Luther Russell: How did you end up working with Stevie in the first place?
I ended up working with Stevie because a long-time friend of mine, Bob Margouleff, was working with him. He and Malcolm Cecil. I went to visit them a bunch of times in New York when they were working at Electric Lady. I struck up a friendship with Stevie. Sometime later they decided they were leaving New York for LA and started working at my studio, Crystal. Then they moved, Stevie, Bob and Malcolm, to the Record Plant, who pretty much gave them whatever they wanted — such as a room for themselves. We only had one big recording room so we couldn't accommodate our clients. We were doing a lot of Motown at the time, and them. So anyway, they moved to the Record Plant and one day I got a call and it was Stevie and he said, "Do you have any time today at the studio?" [chuckles] and I said, "Uh, yeah we have some time." Then he asks, "Well, if I come can you engineer the sessions?" and I said, "Sure. Why not." So he came over with his assistant engineer, Gary Olazabal, who became my partner in recording Songs in the Key of Life, and that's kinda how that all happened. It went on for two years almost every day, many hours and huge amounts of material. I guess it was really his most prolific time — he did more songs in those two years I think than he had done before. Something like 200 songs.
Larry Crane: Like started demo-ing them, at least get them sketched out?
Yeah, some would be sketched out, some were more finished than others and we just kept working until he had what he wanted. The last song we cut was "I Wish" and . When that was done we knew that was at least the end of recording. Then began the very long and intricate mixing process. For some reason the three of us decided edits were no good — Stevie didn't want to do any edits, splicing and the like, but he wanted a bunch of extra sounds, like kids laughing, his daughter Aisha in the bathtub, you know just all this other stuff. So all that was assembled on a 24-track. Then my partner built a mixer, a mixer in that it had faders on it, no EQ or anything just stereo faders, and we had three 2-track machines and the 24-track. You would put songs 1, 3, and 5 on one 2-track, songs 2, 4, and 6 on the other 2-track and the third 2-track was the master recorder. When it came time to add effects you would bring them in off the 24 track and mix in real time with tape machine 'A' to the master recorder. And when that song ended fade to tape machine 'B' adding effects cued on the 24 track all to the master recorder until you were done with all the songs. Live. So when you fucked up you had to do it all over again. We cut everything to vinyl, which was also done at Crystal because we had a mastering room as well.
LC: It sounds sort of like a group consensus, but how did the idea of no splicing tape come about?
You know what? I really don't know. The same kind of consensus was taken on echo or reverb. When we did Songs in the Key of Life there really wasn't reverb but we had echo chambers. Actually in the end we did have reverb, the first EMT-250 in the country. It cost something like $20,000 dollars. We had decided we would use as little reverb as possible though, so on that record it was really just room sounds and distant micing techniques that just added up.
LR: What drove you to mic the horns on "Sir Duke" with the horns facing the wall?
We were after a very particular sound and I had a friend, who is now the head of Infinity speakers, he had a stereo shop and he said, "Hey, you gotta try these microphones." I thought, "Oh yeah — right, in a stereo store they're going to have really great microphones." I was on my way to New York, we were going to work there for awhile, and so he said, "Take one with you and try it out." It was a microphone on a long thin aluminum shaft and the capsule was at the end — it was omni-directional and it had a little power supply with a volume control on it. We were doing a session and I set it up on an acoustic guitar — I thought, "Y'know, we'll try it and see what it does." We put it on there and it was unbelievable. It was like you had already put beautiful EQ and gorgeous echo on it all at once — you didn't have to do anything to it. Eventually we thought, "Well shit, lets try it for vocals." And that's what we did. Tried it on vocals and it was brilliant. I had noticed that when horn players, especially sax players, were warming up would always walk up to a wall and play facing against it. So I stood there to hear what it is they're hearing and they're hearing kind of this backwash of sound and it fills out what they're hearing. Otherwise I guess they really just hear a lot of the reed in their mouth and resonance.
LR: You had a great wall there at Crystal too.
It was a big plaster wall in back. So we decided we'll mic them as we normally do, from the front, but then we'll use two of these 419Zs, these mics were made by a company that builds radio telescopes, and mic them from behind with the mics pointed at the wall. .
