Was there a point where you realized you wanted to make music?
High school in the '90s was obviously a very different time in the music industry. I really liked listening to The Beatles' Anthology, because it was all studio outtakes. I'd heard all of those outtakes, and I was thinking, "This is exactly what I want to do." I was getting into music in my teens, and I wanted to build a recording studio in my basement. My parents said, "We'll give you $200 to build a studio in the basement." Listening to albums like Fleetwood Mac's Rumours was a huge point, because of the way it sounded – the drums were a big thing. Building a studio and playing guitar was a catalyst, for sure. I went to recording school right after high school, then I got my first job as an intern, and that led to an assistant job at Chicago Recording Company [CRC]. On the first day, 25 years ago, they said, "Get out of the industry, it's crashing." That was always in the back of my brain, so I went to Columbia [College] for film in Chicago and focused on directing and editing while I was managing a recording studio. But all I really wanted to do was record bands and work with artists. It was hard to continue doing that as the industry started shrinking, studios started getting smaller, and budgets got smaller.
If you were to give your 19-year-old self a piece of advice, what would that be?
It took a long time to be stable, where I'm at now, and a ton of different side roads. Change any of those, and it would never lead to the same thing. I made a lot of mistakes, but I think that's the biggest point. I was cocky as a 19-year-old. Changing my way would have totally disrupted everything. I wasn't a great assistant, so I got out of that quick and started doing it myself. It wasn't until after graduating film school that I had an opportunity to move to Los Angeles for the first time. That path changed everything. I was out here for a year, and then I went back to Chicago with knowledge to start a real studio [The Alley Recording Company] and do everything that I'd just learned in L.A. If I would’ve stayed in L.A., maybe it would have been different. But life is that journey – you have to make mistakes to get to where you're at.
Who knows if I'd be sitting here with you right now?
Well, think about this. You and I had this big talk when we had our first dinner. Then Covid caused me to do YouTube videos, and content online opened so many other doors that I would have never had if I didn't step into it. You meet one person for an hour, and they can totally change your entire life. It's so weird how that works. If I would have stayed in Ohio after recording school, or if I would have stayed at CRC longer than I did, or if I went straight into film instead of going right back into music after film school? Yeah, it's crazy.
Have you developed a recognizable sound? When did that happen?
As a mixing/recording engineer, everyone has idols. I had a hell of a time mimicking one person. I was producing an album for a guy in Chicago who wanted to work with Doug Sax of The Mastering Lab – the grandfather of mastering. He suggested who should mix it – a Pink Floyd-ish concept album with influences of Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Sting, and Toto. Doug said, "Bill Schnee should mix this album." Bill Schnee is my number one mixer of all time. The best engineer I knew of, growing up. Huey Lewis. Steely Dan. His discography was so elaborate that I thought it was a hysterical joke. Then Bill heard the album that I produced and offered to mix it for a ridiculously low rate. We spent some time together, and I liked him as a person. He got incredible sounds, and everything was tied to his philosophy of critical listening. I remember the first mixes I got back from Bill Schnee on that album. I already had done mixes of half the album, and I remember toggling between the two. He had the exact same tracks, but I was wondering, “How are these tracks sounding three times the size?" Not volume, but size. With three dimensions and the bass is ten times more extended. I came to understand what he was doing after being with him for a while and watching how he works, on multiple levels, on different styles of music. It's just about what not to do and what works. Which is weird, because we're taking philosophies from others. Sometimes smaller sounds on different types of music is what you need. Rock records need to be small. They can't be too big, because then it gets too much information because it's all distortion, drums, cymbals, and loud vocals. It depends on what not to do. After we finished mastering the album, I joked, “I’m coming out to work for you.” Bill said, “Great. Let me know when you get here.” I got to go back to Chicago to tear my life down and move to L.A. I stayed attached to Bill as long as I could, watching every movement. It all came down to critical listening. It wasn’t about microphones or gear – even though he had the best of everything. It was about the sound, and he had this incredibly bigger-than-life sound for everything he did. By the time I went back to Chicago and started my own new studio, I'd learned so much from that. He is the biggest influence of my entire career, but I still don't think I could do his sound well. I still like rock records that are extremely over compressed, and I love Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, where the snare drum is louder than the vocals. I collected all these album-making elements that I thought were unique. Somebody once said my mixes are like a big hug – the bass is almost dangerously big, and the drums are too loud. I think that's based around these three or four different people that I always looked up to. When I started working for Ken Caillat, who produced Rumours, as his main engineer, the thing that he first said to me was, "Your drums sound great. They sound like mine, probably because my snare drums were way too loud." I think it's full circle! All these other mixers – Andy Wallace [Tape Op #25], CLA [Chris Lord-Alge], and Michael Brauer [#37, #131] – I can't do any of that. I don't know how they're getting that sound. Sometimes I'll get projects that have big names attached, so then my confidence says, "Well, it better be working because I got offered this gig." But still, it’s hard because I'm basically working per project at that point. I'm only as good as my last project!
You’ve worked across music and film. Do you approach those worlds differently, or do they bleed together?
Working in Chicago at CRC, they were doing jingles during the day – Disney commercials for [advertising executive] Leo Burnett with full 70-piece orchestras. We had to chameleon ourselves into these genres and learn the difference between mic'ing a drum set for rock 'n' roll versus jazz. I loved rock 'n' roll. I had a lot of friends that were rock engineers, but they didn't know how to do other styles. To only stay in one style of music was a dangerous approach as an engineer or studio owner. I always loved the cheesy smooth jazz sound, because the players were so amazing. That's a completely different sound. Bill was extremely good at sappy stuff, rock, jazz, and all these different genres. He was good at being a chameleon, and I would learn how to focus on the music and understand that we're doing processes based around that. He would be doing some movie score in the studio, and then the next day would be rock drums. It was always right back to critical listening. What does a cello sound like? What is it supposed to sound like? I'd hear someone else put three microphones on a cello player, or something ridiculous. That's overkill, and the reality is that we're just trying to capture the instrument. When I started working for Alcon [Entertainment] – the film company that we were doing movies with – I had to slowly tap into the score side of that. Then, to work with Warner Chappell and their sync department, and trailer-ize music and orchestral recordings, I started learning what not to do versus what to do. Most engineers want to put plug-ins on everything. They want to add EQ, compression, and reverb – it was more about not doing that and doing the bare minimum. I remember my first real score date. I had no idea what I was doing, except I was remembering that less is more, and it worked! There were all these guys that were snobby, saying, "You can't do that. You need to put spot mics on a double quartet. You can't just use a Decca Tree of three mics." I'd be thinking, "That's wrong, because it sounds good doing that." On a Netflix project, my assistant got in a fight with me, which was super inappropriate. He went to the composer, who was my friend and very well-known, and he said, "Marc's only putting up a Decca Tree. Not putting up spot mics. He should have been thrown off the session." I didn't know how to respond to that, and the composer said, “Yeah, it sounds amazing.” That's the biggest thing: Stop thinking in terms of what we're supposed to do. If it sounds good, it probably is good. In the world that we have now, where there are 750,000 YouTubers teaching the same thing, over and over, they're not talking about this.
What mixing processes did you learn from Bill Schnee?
There was a Bill thing that I asked him about, and he didn't even realize he was doing it. It's always "lifting" after every word or solo instrument. Extending the decay time of words, which you're getting all this emotion from. He would spend so much time automating across the board, which makes everything come alive. If you leave the vocal static, it's just kind of flat. Outside of critical listening, that was the biggest thing to get the sound. It's not putting it through a Neve console, a [Neumann] U 47, or into an EAR [Esoteric Audio Research] 660 compressor. It's how you automate two or three tracks together, and do it in a motion that's fluid. It becomes less static and sounds way more magical than before. If you think about the '60s, '70s, and '80s, all those engineers were constantly touching faders. Even if they didn't have automation, they were still recording to tape and touching the faders before it hit tape. Sounds were slowly moving in and out, and that's become a lost art.
Do you think your film background has influenced how you approach mixing albums?
Yeah. The entry into the film universe was year 15 as an engineer/producer. I'd just moved back to L.A., and I started working for Ken Caillat. Ken was a partner in Sleeping Giant, that was partnered with Alcon. We worked on major feature films, and a lot of it was co-writing and titles with artists. But it was also incidental music that we could put into scenes. This led me to go to Salt Lake City for two years just to record big score music for movies, sync, and trailers. One of my biggest friends in my life was Scott Reinwand, who now runs the Warner Chappell universe for sync. He was the executive producer for music that I was mixing for years and years. He would say, “Don't do that. You don't put compressors on this. I can tell it's squeezed." He was very technical. And then the more compressors I took off, the more I started realizing it sounded better. I'd apply that to other genres, and it would always sound better. Who started this whole thousands of layers of compression, or six levels of EQ? There are so many trends in music, so it depends on where you're at genre-wise, as well as what era. But, at the end of the day, music is always about emotion. Growing up, my first cassette was Back to the Future. It had Huey Lewis on it, but it also had the score – I'd be listening to that emotionally. I'm glad I didn't stay a country or rock engineer and not get into all these other avenues, because I'd be missing out on so many other cool emotional aspects. The first movie I did in Utah was with my friend, Anton Sanko, for a French feature film [Amanda]. He sent me a demo of one of his cues before we did the orchestra. It was a 30-piece of orchestra with woodwinds and brass. I said, "This sounds like To Kill a Mockingbird. That '60s era." Smaller – not a huge orchestra. When I recorded, I tried to make it sound like that, and he said, "That's exactly what I was going for." It ended up winning best score for a French Academy Award and sealed us working together. When I hear a song, I always think, “What does this remind me of? What can I take from that?" It could be my first instinct is, "This sounds like Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ but not In Utero, so it's a very different drum sound.” So, I go, "Okay, I've got to make it sound like this." I think soundscape is a huge part of mixing and producing, and that ties into filmmaking because soundscape is all about the emotion we're getting out of that.
