Is recording tracks still important, or has the emphasis shifted more to the mix these days?

I spend my whole life getting sounds for people. I spend my whole life getting sounds so unique that you can’t tell anybody how you got them. Because once you can hear how you got it, it’s not fun to listen to, it gives it away, and the listener starts listening to what you did rather than what you ended up with.

You can’t fool the listeners. You can’t get it through that crack in their attention span unless it’s presented in a certain way. So a lot of times you can take a mediocre recording and mix it right and still get it across. But it’s never the same as when it’s really recorded right, in a way that really captures the band. Then in the mix you just take it the rest of the way.


So what’s your secret formula for getting the tracks right in the first place?

I guess it’s just the way I hear. Beyond that, I think if I ever figure out exactly what I’m doing, I won’t be able to do it anymore. There’s something to say about just going for the feel, and going by what’s natural. As far as your readers are concerned, I couldn’t be any more vague. But as far as understanding what we’re talking about here, if you take the time to walk out into the room where the guys are playing, you are most of the way there. A lot of engineers never leave the chair in front of the console to go out and listen to what this band sounds like in this room, and then keep that in your head while recording and mixing.

I’ve even had a producer come to me on occasion and say, “Shelly, can you come out here and listen. I’m looking for more of what’s going on out here.” Hearing it in the room and then trying to emulate that in the control room, you’re a lot closer to where you want to be than if you never went out there.

I know that every band has a unique personality, and the idea is to capture that personality. There are a lot of tricks to doing that. Some of the tricks are what we do with the guitar amps, how we place them in the room, what we do with the drums, how we tune them, the heads we use. It’s not just one thing. It’s the addition of many, many smaller ideas, as few tricks, and some luck.

For me, Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes was where the ‘big’ Shelly Yakus sound really started to jell. Where did you record that?

We tracked at Sound City, and mixed at Cherokee. Sound City was a medium live room, from one to ten in the liveness index it was about a six, which is good. And it was a good sized room, with a good ceiling height. You never felt constricted, the sound was open. They had an older Neve board, I think an 8028, with transformers. Those boards make a very even sound. It’s interesting. The evenness of a sound is one of the keys to a really good recording.

For example, when you record a guitar, the tendency is for some of those frequencies to stick out. So when you get it into the mix, and there’s only a small place in the mix for that guitar to fit into with all the other instruments…well, you push the fader up and stop when it sounds loud enough. Well, the thing that is tricking your ear into thinking it is loud enough is those frequencies that are sticking out. Yet the body of the guitar is going to fall back into the mix, so you end up with a skinnier guitar sound. But if you get an even guitar sound to start with, when you push that fader up, it will go up higher and that guitar will appear to be bigger, because your ear isn’t hearing these things sticking out like knives. You are moving this mass of a sound, so you have this whole guitar sound, top middle and bottom. It works no matter what you’re listening on.

I’ll tell you something interesting. When we were building A&M studios, we had five rooms plus some production rooms, and getting the speakers right was a big deal, because you are trying to please engineers and producers from all over the world. So we came up with this method to tune the speakers. I would play two songs, “Don’t Do Me Like That” because I had done it and heard it on the radio many times, and it’s simple. Then I’d take Bryan Adams “Cuts Like a Knife,” the Clearmountain mix. That’s also very simple, same as the Petty cut, clear-cut bottom, middle and top. It’s not complicated—I’ve found it’s hard to get speakers tuned with music that has a lot going on. So I would use those pieces of music, then after a while finish up just using “Cuts Like a Knife.” We would play the songs, and go between big speakers and small speakers, and keep working on them until those songs sounded correct.

So one day, after we finished tuning up all the rooms, I called Bob and said, “I gotta tell you something: ‘Cuts Like a Knife’ sounds fabulous. We’ve used as part of tuning all the speakers at A&M’s new studios.” Then Bob said to me, “You won’t believe this, but when send an album out for mastering—this was still when vinyl was important—when I get that first test disk back I have two turntables, on one of them is Damn the Torpedoes and the other is the one I’m working on.” It just came full circle! I was using his work to get my speakers right, he was using my stuff to get his projects right. It was a remarkable conversation, and to this day it amazes me.

But it just proves my point that if you can get your stuff to have that even balance of frequencies, you can make a better record. I think for the people who are making records at home, or in the studio, the key is knowing what you are hearing. The monitor speakers don’t have to be expensive, but you have to be able to hear what’s actually going on. I don’t care whether you’re in a fabulous studio or a bedroom or in an elevator, if you can hear what’s going on you can make great records. But you need to know what to reach for when you’re not hearing what you want to hear.