PSW - Where did you do the tracking?

We tracked at various studios. The first tracking dates were at Emerald Studio A, some others at Ocean Way Nashville, others at Emerald’s Tracking Room. All the tracking was in Nashville, and all the overdubbing in London at Mark’s studio, including comping and editing. Then we did the final overdubs at AIR in London and mixed there. With exception of one which I mixed at BackStage , because of time considerations.

PSW - So you carted the original 16-track analog masters to London?

Yes, we took the digital and analog tapes, my ATR 1-inch two-track, and a couple racks of my favorite analog gear, so we had decent stuff to work with in Mark's place. Mark's studio is minimally equipped. It's basically a living room in a guest home, with an inexpensive console. But it adds that home recording element to the album, which is a lot of fun. You can take your time, no pressures of economics. We worked off a 3348, also had the Pro Tools for fixes.

PSW - What analog machines did you use for tracking and mixing?

They were all Studer A800s, both in Nashville and at AIR. The console we mixed on at AIR is the famous AIR Neve There were only three of them built. These were the last Neves made before going to 8100 series. They look very similar to an 8078, but electronically they are very different. It was actually Rupert's precursor to Focusrite. He left Neve at that point, and started Focusrite, in fact, that console has the first 16 channels of Focusrite as a sidecar attached to it.

It is an amazing console to track on. All the mic preamps are out in the studio and remote controlled. AIR had three of them built, then one went to AIR Montserrat and eventually to A&M, the other ended up at Bryan Adams’ place. It’s a pretty amazing console. AIR has done a lot of mods, so it now has GML automation, all the aux sends are automatable in and out.

PSW - Whose choice was it to mix at AIR?

Both Mark and I decided to mix at AIR. He has always recorded or mixed at AIR, he’s good buddies with George Martin. I met my wife at AIR, so it’s like home, and that Neve is an amazing sounding console. And the concept on the albums was to try to get back to the quality of recordings of years gone by, that heartfelt sonic thing that seems lacking in a lot of the cold recordings of today.

PSW - Are you disappointed that it didn't have a huge hit single?

Not really. With Mark, he’s going to sell a lot of records anyway. He has a huge fan base, regardless of getting any airplay. So though we had little airplay in America, it's done great in Europe.

PSW- Where was James Taylor's overdub done?

James' vocal was done at Emerald Tracking Room. Mark and I were co-producing some sides on James, and Mark had the idea of doing this one song and having James sing on it. Unfortunately, James had not gotten to town when we cut the track, and the key is maybe a step too low, but it gives it an interesting …gives it a personality. Probably could have been a step higher if James had been there, but it works.

PSW - And the Van Morrison track?

Van was done at his studio in Bath, England. We got off the airplane, got in a car and drove to Bath where Van has his studios, the old Tears for Fears studio. It's an interesting studio, with the control room is upstairs, and the studio downstairs. They rented in a 3348, and an interesting thing about that, sad thing,…the engineer who did the recording was not all that familiar with the 3348. The way Van does things, he sings it once and that's that. So we're recording…or think we are recording the first vocal pass, about midway through the song the engineer stops the tape and Mark and I just about died. Because it was an unbelievable vocal take, but the engineer didn't have it in record. So Van reluctantly did give us two more passes. Primarily it was all the second pass, with a few words from the third. Mark was ready to kill the guy.

Most of Mark's lead vocals were either the tracking vocal, or were done directly after the tracking date, so they were done at wherever we recorded. So at his studio we mostly did guitars and background vocals.

PSW - Now, let's move on to mixdown media. Where do analog and digital fit in there? Did you ever go through a DAT phase?

Not really. I only mixed to DATs for backups, and I've never been an Apogee fan. I’ve always mixed to other digital media. I got started early on with the 3M digital machine, which was really an excellent sounding machine. So I’ve always tried to find the best possible converters. There was a stage after that when I did a lot of work for Jimmy Bowen, and he used the Mitsubishi 800s and 850s, which were just horrible sounding machines. But it was work. For mixdown during that period, we mixed to the JVC _-inch VCR system, which was actually quite good compared to the Sony that was the alternative at the time. When standalone converters started showing up…I can't even remember the names of all that I tried. I know we went through all sorts of them. We were mixing to the PCM9000 Sony MO. But it was during Mark's Golden Heart album when we went to mix it purely analog, to half inch, when we went to master we went through every converter known to man, had a shootout that lasted for three days. That's when we came up with the Pacific Microsonics HDCD process. That was one of the very first HDCD recordings. In fact, the converter was just a prototype in a copper box hooked up to a laptop.

I was always chasing the highest resolution possible. When 20 bit came along I tried that, then 24 bit. When 88.2 came along, I was there with that. I’m still not totally convinced that 96 is any better than 88.2, but the Pacific Microsonics at least until recently with the model it only did 44.1 derivatives.

PSW - Now where does the 1-inch ATR fit in?

What I do is I come directly out of the D-to -A converters of the Axiom and go to the 1-inch, though at the same time I'll store the digital output to the Genex. More recently I am transferring straight from the Genex through the Pacific Microsonics D to A converters to get into the 1-inch machine after the fact, while mastering. We’ll come straight off the repro head of the ATR to use the analog EQ mastering EQ, and then back to digital through the Pacific Microsonics A to D's to save the mastering EQ. So there is no tape sag at all from the tape sitting around. It’s also more economical, rather than having to save all the different versions that we do to analog tape. Basically we’re just using the analog machine as a signal processor. That way, we are also able to use all the analog EQ because we're bringing it out into the analog domain. Then at the very end, after we’ve maxed out what we can do in the analog domain we’ll usually use some digital compression and EQ.

So we're going from the record head, straight to the repro head, with no chance of any self-erasure. It does its whole analog thing in that split second. It’s just something I started doing last year, and it's pretty amazing.