For nearly two decades, Chuck Ainlay has been in constant demand as one of Nashville's top session engineers.

Chuck Ainlay

Though he has credits on scores of million-selling country albums, he is best known to rock fans as engineer and co-producer for Mark Knopfler's recent album and soundtrack recordings. A pioneer of digital in the 1980's, Ainlay is now a strong proponent of 'hybrid' (analog plus digital) recording-a technique he used with notable success on Knopfler's acclaimed Sailing to Philadelphia.

PSW - When did you first start working with digital?

Looking back on it, I was an early proponent of digital. In fact, when I was chief engineer out at the Castle I talked the owners into buying the first digital system in town, a 3M digital machine. I probably also had some influence on Jimmy Bowen, that helped get him into using digital, and with him being most prolific producer here in the 80's that kind of got Nashville ahead of the game.

But, all that said, I sort of went through a reversal when I first started working with Mark Knopfler. When he started working here, he asked who's a good engineer in Nashville, he was looking for an engineer to do the last Dire Straits album. Paul Franklin, who was with him at the time said, "You should call Chuck Ainlay, they call him 'Mister Digital.'" That's how I got stated with Mark.

But in doing that album, he and I got to talking more about the philosophy of making records, and how we wanted to get back to a warmer sound. So we started talking about for his next album, a solo album [Golden Heart], doing it analog.

We did that one all analog, but recently I've gotten into this mixed thing where I like to track analog, and then transfer to digital and carry on doing overdubs in the digital domain, because you have the ability to make copies of tracks without generation losses. For doing comps and to transfer into a hard disk system, at some point it's necessary to go digital. But I still like to get that analog warmth and tape compression in tracking.

So that usually means my records end up being a real hybrid sort of thing. After tracking analog, I go digital, do all the overdubs and comp work, and do any hard disk fixing. Generally prefer to mix on my Axiom MT console digitally, then come out of the desk into a 1-inch 2-track analog to mix to and master from.

PSW - What was it that attracted you to digital in the first place?
I remember at the time, this is going back many years, in the early 80's being freaked out at the noise floor being lower, and being able to hear deeper into things by using digital. But this was back when 456 was as good as you could get in tape, maybe even before that. So tape noise was more significant than it is these days with higher output tapes.

I also remember being intrigued by the way the low frequency was not distorted. There is a sort of harmonic thing that you get on basses and kick drums from analog, which now I dig, there is something very musical about it...but at the time I was intrigued by the accuracy of the bottom end.

And then there's the way the impact of the transients were not taken away by the tape compression. All of that impressed me at the time. And so those are the positive attributes of digital. Anytime you want to capture those qualities, digital is probably the preferred recording medium