Dave Pensado | TapeOp

Partway through my chat with world-renowned mix engineer Dave Pensado he said,"Be careful that you don't confuse advice with opinion." Hanging with Dave you realize he is a veritable fountain of advice. In fact he dishes up knowledge, thoughts, and interviews weekly on his online TV show, Pensado's Place, with his manager and co- host, Herb Trawick, at his side. Their recent book, The Pensado Papers, delivers the back story of their career, as well as their show together and was co-written by Maureen Droney [Senior Executive Director, Grammy P&E Wing]. Dave's work has filled the top of the charts with mixes for Mary J. Blige, Michael Jackson, Kelly Clarkson, Beyoncé, Elton John, Christina Aguilera, Jill Scott, Macy Gray, Peaches, Mariah Carey, and The Black Eyed Peas. As we were wrapping up our talk at Echo Bar Studios in North Hollywood, Dave said, "Hopefully we're all honest about our abilities and value to the world, and honest about our ability to leave the world a better place than we found it." What more can we strive for? Well said, my friend.

Your roots stretch back to Atlanta. I know you were playing in bands.

And a little live sound. Then Larry Turner and I decided we were going to put a studio together, one of the more naïve decisions I've ever made. It led us to a gentleman named Phil Benton, who owned a studio named Monarch Sound. It was a very small, unpretentious facility with lots of heart and people who loved to make records. Larry moved up the scale and I became more of a freelance guy. I fell into making records with anybody that would stand still and could navigate the space to a microphone. I did hundreds of free records.

Just trying to get your skills up?

Well, I wasn't worth paying anything for! I wouldn't hire myself. The only way you're gonna do anything in life is to just do it. I had the same taste that I have now, but I just didn't have any skills. I could make a pretty good record, but it would take me a year... the same thing that would take me hours now. I didn't know what the equipment's capabilities were. All those hours of making something sound bad. Then you do that hundreds of times over the years, and all of a sudden you find yourself hearing something come out of the speakers. Immediately in your head you hear what it could sound like, and you subconsciously draw on those thousands of hours of mistakes and happy accidents. Suddenly, without really realizing it, something good is coming out of the speakers. That transition from thinking about it to having it happen naturally took about 12 years.

If you weren't getting paid much, how'd you make a living?

Well, I had some close friends I had helped prior to my engineering life. I took care of them while they were struggling, so I got some help in that area. I had some girlfriends that were helping me out too. Most of my life I had five roommates. I had part of the basement, and we also rehearsed in my bedroom, so my bed was in a corner of the basement, and the rest of the basement was my workbench. I earned a living repairing equipment for a store called Atlanta Discount Music. I'd modify guitar amps and repair TV sets. I was playing in bands, and that shifted to working at Monarch.

What was your impetus to dive into the recording world?

A combination of several things. Probably abject fear at reaching an age where I felt my ability to finally make it as an artist was fading. I could feel that. When you're the oldest person in every band you're in for the last ten bands, you kind of have to evaluate where you're at in life. It was all about how I could stay in music. I wasn't a very good session player. That's why building a studio seemed like a good place to be. The psychological impediment to trying out engineering seemed insurmountable. Easing my way in the back door by building my own studio seemed like a good option, but it just morphed into something. I woke up one day and decided to go to England to work there. That didn't work out. Another day, I'm on my way to California. I've never been able to make decisions that I had 100% confidence in. All my number one records have come from the most bizarre paths. I don't think that in the 30 years of my career I've ever made a phone call or sent an email that actually got me work. I think the only thing that gets me work is to stay in the studio and crank out a record that people hear and like, look at the credits and go, "You know what? I think I want that tall ugly guy on my record! Maybe he'll screw up and do it again."

While you were still in Atlanta, what were some of the things you worked on that were more of a breakout or success for you?

Well, because I was affordable I got to do some things I maybe couldn't have done. I did some R.E.M. demos. I did some of The B-52's. I actually got paid to work with James Brown. Atlanta at that time wasn't the Atlanta of today. Early on, in the late '70s, I was doing a lot of hip-hop because there weren't any engineers that either liked or wanted to tolerate it. There was a lot of residual racism at the time. I wasn't skilled enough to know that there were certain things I shouldn't do, so just by blind luck I didn't clean things up. Back in those days, when you went to a studio you got the engineer for free. These guys were monsters, but they didn't know how to do hip-hop. They tried to clean things up. They didn't understand the energy or importance of it. I've never been one to pretend like I understood the lifestyle or lyrics, but I understood the music and what I felt when I heard it. I understood the importance of a form of music that was so accessible to so many people. Prior to hip-hop, if you didn't have a few thousand dollars, you couldn't go into a studio and work. Now, all of a sudden, for a few hundred dollars you could get a turntable and inexpensive PA system and be creating music. By the time I left Atlanta, studios were actively trying to woo the hip-hop crowd, because that was the biggest source of income, and it still is for a lot of studios. That's kind of my story. Nothing that probably is of any use in terms of a career path for someone starting out, other than just I had the most wonderful combination of stupidity, competitiveness, tenacity, and just never thought about doing anything else. I started in a city that was a great city to be poor in. It's hard to be poor in L.A., Tokyo, London, or New York; but there are some music centers around the world that you can be poor and get a good start.

So you moved to the UK briefly, before L. A.?

I wouldn't call it moving. It was more of a "test the waters" thing. In Atlanta, I had done so much free work, and sucked for so long — it takes a while for the perception of your abilities to catch up with the reality of your abilities. It just seemed like a logical choice to go to London, because all my favorite records were coming from there at that time. But, in retrospect, I realize that was kind of like the end of that movement. I came back to Atlanta. Now I had to choose between New York, Nashville, or L.A. I don't like snow. Nashville was a different place than it is now. Now it's one of my favorite places to make a record. Nashville was out, at that time, so it was Los Angeles. I got in my piece of shit car and drove out!

How'd you go about establishing yourself in Los Angeles and getting work?

Well, I met Herb Trawick. He'd never heard anything that I had done. He introduced me to Kevin Fleming at Island [Records]. Kevin had never heard anything I'd done but he trusted me, and the next thing I knew, I had the number one record in the world. That's why sometimes I feel so bad about giving career path advice. I never had a path! I've never thought about career advancement. I made a successful career happen with the help of a lot of gifted people that believed in me, combined with just outworking everybody else. The success, the hits, the fame and notoriety are all an outgrowth of the thing I truly love, just sitting in a quiet and safe room. It's like a combination of a library, the greatest museum you've ever been to, and Amoeba Records. The process of engineering is the acquisition of taste. Ultimately that's what people pay for. They don't pay for my engineering skills, my patchbay precision and clarity, or how many lava lamps I have. They want something to go out to the public that either directly affects their income, directs people to a show that affects their income, or that gives them the credibility to do an iPod commercial. That's my job!

You're busy. You mix hundreds of songs per year. What possessed you to initially start the online TV show, Pensado's Place ?

Our book, The Pensado Papers , is about how the show came out, along with a lot of other information. I had a medical incident where a blood vessel in my brain leaked like a sieve. As you can imagine, it produced some results I wasn't real thrilled with. I was in the hospital for a few months. Coming out of that, I had to make some decisions about where I was going with my life. Herb Trawick was managing me as an engineer. I just felt a need at that point in my life to do a little more teaching, educating, and sharing of some things that I had worked so hard to acquire, in terms of skills. Herb figured that instead of doing it the old-school way, like a brick and mortar school, he came up with the idea of doing a show on the Internet. We wanted to do quality TV. Herb has a strong background in broadcast, plus his managerial skills, and all of that adapted really well to the process of putting a show together. We got help from some people early on, and that absorbed some of the cost. [Producer] Will Thompson was pretty much a neophyte in the space, and we grew with Will. Will does everything with social media. It evolved, little by little. When I first moved to L.A., all my friends were musicians, artists, photographers, or dancers. Over the course of time, all my friends were mix engineers. Then, at some point, they became tracking engineers and mix engineers. I never thought about the fact that all my friends were engineers, sprinkled in with a few producers, one or two songwriters, and a couple of record executives. When Herb came up with the idea to do the show, the first year was just hanging out with my friends. I saw Chris Lord-Alge, Jack Joseph Puig, Jimmy Douglas, and Joe Chiccarelli at an AES conference a couple of months before we were starting the show. I told them I was thinking of doing something on the Internet and asked for help. It was really a combination of my desire to hang out with my friends, as well as an opportunity to share some things I've learned along the way. I never thought about being the focal point for anything, or changing the world. It was just a naïve thought on my part to share some thoughts, and then have Herb come in. I was content to do it for 10 people, but Herb wasn't content unless it was 10 million.

There's a casualness to the show that's inviting.

There's a lot of work that goes into it, particularly on Herb's part, to make it feel casual. We do a four- camera shoot and live switching. It's very expensive. We film at one of the major taping facilities in L.A., and our quality is as good as NBC, but that comes at a cost. YouTube grants us a lot of liberties, in terms of the bandwidth we eat up. We've been a Top 10 show on YouTube multiple times.

In your "Into The Lair" videos we see you demonstrate techniques using plug- ins. Do you still use hardware too?

All of my gear is in storage right now. When all my contemporaries were buying cars and jewelry, I bought gear. I bought 48 channels of [API] 550 EQs for about $60 a piece in '85. I don't know how many [Neve] 1073s I've got. People were giving those things away. I've got a [Urei] LA-2A that I found in a dumpster. When transistors came in, everybody threw their tube stuff away in Atlanta. I've got a lot of gear, but I pretend like I'm a plug-in, in-the-box, kind of guy.

You pretend?

I think it sends a good message to the public. I think it gives them hope.

People are like, "Hey, I could be doing this," instead of thinking you need an SSL console to even get started mixing.

The world is divided into people who own several hundred thousand dollars worth of analog gear who, oddly enough, are proponents of analog. The other half of the world owns no analog gear, and they're staunch proponents of the digital world. I straddle both equally . I've got every plug-in ever made, and I've got every piece of gear ever made. I use things because I think they're the best for the job at hand. I just recently mixed a song with Boyz 2 Men, so I had four lead vocals that I had to put stuff on. I'm blessed that I can do that in either world. But if you're somebody that has a budget, what are you going to do?

When I'm putting 15 of the same compressors on a song, I'm thinking, "I couldn't do this in the real world." Not at my studio!

You bring up a good point. One of the biggest impediments to the digital world is excess. The ability to use everything. I think right now anyone that can't make a good-sounding record should evaluate their skill set. It's totally within the reach of everyone. There are so many DAWs and plug-ins around the Internet that are free or affordable. When you combine that with the availability of information on the Internet...

When you started working, there wasn't that kind of access.

Hell no. I became a product early on of RE/P Magazine . I had to make a lot of my own gear. I couldn't afford anything. If it weren't for a couple of cats like Ed Seay, Bill Lowery, Mike Clark, Larry Turner, and a cool cat named Tom Wright, I wouldn't be here. I spent ten years acquiring skills that today you should be able to get in six months. I never saw other people work. When I moved to L.A., I didn't know you could put something on the stereo bus. I recently had dinner with Ed Seay in Nashville, and he said, "We didn't do that! We considered it a technique that was a crutch." It just never dawned on me that you would need to do that. That's how naïve and unsophisticated I was. I truly envy my friends that were assisting for competent engineers.

The Pensado Awards event must have been a lot of work.

That's Herb! Herb is a one-man operation.

How many people came out for that?

Well, we only had seating for about 700, but we had way more wanting to come. I'm pretty proud of what we did. That was mostly Herb. The whole point of that was to not compete with any of the existing awards shows. I wanted it to be something that engineers put on for engineers. We tried to make it classy, special, unique, short, to the point, and entertaining. I think that a lot of other people should adopt the AIR award: the Assistant, Intern, and Runner award. What was so cool about that was the studios all lobbied for their person hard. I lost some friends during that, because not everybody could win. I think that award probably symbolically represents what our awards show was about. It was just a wonderful night. With some of the major awards shows, you go to the awards show and then that's over, but you don't know who to brag to and celebrate with. We were self-contained. You come, mingle, and go to the awards show. It's fast-paced. Then you go 20 feet away and there's a party with free alcohol, and it's just a blast. You're in a beautiful hotel, you can eat dinner, and then go up to your room and sleep off your hangover. We could do that and we did. I don't want anyone to interpret that we think we're better, or that we are trying to eliminate any of the other awards shows. They all do great work. It was just something that Herb and I felt we could give back to the engineering and producing music community that supported us for years.

How do you balance your workload?

Balance for me is not a 50/50 thing. Balance for me is figuring out how to do 100% of this, all the time. We're constructed to go through life with a partner. As successful as I was at music, I was equally unsuccessful at life and choosing that partner. I met my wife a little later in my career, but early on in my career in L.A. She's a wonderful person, and I have her support on every level. I think in 24 years of marriage the first time I was actually off on my birthday was when I was in the hospital. I've missed just about every anniversary. Balance for me was being there for the bigger, important things with my daughter. Whenever I did have some time off, I made it an event. We went to Hawaii, Atlanta, or the Philippines. When I'm off, I'm off. I'm riding ATVs, dirt bikes, fishing, and hanging with my family. I love being here. I don't think that in 24 years my wife has been to the studio more than five times. She supports me and I love her dearly. We've constructed a life that has brought me a lot of pleasure. When I'm not working, I feel a little weird. When I'm overworked and behind, I feel more comfortable than when I don't have work, which is extremely rare. The one or two days a year when I have nothing to do, I think, "Okay, this is it. My career's over now."

We all do.

Then I get the call from Herb. I'm always paranoid about never working again. I've had multiple times in my career when I thought that I knew everything I needed to know. Then a week later I'd get humbled. I don't think any of us who have done this more than a minute don't go through that big roller coaster ride of "I'm good. I suck. I'm better. I'm worse." It's those moments where you grow. You don't grow from success and harmony. You grow from the failures and hardships, from having your ass kicked. You grow from thinking you did the greatest mix in the world and having it rejected and re-done by one of your assistants. That's when you grow.

Do you like doing mix shootouts?

I live for that! I love it. Let me be humble and say that I hardly ever lose.

Then it's worth giving you a call.

I'll cheat though. If I have to re-play all the parts, I bring in heavyweights, call all my assistants, and send a vocal up to New York. I love those. Healthy competition is really good for our industry. It helps us get a barometric reading on our talent level at certain points along the way. Mixing and music is a moving target. You constantly have to check your skills against everybody and compete in a healthy way. I like the shootouts because they help you see where you're at and get a sense of your value in the marketplace. They're not always accurate in terms of your skill set, but that's okay. Sometimes the person making the decision might be looking for something a little different than what you do. Do I have a day or two where I'm kind of dragging and just sad? Yeah, I go through that. I've had three or four number one records where two, three, or four different people got it [for a mix shootout]. Usually I didn't know that until later on, when we're all talking together. I had one record where the person hiring me asked me to do three songs. I listened to the demos and figured I'd kill two of them but they had to hire another engineer for the third. They said, "I'll get him to do it, and you do it." We both did it, and I had the person that hired me in the room for my mix. He had a little input into it. When they both came back, he said, "See, Dave, yours is better." I'm like, "You're completely wrong! His mix is blowing mine away." I ended up talking him into putting that other mix on the record. That doesn't mean I'm a good person or that I'm generous. It just means that I can hear quality. Great records are team sports. Don't expect that you should be able to do everything.

We all have our strengths.

A lot of my favorite mixers aren't mixers; they're producers. Their rough mixes are hard to beat. Not sonically, but the feeling, vibe, and emotion... that's what music is. That's what we're paid to do — to enhance that. There are two things in music, creativity, and art that I hate. I hate it when I hear somebody trying to be clever. I don't mind clever things making their way into a song, but only when it's needed, organic, and right. It's like throwing jalapenos in apple pie. That's clever, but good lord, do I really want that? The other thing I don't like — I hear this in movie scores, mixing, and producing — is when somebody's main concern is creating an advertisement for their next work. A lot of engineers are scared to let something come out that's emotional but sonically might not impress their friends. Listen to "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera. My ego was pretty involved in the mix. The producer was telling me that it sounded too good. We went back over it several times and came out with something amazing. That's what I'm talking about: subverting your engineering skills for the needs of the song and producer, and constructing a career that will allow you to do those things intuitively. The engineering skills can follow that.

I think that's just intuition and being a fan of music.

It comes from all those years of buying and playing records, and sharing them with your buddies. You and I come from a time when media was a little different. We had more free time to listen to records.

And lots of used vinyl.

Yeah. I understand where a lot of people are, in terms of listening to music right now. When my clients come in and want me to listen to 14 songs in a row, I just start daydreaming. It's harder to do now. I'm glad I went through that, because those are the years before I was an engineer that made me who I am. For me, an important part of the process was playing in every bar in the Southeast. A lot of times our goal was just to get out of there alive. You learn immediately that subtlety is not your friend. Your friend is dynamics and volume. When you're starting out, people are there to get drunk and to get laid. You're background noise. If you want the club owner to hire you back, you have to keep those people drinking and coming back Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. When you distill the essence of our profession down, whether you're a producer, engineer, or mixer, it's the ability to entertain people and make them want to own or pay for what you're doing.

We didn't go to school for this. But we are both constantly learning.

I think an extension of what you and I are talking about in some ways is the essence of Tape Op . You get opinions from every level of experience in the magazine, in terms of engineering and producing, and I think that's a very valuable thing. Like a Steve Albini interview, for instance. Steve and I have nothing in common. We disagree about everything, but he's one of my favorite producers and engineers. Just hearing his opinions made me rethink the things I do. I'm sure he hates my records, but I love his records and that article. It changed my creative life about a lot of things, and made me a better engineer. I prefer learning from people different to me. That's why I left Atlanta; not because people weren't good, but because we were a lot alike. The healthiest part is when you run into someone who's completely an anathema to your way of working. Those are the moments on the show where I learn the most. It's not about me. It's about the concept that sometimes you can learn more by reading about people with different opinions than you, even opposite genres or backgrounds. There are multiple ways to have a career. You can have a career designed so that you're the top guy for ten years and become irrelevant. The problem with being the top guy is that it's a little easier to fall from the top than from number 100. Number 100 might be working forever, and number one might have a shorter lifespan. Being competitive, I want to be as close to the top as I can get, all the time. I've been blessed to be able to do that. But when you're the top guy, you hear so often that if you don't change up [your game], you can become irrelevant because your sound and concepts get copied so much. The top guys do. It would kill me if a client came to me and said, "Dave, I just heard my song on the radio, and that little thing you did on my song, I really love it. But why did you do it on somebody else's song too?" Those concepts are important; not because you want to force them into your career path, but because they're intuitively part of your career path.

Do you ever get work sent to you that you end up passing on?

It happened once. A gifted engineer and producer named DJ Quik brought me a mix. I listened to it, and I was like, "Quik, I can't improve this. This is amazing!" He'd heard some of my previous work and wanted something similar. That was tough for me. Every time I listen to something, I get a flood of ideas on how to improve it, or bring this or that out — but I didn't get any ideas when I heard that song. It ended up coming out on the album as it was. Having an ego is a necessity, but it can be a curse. But what does an engineer do when my best friend, and a great client, brings a song I don't like? How do I make it better? Well, there's this wonderful thing that happens to us engineers. We sit down with a song we don't really like, and within five minutes we alter something, and that something is so spectacular to us that now we like the song because we think that we've fixed it. In my world, a lot of money gets spent before it gets to me. Sometimes I have to trust the taste of the people: I have to trust that the company president liked it, the promotional people liked it, the VP of A&R liked it, the producer liked it, and the artist liked it. It can't get to me and then have me say, "Oh, I don't like it." That can't be right. I don't know if it's ego, but a progression towards really liking it happens. I've talked to my friends about it, and we're similar in that way. If you don't like something, just stick with it. On mixes like that, I like to bring the client in extremely early and extremely late. Because of that gap between those two, I have to have a high tolerance for things they want to change. I feel it's my job to not just give them a mix, but to give them more than what they want, as well as take out what they don't want. A lot of times, in taking out something they didn't like, they come up with a better idea than mine. I like an atmosphere where we're all free to do that. At some point, I see what their vision was and it all starts coming together.

What makes a mix bad?

The worst mixes I hear are the ones where there was a vision for the song early in the process. A mixer gets that and thinks he's going to put his vision on it, and now you've got two competing visions. You can hear and feel that. I think that particularly, more so now than ever, our job as mix engineers is to complete the vision, not to change it. Back in the day we'd get sessions as a rough mix and we were the ones creating the final vision. Nowadays, within five minutes of creation, somebody's mixing because someone throws a plug-in on. That's called mixing. The mixing process is never not going on. My job is to finish that process with that vision. That's the difference between 2015 and 1995. There's a gradation of that in between. I noticed in the '90s that I could just blatantly change sounds, have hit records, and get paid lots of money to do that. In the early 2000s, there was less of a tolerance for that. Around 2005, I saw my job description change dramatically.

Were you adding more elements, or just morphing tracks before?

Let's go back to the '80s. At one point in time, the most popular synth was the [Yamaha] DX7. It had 32 presets! When I got something created on that synthesizer, it was a close approximation of what they wanted. There weren't that many choices for drum machines or drum samples. What I got was an approximation. In terms of a rock band, when they went into a studio, it was close to what they wanted, but not quite. Nowadays, if you look at the dance world when the top guys put a sound in a song, it's not close to what they want — it is the sound they want! In the '80s and '90s we didn't have 200 great drum samples to choose from. We got it close, and then I took liberties to make it what they wanted. The source of what I'm given is just a different quality now. I can get in trouble sometimes, because people make it what they want without giving me the freedom to do other things with the sound. It can go bad just as easily as it can go good. I can fix anything, but sometimes it takes a while. The process is different. So many people have access to things now. Simple math tells you that the greatest records that have ever been made are being made now. Obviously, by the same formula, the worst records are being made now too. At a time when we need gatekeepers to filter for us, we don't have them. It turns out that the labels didn't do such a great job of filtering the crap out. I'm not a big fan of the streaming services that pick songs for you. If you want an algorithm to feed you the shit you already know and like, if you're going to use those, then just pick something at random. See what you get exposed to. You can manipulate that, or just go to a list of hipster independent music from Brooklyn. Whatever you gotta do to jar your taste.

You have another place under construction. What happened with mixing at Larrabee Sound Studios?

Nothing. Larrabee and Blackbird are still my two favorite studios. I'm at a point in my career that's different than where other people are at. I wanted to do more independent projects with smaller budgets. When you work at the top echelon, like I was doing, two things happen. They can afford to pay me my full rate, the studio costs, and studio time. Your client base is at that level because that's what people can afford. For most of my career I was very comfortable there, and that was where I wanted to be. At this point in my career I've reached out to the independent rock community and made myself available at a good rate, because I can control the costs. My first attempt was to do something at home, but that didn't work out. I have to go somewhere to work, and I felt that somewhere needed to be a dedicated studio. I went to a facility at Oasis Mastering and worked there for a year. It was a wonderful experience. I was in a great sounding room with staff around me. Then my lease was up, and I had to make the decision to stay another year. I wanted something a little different, so I'm in the process of finalizing all of that. My new situation will give me access to a console. A lot of my clients want a console. If you want to pay an extra $1,000 or $1,500 then we'll have it. If you don't, that's fine. It gives me an ability to go and do projects that I could never do before. I'd have to turn them down, or get an assistant after hours. At this point in my career, it's where I'd really like to be. For example, three years ago I couldn't do a Macy Gray record. Not because she has small budgets, but because she's a very intelligent lady and didn't want to spend the money. I was too expensive then. I just did a whole album; it's a great record, and we did it for a reasonable price. Not a lot of people can afford $60,000 or $70,000 to mix an album. I try to work within peoples' budgets. A couple of projects I've done this year weren't a shootout, but it was a thing where, "Hey, if you don't like it, don't pay and we'll move on." I'm not always thought of as the right guy. I'm still learning and growing in every genre.

You seem to spend a bit of time reading physics books and finding information on the web. How does that work into your day and workflow?

Well, I got up at 7 a.m. today. I don't know how other people do it, and I don't know how I do it. You sleep when you can, and your interest, enthusiasm, and curiosity about something keeps you awake when you need to be. Nothing keeps you more alert than a great song. You put the fuel in your body that allows you to run it at 10,000 rpm all day long, and then when your head touches the pillow you're asleep in two seconds. I think those of us that do this, we don't have a complete and total need to get X amount of sleep per day. We tend to get the same amount, but we look at it a weekly level. You catch up. We all have different tolerances. I learned early on the importance of taking breaks. I learned that it's better to find your tolerance for how long you can work at high efficiency, and then you take a little break. Sometimes I'll go for a walk, or get my laptop and read for 30 minutes. Right now I'm dying to learn about the new Avid Pro Subharmonic plug-in. I saw it on Pro Tools Expert, so when you leave I'm going to go spend 10 minutes with their video on my next break. I love geology and collecting rocks. A client of mine, a great band called Zerbin, came in to do some tweaks and they brought me some rocks from Canada. There's one of them I don't have a clue what it is. Sometime today I'll do a little research on what that is. My house is in the mountains. Some days I'll drive the freeway and get to work in 20 or 25 minutes, and some days I'll go through the mountains and it'll take me 45 minutes to get to work. I might get to a 6,000 foot peak, pull over for a second, take three breaths of fresh air, and jump back in the car. I orchestrate my life so that little adventures can happen. If you look at successful people, the path they start on is never where they end up. It's never a linear path. What the outside world calls failure, they just call another turn. Creativity and lessons about it come from everywhere. Go to a museum or read a novel. Go on the Internet and just look at paintings. Get inspiration from the greats. It doesn't have to be engineers and mixers. I get great inspiration from songwriters. If you look at great people and great art, it's mostly craft. But craft can be elevated to a high level, and you can insert art in there, depending on the tolerance of the people involved. I don't want to imply that what I do is equal to what [Paul] Cezanne does, or James Joyce, or anything like that. We might not be making fine china, but you can certainly make a great paper plate. Tunnel vision, with just looking at one isolated area, won't give you a full arsenal of things to choose from.

I was working at a studio once and I said to the client, "The assistant is a really nice guy. He knows the place really well. I wonder why he doesn't do a lot of producing or engineering?" The client said, "He needs to see the world a little more."

Man, what an insight into creativity. When I was playing at my little podunk dive bars in the Southeast I would go out before the shows, meet the locals, and have a little adventure happen. They come in such weird little unexpected ways, if you're receptive. I love to prospect for gold. Prospecting for gold is really difficult to learn. You can read books, which I did; but at some point I just had to get out in the mountains and talk to the old-timers. It took me years to win them over. I would sit down with them and be respectful. I'd never ask them, "Where's the gold?" You don't do that. You get their trust, talk to them, get to know a little about their family, see them a month later, and then next thing you know, it's like, "Dave, let me take you up to the Red Rover Mine and show you something." You go in there, and you learn. That's the way engineering is. You don't walk up to Jack Joseph Puig and ask, "What'd you do on that so-and-so record on the stereo bus?" You don't do that! You just have these little adventures. You run into different people, and the next thing you know you're finding gold. That's the way it goes in the music business.