Where are you at right now?
This is Jack [Antonoff]’s B room at his L.A. studio, Tamarind.
Jack has a space in L.A. as well as one in New York, right?
Yeah, they’re both amazing studios to get to work in!
How did you and Jack Antonoff meet?
I was working at Real World Studios in the UK, Peter Gabriel's studio. We made a record with The 1975 [Being Funny in a Foreign Language], and I was brought in by the band because I was working at the studio – they wanted someone familiar with the setup. Right before the sessions started, they also brought in Jack to co-produce and his engineer Laura.
Laura Sisk.
Yeah!
I was going to say that you must know Laura. I assumed you two had worked together…
Every day! [laughter] I'd been at Real World for eight years, from making the tea, cleaning up the studio, then assisting, and all the way up to being the main engineer there. I loved working with Jack and Laura on The 1975 record – I felt like I’d learned so much from them. They have this incredible way of making you really feel like you're a part of the team. Jack invited me to work on another record with them, and then from there it continued.
You took the Tonmeister course before working at Real World. That's pretty rigorous training, isn't it?
At University of Surrey. That course is amazing – it was a very safe environment, and I made the mistakes there so I didn’t make them later. [laughter] The program was good at putting your ego in check and reminding you that you are starting from the bottom with a lot to learn. They had a placement year, and I went to work at Real World.
You’d do a full year while you're still in school, but you work out of a studio?
Third year, yeah. They have them at Abbey Road, AIR Studios, Real World, and many other studios, audio companies, and broadcasting/post-production houses. After I graduated, one of the assistants at Real World left. I did the interview process, and they gave me a job as an assistant/whatever we want you to do. It’s a small team for a big studio.
One thing people probably don't understand is that most studios don't need a lot of people working there.
Most studios can't afford it. It's three or four people working hard. The job was “do everything.” I built the Real World website; it's still there. I loved it, because if we could imagine it, we could do it. I could say, “When the sessions aren’t happening, I want to go in the workshop and build this.” Peter [Gabriel], and by extension his team – like Mike Large, who runs it – everyone was about fostering ideas, and nothing was too crazy to try. It was such an amazing group of people. I have really fond memories of working there. I went there on my first day, in 2012, imagining I’d probably be sat in the corner and told to be quiet, or they’d give me an admin job. Day one, Peter's engineer at the time said, “He's going out on tour in a month. You need to build all the playback systems and program Ableton [Live].” The take-home from that was that somebody trusted me. Real World was always busy, but it wasn’t often that major-label artists came through back then. I remember Alicia Keys and Harry Styles came through, and I assisted Harry’s session. When the next record [Harry’s House] came around two or three years later, I was still there. Kid Harpoon [Tom Hull, Tape Op #172] called me and said, “Hey, our engineer can’t make it – would you mind filling in?” I said, “Yeah, obviously.” He and Tyler [Johnson, co-producer] took a bit of a chance on me. Harry ended up winning Grammy awards for that record and, by extension, so did I! Peter saw that I'd done that record, and when he came to do his I/O album sessions he asked, “Do you want to step in and help me finish this?” I even got to work on some of the songs on the upcoming record, O/I. We could do a whole interview about Peter. He's one of one.
Yeah. I've massively respected his studio approach for so many decades.
We take it for granted now. He was one of the originators of the idea that we are all one team when we make a record – there is no “us,” then a piece of glass, then “them,” with the [Real World] Big Room being the ultimate testament to that. It's artist first, not technology first. One of the best things about that studio is that all the technical stuff tries to be a bit hidden – even though there's a big console, you can set the room up any way you want, and anything goes! This "anything goes, let’s experiment" approach is probably why Peter’s I/O album took a while to make. It’s truly inspiring to me – it doesn't matter to him how much energy or time he's put into something, he's very happy to throw it out and experiment some more. There’s no association of those two things. I see that with some of the best producers and artists. I see it with Jack. That separation was fascinating, because I used to think, “If we've spent hours recording the drum kit, then that must be the final drums.” But the best record-making is about treating everything equally no matter how much time or effort was put into it or who played the part; nothing should be locked – the only thing that matters is what’s released. No one loves a record because it was made promptly; no one cares how long it takes.
It's such an important way to work.
Peter has lots of ideas like that. I remember him saying he doesn't really use reverb early on in the process, or anything that makes stuff sparkle or shine that could artificially make it sound "better" for a minute.
I just told a client that! “If those performances can hang in there raw, then you're going to be in a good spot.”
Right, and every bit of production in there is extremely thought-through and intentional. If it is not making him dance, he will often bring it back down to just drums and bass. He deeply cares about how it all sounds too, and as an engineer, that's exciting. All of the band – Manu [Katché] and David [Rhodes] and Tony [Levin, Tape Op #33] – everyone cares about the sonics as well as the performance. Early on, I got to work with other people who really cared deeply about how things sound. I guess the most obvious are Ethan Johns [#49] and Dom Monks, Ethan’s engineer at the time. I'd be trying to hear what they're hearing, and they'd be telling me, "This preamp is better than that for this instrument," and I would go back into the sessions after and try to figure out what they were hearing that I couldn’t.
I've interviewed Ethan as well; he's very particular about certain sounds, but also fully listening to the songs.
Right. Dom, who's gone on to have a great career as a producer, is similar. He really taught me to listen. We spend a lot of our time as engineers looking at meters and looking at computers. Often, records with Ethan were done on tape or on [iZ Technology] RADAR, where there's no screen. We were forced to think, “Okay, what am I actually listening to?”
You came up in the post-tape era.
Yeah. I never didn't have Pro Tools. Stories of Peter doing So or one of those records, where he’d have tape machines all synced together, then chaining DAT machines onto the end with timecode to add channels. I never had to deal with that, but I guess what my generation has is the opposite problem.
Too many tracks?
Yeah, now we can do anything, and we can have as many plug-ins as we want. I can have every piece of gear in the world in my computer. When we have everything, how do we figure out which path to take? I think that catches people out.
Absolutely. I feel a producer is more important than ever to keep everything on track.
Yeah, like a real producer.
Like what Jack Antonoff's doing: getting into the songs, digging in, and focusing.
Yeah, just cutting to what matters. The same is true with mixing – you have the final production version, and then you have to get to the final mix. When I listen to a rough mix, I can often hear where it wants to go, but now we have infinite ways to go through that maze to get there. Back in the '80s, it was, "We’re in this studio, with this desk and these EQs. These are the tools you have." Now that you have every EQ available to you, how do you choose? I find myself reverting back. Off to the side here, we've got [Roland] Chorus Echoes and Space Echoes – tape machines. At my studio, I have Eventide and [AMS] RMX 16 [reverbs]. I have digital and analog outboard that's been around since the ‘80s, and I love running stuff through it, printing it, and having that hybrid workflow for two reasons. Firstly, I have to sit back while it prints!
[laughs] It has to be real time.
I like to commit it so that I can then move on and use it for something else. But two, and Jack's the king of this, using stuff like Space Echoes and [Watkins] Copicats [tape delay] and manipulating them in real time adds this life back, this real human touch back into what could otherwise be very sterile. What I'm always searching for is the humanity in stuff, trying to get back to what's real and what's going to help someone connect with this song and this artist. That is so exciting to me. I narrow focus on that, like, “Okay, forget all that other stuff. How do we get to the connection thing?”
Absolutely. I've been using a Fulltone Tube Tape Echo, and I'll print two echoes with slightly different delay times to make a delay. I’ll have an echo plug-in on, replace it with real tape, and everybody in the room goes, “Wow, listen to that!” And it's gnarly sounding; it's not very clean.
It’s almost like the worse it is, the better it is. I remember I did a film soundtrack a few years ago, and we scratched up cassette tape and then recorded the piano through it. I was blown away that something so simple as scratching some tape off could have such a powerful emotional effect.
Speaking of committing, you've worked on some big projects like Kendrick Lamar and Doja Cat. Do you have to do a lot of project management in order to go backward, to make sure you always have a way to find old ideas or alternate takes?
Yeah. We’re pretty good at organizing and keeping on top of it. I'm a little obsessive over file management and workflow. Ultimately, this all means that we can work faster without losing any of the attention to detail. When you have an idea and you want to get the idea recorded, you don’t want anything to get in the way. If someone's saying, “Hey, I love that thing from that version from two weeks back,” if I can get it quickly, I keep the energy of the room going. If I’m asking, “Oh, which version was that again?” then we can lose that flow. Lots of the producers we work with are good at remembering old versions and pulling bits of that back into the latest version. On all of those records we’ve talked about, people never settle. There's always something that could be improved. Sometimes we finish a record the night before it comes out! When you're in that phase, organization is the single most important thing for the mixer. If you are down to the wire, anything to keep the flow going is vital. It comes back to the Real World idea of getting the technology out of the way. If I want to do something, I don't want it to be 30 mouse clicks. I'm from that generation of impatience as well, where I'm like, “Make it faster!”
Right. Some artists don't have a lot of extra time. They have other commitments in their day, and if they come in, they can't watch you calibrate something for two hours.
We're so lucky to work at the best studios with the best assistants. Electric Lady is the kind of studio where I know when we walk in, everything will be perfect. At Jack's studio here, we have nearly a hundred inputs and everything is hooked up. There is no, “I want to record this synth. Let's get it out and plug it in.” It's ready. The setup’s very similar every time, although sometimes we'll bring in a new piece of gear. The engineers, Jack Manning and Dani Perez at Electric Lady, and the team who work here with us in L.A. are the best in the world.
Can you send ahead an input sheet of what you need?
Yeah. Jack and Laura have worked at Electric Lady for so long now that they know. We did some days in Rome and the UK this year, so we will go a day or two early and make sure everything is hooked up. I don't want to be the person holding up the creative flow. We still tend to use minimal plug-ins and commit sounds as we go in. A lot of the producers I work with, even when we're mixing, they say, “We like that, so let's commit to it.” I think that's how we get around this “anything's possible” thing is by being like, “This sounds good. Bounce it to stereo.” Our antidote to endless tracks is I end up bouncing tracks together.
With these bigger jobs, do you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement [NDA]?
I'm sure I've signed some at some point. More than an NDA, it's an understanding that it's not your story to tell. Also, these are my friends, and I want their records to go off and be released in the right way. We spend a lot of time making sure that we're working in a secure way.
Like files can't go anywhere in the middle of a project?
Files and everything around it. Everyone who's an engineer and works with major artists will tell you the same: if you're a talker, no one's going to hire you!
When you're working on a bigger, in-person project, what kind of hours are you looking at?
It really depends. That always used to be a little anxiety-inducing to me, because when you're in-house at a studio, you're there for as long as the client wants to work. If they want to go to six in the morning, you're there till six in the morning. There's something about being freelance that feels a little more liberating. We put in some solid hours, but the time flies when you're loving the music and the people. There are no projects in recent memory where I've thought, “I have to get out. This sucks.” That's partly because I've been fortunate that I love the music and the people that I work with. I will always choose to make records with my friends. One of the greatest gifts about music is that you usually get to work with lovely, wonderful, creative, intelligent, thoughtful people. It's always very focused, and we're making this thing together. I love it so much.
What’s your mixing process?
I use analog outboard and print it, and then I'm a big fan of in-the-box mixing. I like how granular I can get and how easy it is to do revisions and to try ideas. That's the difference between me and the generation before; even though I came up on big consoles and I understand workflow, I didn't do many mixes solely on consoles.
There’s a weird thing where sometimes mixing on the console ties your hands. If someone says, “Make this part jump out of the mix,” there's no headroom left. I’ve got to pull down 35 faders, and now the mix sounds smaller!
Right. But there's also something amazing about the immediacy of having everything on a console, which we lost – especially if you're collaborating with people in a room together. Someone can walk up to a fader and push it up or to an effects unit and start messing with it. With Pro Tools, only one person can operate the computer. With most producers and artists, if they have an idea and know how to use Pro Tools, I’ll step out of the chair and say, “Go for it.” I remember watching Laura do that for the first time. We were working on The 1975 record, and George [Daniel], one of the producers, was trying to explain the effect he wanted. She asked, “Do you just want to do it?” He was a little taken aback, because I don't think he'd had an engineer be like…
“You show me.”
Yeah! I was always taught that the engineer should stay in the chair. But now that we tend to work this way, collaboration means we swap constantly. That's the new way of doing it.
I've worked on records that are going to be heard by a hundred thousand people or something. I’ll think, “Cool! People are going to listen to this!” But when you're thinking millions of listeners...
It’s the greatest feeling in the world to see other people enjoying the music that I've worked on and also felt connected with. There’s this takeout spot near the studio, and a few days after we finished up a record they were blasting it on their sound system outside. They had no idea we’d just finished it here. Or driving along and a car comes past with it blasting out of their stereo. I feel connected, and I think we're all searching for this connection. For me, music is an amazing way to connect with people and feel part of something bigger. It’s so cool and so special that I want to try and inspire and convince other people that it's a great fun thing to do. It annoys me when people who know nothing about music say, “Don't go into music. It isn’t a real job.” It's the opposite. I think it’s the best job in the world.
Oh, I get it. Same here.
Another great thing about music is that it's a leveler. Everybody had to start at the same place. There's no shortcut. No matter what the AI people say, you can't buy taste, and you can’t shortcut getting good at this – it just takes time and hard work.
Can you say what you're working on?
This week I'm doing the Atmos mix for Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX Halftime Show. There's a beabadoobee track [“All I Did Was Dream of You”] that just came out. And we just finished up Jack's record with Bleachers [Everyone for Ten Minutes]. Making that record was so fun, and it’s a great example of pushing the sonic limit, trying new things, and not settling until it’s feeling perfect. Everyone was doing the thing that they love. For me, it's the record that feels closest to when I watch them live. There's an energy when they get together and play in a room, which I think we really captured on this record.
Sometimes albums don't capture that.
That comes from real instruments – there are no soft synths, and it's real drums. There’s an unbeatable thing that happens when you put musicians in a studio together and press record – it’s always been like that, and it always will be. And again, all of this truly comes back to Peter Gabriel. It's funny how it all relates back, in my mind, to the original guy who showed me that that's how you can make records. It's funny thinking about the impact that that record and that studio had on my life, but I guess it is kind of obvious when I look back.
