I first met Alan Parsons in 2004, when I interviewed him for Tape Op issue #42. We’ve been lucky enough to work together on Recording Academy presentations and meet up socially a few times after that. I always thought we’d have fun doing a podcast, and as it was now 20 years later it felt like a good time. Alan had also built his ParSonics Studio on his ranch in California, and a deluxe box set reissue of the Alan Parsons Project’s Pyramid album was coming out soon, so we had quite a lot to talk about. Enjoy!
I went back yesterday and I read our interview that the first time I met you and I went to your previous home up in the hills there in Santa Barbara. It was 20 years ago that we first met.
Wow. Lisa and I probably just got married at that time. We just did our 20th anniversary so it must be around about that time.
Right. It was really fun to meet you then. I remember above the garage you had a temporary kind of mixing studio space set up with the [ASC] TubeTraps.
That's right. I actually recorded an album there. A Valid Path. It was my foray into the world of electronic music. The first time I actually used a hard disk recording system. I was terrified of it, as I thought, “Oh my god. What if my computer crashes? What if the hard disk breaks down?" So, I still backed up everything I did to TASCAM tapes.
No way! To TASCAM DA-88s?
Yeah, eight tracks at a time. I just saved everything just in case.
Wow.
I've always been a back up and back up the back up and back up the back up with the back up. [laughter]. Always been a believer in that.
Yeah. In the days of tape you'd have to get a second deck and do a full 24 or 16 channel backup right. If you're doing it.
Right.
Did you do that? I know that's kind of the story with The Dark Side of the Moon going way back. But, did you do that with the Alan Parsons Project stuff, like make backups of your basic tracks and…
Yeah we would always back up just to be just to be safe. But Abbey Road was lucky enough to have the machinery to do it. There was always the second machine. And when I progressed to Sony [PCM-] 3324, I always had two machines, so I could always go from one machine to the other.
Right.
And that was actually creatively good as well because you could bounce the chorus of a backing vocal say, and just put it in different places or what, from one machine to the other machine.
Right.
Of course it's a piece of cake now to do that in [Avid] Pro Tools. Just cut and paste and it's easy. But when it's a linear recording system it's much more difficult.
Oh yeah. I remember even taking like digital delays and flying a backing vocal into a digital delay that could hold it for a second and then punching it in on tape. Like play it back and punch it in.
Oh yeah. I was a great one for doing that. Especially when you run out of tracks. If you didn't have a track to put something on you’d do it. Literally a wild fly in of stuff.
Right.
To save tracks.
Well the change from the studio where you did A Valid Path to your ParSonics Studio now. That must have been a big undertaking to start building that up again building up a studio?
Yeah. It was. The control room of the new studio was originally a shed housing an electric generator. And there were actually two of them. Because the previous owner had allowed for the end of the world on December the first 1999.
No. Oh really? [laughter]
And had two huge generators. Probably enough to drive the city of Santa Barbara. [laughter] So, that and a shipping container full of survival food. Dried food. He thought that the whole world was going to collapse.
Well, it took a number of years but it did in other ways.
Yeah, everybody got to midnight on that day. "Well, we're still here." Nothing’s happened.
You must have been accumulating recording equipment over the years? Had a lot of that been in storage at that point?
I had accumulated microphones. Not so much in the way of outboard gear. I had a Studer [D19] mic preamp. I had some Aphex stuff. But I'm pretty happy usually just using plug-ins these days. I've got a lovely fake Fairchild [UTA...
