When you started mixing more of your own projects, did set up sessions differently, or do it the same as when somebody else was mixing?

I always approach in the same way. Once I developed a sound that started to work for me, I found that when I started to freelance, I could still use it in a room I had never worked in before. And that would get me a lot closer to the desired result in the fastest time. Because you’re in a new room, with a new band and a producer you’ve never worked with before and some equipment you’ve never worked with before, you need a reference point. So if the mics and the way you have the room set up are totally different, you’re fucked. So what I came with is a way of miking drums and miking guitars, and I know that if it doesn’t sound right to me then there’s something else going on out in the room, assuming all the other equipment is working right. Then I’ll go out in the room and I usually hear what’s wrong. And then once I get familiar with what I’m hearing, I can create variations on that because I have confidence in what I’m hearing.

So I guess that implies dealing with different sounds elsewhere in the chain, I suppose consoles being foremost. What are your preferences in that department?

I think that the theory of recording on one type of console and mixing on another is a valid point of view. And there’s a reason for it. Take any engineer, and sit him down at a board, you’ll find that he naturally gravitates to certain EQ points. After he records this, if he sits down to mix on that same board, he will gravitate back to those same points. It’s a natural knee-jerk reaction. But if you record and mix on that same console, that means you’re EQ’ing the same points with the same characteristics on the same equalizers. But if you go to a different board, everything takes on a different appearance. So even though he may grab for the same points, it has a totally different sound on that board. The sound of 5K on one manufacturer’s console is different than on another’s.

So for tracking, what’s your favorite?

I would say tracking on a Neve,. It’s a great sound. Personally, I prefer one that is not a four band EQ, the old 8028 and 8038. The 8078s have four bands, and they are not class a electronics. They don’t have to be class A, but when they sound like they’re not class A, I don’t like that. The 3-band Neve EQ’s, the 1066 and 1073, they have so much punch, when you use a board that has them…it’s amazing. But all the four bands, for me they border on being mushy. But maybe that’s just me, it’s just how I hear it. If I have to work on a four band Neve board, I’ll usually bring a rack of three band Neve EQs. But don’t get me wrong, some instruments do sound good on four band, but when it comes to recording drums I find I have trouble getting the same presence without over-EQing.

And for mixing?

I would choose a Trident A Range. That board has such a fabulously aggressive sound without over- EQing.. It is just one of the most exciting boards I have ever worked on. That’s why we went to Cherokee to mix Petty’s Torpedoes. We recorded on a Neve at Sound City. It was a magic combination. Some of the other Petty stuff was done at Rumbo on a Neve, but you have to be careful because the Neve can be a thick sounding board, and if you put two together…you have to work really hard to get the presence, but it comes out terrific.

Any preference for tape machines?

Interesting, we had this discussion the other day. In a studio I was working at we had and A and a B reel, and we had a Studer A-800 MkIII as the A machine, and an Otari MTR-90 as the B. Well, the Studer was really thick sounding, this thick and powerful bottom end, and the top is not as open as I’d like it to be, but you get it to work. And the Otari, the bottom isn’t as powerful but the top is clearer. So we put up a rough mix and then switched reels, putting the one recorded on the Otari on the Studer and vice versa. You could hear the difference. But my favorite for years was the MCI JH-24. That’s what I used for the tom Petty mixes. Those machines simply sound good.

As for the MCI boards, they were inconsistent. Some sounded remarkable, but others that looked exactly the same didn’t sound quite as good. And sometimes that’s the whole trick, is hearing the difference between pretty good and great. Between lousy and good is easy, anybody can do that. But good and great can be a fine line, and it can be hard to distinguish if you’re new at this.

That’s essentially what we’re talking about here, the difference between good and great. And people say to me, “I want is perfect.” But to me perfect is boring. We can try to make it great, but perfect is boring.

And some say that’s the danger of using Pro Tools.

Yes, I think that was a big part of the problem with those 170 CDs I auditioned when we had to narrow down the Grammy engineering nominees. You could hear the 160 that were done with Pro Tools, or overdone, with Pro Tools. Now, we have Pro Tools here, and an old API board, and we find that if we mix within Pro Tools and also split it out onto the API in a conventional way, and also sometimes recording on two-inch and copying that into Pro Tools. I can work well. In fact, I’m in love with Pro Tools, and I though I’d never say those words. But it’s the combination of this thick analog sound going into Pro Tools makes a very modern sounding record. But we’re careful not to overuse it, to go too far. Still, I’ve also learned how to record female vocals into Pro Tools without going to tape first, even without outside converters. It doesn’t sound pinched, it sounds full. So we’re very careful with certain things about Pro Tools. But any of this digital stuff can sound pretty bad if you don’t get the level structure right, if you don’t get what’s going into it right.

So what’s standard operating procedure here at Tongue and Groove? Analog first, digital, a bit of both?

Building housing Tongue and Groove, downtown Philly

It’s a mixture. We prefer to go to two-inch analog first, sometimes overdub into Pro Tools, and then mix from that. Sometimes people bring tapes in on ADAT, and it sound brittle if we go straight into Pro Tools, so we bring it through the API to thicken it up, take off the digital edge.

Can you get the sound as big as open as analog on Pro Tools?

No, you are giving up something. But you can get a good deal of it back if you take the output of Pro Tools into a good half-inch machine.

You’ve done so many great albums that I’ve had to skip around a lot. What did we skip over in the 70’s that you think was important or unusual?

The Raspberries first records were interesting. We did those at the Record Plant, and I was lucky enough to be involved in every one of those big singles. Studio B at Record Plant had an API board, but it was a heavily padded room, shag rugs on the floor, padded walls, it was like a big bag of cotton. So in order to get that band to sound exciting we had to come up with all sorts of tricks. We did, and it worked. For example, with “Go All the Way,” I remember the producer saying, “It’s a shame we won’t be able to use this song on the album, because it’s just not played well.” They tried to get the band to do it right all the way through. They would play all right for a while, but when they went from section to section it didn’t work. So I said we got this limiter the other day I’d like to experiment with, it’s this Roger Meyer limiter. It was so violent that we called it the Oscar Meyer limiter because you’d put music in one side and get hot dogs out the other! I said we could try it on this on the mix. We tried it on the mix bus, but it was so violent that as soon as you tried to push a level up it would knock it back down. So we decided to mix the song and then put the whole mix through the limiter. The producer said this is a waste of time, but we put the release time of the limiter, which was set on click stops, at a setting that just happened to be the exact same time as the tempo of the song. And we squashed it until it looked like tone on the meter, and the producer looked at me and said, “I don’t understand, this just went from being not on the album to sounding like a top five record. How is that possible?” But it was amazing, the way it would squash the sound but still let it be dynamic. It’s a contradiction in terms, but it worked. The sound is dynamic but the level is dead flat. Somehow the pulsing of this made it happen, and it would only work on a couple songs. You do that one time and then you think you can squash the Empire State Building down to three stories tall, and you believe you can use it on every record. But it only worked on a couple other songs.