How did you get into recording?
I was the proverbial "young kid starting a band." I began recording myself because I thought that was a part of what musicians did. There were no engineering/production schools at the time. The formal "work your way up in the studio" hierarchy was the de facto standard in those days. I started reading and self-educating about signal flow, microphones, and learning the staples of recording. I still have the demos of the first recordings I did back then. They're absolutely terrible, but they taught me about project management at a young age, i.e., learning the task and being able to get the job done and out the door. I started subsidizing my income by tracking other artists while I was trying to get a record deal for my own band. I was working at a recording and rehearsal studio with a lot of band traffic coming through. They would listen to me doing my own music and say, "Hey, do you want to record us?" Local bands were sending music to labels, so there was this grassroots circulation of my recordings developing. Labels started to call and say, "Hey, did you record this? Well, we have a band that we need to track. Interested?" It started off by being the pre-production [demos], where they just wanted to get some song ideas down, but that quickly turned into records to cut. I ended up working with this guitar player named Jeff Healey. The Jeff Healey camp always used top-end producers, so I was exposed to guys like Thom Panunzio and Joe Hardy. I also worked with a young songwriter/producer named Marti Frederiksen on some Jeff Healey tracks. At the end of our work with Healey, he said, "I really like working with you. We're going to work together again in the future." That's always a really great thing to hear! I told him to call me anytime. I went on my way and did some other recordings. About eight months later, my phone rings, "Hey man, it's Marti. I'm working with a band and want you to come record some drums." All I knew was the gig was in the Boston area, and that it was five days of recording drums. At the end of our conversation, I asked, "Who's the band?" Marti answered, "Oh, it's Aerosmith!"
Awesome.
It was amazing. He had called me on a Wednesday. Monday I was at Long View Farms Studio setting up drums and mics for Joey Kramer. That was a record called Just Push Play. Steven [Tyler] and Joe [Perry] asked me to stay on for the entire project as head engineer for the 11 months the album took to complete. It sold just shy of two million records in America. The single "Jaded" was number one on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart. That album was the dividing line for my career.
Did you travel around a lot in the early days?
I traveled, and I still travel all the time. I have clients in Europe, New York, and Los Angeles.
You do a lot of tracking and mixing.
I wear all hats. I do track. I do quite a bit of mixing, and I do production. It varies, from project to project. I recorded and co-produced vocals for a new Dream Theater album a couple of months ago. I mixed Rush's Hemispheres in surround for their 40th anniversary box set release. My involvement really varies from project to project. I have my separate bag of tricks, and I pull them out depending on what the project needs of me.
Do you carry gear to sessions?
I have some tracking gear, but I am a complete computer guy when I mix. I used to carry around racks and racks of equipment, and now it's just a computer with lots of software and hard drives. Lots of computing power. That's how I do my work now.
Cool. You mentioned the Hemispheres remixes. How did you approach them and keep the spirit of original co-producer Terry Brown's sound?
You're exactly correct. In my opinion, Hemispheres is one of Terry and Rush's best pieces of work. They really did a fantastic job. From what I understand, it was a long and very difficult record for the band to make. I can't speak highly enough of both the band and Terry for the work that they did together. For Hemispheres – and all of the 5.1 surround catalog remixes I've done for Rush [Moving Pictures, 2112, Signals, Fly by Night, A Farewell To Kings] – it's not a full remix, per se, where one would re-conceptualize a mix. What the band and record company wanted was a strong tribute to the original mix. For example, Hemispheres is 40 years old. The process is the utilisation of modern technology to recreate 40-year-old vintage mix concepts. That is what the overall mantra was for the mix process. Then, the mix was spread into a modern hi-res playback format, like 5.1 or Dolby Atmos. For every final mix that I deliver, the mixes are submitted as high resolution 96 kHz, 24-bit WAV files. The record company will convert those files into whatever format that they need for the upcoming product. I would be happiest if the format I deliver was the format sold, but it's a constant balancing act. As you know, media has a finite amount of bits you can fit on there, so concessions have to be made sometimes. If you're printing a master, you print it at as high a quality as possible. For me, 96 kHz has the advantage in the upper frequency spectrum. It's smoother. For processing of plug-ins there's more resolution, and the same goes for mixing. Twice the calculation, over a given period of time. But like anything else, different means to an end for different users. I've done a lot of records at 48 kHz in the past. It's all viable.
How did you start working with Rush?
In 2004 Rush was doing a charity event for the tsunami that had devastated Indonesia earlier that year. I got a call from a friend of mine who works at the Rush office, and he said, "Rush is going into the studio to do a version of "Closer to the Heart." They're going to film the event for a broadcast and they need an engineer. There's no money because it's a charity event, but do you want to do it?" I immediately said, "Rush? Yes!" Alex Lifeson [guitar] and I hit it off. We were laughing and joking around the whole time. We ended up doing an 18-hour day, but it was a ton of fun and it turned out great. A few months later, I got a phone call from Alex and he said, "What are you doing? We're working on this DVD [R30: 30th Anniversary World Tour]. You want to come down to my place and talk?" I went to see him, and we just hung out, drank coffee, and, again, had a bunch more laughs. He asked me about how I'd approach mixing R30. I told him I'd mix in Pro Tools. He said, "You can't mix in Pro Tools!" Keeping in mind this is 2005, clearly, he wasn't sold on it. I offered to return the next day and bring my Pro Tools rig in to play back some music. I pulled everything out of my studio, set it all up in surround at his studio, aligned the playback rig, and proceeded to play back some surround mixes I had done. He was super enthusiastic about it. He asked if I wanted to try doing some R30 mixes, and he loved it. It was really well-received. Not long afterward, I was asked to work with producer Nick Raskulinecz [Tape Op #50] to record and mix Rush's Snakes & Arrows. It was a fantastic experience. Nick is such a great producer and he's also a Rush superfan! We always have a great time working together – a lot of chemistry, having fun, and making records.
In terms of bands you're working with, like Dream Theater and Rush, you seem to be getting work in a certain genre.
In the case of Dream Theater, I had a bunch of Rush history and the lead vocalist [James LaBrie] is a longtime friend, so it's a pretty natural relationship that formed. For me, good music and good sound transcend any specific genre, and I enjoy working in many different genres of music. But once there's a level of success in a particular genre, calls for more work are often focused in the same area. Having said that, I've done work with Pink, Seal, and many non-progressive bands and artists, and I enjoy working with all of them. I've been really fortunate with all the artists I've spent time with.
I first heard of you through the Keram Malicki-Sanchez album, Come to Life. He worked with Ryan Brown on drums. Then you had the best of the best with Neil Peart. How do you approach tracking and mixing with drums?
Well, for Keram's project, Al [Alex] Lifeson brought me in to mix a couple of tracks. That in itself is not quite the same as working with Rush or Dream Theater, where I'm tracking the drums and then mixing them. If I'm tracking and mixing, I'll do what I'd call pre-mixing as I'm working through a session. I'll do all my tom rides and EQs, grouping, and routing, some tracking compression, plus mutes for unused tracks, and so on. When I'm tracking, I pay particular attention to phase, given the amount of mics I have set up around a kit. Both Neil Peart and Mike Mangini [Dream Theater] have 30 plus mics set up around their respective drum kits. They're not all in use all the time in a mix, but with the main core mics – the kick, snare, overheads, and room – checking phase is critical. I distance all overhead mics equally from the snare drum so that the snare is stable in the center field of the stereo image. From a mixing point of view, sometimes I have to make adjustments [in order to] achieve that strong stereo image. From an overall perspective, I try to keep everything as clean as possible. It's attention to detail, because that detail is cumulative across all of the tracks. Dream Theater's The Astonishing topped out at 577 tracks on the largest song, so keeping everything clean and organized is really important when you get into that many tracks.
Wow. File management?
