How did you get into recording?
I was into music as a kid, but I didn't play. I was always buying and listening to records, and was curious about it. When I was in high school, I had friends who were in bands. One of my friend's bands went to a studio, and I got to hang out. It was just a little demo studio; I don't even know what it was called. But I remember spending one night there, thinking, "This is really cool! I've got to learn about this." It was a little bit harder back then. We didn't have the internet; we only had books and magazines.
Were you watching them record to tape?
It was all tape. This is late '80s-ish. After I got out of high school, I didn't know how to get into the studio business. I didn't know anything. I wasn't the guy who had the 4-track at home. I found a recording school, Trebas Recording Institute. It was a two-year program. At the time, recording schools were very new. I went there, and it was really great. I could learn what an EQ does, what a compressor does, and ask, "What are these microphones?" The school was okay. And the teachers were really good, because they had working people. Bobby Owsinski was one of my teachers.
Oh, wow!
Yeah. I was doing well, and I liked it. A guy who sat next to me in one of my classes had gotten a job as a night runner at Cherokee Studios on Fairfax Avenue, which is no longer there. There's a new Cherokee now [on Melrose Avenue]. That guy got fired for doing something stupid, as we all do. I asked him, "So, they need somebody, right?" He replied, "Yeah, dude. You should go get the job." I walked out of Bobby Owsinski's class, walked over to the studio, and said, "I know you need somebody." They hired me that day. I was doing the night runner and going to school. There were five rooms there, so there were always sessions going on.
Were these high-profile sessions that you'd get to eke your way into?
Yeah, totally. We would do Rod Stewart, a lot of old school hip-hop – Dr. Dre and those guys, and Trevor Horn [Tape Op #89] worked there a lot. Because they had all those rooms, there would be something really big going on in Studio 1, and a little overdub in Studio 4. It was pretty cool. I didn't go back to the school, because I was learning more at the studio. I eventually made my way up to assistant engineer, and then I was in the control rooms. I worked there for about three years. If you talked to a bunch of people, you'd find out that everybody would eventually get fired from Cherokee. I got fired for something stupid. I had started to do some live sound in clubs, doing front-of-house for bands and really liking it. I had odd jobs, working for friends and installing sound systems. I did that for about a year and a half. Then I ran into a friend of mine, Bill Smith, who I worked with at Cherokee. Bill's still around, and one of my best friends. I ran into him one night at a bar. Bill had left Cherokee and was working at Capitol Studios. He sat me down and said, "Somebody quit at Capitol today. This is not like the other places. This is a very different studio. This is all big-time. We're doing orchestras, big bands, movies, and records." He explained what a completely different world Capitol was at the time, and still is. He convinced me, so I went home that night and got my résumé together. I went in the next day, walked in the front door of the building, and asked for Michael Frondelli, the studio director at the time. Michael came out, I gave him my resume, and he didn't even look at it. He just went, "How do you know I need somebody?" I said, "I ran into Bill last night." He went down and talked to Bill, came back up, and asked, "When can you start?" I said, "When do you need me to start?" He said, "I need you at 4 o'clock today." I started as what we call a "set up person" at Capitol. It's not exactly a runner, and not exactly an assistant. It's still a position that people hold today. They set up the chairs, the stands, pull the microphones, set all the mics up, plug the mics in, and run the headphones and the DI boxes. It usually gets done overnight, since a lot of the sessions that we do are really big. If they're setting up a string day, it could take five or six hours. Back then, every session needed more than one assistant. Most of it was film and TV work. We were always running 2-tracks live to DAT machine. There were videos to pop in and out of the video machines, and multiple machines all locked up. I became the third engineer on a lot of sessions. I started when the four main engineers at the time were Christina Paakkari, Bill Smith, Leslie Ann Jones [Tape Op #74], and Pete Doell.
I would imagine that was a good way to get used to the patchbay, as well as learning the mics and all the gear there.
It wasn't so much that. It was more that these were sessions like I'd never seen before. I'd never seen scoring sessions and big, huge string dates before. Or union musician dates. It got to the point where they started handing me scores. We were running tape, but we had to write numbers on the scores to know where to go. They'd say, "Okay, we've got to punch in at bar 42." I'd had a basic theory class at one point in high school, so I knew what the lines were, but I didn't really read music. It got to the point where I went to my boss and said, "I'm going to go take a music theory class at a community college for a semester." He said, "If you do it, we'll pay for it." Twice a week, for a whole semester, I went to music theory classes at LACC [Los Angeles City College]. I can't read the music or play it, but I can now follow a score!
There's a scene in the ...Big Band documentary where they got the take, but they wanted to do a full band punch in between specific bars. It was so quick!
It's an everyday thing. Nowadays, it can be a little bit easier. For instance, on that particular session Chris Walden was the composer, and Chris is very organized. His charts always line up. Either he's giving me a Pro Tools session with a pre-mapped tempo and tempo map – there might be some pre-records in it – or at least his score is very linear. Very rarely will he put in repeats and score like that. I can use the bar counter in Pro Tools. I can generate the clicks in Pro Tools. Sometimes it's very easy, but, on a lot of the records we do, we're not using a click. It's just wild time. Or there are repeats in the score. I'm constantly following the score and dropping markers in for bar numbers. Somebody's spending an awful lot of money to have all those people out there. When they need to pick up four bars in the middle, we can't play it from the top!
I'm sure you go through assistants and people who want to help. Is that ever a challenge, where you say, "Just let me do it"?
Yeah, all the time. If I'm in a situation where my assistant can't do it, then I have to take over. I work at Capitol, but I also work all over the place. The people who would be my assistants at Capitol know what to expect, because they've seen it before by the time they're assisting anybody on a session, myself included. I'm usually the guinea pig. They usually start with me, because I'm there. Everybody knows the session's not going to fail if my assistant suddenly folds over on their first session. I like doing that; I like bringing them along. But there will be a certain time where I'll say, "All right, give me the machine. I'll take care of this."
What was the transition from tape to Pro Tools like for you?
Well, it was essentially the exact same thing. First of all, it became easier in Pro Tools, because I had something that I could look at.
Right. You can see what you're recording!
If I was on tape and I had to punch two bars of a guitar solo, I had to go back and say, "Okay, I get it, but let me listen. Let me roll back, because I've got to find where my 'in' and 'out' are." Now we have [Avid Pro Tools'] Quick Punch! Everybody knows that if we hear a bad punch we keep going, because it can be fixed afterwards. From that point of view, going from tape to Pro Tools made life a lot easier.
When you're doing big band or string sessions, do you typically recording linearly in Pro Tools or do you use playlists?
Nine times out of ten, on a film score type session somebody has mocked it up, so there's some pre-records. Even if that's what we're replacing, they're there. So, in a situation where I have a tempo map and/or pre-records, in that case I'll do playlists. Playlist 1 is take 1. Playlist 2 is take 2. That way I know where everything is. It makes comping very easy, because everything's in the playlist and everything's on the grid. Those are the simplest sessions. If I'm doing a record or a project where I don't have a preexisting tempo map, then I'm probably going to go linear down the line. Even if I'm generating a click. But I'm going to be following a score or somebody, so first take we'll flip to playlist 1, so all the audio's labeled ".01," and we'll do the take. As we're doing the take, we're getting marker numbers every eight bars.
So, it's in the audio file's name.
Yeah, so when I do a comp or edit, I know where tracks come from. If they ask, "Oh, can we take the beginning of take 2, the middle of take 3, and the ending from take 1?" I can then put this whole thing together and know exactly what take certain parts came from. When I'm in the studio recording, Pro Tools is just a tape machine. I'm not mixing in it, so 99.9 percent of the time I'm tracking on a big console. I'm controlling life from the console. I don't like to generate headphones out of Pro Tools, because, as I switch sessions, if I've moved something, I have to remember to move it on that new session. I try to keep everything out of Pro Tools as much as possible. When I'm recording, it's strictly a tape machine. After that, it becomes my mixer. Once I have it in Pro Tools, then I'm going to keep as much in Pro Tools as I can. Even if I record an album, and we come back three days later to do vocals, at that point I'll make a mix of the music in stereo in Pro Tools and then have whatever I'm overdubbing on separate tracks. I can split them for the headphones, but I start the process of getting everything into the box. By the time I get to the mix, I'm 100 percent in-the-box. Any processing, compression, and all that, I do it on the way in as much as I can. I commit to a lot of that. I commit to levels. I ride gain going to tape. We do it with the horns and the vocals. Any time I can do it, I'm doing that. It's how I learned from the best in the business.
Speaking of the best in the business, I assume you met Al Schmitt through working at Capitol?
Yeah.
How did that relationship form to where you became his right-hand guy?
When I started at Capitol, Bill [Smith] was Al's assistant. Because I was good friends with Bill, Al and I hit it off. I met him a week after I started there. The first record that he did while I was there was a Willie Nelson album with a big, huge orchestra. It was great. Two rooms with a rhythm section, strings, big band, and the whole nine yards. We got along great. When it came time when they needed help, I was the guy they'd drag in. They were doing big records, top of the tier. Tommy LiPuma, Phil Ramone [Tape Op #50], David Foster, and all these great producers doing these great records. At some point, Bill left Capitol. He wasn't on staff anymore, but he was still working with Al, so he was always there. But they still had to have a Capitol engineer on the session. Then it got to be that I was the Capitol guy there, but Bill was there for Al. Then, at one point, Bill came to me and said, "I have the opportunity to work on a couple albums, so I'm going to stop working with Al." When Al showed up that morning, they went upstairs and had a little talk. Al came back down the stairs and went, "Well, guess it's going to be you from now on!" The next day, Bill wasn't there.
Wow!
Because I had already been working with them for a couple years, I already knew the routine. I knew where to set the gear up. I picked up where Bill left off. It was pretty seamless, actually. It also coincided very closely – within probably a few months or a year – with the release of Pro Tools HD. Suddenly we could go to 96 kHz [sampling rate], and the converters were better. That was when Al decided that he liked Pro Tools. Time to ditch the tape machines! The job of being Al's assistant changed. Not only was I Al's assistant, but I was also the Pro Tools operator, and everything that went on with that. I was still learning Pro Tools. We had to learn how it was going to fit into our workflow. I became a little more integral to the sessions as a person, rather than as just the assistant engineer.
Yeah, it's like command central on big sessions like that.
Exactly. That job became a little different than what it had been in the past, which was great for me.
During that transition, were you ever tracking to both tape and Pro Tools at the same time?
Yeah, sometimes we would do that. We had a box at Capitol built where we could feed the output of the console to two machines. We could feed the returns back to one machine. We had a button where we could seamlessly switch between Pro Tools and tape on a 24-track. We would generate code and record locked. Then we could re-lock it on playback and seamlessly switch back and forth to whatever we wanted. By doing that we could prove to some of our clients, "This sounds as good, if not better. We can do this. It's okay."
Right.
We did that a bit the first couple of times. There was one time we were going to do a record with Tommy LiPuma and Diana Krall. They had done five or six albums with her already. This was the first one where Al wanted to use Pro Tools. Everybody else was like, "Oh, I don't know. We've always been on tape. Does Pro Tools sound good?" Al said, "We'll record to both, and then we can decide later." We had the whole thing set up, and they went out to do the first song. They'd do everything live, so everybody's out on the floor. They did three takes or so, and Tommy always sat in the studio with the band. As they're walking in, we could hear him say, "Man, take three was great, but that solo in take one was amazing!" Somebody went to the restroom or took a phone call. In the five minutes that I had before they listened, I cut the solo from take one into take three on Pro Tools. When we listened, we let them switch back and forth and they couldn't hear a difference. When we got to the solo, Tommy asked, "Is that the first solo?" I said, "Yeah, when you went to the restroom, I did the edit." That was the end of the tape machine!
Nice work!
Once we could prove to them that it sounded good – that they couldn't tell the difference between the tape and Pro Tools – then the convenience of the Pro Tools made the tape go away. But we still do records on tape once in a while.
Do people ever come to you wanting an "old" sound?
Yeah, people come in all the time and say, "I want it to sound like the [Frank] Sinatra record that I fell in love with." There are two things: One, we can do that, because we still have all the microphones and the tape machines. We still have the same chair, podium, and mic stands, so we can do that, absolutely. But when they say something like that, I usually have to have a conversation and ask, "Do you really want it to sound like that? Or do you want that vibe? Go back and listen to those records; the drums were in the back of the room. Do you want to hear the bass drum or not?" On a lot of those records, you don't hear it. The brushes? They go away. I can get the vibe, but in a more modern way. Usually they come around, and say, "I do want to hear the definition of the bass." I'll put up the room mics, and I can use old ribbon mics. I can get that sound, but keep it a little more modern so it's going to hold up on the radio, or in a playlist, or on an album.
Do you track a fair amount of rock bands these days?
Yeah, totally. I had an album nominated for a Grammy [in 2022] for Best Rock Album. Black Pumas' Capitol Cuts: Live from Studio A. We did that live to 2-track. That was really fun – a band live in the room. I still do a lot of tracking with bands. I love it. I don't even know how to break up how much different work I do, whether it's film, TV, video games, Dolby Atmos, or whatever it is.
You're do a lot of mixing in Atmos. What's your take on it?
I love it. I was actually one of the very first engineers to mix music only in Dolby Atmos. Certainly the first one for Universal. I've probably done more Dolby Atmos music mixes than anybody else, at this point. I'm a few hundred mixes in. I love it! I was around for the 5.1 [surround sound] days, which was really fun and really great, but as soon as you'd take it out of the studio, it all fell apart. Moving into an immersive format was not that big of a transition. The transition was, "Here's this new technology of Dolby Atmos that works with the render and object-based mixing," which was technically a little bit different than doing 5.1 or 7.1.
Can you explain that? I'm not even sure what object-based mixing means.
Yeah. 5.1 and 7.1 are channel-based mixing. Left, center, right, left side, right side, left surround, and right surround. We're always steering sounds into those positions, those speakers. If you mix in 7.1, you play it back on a 7.1 system and everything shows up where it's supposed to be. The thing about Dolby Atmos is that it doesn't matter how many speakers the listener has. The playback system figures out where to put the elements. At my house I have a 7.1.2 system. At Capitol, most of our systems are 7.1.4, at least. With the object-based mixing, we use the Dolby [Atmos] Renderer, and we have what they call "objects." An object is a place in space, if that makes sense. I can assign a guitar to "object 12." I take object 12 and I move it into the room. If I have a speaker there, it will come out of the speaker. If I don't have a speaker, it will triangulate, or whatever it has to do to still get the sound to come out of that spot. Dolby Atmos doesn't care. At Capitol, in our mix room, we have 20 speakers. There are three down the walls, four across the back, and six over the top. It's very detailed. I can put sounds wherever, and there's probably a speaker really close to it. If I'm in a movie theater, that might have 50 speakers because it covers more space. The playback system in that movie theater knows, "I have to get object 12 to come out here." If I bring it home, I don't have 20 speakers. I have 10 speakers, but object 12 still has to come out there. The renderer figures out how to place it there.
Fascinating.
I mixed to Dolby Atmos for two years before anything got released. There were only five of us doing it. When I started mixing, I had no clue how, where, or when any of it was going to get heard. If you wanted to hear Dolby Atmos and you didn't know me or somebody at the studio, you couldn't hear it.
You're used to working at some of the best studios in the world. What was the main priority when putting together a home studio?
