Scott Litt | TapeOp

Scott Litt is perhaps best known as the producer of six of R.E.M.'s most successful albums, including Out of Time and Automatic for the People. He's had something of a golden touch, both as a producer — with Katrina and the Waves (and the perennial "Walking on Sunshine"), The Indigo Girls, The Replacements, Juliana Hatfield, Days of the New, Incubus, The Getup Kids, Patti Smith, Ziggy Marley and Crystal Method — and as a mix engineer for Counting Crows, Nirvana, Matthew Sweet and Hole, to name a few. He's also the driving force behind an educational recording facility at the Boys & Girls Club of Venice, to foster a creative environment for a next generation of artists and producers. I fist met him in 1980 when, as a new staff engineer at NYC's Power Station, he mixed some songs for my new band The dB's. He was clearly a cut above anyone we'd been involved with, and we were pleased when he agreed to produce our next record, Repercussion. I've continued to work with him off and on through the years, and every time it's been a great master-class learning experience for me. He's now built a recording and mixing space in Venice Beach, California, and is still mixing and producing.

How did you get the bug that this might be something you'd like to do?

I took a class through The Free School in Boulder, Colorado, which was kind of like The New School [in NYC]. The class was in modern recording techniques. The book called Modern Recording Techniques (by Robert Runstein) was the manual. After I took that class somebody that was involved with it knew of a job in this studio — I think maybe one of the classes might have actually been at this particular studio in Denver. I was offered a job through them, and I quit school to take it. I remember lying awake that night thinking about it — I had moved from New York to Boulder to establish residency to go to college, and I had just started.

You must have really felt a connection with it to do that.

Well, I was a math guy a little bit in school, but once I got to the college level I knew that I could be a math teacher, if I was lucky. I really had just gotten involved in hearing music on that kind of level. The idea of making it seemed like a great career thing, and like a lot of fun. I guess I could have easily been a roadie. I was in this 8-track studio for two years — from '76 to '78 — and it was really about

learning, editing, voiceovers, some jingles and being quick. It was a great experience. Paul Vastola was the chief engineer. I was his assistant, and he was a great teacher.

You were doing razor-blade edits?

It was a 1-inch, 8-track Ampex 440. We had an Ampex 440 2-track for stereo, but we had a mono [deck]- I think it was a 350 or 351, with the medal headgate with the little knob on it that you'd pull off. You learned how to align it — you would record to 1/4- inch, full-track mono. That's the best it gets, you know? I learned on that stuff. The summer of '78 I moved back to New York. In the late '70s there were no technical academies or schools to learn the basics of engineering — the only way to really learn was to do an internship. It was all about the particular studios and their pedigrees. There were famous studios in England, New York and Los Angeles that had unique sounds to them. What you hoped to do was catch on as an intern. The other way that I discovered was to go to the phone book, and that's what I did when I first moved back to New York. I started in the As, and AAA had no answer, and then A-1 [Sound Studios] answered, and I got in for an interview. A-1 was the studio of Herb Abramson — one of the founders of Atlantic Records. There was an echo chamber that was his daughter's bedroom. Herb Abramson and Ahmet Ertegun had decided to part their ways, so he took the equipment and a couple of the R&B and comedy acts. A-1 Sound was on Broadway next to the Beacon Theater. I remember going there for the interview and seeing these tape boxes — Patti Smith and David Johansen — I had been getting into Talking Heads, who were my favorite band. It was a real cheap place after what I had been used to. People would pay in cash. I was at A-1 for about six weeks or so, as I realized what the heck was going on there. The tapes for Patti Smith and stuff were sort of an aberration. We did some crazy stuff recording and project-wise. Since the Talking Heads were one of my favorite groups, and their first record [Talking Heads: 77] was recorded [by the guys that started] Power Station, I looked up where that was and I went over to ask for a job. That was October of '78.

You walked into Tony Bongiovi's office to ask for a job?

I put on a white shirt and I went to Power Station. When the building had been bought, it was a Con Edison power station, so it's a huge concrete building with four or five levels. Tony Bongiovi and Lance Quinn

[the owners] were very involved with the productions and had a relationship with Sire Records and Seymour Stein, [so they did] that Talking Heads record, which I loved. I walked into Power Station at 53rd and 10th and up a flight of stairs — the main lobby was still under construction and the executive offices were up on the second floor.

Did they already have the two studios, or was it just Studio A?

They did have two, but B was still being worked on. A was the main room that had a Neve console and a beautiful, temple-like design of wood.

Were you applying for a job as an intern or as an engineer?

As an assistant. Even though I considered myself an engineer, I wanted to get in there. I had the same mentality that you have when you first start out, which is just, "Get me on a winning team and I'll take care of it."

And that turned out to be a pretty amazing team...

Bob Clearmountain was the chief engineer, and he was fantastic. Neil Dorfsman went on to win a Grammy as a producer and also an engineer. James Farber is still really active. He works mostly with jazz artists and he's great. But Tony Bongiovi — there's legend

around him. One of the ones that he liked to tell was that [at 17] he had written a letter to Motown telling them exactly how he knew what reverb they had made and how they had gotten certain sounds on records. Apparently they were so impressed with the knowledge of this kid that they flew him out to Detroit [in the summers], and he ended up mixing "Love Child" by The Supremes. I'll tell you one thing about Tony: he is an amazing mixer. I remember one of my earliest sessions at Power Station, when I was assisting him on a mix. He did a mix in about 10 minutes — with one echo chamber and one slapback echo — that sounded like "Bridge Over Troubled Water." It was the most unbelievable thing I'd ever heard.

Tony wouldn't spend more than an hour and-a-half on a mix.

Right — he had no patience. This place was built on that session philosophy, where it's like, cut two A-sides in a three-hour session. It was before the days of the long, crazy mixing sessions. The session that I had before the mix with Tony was to sit in with Bob Clearmountain and just observe. It was the recording of vocals for Sister Sledge, the album that Chic [Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers] produced, We Are Family. It was a song called "He's the Greatest Dancer." This was Studio B, so it was still kind of under construction. I was supposed to sit and be quiet, and I remember hearing that session and thinking, "This is what a hit record sounds like." I had never been in a situation like that before. Once the bar is set at a certain height, you can't think about going under it anymore. It was like, "I get it. It's gotta be this good." You don't have to convince somebody that this is major. Bob was engineering — Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards — it blew my mind. So I kept my mouth shut. It turned out a full staff engineer ended up getting sick [a short time later], and I took over the session. Then I stayed an engineer. I'd still get really nervous if I had to engineer something, and I'd make sure everything worked. I would get up for sessions like it was like a sporting event and get excited. I'd not be able to sleep the night before, because there were a lot of things riding on it. It was the big time. The clients that Power Station was getting were major league. As Woody Allen says, "Eighty percent of success is showing up." That opportunity is not really as available as much today for people that are breaking in. I had really great mentors and I really learned. I tried to do the job right and I wasn't a fuck up.

You did two mixes in three hours for The dB's [in 1980], and we were blown away by everything. We'd been recording at Blue Rock Studios [in Soho]. Tom Verlaine was recording and Clearmountain had mixed it and we thought, "That makes sense." We called Power Station and they said, "You can book time, but you'll have to pay $200 on top of the session fee [for Bob Clearmountain]." And we thought, "We're not going to give him $200, plus pay for the studio." They said, "Scott's really good."

Did that really happen? Bob did a few mixes that were world famous, and one of them was when Bob mixed the "Miss You" 12-inch for The Rolling Stones — the sound of that really captivated people. He had done "Good Times" for Chic — he was on fire. He had a great sound going, and it was undeniable. Those were the days before mixers had a manager or agent, so the studio's like, "We can get more for him." I think they were trying to break me as a mixer, too. They saw the good sense of having a number of people that were on staff that were really good. If that was 1980, I'd been there for over a year, and they liked my work.

In three hours you nailed two mixes that were never touched again.

It's funny that you say that, because the idea of mixing two songs in one session is lost now. In those days, if you had a certain amount of time and you wanted to try to get to two songs, you'd do the first one and then the next one you'd do in an hour. You go with your first instinct. If an effect is set up and you forgot to take it down and all of a sudden it's on there, it's like, "Whoa." You tend to go off on a tangent a little bit more in that situation, wouldn't you agree?

Yeah, I think it's great.

Those sounds still hold up.

One thing I remember is you would make the decision pretty quick that maybe there were a couple of tracks that were too out of tune or kind of crummy. So you'd cut them and it would really, really open things up.

That's a really good way to put it, because in a mixing situation that's very true. I never would have thought about that myself, but that's exactly what I do. It's breaking it down into bite-sized pieces. I think if you're putting something in a record that's obscuring, that it's covering up for something that's not right in something else. Getting into layering and all those sounds is not really my thing — maybe dating back to the 8-track days of getting it down into your hands. It's making sure your drums and bass and vocal are working and then going from there, filling in melodic instruments and stuff like that. I'll tell you, I've become much more conscious of tuning than I used to be.

I think you were always really good about that.

I grew up listening to WABC radio in New York, and it was The Supremes, The Beatles and Motown. You've got to imagine then going to work at Power Station, and with Chic, that you learn you've got to lay it back — don't rush. It's usually in the backbeat's hands. I really have prided myself on my records of it being kind of soulful. It had to lock and the bass had to be with the bass drum. When I [started] mixing you would learn to technically lock in the bass and the bass drum sonically — EQ- wise, arrangement-wise and everything. If you could make those two things sing together, you were on your way.

I remember you once telling me that Nile Rodgers used to say, "Once you get the bass and the vocal right, the rest takes care of itself."

It's the bass, but I don't know if it is anymore. Prince kind of dispelled that, because he was doing soul music, and there's not a lot of bass in those songs. He'll use different sounds on the bass drum and things that are hitting on certain beats to make it sound like the bass. I think there's a lot of that now in pop music — bass doesn't translate well. It's like you feel it, but you don't necessarily always hear it. It'd be nice if it made a comeback.

Mixing past the 15-minute point — you've kind of figured out what's not so good. What are you thinking about with something you've never heard before that you're mixing?

That sound. I want to figure out what I can punch up. Then I try to make each of those things as kind of big as possible, unless there's a part that's meant to be low in the mix. I would figure out what was going on in the track. Then I would start with the left [of the console], which is usually the bass drum and the bass and instruments. I'd work individually on each sound, and then put them in a certain stereo perspective. Try to start to get an idea of visualizing what's happening — try to make it sound like each of the instruments has its own kind of area, unless of course you're working toward a leakage/live kind of thing. If you can't do it with EQ, you start resorting to effects. But it's really good to try to do it with equalization, because high frequencies make something sound closer, and less high frequency tends to be farther back — it doesn't make it to your ear as quickly.

So even if something was recorded with a great condenser mic, if you were going to imagine it sitting back, you would dull it up? Yeah, I would if it was ahead of the beat — and in those days you couldn't move it. You

might use delays and things to make it seem like it's farther back in the room, or you're hearing a reflection from it, which means it's in the hallway or something to that effect. You'd try to get the band sounding solid by using those techniques: EQ and effects to put it in the pocket. At the same time you can make everything sound like it's got it's own little thing going on, but you can't always do it.

You're not afraid to pan pretty wide?

I'm still discovering things about panning. I don't think I've learned the best ways yet. I don't think you need a speaker behind you to make something sound like it's coming from behind you. I want to get better at that. I'm thinking it's down to phase correlations, the way that boom boxes have surround sound — that's a phase-related thing if you can really zone in on that. The ideal studio for me would be where they sell car speakers — there's a panel and you can hit all these different buttons and it has a different mix coming up at you. You listen to some of the early mono recordings, and they're so beautiful. Panning now usually applies to a lot of things that are recorded in stereo and put left and right — it's not quite the same.

I've always been fascinated by Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine."

That was in '85 when I had been freelance for a couple of years. I still had a relationship with Power Station, where I could bring stuff in and they'd give me a decent rate — I still loved the studio. I had been getting my mixing and producing chops together in England and Canada. I was asked to mix Katrina and the Waves' first album [Walking on Sunshine]. I was in the U.K. and I mixed it there for Capitol Records, but they had one last song, which was "Walking on Sunshine." If I recall correctly, it was a drum machine, and I think the horns were on it — it wasn't finished.

I was thinking you re-cut the horns...

I remember the last thing being the drums, and we did them at about 2 a.m. at Power Station in Studio B. Alex [Cooper] played great, and the song exploded. I kept looking over at the record button to make sure it's getting it as he's playing this — it was a magical thing. The next few hours was kind of a blur of flying things around, but I remember the last thing of cutting that intro of the "do-dak-a" drum stuff — definitely Motown meets [Wham!'s] "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go." I remember finishing it at 7 a.m., going out into the lobby and thinking, "This sounds really good." Engineer Jason Corsaro was working with the group Power Station — Robert Palmer, Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson, with Andy and John Taylor of Duran Duran. He came into Studio B and I played him "Walking on Sunshine" and he said, "That's really good." I said, "Let me come up and hear what you're doing." By this time Power Station had a third studio — Studio C — which was an SSL console. I'd been up all night and feeling pretty good about things. The album was done and this single sounds really good. I go upstairs and he plays me a mix they had finished, which was the [Power Station] song "Some Like it Hot." Those drums — it sounded like it was from another planet. I was excited about "Walking on Sunshine" for about 20 minutes until I heard that. I was like, "What have I been doing?" Both those records finished on the same morning, and they were very different.

Even today it sounds more current than the Power Station single. That sounds pretty dated.

I don't know. I would tend to say that if you listen to Power Station again, I have a feeling that those sounds are going to hold up. I just do. They were different, but they were good. Jason plugging the [Yamaha] Rev-1 into the Rev-7 [digital reverbs] and making a "Rev-8" out of it! It was the greatest thing ever.

So this was a period where you were freelance and you worked at a lot of places.

I left Power Station in about 1983 to become freelance. That was basically because I had been told that I could make a lot more money not being on a weekly salary and stuff like that. Even though I really liked Power Station, it was time to move, not with small credit to The dB's [Repercussion], which was my first production.

You were around producers at Power Station and you were engineering, and now you wanted to produce?

I usually use this comparison, but being an engineer is really like being a cinematographer and being a producer is like being the director of a film. It seemed logical. I'd seen too many sessions where things had been turned around by hitting the right knob at the right time. My musical knowledge at the time was not really astute, but I was lucky enough to be around amazing musicians. As 1983 got rolling, it was the beginning of post-punk or college rock, later to become alternative — if you want to use those kind of words. The dB's were on the cutting edge of that. Through you guys R.E.M. heard my work. As I became more involved in doing low budget, college radio productions, I couldn't do them at Power Station because it was too expensive to use the studio. The budgets couldn't afford it. When I would travel I would see that college radio was really cool in a lot of places. In New York it wasn't. Talking about leaving New York — the community there kind of sucked. Everybody was competing against each other in a negative way. There wasn't a community where you could get together with other engineers or producers and hang out. Everybody was trying to beat everybody.

And working 18 hours a day.

Having to go to bed at 7 a.m. when the garbage trucks are out — it can get to you. The few sessions I'd done in California were really great. R.E.M. gave me the opportunity to make money and relocate and change my home base. It had been 18 years in New York, so I was ready for a change.

You and R.E.M. met up at a point in your respective evolutions where it really fit. The biggest learning I got from that was when "Losing My Religion" became such a big hit, and Out Of Time

became a number one album. When you have something like that as a producer or engineer, it really is freeing. You could then kind of do anything. I started to see music as very different then. It was more trying to set boundaries, to do things differently and to try to stretch the barriers once you've hit it over.

"Losing My Religion" seems like an undeniable hit here in retrospect, but mandolin was not an instrument really rockin' up the charts at that time.

I'll be the first to tell you that I was really lucky to hook up with R.E.M. at that time, and for them to trust me to do six records. I remember distinctly on Document - the first record we did — when I was finishing "The One I Love," I would play Whitney Houston or anything against it, not trying make it sound similar, but to just make it sound as big and as wonderful in its own way. I thought, "This is where this needs to go, to be the representative of this type of music against all these other representatives." I think that their past producers have had that, too. Joe Boyd — fantastic. Mitch [Easter] and Don [Dixon] — of course. Don Gehman had done really big Bee Gees records and stuff, and was a great engineer. With R.E.M. there were certain things that they were and you didn't want to go too nuts. "Losing My Religion" — I don't know if it was bold or not. "The One I Love" had been a big radio hit and it sounded good in a rock, electric way. After we made the album Green, which had a lot of experimentation on it, I think that's when a lot of that started. We had to do Green in order to make Out of Time, and we had to make Out of Time in order to make Automatic For the People. I see them as logical progressions.

That has to have come from you as well as the band. "How can we go further?" A lot of times I wouldn't bother to say what my vision

was. I did on Automatic... on the song "Drive" — the theme of that album of having kind of a '70s feel to it. I was always into that stuff, like Queen and Roy Thomas Baker. Peter's guitar lines are 12 tracks of guitar. I would have a vision of where I wanted it to be, but that's so I would have a place to go on the horizon. I would share it with the guys sometimes, but I would mostly do it by how I made it sound.

You produced The Replacements' All Shook Down. There must have been some stories...

When I first met the Replacements, I went up to meet them at the Warner Brothers offices in midtown. I walked into the conference room, and these four guys tackled me. They had been left in the room and told to "not to do anything" for five minutes, and they had found all this carbon paper and they had painted war paint on their faces and arms — it looked like Lord of the Flies. I walked in and they tackled me — that was how I met them. Later when I was producing them, someone sent me a birthday strip-a-gram at the studio, and after she got dressed, Paul made such good friends with her that she hung out all day, celebrated with us and ended up singing on that song "My Little Problem." It was a great birthday.

You ended up at Ocean Way Recording in Hollywood. How did this compare to Power Station?

It wasn't as competitive, which was nice. Ocean Way had owner Allen Sides, who really liked vintage equipment and kept it updated. They had made some amazing records there. I mean, people talk about Sunset Sound and the Capitol Studios — the Capitol Studios at the time were in (kind of) disrepair. Ocean Way was really fun to work at. They had this legacy of The Mamas & the Papas, The Beach Boys and all this great sounding stuff. It was a natural for me to be attracted to a studio that had a history like that.

But you were also back in a community where you could walk down the hall and run into somebody else who might be a peer — and this must influence the work you're doing.

I'm not sure I was ever really part of the "L.A. community," because I was doing more alternative- based projects. It was more having a home base — I ended up building my own studio at Ocean Way...

Louie's Clubhouse.

Right. I liked the environs there, and it was close to my house. The culture was really good, but I wasn't one to really pal around with Burt Bacharach or something. The L.A. scene on the alternative side wasn't really happening. It was more hair metal bands than the kind of stuff I was doing. I was doing the Indigo Girls, R.E.M., Paul Kelly, That Petrol Emotion and Patti Smith. I was moving back and forth between coasts. It was never the situation that I had at Power Station, which was more competitive, but also more "pat on the back" kind of stuff.

Tell me about your new studio. Do you have big monitors?

Yeah, I have JBL monitors that Allen Sides put together for me, bi-amped with two cabinets on each side. The tops are these 4333As and the tweeters are these crystals that they had in the '70s. They switched them to plastic, but they didn't work as well as the glass ones. Allen hand-picked these — they used to be in his personal monitoring room. They sound really, really great.

What about the room?

There are no parallel walls. When I built the house and the studio I went with technically a prefab house, and the walls are made with SIP [structurally insulated panel] — oriented strand board [OSB] with a big piece of Styrofoam in the middle. The sound transmission factor is better than stone — it's unbelievable. The ceilings have panels I made based on an Ocean Way design, with Owens Corning 703. The floor is hardwood — Allen Sides had told me once that the ceiling should be different from the floor — if the floor's going to be hard, make the ceiling soft. I've got a set of Pearl drums that Bill Berry [R.E.M.] gave me that are great, a Hammond B-3 organ, a lot of old, vintage keyboards, a Vox AC- 30 and a little SWR [amp] for the bass — a good setup for a 3- or 4-piece band. I really like the mixes I'm getting out of here. That's the beauty of a Neve 8058 console — you have to work with it, but I'm so familiar with that sound. I'm really pleased with it.

What are you using for outboard effects?

This is basically the idea behind my setup right now — I use the Neve and the Fairchild (and the Waves L3) as the sounds. I EQ on the console, but all the automation is done in Pro Tools. If there's something severe that needs to be done or some crazy effect, I'll use Pro Tools for that. What I use my board for is the overall sound. The basic effects are a [Yamaha] Rev-7 reverb, a couple of [Lexicon] PCM 42 mono delays, an Ursa Major Space Station [SST-282] and an Eventide H910 Harmonizer that I use with the control voltage output, to vary it.

That sounds like a great setup — the mental ergonomics of it.

It's the way to keep it modern and also use some of the old techniques that shouldn't be tossed aside. Just because there's a plug-in — I still have to believe that when you put an analog signal through some of these units it's going to give you a sound that no one else can get if they don't have that particular piece of gear. You're making something that absolutely has not been made before.

Do you have Flying Faders automation?

No, I use my hands! Those kind of hands-on moves are usually not automated. It's not a question of recalling a mix and adding a little of this — I try to make it more manual than that and make each mix meaningful. My setup is simple enough, and with what I learned from Tony Bongiovi, I can recall a mix by writing down the effects sends, and then with my ears match the mix levels and EQ and fix what needs to be fixed.

That's a skill that I'm afraid has gone by the wayside. I've seen you do it.

It might not be identical, but the main thing is educating people that it's not a studio of little tweaks. Before I became an engineer and producer, instead of playing air guitar I would "air conduct," pretending to be the conductor of the "Jupiter Symphony" by Mozart. When I started engineering I always would have my hands on the faders — nervous energy — and try to do a bit of "conducting" when I was working. I now realize that to be a strength of mine, so I try to utilize it. I let Pro Tools do major things like mutes and such, I try to get the overall sound through the console, and then I try to do each mix as a unique performance on my part.

Have you already done all the small vocal rides in Pro Tools and then you're doing rides on other things?

Pretty much the comps are done too. You know, having worked with great singers — from Carly Simon to Michael Stipe to Patti Smith — there are differences in performances from take to take, and you want to combine the takes. To do that back in the day of tape was really more involved than it is now, but if you took your time and put a little sound on that, the comp was stronger than the parts. That's what kind of gets lost now — it's not the final mixing stage, but you are mixing the vocal, as it were.

I would watch you doing vocal comps in those days. You were using EQ to match up proximity; you were doing rides and it was really hands-on.

The great thing about doing vocal comps is that you'd put up the drums, the bass and the vocal and you'd have your record. If it wasn't happening that way, something was wrong.

What about the record side?

As little EQ as possible. You are cleaning up problems in the recording process, whether it's a proximity issue or sibilance. I don't think any non-usable information should be stored — get rid of the problems. And on record levels — I'm not one for maximum level on all instruments. That was something that needed to be done in the day of analog tape, but not now.

There was a day when it was pretty automatic to put up kick and snare samples.

Yeah, it was great while it lasted! [laughs] I really try to make what's on tape work. If the snare sound is not very good on the recorded track, I'll try to make it work without a great snare before I'll go to a sample. The sampled drum hits of the '80s and '90s were a kind of precursor to Pro Tools today, where everything is one big sample. You can really create and capitalize on a lot of great things that are available today.

What are you aware of that you do differently from other folks?

I'm fast. I'm faster!

I think that you have been able to preserve the magic and the uniqueness of each artist you've worked with, instead of making them more like everyone else. Your stuff sounds very professional, but it's not cookie-cutter.

A friend of mine once said to me about an R.E.M. track, "You always make the vocal sound so important." And I thought, "What a great compliment that is." To make something that sounds timeless, that doesn't sound cheesy in a few years, is really great. A lot of times it's really luck. Sometimes I'm not happy with what I've done. I remember when we made [R.E.M.'s] Automatic for the People, the one song we couldn't lick was "Ignoreland." The rough mix was the best and we could never top it — we kept adding everything. It's the one song where I was like, "I'm not feeling this," but it made it in and that was it. And then at a Patti Smith concert I met Chris Martin from Coldplay, and he said that he loved "Ignoreland."

What are some things you produced that are your faves? What would you play for people as examples?

"Losing My Religion" [R.E.M.], an Incubus track, "Living a Lie" [The dB's], "My Sister," [Juliana Hatfield] — instead of the more famous ones like "Everybody Hurts" [R.E.M.] or "Heart-Shaped Box" [Nirvana].

I remember reading that Bob Clearmountain always wanted to remix the Traffic records. Then one day he realized that this would make them different records and he gave up on that. Is there one record you wished you'd remixed?

The one from my stuff is Monster, by R.E.M., because I don't think I did very good mixes and I think I could make it better. If I had the situation then that I have now I could have made that a really different record. The thing I always wanted to mix — and that I tried to get the chance to do — was when they reissued The Beatles' stuff, and I was lobbying to do Rubber Soul. Jeff Jones, who is a good friend, was in charge of that for Apple Corps.

Wow, you're hurting me.

Can you imagine? I know that record so well, I think I could have done it with integrity. I would love to do Between the Buttons by the Stones, too.

What advise would you give to beginning mixers and engineers?

I'd say experiment a lot — particularly now, where it can be done on a laptop. Try a number of different things — mixes without equalization, with equalization or without any processing. In particular try filtering things — if you have a song with a few things on it, maybe one track with nothing above 1 kHz, the next with only 2-5 kHz, the next above that — and play them against each other and see the effects that those kind of things have. That's the beauty of mixing. When you start to sonically understand how things come together, it will really help you down the road. I think what I've learned as a mixer is that the best mixes have listenability — the ones you can listen to over and over again. Individually the instruments kind of disappear, and what you get is the song. I still hold on to that — that the song has to hold together. After making it listenable, you still have to make sure it sounds impressive. Some of the details that seem important to you now might not be as important in the grand scheme of things.