When mixing records, I have some hardware and, once in a blue moon, if I really feel like my Dolby As are going to do something that a plugin won’t, and maybe I feel like patching it in… But I usually talk myself out of it. For me, once it’s in the box, it stays in the box. “Today you have so many more tools at your disposal. But what about now? Are things getting more complex or is technology making things easier? In the early days of engineering it was just about setting things up, plugging things in. It was a mismatch where the two worked really well together.” So we had a retro sound, but the vocals weren’t retro. “It made for a really cool sound because Ariana and Justin’s vocals aren’t necessarily in that lane. There was a Rhodes - warm instrumentation, really filling up that mid-range and lower mids. It had that retro guitar sound that was very warm.
It didn’t sound worlds different when we were tracking vocals. A lot of that was right there in the production. “So that was Josh Goodwin who mixed that, and he did an amazing job. Did that sound come from the tracking or was it in the mix? “You listen to the old rock engineers and they’re trying to make space for the vocals in between the guitars, but now you don’t have to make space for anything! Nothing overlaps! And that’s cool and all, but that’s not always my favourite and I think things are trending away from that now.”
It’s changing now, but three to five years ago you had your bass which was all 808s, your melody was all high, tinkly, high frequency stuff and the only thing that sat in the middle was vocals. Everything has got very narrow, very filtered, everything has its own little place. There aren’t a lot of people doing that big sound these days. I get it, but it’s not my instinct to go there. A lot of pop these days is very ambient and almost hollow sounding. “I think my gut is to try and fill up the space but also keep it upfront. If someone was to sit over me and say ‘EQ like this’ and so on, I probably wouldn’t take that gig, ‘cos that would be as annoying as hell. I try not to force anything of mine onto anybody else. “I always joke that I just want everything to sound like 90’s rock! That’s what I bring to it.
It’s fair to say that your work has a real signature to it. “But with vocals… Lyrics change… They’ll want to add or subtract harmonies… And when you punch in and it sounds different on the punch, that’s a big bummer for everyone.” And then if there’s a problem you fix it with an edit, or just re-do the part. “If you’re recording a guitar or a bass, though, it’s rare that people are going to want to punch in on one note. It’s ‘Oh shit… Where did I have that set?’ Just because when I go and punch in the next day and the EQ is not right it’s a nightmare. Is there anything that you always do on a session, or never do on a session? So if he walked over to them I was ready to record.” “I was working with this one producer a lot recently and he always had certain keyboards that he used so I’d have a template with tracks for them so I was always ready. And if there’s instrumentation or a band’s involved then I’ll have definitely already made a mic list and I’ll have made a specific template for that day that incorporates all that. “If it’s vocal tracking I have a vocal template that works for me and I always use.
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