Recording - September 2013 - 15

In the old style of doing things, you
started as a runner—I was a carpenter’s assistant, and I cut my teeth there,
then I assisted Bob and Malcolm and
learned a lot from them, not to mention all the other engineers who
worked at the Record Plant... I went to
Scotland, did a movie, worked at another studio, then went freelance and
worked with a lot of the people I’d met
at the Record Plant.
That was when you were working with
some pretty big names in jazz and
fusion—Patrice Rushen, Stanley
Clarke...
George Duke, Lee Ritenour, Dave
Grusin... Quincy Jones was my first
freelance client! He did a lot of work at
the Record Plant and I wound up subbing for another engineer on his project. This other engineer had
too much on his plate and had
to let some things go; I was driving Quincy to the session one
day and he turned to me and
said, “Would you finish this
record? I want you to finish this
record.” It was the Brothers
Johnson’s first album. I had a
partner named Chris Brunt, and
I pulled him in to work with me
on that.
After that it was a long string
of R&B, fusion, and funk artists...
until 1988, when I left freelance
engineering. It was a time when
the business was changing dramatically. MIDI was coming in
very strong, but what was happening in
the studios was something very interesting that directly relates to this idea of
monitoring and knowing what you’re
hearing.
An artist no longer necessarily contacted you to do the tracks, overdubs,
and mix on a record, all in one place.
Instead, it became a distributed work
process: you might be called in to do the
tracks, but someone else might do the
overdubs, and someone else might mix,
or maybe the mix would come back to
you. And because of this, you’d wind up
working in a lot of places, not necessarily in the room that you were used to
camping out in for a month at a time.
You were in a situation where you
were working with large studio monitors that were all different. They
weren’t all bad—some of them were
quite good—but they were all different. And that really reinforced the
trend toward working with nearfields.
What would an engineer expect when
he walked into a studio, in terms of
monitoring?
In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s,
besides the big soffited monitors in

the room, there would either be nothing at all on the console, or maybe a
pair of JBL 4310s or 4311s. Those were
really the first prevalent nearfields,
especially on the West Coast. Classical
rooms used different speakers, but for
pop control rooms, it was JBLs or
Altecs in the soffits, and in Europe
also Tannoys.
People would carry the JBLs
around with them sometimes, even
back then. They were passive speakers that required an amp, they were
big and clunky... but they always
sounded the same, and good, studio to
studio to studio, whereas the soffited
monitors would all sound different. I
remember two rooms at the Record
Plant in Sausalito—designed to the
same blueprint but sounding very different from each other!

getting lost, that some things weren’t
screaming out. The other thing was
TV... if you were doing an orchestral
date that involved flutes and you
knew that it was going to be heard
over a tiny TV speaker, you had to be
sure that those flutes weren’t going to
come screaming out of that speaker.
The need for an alternative reference
was always there.
Back in those days, you tried to get
your record sounding good and optimized, so it came on strong—a needle
wouldn’t jump out of the groove, you
wouldn’t hit the limiters too hard at
the radio station, yet it still sounded
loud. AM radio had its own sound. The
inside cuts on albums had distortion... you had to worry about all of
that, and alternative references were
vital back then.

The JBL 4310 and 4311, early examples of popular near-field monitors.
Were a lot of engineers carrying them
around at that time?
Not carrying them around a lot, no,
but in the early ’70s you’d start to see
those JBLs on a lot of console tops.
The next thing I remember coming on
the scene was the Auratone; I was working with Quincy Jones at the time, the
first time we worked with them. It was a
4" driver in a sealed box. Some of the
radio broadcast consoles, like the Neve,
had little radio speakers built into
them... people did all kinds of things to
try and emulate what they thought it
would sound like on the radio on drive
time—in those days, there was a speaker in the dashboard of the car. Sunset
Sound went as far as having a transmitter and a receiver! You could transmit
from the board to a radio in another
part of the building and listen to your
mix coming across the radio.
Having a small reference was
required to make sure that your balances were right, that the bass wasn’t

Cut to the late ’80s... people are
moving around now, everyone’s doing
parts of dates in different places,
you’ve got people who are synth
mavens coming in, and all they do is
program sounds for the people who
don’t. The whole lay of the land has
changed. Part of the drill now is
rewinding to the top, arming a track,
and striping it with a MIDI sequenced
synth track of some kind.
How did monitoring change in that era?
Were the strategies the same, or were
they altered for the new workflow?
Strategies weren’t altered for the
workflow, but things started to
become decentralized... you could
now run synths direct in any environment, you didn’t have to worry about
mics and acoustics and all of that
until you got to the mix. People were
recording in all sorts of places, as long
as they had a multitrack. So the monitoring strategy didn’t change, but the
RECORDING September 2013

Recording - September 2013

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