Credits include: Beyonce, Pink, Earth, Wind & Fire, Mary J. Blige, Nelly, Christina Aguilera, Destiny’s Child, Justin Timberlake, Bell Biv DeVoe, Shakira, Backstreet Boys, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey. See the Appendix for Dave Pensado’s full bio.

I think the best thing a young engineer can do is just to totally immerse himself in music. I probably listen to more music than just about anybody I know. Listening to lots of all kinds of music helps you gain a musical vocabulary. If I want to give a rock song a little bit of hip-hop credibility, then I add an 808, which is like a vocabulary “word” I would’ve acquired from listening to and studying everything I heard. If I want to imply surfer music, then I’m going to take my Fender Telecaster and run it through a Fender Twin with a little bit of vibrato and spring reverb. It’s not that a Telecaster through a Fender Twin sounds good, but over the years that’s what our brain has established as “the sound,” and there are trillions of sounds that have become part of the vocabulary of music.

I think that a good engineer should explore that concept and understand how it works. When you have enough immediate “words,” then you can start constructing “sentences” into musical paragraphs. You have to have the vocabulary. Once you have that vocabulary, you start building on it. The next thing you know, you can mix a record, produce a record, or track a record.

For instance, how can you set up some drums and mic them if you’ve never heard the song before or have any understanding of what is needed for that style of music? I’ve seen it done. How can you do that? I’ve seen engineers start a mix without ever having heard the song. They just immediately pull up the drums and start EQing. That would be like putting a can of tomato sauce in pot, and you just start adding spices. What the heck are you cooking? Don’t you think you should kind of know what the dish is before you start adding spices?

Nobody wants to be a tracking engineer anymore. Nobody wants to dedicate their life to getting live drum sounds. Everybody wants to be a mixer. I guess everyone wants to be a director in the movie profession. I personally think that it takes greater skills to be a really topnotch tracking engineer than it does to be a mixing engineer. I’d like to see the schools and the recording community really emphasize and focus on creating great tracking engineers. Do they exist any more?

If I mention some famous person in the recording world as a great tracking engineer, it would be an insult. They would write to you and say, “I’m not a tracking engineer; I’m a producer.” Calling oneself a tracking engineer is no longer cool, and nobody wants to be it. I’d love to see an emphasis and a shift on that because, like we’re saying, if you take the sheer amount of time that goes into the making of a song from the time that it’s conceived to the time that it’s on the radio…let’s just make up a number…85 percent of that’s the tracking guy. Ten percent is the producer, if they’re two different people, and 5 percent is mixing. I’ll do maybe 250 to 300 mixes a year, and it’s extremely rare—maybe 20 times during the year—that I get something I feel was tracked really well.

So where did we get this concept that track engineering isn’t key? Tracking has gotten so bad that much of my mixing is now repairing, and the guys that are good at repairing are considered great mixers. Ten years ago, I’d typically spend about 20 hours on a mix. Now I average around 12 hours, and of those, I spend a good six repairing, four hours getting sounds, and maybe two hours mixing.

Credits include: Lyle Lovett, James Taylor, Carole King, Graham Nash, Jimmy Buffett, Linda Ronstadt, Little Feat, Neil Diamond, Ringo Starr, Heart, Nirvana, Elton John, Billy Joel, Jackson Browne, Barbra Streisand, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Morrissey, Sting. See the Appendix for Nathaniel Kunkel’s full bio.

To acquire the skills you need to be able to effectively manipulate audio, you first need to learn to sit and listen. The process of record production or engineering is being quiet within yourself, hearing music, having an opinion about the music, having a feeling about what you need it to be, and seeing that in your mind’s eye. Then it’s a matter of going to your skill set, pulling out the skills that you need to do it, going to your toolbox, manipulating those tools with your skill set, and applying it to the audio you hear…before you lose your perspective. It’s important to be able to work fast, because the process has to be very transparent and intuitive, and it has to be on the back side of what your emotional responses are to the music. I don’t know how you can acquire the ability to hear a piece of audio, know what you wish it to be, and understand what tools are going to make that vision happen as quickly and efficiently as you need it to occur without having years and years of listening experience.

Credits include: Aimee Mann, Mose Allison, Bob Seger, Christina Aguilera, the Corrs, Duffy, John Fogerty, Loudon Wainwright III, Son Volt, Crowded House, Brett Dennen, Jewel, Liz Phair, Paul Westerberg, Joe Henry. See the Appendix for Ryan Freeland’s full bio.

There are more right ways to record and mix music than wrong ways. Engineers spend a lot of time thinking about what the perfect drum, bass, vocal, guitar, or piano sound is when such a thing does not exist.

Gear does matter. It’s like a painter’s choice of acrylic or oil paint, canvas or cardboard—or how a cinematographer’s choice of lenses and filters radically affects the final product. We make choices to capture a moment and present a mood for each record. Like how different New York City looks in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver compared to Woody Allen’s Manhattan—though they were filmed in the same city only a couple of years apart. Or Pablo Picasso’s Cubist view compared to Gustav Klimt’s Art Nouveau movement—they were contemporaries, but each made radically different choices. The tools we use do define our sound, and our aesthetics reside in 19-inch rack spaces, 2-inch reels of tape, gold-sputtered capsules, and computer hard drives. Your gear choices are a big part of what defines your sound and your statement as an engineer.

Giving too much credence to studio precedents, like analog tape, three-microphone drum techniques, and vintage gear, can distract one from making a meaningful recording. Analog tape sounds great, but recording with digital will most certainly not ruin the entire project. The Glyn Johns drum recording technique is amazing, but it won’t work on every drummer in every room. The Neumann U 47 is one of the world’s truly great microphones, but it’s not always the right choice for every situation. I think it’s an easy trap to fall into—trusting precedent and concept over reality and your own sound judgment.

Performance matters, but it is not everything. I’ve read often that the key to getting a great sound is to start with a great player. And while I love to work with great musicians, it can be equally fun to make a great recording with an average band. And an average band with an amazing or interesting recording can be much more emotionally effective than a great band whose performance isn’t thoughtfully captured by the right engineering. It doesn’t really matter how great you play if no one can hear it. Great recording with a great engineer can make all of the difference.

There are no absolutes. Even if you could go into RCA Studios, record to analog tape, and use only vintage microphones, your recording is probably not going to sound like Sam Cooke’s Night Beat. The other big problem with that, besides the obvious problem of not being Sam Cooke, is that borrowing concepts from the past is a good thing, but straight imitation removes your artistry from the equation. The Beatles made amazingly great records, but I don’t want to limit myself by thinking of that as the gold standard—comparing everything I record and mix to some other record. The band and the songs almost always tell you how they are supposed to sound in order to best get their point across. You can get extremely lost by trying to force a song to a sonic place it doesn’t want to go. Just let it be what it is; don’t ruin it by trying to make it something it’s not.

The way the public listens to recorded music is ever changing—from vinyl, to compact discs, and now compressed files playing on phones and laptops. Every change offers the engineer a new set of problems to deal with and solutions to benefit from. My mixes need to compete with the end user’s entire music catalog on random shuffle. During the days of vinyl, the consumer got up every 20 minutes to change the record and usually adjusted the volume, bass, and treble levels for each record they put on. Now everything runs in a random shuffle of singles with no adjustments made. It certainly changes the way one thinks about mixing and sound in general.

Mix notes have also changed drastically, as people are mostly listening on ear buds and laptops. It seems like fewer and fewer people actually have decent sound systems in their homes anymore. One of the benefits of this is that the degradation created when you compress a sound file is less obvious when you listen through laptop speakers. So the current music playback technology has kept pace with the compressing of the sound file—it’s all pretty mediocre. It’s sad that no one else will ever hear the record you just slaved over in all of its hi-fi glory. The upside is that you, too, can bring your entire music catalog with you wherever you go. I’ve got a large collection of songs that travel everywhere with me on my phone. I end up listening a lot more to a larger variety of things. And the main thing I’ve learned from all this listening is that there are a million ways for records to sound—from big and dark to thin and bright, from loud and compressed to soft and dynamic. And what this constantly reinforces is that more of it sounds good to me than bad—or at least it sounds interesting. It shows that there is no one way to make a great record. There are as many ways to approach sound as there are people in the world.

I now feel like there are a lot more right choices to be made while recording than wrong choices. The important thing is that the entire record sounds right to my clients and me, not that the kick drum sound I got holds up against every kick drum sound ever recorded. Kick drums don’t exist in a vacuum. They belong as part of a whole, as a vehicle to create a vibe for a particular song. You could drive yourself crazy trying to achieve a perfect kick drum, only to realize that particular sound doesn’t work for the next record you record or mix. Let it be what it is. Better to focus on the emotional impact of the entire recording as opposed to focusing on the technical aspects of just one of its elements. There is no wrong answer when it comes to these sorts of things, only differences. Is this mic better than that mic, is analog better than digital, and is tube gear vibier than solid state? I say use it all, abuse it if necessary, and swap it out if it’s not getting you what you need—even if it is a Neumann U 47.

Credits include: King Crimson, Steve Morse, Chucho Valdes and Irakere, Bozzio Levin Stevens, Willie Oteri, ProjeKt One, ProjeKt Two, ProjeKct Three, ProjeKt Four. See the Appendix for Ronan Chris Murphy’s full bio.

As great as a Pink Floyd record sounds, and as great as the engineering was on those records, David Gilmour’s guitar tone doesn’t send shivers up my spine because of the compression they used or the dithering scheme they used on the remaster. It’s because the magic happened before the microphone, and it seems some people don’t really pay enough attention to that fact. It’s like they are busy thinking, “What can I do down the chain, after the microphone, to try and convert this into magic?” It’s a really easy place to fall into, even as a more experienced producer and engineer. Sometimes I’ve gotta smack myself and go, “Wait a second; if it’s not getting me excited without any of my stuff, we’re not where we need to be yet.”

I can do things to manipulate or enhance for creative purposes or mitigate problems, but it doesn’t matter what I have if it isn’t sounding great on the floor. It’s really easy to fall into that trap of “Let me scroll through my plug-in selection and see what might make it sound good,” when a lot of times there are just changes they could make before the microphone.

The difference between two esoteric preamps is far less significant than changing the gauge of your guitar pick or rolling back the volume knob on your guitar amp about 20 percent, so there are all these things that happen before the mic that are all of these night-and-day differences. Switching the preamps from Soundcraft to Neve is not going to change the character of who that person is as an artist or even change the feel of the music. People get obsessed about the fact that some transformer has a little bit more steel content in it than nickel content, but I’m way more interested in what is happening with the guitar in that guy’s hands.

One of the big mistakes people make is they completely obliterate the space between the notes in the music. The reason so many of those classic records sound amazing over the years is the space in between. You can hear the separation and the detail. Dark Side of the Moon was 16 tracks, and they didn’t really use up all the tracks. Something like a David Gilmour track will sound so great because, one, he’s playing it, and two, there isn’t much else going on when he’s playing. It’s all big guitars, and you hear the detail and practically hear the coils on the pickups and the subtle decay trailing off. Back in Black, to this day, is pretty much the benchmark hard rock album, but those guitars are clean and arrangements are sparse and there’s tons of space.

Now you have people recording to their DAW, piling up tracks and filling all of the space with sound. It seems crazy to me having mixes show up with 150 tracks. I see these bands wanting to have this powerful sound, and their recordings are all layered up and they are wondering why their record doesn’t have the impact of Back in Black.

With the introduction of the DAW and seemingly infinite track count, people now throw on layers of guitars, voices, and keyboards and say, “We’ll just figure out what we like later,” but what you’ve done is reduce the joy of mixing to a file-management nightmare, sorting out tracks and almost ensuring the magic of the performance will never materialize. You’ll have the product of too much thinking that’s just ordered tonalities with a beat and little soul.

Some people will say they want their music to sound just like their live show, but for it to be just like that live show, the playback would have to be at about 120 dB SPL, and you’d have a couple of beers in you, and there’d be a light show and so on. It’s a visceral experience. Somebody listening to your album in their car or at home doesn’t have that, so it’s all about finding ways to actually get the listener closer to a specific space, because you don’t just have that live, visceral, multisen-sory experience.

Often you might want to change the perspective from trying to reach the people back in row ZZ and make things a little bit more intimate, like you’re performing to someone three feet away. That even applies to heavy-metal bands. What you’re going to want is to create a really tight relationship, which is why it’s quite common to back off the amount of distortion you have on an electric guitar for the album versus the live show, because what you’re trying to do is get that to be a little more articulate and immediate. A super-overdriven guitar will feel a little bit distant. When you start to bring elements like guitars and kick a little closer to the listener, it makes it really exciting to somebody in the car on the expressway or sitting back in an audiophile listening environment. It’s all about finding ways to create that unique experience.

Credits include: Tom Petty, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wilco, Sting, Ride, Dixie Chicks, Lucinda Williams, the Rolling Stones, Pete Yorn, Foo Fighters, Counting Crows, Matchbox Twenty, Weezer. See the Appendix for Jim Scott’s full bio.

What I like to do is get four, five, or six guys who play great in the same room at the same time with a great song and a great singer, and have somebody count to four and see what happens. If you’ve got those ingredients, something good will happen and usually pretty quickly. It will happen for them, and it will happen for me on the engineering side.

You can dial in a great tom tom, snare, bass, and other sounds, but until they all play together, you don’t really know if that sound is the good sound or the right sound. You can get a sound that isn’t distorted and doesn’t buzz and hum and doesn’t distort the speaker, if that’s your goal, but until everyone plays together and you actually hear music, you don’t know if there’s going to be a balance or any kind of fidelity or any sort of interesting noise that’s being made. If you get great guys playing a great groove, the record is 80 percent done in the first three minutes of work. It’s kind of the hardest work, but it’s also the easiest work because if you really hit it, that’s the most fun.

Great players know how to supply the tone and usually will have it in their first two or three passes. If you’re brave enough to just let them do it without grabbing a bunch of EQs and compressors and trying to force a mix, and you let the musicians listen to themselves, you’ll discover that the guitar player makes a subtle change. He moves the kick back closer to the bridge and gets a sharper sound, or the bass player will throw away his pick, play with his thumb, and get a deeper sound. Maybe the drummer figures out which tom tom speaks out, so he plays his fill on the tom toms that sound good to him. The next thing you know, you are hearing stuff that all sounds better. The musicians will make it happen.

If you want to jump in and start having everyone chasing their tails, then go ahead and start EQing the bass while he’s trying to change the bass and play with his pick. While you are dulling down his sound, he has changed to his thumb, and now it’s too dull. It gets a little out of control until someone decides to wait, and usually that’s me. I’ll just wait for a take or two and have them come in for a little playback. The experienced musicians will know exactly what they need to do to make a good sound, as long as you provided an environment for them to be comfortable to play and gave them a good sound to start with.

My approach is to get as many people going live as I possibly can and keep it all, because that is the heart, soul, and core of a record. If it feels good at that moment, it will always feel good. Even if you take everyone out and just listen to the snare drum or just the rhythm guitar, it still is going to feel good, because it felt good at that moment.

Where is the inspiration, if you are over-dubbing everybody to quantized tracks? To me, that’s just counting bars and beats and doing it by the numbers. Where is the “go for it”? Where is the “I’m going to try to do something here across this crazy change and this thing where it really speeds and goes into the solo”—whether it speeds up or not, it might feel like it should. Personally, I like that excitement, the action and the mystery that happens from people taking chances playing together in a room.

When it comes to fixing things, Pro Tools is just another way, but it can be a bad drug because it’s easy to abuse that. In the old days, you could cut tape, and you would stay up all night. At the end of it, if you cut something together that felt good, you knew that was a good night’s work. You created something where there was nothing, and that was just one way of fixing things. People sang out of tune before there were pitch-correcting devices, and there were ways to fix that, too. You slowed the tape recorder down and copied the offending part over and flew it back in at a different speed—a long note, a short note. Or you could put up a “smoke bomb”—put a power cord on top of that weak part or put a piano note on top of it. There were ways to disguise flaws and put a little makeup on things that didn’t sound so good, but the computer has made all of that the norm. Fix everything…and I think that way of doing things is really unhealthy for the music.

Nowadays, a band can suck, and they will go into the studio, and some poor recording engineer pushes a button, and it comes out sounding in time. No one said it was good, but it’s in time and it’s in tune, and they think, “Geez! It sounds like everything else on the radio. We are great!” If young bands learn the hard way and experience the realization of, “We have worked all night long and our track still sucks”—well, next time they go into the studio, they will have rehearsed a lot, and they may be ready and sound like a unit.

When I trained at the Record Plant in Los Angeles in the early ’80s, preparation was everything. That was when studio time was expensive. In those days, it wasn’t all 12-hour-a-day lockouts. There were some three-hour sessions and six-hour sessions, where it was downbeat right at session time. That meant at 10 a.m., it was the countdown to start recording, “1, 2, 3, 4, go.” And you hit Record, and the band was ready right then to play. What this meant was that all the mics, mic cables, headphones, extensions…everything had to be tested, working, and ready to go before that session downbeat started at 10 a.m. or 2 p.m. or 6 p.m.

As an engineer, the preparation for a session has always been really important. You have to know what kind of music you are recording. People are paying you to be ready. You make a few phone calls; you get the plan before they arrive. “How many different guitar amps does the guitar player have? On this one song, a horn section comes out.” That’s good to know, so that you can put some more mics out. “On this song we have three background singers.” Good to know…we can put mics out for the background singers. If you didn’t care, and the background singers arrived with no place to sing, you would look terrible and never get hired again. You have to prepare, communicate, and then use your experience to make it all look like it’s really easy. I hate people running around and not being ready, especially me. That’s why it’s nice to be prepared, and it’s nice to know how to do it. It’s a great feeling to know that everything in the room is working. I’ll go in Sunday night for a Monday morning session, because I want the Monday morning session to be great. I don’t want to be sweating. I want to be the calmest one in the room on Monday morning. That’s preparation, and that’s what you need.

There is a little science and physics to recording. You can anticipate how loud a guy might hit a snare drum, and you can set the mic preamp at a level that at least gets you close. Whereas, if you don’t get a really long time to do your sound check, at least you’ll be in the ballpark at what would be safe to not distort the tape, not distort the mic preamp, or not distort the Pro Tools when the session starts.

If you have some experience you can set up the room and be ready when the musicians walk in, so it’s not like, “Gee, how do I record a floor tom today? Where should I put the mic? What level should I set the mic preamp at?”

Hopefully, at some point, there is an experience level where you can have everybody almost ready to go and almost have the sound dialed in on things before the players even sit down to track. Some of that comes from habit, some from experience, and some from using something that worked in the past that will probably work again in the future. That’s my experience with it. I don’t feel like it’s experimenting, recording school every day.

Some people come to me and say, “I really like the guitar sounds you got on that band. I really like the drum sounds you got on that band.” And that’s why they are there, because they want something kind of like that. I feel it’s my job to give them something kind of like that. Not to say, “Yeah, yeah, I don’t do that drum sound anymore. Now I record all my drums in the park with one mic. So we are going to the park today.” That’s not what they want. They want a big fat rock drum sound. So you approach it that way, and if you can, use the same drums. Use the same drummer if you can. Give them what they want. That’s what I try to do with mixing, with service and tracking and everything. The musicians will be happy if they hear something that they want to hear, and so will the record company. If you give them what they want, they are going to be happy. They will call you back next year and give you another try. It shouldn’t be that hard, but some people make it harder than it needs to be. I try to keep it as simple as possible. Keep everyone happy and create an environment of safety, love, good vibes, and good music and invite the best players that I can up here to play. That’s how I try to get it done.