Audio engineer David Hough has been with Austin City Limits since the first pilot episode in 1974. Over the course of nearly 40 years, Austin City Limits has presented quality television episodes of live music videos with excellent sound. Several years ago they moved from their longtime home at Studio 6A on the University of Texas campus to the new Moody Theater in downtown Austin. Given their relocation, I thought it'd be a good time to see how things worked behind the scenes. I'd long been a fan of the show; David and I spent an enjoyable afternoon visiting the new and old locations and chatting about the rigors and joy of recording and mixing these live performances.
What was the path that led you to Austin City Limits?
I went to UT [University of Texas] from '68 to '73. I was in the Electrical Engineering program. I was also the drummer in a UT jazz band. We were building our own gear and I was always hanging out at the electronic music lab. I got to play around with Moog synthesizers. We were also building our own stomp boxes. This is when Electro-Harmonix was just getting started. We were playing around with germanium transistors and fuzz boxes. We built our own speaker boxes. Back then there wasn't anything of the sort at RadioShack.
You could buy the raw parts at RadioShack.
Yes. And then it came time to get a real job, so I started poking around recording studios. That's when I met Malcolm Harper with Reelsound Recording. He was just putting together his very first portable studio, so his console was waiting on the Airstream trailer he'd ordered. It was his console that we dragged up to do the pilot. It was B.W. [Buckwheat] Stevenson first and then two weeks later it was Willie Nelson. I was still trying to find a day gig and that's when I fell in with the PBS affiliate — back then it was Channel 9, KLRN -there was an opening in the audio department. We were in a new facility in 1974 that'd been built on the UT campus [in Communications Building B]. The bilingual children's program was using the smaller recording studio and 6A was totally empty! That crew used to take their breaks and play volleyball [in there]. [laughter] Bill Arhos, our program director at KLRN, said, "Let's do something based on The Armadillo World Headquarters [music hall], send it to PBS and see what happens." We sent them a couple of pilots and PBS said, "Send us some more."
Did you set up a temporary control room for tracking?
It was a built control room, but there wasn't any equipment in it.
It was built for that TV studio?
Yeah, that floor had two control rooms and two studios but they were only using one of them. So they built a temporary set. The producer, Paul Bosner, and the director, Bruce Scafe, came down from Dallas for those first two seasons. They were the ones trying to come up with the name of the show. "Should we call it Crossroads or what?" Paul was driving into town and saw the Austin city limits sign. He wrote that down and it stuck. It's a good one.
It doesn't really say anything specific, except "Austin."
Yeah, it doesn't lock it into country music, which is a good thing in case the music scene changes. The first two years were so fun; it was mainly promoting local bands. I'd have to look at the discography to remember it all.
I'm sure it's a ridiculous list of "Who's Who." I'm sure you had Asleep At The Wheel [Tape Op #32].
Yes, and the Texas Playboys came out of retirement. It was great! After the second season, Paul and Bruce figured that was that and they returned to Dallas. But then PBS ordered another season. I was getting my resumé together and thinking about heading to California, but I didn't really like it there. I came back for the third and fourth seasons. I was the A1 position [audio engineer], at that time.
What had been your position before?
On the pilot, I think they let me manipulate the master fader. [laughter] "Just make sure those meters don't go into the red."
The human limiter!
That was the first few years. The director of the fourth year dragged the editing out to Nashville to work on a CMX system out there. We built the entire season of 14 shows in seven days. That wasn't all that fun. Then [director] Allan Muir and [producer] Terry Lickona joined us in 1978, and that's when it got to be fun. That's the crew that locked in and pulled together. Most of that crew is still with us. That's when we started getting Ray Charles, Roy Orbison, Leo Kottke, and Pete Fountain.
What do you think it is about a crew when it does lock in? Is it just a combination of personalities and the same vision?
A lot of it has to do with a sense of humor! [laughter] A lot of it is the M.A.S.H. version of working — you're under so much stress, you have to use humor to pull through. A lot of these people have become family at this point.
Did you ever imagine that it would just keep going and going?
You know, I figured it would go year to year. It wasn't until Allan Muir was around for a few years, and when Gary Menotti took over directing in season 8, that I stopped worrying about it. The show was fortunate to have access to the UT campus. Equipment-wise, it was all analog. After we did the pilots on the borrowed rental gear, we had a budget to buy a console because of the children's bilingual TV show — they were the ones who had the budget. So we bought a 16-channel Neve console that had the 1073 or 1081 units in it, and we got a Studer A80 16-track.
You could do far worse!
Right! And then when bands came in, like Roy Orbison, we'd borrow an outboard console. At one point, I ended up buying a 10 x 4 Ramsa console to do drums and keyboards.
And you could sub-mix things.
Yeah. We could only use 12 tracks for the band. We did that through '87. Finally we got some nice letters from larger acts out of Nashville that convinced our very tight-budgeted general manager to spend some money. That's when we finally upgraded to a 36-channel Neve and a 24-track Studer A820 with Dolby SR.
Did you use the big 14-inch reels?
Yeah, the big reels. They were affordable back then! [laughter] Those are all sitting in the library right now. We ran 2-inch, 24-track from '87 — even after we traded in the Neve — until 2000. We were still recording on 2-inch for about two or three more years (seasons 29 to 36) until we got the Pyramix [digital audio workstation]. I think we stuck with that 2-inch for so many years because we were just in the habit of buying tape. Then when I showed the numbers of what it would cost to backup to an LTO [Linear Tape- Open] it was like, "Oh, let's do that!" We went with Pyramix because of the MADI [Multichannel Audio Digital Interface] connections.
I noticed a lot of MADI here. One of the things you can encounter in the digital realm is overs that tape wouldn't have.
Exactly! Having been through analog all these years, I still track at analog levels. My peaks are only about -10 or -6 dB, and I always aim low because the band plays louder at night in front of a crowd. No kidding.
The sound check and run- through are always totally different from the live show.
Alabama Shakes are a perfect example. She [Brittany Howard] wouldn't sing at all during rehearsal, but during the show she was like a whole different person. It was unbelievable! We knew ahead of time that she'd be saving it. The other funny thing about levels is that broadcast is a whole different loudness than CD or even DVD these days. PBS, even though they're not a commercial outfit, have decided that they're going to follow the CALM [Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation] Act. So that's been my nightmare for the last few months — delivering shows that aren't too loud. The year before that, they were just concerned about dialogue. That wasn't too bad. But the last show I delivered was Wilco and their songs are all over the place dynamically.
They can be very dynamic!
I know, but the broadcasters want everything the same loudness. The way they're measuring loudness on their gear... music is at a disadvantage on that metering. It's because there's a lot more RMS energy. So the meter comes on and it builds up and tells you that it's louder than my ear is telling me. Then the dialogue comes up between the songs and it drops way down. What am I going to do about that? In the analog days, it turns out I was hitting dialogue at -27 [LUFS (Loudness Units, relative to digital Full Scale)], which is what the film guys do. But PBS wanted it louder, so I turned it up. But that meant the music got louder too! [laughter] I didn't want to do that. This last year, after delivering Wilco's show and having three or four shows rejected for being too loud in spots, I pulled out my Ampex ATR 104 [tape deck] and fired up my VU meters. I brought up what they said was 2 dB too loud in my meters and pulled it down. So I'm back to mixing on VU meters now! [laughter]
Really? Is it in the main control room here?
It's in 6A where we used to shoot. We do all our post work in 6A. This room, at Moody, is set up to capture, record and mix. When I do the final editing, mastering and delivery, that's up at 6A back at the UT campus. All the Avid Euphonix System 5 stuff is in both rooms, uptown and downtown. When we spec'd this console, [we made sure] it's exactly the same as what we've had for the past 12 years up in 6A. And we also got the old desk upgraded to the whole new layout. I could take a thumb drive with this layout and finish a mix uptown.
Do you ever have to run both places at once to get a project done?
Sometimes I do.
With a band live on stage, one of your main jobs is to be back here making sure it's getting captured.
Yep.
Are you making a live, 2-track mix at the same time?
Yep. That's the fun part.
Is there redundancy going on, gear- wise? Is it being put to a RAID drive immediately?
AMD gave us a box with Windows 8 on it and we do have that standing by. That was actually the first box to come into this room when we were setting up — Willie Nelson came in with a 50-piece orchestra and we didn't have our Avid Pro Tools setup yet. This room was fumes, glue, paint and dust. I went uptown and grabbed the AMD box, as well as Nuendo, and it captured all 56 tracks. That worked out great. Then Pro Tools came in. I do run both of them, as a redundancy.
Do you run Nuendo while you're running Pro Tools?
At the same time, yeah.
You talked early about the MADI. Is the audio being sent over to campus as well to be achieved at the same time?
What we're doing here is generating a 5.1 mix and a stereo mix in Euphonix, so we have those eight tracks. And that's being piped into AES. Then there's a gadget that embeds those audio tracks with the digital video feed into the fiber cable that runs four miles under the streets, via City Hall and UT, and then to KRLU into a stack of hard drives. Then the Avid editors up there play it back. They have access to all eight audio tracks.
In sync and ready to go.
And then they use their chops for the splices and edits. I used to do a mix old school — 16- or 24-track analog — and I'd mix it down to stereo and then do my splicing, editing and sequencing. This new method gives me the ability to splice up the multitrack to match the video edits. Then I can smooth the applause transition from song to song. It's a backwards way of thinking from the way I've done it before. I've been playing around with that versus my old methods.
The 5.1 and the stereo mix are just being used for editing?
That's the reference the director gets to hear when he's cutting a show. And we hand the band a DVD at the end of the night so they can tell us what songs not to use! [laughter]
You shoot about 90 minutes. Is it an hour long show?
It's an hour edited show, so it will either have two half hour segments with two different bands or a full hour with something like Widespread Panic.
Do you make a new mix then?
Yeah.
So the show is not usually your 5.1 or your stereo mix you created on the fly?
I wait until after the Avid edit.
You're mixing to picture?
Yes. I start off not mixing to picture and I get my basics down. Then I'll look at the picture and put it together. Like, "Oh, Gary [Menotti] got a tight shot of the percussion."
Right. That would look weird if it wasn't present in the audio.
Right. Now that we're getting into bigger name acts — like Steve Miller has his own studio and he wanted to do his own mix, and I'm fine with that. I get my ego out of the way! [laughter] It's actually less work for me, and the artist gets the mix he approves.
Like when you did Radiohead, you mentioned Nigel Godrich had been here.
I thought they were kidding when, at the beginning of the day, the band said, "Our engineer is coming in and he'll have a final mix approval at the end of the day. You won't have to come back to mix the show." I thought it was great! Again, less work for me. I was skeptical, but by golly he did it! [laughter]
You liked his mix?
It was fantastic!
What do you think of the changes in technology? It's been a massive difference to go from your first pilot where sound went into the videotape feed...
The first few years were all mono and straight into 2- inch videotape. The 2-inch was a helical scan, so the oxide wasn't optimized for audio. It wasn't until the fourth or fifth year, when Allan Muir came on, that we started doing our mix-downs in stereo to the [Ampex] ATR 104 with time code on the fourth track. We would ship PBS the reel of audio with time code; they would lock up SMPTE time code and some kind of synchronizer. Later on the Adams-Smith [sync units] came out and we were looking at 3/4-inch U-matic videos. Then we got into digital, around '99 or 2000, with Euphonix. We went to Pro Tools 5 with the A/V option card. That was in '99. Suddenly the video was on a hard drive! That was sweet. We shopped for audio consoles back in '88 or '89. It was down to Studer or Euphonix, in my opinion. We also looked at SSL. We didn't know which of those companies was going to stick around. We went with Euphonix. The Euphonix is fast and that's important in broadcast because we're up against deadlines. But I've got buddies with home studios that are still committed to recording with analog tape. I love analog and I'm glad it's still out there.
When different artists come in, are you dealing with a constant rotation of what equipment an artist would like to use?
Yes, the artist has the final choice. I have no ego that gets in the way. We have a wonderful collection of Shure microphones. We've also had endorsements from AKG. Bands also come in with their favorite mics. The British bands, like Coldplay, usually come in with their Sennheisers and they sound great! I'm totally into the bands getting the sound that they're used to.
You guys seem to be much more into making the artist comfortable versus running them through the mill.
Absolutely. And that's the advantage of having a crew that's been working together for such a long time. Everybody knows what everyone else is doing. It's a well-oiled machine. Sometimes bands will come in kind of grumpy because they are exhausted from the road, and our crew will cheer them up! It helps that we're in the cool indoors and not outside in the wind and heat.
I used to think the show took place outdoors, under the night sky! The trees and the lights...
That's from a photograph that was taken from a hillside south of town. It was projected onto 4x8 sheets of plywood, one at a time. Drawn in, drilled out, painted up. We used Christmas tree light bulbs! The new set is based on the exact same thing.
Have you found your job has had a learning curve over the years?
Oh, absolutely. Especially in the past year or so with the conversion to the Avid. Suddenly I had to become a video editor to learn how to sync my sound with the images.
Do you shoot by the seasons?
Pretty much, but now it's going year-round. Our crew is getting hired out for things that aren't Austin City Limits. For instance, we just did something for Jay-Z and that was a huge shoot. We also just did something with Nas for a cable station I've never even heard of!
It sounds like your days are filled up!
Totally filled up. I'm a little concerned about our crew getting overworked. There's a lot more to do than ever before.
What do you see for the future?
We're in this lovely new facility. It's exciting. It's like a music church! We hope that it will become more like a listening room, as 6A was, and less like a bar.
