From Peter Gabriel to Paul Moak: A Defense for Artist-Friendly Studios

  

With a few exceptions, all the recording studios I've ever visited or worked at had one thing in common: they did not encourage creativity.  I know, hard to believe.  Strangely, a lot of great music gets recorded in unfriendly creative environments.  You know what though? Great music is a tribute to the grace of being human. Not necessarily an encouragement to studios for a job well done.  So how do they fail to encourage creativity?

First a little history.  The modern recording studio, at it's heart, is the product of the scientific mind.  The DNA of a recording studio is made up of the building blocks of electricity and sound as well as significant scientific and technological discoveries.  In the beginning it was likely that your recording engineer knew more about voltage and nanowebbers than how to spell a G9+5 chord.  Lab coats and pocket protectors were de rigueur in the earliest recording studios. 

Musicians didn't crossover into the engineer or producer sector.  Musicians read their charts, took a cigarette break, and moved on to the next studio and session.  The electrical engineers were in charge.

Not anymore. The whole process has been democratized. Now everyone is an engineer.  Everyone is a producer.  And though we spend a tremendous amount of time in home studios or spare bedrooms with some sort of DAW, we still use a variety of other kinds of studios for tracking and mixing.  The lab coats may be gone, but many of the old studio designs and practices still linger and continue to discourage creativity.

Studios should be about helping humans capture performances with the best and most diverse gear and instruments available.  Instead, many studios begin their day by setting up mics and plugging innumerable cables into a patchbay that needs a code book to be deciphered.  On top of that, the engineer is the only person in the room that understands the routing of the hundreds of mic, line, and patch cables.  Finally you start recording.  Once the session is over the console and gear are zeroed out and everything is torn down and tucked away very laboratory-like.  No one but the studio's trained engineer could get a CD to play once everything is torn down (and maybe that's a stretch). The next day you get it all out again and go through the same process for your new studio client.  Clean slate and all that.  I get it.

This is the studio tradition that began back in the lab coat days.  Of course there's merit in a clean, organized work environment.  But understand this, the only thing musicians and artists care about is closing the gap between what they can imagine and what they can create.  To the degree that engineers and studios frustrate this good goal, to that degree engineers and studios fail their mission and discourage creativity.

A few quick stories highlighting a different path -- one that encourages creativity and gets people into the action without a lot of technical tripping and slipping.  Twenty four years ago I was recording background vocals at producer-engineer Bill Schnee's studio in Los Angeles.  Jack Joseph Puig was the producer on the project, a rock album for an amazingly soulful gospel singer named Russ Taff.  We were recording a song of mine called "Down In The Lowlands."  The track featured some of LA and Nashville's best, including Paul Leim, Nathan East, Dann Huff, Robbie Buchanan, Mark Douthit and Lenny Castro. The track sounded stellar.  In fact, it sounded mixed.  Good reason for it too.  It was.  JJP explained to me that he was always mixing (in mix mode) even when doing overdubs.  I liked this idea.  It certainly made singing background vocals a more inspiring experience.  It also helped JJP know when enough was enough.  He didn't have to guess what it would sound like mixed.  

Hopefully you can see the positive implications of recording and monitoring where you're always mixing, shaping the track toward its final end.  Contrast this method with one that breaks the recording into project categories of tracking/overdubs/mixing with only the final one (mix) actually representing your true vision for the project.  JJP showed me that the true vision for a project could be front-loaded and needn't be something that had to wait to be heard until the proper mix day.  If you try this or ask for it, beware.  You may meet some resistance.  Any vocalist who has ever tried and failed at getting an engineer to add a compressor, reverb, and a delay line to their headphone mix knows what I'm talking about.  The lab coats are still lurking.

Back to my early days with producer David Kahne at The Automatt in San Francisco, I remember Herbie Hancock in one of the studios with all his gear setup (essentially every keyboard and synth available).  He could come in with his engineer/keyboard tech and record anytime.  It was plug and play.  I've never seen anyone create this kind of plug and play setup better than Peter Gabriel and more recently Paul Moak in Nashville.  Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios is a place that stirs the imagination and invites creativity.  Engineer Richard Chappell once gave our family a thorough tour of all the studios including Peter's personal one.  It had the requisite SSL console and Sony 48 Track digital machines popular at the time, but what set it apart was its focus -- the artist.  There was a central performance station in the middle of the room where Peter sat.  It included his various favorite keyboards, drum machines and other instruments.  His vocal mic was setup at the keyboard and always on to capture any melody or lyric idea.  They were always in record, always documenting the artist at work.  

In Nashville, engineer/producer/musician Paul Moak has a similar setup.  It's in the tradition of artist studios like Peter's or Jon Brion's, but the Smoakstack is also a commercial studio, one I recently rented for Nathan Tasker's new project.  I knew it would be interesting.  I'd heard that Paul had collected a warehouse of inspiring instruments.  What I didn't expect was how intuitive the setup would be.  Paul has anticipated every probable creative choice and set up microphones and DI's to accommodate those choices.  If you walked up to a vibraphone it was miked and ready to record.  Tack piano?  Ready to record.  Les Paul into a Matchless?  Ready to record.  Drum set?  Ready and waiting.  Paul has wisely assisted artists and musicians in closing the gap between what they can imagine and what they can create.  The studio is helping and not hindering the artistic process and that's actually pretty revolutionary for studios.  I suspect his new place in the Berry Hill community of Nashville will do very well.  Not only does this style of recording represent the best of the present and surely the future, it represents what artists and musicians are looking for and actually need in terms of a space that encourages performance and captures it quickly and well.  

Recording should be transparent unless you choose otherwise.  It's about the music first.  We are only taking a sonic picture of the music because its so good more people need to hear it.  A plug and play studio encourages the making of music the very moment you walk in, and as a result, the making of good recordings.  That's the workflow.  I'll be back at Paul's soon.  I'm setting up a day for my friend k.s. rhoads to work there.  I know he'll love the plug and play, artist-friendly hang.  Who wouldn't?  Besides, why should we have to work in artist-unfriendly studios?

• Jack Joseph Puig Bio and Discography
• Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios
• Paul Moak Contact Info 

Comments

[Brian Steckler]

Great post as usual.

I did a record a couple years ago where we went in with the same mindset, at least for the basics sessions. We had a couple drumkits miced up and ready, as well as the piano, and bass rig. It was sure fun to finish one drum take and have the freedom to say "ooh, what if we went with the "lo-fi" kit for the second verse? Let's try it now!"

And of course, any MIDI programmer worth his salt has any number of Logic or PT templates set up and ready to dive in with all his favorite patches loaded ready to rock.

I'm a fan of the "always in mix mode" too. Especially now with the DAW technology, it's so easy to develop the mix's sound as you go. The mixes for the record I'm finishing this week are taking me only a couple hours at most because I've already got it sounding like I want as we finish tracking each part.

[BabyBloomr]

Russ' cover of your song is one of my most favorite things he ever did.

[elizabeth]

~ thank you for this timely post.
was mulling over in my mind where to go from where Im at~ at the moment just a few days ago/ and my dream of where and how I'd like to do it, if I could dare dream of the perfect place and atmosphere~

~thanks
elizabeth

[Bruce]

Insightful as usual, Chuck. But you didn't mention where you thought your studio fit on that scale.

[Mark Pettigrew]

Your description of Russ Taff as "amazingly soulful" was right on! I loved his records back in the day.

Regarding ways in which studios can be "musician friendly," I'd like to observe from personal experience that one of the biggest hindrances to artistic creativity in the studio is the high hourly rate and the ticking clock. The pressure of producing THE performance which will forever go down as your best version of a particular tune you've written, all within extremely limiting budget constraints, can be enormous. It can make it very difficult to even get a decent take, to say nothing of the definitive take.

As a keyboardist, I think that one of the greatest things about MIDI sequencing is that it pretty much eliminates the hourly studio rate as a major factor in one's actual performance, because the act of sequencing the performance (in the privacy of one's own home) and the act of recording that sequence as an audio file later in the studio can be two entirely separate things. Creating a good sequence, prior to taking that MIDI file to the studio, isn't dependent on the acoustics in which the sequence is created; in fact, it isn't even completely dependent on the instrument with which it's recorded, since one can switch from one patch or keyboard or sound sample to another after creating the sequence. Want to create a sequence with a sampled digital piano and then re-record it with a Yamaha (MIDI-equipped) Disklavier grand, captured with ridiculously expensive Neumann mics (or the Earthworks PianoMic system)? No problem. But of course, that presupposes that the studio is MIDI-savvy, which might include knowing how to remap velocities (if necessary) in order to get the best performance out of that Disklavier. (At least I think that's possible; correct me if I'm wrong, Charlie.) Since the performance is already permanently a part of the MIDI file, one can try out different mic positions, effects settings and other variations in order to get the best possible sound (or sounds) for that particular recording.

Obviously none of this is applicable to vocals or other instruments which can't be sequenced. But inasmuch as that method offers enormous benefits for keyboardists, electronic drummers and so forth, it seems to me that any decent pro studio these days should be well versed in the art of taking MIDI tracks from musicians and converting them into the best possible audio recordings, thereby helping their clients to reduce costs and performance anxiety-related problems as much as possible. That includes being equipped with the best equipment (such as the aforementioned Disklavier grand piano) for that job. That might also include offering classes to musicians who know about MIDI but lack knowledge about how to make the most of the benefits of MIDI sequencing.

Admittedly, the audio quality of home DAWs and DAW software is getting better and better all the time, and the benefits of extremely small data files are less important than they once were, now that we have file storage options with capacities rated in the gigabytes and even the terabytes, but MIDI sequencing still has a very valid place in the creative process. In terms of editing functions (such as changing the key of the tune without any degradation in the sound quality), MIDI sequencing offers a lot more flexibility than most audio DAWs offer via their audio components, which is why sequencing is still a significant part of Pro Tools. Sonar and other DAW apps.

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[Dianna Agron]

What an excellent blog! Any vocalist who has ever tried and failed at getting an engineer to add a compressor, reverb, and a delay line to their headphone mix knows what I'm talking about. The lab coats are still lurking.

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