Recording - February 2011 - 31

What preamps are you using? I have some old Neve preamps that I like a lot, I have some UpState Audio preamps that I really love. I have some Great River Electronics preamps that I like, and I have some old Studer tube valve preamps that I love. I also have some Manley Labs preamps. I have a lot of preamps and a lot of microphones that I’ve collected over the years. Is it important to the overall sound that sometimes the vocals aren’t always in perfect pitch? Oh absolutely, that’s the way it worked years ago; it was all about the emotion in a work. I mean Frank Sinatra, you listen to his records and every so often he’s a little sharp and that’s the way it was. All the singers back in those days had good pitch and microphone technique where they would lean in on low notes and back off on high notes. It’s a whole different ball game today. Today everybody relies on compressors and the vocalist stands 2 or 3 inches from the microphone and sings everything from that distance; I don’t work that way. When you start a mix do you have a certain process that you begin with? I usually start with the bass and the drums and get the rhythm section together as best I can. Then I’ll get the vocal in the mix and I’ll try to get the vocal right with the rhythm section. I’ll take the vocal out and add the strings or the brass or whatever if it’s a big band and then I keep taking the vocal in and out to make sure that it’s sitting right. That’s how I put it together. I work extremely fast, so I don’t spend a lot of time tweaking around with little things. Will you have the musicians around while you’re mixing? If it’s a band then sometimes one of the members will be there, but normally no... It’s a distraction, or in some cases they are only listening to their instrument, and to them the balance will be a little out of whack. Will you ever mix down to tape and then bring it back into Pro Tools before mastering? No, If I mix it down to tape it will stay there. If I’m mixing down to 1/2" inch tape then that’s what I’ll take to the mastering house. I usually mix down to 1/2" tape and Pro Tools and then I take those down to Doug Sax, my mastering guy, and we’ll sit down to figure out which one is best. Do you leave headroom in the mix for mastering?
RECORDING FEBRUARY 2011

No, I give him a final and that’s what it is. I don’t leave any room for mastering to manipulate the sound. I don’t like it when the mastering engineers use too much eq or compression on my stuff, and that’s why I use Doug Sax—he doesn’t do that. Do you feel people have lost a certain respect for great musicians? I don’t know about anybody else, but I know that I haven’t. I try to tell guys when I go around the schools that the best friends you have in a recording session are the musicians in the room. If a guy comes up with an instrument you’ve never seen before, ask him where they put the microphone the last

time they recorded. He’ll tell you, “Well, last time they put it over here and it sounded really nice,” and then at least you have a place to start. You’ve got to make friends with the musicians, they’re the first ones to tell you if it sounds good or not. They care about how their instruments sound. Daniel Rolnik (rolnik@recordingmag .com) wrote weekly live-show reviews for L.A. Record magazine before moving to the Bay Area. When he is not recording, he creates documentaries for humanitarian organizations, all while attending Ex’pression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville, CA. Al Schmitt photo courtesy Capitol Studios, Hollywood, CA.

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Recording - February 2011

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