Having said all that, I think the reset-ability of Pro Tools is really great—the fact that you can have a mix completely set up, spend five minutes on it, put it to bed, and then get something else up.
That whole aspect of digital recording is terrific, and it’s a real bonus in live sound too, being able to completely reset delays and things on a per-song basis.
Using an SSL, I can’t really jump around from mix to mix as much as I’d like, because, even if you work fast, it takes a minimum of half an hour to reset a song. In some ways, that’s good because you tend to get a mix up and then work on it until it’s done.
There’s that old joke about, why does a dog lick its balls? The answer being, because it can. The same goes for Pro Tools.
There are times when you ask yourself, why am I mixing this song for the 20th time? I think a lot of us can fall into the trap of not seeing the forest for the trees. So in some ways I regret not being able to get mixes up instantly, but in another way it makes you work harder because you think, okay, this is the time when the song is going to be mixed.
Look at the days before automation, when everybody in the control room was hanging on to a fader—that was a performance itself.
Do you think Pro Tools can help an artist achieve the optimum performance?
Well, I’ve done a lot of live recordings over the years, and nine times out of ten the singer would want to come in and redo a few things, maybe for technical reasons or perhaps because something was sung a bit out of tune.
You can get away with a lot at a live gig but a record is forever, so you’d have to get people back in to fix things.
Nowadays with Pro Tools you can fix everything afterwards without having to get anyone back in the studio. I think that’s a creative use of software—using it to make repairs, as opposed to making someone patently untalented sound acceptable.
Hopefully I’ll never find myself in the studio with someone patently untalented!
Mind you, I’ve had artists come in and sing and then they say to me, “Alright, I’ve done my part; now you do your thing.” They know that you can do a lot of polishing, and so in some ways artists are starting to get a little lazy.
When an artist sings a chorus and says to me, “Alright, there you go, now you can go paste that in,” I’ll say to them, “Sorry, mate—you’ve got to sing it again, all the way through” because I simply don’t want to work that way.
Similarly, if they want a double-tracked sound, I’ll make them actually sing the double-track instead of constructing it in Pro Tools.
Most producers seem to come either from a purely technical background as an engineer or a musical one, as a musician. Which set of skills do you think is more important?
These days, I think that having that musical background is much more important, because if you can be involved in writing songs with your artist, that will work out for you much better financially.
The old historical model simply isn’t any good these days unless you don’t mind being poor; the numbers just don’t stack up any more.
What kind of advice can you give to someone who wants to be the next Hugh Padgham?
Always do your own thing; don’t try copying other people. But my most pragmatic advice would be to develop your songwriting skills.