Arnie Acosta

Arnie Acosta is a man who always plays an integral part when and where his efforts are put to use. He was established as a part of the hit factory that was A&M Records in the label's heyday, the 1980s, where the likes of The Police, The Bangles, Bryan Adams and "We Are The World" dominated the airwaves. He's now closely associated with the rock band U2. His career is a long one, however, intersecting with pop, jazz and a lot of rock n' roll history. After A&M, he later went on to work out of The Mastering Lab in Los Angeles, where he continues 'til this day making singles and album recordings ready for manufacture and radio. A few years ago he remastered the entire U2 catalog for Apple's iTunes Music Store. He won a 2006 Grammy Album of the Year award for U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb for his role as mastering engineer, not to mention Song Of The Year and Rock Album Of The Year.

How many records do you think you've mastered in your career so far?

There's no way of really reading that number. It has to be hundreds upon hundreds if not thousands since 1966, when I started.

What brought you to music?

I was in the service in Southeast Asia and had been working with a lot of sophisticated electronic equipment that the National Security Agency and the CIA were sending us to monitor activities over there. When I got out of the service my brother and his wife invited me to stay with them in New York knowing that I was kind of "messed up" from the service. I flew there only to find out that my sister-in-law was working at a studio. She invited me to the studio and I ended up working for them the very next day. I remember when I walked in I looked at all this audio equipment and remember thinking that it looked like it came out of the Smithsonian Institute. It looked to me like vintage stuff compared to what I was used to working with in the service! It was owned by a jazz flugelhorn player and arranger. His studio actually had the very first 8-track recorder. I was told it was Les Paul's Ampex 300 that he had designed and modified for multi-channel recording. It was a high-end studio that primarily did all the big ad agency stuff — music for TV ads, etc. That's where I got my start.

Did you start mastering records there?

No, I started out as a second engineer in the live studio. Mastering then hadn't come into its own yet, as far as independent mastering [was concerned]. All the major labels had their own mastering rooms, but they were not anything like what we know as mastering rooms today. Back then, after "mix downs" were finished, they would send the mixes "upstairs" and have the cutter cut it without the true realization that you could really wreak havoc on a perhaps otherwise good recording by having poor mastering. In that time, mastering wasn't considered a particular art or an integral part of the process. It was primarily just a matter of transferring onto disc, with the limited parameters that you had to maintain for lacquer masters.

From there, where did you branch out to?

Well, after about fifteen months I couldn't stand New York any longer. Back in the '60s, I felt it was worse than Vietnam. So I came back to the West Coast hunting for work. The only thing that I could find at the time was at this small company in the San Fernando Valley called Muntz Stereo. It was owned by a man that was called "Mad Man Muntz", a rather unique entrepreneur that was one of the innovators of the 8-track tape recorder. The company manufactured 8-track cassettes. Remember those? The facility also had a small studio and editing bay, so I actually went to work for Muntz in his engineering department. Strangely enough, one of the people working there was the ex-wife of Bill Putnam... the legendary Bill Putnam [ Tape Op #24 ]. Knowing that I wanted to get back into the studio business, she arranged through Bill to get me an interview to work at his facilities, United Western Recorders in Hollywood, which were then the largest independent studios in California. While at United Western Recorders I started out just doing session setups, some seconding and even night studio office management. So I was really getting my "chops" in how the industry works, and how the business runs. It was really cool! It was in that era where all your great "studio cats" were playing all the time. I got my foot in the door and it was exciting. While there I had the opportunity to watch the mastering process by a guy named Bill Perkins, the great sax player who I guess at the time was moonlighting as a mastering guy for Bill Putnam. From United Western I went to work at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood. Gold Star was considered the home of rock n' roll in those days. It was there that I actually learned the fundamentals of cutting records. Most of the disc work was refs and publisher dubs — references for the artists and publishers. Back then, the major labels were doing their own final mastering for replication. Between working at United Western Recorders and Gold Star I got to meet and be around so many great artists of the time, like the Righteous Brothers, Iron Butterfly, Sonny and Cher, Frank Sinatra and on and on. From there I went to work at Wally Heider's Studio. It was there that I really started to learn how to master records on an old Neumann lathe.

Wally Heider did the whole San Francisco scene.

He did a multitude of different things. He had his L.A. facility and his San Francisco facility. He was actually an attorney by training — a brilliant guy. He was also a jazz aficionado and a great engineer with a great pair of ears. While working at Heider's, I heard on the street about this new independent mastering facility called The Mastering Lab that was going to be opening soon. The buzz was that "you gotta hear these speakers they have." So one day I hightailed it over to The Mastering Lab and introduced myself to Doug Sax, the owner. He invited me to come in and listen and I was totally blown away by the sound of his monitoring system. Doug still had a mono cutter head, and was just ready to receive a Neumann SX-68 stereo cutter head from Gotham Audio in New York. After listening to the monitor system that day I turned to Doug and said, "Doug, I want to work with you." Looking back, what a great stroke of luck it was for me to be associated with Doug Sax and The Mastering Lab. Within months of starting up, the Lab saw an enormous increase in business week-to-week. We were garnering twenty-five to thirty-five percent of all the chart activity at that time. Although there were at least two other independent mastering facilities operating at that time, they were "out-of- the-box" kind of facilities, and not really any real competition for us. It was a very exciting and really creative time because we were really truly making a difference in what the public would eventually hear.

Do you remember some of the records you worked on back then?

Oh sure — Elton John's Yellow Brick Road, the Who's Quadrophenia and Tommy soundtracks. I also did work for Carly Simon, Ringo Starr, Ray Charles... too many to list. Let me say something about Doug Sax: Doug has contributed so much to the record business through his ceaseless efforts in improving the quality of mastering and the recording arts in general. To have been associated with him and The Mastering Lab through all these years has been an incalculable experience. To this day I think of Doug as a great friend and mentor. In those days the work was so busy that you had no time for reflecting on other things. It was just madness — that's how busy The Mastering Lab was.

At some point you went to A&M Mastering. How did that happen?

I left The Mastering Lab. I kind of got "burnt out" working twelve to fourteen hours a day for about seven years. I took a few months off and then eventually went to work for Warner Brothers. I was mastering for them in North Hollywood for a couple of years, then from there I went to A&M Records. I was hired at A&M Mastering right after Bernie Grundman left to start his own mastering facility, and I actually took over Bernie's old room at A&M in 1984.

So all the records are coming to you now?

There were two other guys that were working there, kind of Bernie's minions that took over the overflow that he couldn't do. So there were actually three mastering suites that were virtually identical. I guess you could say I was doing a majority of all the A&M label stuff and a lot of private clients. That's where I started with U2. They were working with Jimmy Iovine, who was in charge of the studio at the time, working on the Rattle and Hum album. So they brought me a couple of songs to do some reference work and to have a shoot out with other cutting rooms in town. They liked my work the best, so I ended up doing the album and all the singles. I've been working with them ever since.

You've done everything since then for U2?

Every record except the Pop album. The producers wanted to work in New York on that one and were all set up to do it in New York. So they did the mastering there, and frankly I was happy that they made that decision, because I never cared for the album in the first place. There were a couple of cuts off of it that were great. They were being taken into a direction that I felt that wasn't really them and I felt that you could hear it in the music.

Did the Achtung Baby record pose any challenges?

I think sonically it was their best album. It had a tremendous bandwidth and bass components that were really shocking. It tended to be a kind of an outrageous sound. People still come up to me and say, "That Achtung Baby sounds amazing!"

With their records, would they bring in various mixes to you, and you would then have to compile something, or was it all finished?

Their M.O. is that they send me numerous amounts of mixes, and to try this and try that. There's usually a lot of editing involved, where they want to take a chorus from this thing, a break from that, etc. With the exception of Rattle and Hum, none of the albums were strung together. Before I get any further, regarding their M.O., I'd like to mention Cheryl Engels of Partial Productions, Inc. She has been an integral part of the whole post-production mastering process from the very beginning. She has been responsible for keeping all these post-production efforts alive and well. She keeps a copious amount of notes in her computer about everything we've ever done — every EQ, every setting and every nuance about every mix. She is an amazing, amazing person. All these records would not have been completed without her because of the complexity of the way U2 works. Cheryl handles all the communications from them as well. Originally, her primary responsibility was quality control of the final product, but since she has gone well beyond that responsibility, overseeing so many aspects of the production — both audio and video. They are too numerous to list.

Do you have input on the running order of the songs on the album?

Yeah, I do have a little bit of input. I tell the guys if there is something wrong with the mixes, and I make comments on a track that doesn't seem to fit. That's a natural thing for most mastering engineers. After you've had so much experience you really kind of know intuitively how a record should flow. It's a responsibility to give your input in a sense, when you've had a working relationship as long as I've had with these guys. It's kind of unique for me, because I don't get to talk with them that much. Cheryl handles correspondence, a lot of faxing, a lot of emails, about all the things that are going on. I just don't have the time to do that. Occasionally, I'll talk to Edge and get these problems with the mixes resolved.

You completed two huge projects for them. One was the How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb CD...

I love the title...

... and of course their entire catalog for iTunes.

I think it was three hundred and sixty-six songs that I did.

Approaching mastering for downloaded music — that must have presented a whole new set of challenges.

Exactly. It is all up in the air because of the compression scheme that iTunes uses. In reality, in this world, convenience listening is what it turns out to be. You're not necessarily talking about sonic purity as far as what's going on if you are listening over an iPod. The only approach that I always take, no matter what I am doing, is to give a full bandwidth and then go for it as you would like to hear it in a large scale professional monitoring situation. That way if there's any deficiency in the encryption, then it's their problem. It's mostly hit and miss anyway, and it was certainly one of the first questions that would be raised if there was any kind of nuance that you could put into the music for more fidelity. You would probably have to take each song and do a mastering session, have it loaded into an iPod and then listen back. In the end it would have taken months and months, and we had a very narrow window of time.

You went back to the original masters for the AAC files?

As close as we could. Many of them were taken from first generation U-matic masters that I had created way back when. We did use several original masters.

I can't imagine how many masters you must have had there.

The room was just overloaded with boxes. Luckily, as I had said before, Cheryl Engels had everything coordinated because of her filing system and technique for cataloging these thousands of tapes. Without her it would have been total chaos.

What are you working on now? I mean, are there any new projects coming up? Well, I'm just taking it easy right now. Right now I am working on a project of classical music recorded in

Russia, and we are mixing on Pro Tools.

Later you left A&M?

Eventually left A&M around 1994.

So from then on, where were you located?

What happened at A&M was really interesting. When I was there, A&M was initially sold to PolyGram and PolyGram was then sold to Universal. I went through two changes in regimes there and things changed dramatically. The new people came in and it went from a big-family-like operation to running a shoe factory. The new people had that "bean counter" mentality, you know, that hierarchical mentality. About a year before I left A&M, I had actually refused to work on any kind of "rap music". It was just a moral judgment on my part. I couldn't do it morally or spiritually. So I became like "Peck's Bad Boy". Anyway, they started hassling me. One day I just told them, "Listen, come on guys, I've been around the block too many times to put up with this kind of stuff. I'm leaving. Goodbye." I got in my "huff- mobile" and drove off the A&M lot. Strangely enough, just a few days later, the All That You Can't Leave Behind project came along. All of a sudden I didn't have a room to work in, so I called up Doug at The Mastering Lab and said, "Doug, look, I'm in a bind. I left A&M. I need a room to work." Doug said, "Yeah, I'll get you a set of keys and come on in and just work around the regular staff." I went there and did my night and weekend thing and it worked out fine. I've been working out of there since.

So, you're right back there with Doug Sax?

Right where it started — it was so great. Doug is one of the most gracious people anyway, a real nice guy. So that's the way I've been working. It just worked out perfectly. It's karmic. You have these people that enter your life for whatever strange reasons that you don't even contemplate, and then years later you realize what real friendship and bonding took place with all this. You might think of it as just hard work and career, but it opens up with a lot of wonderful things. I was really fretting like, "Oh my god, another U2 project and I have no room to work out of." Of course I was familiar with the Lab to begin with, so it wasn't an alien environment that I would have to work out of. It worked out perfectly. I couldn't have asked for anything better than that.

Do you have a favorite format when you receive a project?

Well, not anymore — the technology is changing so rapidly. I am basically a proponent of analog recording and always will be until digital technology evolves further. I was surprised recently during the iTunes marathon of how sonically viable the U-matic PCM masters sounded with the old U2 stuff. At the time, my ears were attuned to HD digital recordings. I noticed the sonority I was getting back off of the U-matics as opposed to what my ears were used to from listening to high-def digital formats. Obviously the music business today necessitates the need for DAWs as a "quick tool" to get through the process. It's just the way it is.

What about the apparent loudness of records that's happened during the years?

Well, there are different approaches for different music. Every different kind of program material has its own frailties, as far as that goes. You have to know when you are reaching that critical stage where it's losing its own little nuance because of a level problem or lack of dynamics. Today's pop music is actually recorded at almost the threshold of pain, as far as level goes, and yes, it does induce its own nuances no matter what system you are using. You have to be discerning and in control and be able to know what correct levels to record at, because certain instrumentation, certain sonic environments, depending on the room that it's done in — all these things have interplay with the actual overall sound of complex musical situations. Even in digital devices where you have tremendous bandwidth and headroom, you still must critically listen and play it back to find out what [the] criteria is for the best sound. There is no other way to do it. It's all a kind of "seat-of-the-pants" situation.

What are your personal thoughts about mastering?

In a sense it's so subjective, other than the kind of rote things that you have to do depending on the media you are working with. The mastering engineer puts the onus on by critically dissecting someone's work that they have put their blood, sweat and tears into. It seems like an arrogant position to be in, to try and tell a producer or an engineer some of the frailties of the mix, or some certain sonic component of a recording, but that's the job and it's very subjective. It's something that takes literally years of critical listening to do. If you were giving a class in mastering, the first order of the day would be the fact of monitoring — how you listen and what you are listening for — and being super-critical of every little nuance in the recording. That's kind of like coming from a negative point of view, but it's actually imbued with positivism because you are trying to make the best of what you have. So mastering is just a kind of unique last chance to get things right. Yeah, and there's conjecture of what's right to whom, but in fact, there is criteria to be able to be discerning and critical and be correct at the same time. You also have to anticipate what people are listening on and what their environments are, and what's best for this and what's best for that. It's a very subjective kind of situation, as mixing is. Mixing is the same way. It's an evaluation of where things should be and what they should sound like, and there's no real way to explain it. It's just an intuitive aspect of the human experience in a technical sense. r

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