Where are you living these days?
I just moved back to Cocoa Beach, Florida, from Woodstock, New York. I have my studio set up in Cape Canaveral, a neighboring beach town.
What's your background?
In the beginning I started out doing a lot of contemporary jazz. There were a lot more stations in those days. I had a number of hits on those, and I toured with George Benson and Kenny G. It was cool. Then I kind of saw the writing on the wall, that it was going to end, and I switched over and really got into doing more hard rock. It's what I grew up with. I embraced that again, and I try to get as many people involved in doing what I'm doing. I like to do these benefit albums, because they give more meaning to songwriting and everything.
Yeah, I noticed that with the recent one, Brothers In Arms, and Guitars for Wounded Warriors before that. There was a jazz album for the Pulse nightclub victims, Orlando In Heaven.
I did that with [guitarist] Larry Coryell. I was fortunate to work with him in Florida before he passed away. That was a cool session with him, one on one.
You've roped in a crazy list of people for these records. How do you go about getting some of these names to come in?
Usually, I've got some introduction to them and I'm talking to them. We discuss what I'm working on and thinking about. I ask them if they would be interested, and if they want to get involved. Usually, they're pretty open with everything. I usually try to tailor the songs to them so that I don't give them something that's way out of their line. I try to be specific with everything that I do with that.
Like writing?
Yeah, writing songs and saying, "This will be good for Joe Satriani." But I'll give him a couple to choose from, in case he likes one better than the other. I'll make sure to have a backup. I try to hone into it so that I'm not giving some straight-ahead song to the guy from Armored Saint or something.
You've mentioned having a mobile analog rig.
Yeah, I do. I bought this thing from Southern California. It was a 26-foot trailer that was specially made for audio recording. They had extended the ceiling to 9 or 10 feet. It has two rooms with a sliding door between the two. One's a little live room and the other's the control room. I use digital, because you have to do so today. But everything does go through the desk. I have a modified Trident 24 [console] from 1986 that I completely brought back to life years ago. It fits absolutely perfect. It had two producer desks, so I had to get rid of one in order to fit it! It's got a patchbay that's built in from the factory. I have an Otari MTR-90 2-inch [tape deck] that I recorded all the drums, bass, and guitars on. And I mixed everything down to an Ampex AG-440, an old dinosaur 1/4-inch, but it sounds so good. With this project I could take the time to do that. For mastering, we mastered it right off the tapes.
Yeah, don't do a transfer and then send it over!
Exactly. We took the tapes and went to Airshow Mastering in Boulder, Colorado. It's a great process. It's a longer process, but it was well worth it at the end of the day.
You're tracking the rhythm section to tape, and then moving it over to digital?
I get as much as I can done on tape, and then I transfer it over to either [Avid] Pro Tools or [Apple] Logic. From that point, I'll work in a digital domain, fly in the parts and everything, and then mix it from there. I'll get the best of both worlds. Especially because a lot of this was done over the pandemic and lockdown. Nobody could come over, even if they were down the street.
Do you find most guitarists have the equipment ready to go and are able to send off tracks?
Yeah, most people do today. They can at least hit the space bar and record. A couple of the older guys that I wanted to get, British Invasion guys, they don't. I was talking to one of the founders of Thin Lizzy, but he had no way of doing this from home. I was talking to Robin Trower [Procol Harum], and he had to go to a studio. I don't think they're into that whole digital age, which I get. They're so used to their whole life of going into studios and having everybody else deal with it.
No kidding.
Steve Morse has done this lot with me, even when he's on tour with Deep Purple. He'll do it on a laptop and send it to me, because he's got the plug-ins that work for him. I guess that's the world we live in now, that everybody does everything remotely.
Plus, if you were going to rent studio time for 15 different players it would blow the budget.
Yeah, it's going to be too much. I can't expect them to get here, because everybody has their different schedules, and everybody lives everywhere across the world.
Do you find yourself coaching these takes?
Yeah, I've done that a couple of times. Usually when I go to them, they understand what I'm giving them, and they do exactly what I thought they would do. I don't have to coach too much. I'll leave a section open, tell them how many bars there are, and what key it's in. Then I tell them, "You can do what you like, but this is the parameter here." I also leave it open too, like, "If you hear anything else anywhere, put it in." We can always cut and paste with that. A couple of times I've said, "Why don't you take an alternate track?" There were a couple of incidents where I liked the first part of the track that they did, the second take I liked the last part of the track, and on the third take I liked the middle. I'll try to put it together for them. If that's the case, I'll send it back to them and ask, "Do you want to edit? It's your solo. Or do you want to take another solo and incorporate all of this?" Usually, they're pretty cool about that.
What about keeping these tracks in sync?
That's the biggest challenge. I'll give them a count-off from the top. I ask, "Give me the count-off, and then your track empty until your part comes in. That way I can line it up perfectly." Sometimes they'll give me the track with nothing on it and say to start it from the beginning, but it doesn't always work that way. It can be different there with timing. I'll line it up to the top, and it'll be far enough off where I notice it. You would think that everybody starts from zero, but for some reason there is always a weird issue.
You also do a lot of writing for TV, movies, and more. Did that begin during your jazz era?
Yeah, it started up around that period. In the late '80s and early '90s I started doing a lot of television. One of my first engineer jobs was as an assistant engineer at a jingle house in New York City. That was crazy, because everything's got to be "done yesterday," and nobody has any patience. We'd have all these advertising guys breathing down our necks. Through that, I saw how I could do very well with composing for television. In those days, a lot of people snubbed their nose at it; especially in the record industry and publishing, they didn't care. It was all about big hits and mechanicals. With my jazz records, they started playing them on shows and syncing them. So, they would hire me to custom compose music similar to my albums; that way they would be able to control the master and publishing. I thought it was interesting, because places like Warner Chappell Music – who snubbed their nose at this work – years later they wound up buying all this television production music. Their records were not doing well anymore, and they wanted to get involved with the lucrative television market for licensing.
Had you been setting up your own studio spaces and recording yourself before those opportunities?
