Noted Nashville engineer Chuck Ainlay discusses his innovative "hybrid" analog-digital recording techniques, with a focus on Mark Knopfler's latest release For Part I of the Chuck Ainlay interview, click here.

PSW - How about with Sailing to Philadelphia? Who decided the recording formats for that project?

This was a bit different situation because I was co-producer on the project, and there are a few times when I actually do have the power to make those choices. Being a co-producer with Mark, we talked about the feeling of what we wanted to do. Since we've started doing these solo things, it's been about trying to capture sonically the heart of music, and we feel as though analog best does that. It has the warmth, maybe it's a throwback to what we grew up with, whatever-there is something about the analog stage that is reminiscent of music that has affected us in the past.

So that's why, with that album, the tradeoff was between convenience and analog. I wanted to get the compression to where it would best help me out, that's on the drums, and the roundness on the bass. Like I said earlier, this seems to be the harmonic distortion that comes along with low end in analog, and I think that's something that helps out bass guitar.

So drums and bass were cut 16- track analog, then we locked up to 48-track 3348 16-bit DASH for everything else. That's where convenience came in, being able to do multiple takes on marks guitars on different tracking dates, being able to comp later without generation loss.

A lot of what we do in Nashville, and a lot of the charm that Mark finds here, is that things are recorded pretty much live in the studio, so we are trying to get a performance going, a musical event happening in the studio, and we not only go for vocals but also for Mark's guitar. But there might be an odd note here and there that's missing, so we'll take passes of guitar directly after we cut the track same with vocals, then later down the road, we'll comp that all together. That's why the second time around with Mark's solo projects, rather than do it all analog, I decided to go with a 48-track digital.

PSW - Did you bounce the analog tracks over to digital for the overdubs?

Yes. We did not have to have the analog locked up for overdubs. We played them once on initial playback and then transferred them to the 48 track. They were put away until mix. Then in the mix we locked up the analog-except for a couple songs where we had done some multi-track editing in the digital domain, and so we couldn’t use the analog tracks on those songs.

PSW - That's an expensive approach. Was it worth the extra money?

Yes, but I don't think I could do that on a typical Nashville country record. Mark's album is different in that, the way it is budgeted is more open ended. A typical country record, on other hand, at best will have a $350,000 budget, in fact that's pretty good. I won't even talk about how much Mark's records cost!

PSW - But they have shelf life. They make money over the long haul.

Yeah, that's it. That's something that gets lost in the record company situation today. Everybody wants to have that big current hit record, and not thinking about the longevity of the record. A lot of new artists are here for one record, then gone the next year. Just another new face on the block. Mark just happened to be an artist that came along at a period of time when labels were interested in supporting artists for more than one or two albums, has been able to keep that mystique about himself, and keep creating great music along the way.

PSW - For the analog basics, did you run that 16-track at 15 or 30 ips?

Well, the first album, Golden Heart, we did 15 ips SR, but this latest one was 30 ips with no NR on the 16-track, using the BASF 900.