F. Reid Shippen is a successful music producer, engineer, and businessperson. He has also helped out Tape Op over the years with his insightful reviews and great ideas, so we thought it was about time to drop by and pick his brain. His credits include Little Big Town, Dierks Bentley, Ingrid Michaelson, Kenny Chesney, Lady Antebellum, Eric Church, Cage The Elephant, and India.Arie. He lives in Nashville, and has a mighty fine mix room set up for his own use.
AH: In one of our first conversations many years ago, you told me you had a business degree.
I have a degree in Recording Arts & Sciences and Business Administration from Middle Tennessee State University. I started school as an Electrical Engineering major, then an Accounting major, and realized early on I'd rather be interested and poor than secure and bored.
AH: What was it that got you into music from this side of the glass?
I'd always done music as a kid, like singing at church and being in bands, but I never really considered it as a career. It seemed super interesting, and I was going to go for it, so I quit school and moved down here.
AH: Where were you living before Nashville?
I grew up in Fair Haven, New Jersey, south of New York City.
AH: Had you made records for your bands in studios?
Nope. High school was the only time I was in bands. I'd done musical theater and church singing performances – but not recording.
AH: Were there certain albums listened to and identified as recordings that were made in a studio?
I really got addicted to, and started to pay attention to, albums like Heartbeat City by The Cars – I knew every note of that – and [AC/DC's] Back in Black. Also tons of ‘80s pop, like all the Peter Wolf pop music, the David Foster productions for Earth, Wind & Fire, all the albums by Chicago. As I look back now, I see that I gravitated towards great songs and really great production, but I didn't realize that at the time.
AH: That wasn't inspiring you to be a music producer?
My parents used to say, "Music is an avocation, not a vocation!" Until the Grammys started showing up, I guess.
AH: How many Grammys do you have now?
I've mixed ten Grammy Award winning records. A Grammy and four dollars gets you a latte at Starbucks. Don't tell The Recording Academy I said that.
AH: When you won your first Grammy, what did your parents actually say?
I remember the conversation with my dad was like, "Do a lot of people get those?" I said, "No, not a lot." He's like, "That's a pretty big deal isn't it?" I said, "Yeah, I suppose it is." I think that's when it clicked for him that this wasn't just fooling around with music, but an actual job.
AH: Are you picking and choosing the artists you work with?
I guess everybody does, to a certain extent. In the music business, as you know, it's more like they pick you. I've had a really weird career arc where it's been a lot of genre-hopping. I grew up on New York City music. I saw the Beastie Boys when they were a punk band. There were all kinds of great music, hip-hop, and all of that culture. When I moved down to Nashville, it was country or Christian. I was like, "Okay, wow." I didn't even know what Christian music was, because we didn't really have it growing up. And country music? Country music to me was Johnny Cash and John Denver. I jumped into the Christian music scene because it included rock music, pop, hip-hop, and all these different genres.
AH: It's interesting that people even consider Christian music a genre.
It's very strange. But it let me work on diverse genres of music.
AH: Why did you choose Nashville over New York? New York has a vibrant music scene.
Not so much a vibrant studio scene, does it? I came down here and had to go to school and work full-time to put myself through. MTSU was the only school I could afford. I had the single-mindedness of, "Okay, I'm going to put my head down and work my ass off." I looked up, it was six years later, and I was living in Nashville. I did school, and then internships. I almost didn't graduate because I was working in studios. It's like, "Okay, I can work on this record – or I can sit in class and do a synopsis of a Mix Magazine article." No thanks. MTSU was great – there were a couple of great teachers, like John Hill. Nobody wanted to be in the [school] studio from midnight until eight in the morning, so I got free run of the place.
AH: Were you recording bands?
Anything. I was experimenting. I started interning, and then I had an intern-to-assistant opportunity – one of those crazy moments. The engineer was mixing this song, and they were locking 32-track digital – which was Nashville's crazy-ass format – Mitsubishi machines. Sony digital didn't hit here until later. One really popular producer decided he was going to use two 32-track Mitsubishi machines – locking those, plus TASCAM DA-88s, two 2-inch machines, and video – and they couldn't get them locked. They all went to lunch in frustration. I stayed, and when they got back they were locked. That's when I went from intern to paid assistant, because they were going to another studio the next day, and they were like, "You're coming. Let's go."
AH: How did you go from being an assistant to getting your own engineering and mixing gigs?
I fell into it. The first thing I ever mixed was this Christian hip-hop project. They only had the money for three songs with the real mixer, and the producer was going to mix the rest. They had to run one of these [pointing to his SSL console]. I said, "Why don't you let me mix it? If you hate it when you get in here, you're going to have to do it anyway. I can show you how to run the board. But if you like it, so much the better." I ended up mixing the rest of that record, did another record, and the next thing I knew, I was a mixer.
AH: Looking at your discography today, it's all over the map. You've worked on so many projects within all genres. At what point did you become F. Reid Shippen, mixer and producer – versus F. Reid Shippen, engineer for Christian music?
A lot of the people I was working with were super talented. One of them early on was Charlie Peacock. Everybody knows him now as the guy behind The Civil Wars and Switchfoot, but back in the day he was a Christian artist and writer. He's an incredibly wise, thoughtful, and amazing human being. We were all working together, and in that crew happened to be my mentor, Tommy Sims, an amazing bass player and producer – he's done everything from Bruce Springsteen to Michael McDonald. Jay Joyce, who was a guitar player and had a local band called Iodine with Chris Feinstein and Brad Pemberton – they did their thing. But Jay now is a guy who's done everything from Patty Griffin's Flaming Red record to the last Eric Church record. He's an insanely talented guy. Chris passed away unfortunately, but Brad's the drummer in Ryan Adams' band. There was this whole community of people, which is really the best part about Nashville.
AH: Due to my ignorance of Christian music, I had this misunderstanding that there's this well-defined boundary called Christian music, and nothing ever travels outside it. What you're really saying is that you worked on Christian music, but the community of Nashville is boundless?
Yeah. The opportunity came out of that. The cream rises to the top. In Christian music, there was this big popular band called White Heart, produced by Brown Bannister. He's got 14 Grammys – one of the nicest, most-talented producers I've ever known. He worked with Amy Grant and did all her records. White Heart had Tommy Sims. Chris McHugh was the drummer, who went on to be a massive session player and music director for Keith Urban for ten years. All these insane players were circling around. We all got to know each other through that, and the sphere started to expand. The people I was hanging out with started to get into R&B, and then along came Jonny Lang, Marc Broussard, and all that R&B-type music.
AH: Were you tracking and mixing, or were you focused only on mixing?
I started doing everything, but there was a period where I focused exclusively on mixing, because there was so much mix work coming my way. That was a period when I did stupid things, like selling my [Neumann] U 47, because I didn't track. I wish I could get that one mic back. I was pretty hardcore mixing for a long time. Now I'm also doing some tracking, because what broke me into country music after almost 20 years in Nashville was Jay Joyce saying, "Hey, I'm doing this record for a band called Little Big Town. Do you want to record it?" We did the record in three days. That was the album that took them from, "This band might be over," to one of the biggest bands in country music, period. I did that, and Eric Church, and all of a sudden, I'm swimming in country music.
AH: You did everything in three days?
About eighty percent, including most of the vocals. It's a Nashville thing. With Little Big Town, the players were great, and the singers are all world-class. The way country music works is different than everywhere else that people track. What's happening now is country is turning into pop. They're realizing that doing it the old-school tracking way is important. This Brett Eldredge record I'm working on now – it's very common for us to go into the studio and walk out two days later with seven songs. You have all the drums, all the bass, all the guitars, all the keyboards, and – since Brett's a great singer – most of the lead vocals, because he sang it while it went down. The producer takes it home, maybe fixes some of the vocals or puts some background vocals on, maybe takes some of the demo programming and spiffs it up, and edits some of the tracks. He might add an overdub or two and then send it to me to mix. It's blazingly fast. If somebody said, "Hey look, we have to do this record from start to finish," and it's somebody like that, we could literally do the entire record in three weeks, from the very first note recorded to the very last mix – without a problem. The quality of players in this town is scary. It's fascinating to watch them play and be like, "They played an entire song and didn't screw up at all." It's never wrong. Every once in a while, someone makes a mistake because they're trying something; but, otherwise, they're scary good that way.
MR: You've talked about Christian music. When I'm flipping through the radio dial, there's a recognizable sound to that CCM music. Is it the radio station, or do they all have that vocal sound?
They all have it. That's probably my fault.
MR: Are you willing to talk about where that sound comes from?
I think it's giving them what they want. Genres gravitate toward different sonic spectrums automatically. That's what CCM gravitates toward. I've never actually thought about that a ton. People actually say that. They say, "Oh, I know instantly that's a Christian song." So do I. I don't know why, but it totally is. It's so identifiable. I think it has more to do with the end result of Christian music. It's not necessarily the song, per se. In a lot of genres, the end result is, "I have something to say, and here's a song I'm going to say it with. I want to communicate it as emotionally as possible." In Christian music, the thing they're saying is a more global thing, overall. They're talking about God, obviously – something bigger than the actual content of a song. One of my favorite Christian records of all time is Lauryn Hill's solo record [The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill]. That record is insane. But when you really dig into the content, and what she's talking about, honestly, it's a Christian record. She grew up in the church. That's where she's coming from. I think country music allows more of that because Christianity is a bit more prevalent down here than in the north or the west. There was a famous interview recently, where Luke Bryan said, "You know what I like to do? I like to hang out with my friends, drink beer, fish, and drive around on my farm. And that's what I write songs about." I thought, "Okay, I get that." It's like East Coast hip-hop, which is some of my favorite music. They grew up in a completely different system, with a completely different context, and that's what they wrote about. You always end up writing what you know – most of the time anyway. Nashville is very famous for being a songwriter town. Country music is the business of songwriting. Songwriting is huge in country music. A lot of other genres – you're not getting outside songs.
AH: You have a lot of speakers set up. I know you've had these ATCs for a while.
Yeah. I adore the ATCs. They're one of the best speaker lines I've ever heard. I think they're awesome. But if it were up to me, this entire front wall would be filled with speakers.
AH: But no Auratones?
Well, there's this – a Rogers LS3/5A. It's a 1970s speaker design from the BBC. [A few other companies also licensed the design from the BBC, including Spendor, Audiomaster, KEF, etc.] They are freaking awesome. I was doing a record with a local mastering engineer that I'd never worked with. We asked if we could listen, and he had these little speakers. He played the mix, and I was like, "Dude, that sounds absolutely perfect." He said, "I haven't mastered it yet." I asked, "Oh... what speakers are those?"
MR: That's interesting, from the point of view of a mixer, to have five pairs of speakers.
It's more for the psychological shift of, "Now, let's listen to it in a completely different context." I want to know what I'm getting used to, in this context, so that when I listen to it over there, it's like, "Oh, the snare's way too..." So I use that to keep me on my toes. Because nobody seems to make a speaker controller that lets me run eight pairs of speakers, I've got to custom-make something that will let me switch.
MR: When you're mixing, do you reference other peoples' recordings, or do you stay in your own world?
I made a note the other day to remind myself to put together a list. The thing that made me realize that was Sound Check in iTunes. When you listen to everything at the same level, some of the old Roy Thomas Baker productions sound amazing, and some of this newer music really doesn't. That was the great leveler – literally and figuratively. It should remove the volume wars so that we hopefully don't have to deal with that anymore in the future. Unfortunately, as long as there are artists and managers – and drummers – there will still be volume wars.
AH: Do people still care about the volume war here in Nashville?
Almost every song has a rough mix; it's usually hyped, multiband-limited, and loud. If I do a good mix, and I send it to the artist who's out on tour, they pull it into their iPhone. When they listen to the rough mix that they're used to, it's cranking. They listen to my mix, and it's not nearly that loud. They're going to pick the rough mix. That's the way it works. That's life. Humans are programmed to think that louder is better. It's the old cheat. That's the way our hearing works. More often than not now, we've got music that's entertainment and we've got music that's art. The music that's entertainment, let it be entertainment – that's fine. Some of it's almost disposable. Some of it has always been disposable. How often do you listen to Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus"? People are listening to [Pink Floyd's] The Wall. They're still listening to Stevie Wonder. Nobody's going to be nostalgic for the "Macarena." But "Back in Black" is going to be around forever. If you're a professional doing this for a living, and you really want songs to be great, you're always aiming for "Back in Black." "Macarena" is easy. I could get that mix on my laptop at the beach. Some of this maybe doesn't matter [gesturing at the gear throughout the room], but the ones that do matter, that's why I want this gear. I want to be able to get that last drop of blood out of the stone.
MR: How do you start when you get assigned to a mix?
Almost all the time, I start by listening to the rough mix – for two reasons. One is that's what the artists and the producers have gotten used to. But also I do it because I get tracks in from all over, and it really sucks to mix a song, send it out, and have people say, "Hey, where's that guitar?" I always ask for the most recent rough. I actually have mixed songs where they've said, "These are the wrong guitars" – because they didn't send a rough, the project was three months old, they cut guitars, the guitars didn't come, the tracks weren't labeled, or somebody forgot. I am sure to ask, "Do I have everything?" Or, if something sounds strange, it's not my job to say, "I don't like that vocal." If something sounds really weird, I'll fix it. But sometimes I'm like, "Yeah, this vocal is not in the pocket." They're like, "What are you talking about? It sounds great!" I have to say, "That's your call." I double-check to make sure I'm actually mixing the tracks that I'm supposed to be mixing. I take a look at the vocal and make sure the vocal is great. I try to find a really cool spot and see where the vocal will fit in, whether that's in the theme of the song, or the elements that jump out of the song. "What's the hook? What's the thing that makes this most interesting?" A lot of times when I'm starting a mix, I'll hear something and say, "Oh, let's save that for later." I'll fly something to the intro, or change something, and then be like, "Okay, I'll table that and come back later." I sit and work through the drums, the bass, the keys, and the disparate elements. It varies so much from song to song that it's hard to say. There's no real template.
MR: If you don't work from a template, where is everything dedicated? How freshly do you approach it?
A lot of the outboard gear doesn't change settings. I've bought a piece of gear, like Phil Moore's Retro 176 [Tape Op #66], which is great. I messed with it and over the course of a couple months, "Oh, I'm always going to it for this." So it stays set there. I can change what it does by changing what goes into it, and how it goes into it. If I feel like the overheads need a little more smack, then I'll insert the [UREI] 1178 on them, or whatever, and see if that works. If that doesn't work, I'll try something else. But most of the time I don't start with anything. There's a basic technique, insofar as when songs come in my assistant takes them, cleans all the mouth noise and crap out of the vocals – like the diesel generator if they cut it on the tour bus, which actually happens. He'll make sure everything's cool and that all the files are there. If you use templates – sometimes, you screw yourself by starting with a template, although every once in a while, you pull something up, something that you never in a million years would have thought about, and, "Oh, that's really cool." The happy accident. It's honestly another thing I really like about consoles; that almost never happens in Pro Tools, because you're always starting where you stopped last. It's fun to throw something up on a console and get a fresh perspective, instead of, "Oh, this is where we started last." It's easy to get used to that.
MR: Is it freeing to work on songs you didn't track?
Yeah, it's easier to work on songs I track because it sounds good. Or I know who to blame if it doesn't! But a lot of what I work on, I don't track. The trick to doing this well is, "Don't go in with preconceived notions." You can go in there thinking, "Okay, this is how it's supposed to happen." But for me it's like, "No. Where does it need to go?" That's how I look at it.
MR: How much latitude do you feel you can take in moving parts around?
I will piss people off. I remember the first time I worked with one producer, he said, "We want this to be radio. We really want it to hit hard." I pulled it up, called a friend of mine, and said, "Let's re-cut the guitars." I did it, sent it to them, and they were like, "The mix is great! Whose guitars are these? Who are you to re-cut guitars?" I said, "You said you wanted it to hit. I can mute them." They said, "No, don't mute them." That's rare, but I do programming on a lot of what I mix. If it needs more bass, I'll throw a Moog in the chorus. If it needs a different intro, drum programming... I do percussion on almost everything. As far as arrangement, I'll take sections out and shorten them, or whatever. The beauty about doing it in Pro Tools is, "Okay, you don't like that outro? Undo." Pro Tools still hasn't figured out how to do multiple layers of grouped "undo," but it's easy enough.
MR: Do you tend to spring that on them? Or is there some communication, either at the outset or when it's going on?
Oh no, I totally spring it on them. Most of the time they send something, and whenever I get to it, I'll mix it, and they get mix number one. Sometimes it's completely different than what they sent me.
MR: Would you agree there's a fine line between having a musical style and being in a rut? How would you navigate that?
That's part and parcel to some of what we were talking about. If you use the same outboard, the same drum samples, or the same template all the time, you're going to get into a rut. Let's face it, there's a lot of work to do. I could get to the studio at eight in the morning and work until seven at night. I want to go home. I don't want to be in here 16 hours a day. I start to suck when I'm in the studio for 16 hours a day. I have to fight the urge to be lazy and be like, "Okay, I know how to make this a radio hit. I've done tons of them in the last year." No, that doesn't interest me. I try really hard not to do that. Although sometimes you get forced back, like, "Dude, can you make it sound like this song?" I feel like, "Well – different singer, different band, different song – but I can try." I get really good at reading between the lines of what people are trying to communicate. The biggest problem I'm running into is that people get used to the demos. Especially demos that are crushed through two or three multiband limiters with EQ and craziness. A lot of young producers put all that on their mix bus and spend two weeks building a track. They're not realizing that when there's 15 dB of multiband compression, when you take all that off and send somebody the files, those sounds don't exist anymore. It's completely different. Then you're trying to get back to that point. I've had to train a couple people and be like, "If you really want your tracks to hit, take all that crap off, and do it from the get-go. Write a great song. Build a great track. Don't cheat it. I can't take three weeks trying to figure out how to decode 30 or 40 tracks of percussion going through this unbelievable mastering compressor." Anyway – that's the job.
MR: You probably start with whatever stereo bus compression you're going to do while you're mixing?
Yeah.
MR: For the same reason, it's going to affect how everything sounds. If you get 75% of the way through the mix, and then put compression on it...
I've never been good at that. I mix through what I'm mixing through. There's the SSL stereo-bus compressor. It's a quad-bus compressor, so when you have four channels going through, it's reacting differently to that. I never use meters. I do a lot more compression on individual and parallel tracks than the overall mix.
MR: Is there an EQ on the overall mix?
There are a couple. Right now there's a tiny bit of the Dangerous BAX EQ [Tape Op #79] and a little bit of the Mäag EQ4 [#88]. There's a pair of CAPI VP28 modules [#95] running as line gain stages. The Dangerous Liaison [analog patch recall, #88] is super cool. It lets me insert a bunch of gear. There are some old Western Electric transformers inserted on the mix bus right now, which is really cool. The Liaison lets you switch them in and out; it's super awesome. I love being able to try different gear quickly. I want it to recall from Pro Tools, which no one's figured out how to do except the Bettermaker guys.
AH: Yeah, the Bettermaker EQ is one of the few analog hardware devices that you can control from a plug-in.
Yeah, I really don't get it. What is Dave Derr [Empirical Labs, Tape Op #33] waiting for? The Distressor is all digitally controlled. You could put a USB port on that thing and be done. If I could recall Distressors, I'd have 12 of them.
AH: I bet it would be cheaper to build. You wouldn't need all of the controls.
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it's always been done one way, and we don't want to think about doing it differently. I've had meetings with gear companies where I'm like, "This is what we would use every single day." The engineers at these companies respond with, "I hadn't even thought of that." And I reply, "I know, because you're not making records." Honestly, the perfect example is a compressor that I reviewed. These guys made this box, and it sounded really amazing. But [in order] to adjust it… If I'm in a room with a rock star, and she's like, "I'm ready to sing. Let's go." She gets behind the mic. As soon as she starts singing, if it takes me ten minutes to adjust, it's completely useless. I don't care how good it sounds. There's no way in hell I'm going to make Martina McBride wait for me to dick around with all these little settings. It's like, "Guys, all you had to do was put four knobs on the front of this thing." It sounded great, but it's totally unusable in the studio workflow. I'm amazed walking around the NAMM Show. People don't know how to design for user experience; and user experience has so much to do with everything, especially when you're making music. I want a [Universal] LA-2A. It has two knobs on it, it sounds great, and it's pretty difficult to make it sound bad.
MR: What do you use for converters?
Burl [Tape Op #79, #84]. They sound amazing. I use Burl for almost all the crucial conversion. The rest is Euphonix. The old Euphonix converters are fantastic sounding. Then the two-mix goes [back in] through the Lavry AD122 96 MkIII.
MR: Do you think the Burl has a sound?
The Burl A-to-D has a sound because of the transformers. The Burl D-to-A [output] is really nice, clean, and open – out of the way. They sound really good. I've shot out converters on a fairly regular basis for a long time. It's the first time I heard something that sounded better than what I was using before, which was the Euphonix. The Burls were better. I don't use them for the two-bus [returning mixdown] – sometimes it's too much of a good thing. The beauty about living in Nashville is you can try gear. All of the favorite tracks I've ever cut have been on a Neve or an API [console] into a Studer or Ampex [tape deck], and that's all transformer-to-transformer. They talk really well together. When I was setting up this studio, I realized I can put an 1176, a Pultec, or whatever, on the insert of my converters, and it doesn't sound nearly as good as if I put it on the insert of the console. The reason why is because that gear was designed to work with a console, not to work with converters. I don't know – that would be interesting to find out.
AH: Why don't you design gear?
I've considered that. The one thing is – we need another mic preamp like we need another hole in the head. I mean, seriously. How many freaking clones of limiters and mic preamps can we put out there? I dig through a lot of gear because I'm trying to find the best thing ever. Honestly, a lot of the gear that I truly love is impossible to make, because the equipment doesn't exist. Or the materials don't exist. Or they're illegal – RoHS [the Restriction of Hazardous Substances compliance directive] is not a friend of audio gear.
AH: Name one concept of some product you wish you had.
I'm considering starting a company that will help people who have great ideas or designs, but know nothing about business or marketing and can't get out of their own way. [It would be] a company that can help them, without being the middleman broker who's taking advantage of them and screwing them over. That excites me.
AH: You want to help them start the business, not only in terms of finding investors, but also manufacturing and distribution partners, and everything in between?
The whole thing. This gets back to the conversation you and I had a while back, about the person who's an amazing bartender but shouldn't be the bar manager. That's cool. We'll put the infrastructure around you to make great cocktails. If you're really great at that, you should be doing that. If you suck at inventory, and marketing, and accounting, you shouldn't be doing that, because you'll suck at it. It'll take the time away from you doing what you really should be doing, which is making cocktails. I co-founded Atomic Instrument a few years ago, and it taught me a lot about the difference between building a product and running a successful business. I connected with a studio tech and designer, Norman Druce, and together we built the company. Norman had an idea for a power supply for SSL consoles, and I had the resources and relationships to bring the power supply to the marketplace. Plus, I was the end user. Once we refined it, branded it, tested it, and all that, we were able to take it to market and place Atomic power supplies with engineers like Bob Clearmountain [Tape Op #84], Vance Powell [#82], and Tom Elmhirst. When I join a venture, it means that I stand behind the quality of the product, the people, and the promises behind it, as well as the long-term direction of the business. Ultimately, I decided to part ways with Norman and Atomic, due to personal differences between us on the above points. It was a great learning experience. It was very successful, as small companies go, and I look forward to my newest venture. I'm zero percent interested in something that's "good." There's a lot of good gear out there. I want something that's ridiculously good, or I'm not interested. If somebody comes along with something that's going to beat my Telefunken V76m [preamp] on certain vocals, I'm super interested in that. A V76m is difficult to come by. Because I run across these people, I get this unique advantage. I might be talking to someone who's making microphones with materials no one else has dealt with, because everybody else is like, "We'll go overseas and make a bunch of mics." And they're good enough – that's fine. But I've mixed songs cut on a "good enough" mic. You put it up next to something I've cut the way I wanted to, and people ask, "Why doesn't this vocal sound as good? It's the same singer."
AH: When I think about recording music, there's artistry and creativity involved; but there's also a lot of working with technology, in the sense that there are best practices and the end effect is ultimately a better recording.
Let's make a panel. That panel is going to include Ray Kennedy, Richard Dodd [Tape Op #105], Bill Schnee, George Massenburg [#54, #63], or whomever. Now let's take all the 1176 clones that have come out, and let those guys play with them. Guess how many are going to end up in the garbage? Not enough people know what a good 1176 sounds like. We know how to make a really good 1176, but it's incredibly time-consuming. You have to go through hundreds of transistors and match them by hand. If the circuit isn't balanced correctly, it doesn't sound right. It takes a very special sort of psychotic person who wants to sit there and do all that; and it ends up being expensive.
AH: Who's making amazing-sounding gear today?
Steve Firlotte, who started Inward Connections – he's a genius designer. Everything he makes is fantastic. This is going to tick a lot of people off, but I think almost everything that gets made for the 500-series disappoints, because it's making compromises. I've found a handful of gear that sounds amazing in 500-series, mostly from API. But the Brute [Opto-cell] Limiter from Inward Connections [Tape Op #84] is great. I think the Mäag Audio PREQ4, especially on ribbon [mics], is ridiculous and amazing. Take old RCA ribbon mics, and put the Air Band on them. You can crank it and you don't get noise; you get this beautiful, open top-end. It's incredible. I use that, as well as the CAPI gear. That's about it for 500-series products. Outside of 500-series, everything Jonathan Little [Little Labs #75] makes is awesome. His gear is not something you use every single day, but when you use it, it's great. The open slot [pointing to a 500-series rack] is for a Radial Engineering EXTC [#100] that lets me run [line level] out through guitar pedals – but it's more of a utility device.
AH: Which pedals are you using with the EXTC?
Pretty much whatever I can get my hands on. What I use now generally runs toward older pedals because that happens to be what I have a lot of. The EarthQuaker Devices pedals are amazing – so many creative songs come out of that gear. I've used it for drums, vocals, and crazy, inspiring effects in tracking and mixing. I'm super interested in the JHS Pedals guy [Josh Scott]. He makes the Colour Box [Tape Op #107]. Guitar pedals are awesome, because even if they're not very well-designed, they can still ruin sounds in a really fun way. I track with pedals a lot. Every time I record there's a track called "Hot Karl". Don't Google that. It's an Ampex run into an old guitar pedal that you can't even get anymore. It does this pumping distortion thing. It doesn't get used all the time, but depending on the song it might get used a lot. You can pump that into the drummer's ears, and they get amped, because they're hearing it differently – something that's really cool instead of something they're just going to mess with later. I run vocals through it. I own two or three really cool bass pedals I'll bring, to mess with the bass player and get them into a different mode. Guitar pedals are conversation starters. "What can we do weird to make this feel different?"
AH: When you say that you use pedals as you're tracking, is that from having used pedals mixing and putting them to use on the tracking side of the process?
I'm always trying to get fired. I love painting myself into corners, especially during tracking. A lot of times, I know I'll be mixing what I'm tracking, so I'll screw myself on purpose to see if I can make something different. That Little Big Town record [Tornado] was an interesting example. That was cut live. Drums, bass, one or two guitars, four singers, and a keyboard player – everybody out playing at the same time. The drums were in a little room, and I had a mic on the drums running to an old Vega tube amp that was cranked. There was an RCA 44 [ribbon mic] on it. We were trying to make something different, and the record sounded way different than everything else, to the point where people were like, "This is the end. Nobody's going to play it on the radio." And it was a massive hit. Then, all of a sudden, it was permissible. "Okay, let's try and make a vibe for the artist." It's really easy to be a documentarian. I don't say this to be down on Nashville at all, because Nashville's amazing. But when you're going in and cutting four or more songs in a day – sometimes even cutting an entire record in two days – the easiest way to do that is to be safe. Capture the performance, and it sounds safe. People play safe, and you mix it safe, because you're used to hearing it that way. And you get something generic. I'm the guy who likes to go in, and there's a nice room with a nice drum kit, and I'm like, "Here are my drums. We're using these instead." I'm taking another drum kit and setting it up in an iso booth with one microphone and a guitar amp; and we're putting a cymbal on the snare. All of a sudden the drummer gets amped and starts playing something cool. Everybody says, "Oh, man! Let's start with that!" And the music follows it. My gig is to be a catalyst. Everyone's processing through their ears, so we get to touch everything that's going through there.
AH: Was it your breaking-the-rules strategy that got you to the place where you are now – a very successful engineer and producer?
I think I'm a more successful engineer than I am a producer. I didn't get good at mixing until I stopped being scared of doing things that were wrong. You don't get good at mixing until you stop thinking about the right way to do something, and [arrive at the point of] want[ing] it to feel awesome. Don't look at the EQ on the snare drum. This is the snare drum [pointing to the EQ settings on the snare channel of the SSL]: 15 dB, 15 dB, 15 dB, 15 dB, 15 dB. Richard Dodd told me he was working on this record for these guys in France, and he was struggling with a song. He was mixing in the box, and he was like, "Man, they didn't like it." He couldn't figure it out. Finally, he got frustrated and said, "Fine, I'm going to put it on my console." He mixed it on the console in an hour and sent it to them. They were like, "What did you do?" He figured, "Okay, it's a shift in perspective." Then he said, "These guys have been calling in changes and don't live here. I should start taking pictures of my console so that I can get back to this if I need to." As he started taking pictures, he was looking at the settings he was using and realizing he would have never have done it that way in the box. There was never a time he'd take a digital EQ and "dime it." He was looking at the console, and EQ was cranked. You don't cut a little bit. You cut it all the way out. You pull up a plug-in, and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to take a little midrange out, or add some top-end." But if you look at the SSL, the curves are like this [drawing extreme frequency-response curves in the air]. The midrange is gone, the top-end is chopped out, there's more over here, and cranking that. Analog is more forgiving with that than digital is anyway, as we know. I think that makes a difference, which is why I still have one of these [pointing at his SSL console].
AH: Is "forgiving" the right word? Forgiving implies that you're doing it wrong – that somehow you made a mistake.
That's true. Accepting? Yeah, I don't know. You can do something safe, like dinner or a movie – or you can have a really fun date. You might as well have a really fun date, because you don't know. Tomorrow's not guaranteed. You could be gone tomorrow. Have a fun date, you know what I'm saying? And sometimes that backfires, and you get fired.
AH: I love your gear reviews for Tape Op because every single one of them is educational. Have you ever taught recording?
Every once in a while MTSU would bring me down to talk to the students, until one student asked, "Well, what should I really be doing?" I said, "You know what you should do? You should drop out of school, buy a pair of Neves, a pair of [Empirical Labs] Distressors, and start recording." MTSU never asked me back. I went to school because my parents thought I needed to, and I was too young and naive to say, "No, I don't need school."
AH: I went to Blackbird Academy earlier today and spoke to Mark's students. I feel like Mark has a great group of students who are motivated to learn as much as possible.
Mark is an amazingly cool and interesting guy. I think Blackbird has a tendency to curate that kind of personality, because of everything that emanates from John McBride [Tape Op #97]. John exists to be exactly what we're all talking about. If I had the financial resources John had, I would own that studio too, because I want to try everything to find the best thing. He spent 15 years finding the best vocal chain for Martina, and now he's got it. It's that U 47 and that Fairchild. He had to go through everything to find it, and that's what I've been doing. I have to go through everything to find the best thing. Otherwise you get complacent.
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