Recording - June 2018 - 18

CJ VANSTON Derek Smalls
On Recording
I'm going to pass that on to Derek,
he's a big Sinatra fan. [laughs] This is
my complaint about music... people like
production, they like wide and large...
that's why we get these great stereos
and sound systems in our cars. And I
know exactly what you're talking about
with this smashed mono sound. I like
the wide swath, ear candy popping in
on the sides.
I'll never forget, I was doing my
production thing in a studio once and
a record executive told me, "You know,
mate, I worked with a band a couple
of weeks ago, and they just went out
in the studio-four guys, and that was
your record." And I said, "You think I
can't call in three guys who live within
a mile of here, the greatest musicians
on the planet, and go in the studio and
do that? But that's not how the greatest
records of all time were made. It's
production! Look at Dark Side Of The
Moon, or Sgt. Pepper's, or Thriller, or
Rumours... these records took years of
work and tons of overdubs and lots of
forward thinking to create this giant
sound. People love production! The
only people who don't like production
are the people who have to pay for
it." [laughs]
Luke [Steve Lukather] and I got into
that about his records and about how
we both love production, detail and
sounds you don't necessarily hear the
first time, stuff you hear the second
time that adds a texture underneath.
It's like a plate of really good food...
you don't say, "Oh, taste that fennel!"
But it's in there.
We were discussing this idea of
'overproduction'... critics love to bring
it up, and they always cite bands like
The Clash. The Clash? [laughs] They
took a year and a half to make their
greatest records! They didn't just go into
the studio and play one time through!
So I said, "If that's true, then the biggest
overproducer of all time was Beethoven,
because he needed 90 musicians to
play his shit." [laughs]
18

RECORDING June 2018

When mixing this album, was it
again all Logic plug-ins, or do you
have other favorites that you'd like
to give a shout out?

I have a ton of favorites. I love all
the Universal Audio stuff, it's great. The
iZotope stuff is awesome-we used
Nektar on Derek's vocals.

There's a company called Toontrack
that makes a plug-in called EZmix, which
I think is a really misleading name. People
think it's "baby's first plug-in," but it is
such a radically cool plug-in... it's an idea
machine for me. You want a really wild
sound, and you pull up EZmix and do a
search on 'acoustic guitar' and there are
75 acoustic guitar patches, and you can
just go bang, bang, bang, trying them
out, from basic clean stuff to really crazy.
Inside EZmix there are all these
different effects-compressors, flangers,
phaser, reverb, all these effects inside
of it... but each preset has only two
knobs. These presets were created by
some great engineers and producers,
and to make just one of them would
take ten minutes of dragging this plugin here and that one there. Instead, with
one click you can try out something
amazing like Leslie guitar over a bridge
or chorus. I actually don't like telling
people about it... it's too good, and it's
too easy. [laughs] Hence the name!

Do you go for vintage plug-in
models when mixing vintage-style
tracks?

"The only people
who don't like
production are
the people
who have to
pay for it."

I use whatever I want. Honest to God,
the stock Logic compressor is so good,
I use it for most of my compression. It
really works for me. My favorite reverb is
Space Designer in Logic. It's incredible-
it used to cost $800 sold on its own. Like
[AudioEase] Altiverb, it's this very powerful convolution reverb that I've created a
lot of sounds for, and because it's
integrated with Logic it's easy to automate
and doesn't hog a lot of memory. The
vintage stuff I really dig is by Universal
Audio-the EMT 140 and 250 plate
reverbs, really great-sounding.

I always like to ask when I do these
interviews: did you run into any
particular challenges in the making
of this record?

The only real problem was density. On
some of these tracks, there's so much
going on; it's tricky to keep it all in the
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - June 2018
