not getting outside songs.
AH: You have a lot of speakers set up. I know you've had these ATCs for a while.
Yeah. I adore the ATCs. They're one of the best speaker lines I've ever heard. I think they're awesome. But if it were up to me, this entire front wall would be filled with speakers.
AH: But no Auratones?
Well, there's this – a Rogers LS3/5A. It's a 1970s speaker design from the BBC. [A few other companies also licensed the design from the BBC, including Spendor, Audiomaster, KEF, etc.] They are freaking awesome. I was doing a record with a local mastering engineer that I'd never worked with. We asked if we could listen, and he had these little speakers. He played the mix, and I was like, "Dude, that sounds absolutely perfect." He said, "I haven't mastered it yet." I asked, "Oh... what speakers are those?"
MR: That's interesting, from the point of view of a mixer, to have five pairs of speakers.
It's more for the psychological shift of, "Now, let's listen to it in a completely different context." I want to know what I'm getting used to, in this context, so that when I listen to it over there, it's like, "Oh, the snare's way too..." So I use that to keep me on my toes. Because nobody seems to make a speaker controller that lets me run eight pairs of speakers, I've got to custom-make something that will let me switch.
MR: When you're mixing, do you reference other peoples' recordings, or do you stay in your own world?
I made a note the other day to remind myself to put together a list. The thing that made me realize that was Sound Check in iTunes. When you listen to everything at the same level, some of the old Roy Thomas Baker productions sound amazing, and some of this newer music really doesn't. That was the great leveler – literally and figuratively. It should remove the volume wars so that we hopefully don't have to deal with that anymore in the future. Unfortunately, as long as there are artists and managers – and drummers – there will still be volume wars.
AH: Do people still care about the volume war here in Nashville?
Almost every song has a rough mix; it's usually hyped, multiband-limited, and loud. If I do a good mix, and I send it to the artist who's out on tour, they pull it into their iPhone. When they listen to the rough mix that they're used to, it's cranking. They listen to my mix, and it's not nearly that loud. They're going to pick the rough mix. That's the way it works. That's life. Humans are programmed to think that louder is better. It's the old cheat. That's the way our hearing works. More often than not now, we've got music that's entertainment and we've got music that's art. The music that's entertainment, let it be entertainment – that's fine. Some of it's almost disposable. Some of it has always been disposable. How often do you listen to Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus"? People are listening to [Pink Floyd's] The Wall. They're still listening to Stevie Wonder. Nobody's going to be nostalgic for the "Macarena." But "Back in Black" is going to be around forever. If you're a professional doing this for a living, and you really want songs to be great, you're always aiming for "Back in Black." "Macarena" is easy. I could get that mix on my laptop at the beach. Some of this maybe doesn't matter [gesturing at the gear throughout the room], but the ones that do matter, that's why I want this gear. I want to be able to get that last drop of blood out of the stone.
