The Bob Lefsetz PodcastThe Bob Lefsetz Podcast
Bob Lefsetz is the author of “The Lefsetz Letter.” Listen to his new podcast where he'll address the issues at the core of the music business, interne…
Producer Howard Benson has worked with acts as varied as the All-American Rejects and Kelly Clarkson. You know his hit with Hoobastank, "The Reason," as well as P.O.D.'s "Payable on Death" and multiple records with Three Days Grace. This is his story, how he made it and how he produces records.
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Set's podcast. My guest today is producer Howard Benson. Howard, we had to delay this because of issues with the fire. So how did that work out for you?
Well, we were in at fire ready set evacuation spots, so we didn't have to evacuate, but we had to get ready to evacuate. So we were as most people were running around the house trying to figure out what to do. I was tearing the studio apart, trying to get the microphones, like the Sony C eight hundred, which is irreplaceable. So yeah, most of my stuff is in the cloud, but there was a bunch of other things. And then we had the fire that broke out up north of us, the Kenneth Fire, so that we were just surrounded. Look, we're lucky. We're one of the lucky ones. All we had to do is just sit and wait. But you know, it's just terrible what happened to everybody else. Just you know, I was down in Santa Monica a few days ago and you could smell the it's just you know, the smoke still down there.
So yeah, so you talk about your studio, you have a studio in the home.
I have a studio here and I have a studio on Woodland Hills, and the actually studio in Woodland Hills is where we were going to evacuate too. That's where my daughter lives. And I owned that studio for about twelve years. I bought it from a guy that worked at Disney and it was at Disney Studio, so it wasn't very soundproof. We had to really we had to bring a console in from Scotland and refurbish it. So we rebuilt the studio and that's what I've done most of my records in the last twelve thirteen years. But the home studio here is where i do all my vocals, and the vocals I'm kind of known for vocals. That's like part of my you know, white people hire me. So I have a vocal booth back there and I have you know, we're all wired into the other studio with a curs and all that kind of stuff. So while I'm doing work here and the other studio, they're doing tracking and doing all the other stuff the guitars based drums. You know, we still are kind of a traditional recording business. You know, we still record with real instruments. That's not to say we don't usual you know, we still do a lot of you know, programming and all that, but people come to us because they like the sound of real things and they like the sound of humans in projects. So that's kind of like our you know, there was a moment there where were like, uh, oh, we're going to all be replaced by you know, an AI or something. But then we realize that there's actually more of a demand for real things than you know, there still is out there. So yeah, so all the vocals are done here.
Okay, let's go back to the room. So the room you have in Woodland Hills, do you only use it yourself or do you have other people use the room?
Right now, it's mostly my projects and my engineer Mike Plotnikoff, who is now a producer, and Joe Rickard. So these are guys that you know, back maybe ten years ago where my engineers and mostly doing that for me. But they've got their own clients now, so they leased the studio from me and I kind of give them a really good deal for that. I have another producer named Lenny Skolnick who works there, so we try to keep it within our group of people that we know, because you know, there's a lot of gear there, there's a lot of stuff. We don't really have a staff that can accommodate different producers with different types of methodologies of working, so, you know, and we're also really busy, honestly, like we are always booked, so we you know, I even have trouble with getting my projects in there. So it's mostly my stuff, Mike's stuff, Joe's stuff, and mostly honestly, in the last four years has been Judge and Jury, the record company that I own along with Neil Sanderson from Three Days Grace he's my partner, and my son Grady, who runs the company. So we use that studio to record most of our music there.
And you know, okay, so most of the big studios closed to what degree is your studio Woodland Hill's equivalent, like with a big room and certain equipment, just that it's basically controlled by you and not used by outside sources or would you go to another studio maybe to cut basics.
No, we can do it all there. We have it all worked out. I mean the room you know now that we've had the room for you know, you know, at thirteen twelve thirteen years. We know how to get a great drum sound out of that, so we don't have to go anywhere else. We can do strings there. Our console is an eighty fifty eight Knive, an original Rupert Neve console with twenty four inputs. We have all the analog year you want, amplifiers, everything. The only thing we have to do is when we switch from guitars and bass to drums, we have to tear it apart and rebuild put it together, you know, so we have the room with it, you know, like we're doing drums. We don't want to have the amps taking up the room space. So you have to do a lot of that kind of stuff. But we really don't have to go anywhere. The only place we go is to do vocals. And I like doing vocals in my home studio because I have a folk booth build here.
Okay for that? So how big is the room in Woodland Hills.
That's a really good question. It's I don't know, Like, can I ask my engineer. He's right here, sure, how big is it? It's Wooland Hills room, do you think, Yeah, it's like the size of two garage too. It's okay. So it was originally built for an RV, which I just found out. We found the original plans. So it's the size of like a two car garage, A big two car garage would be the live room right. Then the console room is about the same size, so that's you can and then there's a separate room for putting guitar amps. So there's a third room that you can use to isolate. Then there's a fourth room that was a bedroom that we use for all our pro tools work and you know, just a programming. It's kind of big, actually, and it's attached to the house. I'm not sure if it's legally attached or not. When I bought it, it was set up like that, so we just kind of kept it, and you know, it works for us.
Well how about you know they've been cracked down on home studios, how about zoning?
You wanted something. When we walked in there, we were actually very worried about that, and then we realized after the first we actually had all these plans to mitigate the sound. We realized the neighbors with the kids were louder than we were, so we actually are the quietest people on the block. We have it so soundproofed, and we make sure that our clients are very when they come into the It's a flag loot by the way, so it's in the back so you don't see it from the street. Everybody takes super care to make sure that we are the least obtrusive people on the block. So nobody's asked us any questions. We have had the city out there. They have filmed some stuff there because it's a pretty cool filming location, being a flag loot and having a lot of land. It's a half an acre of land actually, and so we won't run into anything. We haven't had any problems at all.
Okay since the city was there. Technically is it legal?
Yes, Okay, they've walked around it and we've you know, refinanced it and everything. So we just I know that there's some things I wouldn't want to dig into. Let's put it that way. You know, like there's some paperwork I can't find from the original owner. He basically didn't pay his property taxes and left fast. So we got a really good deal in the house. That's you know, kind of what happened.
So how did you sound proof it?
It's really interesting. We got a guy in there named Matt Ellingson and he was kind of built Bay seven Studios in North Hollywood. That's where I came from. I was there for about twelve years. That's where I made all these records, the Mike Camp stuff. Everything was done there, and we just kind of said, okay, this is okay for doing trumpets and violins and Disney stuff. But we put on an extra I would say, about two inches of insulation on the interior of the house all aroun round it. And it worked. You know, we were kind of estimating, honestly, we didn't really do it that technically. We figured, okay, if we point to guitar amps this direction, we do the drums that direction. We you know, we insulate the walls that are towards the outside of the studio very well. We also, the bigger problem wasn't this actually the sound going out to the neighbors. It was the sound coming into the control room. We couldn't even play a guitar without hearing it in the control room. That we had to do a lot of work to isolate that. You know, somebody said, I think it was you know, Massenberg or something that you have to look at sound as water. If there's a leak, it's going to come through. So we had to make sure that there were no leaks, like everything was plugged up. So it took us about two or three weeks. We actually went through a kind of a bit of a thing where we were thinking, maybe we'll put everything in the other garage on the other side of the house and run tie lines in so we don't have the sound. But that just turned into a bit of a nightmare. So we you know, hey, we can run these full on marshal amps at full blast and we don't have any problem with it at all. So we did it pretty you know, we had to do a few adjustments later on with it to make it work, but I think we have it pretty well now. It's been working pretty well and no complaints, you know.
Okay, So why would you not cut vocals there and do the vocals in your house.
That's a personal thing that I liked. I liked to be with the singer, with my engineer Hatch, who is here away from the There's so much going on at the studio, people coming in and out. It actually is distracting. And I've always kind of liked to do vocals one on one with singers. That's just something I like to do. I like to have a It's a very personal thing for singers to sing and when I can just talk to them. In fact, I don't even have a talkback. I use an open mic, so there's never me pushing a button. They can always hear what I'm saying, so there's never the thought that I'm saying something about them. I learned that early on when I worked with Al McKay from Earth withinin Fire. He was one of the first people I came out to LA and worked with and I did vocals with him, and I realized how the talkback button can get you in trouble if you say something you don't realize somebody pressed it or didn't press it. So I said, you know what, I'm not going to have a talkback, but I'm going to leave the mic open. So right here is a fifty seven that's always on. Singer is in the vocal booth. They can always hear what I'm thinking and saying. I could hear what they're thinking and saying, and it keeps it more honest. It doesn't it's not like they're thinking, oh, Howard doesn't like this, or he's saying something to the engineer, or he's you know. I think it just keeps more of an honest relationship between me and the singer. So yeah, and I just like a smaller room. The room in the studio is a little too big, honestly, the vocal booth is and even when we try and put like baffles around it still a little bit here. It's a dead room. It's actually a room, believe it or not. When we built this house, the contractor had an attic space that was nothing in it, and I kept saying to my wife Monica, what's in that attic space, Like, there's nothing. I don't know what's there. So had him come back and he knocked a hole in the wall. There's this big empty attic and I said, you know, being a producer, vocal booth. So I had the same guy, Matt who helped us at the studio, come in and build a soundproof vocal booth, hardwired microphones. There's a Leslie cabinet back there from my Ham and Oregon, all wired up ready to go. Because I love putting organ on stuff. And yeah, I have a good relationship with my singers they come here, they know it's by the way. They also sometimes don't like singing around their band members and that kind of takes them out of that place. So they can sing with me and you know, we can talk honestly about things or not having somebody say hey, try this or try that. You know, it doesn't interrupt the flow. So I got used to that. I've been doing it like that for twenty years. Even at Base seven when I was there, I had my own vocal booth area where it wasn't part of the studio. I had the owner build it in the attic there and we would have them climb up a staircase and it would just be me and the singer and my engineer, Hatch, and that was it. You know, that's that's the only people there.
Okay, when someone's in the vocal booth working with you at home, can they see you?
No?
And I can't see them?
And is that conscious or the way the room worked out?
That's the way I like it. I like it like that. I don't care what they're doing in there, you know, they I just need great vocals so they can just do whatever they want, you know, as long as I can tell, you know, when they're not up on the mic and something's off. But in there they have they can adjust their own levels too, So we have a separate mixer in there where they can adjust their volume of their vocal. They can adjust the volume of the track so they don't have to talk to me about that stuff. They can just sit there with their hands on the thing, so they can go over it and they can adjust like you know, a lot of times the singer will go, oh, turn me up, turn me down. It's not this, there's not that here. They can just do it all on their own, and so they have more control over their own sound. You know, it works out really well.
Okay, So you're saying you're known for your vocals, you're cutting them in your house. You know, you're keeping your mic live the whole time. What else is involved in your special sauce.
We have a Sony C eight hundred mike that I got after I did the Hoobastank song The Reason, which was a pretty big song for me. I didn't like I heard the song on the radio when I was driving around, and I didn't like how it sounded. I was using an eighty seven or a sixty seven. I forget what mike it was. I remember said to my engineer, you know what, I think, this doesn't sound hyped enough for me. It just sounds too dull. So we he suggested, Hey, we should use this new mic. It just came out the Sony C eight hundred. It's a much more hyped up mic, much more top end, more strident. But we need to have a knave like ten eighty seven or something like that to calm it down a little bit. And then a compressor A tube in fact, is right in front of me, the kneve and the tube tech. It goes right from the mic to the kneve to the twuoe tech straight into pro tools. That's it. Nothing else is going on now to me. The special sauce is coming back to the singer's headphones. Is a much more compressed version of their vocal. We're not recording it compressed, but I have it slammed going into their headphones so they can get on the mic off the mic, and it's just like this, and they sound amazing in their headphones. And I've always believed that the headphone mix is a huge part of getting a good vocal out of a singer. If they don't sound good in their headphones, they don't think they're going to sound good.
Now.
I don't use auto tune. I know a lot of people do that. I don't do that, but I have it so that the level is not changing very much in their headphones. It's a very static level. I'll worry about it on my end, do you know what I mean? Right, they're not I'm not going to have them worry about it. So, yeah, that's part of my special sauce is that, you know, and if they want a little rever, a little rever, if they want some of that, you.
Know, starting like forty five years ago, they started to com vocals, etc. What's your style in terms of cutting.
I learned how to comp vocals from the greatest of all time to meet Keith Olsen. Keith was one of my mentors, and we would sit and do vocals on tape back then and have them graded, and every line had a grade on it, and you got a seven for just being in the vocal booth, and if it was a really good vocal, you got a nine. So and I always said to him, why is it seven to nine? And he goes, because you're here it's a seven because you're even in the studio, and nobody gets a ten because nobody's good enough. So basically we would go through every line and grade them seven, eight, nine, and there'd be three or four people grading it. Then we would take that give it to the engineer. They would comp the vocal like that. So I learned how to listen very critically through things with him. And he was a genius at doing vocals. He did all those Fleetwood, Mac and White Snake records. And you know, I can't credit him enough for teaching me how to be a real per, how to handle myself in the studio, and just you know how important vocals were because he cared about I mean, he was the rest of the track was important to him, But the vocals are when I could see his brain really click on, you know, where like this is the melody, this is the harmonies have to be here, this is where it fits in the track. We don't have enough space. There's all this kind of stuff that I picked up from him.
Okay, Traditionally the vocals are cut last. Is that what you do?
No, I cut them right away as soon as I have In fact, i'm cutting three days Grace. Today we're just working to demos. You know, they're going to cut the rest of the stuff in the studio, the bass, guitar and drums, following what the demo is. But I'm going to cut the vocals to the demo because I know it's close enough. I don't need the rest of the track for that. In fact, I think that's a huge mistake cutting them lost. I think that makes them sound like they're the least important thing. To me, they're the most important thing. I want to get the vocals done right away, because what if I have to redo them, you know, or I want to change them or something. So I think producers. I don't see producers making that steak, although I guess they do, because you know, you might be maybe they do, but I don't. I don't do that, like I think that's the number. To me, you're walking through CVS and you're hearing your song on that little speaker, what are you hearing vocals? That's it? So to me, that's what matters. I honestly, the rest of the stuff, I don't care if it's a strat or a less paul. I don't care what strings they're using. I don't care what you know, drumheads, because if the vocal isn't good and the song isn't good and the lyrics aren't good, it's not good to me. That's how I think about it, And that's kind of when I started having hits, by the way, it is when I started thinking that way, you know.
Generally speaking, when someone's here cutting vocals with you, are you cutting song by song? Do you like the whole album written? What do you do?
I do it song by song. But I'm still an album guy. I love albums. You know, a lot of the bands I produce still make albums, but the albums aren't made the way they used to be in a six week period. They're made over a lot of time in between bands touring schedules and everything else. You know, it's just a different business than it used to be. The bands don't make as much money from the music, so they're touring and taking gigs and taking you know, doing other things like the music is almost I always looked at it that the music was the most important thing in their lives. Now the touring is almost more important to them because they need to make money. So I'm there to accommodate their schedule a lot. You know, like a lot of times when I do an Inflames record, or I do even a three days Grace record, or I'm doing some Daughtry stuff in a couple of weeks, it's in between their touring schedule. You know, they'll fly in, we'll do some vocals, they'll fly out, so you know, and we have to nail it pretty much.
You know. Okay, I'm coming in, I'm cutting a song. How many times are I going to have to sing it for you?
Not that many. I'm not one of those guys that does an eight hours My My average vocals session for one song is about two hours. That's it.
Okay, I'm in there singing. Are you ever going to change the lyrics or say you should absolutely tell me about really?
Well, you know what, it's an interesting point about how you bring that up. If you tell an artist ahead of time that you need to change the lyrics, a lot of times you're going to get this response. Not a lot of times, but dude, that's my favorite part of the song. I can't believe you don't like it, and then they're going to obsess over it. Talk to the band, I like to have the artist in the studio on the mic, and then I'll say, you know what, I'm not sure I'm feeling that line, even though I've known about it for about a month, But right at that moment, I'm going to get more of a response of okay, Lee, let me give me a second. Let's try and work something now, and they'll bring out there you know, spelled you know, rhyming dictionaries or whatever you know they use and we can kind of do it. Or sometimes I'll call this the main writer on the phone and I'll say, hey, dude, we got rewrite this line. We're gonna move on. Can you come up with something? So yeah, I'm very I think that's huge. The lyrics, I mean, I've changed lyrics on lots of songs that have made a huge difference to me in the sales of the songs, you know, just because you know, we've known that that was a bad lyric. But we know if we bring it up at the wrong time, we're never gonna get it changed. There'll be an argument against us from the entire band that we can't overcome. So you have to just hold your powder to the right moment, you know, it's kind of like knowing when they run the Philly Special, you know what I mean, it's a joke for Philly fans.
Oh okay.
Do they tend to come up with the new line that fast? Well, that's my job is to push hard to do it. Yeah, Like, I know what I'm looking for. A lot of times it's a line. It's really bad. It's not a lined. It's not good.
It's a lined. It's like a cul de sac where they wrote themselves into a like you know, you have this nice flow and then all of a sudden you're like, uh, people, places and things. I don't care. It's got to be something emotional. We're selling feelings here, that's what we are. That's our business, you know, selling like people, places and things. That doesn't do anything. So I'm usually looking for something that's going to connect on an emotional level. It's going to further the you know, the feeling I'm trying to or the artist is trying to get across. So it's not we're not talking about wholesale rewriting here. A lot of times it's just a line or two, or there's a word that doesn't rhyme correctly that maybe they missed, Uh, maybe there's a W instead of an I. That happens a lot where people switch tenses too much, you know, or not tenses, but you know, they'll say like you know, I, I you and then there's a W and then you go, well, wait a second, we you know, do we want to say that? Is that what we're trying to say? We're going to make a big message here and say we you know? Or is that do we want to keep it focused on the relationship between the two people. You know, those type of conversations come up a lot, you know.
Okay, so let's assume I'm going to cut a vocal with you. Ay, how far in advance would I schedule it?
Be?
What do you want? You want a demo in a lyric sheet or.
What I want? A lyric sheet? For sure? And a demo would be nice because I like to put the demo in the session because there's certain things on the demo that you can't reproduce the kind of you know, the inflections of the vocal or just the phrasing, and artists will misremember a lot of that stuff, like what did I do on the demo? So it's nice to have the reference there. You know, you know, I just would like you to warm up. Actually, warming up is a good thing. You know, when you're not warmed up, that means we have to do extra takes and extra takes or sometimes you know, it's that immediacy that you want to get out of a vocal. That's sometimes great. You know that the first shot at it is sometimes the truth. But if you're not warmed up, you know, so I'll sort of ask, hey, just do a few minutes of warming up. You don't have to go crazy here, you know.
But let's assume I'm cutting the vocal. As you said with Keith Olson, nobody's perfect. What might you say to me to get the best vocal?
I'm not. I don't. I'm not believing it right now, Bob. You got to sell You're just not selling it enough. Like I mean, it's cool and everything, but it's not changing my life. I'm not giving you exact things. I'm not saying sing it like this. Sing. I never do that, and people think I do that because they go, oh, look at these records. You must know. I want you to give me it the way you want to give it to me, But you have to give it to me with conviction. You have to sell it to me. You have to give it to me that I'm feeling something. And if I can't feel it, what are we doing here?
You know?
That's that's it. And I you know, I never get abusive in there with I mean, I've been with abusive producers, and I started my career working for some people I won't name who are just like, hey man, you know you just suck in there. You know you shouldn't even be in. I can't believe you're even like in this project. You know, I'm like, no, I'm never going to go that way. I'm gonna just be trying to give them positive reinforcement. But you have to make me happy right now and yourself, you know, or imagine you're in front of one hundred thousand kids right now, you got to act. We got to feel that right now. So you know, I'm sometimes at odds against the band too. Some of the band, the bands that come in, they don't really know what they're looking for either, and they'll say the wrong things to the singer. And that's sometimes why I don't want the bands in the studio with me. Like sometimes they'll just give them what their movie in their head is, you know, like I'm trying to get the singer to give me his movie what's in his head? So a lot of times you don't want the distractions of other people saying things, you know, to get some the you know, they can throw off your vocal. I trust myself enough at this point, you know, to know what I want, and then I do harmonies. I'm a very big harmony guy. I stick to bach. I'm a Bach guy. When I went to music school, I learned a lot. I mean, I have a degree in engineering and aerospace engineering from Drexel, but I took a year off and went to music school and studied real hardcore harmony. Arrangements hinder myth all that stuff. And when I do my arrangements, they're very traditional. Like all the arrangements I do. I try not. I stick away from parallel four its parallel fiss I. You know, I don't take the harmony and flip it over the vocal so the ear gets you know, mistakenly taken to the harmony, all that kind of stuff. But I do break the rules, you know, when I want to break them. So harmonies to me, are there to emphasize the lead vocal to make sure the lead you know you want to when you listen to the Beatles, they're the best at it. They know how to go from three part harmony to unisons, back to three part back to unisons, and it emphasizes certain lines and that also builds on the vocal. I'm thinking about that at exactly the same time we're doing the vocal. Hey, I'm going to put up a harmony here. Oh, I'm going to do a lower vocal here, I'm going to do a falsetto here, I'm gonna do a third above the vocal here, I'm gonna do a six below the vocal here. And then sometimes that guides me on about how I'm going to have you sing it. You know, there are certain things where I'm going to go, Okay, the energy is going to come from this high harmony part I'm going to put on there, and invariably i get well, if I can't sing above it s and I'm like, yeah, you can, you can, You're gonna you know, and they invariably do. So, you know, you just have to kind of get their heads positive about it, and all of a sudden you're hitting d's and then ease, and they're like, oh my god, I never sang that high in my life. Well, you only have to do it twice, so you know that in the double and I got it. Now, what am I gonna do live? That's your problem, you know, that's not my problem.
Oh okay. You know you talk about the sixties, the Beatles, et cetera. You know you actually had backup singers, whether members of the band are external people. Then you hit the seventies, lead singers are doing their own backgrounds and their own Hartleys. What's your viewpoint on that?
It's both are great. If I have a band member that can sing backgrounds, I'd rather have, and and they have been singing with the lead singer for a while, it's magic, absolutely, like you get this other thing happening. It's like Jagger and Richard's and stuff like that. You know, you know these other sounds that come out. But there's also something cool about having a singer that does their own vocals. Like when I do Daughtries record, for example, he sings his own vocal harmonies and he sounds great singing them together. You know, Kelly Clarkson, when I did her, I had Kara Diaguardi do the backgrounds because she's a great singer and she can sing with you know, Kelly very well. They match great. So I think it just depends on what's going on. You know, a lot of times in three days Grace, for example, Neil the drummer likes to sing the octaves, so I'll have him do it, and he does a great job at that. So I think it really depends on the song. You know, a lot of times the singer, by the way, cannot sing the super super high parts, so we do have to get somebody. If a band member can sing the super super high parts, thank god. Like I love it. I don't like generating harmonies that much. I'll do it once in a while, but you know, I like the real deal. The real thing adds to it.
Okay, let's just shoom. You nailed the vocal. Now you're going to woo Hills in the big room. What happens next.
Well, I usually get the track from the Woodland Hills and I put it together. Here, I'm the I'm the.
No, I'm actually I'm not going that far. You say you cut the vocal first, Now you have to cut the track.
Well, it's being cut alongside me doing the vocal at the same time.
So okay. Traditionally, while you're cutting the vocal, somebody on your team is cutting the track. You're not even there.
That's exactly right. I already know what I want.
You trust your team enough to get what you want.
Absolutely. I've been like that for I don't know twenty years, the same guys. I know they know what I like, and I know it what I want, you know. So a lot of times what they're cutting is just the meat potatoes anyway. It's the bass, guitar, drums, stereo guitars, guitar solos. I'll well, you can't see it here, but I'll add a whole bunch of keyboards and programming after I have that all put together, and I'll listen and I'll go, you know what, we need something here or this. I'm a big believer in space, so I feel like we always over record everything, like I like to take things out to me the space. If there's a four member band, the space is the fifth member of the band. If you look at scorers, those little swiggly lines, and the score means don't play, you know. So a lot of bands with pro tools now have a problem with that because they want to record every bar, every measure, every sixteenth note has something going on. I like space, you know, So when I get the music back, a lot of times I'm subtracting from things, not adding to it. I'll add things here and there, But like, I want it to sound bigger. I want the drums to be bigger, the guitar is to be I want to be able to hear everything, you know, so and I know what Mike's going to do. Mike's a great engineer. He's one of the great sort of like original guys that could still record live instruments, So I know what they're going to sound like. I kind of know the demo that if we don't have a good demo, by the way, we're not going to record it. So the demo has to be a pretty good guide. You know. That's a lot different than it was twenty years ago. We're in the rehearsal hall. I had to be okay with it in the rehearsal hall to go we're going to record it. And then I was on there more often in the studio directing traffic because we didn't have anything to follow. But now we have demos to follow, so I know kind of pretty much where we're going with it. So yeah, it's a bit different.
Okay, just going You mentioned pro tools a couple of times. Do you have an opinion of analyg versus digital?
Yeah? Yeah, I probably made my whole career when I switched to pro Tools. I switched to ninety six. I was one of the first rock guys to use it. I used it on Sepulteur record in nineteen ninety six ninety seven when it was called sound Designer, and I used I use it on a Less than Jake record back there, and I remember I bring this stuff into like Chris sod Algae and he would be like, what the hell's this stuff? You know, what's this computer? Like, I don't know what this? You get this thing out of here and who are you?
You know?
So, you know, we went through our growing phase back then, figuring out how to use all this stuff. But I don't think I could have made any of these records without the computer. I just wasn't I was I just couldn't connect my brain to the tape. Thing was too slow for me. Honestly, I just had all these ideas about what I wanted to do, and I was always weighed down by this slowness of tape and I just liked, you know, adding you know my vision. When the big, first big record I had was the pod record Fundamental Elements of Southtown, and if you listen to that record, there's a lot of really cool stuff going on in there. Which really made it work was having autotune, because you know, I remember in ninety six when I was doing Less than Jake's record, I had called Avid wasn't called Avid but pro tools back digit design. Back then, I used to answer the phones actually and I would calm up and say, hey, I'm having this problem. I'm getting IRQ errors. And you know, we were still on these powermats back then. And one guy said to me, Hen, I'm going to send you this floppy disc. I try this plugin out, and back then it was not that many plugins. But he said, it's a company called Antari's and they do stuff for the government or something. I don't remember exactly what the story was, but I got this plug in and I put it in and it was auto tuned, and I remember thinking, oh my god, this is going to change everything like this, like these singers and Less Than Jake are really good, but now they sound really good and they loved it. The band. They were like, man, I've never sounded that good in my life. So that made the performance more important, you know what I mean. Like I wasn't focusing on the tuning anymore. I was going, man, this performance is badass. It's a little flat right now, but I'm this is way better than the one that's in tune. So I think that sometimes people missing like I never used auto tuned to the point where people made fun of me or anything. I never had that problem. Nobody ever said to me, oh, you over auto tuned it. In fact, if anything, I got the opposite. The bands wanted more auto tune. My autotune guy, by the way, my protols guy, sorry, my editor in Texas, a guy named Paul Decarley. He does everything graphically, so we don't We don't just use the button, do you know what I mean? We just don't turn it on like the standard. You know, he draws it in, so we try to keep it natural. Nowadays, they don't want that, you know, the artists want they want it on stunt, you know. So I find myself double auto tuning things. Now it's crazy. Back then, we were trying not to make it sound autotuning. Now everybody wants it perfectly, you know. But by the way, when I did Lesson Jake, I auto tune the horns. That didn't work out very well.
Okay, you know, I'll write about a record, Oh, auto tune, autotune. You're you're telling me that you can use auto tune. Let me put it in a different way. Can you employ auto tune such that people can't tell it's auto tune?
You know, here's something really interesting. I have not used it, and people have accused me of using it because they say, oh, that sound has to be auto tuned. I'm like, no, that's actually the singer. Now, if I auto tuned it, you probably would think it's not auto tuned. So, you know, it's the opposite of what people And this is one of my theories about recording in the studio. It goes back to a bigger thing. The more accurate I have the music in the studio, the more detailed I get it, the more on, you know, everything being really locked in, the more live it sounds. Now when it's not done like that people listen to when I've done records that have been like loose and live, they go, oh my god, you you edited it terribly. No, that's the band. That's how they sound. Now when you're seeing a live show, you can't tell those things. You're in this big room. Everything's coming at you, this big assault of sound. You can't tell if the kick and the bass aren't married up, but you certainly can tell if I didn't do that in my production. So the more I made it perfect, you know, not perfect, but tied together like a great band was playing like the best session players in LA were playing it, the more people found it sounded live. So I was like, you know what, I think I'm onto something here. Actually, you know, I'm going to get it to sound great, and then it sounds, you know, as long as I mix it right. I never had anybody tell me my stuff sounded like, you know, like not as good. It's like the band. In fact, I always had the opposite. Oh the band sounds worse live. How did you do it? How did you make that record sound like that?
Well?
I use pro tools, you know, so I always leaned into it, Bob, do you know what I mean? I leaned into it. I didn't lean away from it. I figured it's it's something that's now part of the world. I'm going to use it. I didn't shy away from it. A lot of producers in the early middle nineties were not getting I wasn't getting projects because bands would not want to record in the computer. But once they did it, they were sold. They were like, Wow, we sound great. We never sounded that great. That's you know, that's how I learned it.
Okay, just hammering this point. There are people who talk about an analog sound and a digital sound. What's your take there.
I absolutely love the analog sound. We use the whatever we can use in pro tools. There's a couple of selections you can make. One of them's called heat that adds a compression sort of a fake well whatever their version of tape compression is to things. I think early on in pro tools they didn't have as good of converters, so things sounded squirrely. Back then, you couldn't get a really good you know, the resolution wasn't great. Nowadays, the resolution is really good in the computer. Like you can use all kinds of plug in tape emulators, all kinds of stuff like that. I have a whole record album collection, like I got rid of all my CDs, but I have all my albums and I have a record player, and when I put it on, I enjoy it for about ten minutes, and then I just go, oh my god, Like where's the fidelity? I mean the RIAA curve. It's a pretty brutal curve.
You know.
Further you get into that record towards the center, the less base you have, and you know what I mean, Like, yeah, I could to fall in love with that stuff, but I don't know. I just like the full fidelity of records, the big you know, once the digital sound got once when Clear Mountain came out with the Apogee stuff, that changed everything. Like his resolution was so much better than the pro tool stuff. And I remember we bought all that stuff and we were like, whoa, now it sounds great. Then we started doing stuff ninety six K and then we realized, wait a second, doesn't sound that different than forty eight, and our computers are starting to crash all the time. We actually had a big argument with Universal Records about this whole thing. We had to kind of like en mass me and a bunch of producers say we cannot record ninety six forty eight because we just can't run the computers like that, you know. They were like, no, it has to be at that resolution, like for rock music really, you know, maybe if you're doing a jazz record, I get it, you know, but for rock music, it's just killing us. So now the standard recording is like forty eight to twenty four. That's kind of where we're at right now. I don't see many records that are outside of that either direction, you know, I don't see any forty four or one stuff.
Oh okay, but the computers continue to improve. Would the computers choke on ninety six today?
You know, it still takes longer to process everything. It slows everything down. Probably is not as bad, it's funny. The only reason I bring it a up is we had to open up an old record that we're going to work on this week at ninety six, and then we realized how long it took us to like process stuff, you know, when we were just like like, oh my god, it's like, I know, it's not that much longer really in the world in the you know, maybe it's three minutes compared to like five minutes or something like that. It's shorter, but that just adds up over time, you know, and so there's not that much difference for a rock project to put to go through that. So I think we've all kind of I think it's a subconscious decision. All us rock producers that made that were sticking to this resolution. And I don't see anything else coming in that that. Like, I mean, Apple has their thing where I guess they have well, I'm not sure you have it anymore. I see most of the atmost stuff from them, but I don't know. I guess it's individual you know, preferences.
Wait wait, wait, wait, wait, play that out with Apple. I'm not sure I caught your point.
Oh well, we have to do what Apple used to do. They had that like super audio thing for a while, or I forget there was like these high resolution records we had to make for them. But now they really want are atmost mixes of everything. So we just have to deliver atmost mixes of every song now, or else we don't get the good play listening from them. That's kind of what you trade off, you know, like they sort of have you a little bit, you know, in that way, like if you don't give us the utmost mixes, we're not going to say what's going to happen, but you may not get all the goodies.
You know, what's your take on outmost mixes.
I don't make them. I have an engineer do that. But I've heard old records mixed and atmos and I look, I think it's just because I like my old album collection the way it sounded. I'm not a fan of it. I don't even like it when they redo that stuff. Like I've heard doors records where they put some of the vocals back in they weren't there. I don't like that.
I don't know, well forget you know, redoing old records and at most they always fuck it up. But originally the ones Apple had the vocals weren't loud enough. But if you're starting from scratch, oh yeah, what's your viewpoint on?
It's fine for some people. It's not something again that I pay that much attention to. We have a guy that doesn't. He sends them out. That's it, you know, it's not it's made for a certain Uh. I think my new car hasn't can handle it. I mean, my tesla said they could, but I couldn't hear any difference. Honestly, I think it's basically made for headphones, the app, the Apple earbuds. That's really why, you know, that's what I've heard, But I just don't Again, my focus is more on the production of the stereo mix the songs, the vocals, that stuff. You know, there's a whole group of autmost mixers out there that do a great job, I guess, and you know that's it. I really have not so much of an opinion.
Okay, let's pull back from that. Yeah, so you don't believe there are people who believe we're cutting the band altogether live it adds and energy. You actually believe the reverse?
Well, I do like to cut it live just to get the arrangement down, But yeah, I believe the reverse. Yeah, but I do believe that cutting the band live to get the original, to get to work the parts out, is important. Do you know what I mean? Because you can't like to work it out. But a lot of times when a guitar player is in there by themselves, they're coming up with parts as they're moving forward through the song, and a lot of times they don't even want to be in the studio with this. They want to take the song home with them and do it in the middle of the night in their underwear, and that's when they come up with their great guitar solo. So I think that's the pandemic has kind of changed the way we thought about that a lot. We just never conceived of doing a record without all the members there, and now all of a sudden, we're doing records with none of the members there. You know, we just had to make it work. It didn't work, by the way, using zoom or any of that. That stuff was just impossible to do. So we just had to like send it out, get it back, and if there was some problem, I call the guitar player. Hey, you know, you got to do it again, or it's not in tune. And that's one of the reasons we still have to have the guys come to my studio with Mike. The tuning issues with guitars. You can be good at it, but you need someone there to really help you with that. It's just too hard to get everything in tune all the time. You know, you spend most of your time tuning when you're doing guitar parts.
Okay, you're here at home the Vocal studio. Your guys are in Woodland Hills. They're cutting a track. How long does it take them to do it?
So they're cutting usually the okay, so let's just take it, for example, three days, Grace. I'll tell you the recording process for that. Neil has cut all the drums in Ontario, working off the demos, so the drums are now edited by my editor in Texas. The finished drum track is in Woodland Hills. The guitar player and the bass player in Woodland Hills from they came down flew in and Mike is recording. What we already know is the version that we're going to do because we have a really good demo that was made a couple months ago. We agreed that this was what the demo was. This is the guide. Now we're going to do it for real. So we're going to make sure those stereo guitar parts are in tune, the extra sweetening parts are the way we want them. They's just extra parts added, and that in some form is going to be sent to me to do vocals today with Adam. He's coming over here after we're done, so wherever the song is at, I'm going to start doing the vocals. At that point, it may not even be done. It may not even have the edited guitar as yet. But I know enough about working with Adam and Matt and this band that I can do it with even the demo guitars if I had to. So, you know, things are kind of We have a chart, by the way that we keep. When we're finished something, we check it off, so we're not it's not chaotic. We do know where we are in the project, but there are a lot of things happening at once, you know. In another part of the world is programming going on. We have a couple of programmers, one list in Dubai actually that we use that program strings and things, and we'll send him the track and say, hey, do some stuff, send it back and we'll see if we like it, and if we don't, we won't use any of it. Sometimes, so have an idea that I'll take and redo it over here in my stuff, you know, and I'll add a lot of the keyboards. After I've done with the vocals, I'll put some B three on it and things like that. I still like adding B three to these records. It's a anyway.
Okay, wait a second, just going back to this three Day's Grace project. Yeah, you did say I'm trying to understand that you cut the vocals first, right, But in this case, it sounds did you cut the vocals first the way you were talking, or did the guy cut the drums first?
I have to open the session up and let you know, actually, because I might be working with demo vokays.
Let's not go there right now. Let's start with how does the guy cut the drums in Canada first?
Because he's working from a demo that's been worked out, so he's playing to the demo.
And what about do you send your engineer there?
No, we have an engineer in Canada that we trust that we've been using a long time, and he has a room that he's going to record it. And since we're going to probably replace a lot of the drum sounds with samples, we're looking for a performance more than we are looking for drum sounds. So if we get a snare sound that a little squirrely, we can always replace it.
Okay, let's stay there. He's cut the stuff. Tell me about replacing the drum sounds with samples.
Okay, so he cuts it and say we don't like to kick and snare go And by the way, that happens ninety percent of the time. Okay, Like, it's not unusual to do this. In fact, if you look at the old Steely Dan documentaries, they were doing it back then. You know with the Wendel thing that you know, their engineer had Gary Katz and all those guys. So we will take the drum track, assign MIDI notes to the kick and snare that will trigger MIDI information that we can take any kick and snare anywhere in the world and have a trigger. We will print that underneath the snare drum track. They'll be samples of snares, there'll be samples of kicks, they'll be samples of Tom's. So then we have the choice when we mix of which ones we want to use, and that leads it up to the mixer. A lot of times as the mixers mixing, the mixer will go, you know what, I don't like this snare drum that was recorded. Look at that snare number three that fits into this mix much better. Now he doesn't have to go through the energy of replacing it. We've done it for him already. We've given him a menu of stuff that he can use. So you know, something we worked out with Chris ord Algaeback in the day, Chris liked to have all that stuff. You know, we would give him like samples of all kinds of stuff, and he would. In fact, we gave him his samples. He gave us our He gave us his samples, and we give them back to him put on the track. So then we get this drum track back that is, you know, it's not mixed or anything like that, but it's good enough. But we can work with it. And whatever case it is, it might get to me with note with guitars that are not finished, base that's not finished, but enough that I can cut the vocals. And while I'm cutting the vocals with at them, they're still cutting the guitars over there at the studio. But I know the arrangement because I already have it, the demo arrangement of it. You know. Now, the demo has to be in tune, obviously, and most of the time it is. But if it's squirrely, we'll let them know. But I don't really run into that at all. Honestly. The demos are pretty you know.
And everybody's working to a click. How do you keep it all?
Yes, everything's yeah, oh, yeah, it's metrono.
Yeah.
I don't think I've seen a non metrono, a tract not to a metronome in thirty years.
You know, Okay, you always have a third party mix it. You never mix yourself.
I tried once or twice. I'm always I'm you know what, I kind of am not as precious at that point. I used to be much more precious about it. What I do now with mixing is well. For example, in three days Grace, they're gonna have some out third party mix it that I'm not gonna have anything to do with. I will have a say though, when they send it to me, I'll say to them, hey, I don't think the harmonies are loud enough. I'll talk about the vocals, mostly because they have their own opinions about the rest of the track. My really focused on how the vocals sound on the records. I do that, like for example, for Judge and Jury or for Inflames, my mixer Joe will mix them. And this is a pretty cool system. We have my pro tools Rig and his pro tools Rig are identical down to the plugins, down to everything. I'll send it to him first. He will mix it about sixty to seven. He'll send it back to me. Then I will add all the vocals into it the way I want with the effects. I want the delays, I want the reverbs, I want the doubles, I want where the harmony should sit. All that. Then I will send it back to him and he will finish getting it. He'll bake it more, he'll get the bread to be baked more, and then he'll send it back to me, and then I'll mess with it a little bit. Then i'll send it back. He'll mess with it. He's pretty much mixing it. I'm really just making sure the vocals are right. So that's how that one works. It's just different on every project.
Okay, let's go back to Three Days Grace. Why do they want to have a third party mix it without your input the same way you're talking about with the guy with the same pro tools.
Rig Because there's some mixers like Dan Lancaster, and you know there's some A list mixers who you just trust more that you just go, you know what, these guys have it. This is the sound I want, you know. I know that anything I say in this situation with Three Days Grace that I've produced five albums of theirs. We all kind of know what's going on here, do you know. It's not like we're not going to drive the car off the cliff on this one. You know, if it's a new band, it's a different situation because then it we're creating something, a sound, something that's new. So therefore I'm way more involved in that. But on three Days Grace, I kind of know that I've been producing that band since two thousand and five. I kind of know, you know what I mean where the bodies are buried there?
Oh?
Okay, So they were working with Gavin before you, and then it seems like in the middle they went back to Gavin and then back to you. Yeah, what's that about?
Should happen with Gavin?
Should happen with that?
You know?
Personally? Or the way the record came out?
I just don't think they liked the I think they wanted someone a little bit more.
Organized, Okay, But they went back to him, right.
They went back to him, Yeah, because I did two albums with them. Then they had Don Gilmour produce an album, which then Adam left the band. Then when they went to Matt, I think they you know, they'd moved on. I mean it's okay. You know, like I produce a lot of multiple records by bands. They've done like four Theory records and those would be my fifth you know. So I stayed with bands a lot, but I think they just wanted to change it up. And when they went back with Gavin, I think it fell into the same rhythm it did on the first couple before they brought me in on the second album, A lot wasn't getting done, you know, fast enough for them with the With I have a I have a real team of people that is like when you work with me, you're going you get the full treatment. You know we got you know, you could trust it. We have guitar texts, we have drum texts, we have editor We have a studio that works things. You plug things in they that they work, cables work. This is stuff bands like to have. They it's in the background.
You know.
It's like flying in an airplane. You don't want to think about the rudder control, or you don't want to think about the you know, whether the left engines. You know, got a fan blade. It's broke with us. You come in the studio, you don't think about any of that stuff. Everything works We pride ourselves for that. That's something we really when I made this team, I said, we want the passengers to have a great flight here man, you know. And we're not partying with them either. I don't care how much they want to hang out with us. We're not hanging out with them, you know. And you know, a lot of producers get sucked into that thing where they want to hang out with the band. They think they're part of the whole thing. No, we go home at night, we leave the band. They are the band where the producers they come in. It's very professional. That's how I like it, you know. And the band's really like that too, because it gives them a certain amount of time to be creative and we're not going into the middle of the night doing junk. Then you come back the next day and you just realize it's all garbage that you just did. You're sort of like focused on what you're doing. And we work really hard for eight hours, like we barely stop working. But you're exhausted after that, you know. So I think they liked I think they like our organization. We you know, I once had a band come to me some forty one or an artist they said, we need to take you out of your comfort zone and put you in another city so you get, you know, out of your comfort zone so we can make this record. I said, guys, that's the last thing you want me to do. You're the creative people, we're you know, you want me to be crazy too, you know, like that's what you want. Like, no, you want us to be the steadying influence. So you guys can go ahead and be as creative as you want. You know, we'll make sure the plane doesn't crash. You know, that's our job. So you know, my job is to land the plane safely, you know, and make sure we have delivered the record. The word of a producer it means to produce, you know, it doesn't mean to like screw it up. So like I take that really seriously. That's why I work a lot, because record companies know I'm going to produce for them, you know, and the bands know I'm going to hand in the record, and you know it's going to be on budget at on time. You know, I want to have hits too, you know. That's another thing. Like I don't hire me if you don't want hits. You know, I like having hits, and the bands like having hits. They may not say that, by the way, but they like it later on. Usually if I have a hit, I'm in the chair next time, you know. So you know that's how I look at it. I'm a working class kid from Philly, man how I look at it.
You know. Three Days Grace is managed by qbe.
Prime Great Manage.
Okay, yeah, Cliff has opinions. To what degree is Cliff involved in the record.
In my side of it, not at all, but in the bands side of it a ton. So the band uses him as their A and R guy absolutely, because there really isn't that A and R. There is no A and R from the label on these projects anymore. You know. They get the budget and the band has to kind of do it bouncing ideas off their producers or their management. So I give my opinion, Cliffs gives his opinion, and the bands make up their own mind at that point. Now, the singles being picked are usually being picked by the radio person over at q Prime who his name is escaping me Warren, But Warren, right, Warren is the He's amazing at picking singles. In fact, yesterday Neil said to me, what do you think the next single is. I'm like, don't ask me. You know, I'm just going to deliver you up to the plate and you'll get a nice swing. I'm not sure what ball we're throwing, but you're going to get a nice swing, you know.
So okay, let's go back to the recording process. So you have all the instruments recorded, you have the vocals recorded. Now you're in your own house. What do you do to it?
That's my fun time. I rearranged as much as I want. I changed chords around, and I sent it to the band and sometimes they go, Howard, what the fuck are you thinking? You know? And sometimes they go, oh, I love this. So it's that, you know. My manager used to always say, you need to give Howard a week to do his thing, and you know I would just It's that's where the to me, a lot of the record comes together. Like if there's like a chorus in the wrong place, or I need a double chorus here, the bridge is too long, we need a break here, the vocal is the second verse should have been the first verse. Those are things that I can now. I've got all the ingredients. I got kind of a cooked meal. It's not quite done yet. Now I can move the pieces around, you know, and bands really really like that for me. They want me to do that. You know. If I don't do that, I'm not doing my job for them. So I have to put that time aside, and I have to be has to be like sort of quiet, and I have to be able to be focused. And sometimes I'll work straight for like twenty minutes, take a break, watch Sports Center, come back, work twenty minutes, take a break, do something else, go for a hike, come back, look at it again in a different way angles, you know, try to envision it differently. And sometimes I think it's amazing and I'll send it and everybody hates it, and that's the that's you know, And I don't have any ego with that. If it's something that I feel super strong about, though, I'll make a stink about it. But a lot of times I'm just running stuff up the flagpole to see who salutes, you know, Like I'll just try things like that. And you know, it's a little bit more that the bands, because they all have pro tools now, they know how to talk to me directly about things, so it's a little bit more easier to do it Like a lot of times the band will say, hey, can you move this part a couple of bars over to this and move this thing? The few beats back and I know what they're talking about, so the you know, the communication is real smooth now. Used to not be that smooth because they didn't know what I was doing in the computer back then. But now everybody sort of works in pro tools are logic. We're all talking the same language much, you know. So yeah, that's okay.
Just since you mentioned that, I was going to ask you, obviously a pro tools guy, what's your take on logic.
I think it's great for writing. I just didn't let I never learned it, you know, I didn't need to. So we see a lot of projects come in on logic and we just transform into pro tools, you know. I think it's a much Pro Tools is really a the more professional to me medium to record in the problem with it is is that it's not easy to do a lot of MIDI stuff in it. The MIDI stuff is sort of clunky still, but I don't have to, you know, I'm not working in that medium that much. I'm working you know, if I do MIDI on it, you know, it's it's mostly using the instrument tracks and using virtual instruments, or if I have to do some real instruments, I just you know, play him live. Most of the time. All these stuff I do is live the work and stuff. I don't really you know, do any MIDI stuff with that.
So yeah, okay, you're in your room. People can't see because this is audio only. There are multiple keyboards. You talked about the organ, to what degree do you add sounds a lot?
Yeah, so you can't see all this stuff. But I have a collection of Vox continentals. I'm a big sixties organit.
Wait wait wait, wait wait wait. If you have a collections of Vox continentals, is that because you know they're not making anymore or each one sounds different.
They all sound different, and I love the sound. I just love it. And they the bass sound the bottom end you When I work with man Xeric on a few things, I was lucky enough to meet him, I was a huge fan. I learned how to properly hook up a Continental to a speaker so they sound like a door sound. So I sneak this stuff in on my own, you know, for my own purposes, Like I just you know, I'll put a B three in there and I'll be like, yeah, man, ask the Keith Emerson sound I snuck in on that record, you know, and the band's like that stuff. There's you know, you're paying homage to your you know, the greats, the great people, you know. So yeah, I use a lot of virtual keyboards, melotrons, all that stuff, whatever works, and sometimes just a lot of modern stuff just for like, you know, doubling bass, and sometimes we'll take the real bass out and just use a bass a mode base, you know, like an old style mode base or you know, I just got a d X seven actually because somebody had requested that old d X seven Toto sound, and I bought a d X seven online. Of course, it got here from Japan. It was destroyed in transit, you know, and I fixed it. So now I'm going to put that old base Base one. You know, Base one is the preset and we're going to put that on one of our records. So you know, it's amazing what some artists refer to, Like you wouldn't know that some of these guys know some of these records, but you know they'll be like, yeah, like that Rosanna sound, and like, oh, I don't even know you knew who that project was, you know, so we'll steal. We'll steal some shit from Steve per Caro, you know, things like that. You know, I'm a big music history fan, like I love to go back. Me and Pete Ambarger are always talking about music history all the time, just about you know, all the greats and the keyboards they played, and the guitars they used, and the songwriting. I just went and saw Jimmy Webb at the Canyon Club play all his songs on a piano. It was so amazing. I mean, I'm such a you know, I'm kind of a geek when it comes to that stuff.
You know. Okay, so you finish. How long does it take you to work on a track in your room.
Well, if it's a smooth one, it could be I don't know, maybe a day. But sometimes I'll have to go back and rethink it. So yeah, you know, the band says, well, we like it, but we don't like this, or they'll say, hey, great, let's send it to mixing. We're done, that's it, you know. But sometimes they'll just say, hey, you know, you took too much out. I'll hear that a lot. Actually, I like to short things and get to the meat of the bone. You know.
Okay, how many times might it go back and forth? And to what degree do you stand up for your choices at the end.
If I think it's a deal breaker when it comes to the commercial aspect of the music, I will I will absolutely put up a fight if it's something where hey, dude, the tambourine shouldn't have been in the third verse. It needs to be in the third B section. Okay, you know, like that's not something I'm going to start a fight over, you know. But if somebody says to me, and I've had this a bunch, hey, I don't like that double chorus at the end, and this song is like two minutes and thirty seconds long, and I'll say, not much of a song there, man, Like I think we should repeat the chorus. But I'll tell you what, instead of the chords going a minor FG, let's go a minor GF. It'll still work. The melody. We're in the same KEYSC, we're in the relative minor, the relative major melody of work. Let's mess around with the chords and we'll do the double chorus. But let's make the second chorus a little bit differ, and maybe made the drums halftime, and I'll add a little gifted the end, you know, like another part that comes in, you know, like a secondary hook. So those are the kind of things that you know you could do pretty quickly.
Actually, you know, Okay, you've been around for a while, well before I get there. What's your take on mastering? Uh?
Boy, that's really funny question. When I first got into the business, I hung out with a guy named Tony Ferguson who was mastering the No Doubt record, And I remember I went over to Interscope and he played it for me and he said, I saved this record in mastering. I said, and you know, I didn't know any better. Like I was like wow, because I mastered it seven times and this is the perfect mastering. And I was like, wow, Okay, now I go. No, he didn't. It was a good record, you know already, Like it was mastered sixteen different ways, it still would have been you know, tragic kingdom, you know what I mean. So I my feeling has gone one hundred and eighty degrees, like I don't want him to really mess with what I've got. I need him to do a few things for me, make sure the levels are all consistent throughout the project and if I miss something like I have too much boominess and base and things like that. But a lot of times you really need him just to make sure the codex are correct for the different formats you're delivering too. So you know, I have a guy who masters our stuff in Switz, Sweden, as we have this guy Niles Nielsen, who does all our stuff. He's the keyboard player for in Flames. He has a separate mastering business and he's he's amazing. He's really quick. The stuff comes back, it sounds great, it's not overly done.
You know.
I think Ted is probably the best, but sometimes we can't afford him to do some of his records. Ted Jensen, you know, we used him a lot of records, but you know, sometimes it's just easier to use some of these other guys. You know, some mixers just do their own mastering. So I think it's going on. It's it used to be something that is like an official meeting where you and the band and the management the label went to the mastering lab and Big Bear Tooth speakers, the whole bit big. I don't know what they were called, but everybody sat there and went through this whole thing. You know. Now it's something that you just go, hey, we need it mastered. The next day it comes back from the mastering guy. That's it, you know. So, yeah, it's a different business now. I wouldn't want to be in that business.
No, No, I know people who are, and it ain't like it used to be. Speaking of ain't like it used to be. You've been around long enough. It's the Internet. How's that affected budgets? And how's that affected the way it work?
Well, now that's why we have the label because honestly, three or four points being a record producer, it ain't there anymore. I mean you're dealing with one song. Basically, one single pays you the points. And instead of selling albums like we used to where we made three or four points on ten songs, now you're making it on one song and your rock business so you're not streaming at all what's used to stream. So the record company, Judge and jury, we own fifty percent of the master with the label with the artists owns fifty percent of it. We fund everything, but we're making more money, but we also have to fund it. But at this point in my career, I can fund it. So you know, wait, let's let's park Judge and Jury for a second.
Okay, when you're dealing with Three Days Grace, you're dealing with another band where it's not your money. Right to what degree of the budget's going down? How do you compensate what goes on there?
I think in Three Days Grace, it's not Look, our budgets used to be about, say, four hundred thousand per album. Now they're down to maybe two hundred thousand for this product, for this project. This is an this is an odd project because they're still signed to a major, which is very rare. You know, I can count on my one hand the band signed to majors. I think, so they still get a pretty good budget. And yeah, I mean it's not I mean, it's definitely different. Like I don't charge you know, my relationship with them is just a little bit different because I'm in partners. It's hard to say, you know, I have my own deal with them. It's really not fair to say what that is like. But I wouldn't want to be a producer, Bob right now, A rock producer. I think it's too hard. I think it's really a tough business to be in. It used to be a big, really really good lucrative business to be in, but I got in under the wire, honestly with it. You know, I had hit records when you were still selling albums and iTunes, downloads and things like that streaming. The only the reason I excuse me my career and I still do well is I produce so many records, you know, like one hundred and seventy of them, and so my catalog is really huge if you look at my resume, and so I get income on all those songs. So it's just, you know, not any one of them in their own would be able to like support a lifestyle that I have, but all of them together do. And I got that from I really, I really I what Chris SORDAUGI was doing, to be honest. Chris was just mixing records so fast. He was mixing like entire albums in three or four days, you know, And so every year he'd mix what fifty albums, sixty albums, seventy albums. His shot at hits was so much higher than everybody's because his odds were better. And I thought, you know what, as long as I can get the songs right and the bands and I sell records and I make great records, who cares how fast I work, you know. So I put a team together and I did it quickly so I could do ten albums a year. There were some years I did ten albums, you know, and if I'm batting three hundred like a baseball player, I'm in the Hall of Fame, you know. So you know, to me, it was more about that than it was about you know. I mean, I wanted to have a life after music. I have a family, I live in you know, I live in calabass have two kids. I sent him through college, and I worked my ass off for I still working. I don't even have to work. But I love doing this rec I love this business. You know, I'm kind of like never going to be able to. I look at and Clive just keeps working, you know, like I kind of want to be like him, you know, just keep going, you know.
Okay, let's go back. Let's assume I'm not signed to a major label. It's basically my money or an investor. Are you gonna work with me?
Uh? As far as a record label or.
No, no, no, no, no, I want to make a record. I want to use your team, right, I personally will write the check. Not a label, not a traditional outfit. Are you open to that business?
No?
I give that to my other guys. It's too hard. And the reason is not because of the sales, but because a new artist with lots of money, they don't know the tempo of making records. So you end up in this endless cycle of redoing and redoing and expectations. How come it's not selling, Howard, how come's not selling? Well, you don't have any followers. Nobody's you know, following, there's you know, yeah, but you fucked the record, you know. Like all this stuff starts to happen with people that don't know what they're doing. The mature artists don't give you that stuff. They know the tempo of what we're working in the worldview of the music business new people. It's tough man working with I've done it before, I've done I'm not doing anything just for the money. I'll give that to my guys to do that. Oh, kills are called like puff pieces, puff projects. How many people are on the payroll, Well, they're not they're all ten ninety nine.
S Okay, So that's the point. So let's assume you give it to one of your guys. You've taken a piece. No, so you own the physical plant. You might be doing work there. Somebody else might be doing work. Yeah.
Yeah, And this is my way of giving back to my team. They've been loyal to me. They've been there for me every year, every year since two thousand and two, two thousand and one, and they have business worlds they want to grow. I'm fine my life, and so anything I don't want to do, I just give it to Mike, or give it to Patch, or I give it to Joe and or I give it to my son Grady, who will give it to somebody he knows. And if they he wants to commission him, fine. If they want to use the fine, if they want to use the studio, fine, it's okay with me. It's not worth it's life. It comes under the life is too short Moniker for me. Do you know, like I'm just not getting in the studio with some new artists that for money.
Okay, just to dig ones. If someone of your guys is cutting in in the studio in your house, you're going to take a commission on that or just streen.
Wellside of my house. It's in the studio. That's not my house. That's that's my other.
The loose language by my part. They're working in your studio where you just charging them an hourly or daily or are you taking a piece of the project.
Since they're leasing the studio from me, it keeps them working. That's where I'm getting something. So I know if they're not getting projects, they're not going to keep leasing the studio. So it behooves me to make sure there's projects there, you know, so they can skip paying the rent. So I'll give them stuff. Hey, hey, here's a project that came in. They have twenty thousand dollars to do two singles. Mike, do it.
That's it, Okay, let's switch gears. Tell me about Judge and.
Jury record company that me and Neil started about five years ago, and we sign new bands, established bands. We like. They come to us because they like working with me as a producer, or they like working with Neil as a songwriter because Neil has had a lot of hits and now they really like our team of We do have people on staff on the judge and jury, and they like our marketing department, which is run by my son Grady, who loves the music business. He's on the he's on the business side of it, collecting royalties and things like that. So it's a standalone label through the Orchard you Alan Becker signed us over there. It gave us, you know, a good deal, and uh, it's fun. I mean, I've never thought i'd actually own a record company, but I think I think it's only really worth doing if you're owning about half the master now. So you know, it's a lot of work to make these records sell anything. You have to promote them a lot. You have to put a lot of money. And I'm not talking about radio promotion, but even just the basic marketing and social media and all that stuff. I'm not involved in that stuff that much. I'm more involved than the sort of creed Like I said to them, I'll do this with you guys, but I still want to just do what I do well, which is produce records like I'll you know, and if they don't want to hire me, by the way, the artists, they don't have to, like sometimes we'll just buy finish masters from them. You know, we're not forcing anybody to work with us, you know, but some people like we'd signed this band Saliva that you know is a you know, hasn't made it, you know. They said, we've never made a record that sounded the way we wanted. We want to work with you guys, as we said to them, Okay, let's do a record together. We signed them for one album and you know, pretty easy deal to make. We have a record right now that Tommy de Benedict. This is working at radio for us and you know, being on the other side of the desk a little bit, so it's an interesting, you know, place to see things.
Okay, let's pull back lens. Okay, what is funding this?
We well, Neil and I pay for everything.
Okay, it's not from an advance from Sony or anything like that. What do you mean? Sorry, But my point is you and your partner are paying for the whole thing. You're the bank.
Yes, we're ok. We have not taken any money from anyone.
Ok But there's no third party income other than if you're actually streaming something or whatever. So how many records have you signed or put out.
We've put out That's a really good question. I'd have to look at the catalog. But with a lot of the singles and doubles, you know, one home run with Breaking Benjamin at Star Set. We went to number one with that one. I say, we've signed. This is our busiest year. We're putting out four albums in the next four months. Saliva album, a album by Dead Habits, which is the singer from Escape the Fate, his band, Caleb Piles, the Christian artists that we're working with, and god, who's the fourth one. I'm spacing out right now, but oh Ray Garrison Silo's project. So we have a publicist on board outside that we hired for that, and so it runs like a record real record company, and my job is mostly to be wheeled in to make some you know, the bigger decisions since I'm paying for it. Same with Neil. But we have like ten ninety nine employees as well for this one who work you know, with us, And once you get down to it, you're really looking at two or three people that can do the work because being with the Orchard gives us a big advantage. They have a good staff there, so they do a lot of that you know, royalty stuff for us. They pay the royalties and all they do, also do the marketing, they do the social media stuff for us. We do a lot of it too, but they augment that. So we're not just sitting here alone on the ocean by ourselves. We have a partner. We're paying them eighteen percent for that, though we do have to pay them a distribution fee. So yeah, I had to learn this from scratch, by the way, in twenty twenty. It was like learning a new business from It was like an upside down business to me because I was used to like, you know, here, we make full albums, we go to radio, you know what I mean, like the traditional record business. It wasn't like focused on social media or anything like that. Now it's all so it's so focused on that stuff.
Okay, is this a vanity project? Are you guys making any money?
Yeah, we're making money. Yeah.
Okay, So you talked earlier about rock not streaming. What is the state of rock today? Well?
Rock? Okay. The trick in our company just because I know the numbers keep the cost down, which is why the studio really has a lot to do with it. We don't have to pay those kind of things if I produce it I'm not charging. Neil's not charging. Our biggest expense is on putting a record out. Are really the marketing expenses.
You know.
The cost of doing the projects is not that much because we have all that. That's part of the reason we started it is we figured, Okay, we can defray a lot of these costs because we're the ones doing the albums. So if we stream, say, you know, twenty million streams, we can make enough money to make money on that project. Not every record does that, but once you start building the catalog up, the catalog becomes worth something. As you know, you can sell catalogs later for like ten times earnings. So the trick is to own the own, you know, to keep building up your you know, the value of your catalog, your your intellectual properties. And I learned that as a producer because I have a lot of that stuff in my you know, people are always trying to buy my catalog as a producer. So we just said, you know what, why don't we do it as a record company. Neil sees that from three days Grace, you know.
So let's just go sideways for a second. Sure, have you sold any rights?
No?
Would you no? Give me your philosophy.
It's you're dumb ast shit to sell them unless you you know, when you sell them, you have like four wives and seventeen kids. You have to split the money up with and you can't, you know what I mean. I'm lucky. I have the same wife of thirty five years, and my kid's great at royalties. I don't need. I don't have any of that stuff. Like Mike, you know, my son's great at finding sound exchange royalties that didn't exist, or you know, going to Sony and saying, hey this you know project this record you did blah blah blah. The point schedul didn't give the escalations or all the you know, the AFM after money is not coming in, where is it? He's listed as a keyboard. You know, you need somebody on staff to do that, and my kid, luckily is on staff, so he has made me a lot of money. Grady finding missing royalties. Not everybody's like that, but to me, it's an appreciating asset music, Like it's only going to go higher because you're gonna have more people getting Spotify. I mean, this is we're like in the second inning of this right now. So why would you sell it. You're not going to get that in come anywhere else. First of all, why do people want to buy it so badly? Do you know what I mean? You know, I'm not forcing people. They're coming to me all the time.
It just cracks me up. You know, you're a musician. These people who are saying their business is money. The people who are buying it, they're not buying it if they're not making money. It's crazy.
That's all you really have to think about. It's that part of it, you know. I mean, you're dying for these royalties. It's a cash machine. Think about it. Every It doesn't matter what's going on in the world. The reason why hoobastank is going to stream every day somewhere, and why would I give that away?
You know, I'm with you totally on this. Let's go back though. You talked about Judge and jury, rock the rock world in general. Give me your take.
You know, it's a This is one of those things that either I sleep well at night or keeps me night. But when I go to like Louder than Life and I go, oh my god, this is healthy. Look at all these kids. They're killing each other out there. It's awesome. And then you look at the streaming and you go, yikes. You know, like some half the bands are not streaming anything here. So I think it's like, look, it's not as lucrative as it used to be. But I think if you're smart about it and you don't overspend, and you have compelling material. I keep going back to this with my company. We need to have great material. A lot of the material or these rock bands are doing is not great. It's okay, you know, it's not where it used to be, where we were the forefront of you know, talking about things that nobody wanted to talk about. We were, you know, the bad boys. You know, we're no longer the bad boys anymore. It's just bland. So as much as I talk a good game, I'm still trying to get that to be in our music. But it's hard because some of the artists are just not like that anymore. You know, they're not saying anything that's that radical or anything. I mean, I just I don't know, I'm not really sure what to think about it. Sometimes. All I know is I love doing it, and that's you know. I just love the sound of a good rock song. I don't know, you know, maybe that's a bad explanation, you know, I don't know.
Okay, in terms of the percentage of new music listening, is rock just not being promoted and marketed correctly or is the audience not listening to it? In the percentage it used to be a reflection of the music itself.
I think it has to do with the star power of the of the artists. We're not I don't think that right now we're selling music anymore. We're selling brands, and the bands are just not good brand. They're not like branded. You compare the brand of Olivia Rodriguez to the brand of say, you know, a band like you know, bad Omens, which is a big band and bad Omens does pretty well, but they're never going to compete with a brand like that, with a or swift brand. You know, there's things are just massive, they connect more. You know, we just don't have that for whatever reason. And it comes down it's not I can't fix that. The artists have to do it. Like you know, I remember back when van Halen came out, nobody thought Van Halen would work back then, but you know what, they were so special and so great and so different that they came out of they came out and stuck out. They created something that wasn't there before. We're just not doing that. We're just not you know. So, I mean it's a really tricky question.
I thought, well, well, but you're in the heart of it, So let's go so in what's called active rock as a radio for a bat Okay, let me put it this way. I remember when led Zeppelin was considered heavy metal and Black Sabbath was too far out. You listen to active rock a lot of these records. I feel if you haven't listened to the history of forty years worth of music, you don't know how they got there. So that the the average person who hears it the first time, they're not immediately into it. So the question becomes is it the music itself? Is it the acts? Is rock played out? Could it be shaken up? You talk about the Beatles doing harmonies the best whatever the Beatles did, harmony's choruses, bridges starting with the chorus versus you're not hearing an active rock.
No you're not, And there's no story really Like you were just alluding to this a little bit that when you hear a led Zeppelin record, there's a story behind it and you're hearing you know, even a Who record, there's a story you can think of. I can't think of a story behind most of these bands, Like there isn't any story. You know, people like to have that kind of stuff. But when you think of Tyer Swift, you think of a story. I mean the kids, do you know when you think of you know, a lot of huge pop bands. You know, Billie Eilish is a great one, there's a story there. It's like, look at you know where she came from and her brother and all this stuff. And you know, we just don't. We're not good at telling stories anymore in our business. And I'm not really sure why, you know, I'm not sure where it's coming from. I think the active rock thing is a really we There's always been this problem with active rock where it just becomes its own worst enemy because it starts sounding like everything else. It sounds like everything else on there, and it just because like I was listening to Octane this morning and I was like, oh my god, I can't tell the difference between any of these projects. They all sound the same, and by the way, I'm one of them, you know, Like it's almost like if you don't get the texture. And al In Kovak, who you know is great at active rock, you know, he used to say this stuff in meetings. He would say, you need to get the texture right. In other words, it needs to sound like active rock to be on active rock. Who cares about the songs doesn't matter. What matters is the texture. I don't look. I wish it wasn't like that, because I think the songs matter, you know, but active rock has turned into a thing where it's a texture based thing. I think in pop music it's more the songs have to be great, you know, because you could hear pop music and it sounds like the old broadcasting where everything was different. You know, you could put on like a station, there'd be something like this, something like that, something like this, and active rockets all the same, you know. So I mean I joke with Three Days Grace. You guys could fart on the tape and it's going to go to number one, you know, you know.
Okay, just Three Days Grace been around for a while, but you've been around even longer. The people coming across the transom, are they different today?
As far as the artists, Yeah, you know, they try to be like, we have an artist we work with. It's a bit more of the DM side.
And let me reframe my question. Okay, back in the days of the English rock stars of the sixties and seventies, they tended to be people who were not great socially did it to get laid? There was no social media. They practice, they practice, they practice, they got their notoriety. Today you have a lot of people, Oh I learned three chords, let me start promoting myself. So the people who come in as people as desire, as creativity, what have you seen change?
It's so much more based on how many followers you have. That's the first thing they tell you when you meet a band is their social media following, you know, because they assume that that's what we want to hear about, do you know, And it's probably true, you know, because it's really hard to take something from zero to It's like we have this you know. Look, it's hard to get from the goal line to the twenty. It's a lot easier to get from the fifty to the goal you know what I mean. So it's really hard to start this up. So bands end up becoming you know, not only artists, but performers and videos and they do anything they can to get attention. It's less focused on the music and the songs actually focused more on the notoriety. But it's even hard to do that to break through that. You know, there's just so many people competing, you know. Craig Common once said to me, it's the dumbing down of art the Internet, Like there's just so much dumb art out there. It's really hard to get yourself noticed. And I think bands because they're working with two guitars, bass and drums, it's even harder. You know, you're you know, if you'ren't using those instruments, you're not considered a rock band. You know, well a courdy the well, the Grammys would maybe say it's differently because they put things in the rock category that are.
Let's not get into the Grammys. You know that's coming.
I was.
I got my own issues there and that's but let's go back to the bands. Okay, I have a manager, ultra successful, you know who this person is, doesn't want to manage any band, say's too complicated, just wants to manage solo artists. Where that person's and maybe there is a band, but it's clear there's a leader. Do you have a take on that?
Well, I totally see his point of view, because you can have a really good band that one guy is the I call it the tyranny of no. They're just saying no to everything and they have a vote and it's no, no, no, no no, and you're fucked. That's it there. And usually it's the guy who can't play, the worst guy in the band, and they use their no power to stay in the band. I see that a lot in band. It's like you have this really good band with three good guys and say the drummer can't play, and they you come up with these good ideas about baby, telling more of a story about this or that, and they're like, no, no, no, that's not us. No, no, no, what are you gonna do? You know, like, you know he's right. Probably, you know, we don't really have that ability to discern that stuff because we have to put out projects. We can't just say, well, there's one bad guy in the band. We can't do it. We have to work around that. But by the way, as a producer, my life is summer camp, do you know what I mean? Like they come in, they leave. As a manager, that's a way worse job he's got them, you know what I mean? Like, that's you're basically babysitting the whole time. You know, I don't only have to babysit for six weeks or something. You know.
So you say you're a working class kid from Philly, Tell me.
Well, I came up in a blue collar city. And I looked at myself as like, oh, well, well, since you're saying.
You're working class kid, what did your parents do for a living.
My did was an insurance salesman okay, and my mom was a school teacher.
Okay, so straight middle class. How many kids in the family?
One kid? My brother owns an accounting works as an.
Accountant as a younger or older.
Younger two years and he was in a band.
So what kind of kid were you? You mentioned watching Sports Center? Were you an athlete? Were you good in school? Were you popular or unpopular?
I was. I was in a band from when I can. I was kind of a chubby, fat kid. So my way of getting girls was being somehow. A kid came to my house one day with his band. It'say, could we use your basement? And I said, yeah, you could use my basement, but I have an organ down there I can play. I couldn't play, but I told him I could and it was a pipe pump organ, and that it caught me, you know what, I mean that I got the disease because like I could play stepping Stone by the Monkeys, there's only four notes, and all of a sudden, you girls would show up in the basement, you know. So you know how that is? One thing leads to another and I'm playing in bands all around Philly and I, uh.
Well, let's slow down, wait to slow down. Yeah, did you ever take music lessons?
Well, my mom was a music teacher, so I learned it from her naturally. I used to hear her play piano. It is a funny story. She used to play my favorite things downstairs. I would un her upstairs and the chord progression is the same as Light by Fire, and I remember how much I love Light by Fire. And only years later did I put together the two things, and I went, you know what, I think that's because she kept playing my favorite things downstairs, you know. So yeah, I just I used to be one of those guys that dropped the needle on things and just learned it by year I developed a really good ear. I can't read music that well. I'm good chord changes. I can read chord change. I can read like charts really well, but I can't read music, read music music like you know, you can't put chopin in front of me.
Oh okay. So you're playing piano at what age?
Organ?
Oh? Organ?
Like eleven twelve?
Okay? And this interaction where they you're playing in the basement. How old are you then?
Thirteen? Bar Mitzvah. I was getting bar Mitzvah about then.
Okay, so they're playing in your basement. Did the bands whoever in play out play gigs?
Yeah, we played bar Mitzvah's and you know what happened. I got really good, really fast, better than the rest of the guys. So I started to learn songs like in a Gotta Davida and the doors and things that day, didn't you know? They were like, what is this stuff?
You know?
We want to play you know, rolling Stones music? And I started gravitating more towards keyboard stuff and all, and then I you know, back then, you just played in any band that was around, you know, like you're there was another band they needed a keyboard player. I dragged my Vox organ you know RMI actually an RMI organ over to their house and play. So when I went to Drexel.
Were okay, continue continue.
Yeah, I mean I played in the high school bands. I still have all the notes, by the way, I kept everything. So we played like you know, bar Mitzvah's and I don't know, churches, just stupid stuff, you know, like with thirty people would show up. But I started learning songs, like learning how to play other people's music. So I play. I knew all the Stone songs, I knew the Door songs, I knew the Beatles songs. I learned all the songs of the moment. And when I turned seventeen or eighteen, I wanted to go to school Drexel. I wanted to get it. At that time, I wasn't thinking about being a music pro. I was good, and I'd liked math and science, so I wanted to be an engineer. So I went to Drexel University and enrolled in the materials engineering department. Of course, but then I dragged my Hammond dorgan down the Drexel with me, joined a fraternity, put it in the basement, started learning Emersus Lincoln Palmer on it Tarcas, and these people were hearing this through the neighborhood because I had it turned up at full blast and people would come around and watch me play Tarcas. And another band got together, a fraternity band. I joined that one, and then another band got together where I would play Amersus Lincoln Palmer, and you know, then something really interesting happened. A band came through with Lee Andrews and the Hearts. He was a Philly guy and he had a hit song back in this fifties. There was a seven piece band, a disco band with him. I was like the social chairman of the fraternity at the time, and these guys and I said, well, you don't have a keyboard player, and they said, well, we're not going to be with him anymore. Do you want to join the band? And I was like okay, and I joined the band and we started playing disco techs around South Jersey back in the day where the Penalty Box was someplace else, wild Wood, Cape, May, all those Jerseys shore towns, and that's where I really got good at it, because I had to learn how to arrange beg songs and Bowie songs and songs that were more sophisticated. So I started learning how to do horn arrangements, and this thing just started. But I was still going to Drexel and during my engineering degree, so I was like literally living twenty four hours at a time, you know, driving back and forth from the shore, playing in this disco band. And eventually I started writing our own material and it wasn't any good. I graduated from college. The band I was in wanted to come to La. We came out to LA. I got a job at Air Research at Garrett down in the South Bay as a mechanical engineer, and I worked there for four years. So I worked, you know, promoted a few times. I was a good engineer, Actually I liked it. I worked on the C five B. I worked on lead edge slat actuation systems for F eighteen's. I worked on the Space Shuttle, the orbital gimbo actuators. I worked on all that stuff. I was a mechanical engineer, so these are actuators that actually move the surfaces. But at nighttime, I was going to Sunset Sound because I knew the second engineer there who get free studio time, So you know, you're hustling, you know what I mean, that's what you're doing. So I was hustling studio time at night and getting bands that were local, like Jack Mack in the Heart Attack. I'd get them studio time, I met them somehow a band, and you know, I was learning how to I didn't really know what my job was yet, you know what I mean, Like, I didn't know there was a I knew the producers were producers, but I was just trying to make music. And then all of a sudden it clicked to me, like, wait a minute, I really don't want to be in any of these bands. I want to be the guy that calls the shots. First of all, I don't have to tour. I don't want to tour. A second, it combines engineering and music, and I'm kind of okay at both of those things. You know. I did take a year off from Drexel and went to music school. I went to Philadelphia College of Performing Arts.
Wait, wait a little bit slong. Yeah, sorry, there's a scene in Philly. Okay, there's the whole black scene, but you also have Hall and Oates, you have the guys in the Hooters. Did you intersect with those people.
At all zero. Never I was in this suburban Philly scene, whatever that was, you know, and the Northeast Philly scene. The guys in my band were all from Northeast Philly. They all went to Catholic schools and we played the proms, all the Catholic school proms. Their father Judge holy ghost.
But even when you were in college, you did intersect with those.
People though, the only time I met Gamble I met him at a fundraiser about ten years ago to raise money for Jefferson Hospital or something like that. So I met him, and I was really stoked to meet him because he wrote Expressway to Your Heart, which is one of my favorite songs because I drove on the Scoogle Expressway a lot. So I was stoked to meet him. And I love the Spinners, you know what I mean. I grew up listening to all that stuff, all the Philly soul stuff. But I never met them. I never interacted.
Oh oh, okay, just to clear ups and data. You graduate from Drexel, you work in Long Beach or somewhere down there. The band comes.
Out too, Yeah, and the drummer came out.
What happened with the band?
They were all college graduates. So they all school, they all had jobs, so one worked at Farmer's Insurance.
Now I'm less worried, I'm less interested in what they did for jobs. What was going on with the band?
Oh our band? Well, we got an invet Okay, the Dubin family from Philadelphia. They own a paper company, big paper company. They were friends with this guy, Edward Slockin. His father owned the Beverly Hills Hotel in nineteen eighty two before he sold it to Marvin Mill who sold it to the bar Nay. This guy had a lot of money, so one thing led to another and he became our investor. So we got it in the studio through Sunset Sound. The people I met with producers. One of the producers was Dennis Kirk, the other one was Chris Bond, And we tried to make demos. We were fucking horrible because we were This is kind of like comes into the rest of it. But at one point the producer said to me, you're unproducible. You're just such a jerk in there. You always won it your way. And finally I ended up producing the sessions, and you know, in the back of my mind, I'm going I kind of liked this gig better than the gig I have, which is just sitting here bounding on keyboards, you know. So you know, I think that's kind of how it led to that, because I just like everybody's career, it's like it fits and starts, you know what I mean, like things. I remember after we made our demo, Eddie said the manager, Oh, Clive Davis is in Bungalow four at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I'm going to take them the demo. You'll be signed by this time tomorrow, right, So you know, he goes into Clive's bungalow, which, by the way, thirty years later, I told Clive I have a bone to pick with you, and I called him out. So he goes to Clive and he goes, this is the band that I've been managing, and I paid for this demo, and Clive goes, he puts it on, and he goes tell them to stick with their day jobs. It was crushing moment. Crushing, right, I thought I was going to be able to quit my day job.
You know.
Say I worked another two years at Garrett This is now in nineteen eighty four or something like that, and Finally I said to my parents. I call my parents up and I was like, look, I know you you know suffered to get me through college, but I'm going to do this for I'm going to try this, you know. I'm going to move to the valley to Encino, to a little house and live in the garage. Was pretty much what I was doing. Set up my eight track FoST X and try it.
You know.
And the problem with leaving an aerospace job is once you leave your aerospace job, it's hard to get back into it because the technology takes off after that. So after about three or four months, I was kind of committed to it. So it took me two years to produce my first album. At that point, I got lucky and got a Tsol album that was on Enigma Records that they had not delivered and the band they were ready to get dropped, and a friend of mine knew them, and one thing led to another. I got him in the studio. I finished the album, I got my first producer credit, and then two years went by and I got my next producer credit, which was their next album. So you know, I wasn't producing very much, but I was learning along the way and then I got lucky. I met a band called Bang Tango.
Wait before you get the Bang Tang, what were you living on?
I was living on demos, and I had met my wife, Monica, who was and she was a publisher at the time. And she started giving me, by the way, a lot of grief because she said to me, all you care about her guitar sounds, that's it. You just care about guitars. You're not caring about the songs enough. I said, Ah, who guess the fuck about the songs. It's about the guitars, you know. And like she's hammering me about this, and I'm not listening to her because she's my wife, of course, you know. So I'm like, you know, this would come back later when I finally figured it out, you know what I mean, Like, Oh, she was right the whole time, you know. So you know, you know, I struggled a long time. I quit my job in eighty four and I didn't have a hit record, a real bonafid hit till nineteen ninety nine. It took me fifteen years kids in school, private school, doing demos, keeping my nose clean. I worked for Irving at Giant Records in nineteen ninety four. That was boot camp for me. I learned how to handle myself in the music business. I met Keith Olson about then, still didn't have any hits. It was like, I got to tell you something, man. I was ready to give up. I had really ready to get a real estate license.
You know.
There were times where I was making ten thousand bucks a year. We were living off savings I made. Sylvia wrote, you know when after I started having hits, Sylvia Rohane hired me and those were all good days. But I paid my dues man, Like, that's when I had my first hit. I remember thinking, I am not letting go of this not happening. Like this took too long, you know, like like you know it was. It was the weirdest thing because I didn't think it was ever going to happen. Actually, I really had kind of mentally almost given up that point, you know, but Pod gave me the chance to do it. And you know why. It was protest.
Wait wait wait, wait, slow down. Tell me about bang Tango first.
Well, bang Tang was a project I back then in the hairband days. Anytime you walked into a club in LA they were getting signed. So everybody was getting signed. If you had hair and you could play, you got signed. So I was on the every night I was at the Sunset Strip going looking for projects. The Gazari's, you know, Whiskey at the time, I think it was the Viper, remember the Central Filthy mcnasty's. I forget what it was called, but you know, and Brett Hartman over at MCA liked it. I was hanging out with the band a lot because I was trying to get in rehearsals, you know, I had to make myself useful. So I would go to rehearsals a lot with them, and I would start arranging their music. I had no contract or anything, and I got a lawyer who liked me, and one thing led to another and I got the project and then it did pretty well. But that was like, you know, few and far in between those projects at that time that did anything. There's no royalties or anything from that stuff. So then I did pretty boy flittle hair bands back then, you know, I was kind of at the end of the hair band era in a way, kind of got into it, you know, but I couldn't compete against the good guys. The guys were killing me, like Tom Worman and you know Michael Wagner, Bo Hill. These guys were like legendary to.
Me back then.
You know, they were the legends Bob Rock, you know those guys Fairburn.
Okay, so the breakthrough was Pod Yeah, So how'd you get that gig?
Well, they call it the The A and R. Guy actually liked my Bank Tango record. I can believe that. And Tsol he was a fan of those records, and he called me up and he said, this band is from San Diego. They're a Christian rock band, and we're going to break him in the real world, but we want to make a record that sort of straddles the line. And I like your record that you did with them, And I liked this last Lesson Jake record you did Hello Rockview, which actually became their biggest selling record.
Wait wait, wait, just a little bit slower. How'd you get the less than Jake? Right?
I did a single for the screen movie. They were in a screen movie that Wes craven I directed and their manager was friends with my little manager at the time, and they needed a producer really fast to go to Gainsville to do a cover of I Think We're Ala. I Think what's that Partcherd's Family song?
Jesus not my area of expertise.
But anyway, it was a Partrid's Family and we did a cover of it, and the band like working with me, so they asked me to come back, and I came back to Gainesville with pro tools in hand all the way to Gainesville and we started making the record and it came out really well, you know, but then it wasn't selling that much though, because it was still a ska band. It had a limited audience. Wasn't putting food on the table. Let's put it that way, right And anyhow, so this all comes together and John Rubi Lee, the A and R person for Pod and I said, listen, I'm gonna do this in the computer. And they had already hired Ed Stasium to do the record, and it's a great producer and everything, but he's an analog guy. He's in tape. Rubi Lee, in a flash of inspiration, calls me back and goes, listen, tell me more about this computer thing. And I said, well, I'll be honest with you. Your band really needs this computer. I'm being honest with you. They are going to benefit from me. The one thing I've realized being in a band. My band was the worst band in Hollywood. We had nothing to say to the youth of America. Nothing. I was raised a normal middle class kid. I'd have anything to say. That was the problem with my band. We had nothing. We were laughing at Motley Crew across the street, you know, because they were dressed up and shit pod though. When I saw them, I was like, these guys have everything I don't, which is a point of view. They have energy, they're intense. They just need my arrangement help. And he took a leap of faith on me, and we did it on the computer in pro Tools nineteen ninety eight. And I remember waking up one morning looking at TRL and there's Southtown and I literally could not believe it because it hadn't happened before, you know, for me, like like that, you know, And I kept doing double takes, you know, like, wait a minute, did I produce this? It can't be mine. I'm so used to not having anything sell at that point, you know. And then it was like holding off for dear life. After that, like all of a sudden, I'm getting hired by everyone, buddy, and my career just it took off so fast that it was like a blur. You know. I had to learn how to start turning projects down, which was another art itself, you know, you know, how to work quickly, how to keep producing hits, and you know, form a team around me get you know, the best engineer I could get, Mike from. Mike Platnikov was from Little Mountain Studios in Vancouver, and I loved the sound of those records. So I brought him down to do my engineering, and you know, one thing led to another, and it just started like I don't know what happened, honestly, it just was so quick, you know. So but I put in I used to I thought to myself, you know what I put in all this time doing this, you know, kind of like, you know, I appreciate this like a lot. You know. I didn't take it for granted at all. I wasn't a kid at that point. I was still thirty, you know, forty years old. I wasn't a kid, you know.
Okay, tell me about the recording the Youth of the Nation.
Well, that was probably the first time I had recorded anything that sounded exactly the way I wanted it to. Because it was a song that I had heard in rehearsal back when we rehearsed and rehearsed in Santia for that second album. There was a school shooting walk into the seven eleven. Sonny turns to me and he goes, Marcus has this lyric, we are the youth of the Nation. I wasn't sold on the lyric because I thought it was too big and I thought it was preachy. But Sonny goes, here's the opening line. It's the last day of the rest of my life. I wish I would have known, because I would have kissed my mama goodbye. And I went, oh my god, that's I mean, I could I almost get teared up thinking about it now. It hit me so hard, and I called my manager and I said, Aliyah, I can't even fuck this one up. You know, this is going to be a great song, you know. And we put it together and then I think Marcos and I were talking about a kid's choir and I love bob Ezrin's production of Another Brick in the Wall, and I said, you know what, this is the time, this is the moment I'm going to use them. And I made a huge error. I brought in the fans of the band to come sing the parts. And the lawyer calls me on the phone right when I'm about to hit record, and he goes, you.
Can't record them. They're not lee. You better get them out of here as fast as possible. I said, why, they're just going to see the chorus. He goes, We're going it be sued so many ways. So I saw, I said, do you have any posters in the trunk of your cars? Just get the band, get the kids out to the parking lot. So I hired a Disney vocal arranger and got Disney Kids to come in legitimately with the contracts, you know what I mean, real kids schore. That was I dodged the bullet right there a little bit, but it was my naive diativity at that point, you know. So anyway, and the song came together and I just I remember when I was done the song, I thought, finally, this is the way I want it. This is kind of what I this is the feeling I want from this song, this big song with this big message, telling this intimate story verse by verse about a person you know, about little Susie and about you know, my you know, being taken two to the chest and just you know, all this kind of stuff. It's it's a very intimate story with a massive message, and it just kept, I don't know, it just got where it got.
Then.
I felt the same way about a song called move Along I did for the All American Rejects. It had the same idea to it, intimate story about trying to get through the day. And I brought the kids choir into that one too, you know, because I wanted to do the you know when you sing the chorus and the breakdown, same thing as you so, But I created Bob a lot because Bob, I think is brilliant and he did such a great job on those records. But you got to pay homage and respects, and the only way to really do that is through your work, you know.
So, Okay, did you know the Reason was going to be as big as it was?
No?
It's second engineer in the studio. We were working on all these songs, and the second engineer, he's just some kid, and he goes, that song's going to be huge, And I said, what are you talking about? This love song? You know?
Whatever?
You know, like you know, you're in a in the middle of it. At that point, and he goes, I'm telling you, my my girlfriend's going to love that song. And then of course Lee or Cohen, who's running the label at the time, calls up and he goes, I think that song's going to be huge. And then somebody said it needs a bridge, and I went, you're right, it does need a bridge. And I thought again, I went back to the Beatles, and I said, how am I going to come up with a bridge? And so I took the little help from my friend's idea where it goes to when he goes, you know, I get by with the little help of my friends. It's the first time you hear the D chord, so it goes e ed a. You don't hear it the rest of the song. It's only in those spots. So in the bridge of the reason I put the dcord, I put the one that doesn't appear anywhere else in the song there. And you know, the reason is you is a D chord? Reason is you? Is it D chord? So there again you have to refer back to the stuff that's great, you know, And that's kind of how that worked out that one. And then the little piano intro part I put on. There was a reference to one note Samba by Sergio Mendez. It starts off the ding ding ding ding like that, and that was kind of a paying respects to that and Count Basie who always said you can get away with one note. So you know, that's just what was going through my head.
Okay, let's go back. You went to music school in the middle of your tenure at Drexel.
Yeah, and it's funny. I got my honorary doctorate from Drexel in twenty fifteen, and I told a funny story during the speech because my grade point average was terrible and I dropped that at Drexel. I went to PCPA and I had to reapply to Drexel, so I had to go to Dean Woodring and sit sheepishly in front of him and say, listen, my parents are really mad that I'm not finishing his degree, so can I reapply? And he let me back in right, And I did pretty well the rest of the time there because I focused on it. When I got my honorary doctor and he was there and I went up to him and I said, Dean, I really appreciate you letting me back in. I don't have no idea why you did, and they must not have looked at my great point average when they gave me this and he goes, you know why I let you back in? I said, why he goes because anybody who comes back who wants to be back in is usually a pretty good student after that, because you're not They're coming in of their own volition. And I was like, wow, okay, so it was kind of easy decision then, you know, like I was actually really thanked him up and down for that one, you know, because he didn't have to. I mean, I was not thinking about engineering back then. It was all music to me at that point. You know.
Okay, but did you drop out to play music? Did you drop out to go to music school?
Yeah? I dropped out to go to music school. I'd play music, yeah.
And so what did you think you were going to learn at music school? And what did you learn?
You know what? I didn't really know at the time, but I knew one thing that I was good at. Two things. I was really really good at soul fesh, which I means I could hear intervals easily, Like I could sit down as somebody plays a C and they play an F I know, it's a fourth. If somebody plays an A and plays an E, I know it's a fifth. I had a really good ear, but I couldn't put together harmonies. And a lot of this stuff in the bands was disco band I was in. They were asking for harmony arrangements and I was trying to I was guessing a little bit. But when I went in there there was a course in three part harmony arrangement. It's called Hindamoth. It's a book called Hindemith, and it's so basic, so basic, but it's basically called arranging for a four piece. That's it. That's the whole thing. All the stuff I learned in there still applies. All of it. Arranging for harmony, it's arranging for a small because basically these bands are they're really four piece bands. You know, bass drums, guitars, you know, vocals, that's it. The rest of it's sweetening, you know. So that was a big I'm so glad I went there. I a still learned a lot about music history, which I don't apply or anything like that, but you know, didn't do very well at site reading, that's for sure, you know. And I audited it to classes.
You audited it right, so.
Which means that the only ones I got transferred across were the ones that apply this humanities classes to Drexel. So I was able to apply my ear training course, my history course to my humanity's credits a Drexel. So it wasn't a total loss, you know what I mean. It wasn't like I dropped, you.
Know, Okay, just a couple of things. It muses school. Why were you auditing as opposed to taking the courses for real?
Because I couldn't take I couldn't play keyboards, That's the one. That's the one course I audited. It was the you know, sitting and playing site reading. I just the kids who to MUSA school were so far advanced than I was. They were kids playing.
But that was the only that was the only class you took. It you as the only one. YEAHA was it a one year course? I just went for one year and then what was it? I went back to Drexel? You know, I mean what went through in your head that, hey, I'm going back.
I felt like I learned enough. I just wanted to learn how to arrange and I knew that course existed, Doctor Chris Wiki. He ended up becoming the provost there. He taught the course and I had heard about this guy through somebody and he said, yeah, he's really good at arranging for small ensembles, and some reason in my mind, I just wanted to do it, you know what I mean. It was probably very reckless, honestly to drop out of three years of Drexel, you know, to do this. I didn't even know if they were going to let me back in or not. But that's where my life was going at the time. It was a bit little reckless, you know. But at the end, I realized, you know what, it's nothing else I can learn in this school because I'm not going to play concert piano. It's not where I'm heading, you know. So but what I could do that the other kids couldn't do. I could sit down and improvise. They couldn't do any of that. These kids. It was funny. They could sit and play box Italian concerto, say reading it, you know, but if I said play a minor D and the amprovised, they didn't even know what I was talking about, do you know. So it was weird how the two sides didn't you know what I mean of music? They were surely different to disciplines almost you know, Just to.
Be clear, did you drop out to go to music school or did you drop out and then go to music school.
I dropped out to go to music school. I applied to music school first.
Okay, yeah, yeah. And at the time, you had no intention of going back to Drexel, no at all. So why did you go back to Drexel Other than parental pressure?
I went back because I think I got you know, I started feeling kind of a little bit stupid about it. I was like, you know what I did three years at this Drexel. I'm going to get my degree at some point. Why am I like? I got Okay, I learned soulfege, I learned about arranging. I'm never going to be a concert pianist, you know. Let me finish the degree. I'll get a job. I'll go to LA And that all worked out pretty well. Got my job, had my degree, so I could get a job in LA and I'll live in LA and try the music business. But at least i'll have a job. If I didn't get my degree, I wouldn't have a job. I wouldn't know how I was going to support myself, so I had to have the job.
You know, Okay, you literally scratched your way to where you are now, very admirably. You have all the success, you're busy, You've achieved so much. But is there something on the horizon? Is there still a dream? Walp you say I want to do that.
No, I just want the label to be self sufficient, That's really it. I think if I could produce the Beatles, I would, but well.
Needless to say, the Beatles you can't produce because two of them are not here. But is one of the one of the dreams to work with some hero, some.
Icon, you know. I worked with two of my favorite heroes already, one with Santana. I produced a Santana record and I worked with Ray man Zeric on that record. So I got to work with people that I idolized, and I got to know Ray pretty well. I would say the one person I wish I had worked with was with Keith Emerson. I never got to really work with him. I was a huge prog rock fan growing up, and that didn't work, you know, it just didn't work out. I tried contacting them. I don't know. I'm sort of happy where I'm at right now. You know, my kids in the music business, which is good. I like that. My wife sort of is retired and she sold her publishing company, did really well with that, and we travel a lot. That's one thing I really liked doing as traveling because I like seeing the rest of the world. There's so much more to see than just living here, you know. I went to Vietnam earlier this year. I went to Cambodi at Laos and I think that you're not serving yourself, is my opinion, as a human when you don't see everything. You know, like you're only going to be on this earth a certain amount of time. And when I went to Vietnam, it was such an eye opening experience and all these different places. We're going to Australia in a few weeks. I just want to see it all. That's what I want to do, you know. So I'm lucky to be in that position where I can do things like that.
How much of the year are you traveling?
I would say probably a quarter of the year.
Oh really a lot, a lot?
Oh yeah, these is three week trips. Some of them, yeah, they're big trips. Some of them are just plan trips, like TALC tours, you know that you go on a trip with a bunch of people, and some of them are trips we do ourselves. I'm going in June to play I just learned how to play golf for some stupid reason. But I'm going to play golf with a friend of mine in Scotland later on this year, and then we might go to Morocco later in the year. I never thought about going to Morocco, but somebody said, hey, you should check it out. It's a new you know, it's sort of an interesting place. I'm a big World War Two. It's aanatic wheal. I love reading about that stuff, and they have I love to see sort of where you know, the battles were fought, the Kerosene Pass and all that stuff.
You know.
So you know, I love going to Normandy. That was a great trip to see the bat you know, the beaches and all. And went to you know, travel to Iceland. Great trip. Something that's like, you know, you don't see things like that that brings color into my life, you know, like it makes it more. It makes me appreciate living here more.
Actually, you know, so we're we're a couple of places on your horizon. So called bucket list.
You want to go to, Well, we're talking about going to India and that would have to be with a land trip, I think, because you need to have a guide for that one. Yeah, I like to try that, you know, not too long, Like some of the trips are too long for me, Like I don't like twenty days? Is it for me? Be it away from home?
You know?
So I'd like to try that, I think. I don't know. Australia was one of them. In New Zealand that's going to be checked off. But you know, we thought about Antarctica, but that's a whole other thing. Like sometimes you can't get there if the weather's bad, you've wasted the whole trip. I'm not sure I want to risk that. I don't know. I'm not no desire by the way to do a safari. So that's the bottom of the list. Okay, everybody says to do it.
But you're on one of these trips it's twenty days long. Are you disconnected?
No?
Are you basically working while you're on the trip?
I can't get away from the work. Yeah, I don't mind either because it breaks it up for me, do you know, Like I like sometimes it's in the middle of the night. My time usually at there are time you know what I mean, Like at the time is off, it's like eight o'clock. Night is usually like mid noon in LA or something. So you know, I'll set up a meeting or something like that, and you know, put my two cents and I can't do music from there. It's mostly the record label stuff I can do from there, so yeah, I don't try it. I'll listen to mixes, you know, okay mixes and things like that.
So yeah, Okay, Howard, it's been great talking to you. Thanks for sharing your story and your insights with my audience.
Oh well, thank you for having me. Absolutely, I'm a big fan. You know. We listen to you all the time.
By the way, well, as I say, it's good to hear you know, your philosophies and to get into some of this nitty gritty, I mean cutting vocals. You really you made some good points, but there's still more points to make. You say, you work with Kelly Clarkson and some other people. But we're gonna leave it here for today, Okay, till next time. This is Bob left Stacks
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