Are you content with the results of the renovation process?

This process has been pretty radical and cool. It’s one of the best challenges I’ve had as an engineer in a long time. We’ve had to utilize whatever we had during each of the phases, which is good because it brings you back. If you have all the gear in the world and use it every day, you can lose contact with the music. We came up with some pretty interesting things a year ago when we didn’t have so much equipment. It helped remind me how much fun this business can be, especially after seeing how well the renovation turned out.

How many rooms comprise the new studio?

There’s the control room, which is really small but sounds really great.

We’ve got a drum booth that used to be Porter Wagner’s golf course. I’m a firm believer that things like that were part of the magic of Fireside, so instead of getting rid of it, I put a roof over it and made it the drum room.

We’ve got what I call ‘Dolly Parton’s Vocal Booth’, which is a small booth primarily for scratch vocals.

We have another vocal booth, which is quite a bit larger.

Then we have another booth that we built specially just for the Steinway B-Series – the ‘Charlie Classic’ I call it.

And we’ve got the area around the fireplace, of course, which is the main part of the room. I use the fireplace itself as a diffuser. I did some calculations on my computer and figured out that the best diffuser in the world is something like a fireplace made out of stone – it scatters the frequencies. And that was a big part of why that room sounded so good on some of the old recordings. Some of the Ray Price stuff that was cut in there and some of Merle’s records that he did back in ‘76 had the most incredible room sound.

So the fireplace is really part of the studio’s signature sound?

I don’t think anyone ever got down to the science of what made that room jive, but the fireplace was definitely a part of it. When Charlie Rich would cut in there, he used to take the Steinway B-Series and drag it out into the middle of the main floor to record. He’d line the top of the Steinway with champagne glasses and between every take he’d drink a glass and throw it into the fireplace. For me it’s a diffuser, for him it was just a place to throw his glasses. But it’s always been a part of the recordings that come out of this studio.

That’s kind of the way they did it then. Merle would come in and fight with Porter Wagner over Dolly right in the middle of the session. Marty Haggard (Merle’s son) was telling me all kinds of stories about when Merle and Porter broke out in jealous fights and went right out of the studio to wrestle around while everybody else was trying to cut some tracks.

It must have been a soap opera in there.

Yeah, we think nowadays that it’s a soap opera with the music business, but I think that those guys had us beat.

Do you think that the artists who want to work at Fireside now want to recreate some of that atmosphere and spontaneity?

Definitely. I deal with a lot of people who don’t have a major label backing, who are getting investors along the way. They still want that fire and that power because they need every creative edge they can get.

You must be quite bonded with Fireside at this point.

Yeah. When I worked at Masterfonics I worked around some great engineers, like Jeff Baldwin and Mutt Lange. But throughout all of those sessions, there was just so much tension. When I came down to Fireside and I found artists who are just as good without all of the tension and stress.

Let me interrogate you about your setup down at Fireside. Are you running a hard-disk setup?

Basically what I’m running is 48 tracks of RADAR, which is the only computer system that I’ve allowed in at this time.

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