Luis Lahav : Dispatch from Israel...

How did it all start?

As a kid I played guitar, and by the age of 17 I was playing in musical theatre orchestra in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. It was the late '60s, and like every other Israeli teenager at that time, I was drafted to the Israeli army. I started as a marine, but eventually joined a military band. Two years later I was released and flew to NYU, planning to study philosophy and cinema studies and even fashion design at some stage, but it didn't take long before I made a turn and started studying at the Institute of Audio Research. While still in school I was looking for a way to set my foot in the New York studio scene, so I contacted the World Bank, telling them I intended to set up a studio in Israel, which was my original plan. Back then they had a policy of assisting third world countries, so they were willing to introduce me to some industry people. One thing led to another and at some point, the people at Ampex introduced me to Neil Diamond's producer, Brooks Arthur, who took me under his wing and made me a runner in his 914 Sound Studios in upstate New York. It took me about six months to become a house engineer, and all of a sudden I was recording the likes of James Taylor, Janis Ian, Blood Sweat and Tears and others, which were all Arthur's clients at that time. One day in 1973 a producer named Mike Apple brought a young and practically unknown artist to the studio, with whom I immediately fell in love. It was Bruce Springsteen and we made two records almost right on the spot [Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent and the E. Street Shuffle, both released in 1973]. After these two records were released we started working on a new one, starting with the title track "Born to Run".

Born to Run was released in 1975, so I guess recording didn't go as fast as with the first two?

It wasn't fast at all. On the song "Born to Run" alone we had been working six months! Springsteen kept changing the lyrics and the song got finished only when he was pleased with the text. But we weren't working only on the vocals that entire time. We were tweaking, over-dubbing and pre-mixing until the last moment. In addition to the rhythm section there were strings, glockenspiel, piano, electric guitars, brasses, about four or five acoustic guitars, you name it. You've got to remember it was only 16-track, so pre-mixing and bouncing was the only way to go. There are probably thousands of parts and instruments in it, all bounced down to sixteen tracks. For example, the sax solo was edited from about seven different solo tracks, and for the snare drum we used a big AKG reverb box, maybe it was a BX20, but we didn't have gates so I had to do yet another bounce, muting the reverb after each snare hit. That's the reason why the reverb on the snare sounds different throughout the song. And it took me hours punching in and out, what you can do these days in seconds.

Do you think working like that — making crucial decisions with no way back — had an important impact on how the song turned out?

I can't really tell. It was about using the tools that were available at the time. When you have more tools and options it changes the way you work, but not necessarily for the worse. It's very common these days to complain about how working with computers made the music making process much longer than it used to be, because of the endless options it gives you. But here's a song that was made thirty years ago and took six months to accomplish — so it's not about the tools you have at a certain point, but more about how you use it and whatever concept you have.

Was there a concept or was it just the way things evolved?

I believe we had in mind that Phil Spector thing...

With whom you had the opportunity to work.

Yeah. Prior to 914 Studios, I was for a short period an assistant at A&R studios, so I was in sessions with Phil Spector. But I was just one of the kids, so it was not a one-on-one experience...

Yet something got into Born to Run. I can't really tell. I mean for me, the best school ever was watching great producers at work, but it wasn't just copy and paste, that's for sure. It was more like getting an attitude toward things, learning to know what's important, what's a keeper, how to listen to things, knowing the difference between psychoacoustics and reality, all of that more than anything specific. But being very young I was very impressionistic, so I guess everything had an influence. I don't quite remember the reasons for doing one thing or another, just the general feeling — and it felt great to be young. [laughs]

So for you it wasn't just engineering the song?

The formal deal was that I was hired as the engineer. But it was my baby, working on that song for half a year, around the clock. When the song was ready everyone realized we were on to something unusual, and it became pretty much clear this was about to set the concept for the rest of the album. Unfortunately, after doing the rhythm section recording for the rest of the songs, I had some family matters, which forced me to return to Israel.

So they moved to another studio and used other musicians for the rest of the album?

Yeah, they started to feel that 914 was getting a little old. Nothing really serious, but the piano was croaking — this sort of stuff. And on the other hand Springsteen had already gathered his live band. For example, on the Born to Run song they used [drummer] Ernest "Boom" Carter, who was basically a jazz drummer, and he does that long, unison-jazzy, syncopated fill [sings] in the middle of the song. Later I did the PA sound for Springsteen's live show and I remember that on the first gigs Max Weinberg had that thing with that fill, like he was desperately struggling to get the exact feel of it. After a while he just gave it up and did his own thing, which was great on its own.

So you were doing PA sound alongside the studio work?

I did a two month tour with Lou Reed, and also became the maintenance engineer at 914. In 914 it was a 16- track, 2-inch Scully machine and we recorded to it though a dbx noise reduction system. Now that's a funny thing. I watched the Born to Run DVD [Born to Run: 30th Anniversary 3-disc Set] and they are listening to the soloed tracks and Springsteen says something like, "This is so untypical of Luis Lahav. The acoustic guitars are so compressed." They really don't understand how come it sounds so different from the mix. But you have to use the same dbx system in order to decode the tracks, otherwise it comes out scrambled.

And what about the rest of the gear?

We were using an API console, wonderful equalizers, but no individual dynamics per channel — so we used a lot of outboard gear, mainly UREI stuff like the LA-2A and LA-3A. The studio had a great microphone collection, lots of Neumann's classics, but back then it was the industry standard. It took the world years to realize that no one is inventing anything better. With the Brauner [VM1] I feel I can sometimes get it to sound even closer than a U47, but whenever I see someone singing into a U47, let's say on a video clip, I regret that I didn't buy a couple of them back then when it wasn't as outrageously expensive as it is today.

I know you have a modified version of the Brauner VM1.

I got the VM1 for the Dana Berger record I've recently done. I was looking for a mic to fit her vocals and the VM1 seemed to be perfect for the task, but it was much beyond the budget. So I contacted Dirk Brauner and asked him if he could make a cut-down version, leaving out some of the directional patterns. He kindly agreed and I was very pleased with the result. Together with the Telefunken V76 it's a great vocal channel. And if you have a very good analog to digital conversion, the rest is much easier.

I seems that the smallness of the Israeli market has an effect on the way records are done.

Yep. Selling 100,000 copies from an album is considered a phenomenal success, with most artists hoping to sell 10,000 copies, but not making a lot more than a few thousand. Record budgets have to be determined on that ratio. $80,000 for a master is considered a huge budget, and it's mostly between $20,000 and $30,000. So plug-ins and virtual instruments are a blessing. I can do things that would otherwise have been out of reach, considering the budget. Unlike working with a band, when you deal with singer/songwriter artists, the result is focused around the vocal performance — so you can achieve great results in a project studio environment. It turned out that most of my recent works are of that nature. Or maybe I choose to do such projects because it fits my setup better. I don't know. Anyway I think it's about time for me to move out of the home studio to a less limiting environment.

You seem to take advantage of all the goodies offered by DAWs. Don't you ever look back?

More than everything else I miss analog tape. Recording to digital is utterly different. To me it's all in the way it deals with transients. With analog tape, peaks are largely ignored or compressed, depending on how you look at it, while digital accepts it all. So you get a lot more punch in digital, but then you have to limit the signal in order to bring up the rest. On analog tape it's done by its nature — a lot more texture which you don't have to unhide. But if you ask about mixing to analog or digital master when it's already recorded and processed digitally, then I care less about that.

But you do use analog summing?

It's a custom unit built for me by Eithan Shamai, a major gearhead who works as the in-house engineer for the Israeli Philharmonic. I don't expect it to be a replacement for an analog console. It's not about that. It's just a complement for the digital mix. I don't know if in the bottom line it gives me better mixes. Many people claim it does work out better for them. But I think that the major advantage of analog summing is that it makes it much easier to blend things together in a friendly way. Starting to mix without the analog summing, I eventually found myself spending too much time, using a lot of processing power just to get things blend. And it's even harder when you mix a song which was overdubbed part by part, where everything is separated by the nature of the process.

Going back to your story — you left New York in 1974, but you came back a few years later.

I moved back to New York in the late seventies, but found myself in a totally different scene. It was the disco era and I was making dance tracks for clubs as some sort of a ghost producer. It was still done mostly live and I had the pleasure to work with likes of [drummer] Bernard Purdie and [pianist] Eddie Palmieri. I spent a few years doing that and some classical music editing, then moved back to Israel, and a few years later once more back to the U.S. I finally settled in Israel in the late eighties. I guess that by then I understood that once you leave New York, your spot fills up very quickly.

Were the eighties when you started to gain a commercial success from your Israeli works?

Yes. We did The Woman That's With Me [by Israeli Singer David Broza, released in 1984 and still considered one of the top selling Israeli albums ever], and a couple of records with Shlomo Artzi [Dance in 1983, Unquiet Night in 1985 and July-August Heat in 1988].

Although no one will argue with the success of these and other records, the common complaint against you back then was about how you took soft, clean vocals and turned them into raspy rock and roll monsters.

I never understood that. If you listen to these records today, you'll find it's untrue for Shlomo, David and most of the other artists I've worked with. There's one album, Gidi Gov's Derech Eretz [1987], where Gidi is actually hoarse, but if you listen to him today, he still is. But here's a funny story. I was in the States when I was asked to come to Israel to do that record, which was a rather massive production with many musicians, and it was really hard to book everyone together. So it turned out that the sessions took place during the Hanukah holidays — Gidi arrived at the studio to do vocals everyday at about seven at the evening, only after he finished his daily engagement as a singer in a Hanukah children show, where he was doing three shows a day. So you get the picture — he was actually singing around the clock, and for my part I was trying to get the best vocal performance. So obviously he got exhausted and on the album he sounds a bit raspy. But for the most part this whole hoarseness thing is a bit of myth. By the way, we mixed Derech Eretz twice after we weren't satisfied with the first mixes. Together with [engineer] Yacov Moreno, we did the second run of mixes three days in a row, but it wasn't full days, because we were also doing PA sound for Shalom Hanoch at the same time. So we started each day mixing in the studio, went to the show hall, did the show, then back to the mixes. And since these shows were loud as hell, when we mixed, our ears were still booming — I think that's why the album has this bombastic, reverberant sound. Many years later I listened to the tracks and it's all close and warm and I wondered how come it ended up so differently.

But your production doesn't always start and end in the studio. In some cases, you're already involved at the early stage of getting the songs together.

Sometimes when an artist is having a writer's block, it's about putting him into the writing discipline. To get his writing muscle into shape, give feedback — make him realize which parts make the essence of a song. For example, on the Ronit Shahar album we just did [Lehat-hil Lehamshich, 2006], only a few of about twenty songs she initially brought in have made it into the record. For her it was a process of redefining her writing, or more correctly her writing habits. I don't think that songwriting is about waiting for the muse to hit you with a song. Like any instrument playing or even sports, you need to practice your writing ability. There are all sorts of techniques, for example reading a book and writing down whatever comes to mind. Getting inspired by an unexpected thing. For some artists it's about making them realize that writing is their day job, and that they need to give it at least a few hours a day, no matter if nothing comes out of it immediately. Sometimes the muse does come eventually, but you can't just sit around hoping it would happen.

Talking about Ronit Shahar's album — you were building the production around her vocal and guitar performance, and I've seen you sitting for about three months, doing vocal takes for 6-8 hours a day, four days a week. How can you tell when that's finally it?

It's really hard to define. One thing for sure — you can have a vocal take which is not perfectly in tune, or not right in time with the rest of the playback and it can still make a great performance. It's more about sentiment and expression than technique. Of course, I'm very happy when the take I like best is also perfectly in tune and in time, but with today's pitching tools I even care less about the tech side. There's more to it than listening to a take on its own. It's listening to the take and listening to its reflection on yourself. Looking back on projects that didn't do well artistically or commercially, I realize they were all done while I wasn't completely in tune with myself. Sometimes you don't pay attention and you actually trying to fulfill an image you had in mind, or a preconception, or just trying to match other people's expectations or influences. That's when you're loosing the thread that's giving you the truth. It's a very delicate thread and it can be easily torn, and on many occasions I did break it down without noticing. Considering the fact that after all, you're dealing with someone else's art, that thread can be very hard. It's all about listening to your inner voice.