But New York City was calling. “Engineers came over from New York and displayed cool studio wizardry that we knew nothing about,” he said. “I decided that I needed to see that firsthand.” He got a job as assistant engineer at midtown’s Sound on Sound in 1992. It was a commercial studio— elite, state-of-the-art, high-pressure, and corporate—that recorded jingles and worked with New York’s first-call session players, arrangers, and producers.
Siket made it his business to be at work when Butch Vig came to check out Sound on Sound for Sonic Youth. “At that point, Butch was the hottest producer in the country,” Siket recalls. Vig had just produced Nirvana’s Nevermind. “I told him, ‘We’re the greatest. You have to record here.’” Siket worked those sessions with Vig (for Sonic Youth’s Dirty) and continued to work with him on Freedy Johnston’s critically acclaimed This Perfect World, Sonic Youth’s Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star; Helmet’s Betty; and many others.
That was just the beginning. Siket went on to build a diverse and extensive discography doing sessions with Steve Lillywhite, Phish, moe., and a small army of festival headliners, and also started teaching at New York’s School of Audio Engineering. He’s still at it. “One thing I always dreaded was waking up and seeing a recording console,” he says, referring to the small studio that currently doubles as his Manhattan apartment. “I spend 12-14 hours a day looking at one now, anyway. I see it all day long.”
Premier Guitar spoke with Siket about working with great producers, Phish’s unorthodox approach to the studio, the death of tape, the pros and cons of digital recording, capturing great guitar tones, and window-shopping with Thurston Moore.
You’re sometimes credited as either the engineer, mixer, or producer. How do you define those different responsibilities?
An engineer is the guy who gets the sounds. He or she sets up and chooses microphones, employs equalization, compression, delay and reverb—and basically does the recording. The mixer balances the final recording to two tracks, consolidates all the tracks, whether it’s 4-track, 8-track, 16-track, 24-track, 48-track—or now in the digital age, unlimited, ad nauseam tracks—to a stereo file or an analog 2-track. The producer is responsible for how a record comes out. He or she hires the engineer, decides to work with a band or gets hired by a band, and chooses the songs. How involved producers are varies. Sometimes they cowrite and change a lot of stuff. Sometimes they don’t. They hopefully coax a great performance. They choose the takes. They can be hands-on in the mixing. I’ve had producers push me aside, grab the EQ, and say, “No, no, no. Do it like this.” Others don’t touch the console, they are there just as an objective ear. Producers are also responsible for keeping it on budget, perhaps hiring session musicians, choosing the studio, and they are the liaison with the record company. But basically, the producer is responsible for how the record turns out.
Let’s talk about some of the different producers you worked with. What are some things you learned from working with Butch Vig?
I knew how to edit tape, but he showed me tape editing on a whole other level. If the drummer was dragging, we could somehow take the late snare drums and pull them up into time, just from taking out minute slivers in the tape.
Manually, with a razor blade?
Yeah, but you had to be late. If you were early we couldn’t do anything about it because you can always take time out, but you can’t put anything in [laughs]. I learned a lot from Rob Grenoble [from Water Music in Hoboken] about the importance of finding the right tempo. I learned a lot about editing from Rob, too. But Butch took editing—and especially fixing things in post-production—to another level. Like tuning vocals with the Eventide Harmonizer. We didn’t have Auto-Tune back then. We would use the Eventide Harmonizer, bounce vocals through it, sharpen or flatten them to get them into tune, and reference them to a Peterson Strobe Tuner. We had to figure out how to set the harmonizer, how many cents flat or sharp, in order to get it into tune. And that was real grueling, laborious, syllable-by-syllable work—depending on how heavy it had to be—but at the end you could transform a performance pitch-wise. It sounded really good, but it took a while.
I really absorbed editing and I got so good at it. I took that skill with me and used it until we weren’t using tape anymore. But I apply some aspects to how we do it now. It wasn’t just the skill of editing, it was the art of editing. For example, I did a record two weeks ago and listening down I liked all the verses from one take and the rest of the song from another take. I didn’t have to do a test edit—it was just that sense of tempo—I made the edit and the band was flabbergasted. I was 95 percent sure it was going to work.
John Siket with the band Phish at Bearsville Studios in October of 1997. Photo by Sofi Dillof / Courtesy of Phish
Can you talk about working with Steve Lillywhite and the Dave Matthews Band on 1996’s Crash?
We had just finished the Soul Asylum record I did with Butch [Let Your Dim Light Shine, 1995]. I got a call from RCA, they wanted me to work with this band called the Dave Matthews Band. I hadn’t really heard them. But I asked, “Who’s producing?” They said, “Steve Lillywhite.” And I was in. His name was on so many records that I owned. I just said, “Oh man, I’ve got to work with this guy.” That’s where I learned a lot more about coaxing a good performance out of the band, making them feel at ease in the studio, and mixing as you go.
What does “mixing as you go” mean?
Don’t put off decisions until the mix. Make as many decisions in the moment as you can. We would print effects. Anything we could do that would shape the track toward [Lillywhite’s] final vision, we would do right there on the spot. Every time we did an overdub, we did a mix. By the time we were done overdubbing we had rough-mixed the song so much that it wasn’t a problem. We did our last mix because there was nothing left to record. I used to view recording and mixing as two separate processes. He taught me to view them as the same process.
So he did everything in the moment?
Yeah. It’s a very English way of doing things. I think English engineers are a lot less conservative than American engineers. They’re very apt to print effects. They probably use a lot more compression and EQ going to tape than American engineers do.
At first I was resistant. He said, “You should be able to mix three or four songs a day by the time we are done with this project.” To me, it took a day to mix a song—that was just so ingrained in my head. I said, “Name me a song that you’ve mixed in a short amount of time.” He said, “‘New Year’s Day.’ Do you know that song? I’ll tell you how it goes: I was doing vocals with Bono and he said, ‘I’m not really happy with these lyrics.’ I said, ‘Take 30 minutes and sort out your lyrics.’ We sat around for 15 minutes and did nothing. And then I said, ‘Let’s mix ‘New Year’s Day.’’” They had 30 minutes, they didn’t do anything for the first 15 minutes, and then it occurred to him, “Let’s just mix ‘New Year’s Day.’ Why not?” And they did it in two passes.
Every rough mix that we did, we took it very seriously—we acted like it was a big deal. So think of it: If you mix a song 10 times that way, you’re going to remember a lot of what happened. It takes the fear out of mixing. Steve’s sitting there, you’re sitting there, you’ve seen each other do the same thing 10 times before, you’re just going to try to do it a little bit better—but you try to do that every time—and you’ve got everything recorded. So it’s just another exercise. It’s very smart and it’s kind of obvious when I look at it in retrospect. It’s really just a good way to work.
He would also play rough mixes for Dave Matthews’ friends when they came by the studio. He would pay close attention to what they responded to. One day I asked him, “How come you’re always playing rough mixes for everybody?” And he said, “How am I going to know if they’re any good?” That stunned me. He was completely serious.
How did he get the band to relax and give a good performance?
He played a lot of ping-pong with them. He set up a ping-pong table in the live room. The band would get wound up and play ping-pong. There was a ragged, old yellow shirt that the leading ping-pong player wore. It was called, “the Yellow Jersey.” “Who’s going to get the Yellow Jersey?” [Laughs.] He did that a lot. He distracted them.
You’ve done a lot of work with Phish—Billy Breathes, The Story of the Ghost, Farmhouse, Slip Stitch and Pass, The Siket Disc—how did they distinguish between live and in the studio?
When I met those guys, they were basically tired of a producer telling them what to do. They wanted an engineer who could make producer decisions, but remain an engineer unless asked to do so. That was me. We were in the studio for nine weeks.
I learned a lot from those guys. One thing they asked me to do was, “Take a blank reel of tape, roll halfway in, and then one of us is going to play one note, another person is going to play one note, and then another one.” But that didn’t last too long, it soon turned into one person would play something—a short phrase—and he could play any instrument. For example, Trey [Anastasio] played drums at 4:37, Mike [Gordon] played violin at 2:07. You had all these little patches. Then someone would say, “I liked what you did on drums. I’m going to add a bass part to that.” Then they changed the rules a little bit. Instead of recording something, you could erase something, and you could erase somebody else’s part. You had this constant, “I am going to record or I am going to erase.” A couple of songs started to come out of these little things. There’s a segue called “Steep” on Billy Breathes that’s part of that.
Those guys rehearse like crazy, too. To this day they take rehearsals very seriously—you can’t call in sick to rehearsal, you’ve got to be there—but each one of those guys loves music so much that it’s okay. I saw them two years ago at Madison Square Garden and they sounded better than ever to me and they just looked like they were having a great time. Simultaneously being really serious about it but enjoying themselves, too.
John Siket (middle, facing camera) backstage at Phish’s Clifford Ball festival in Plattsburgh, New York, circa 1996.
Photo by Danny Clinch / Courtesy of Phish
What does Trey do for getting guitar sounds in the studio?
At the beginning of Billy Breathes Trey said, “I need to find a new sound.” He brought up vintage guitars and amplifiers and he started using them. But then he was like, “This isn’t me.” He just used his custom Paul Languedoc guitar and his homemade cabinets. And it’s true, that’s his sound. It’s a very distinctive sound.
His rig is stereo, so when he played through his rig I recorded him in stereo. I used a pair of Sennheiser 409s or a pair of [Shure] SM57s. I probably used a little bit of compression with him and not a lot of EQ. His sound is very sculptured, to my ear, already.
Can you talk about The Siket Disc a little bit? What’s it like having an album named after you?
Oh man, that. Well, it felt good, actually [laughs]. The genesis of that project was that Trey told Steve Lillywhite, “We’ve been off the road now for 20-some weeks. We should really be making a record while we’re mid-tour, not when we’re sitting around for 20 weeks. During the first substantial break we have on our next tour, fly to that area and we’ll go into the studio and record.” Trey came up with this idea where Steve would pick songs—we had a Doors song, we had a really obscure Bill Withers song—and Steve played just a snippet of that in their headphones. They would learn it. Then they would morph a jam from it until you couldn’t recognize it any more.
We did a lot of that in Seattle. But we didn’t end up keeping any of it, which I was really surprised about. Later on, Trey approached me and said, “I want to go into the studio and we’re not going to have any plan. We’re just going to go in and play and see what comes out.” We went to Bearsville. We rented out some studio time and The Siket Disc is that. It’s pure improvisation. I don’t think anybody came in with anything written down. I was mixing it live basically. That was my monitor mix. I recorded it to DAT. It went to multitrack, but it went live to 2-track as well. About 80 percent of that record is mixed live, too. We did one or two songs over in the studio again. It was kind of live on my side and on their side. But if anybody can pull it off, it’s those guys. A lot of people really like that record. It’s all instrumentals. But it’s concise, at least. And it goes by and it’s like, “Hey. That was cool. Let’s hear it again.”
tape than American engineers do.”
You did a lot of work with Sonic Youth, including producing the Washing Machine album. Tell us about recording a 20-minute opus like “The Diamond Sea.”
We were staying in a hotel in downtown Memphis. Within walking distance from our hotel was a pawnshop, and in the window of the pawnshop there was a big guitar pedal made by Ludwig [the Phase II Synthesizer]. It had a control on it that said “animation.” I was a rabid gear hound at the time and I had never heard of a Ludwig pedal. I told Thurston [Moore], “You’ve got to see this. It looks so outrageous.” It looked like an elongated lunch box and it had a latch. You opened the latch and the thing folded down and here was the pedal, with all these controls. Thurston saw it and bought it instantly. He used it that day on “The Diamond Sea.” I thought it was really ballsy that he got this thing—and here’s this big flagship song on the record—and he plugged it in and made it part of the sound.
That was one thing about those guys: They didn’t try to baby their guitars, they really tortured them. To get their guitars into some of those tunings wasn’t the greatest thing for the guitar. Lee [Ranaldo] told me, “They’re tools, man. We don’t care. We’re not trying to walk around with museum pieces. They are devices that allow us to express ourselves.” They didn’t abuse their guitars per se, but they didn’t look babied.
They looked loved.
Yeah. I mean, Thurston played through a Peavey amp. He could have had any amp he wanted, but that was the amp he wanted. It wasn’t an amp that he just ended up with. He liked it for some particular reason.
Were they particular about using the studio space or did you just close-mic the amps?
No, I didn’t tight-mic the amplifiers at all. I went a couple of feet out. Somebody told me how Television was recording their guitars around that time [for Television, 1992]. For some reason they weren’t putting the mics right up on the grills, they were using two condenser mics a few feet back. I liked their guitar sound, so I decided to try a more ambient approach. Anybody can jam a 57 up in front of the speaker, that’s not new. We were working at Sear Sound for Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, and they had a lot of RCA ribbon mics there that were in really great shape. I put both a RCA ribbon and a Neumann U 47 a few feet back from the amps. I used the faders to combine, make a mix of the two mics, and send it to one track. I did a variation of that in Memphis.
When recording great guitar sounds, is it more important to get a great sound to tape or do you prefer to EQ it after the fact?
I used to be of the school where I told the guitar player, “Don’t add any delay or reverb, I’ve got better delays and reverbs than you do. I’ll add them later.” I learned the hard way that people play to their sound better than if I’m trying to approximate it later. I try to get the most finished sound I can at the recording, though I’m not above adding something later.
Lately I’ve been taking a raw direct from the guitar, in case I want to embellish it later. I like to use directs. Sometimes I’ll fold them into the guitar sound. I typically record them without compression so they are as dynamic as can be and then when I’m mixing them down, I’ll compress them. I’ll blend them in a little bit to the amp sound, just to fill it out. I don’t necessarily have to put another layer of distortion on it or something like that, but I’ll push that fader into the amp sound to fill it out. A direct is often such an alien sound from the amp, it’s so different—the amp just doesn’t seem to have any of those frequencies. I take a direct—pre effects—and record it straight. One box I’m really fond of is the Roger Linn AdrenaLinn. It’s probably one of my favorite amp simulators, if I had to have one.
How about acoustics?
Sometimes I’ll do a double track and I’ll Varispeed it down so when the doubled track plays back at normal speed it plays back a little bit brighter and a little bit sharper. Just a very tiny amount though.
When you started out everyone recorded to 2-inch tape. The world is completely different now. How do you adapt?
I made the transition from tape to digital kind of gradually. I went from a completely tape-based workflow to a dedicated hard disk system called RADAR, which stands for Random Access Digital Audio Recorder. And they were dedicated machines. Although they were computers recording to hard disk, they didn’t do anything else. They were specialized. I really like that system. I used it for as long as I possibly could, probably a bit longer. It sounded fantastic and it reminded me of tape. The auto locator looked like a multitrack reel-to-reel locator, so I didn’t feel like I had to use a screen if I didn’t want to.
I like the sound of tape, but you can’t go back. If I had my druthers, I would record to 16-track, 2-inch and then bounce it into Pro Tools and do the edits in there. Because I do like the sound of a tape machine that is well maintained. But I don’t run into those scenarios very often. I haven’t used multitrack tape in probably six years. It’s been a little while.
Do you use Pro Tools now? You’re not using RADAR anymore?
Just Pro Tools now.
Do you still use the console when you do the mix?
Yeah. But it’s more about the freedom to do something—to reach over and grab an EQ and then reach over and grab a different EQ. On Pro Tools you’ve got to open one channel, pull it down, fiddle with it, close it, then go grab the other one. It reminds me of accounting [laughs]. Whereas on a console, you’re like, “Oh yeah, I feel like turning up a reverb or adding some treble.” I go around like a bumblebee and touch certain knobs, and the mix starts to come together. I do have a tactile controller though. I have 24 physical faders, 24 physical pan knobs, physical mute switches, and so that takes a little bit of the sting out of it.
It seems like the old way is much more organic.
I mean, we’re here now and I’ve just had to accept it. I still rehearse a lot. I rehearse with bands a lot before we go into the studio. I look at the arrangements. We talk about tempos and the right key for this or that. I go and see the band play live. So a lot of the other things are still in place and are just as valid as they always were. But now instead of lugging four big reels into the studio, I put the hard disk into my briefcase and walk home with it. But I’m not one of those people who will just zoom in on the molecular level and manipulate music until it’s perfect. That’s not fun. That was the thing about Pro Tools that put me off about it. It’s really just a glorified editor. It’s not a miracle machine.
Exactly. I can make it sound like you play better than you do, but I don’t want to. I want you to play well. I want to coax you to play well. I want to inspire you to play well. You want to play well.
Essential Listening: Selected John Siket Discography
This Perfect World, Freedy Johnston
Siket engineered this 1994 release, which cemented his relationship with producer Butch Vig. “I remember I was sitting in my crappy little apartment in Hoboken and the phone rang. It was Butch Vig and he said, “Freedy Johnston. Would you like to engineer?” I said, “Heck yeah.” Then Butch said, “Well, it’s not going to happen for a couple of months, but I’m supposed to record a couple of tracks with Helmet. Do you want to do that?”
Washing Machine, Sonic Youth
Siket produced this album in 1995. He also worked on the band’s previous releases, Dirty and Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. Washing Machine includes the noise-guitar opus, “The Diamond Sea.” According to Siket, the final mix features layered multiple takes. “One [take] is backwards, sort of underneath the forward version. There’s the forward 20 minutes and then somewhere in that 20 minutes you hear a backwards 2-track live mix, as well.”
Crash, Dave Matthews Band
This was Siket’s first time working with legendary producer Steve Lillywhite. The album peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 200, and the track “So Much to Say” won a Grammy.
The Siket Disc, Phish
Siket reveals that most of this instrumental album was recorded and simultaneously mixed live to 2-track.
Keith Urban’s first instrument was a ukulele at age 4. When he started learning guitar two years later, he complained that it made his fingers hurt. Eventually, he came around. As did the world.
He’s in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He’s won 13 Country Music Association Awards, nine CMT video awards, eight ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Awards, four American Music Awards, and racked up BMI Country Awards for 25 different singles.
He’s been a judge on American Idol and The Voice. In conjunction with Yamaha, he has his own brand of affordably priced Urban guitars and amps, and he has posted beginner guitar lessons on YouTube. His 2014 Academy of Country Music Award-winning video for “Highways Don’t Care” featured Tim McGraw and Keith’s former opening act, Taylor Swift. Add his marriage to fellow Aussie, the actress Nicole Kidman, and he’s seen enough red carpet to cover a football field.
Significantly, his four Grammys were all for Country Male Vocal Performance. A constant refrain among newcomers is, “and he’s a really good guitar player,” as if by surprise or an afterthought. Especially onstage, his chops are in full force. There are country elements, to be sure, but rock, blues, and pop influences like Mark Knopfler are front and center.
Unafraid to push the envelope, 2020’s The Speed of Now Part 1 mixed drum machines, processed vocals, and a duet with Pink with his “ganjo”—an instrument constructed of a 6-string guitar neck on a banjo body—and even a didgeridoo. It, too, shot to No. 1 on the Billboard Country chart and climbed to No. 7 on the Pop chart.
His new release, High, is more down-to-earth, but is not without a few wrinkles. He employs an EBow on “Messed Up As Me” and, on “Wildfire,” makes use of a sequencerreminiscent of ZZ Top’s “Legs.” Background vocals in “Straight Lines” imitate a horn section, and this time out he duets on “Go Home W U” with rising country star Lainey Wilson. The video for “Heart Like a Hometown” is full of home movies and family photos of a young Urban dwarfed by even a 3/4-size Suzuki nylon-string.
Born Keith Urbahn (his surname’s original spelling) in New Zealand, his family moved to Queensland, Australia, when he was 2. He took up guitar at 6, two years after receiving his beloved ukulele. He released his self-titled debut album in 1991 for the Australian-only market, and moved to Nashville two years later. It wasn’t until ’97 that he put out a group effort, fronting the Ranch, and another self-titled album marked his American debut as a leader, in ’99. It eventually went platinum—a pattern that’s become almost routine.
The 57-year-old’s celebrity and wealth were hard-earned and certainly a far cry from his humble beginnings. “Australia is a very working-class country, certainly when I was growing up, and I definitely come from working-class parents,” he details. “My dad loved all the American country artists, like Johnny Cash, Haggard, Waylon. He didn’t play professionally, but before he got married he played drums in a band, and my grandfather and uncles all played instruments.
One of Urban’s biggest influences as a young guitar player was Mark Knopfler, but he was also mesmerized by lesser-known session musicians such as Albert Lee, Ian Bairnson, Reggie Young, and Ray Flacke. Here, he’s playing a 1950 Broadcaster once owned by Waylon Jennings that was a gift from Nicole Kidman, his wife.
“For me, it was a mix of that and Top 40 radio, which at the time was much more diverse than it is now. You would just hear way more genres, and Australia itself had its own, what they call Aussie pub rock—very blue-collar, hard-driving music for the testosterone-fueled teenager. Grimy, sweaty, kind of raw themes.”
A memorable event happened when he was 7. “My dad got tickets for the whole family to see Johnny Cash. He even bought us little Western shirts and bolo ties. It was amazing.”
But the ukulele he was gifted a few years earlier, at the age of 4, became a constant companion. “I think to some degree it was my version of the stuffed animal, something that was mine, and I felt safe with it. My dad said I would strum it in time to all the songs on the radio, and he told my mom, ‘He’s got rhythm. I wonder what a good age is for him to learn chords.’ My mom and dad ran a little corner store, and a lady named Sue McCarthy asked if she could put an ad in the window offering guitar lessons. They said, ‘If you teach our kid for free, we’ll put your ad in the window.’”
Yet, guitar didn’t come without problems. “With the guitar, my fingers hurt like hell,” he laughs, “and I started conveniently leaving the house whenever the guitar teacher would show up. Typical kid. I don’t wanna learn, I just wanna be able to do it. It didn’t feel like any fun. My dad called me in and went, ‘What the hell? The teacher comes here for lessons. What’s the problem?’ I said I didn’t want to do it anymore. He just said, ‘Okay, then don’t do it.’ Kind of reverse psychology, right? So I just stayed with it and persevered. Once I learned a few chords, it was the same feeling when any of us learn how to be moving on a bike with two wheels and nobody holding us up. That’s what those first chords felt like in my hands.”
Keith Urban's Gear
Urban has 13 Country Music Association Awards, nine CMT video awards, eight ARIA Awards, and four Grammys to his name—the last of which are all for Best Country Male Vocal Performance.
Guitars
For touring:
- Maton Diesel Special
- Maton EBG808TE Tommy Emmanuel Signature
- 1957 Gibson Les Paul Junior, TV yellow
- 1959 Gibson ES-345 (with Varitone turned into a master volume)
- Fender 40th Anniversary Tele, “Clarence”
- Two first-generation Fender Eric Clapton Stratocasters (One is black with DiMarzio Area ’67 pickups, standard tuning. The other is pewter gray, loaded with Fralin “real ’54” pickups, tuned down a half-step.)
- John Bolin Telecaster (has a Babicz bridge with a single humbucker and a single volume control. Standard tuning.)
- PRS Paul’s Guitar (with two of their narrowfield humbuckers. Standard tuning.)
- Yamaha Keith Urban Acoustic Guitar (with EMG ACS soundhole pickups)
- Deering “ganjo”
Amps
- Mid-’60s black-panel Fender Showman (modified by Chris Miller, with oversized transformers to power 6550 tubes; 130 watts)
- 100-watt Dumble Overdrive Special (built with reverb included)
- Two Pacific Woodworks 1x12 ported cabinets (Both are loaded with EV BlackLabel Zakk Wylde signature speakers and can handle 300 watts each.)
Effects
- Two Boss SD-1W Waza Craft Super Overdrives with different settings
- Mr. Black SuperMoon Chrome
- FXengineering RAF Mirage Compressor
- Ibanez TS9 with Tamura Mod
- Boss BD-2 Blues Driver
- J. Rockett Audio .45 Caliber Overdrive
- Pro Co RAT 2
- Radial Engineering JX44 (for guitar distribution)
- Fractal Audio Axe-Fx XL+ (for acoustic guitars)
- Two Fractal Audio Axe-Fx III (one for electric guitar, one for bass)
- Bricasti Design Model 7 Stereo Reverb Processor
- RJM Effect Gizmo (for pedal loops)
(Note: All delays, reverb, chorus, etc. is done post amp. The signal is captured with microphones first then processed by Axe-Fx and other gear.)
- Shure Axient Digital Wireless Microphone System
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario NYXL (.011–.049; electric)
- D’Addario EJ16 (.012–.053; acoustics)
- D’Addario EJ16, for ganjo (.012–.053; much thicker than a typical banjo strings)
- D’Addario 1.0 mm signature picks
He vividly remembers the first song he was able to play after “corny songs like ‘Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread.’” He recalls, “There was a song I loved by the Stylistics, ‘You Make Me Feel Brand New.’ My guitar teacher brought in the sheet music, so not only did I have the words, but above them were the chords. I strummed the first chord, and went, [sings E to Am] ‘My love,’ and then minor, ‘I'll never find the words, my,’ back to the original chord, ‘love.’ Even now, I get covered in chills thinking what it felt like to sing and put that chord sequence together.”
After the nylon-string Suzuki, he got his first electric at 9. “It was an Ibanez copy of a Telecaster Custom—the classic dark walnut with the mother-of-pearl pickguard. My first Fender was a Stratocaster. I wanted one so badly. I’d just discovered Mark Knopfler, and I only wanted a red Strat, because that’s what Knopfler had. And he had a red Strat because of Hank Marvin. All roads lead to Hank!”
He clarifies, “Remember a short-lived run of guitar that Fender did around 1980–’81, simply called ‘the Strat’? I got talked into buying one of those, and the thing weighed a ton. Ridiculously heavy. But I was just smitten when it arrived. ‘Sultans of Swing’ was the first thing I played on it. ‘Oh my god! I sound a bit like Mark.’”
“Messed Up As Me” has some licks reminiscent of Knopfler. “I think he influenced a huge amount of my fingerpicking and melodic choices. I devoured those records more than any other guitar player. ‘Tunnel of Love,’ ‘Love over Gold,’ ‘Telegraph Road,’ the first Dire Straits album, and Communique. I was spellbound by Mark’s touch, tone, and melodic choice every time.”
Other influences are more obscure. “There were lots of session guitar players whose solos I was loving, but had no clue who they were,” he explains. “A good example was Ian Bairnson in the Scottish band Pilot and the Alan Parsons Project. It was only in the last handful of years that I stumbled upon him and did a deep dive, and realized he played the solo on ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Kate Bush, ‘Eye in the Sky’ by Alan Parsons, ‘It’s Magic’ and ‘January’ by Pilot’—all these songs that spoke to me growing up. I also feel like a lot of local-band guitar players are inspirations—they certainly were to me. They didn’t have a name, the band wasn’t famous, but when you’re 12 or 13, watching Barry Clough and guys in cover bands, it’s, ‘Man, I wish I could play like that.’”
On High, Urban keeps things song-oriented, playing short and economical solos.
In terms of country guitarists, he nods, “Again, a lot of session players whose names I didn’t know, like Reggie Young. The first names I think would be Albert Lee and Ray Flacke, whose chicken pickin’ stuff on the Ricky Skaggs records became a big influence. ‘How is he doing that?’”
Flacke played a role in a humorous juxtaposition. “I camped out to see Iron Maiden,” Urban recounts. “They’d just put out Number of the Beast, and I was a big fan. I was 15, so my hormones were raging. I’d been playing country since I was 6, 7, 8 years old. But this new heavy-metal thing is totally speaking to me. So I joined a heavy metal band called Fractured Mirror, just as their guitar player. At the same time, I also discovered Ricky Skaggs and Highways and Heartaches. What is this chicken pickin’ thing? One night I was in the metal band, doing a Judas Priest song or Saxon. They threw me a solo, and through my red Strat, plugged into a Marshall stack that belonged to the lead singer, I shredded this high-distortion, chicken pickin’ solo. The lead singer looked at me like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I got fired from the band.”
Although at 15 he “floated around different kinds of music and bands,” when he was 21 he saw John Mellencamp. “He’d just put out Lonesome Jubilee. I’d been in bands covering ‘Hurts So Good,' ‘Jack & Diane,’ and all the early shit. This record had fiddle and mandolin and acoustic guitars, wall of electrics, drums—the most amazing fusion of things. I saw that concert, and this epiphany happened so profoundly. I looked at the stage and thought, ‘Whoa! I get it. You take all your influences and make your own thing. That’s what John did. I’m not gonna think about genre; I’m gonna take all the things I love and find my way.’
“Of course, getting to Nashville with that recipe wasn’t going to fly in 1993,” he laughs. “Took me another seven-plus years to really start getting some traction in that town.”
Urban’s main amp today is a Dumble Overdrive Reverb, which used to belong to John Mayer. He also owns a bass amp that Alexander Dumble built for himself.
Photo by Jim Summaria
When it comes to “crossover” in country music, one thinks of Glen Campbell, Kenny Rogers, Garth Brooks, and Dolly Parton’s more commercial singles like “Two Doors Down.” Regarding the often polarizing subject and, indeed, what constitutes country music, it’s obvious that Urban has thought a lot—and probably been asked a lot—about the syndrome. The Speed of Now Part 1 blurs so many lines, it makes Shania Twain sound like Mother Maybelle Carter. Well, almost.
“I can’t speak for any other artists, but to me, it’s always organic,” he begins. “Anybody that’s ever seen me play live would notice that I cover a huge stylistic field of music, incorporating my influences, from country, Top 40, rock, pop, soft rock, bluegrass, real country. That’s how you get songs like ‘Kiss a Girl’—maybe more ’70s influence than anything else.”
“I think [Mark Knopfler] influenced a huge amount of my fingerpicking and melodic choices. I devoured those records more than any other guitar player.”
Citing ’50s producers Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, who moved the genre from hillbilly to the more sophisticated countrypolitan, Keith argues, “In the history of country music, this is exactly the same as it has always been. Patsy Cline doing ‘Walking After Midnight’ or ‘Crazy’; it ain’t Bob Wills. It ain’t Hank Williams. It’s a new sound, drawing on pop elements. That’s the 1950s, and it has never changed. I’ve always seen country like a lung, that expands outwards because it embraces new sounds, new artists, new fusions, to find a bigger audience. Then it feels, ‘We’ve lost our way. Holy crap, I don’t even know who we are,’ and it shrinks back down again. Because a purist in the traditional sense comes along, whether it be Ricky Skaggs or Randy Travis. The only thing that I think has changed is there’s portals now for everything, which didn’t used to exist. There isn’t one central control area that would yell at everybody, ‘You’ve got to bring it back to the center.’ I don’t know that we have that center anymore.”
Stating his position regarding the current crop of talent, he reflects, “To someone who says, ‘That’s not country music,’ I always go, “‘It’s not your country music; it’s somebody else’s country music.’ I don’t believe anybody has a right to say something’s not anything. It’s been amazing watching this generation actually say, ‘Can we get back to a bit of purity? Can we get real guitars and real storytelling?’ So you’ve seen the explosion of Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers who are way purer than the previous generation of country music.”
Seen performing here in 2003, Urban is celebrated mostly for his songwriting, but is also an excellent guitarist.
Photo by Steve Trager/Frank White Photo Agency
As for the actual recording process, he notes, “This always shocks people, but ‘Chattahoochee’ by Alan Jackson is all drum machine. I write songs on acoustic guitar and drum machine, or drum machine and banjo. Of course, you go into the studio and replace that with a drummer. But my very first official single, in 1999, was ‘It’s a Love Thing,’ and it literally opens with a drum loop and an acoustic guitar riff. Then the drummer comes in. But the loop never goes away, and you hear it crystal clear. I haven’t changed much about that approach.”
On the road, Urban utilizes different electrics “almost always because of different pickups—single-coil, humbucker, P-90. And then one that’s tuned down a half-step for a few songs in half-keys. Tele, Strat, Les Paul, a couple of others for color. I’ve got a John Bolin guitar that I love—the feel of it. It’s a Tele design with just one PAF, one volume knob, no tone control. It’s very light, beautifully balanced—every string, every fret, all the way up the neck. It doesn’t have a lot of tonal character of its own, so it lets my fingers do the coloring. You can feel the fingerprints of Billy Gibbons on this guitar. It’s very Billy.”
“I looked at the stage and thought, ‘Whoa! I get it. You take all your influences and make your own thing. I’m gonna take all the things I love and find my way.’”
Addressing his role as the collector, “or acquirer,” as he says, some pieces have quite a history. “I haven’t gone out specifically thinking, ‘I’m missing this from the collection.’ I feel really lucky to have a couple of very special guitars. I got Waylon Jennings’ guitar in an auction. It was one he had all through the ’70s, wrapped in the leather and the whole thing. In the ’80s, he gave it to Reggie Young, who owned it for 25 years or so and eventually put it up for auction. My wife wanted to give it to me for my birthday. I was trying to bid on it, and she made sure that I couldn’t get registered! When it arrived, I discovered it’s a 1950 Broadcaster—which is insane. I had no idea. I just wanted it because I’m a massive Waylon fan, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that guitar disappearing overseas under somebody’s bed, when it should be played.
“I also have a 1951 Nocaster, which used to belong to Tom Keifer in Cinderella. It’s the best Telecaster I’ve ever played, hands down. It has the loudest, most ferocious pickup, and the wood is amazing.”
YouTube
Urban plays a Gibson SG here at the 2023 CMT Music Awards. Wait until the end to see him show off his shred abilities.
Other favorites include “a first-year Strat, ’54, that I love, and a ’58 goldtop. I also own a ’58 ’burst, but prefer the goldtop; it’s just a bit more spanky and lively. I feel abundantly blessed with the guitars I’ve been able to own and play. And I think every guitar should be played, literally. There’s no guitar that’s too precious to be played.”
Speaking of precious, there are also a few Dumble amps that elicit “oohs” and “aahs.” “Around 2008, John Mayer had a few of them, and he wanted to part with this particular Overdrive Special head. When he told me the price, I said, ‘That sounds ludicrous.’ He said, ‘How much is your most expensive guitar?’ It was three times the value of the amp. He said, ‘So that’s one guitar. What amp are you plugging all these expensive guitars into?’ I was like, ‘Sold. I guess when you look at it that way.’ It’s just glorious. It actually highlighted some limitations in some guitars I never noticed before.”
“It’s just glorious. It actually highlighted some limitations in some guitars I never noticed before.”
Keith also developed a relationship with the late Alexander Dumble. “We emailed back and forth, a lot of just life stuff and the beautifully eccentric stuff he was known for. His vocabulary was as interesting as his tubes and harmonic understanding. My one regret is that he invited me out to the ranch many times, and I was never able to go. Right now, my main amp is an Overdrive Reverb that also used to belong to John when he was doing the John Mayer Trio. I got it years later. And I have an Odyssey, which was Alexander’s personal bass amp that he built for himself. I sent all the details to him, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s my amp.’”
The gearhead in Keith doesn’t even mind minutiae like picks and strings. “I’ve never held picks with the pointy bit hitting the string. I have custom picks that D’Addario makes for me. They have little grippy ridges like on Dunlops and Hercos, but I have that section just placed in one corner. I can use a little bit of it on the string, or I can flip it over. During the pandemic, I decided to go down a couple of string gauges. I was getting comfortable on .009s, and I thought, ‘Great. I’ve lightened up my playing.’ Then the very first gig, I was bending the crap out of them. So I went to .010s, except for a couple of guitars that are .011s.”
As with his best albums, High is song-oriented; thus, solos are short and economical. “Growing up, I listened to songs where the guitar was just in support of that song,” he reasons. “If the song needs a two-bar break, and then you want to hear the next vocal section, that’s what it needs. If it sounds like it needs a longer guitar section, then that’s what it needs. There’s even a track called ‘Love Is Hard’ that doesn’t have any solo. It’s the first thing I’ve ever recorded in my life where I literally don’t play one instrument. Eren Cannata co-wrote it [with Shane McAnally and Justin Tranter], and I really loved the demo with him playing all the instruments. I loved it so much I just went with his acoustic guitar. I’m that much in service of the song.”
What was it like mixing the iconic founders of the heavy metal genre? “What was great about it,” says Scheps, “was being able to pull up faders and have it be Black Sabbath, as opposed to a band trying to sound like Black Sabbath. Nobody else plays like that.”
As a mix engineer, do you have input on how things are tracked, or does it only come to you after the tracking is finished?
Usually it’s at the end of the tracking process. That’s when they start thinking, “Hey, who should we get to mix the record?” But there have been a few records where from the beginning they’ve said, “We can’t afford you for the whole project, but we know we’re going to want you to mix. Do you want to come and hang out during the tracking or just be involved a little bit?” That can be great, though I never want to step on the toes of the person who’s actually recording. The last thing any engineer wants is someone else coming in the room and saying, “No man, you should do it that way.”
When you get the tracks, do they also send you a rough mix that was made during tracking?
Almost always. With the way Pro Tools is now, and people working in the box, the rough mixes are usually not terribly rough. They’re quite involved. I always want to get a picture of why they thought the stuff was ready to be mixed.
Is the rough mix the first thing you listen to, or do you put the tracks up first?
Usually I listen to the rough mix. There’s a lot of prep, laying the session out to get it ready to mix. So I do that while listening to the rough mix.
What’s your prep process?
A lot of it is just organizing the Pro Tools session. I mix on a console, so I split things out over multiple outputs, usually 32 to 40. I try to lay things out the same for every mix. The lead vocal is always on fader 24, and the drums always start down on fader 1 and get eight to 12 faders. Next comes bass, then guitars, then keyboards, and above fader 24 is percussion. Once I start mixing I no longer have to think about where stuff is. Color-coding is a big part of my process. The drums are always a very dark blue, the bass is a brighter blue, guitars are always green. If there are a ton of guitars, dark green is the most distorted, and light green is the most clean or acoustic. I can glance at the screen and get a fast snapshot of what’s coming up and how the arrangement plays.
How much of the process is in Pro Tools and how much is in the console?
Most of it is in the console, but there are lots of things that get mixed together in Pro Tools before they come up on the console. If someone has tracked all the guitars but hasn’t yet combined all the microphones, then that gets done in Pro Tools. The last thing I want to think about is five microphones or two different amps when it’s a single guitar performance. That guitar performance gets one fader. Most of the actual mixing happens on the console with outboard gear, but every once in a while I reach for a plug-in just because it’s a different thing.
After the prep, how do you start the mix?
Once I’ve got it all laid out and I’ve listened to the rough mix, the first 70% of mixing is getting a balance. While I’m getting the balance I’m also EQing, compressing, setting up effects, and things like that. I spend a very long time just trying to get a balance where the song plays itself. There was a reason people chose that performance of the song to mix, so presumably there’s some point with the faders all just sitting there when the balance is right, it’s exciting, and you feel why they chose that take.
Some mixers always start with the vocal. Some start with a kick drum. Do you have a process like that?
No, things come up all at once. At the very beginning, I do start with the drums, and usually the kick drum first. But I want to make the drums act like one instrument, not many tracks. I want to think about drums as drums. So I go through and make the drum kit a single instrument the same way I would if I had, say, five tracks of guitar that make up one performance. But outside of that, all the tracks have got to be in. I work my way through the instruments to discover what’s there and fix any sonic problems, but it really is everything all at once as soon as I’ve got the instruments acting as instruments.
Scheps hanging out with the Hives' Nicholaus Arson, Vigilante Carlstroem, Dr. Matt Destruction, and Chris Dangerous Photo by C. Villano
Do you view each song individually, or as part of an album?
I don’t worry about how stuff goes together. It’s almost never a problem because an album usually has common threads. The songwriting. The vocalist. A lot of times the drums have all been tracked at once. There are enough common threads that it’s almost better to find what is amazing about each song, and to discover what will be super-cool for it. It keeps the album fresh as you go. If you worry about trying to make it consistent, all that happens is you end up with a slightly more boring record.
So you start each song completely from scratch?
In terms of the source tracks and EQing, absolutely. But the outboard gear I use for parallel compression, reverb, or delay is always there. What changes is what gets sent to it on each song. I’ve got a couple of stereo things that usually work on drums. I’ve got some stuff that usually works on vocals. Sometimes I add bass to the one that’s on the vocal or … well, that’s the part that changes every time.
Most people working in home studios are working in the box. Is there any essential gear for them?
I think a control surface is essential. If you’ve never mixed with multiple faders in front of you, you’re really missing out on something awesome about mixing: being able to ride a bunch of things simultaneously and really feel how you can change the balance going into the chorus and stuff like that. In terms of audio gear, I really don’t think there’s anything essential. The stuff that Tchad Blake [engineer for Peter Gabriel, The Black Keys, Sheryl Crow, and many more] is doing completely in the box sounds so amazing that you can’t argue that you absolutely need to have an analog bus compressor or anything like that. It’s just not true.
If someone wants to put together a great home studio, what’s most important to focus on?
Well, the drag is that it is a chain of gear and then acoustics, and the weakest link is the weakest link. You don’t want to have any weak links. The speakers are critically important, as is your listening environment. If either of those is terrible, then it doesn’t matter what else you’ve got going on. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be a professionally treated room. My control room is not professionally treated. It looks like a big living room, and I love that.
How do you decide when a mix is done?
That’s a really hard question! But I always know. As I work on a mix, the one thing I want is for it to hit me emotionally. Until it’s doing that, I’m not done. I also build up a mental to-do list, whether it’s building vocal effects in the chorus, making sure the downbeat of the bridge is a big deal, or doing some panning moves. Until I’ve ticked off everything on that list I’m obviously not done. But really, I just want to hit play at the beginning of the song and be engrossed all the way to the end and think it’s awesome and want to hear it again. If I get to that point, then I’m done.
Let’s talk about 13. It’s been said that Rick Rubin wanted to recapture the vibe of the first few Sabbath records. Did you get simple sessions, as those early albums would have been, or did you get tons of tracks?
For most of the album, it’s the live tracking band plus one guitar overdub and vocals, and that’s it. I never had conversations with the band or Rick about this, but I assume he wanted to recapture the way they made their first few records really fast. As far as I know, they made the first record in two days. They just were a great band. They jammed, and that’s what was awesome about them. Obviously the vibe and lyrics and stage show were big parts of it, but they were also just a great band. Rick wanted the album to feel like those guys playing together. The arrangements absolutely speak to that. Tony [Iommi] did a bunch of overdubs. There were extra guitars and keyboards and some really cool sound effects and things. But those were always meant to sound like overdubs. They weren’t meant to finish the songs. The band tracks finish the songs. That made it really easy in some ways and really difficult in others. When you’ve got a nine-minute song where 150 things come and go, all you need to do is make sure everybody can hear all those things. When you have a nine-minute song with only bass, drums, two guitars, and vocal, you’ve got to keep everybody’s interest. It can actually end up being a little bit trickier to mix.
A Mixer’s Glossary
Automation. Using a computer to record and play back fader moves and control changes during a mix.
Bounce. To re-record a track or tracks to a new track, including any plug-ins or effects used on the original tracks.
In the box. Working entirely within a computer, using plug-ins and software tools rather than hardware processors and outboard gear.
Mixing. According to Andrew Scheps: “The mixer is the guy who gets all those performances that have already been recorded and has to make it into a stereo thing that you can put on a CD or iTunes.”
Out of the box. Using external hardware processors and mixers rather than software in a computer.
Parallel compression. A technique where uncompressed signal is mixed with a compressed version of the same signal.
Ride. To move faders while the song is playing to adjust the mix.
Rough mix. An impromptu reference mix created during the course of tracking.
Solo. To play back a track in isolation, with all other tracks muted.
Tracking. According to Andrew Scheps: “Tracking is setting up microphones and recording the performances.”
Andrew Scheps often consolidates tracks within Pro Tools so that instruments always appear on the same mixing board faders.
All the songs are quite long. Did you mix them section by section?
No, you have to do it all at once, because there’s no way to know whether it’s going to work otherwise. If I really had to change something drastically, I could automate that change in Pro Tools so that what coming up on the faders would change. For a lot of my mixing, once I turn the automation on, I start at the beginning of the song and ride a few things together all the way through. I don’t say, “Okay, now I’m going to ride this guitar in each chorus.” I like to treat it like you’re mixing front-of-house [live sound]. I sometimes overdo things and refine them later. But it gives you a great sense of the shape of the song and how it’s going to work.
The album has big guitars, often doubled, which could have made it difficult to hear the bass. But on “End of the Beginning,” for example, the bass part is active, and you can hear all the notes. How did you achieve that?
To be honest, a huge part of that is the guys’ playing, because their tones are amazing, the dynamics within their performances are amazing, and their rigs are amazing. Also, Greg Fidelman, who is a fantastic engineer, tracked the record. The tracks were great when I got them. It was just a matter of making sure that some things didn’t step on other things. Let’s say it’s two guitars going for most of the song, one hard left and one hard right, and the bass is in the middle. Immediately you’ve given yourself some room. Then finding EQs—the good thing is that the EQ where all of the notes live on a guitar is an octave up from that same spot on the bass. So you can use EQ to bring out frequencies on those instruments that don’t necessarily interfere with each other. Also, there are a lot of subtle fader moves over the course of a nine-minute song. When a bass riff appears for the first time, it’s a little louder than the second, third, and fourth times, because it’s already established, and you’ll hear it if you want to. There’s always a main instrument, whether the solo or the vocal or sometimes the bass or drums. The idea is to let those ideas be small so that you don’t necessarily think, “Wow, the bass got loud for a bar.” You just think, “Oh my God, what an awesome bass line,” then “Hey, wait, that riff was ridiculous,” then “Oh, now Ozzy sounds incredible.”
Shifting focus is a great tool. Well, it’s not really a “tool”—it’s just what everybody does when they ride faders. It’s one of the reasons I love the console. It isn’t just about turning the bass up—I might turn the guitars down a little bit to make room. But they’re very subtle moves, and they’re usually not very long.
A Selected Andrew Scheps Discography
Adele, 21
Johnny Cash, Unearthed
Black Sabbath, 13
Josh Groban, Illuminations
Red Hot Chili Peppers, I’m with You, Stadium Arcadium
Jay-Z, The Black Album, Collision Course (with Linkin Park)
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals
The Hives, Lex Hives
Metallica, Death Magnetic
The Mars Volta, Frances the Mute
Weezer, Weezer (Red Album)
Another problem with dense mixes is getting the vocal to come through. Is there special processing involved?
First of all, Ozzy sounds amazing on this record. When I got the vocal tracks I was so excited. He has an amazing voice that works with guitars. All of the great rock singers have that. Chris Cornell is the same way. There’s something in his voice that is aggressive and that carries a lot of power but just cuts right through drums and guitars so it’s easy to hear. Singers do a lot of the work for you when they’re good. The vocal probably had a bit more effect on it than I would normally use, because that’s part of Ozzy’s sound. There’s some doubling, some slap delay, that kind of thing. I also use parallel compressors. I have one compressor that’s fairly aggressive so I can add a little bit more aggressiveness to the vocal when I need to. But a lot of it is just finding that static balance at the beginning, and then all of my rides work from that balance. Whatever the balance is before the faders start moving, you can hear everything. Then it’s just a matter of, what do I want to draw your attention to? What should be featured?
Was the band involved with the mixes?
Well, it’s not finished until they like it. [Laughs.] The band didn’t attend the mixes, but they were very involved in all the mixes. They all had comments. We worked together until Rick and the band were happy with everything.
You’ve mixed everyone from the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines to Adele, Metallica to Neil Diamond, Red Hot Chili Peppers to Jay-Z, and now Sabbath. Do you use the same approach in all those different styles?
I think my approach really is the same. Obviously, there are differences in terms of how aggressive to make certain things sound, what you do in terms of vocal effects, and stuff like that. But in general I think of myself as kind of a rock guy, and I mix everything like a rock record. I’m trying to make everything exciting, and I’m just trying to make the emotion come out. The core of what I do is trying to get the emotion of the song out of the speakers. That’s it. The gear can change, but it’s always about the performance and the song.
Michael Wagener keeps busy making records and teaching workshops in his Nashville-area studio.
For those who like their rock with flash—both technical and visual—the ’80s were a watershed moment in guitar history. If there’s praise/blame to award any single player for starting the whole trend, it probably goes to Edward Van Halen and his game-changing 1978 debut of “Eruption.” It took a couple years for players to figure out his approach en masse, but it’s safe to say that without Edward there likely never would’ve been bona fide shred masters like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani—nor the legions of players who had the hair and the “super strat” but far less-memorable chops and songwriting savvy.
In the studio, the man who helped many of the decade’s more excellent shredding guitarists get their tones was engineer and producer Michael Wagener. A guitarist himself, Wagener was a founding member of German metal band Accept until an army draft notice interrupted his musical career. When he later returned to the field, he decided to sit on the other side of the recording console.
Wagener relocated to Los Angeles at the behest of his friend, Don Dokken, and began making history with an incredible list of ’80s hard rock and metal clients: Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, Megadeth, Skid Row, Mötley Crüe, Extreme, his friends in Dokken and Accept, and many more benefitted from Wagener’s ears and talents. But Wagener wasn’t just a headbanger. He also worked with some of the decade’s most successful mainstream acts—including Janet Jackson and Queen—as well as a variety of more melodically dynamic artists, such as King’s X, Badi Assad, and Muriel Anderson.
With more than 94 million records sold, Wagener has certainly earned the right to kick back and relax. But instead you’ll find him at his studio, WireWorld, just outside of Nashville, making records and teaching the next generation how to record with his weeklong workshops.
First off, can you walk us through your journey from founding Accept to ending up behind the glass in the studio?
I grew up with Udo [Dirkschneider], Accept's singer. We went to school together from when we were 6 years old. When I was 12, Udo and I formed a band called Band X. We went through a lot of member changes. When I turned 19 I was drafted to the army, and I was stationed 350 miles away from home—which made practicing with the band very hard. Udo and I then came up with the name “Accept,” but shortly after I left because the distance made it impossible to keep things together.
After my time in the army, I got a job at STRAMP [Strueven Amplification] in Hamburg, Germany, where we built Marshall-like guitar amps. Our clients were Rory Gallagher, Jack Bruce, John Entwistle, Leslie West, and so on. During my time at STRAMP, I got my degree in electronics, and in the mid ’70s we started designing studio gear—mixers, one of the first digital delays, etc. We also started importing tape machines from Otari and other studio gear. After a while, we set up a small studio so we could demonstrate our gear. It was there that I realized that working creatively with the gear was much more fun than building it. In 1979, I built a studio in Hamburg called Tennessee Tonstudio—weird, huh? Since there were hardly any clients in the beginning, I had a lot of time to learn how to work with and use the gear in the studio. We originally had a 2", 16-track Studer tape machine, a Sound Workshop console, and a bunch of outboard gear—plenty of stuff to practice with. Around the end of 1979, I met Don Dokken at that studio. Don invited me to L.A., and since I always wanted to go to the USA, I accepted his invitation. I spent three weeks in L.A. around Christmas in 1979, and I decided that was the place for me to be. In 1980, I moved to L.A. with the intention to stay.
How did you get your career started there?
L.A. was the place back then—the music scene was awesome and I was really into the style of music being created at that time. I lived in a house with Dokken, [Ratt drummer] Bobby Blotzer, and Alan Niven, who later became the manager for Great White and Guns N’ Roses. That’s when I worked with Mick Mars' original band, Vendetta—which is how I got to mix Mötley Crüe's first album in 1981. Unfortunately, the economy was not the best in the mid ’80s, so I moved back to Germany. In the following years, I travelled back and forth between the U.S. and Germany, working with bands here and there—Accept, Malice, Great White, Dokken, 45 Grave. In 1984, Tom Zutaut, then executive at Elektra A&R, called me to come over and do a single [1985’s Ain’t Love Grand] with the band X. Things fell into place and I’m still here.
Selected Discography
Michael Wagener’s recording career spans more than three decades and includes an incredible number of hit records. Here are a few that he produced, recorded, and mixed to check out:
Alice Cooper, Constrictor
Dokken, Breaking the Chains and Under Lock and Key
Extreme, Pornograffitti
Great White, Great White
King’s X, Ogre Tones and XV
Ozzy Osbourne, Live and Loud
Skid Row, Skid Row and Slave to the Grind
White Lion, Pride and Big Game
X , Ain’t Love Grand
Wagener is also in demand for mixing other producers’ projects, including:
Accept, Balls to the Wall
Badi Assad, Rhythms of the World
Dokken, Tooth and Nail
Janet Jackson, Black Cat
Megadeth, So Far, So Good … So What!
Metallica, Master of Puppets
Mötley Crüe, Too Fast for Love
Ozzy Osbourne, No More Tears
Queen, Stone Cold Crazy
You worked on a lot of seminal metal and hard-rock albums in the ’80s. What was the process like for those recordings?
The ’80s were great for making rock albums, because there were substantial budgets. I would get a demo from a band, work on it at home, go into preproduction at the band's rehearsal room for a couple of weeks, then let the band rehearse the changes to the songs for a week or two, and then go into a cool studio to record and mix the album. A lot of gear was rented to get just the right tones for every track. The musicians practiced their music before they went in to track. A lot of time, effort, and money were spent to get everything right and create a sound for that band.
How involved were you in crafting each band’s sound—did they come up with it on their own or were you guiding them?
Back then, the musicians were not as involved in studio gear, etc., but it was also always a common decision between the band and me—everybody had to agree to the plan.
Did you have a standard procedure for recording guitars in those days?
Not really. I was still experimenting myself, trying to listen to what was important for the sound. I tried everything from using just one microphone on one speaker to using 16 microphones and running everything through a Fostex 4-track tape recorder. It was also the beginning of digital tape machines, which I loved from day one.
What was it that you loved about digital recorders?
Even with all the problems in the beginning, to me the digital tape came back with the same punch as the original. Analog tape always rounded off the edges a bit. We did tests with some great ears in the room—like [Steely Dan engineer/producer] Roger Nichols—using different tape stock and different machines and heads. We messed around with biasing for days, but never ever did a kick drum or snare come back with the same punch it went in with. Digital tape always had that punch.
How has your recording process changed since then?
The recording process is still the same. The digital age offers a lot of conveniences—like the undo button and immense editing capabilities, which sometimes get used to enable not-so-capable musicians to make records—but I still believe music should be performed by musicians, not typists. If it wasn’t a great take, do it again! Auto-Tune and Beat Detective basically don't exist for me. We are selling emotions—there are no emotions in a grid!
Back in the ’80s, many guitar solos were very technically demanding. Could most of the guitarists come in and play them in a couple of takes, or did it take a lot of tries—or did you have to edit parts of various takes together?
In general, the players practiced until they could play the whole solo in one take. I remember Vito Bratta [White Lion] playing the solo to "Wait" while we were tracking the drums. We never replaced it, it was just great. There was some comping on some albums, but not to the extent it’s done today. You would maybe have a first half and a second half of a solo, which you comped together.
Since moving to Nashville, you've worked on projects in a wide variety of styles. Is your approach different for each style?
Each artist and each record deserves its own style, so yes, I approach different styles with different recording and mixing methods. The basics stay the same: I track with [Steinberg] Nuendo and mix through an SSL console using a ton of analog outboard gear, but the mics and setup are going to change with every artist.
You've got a huge collection of guitars and amps. How do you choose the one you want for a particular part?
Normally the musicians bring their own guitars and basses, but just in case those don't work for a particular part, I just might have an instrument that works. Over the years, I learned the sound of my own instruments very well and know which ones could work for certain parts. I have a Creation Audio Labs switching system—the Sentinel—and I can compare 20 amps and cabs in a few seconds. That makes the selection process very easy. I’m also using the Kemper Profiling Amp a lot. It has a lot of my amps stored in it and it sounds awesome.
“Normally the musicians bring their own guitars and basses,” recording guru Wagener says regarding the use of his expansive gear collection. “But just in case those don’t work for a particular part, I just might have an instrument that works.”
Do you record the Kemper direct or do you run it to a cabinet and mic it?
My profiles already include the amp, cab, mics, preamps, etc., so I normally use it direct. When I profile a sound, I have maybe one, two, or three amps going to a few cabs with different speakers and a bunch of microphones, which in turn are going through different mic preamps. All the mics are mixed together to one mono track, and then I profile that sound.
Other than having such easy access to all those tones, what’s your approach to recording guitar like today?
I use mainly Royer R-121 ribbon mics in combination with Royer R-101s or condenser mics like the Lauten Audio Horizon, the Miktek C7, or one of the cool Mojave Audio mics. The mics get placed very close, sometimes inside the speaker.
Do you have tricks for finding the best spot to place the mic on the speaker?
Yes—listen! [Laughs.] I re-amp a DI guitar track at low level back through the amp and use headphones to find the sweet spot. If you move the mic around in front of the speaker, you can clearly hear where the placement for the best sound is.
What Is Re-Amping?
Re-amping is a studio technique that allows the sound of an electric guitar to be changed after it has been recorded. Typically, you play your part through an amp, just like normal—but the amp’s sound is not recorded. Instead, the dry sound of the exact same electric-guitar part is simultaneously recorded through a direct box before it hits the amp. Later, the dry guitar track is played back through a re-amping box, which is sort of like a direct box in reverse: The output from the re-amping box is sent into an amp, which is mic’d up and recorded.
The advantage of re-amping is that you can try numerous different amps and effects and experiment with tones until you find exactly what is right for the track. Wagener’s tool of choice for re-amping is the Creation Audio Labs MW1, but other options are available from Radial Engineering, ART, Reamp, Millennia Media, and others.
“When I’m mixing, I go away into Wagener Land for a few hours … It requires high concentration and I don’t want to be disturbed by anybody or anything in the control room—even opening a peanut will throw me off the track!”
Do you only use close mics, or do you also use room or distant mics?
I mainly use close mics, about an inch or two or three away from the speaker's center. Sometimes I use "Fritz" [a Neumann KU-100 head-shaped dummy with binaural stereo mics in its ears] for a room sound, especially on cleaner tones.
Do you prefer recording in a small or large space?
I would say medium for guitars. Since most of the ribbon mics have a figure-8 pickup pattern [which picks up sound from the front and back of the mic capsule], the reflections of a small room might get in the way. In general, medium-sized, sound-treated rooms are easier to control.
You developed the Creation Audio Labs MW1 direct-injection rack unit as a tool for recording guitar. What is it and how did it come about?
I met Sarge [Gistinger] from Creation Audio Labs at a NAMM show and he asked me, “If you could have any piece of gear for your studio, what would it be?” I was always looking for something that could match impedances and levels between studio gear and instruments, so we collaborated for nine months and the MW1 was born. It’s the brainchild of Alex Welti at Creation Audio Labs. I gave him some suggestions for different features, but Alex came up with a piece of gear way past my wildest imagination. It’s a studio Swiss Army knife that can help you solve a lot of little problems in getting a great guitar tone—I wouldn’t record bass or guitar without the MW1 in the chain.
What tricks have you found for making a rock mix sound big?
It's a matter of mixing each instrument to its fullest potential. In modern mixes, sometimes compressors get put on each track and all the instruments are always loud and in front. But I think creating dynamics—putting the right instrument in the front at the right point in the song—creates that bigness.
But how do you get guitars to sound huge when you also have huge drums and bass and a powerful vocalist?
The secret lies in mixing the important instrument up when it’s needed. That is a constant process that cannot be done by an automated or plug-in process—it's hands-on, all the time. When I’m mixing, I go away into Wagener Land for a few hours, because one move on a fader requires another one down the line. It requires high concentration and I don't want to be disturbed by anybody or anything in the control room—even opening a peanut will throw me off the track!
Tell us about the workshops you teach at your studio, WireWorld.
I do production workshops that go for seven days. We have a live band and go from pre-production to mastered product during that time. It's a hands-on experience for all the workshop guests. We compare mics, preamps, compressors, EQs, etc., talk about room acoustics, little tricks of the trade, and I try to answer any question the students might have. I have people coming from all over the world, so besides learning from me, they learn from each other. It's a great experience.
You’ve also recently started your Ears-4-Hire workshops. How are those different?
Those are more personal—I come to your studio and we work on your equipment to mix or record a song. I will point out weak spots in your studio and show you workarounds if you don't have the expensive gear.
Do you have advice for guitarists making their own recordings at home?
The most important thing is to find your own sound. In this time of plug-ins and presets, it's very important to create an individual sound. If you don't have enough space or can't crank your amp, record a good DI track with a great direct box and rent a big studio for a day to re-amp guitar tones—or use a re-amp service to get your tones.
Wagener’s Top Five Guitar Mics
Michael Wagener’s WireWorld studio is packed to the rafters with an amazing collection of recording and guitar gear. Here are some of his favorite microphones for capturing guitar amps. Wagener places the mics very close to the speaker, one to three inches away from its center.
Royer R-121 (ribbon), $1,295 street, royerlabs.com
Royer R-101 (ribbon), $799 street, royerlabs.com
Miktek C7 (large-diaphragm condenser), $899 street, miktekaudio.com
Lauten Audio Horizon LT-321 (large-diaphragm tube condenser), $1,099 street, lautenaudio.com
Mojave Audio MA-200 (large-diaphragm tube condenser), $,1095 street, mojaveaudio.com
You started as a musician in your teens?
Yes, I was in a rock ’n’ roll band. I was in the 7th grade playing lead guitar
with a bunch of guys that were seniors, and then just kept playing.
The bass player was Harry Dailey, who was the first guy Jimmy Buffett
hired for the Coral Reefer Band. He wrote some songs with Jimmy.
How did you go from being in a Virginia rock band to connecting
with Chet Atkins?
A friend of mine, Frank Grist, worked for RCA in the mid-Atlantic
area, out of Washington, D.C. Chet was coming to the Stardust
Lounge in Waldorf, Maryland, and I got to have dinner with him.
Then Grist brought me to Nashville and I signed some songs to
Cedarwood Publishing Company. Chet always invited me to stop
by, to say hi when I was in town. He was the one who told me
about Belmont [University]. He helped me get into Belmont, and
shortly after I graduated I became Marty Robbins’ chief engineer.
How did you make that connection?
I used to hang out at CBS Studios when I was going to Belmont and
many of those engineers knew me. Marty was looking for a chief
engineer and he came in one day when I was doing demos for Loretta
Lynn’s publishing company in his studio and asked me if I could meet
with him the next day. I had no idea what it was about. He asked me
to be his chief engineer. He was the best guy I ever worked for. Great
sense of humor. A stylist … I mean, when you count the unique
voices of the world, you’ve got your toes on your feet and your fingers
on your hand and then everybody else kind of copies those.
How did you start to branch out to other artists?
When I was in college I used to go to bluegrass festivals in the mid-
Atlantic area and I would get in for free and get cheeseburgers and
French fries and Cokes if I did the sound. I figured, what a deal!
The guy who had the sound company was [renowned bluegrass banjoist] Eddie Adcock, so I had pretty
deep roots in bluegrass because of all of
those festivals and meeting so many musicians.
I loved the music because it was one
form of music where everybody could play
and sing or they didn’t work, unlike some
of the other forms of music.
[Dobro player] Jerry Douglas and [banjo player] Béla Fleck were old friends, and when Marty passed, I guess around ’83, I built and was chief engineer for what is now Curb Studios on 16th Avenue. I helped with the construction of that and the design, and started working with Béla Fleck and continued through most of the Flecktone records, then Jerry Douglas, Alison Krauss, Rhonda Vincent, Claire Lynch, and some of the prominent names of bluegrass. It was not as lucrative as country music, but it sure was a whole lot of fun!
The session crew for David Holt’s Grandfather’s Greatest Hits. Back (L to R): Mark O’Connor, Duane Eddy, Jerry Douglas, Larry Paxton, Steve Turner, Doc Watson. Front (L to R): Steve Heller, Chet Atkins, David Holt, Bil VornDick.
Bluegrass was your primary area early on,
but you branched out to jazz, country,
Celtic, and rock.
Well, I’m doing a lot of pop music now,
with artists from the past that were established
on major labels. I’m working on Jon
Pousette-Dart’s new album right now. He
was on Capital for all those years. Tomorrow
I go into pre-production with Lynn
Anderson, who had “I Beg Your Pardon, I
Never Promised You a Rose Garden.”
But I guess we’re talking about guitar players ... I worked with Bryan Sutton early on, when he was doing his first album. And the tribute album for Merle Travis on Shanachie Records with Chet and Thom Bresh, who is Merle Travis’ son. They sent in Merle Travis’ guitars from L.A., from the vault, for the sessions, so anybody could pick up those guitars and play them on the session. I also recorded many albums with Doc Watson, and I’m very fortunate to have engineered an album [On Praying Ground, 1990] that won a Grammy for Doc. I will miss Doc a whole lot. He was such a kind man and I sort of started playing the guitar by listening to his albums when I was young.
When you’re working with an artist like
that, who has a very established style, do
you see yourself more in the engineer role
or more as the producer?
A producer to me is a mediator. In the
case of the Merle Travis thing, I was the
producer and engineer. But with Doc
Watson, [bassist] Michael Coleman was
the producer—he’d been on the road with
Doc for years. As an engineer you try and
make everyone sound like they want to be
heard. I’ve always felt that the producer was
the person who could answer the question,
“What do you think?” correctly … or as
correctly as you can, within the political
compound that you’re in.
As a producer or engineer who’s been
hired for a project, do you start in pre-production
or do things start for you
when the project comes into the studio?
As an engineer, I’ve always been involved in
the pre-production. As a producer, of course,
you’re in it for months beforehand finding
songs, going to meetings, and then helping
the artist do the arrangements. And then
trying to find the theme of the album, not
so that all the songs are necessarily about
the same thing, but so that the album has a
motif—like a painter painting a picture where
all the different elements come together.
How much, as a producer, do you have to
draw performances out of artists?
A lot. Every artist is different and unique.
Everybody has their good day, and everybody
has their bad day, from musician to
engineer to producer. Many of those artists
come in and knock it right out. That’s
one thing good about Nashville: There are
so many great musicians and guitar players.
But there are times when a producer
needs to show the artist how to become the
song—get inside of it and project it in their
performance. That’s hard to explain, but
when the artist gets there in emotion, and it comes out, that is when the hair goes up on
the back of your neck.
You’re a big fan of guitar.
I love guitar so much that I volunteer to
be the stage manager at the All Star Guitar
Night at [Summer] NAMM. I guess I have
for about 10 years. I do it to raise money
so that children can get instruments, and
that’s very important to me. I don’t charge;
I let them beat me up on their scheduling
for weeks ahead of time, “I want my
soundcheck here.” Stage managing is mediating,
but we all do it for the children with
dreams of playing music.
The 3:1 Rule
Bil VornDick always uses the 3:1 Rule when mic’ing instruments in stereo. Here’s how it works: If your two microphones are each one unit— for example, 1'—away from the instrument, then there should be three units (3' in this example) between the two microphones. VornDick also recommends keeping the two microphones between 90 and 120 degrees of each other.
Following the 3:1 Rule ensures that your recordings will be in phase, without danger of cancellation problems later in the mixing process.
Let’s talk specifics. How do you mic up
Béla Fleck’s banjo?
I use a 3:1 mic’ing technique normally on
Béla [see sidebar, “The 3:1 Rule”].
As to which mics I use, it really depends
on what banjo he’s playing. It depends on
the timbre of the instrument. With Earl
Scruggs, I’d normally used a [Neumann]
KM 84 and a [Neumann] U 87. I used
the KM 84 on the high side and the U
87 on the low side. That’s what he liked.
But every banjo is different. If it was a
very mellow banjo, then I would probably
put a Milab DC-96B on the low
side or a Sony ECM-33P on the low side
and a KM 84 or a Miktek C5 on the
high—I’m using that one a lot. But you
really have to listen to the instrument
first before you just stick mics up.
How important is the room that you’re
recording in to the final result you get?
Very important. I have the musician
move around in the room to find the
spot that translates best for the overtones
of the instrument. The bass is very particular
to axial modes [resonances caused
by sound bouncing between two parallel
surfaces] in the room, where the guitar
wouldn’t be as much. So if I’m going
into a new room, I’ll have the musician
walk around and play, sit, and then
move around some more. Find where the
instrument sounds like the instrument to
them, then the rest of it’s easy.
Do you mic acoustic guitar the same
way that you do banjo, using two
microphones?
Yes, I do. Because I hear in three dimensions
and you can’t get three dimensions
with one mic.
Do you have go-to acoustic guitar mics?
Yeah, I have a pair of [Neumann] KM
54s that I like a lot. Then the Miktek
C5s—I’m using those a lot more than
the KM 84s. I used to use KM 84s all
the time, but the C5, I really believe in
that mic.
That’s great to hear because that mic is
fairly affordable compared to the others
you mentioned.
When it comes down to it, it’s the performance.
You could record it on a Shure
SM57, and if you’ve got the performance,
that’s what the people driving down the
road are going for. A lot of people use
SM81s. The KSM141s, the new mics by
Shure, a lot of people are using those. It
depends on the budget that you have.
How far away do you place the two mics
when you’re recording acoustic guitar?
They’re about 8" off. If you’re sitting
with the guitar in your lap, there’s one
coming in to where the curve reaches the
neck; it’s not faced toward the hole. And
the other one is off the player’s shoulder,
the right shoulder coming down. If you
look at the symmetry and the angles,
they’re facing to the back of the hole
on the guitar, which is where the sound
comes resonating from.
You’re trying to capture the sound of
the whole body of the instrument, not
just getting the surface of it?
Exactly.
So you place the mics fairly close up?
It depends … if it’s a solo guitar, I move
them back. But if it’s in an ensemble,
with a bunch of people sitting around,
it’s usually about 8" or so.
I use the 3:1 rule, then move the mics around with the artist playing the instrument. If you’re going to mic in stereo, put the headphones on and make sure that the left mic is left and the right mic is right and then move them around, and ask the player, “Does this sound like your guitar?”
You’d be amazed, if you move a microphone just a little bit in, a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right, what a difference that will make, depending on the overtone series of the instrument and the key that it’s in. And the instrument, of course, is going to resonate in different keys.
Do you end up panning those two
microphones across the stereo field or
do you bring them pretty close together?
I bring them to 9 and 3 o’clock. If you
pan them all the way left and right, once
it gets to a transmitter on a radio station
you could have phase cancellation. I’m
still old school, making records for radio.
But if I were stacking a couple of guitars, I
wouldn’t have them both panned that way.
I’d have one at 8 o’clock and 1 o’clock and
the other one at 10 o’clock and 4 o’clock.
Do you worry about bleed between the
instruments when you record multiple
musicians at the same time?
If you get your angles and your positioning
of your microphones, and you have
them pretty much out of phase with the
mics on the other players, then there
really isn’t that much problem if you’re in a cardioid pattern. A good example: I had
Jerry Douglas, Tony Rice, and Earl Scruggs
sitting within three feet of each other on
one of Jerry’s recent albums, and I was able
to punch some stuff in fine.
You’ve been involved with some very interesting
projects for Fishman, creating the
guitar images for the Aura system, and also
the new Retro series guitars for Martin.
The idea was that you took guitars into
the studio and recorded “images” of them,
which are then embedded in the guitar
electronics. Were those guitars recorded in
a tightly controlled room?
Yes, I had them in an environment where
there was a baffle behind the guitar, so I
wasn’t receiving any environment in the signal
path. All you were hearing was the guitar.
How did you get involved in the
Martin project?
I got a call from Larry [Fishman], who
said that Martin wanted to put out a series of the old famous Martins: the D-18, the
D-28, the D-45, and the OM. He said,
“They’re going to bring down the guitars
from the [Martin] museum and we’re going
to image them and try to get the new
guitars—when someone plugs in with the
Aura—to sound like the old guitars.”
We really didn’t know what was going to happen until Larry processed some of the signal into an Aura and actually plugged it in, to see if it would work. We were both amazed.
That’s a fun project!
It took a couple of days. They came to the
studio here at the house and unloaded a
million dollars worth of Martins. [Laughs.]
Then I went out and got a slew of microphones—an Electro-Voice 639, I got that
from RCA Studio B. It was one of [legendary
Nashville producer] Owen Bradley’s
microphones. I got a Telefunken ELA
M251 from there, and Wes Dooley let me
use some of his ribbon mics.
So you didn’t just use the original vintage
guitars, you also used original vintage
microphones.
Yes, because there are a lot of traditional
players that want—but can’t afford—an old
vintage Martin, but they want it to sound
like it would have sounded in the ’30s, ’40s,
or ’50s. That’s how we were able to accomplish
it.
How much does the rest of the gear that
you use—the preamps, EQs, compressors—factor into the sounds that you get?
Quite a bit. On [the Retro series], I was
shooting four microphones at one time
and I went through APIs [mic preamps]. I
needed a defined and uncolored sound on
them, so that’s what we used.
What about when you’re recording someone
like Jerry Douglas or Béla Fleck?
The Great River [MEQ-1NV preamp] and
a pair of [Neumann] U 67s are normally
what I use on Jerry. On Béla it would vary
depending on the banjo. I use Neve preamps
a lot or APIs.
How much equalization did you end up
doing once you capture those sounds?
Mainly just high passing. It would be very
good for the people who are reading this
to know that they need to know the frequency
range and the lowest note on the
instrument that they are recording. Once
you put that high-pass filter in, the instrument
will feel like it is lifting itself out of
the speakers.
Other than that, there’s no EQ?
No, not much, if any.
What about when you’re making a record?
Sometimes there are different hot spots in
some guitars. The older guitars usually have
a boom between 160 and 240 Hz that you
have to taper a little bit. But usually that’s
about it. It depends on what key they’re in.
It can vary from song to song?
Right. The key of the song is very important.
It’s like tuning a vocal. If you don’t
know what key the vocal is in, you could be
searching all day for the right notes.
What advice do you have for someone
who’s trying to record acoustic instruments
at home, who doesn’t have an ideal
acoustic environment?
Base it all on performance.
Don’t stress about the sound quality?
Well, sound quality is good, but the people that
are driving down the road, I think they’re more
interested in the performance than they are
in, “Whoa, what microphone did you use on
that?” I don’t know of anybody driving down
the road listening to the radio calling anybody
and asking them, “What mic are you using?”
Well, I do get those calls, I guess. [Laughs.]
It’s all about the song.
It is about the song. The main thing is, if it’s
not happening, walk away. Get something
to eat, make sure your blood sugar’s right,
and go in and try again. The hardest thing
for most artists is knowing when to stop and
walk away. In all the decades I’ve been doing
this, usually when I have an artist who’s getting
frustrated because they can’t play exactly
what they’re hearing in their head and their
fingers aren’t working with their mind, if you
get them away for 10 or 15 minutes, they’ll
go right back in and knock it right out.
That’s the psychologist part of being a
producer … knowing when to have the
artist step back.
Exactly.
What’s the hardest instrument to record?
Probably the hardest instrument to mic
is the hammered dulcimer because of the
overtone series it generates. The mics have
to be perfectly in phase. I normally use KM
84s. I’m getting ready to do my 88th album
on Craig Duncan soon.
Wow, 88 albums?
He does instrumental albums for the gift
markets and tourist places that sell a lot of
product. You’d be amazed how many people
want to listen to the melody, but they don’t
want somebody screaming at them. And
pretty much in music today, it’s how loud
can you make it and how compressed is the
vocal? A lot of people say, “Why are they
screaming at me?” So listening to instrumental
music is pleasing and relaxing.
It’s an industry perception, rather than a
listener perception, that a recording has
to be made that loud.
I learned that a long time ago. My daughter
had a birthday party and the girls found my
collection of vinyl. They had never seen vinyl
records before, so I showed them how to set
the needle down. What I noticed was that
when they put the needle down, they turned
it up and listened to it. Then later, I came
down, you know, delivering the pizzas and
the Cokes and stuff, and they had the CD
player out and they were playing a CD, pushing
play and then turning it down. That told
me a whole lot.
When you mic the hammered dulcimer,
do you mic that in stereo?
Yes, in stereo, using the 3:1 rule. But I keep
the mics up and away because the hammers
are moving so fast that he doesn’t have a
chance to hit any of the mics.
What about upright bass?
I usually mic it with a C5 up on the
top and usually one of my Neumann U
47s on the low end. If we’re going more
“organic,” I’ll use an RCA 77DX. The
new Shure KSM353 is really nice, and
the A440 from AEA, if you’re looking
for a traditional thing. But on [jazz bassist]
Charlie Haden’s album [Rambling
Boy], I used a [Telefunken] 460 on
the top end and a U 47 on the low
side and ran them through two [Neve]
1073 preamps. Charlie [recipient of the
Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2013
Grammys] was in seventh heaven, which
made me very happy that he was happy.
Half of it is making the instrument sound
like the instrument when the musician
comes into the control room.
Have you done much bluegrass recording
where you record everything with one
microphone?
In the old days, but we still would address the
bass, because the bass is usually nondescript
back there. I did one artist … I was still going
to Belmont, I guess, working on the weekends
at the studios in Hendersonville that the Oak
Ridge Boys owned. And a very prominent
bluegrass artist came in. I think it took me
45 minutes to record that album. We went
straight to 2-track. It was nice because the studio
paid me for the day. [Laughs.] By the time
I had the 1/4" tape edited and the box written
on with all the information, it was probably
20 minutes after 11. We started at 10.
People don’t make albums like that
these days.
I did an album like that with Richard
Greene, a fiddle player. It was fun because I
mixed it as we went.
If somebody’s putting together a home
studio, where should they put their dollars?
What should be the priority?
Interface and word clock. The word clock
runs everything, and your audio interface
is your converter. If you have some really
good mic preamps—you’d be amazed what
an SM57 and an SM58 sound like with a
really good mic pre. If you’re a guitar player,
save up and get the microphones that will
last you a lifetime instead of just buying
something that’s going to get you by. The
same thing with mic preamps. I usually
tell my students, have a good stereo signal
path—mics and mic preamps—and then
for vocals, have a good mic preamp and a
couple of mic choices.
A lot of people still cut their tracks in the bigger studios. Most of your time is going to be spent overdubbing.
So keep the focus there rather than trying
to set up a home studio where you can
track a whole band all at once and have to
sacrifice the quality of the gear to do it?
Exactly, because it’s cheaper in the long
run to go in to a bigger room. Be prepared,
be rehearsed. The Beatles went in and did
their first album in 11 hours, something
like that. If you’re prepared, you can go
into a studio and rent it for a day for less
than it would cost to buy a half-decent
microphone.
Then you can take the tracks home and
spend the time there working on the
details and overdubs.
Exactly. What’s so funny is that I work
with a lot of artists that should be just artists,
but they also want to be engineers,
and they don’t realize that there are two
hats. The artist will waste a lot of time and
their creativity trying to figure out how the
computer works or the interface works or
plug-ins work or what to use, instead of
being creative. It happens with songwriters.
A songwriter will write a hit song, then
they’ll go out and buy a bunch of gear and
have a studio in their house and then they
stop writing songs. The same thing with
artists—they stop singing or a guitar player
will stop spending time practicing. For the
hours of figuring out how to hook up a
microphone and get the best signal, why
not have somebody who actually knows
how to do that and spend your time practicing
and working toward that moment
when you’ll be working with that engineer?
You have to figure out what you want to be
in life. Do you want to be an artist or do
you want to be someone that has a really
steep learning curve to become an engineer?
Have you noticed that lately with artists?
Are they not able to knock it out in one
or two takes?
No, normally they can knock it out. There’s
a group that I work with called MilkDrive.
They’re like a new New Grass Revival out
of Austin. They can come in and they just
knock it out.
Because they’re focusing on being artists.
Yes, they all have their Pro Tools 002s and
003s and they play around to get their ideas
and their demos down, but not a master
recording for release.
The Hillbenders is another group out of Missouri. They all go down live—vocals, everything. There are still groups out there that can do it.
Selected Bil VornDick Discography
Alison Krauss and Union Station, I’ve Got That Old Feeling
Rhonda Vincent, Taken
Charlie Haden and Family, Rambling Boy
Ralph Stanley, Clinch Mountain Country (featuring Bob Dylan, Vince Gill,
Dwight Yoakam, Kentucky Headhunters, Diamond Rio, Marty Stuart, Ricky
Skaggs, and many more)
Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, Flight of the Cosmic Hippo,
Tales from the Acoustic Planet, and many more solo and with the Flecktones
Mark O’Connor, The New Nashville Cats
Doc Watson, On Praying Ground and many more
Shawn Lane, Power of Ten
Jerry Douglas, Russ Barenberg, and Edgar Meyer, Skip, Hop & Wobble
Jerry Douglas, Slide Rule and many more
Marty Robbins, Legend and many more