I went back yesterday and I read our interview that the first time I met you and I went to your previous home up in the hills there in Santa Barbara. It was 20 years ago that we first met.
Wow. Lisa and I probably just got married at that time. We just did our 20th anniversary so it must be around about that time.
Right. It was really fun to meet you then. I remember above the garage you had a temporary kind of mixing studio space set up with the [ASC] TubeTraps.
That's right. I actually recorded an album there. A Valid Path. It was my foray into the world of electronic music. The first time I actually used a hard disk recording system. I was terrified of it, as I thought, "Oh my god. What if my computer crashes? What if the hard disk breaks down?" So, I still backed up everything I did to TASCAM tapes.
No way! To TASCAM DA-88s?
Yeah, eight tracks at a time. I just saved everything just in case.
Wow.
I've always been a back up and back up the back up and back up the back up with the back up. [laughter]. Always been a believer in that.
Yeah. In the days of tape you'd have to get a second deck and do a full 24 or 16 channel backup right. If you're doing it.
Right.
Did you do that? I know that's kind of the story with The Dark Side of the Moon going way back. But, did you do that with the Alan Parsons Project stuff, like make backups of your basic tracks and…
Yeah we would always back up just to be just to be safe. But Abbey Road was lucky enough to have the machinery to do it. There was always the second machine. And when I progressed to Sony [PCM-] 3324, I always had two machines, so I could always go from one machine to the other.
And that was actually creatively good as well because you could bounce the chorus of a backing vocal say, and just put it in different places or what, from one machine to the other machine.
Of course it's a piece of cake now to do that in [Avid] Pro Tools. Just cut and paste and it's easy. But when it's a linear recording system it's much more difficult.
Oh yeah. I remember even taking like digital delays and flying a backing vocal into a digital delay that could hold it for a second and then punching it in on tape. Like play it back and punch it in.
Oh yeah. I was a great one for doing that. Especially when you run out of tracks. If you didn't have a track to put something on you'd do it. Literally a wild fly in of stuff.
To save tracks.
Well the change from the studio where you did A Valid Path to your ParSonics Studio now. That must have been a big undertaking to start building that up again building up a studio?
Yeah. It was. The control room of the new studio was originally a shed housing an electric generator. And there were actually two of them. Because the previous owner had allowed for the end of the world on December the first 1999.
No. Oh really? [laughter]
And had two huge generators. Probably enough to drive the city of Santa Barbara. [laughter] So, that and a shipping container full of survival food. Dried food. He thought that the whole world was going to collapse.
Well, it took a number of years but it did in other ways.
Yeah, everybody got to midnight on that day. "Well, we're still here." Nothing's happened.
You must have been accumulating recording equipment over the years? Had a lot of that been in storage at that point?
I had accumulated microphones. Not so much in the way of outboard gear. I had a Studer [D19] mic preamp. I had some Aphex stuff. But I'm pretty happy usually just using plug-ins these days. I've got a lovely fake Fairchild [UTA UnFairchild 670M II], which sounds great. I'm using that. I'm very happy with a Universal [Audio] front end. My comps and limiters. But, in general I'm just doing everything – not so much "in the box", but just using the Pro Tools system to the max.
Are you out of [Steinberg] Nuendo now?
Yeah, I'm long gone from that. Although I'm using [Steinberg] WaveLab for surround mastering. Have you been doing surround stuff? Atmos stuff?
Not at all. I haven't had any demand for it from clients. I keep wondering when someone's going to ask.
I'm waiting for the phone to ring too. I mean…
Here we are.
It seems that Bob Clearmountain [Tape Op #129], Steven Wilson [#143]… Those guys…
Elliot Scheiner.
Yeah. …they got all the work. I don't know if they think, "Oh, he's also a rock star. He wouldn't be interested." I am! I want to do that stuff. I enjoy mixing in Atmos and in 5.1. I really do.
And is it pretty interesting to go back to the Alan Parsons Project records and with these reissues and…
It is yeah. Well I don't know if you knew that two weeks from now, the Pyramid album is coming out in a box set.
I got a pre-release so I got to listen to a bunch of the tracks. It's amazing, with all of Eric [Woolfson]'s demos. All the bonus tracks, outtakes, and pretty early takes.
You got to hear it though, that's good.
Yeah. Fantastic.
They're doing a playback in London. Got the press and journalists going to hear it in a studio in London with me.
Is that going to be the Atmos mix?
Yeah. I'll be doing Q&A by Zoom after that.
Right. When you're pulling those together to build a new mix or an Atmos mix, are there missing – like we just talked about flying in tracks when there's no tracks left – are there missing sources at times from things that were flown in even at mastering?
Oh yeah. There was missing stuff we had to recreate.
Yeah.
There was a bell sound that somehow got lost and a couple of other things, but I have a complete genius Pro Tools operator in the studio. His name is Noah Bruskin, and he's just an absolute master of Pro Tools. He's incredible.
And I feel like I'm back in the days where I was then, doing pure engineering. Literally pushing faders up and down, tape op behind me. And it feels like that again. It's great. It's really lovely.
It takes that part out of your mind so you can focus more on the sound and the music.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I envy people who do both but no thank you. I'm a hands-on faders guy.
Speaking of that we both have Rupert Neve Designs 5088 consoles.
Right. Right, so we do.
I'm so pleased with it. I think it sounds ridiculously good.
Yeah. I did the same kind of research. I've got console number 27, so I didn't get the Shelford color or anything either. I don't get the darker gray. At the point when I was looking, I felt like there just weren't that many analog consoles being built of this high quality.
Right. And it's arguably the last console that had his [Rupert Neve] design on it before he died.
Right. I really enjoy using that for mixing and I do a lot of mixing in the box and then I go back to the console and I'm just like it is really something much better to me to my ear.
It's a little bit of a frustration because Dolby Atmos, you can do it all analog what they call track based as opposed to – object that's the word – object based or track based.
You can't mix the two at least not yet. But you essentially, what I've had to do is I balanced everything up for Atmos and then Noah literally matches it and puts it in the box.
Right. When you're working on something like the Pyramid box set were you involved from the beginning of like sourcing tracks? I know that Eric's family also, the daughters went through the tracks and found stuff too.
Yeah. We listened to everything. Sally [Woolfson]'s got all the tapes in her possession, so she knows what's there and then she dug out all the cassette tapes that Eric made of the early versions of the songs and stuff.
But it was a really nostalgic thing to hear the multitracks again. I enjoyed it very much. To a large extent we went back to the tapes and matched the stereo version, the original stereo version. We didn't bother with a new stereo mix for the box set because it was as "high def" as it could be – it was analog.
That's kind of what you were known for too, that those records sounded great in that era. They were like pushing the boundaries of really clear, well-produced audio, in my opinion.
Well, I should accept that as a compliment.
Why would you need to remix it? Steven Wilson got involved in remixing the Yes records and King Crimson…
Yeah. All the ones I would have liked to do.
Well, me too.
But particularly The Who. I think The Who stuff is out there in box sets as well. I would have loved to have done that.
Yeah. That would be a real treat. But I would think a lot of times, do we need a new stereo mix? Sometimes you can gain clarity. I think there are some records, like Yes' Relayer, that was a little murky sounding in a certain way.
Yeah. There's good new technology out there to do stuff like that.
Certainly.
But it's really fun to, like I said it's a trip down memory lane. It's nostalgic to hear that stuff again. You hear all the, on outtakes, you hear all the joking around.
With Colin [Blunstone]?
Oh, yeah, you heard that? Yeah, that was funny. Rod Argent became ill a couple weeks back.
Right. I heard that.
So, I don't know what Colin's plans are. We had just played together, not together on stage, but we did this on The Blue Cruise, which featured The Zombies and us.
Nice.
