There are those magical moments in the recording studio when musicians give birth to a song, yet it is when those same musicians play that song in front of an audience that it comes to life. Live sound mixers are in a unique position to watch as audiences and musicians respond to each other. Likewise, these Front of House engineers have to respond almost instantly to problems that arise, which can run the gamut from faulty gear to failing instruments to singers who might need a bit of technical assistance to hit all the appropriate notes. For many active producers working these days, including Ryan Greene, Don Gehman, Ross Hogarth and Mark Howard, this was the perfect training ground for the stresses and joys of the studio environment. Although Greene had been working as a staff engineer in Los Angeles, he says he learned some valuable lessons during his live-sound gigs around town. "When you're doing live sound, you really learn frequencies," he explains. "If something is ringing in the system, you don't have a lot of time; you have to know." He and other members of the live sound crew would play a game as the band was sound checking, called "Name That Frequency," where they would try to guess what frequency was being altered by another engineer. "It was stupid, but I really learned a lot. It was almost ear-training in a weird sort of way."
In addition to the sonic challenges that live mixing affords, according to Mark Howard, working in that environment also gives you a head start when it comes to tackling technical problems in the studio. "In the live world, you show up, you've got a P.A. and you set it up. 'Why doesn't this work? The show is going to start in 10 minutes…' It's all about fast thinking and knowing and troubleshooting, and I think that kind of technical thinking works in the studio, because you plug in and if it doesn't work then you've got to think. A lot of studio guys don't have that kind of training–they kind of work at their pace and it's slow," he says. "For me, every time I go to record, it's like you're onstage, and that's the opening of the show and you better have your fader up and you better have your level when that guy starts to sing. You can't mess it up or there can't be no signal, because that might have been your take.
"You have a small window of opportunity to get performances out of people," he adds. "I steal performances out of people, because if you don't get them and you start to labor, then you're not going to get that soul. I rely on that kind of stuff for vocals. If I looked at the percentage of all vocals or overdubs, I think a lot of the great stuff comes from that very first time through. They are thinking, 'Okay, this is my first pass.' They'll try a bunch of stuff and you'll get an amazing take, but once they start to refine it they lose a lot of the character."
For example, Howard points to the guitar tracking sessions with Marc Ribot on Tom Waits' 2004 album Real Gone. "He's an amazing guitar player," Howard reports. "The guy is phenomenal. The first pass, the guy just plays a bunch of crazy stuff and it's wild, but once he starts to refine it he loses that. It's perfect and it's amazing, but the excitement of it is kind of tamed. So, that's what happens; the more you sing the song, the more you re- fine it. For some things, that's great, but when you are going for performances and you want attitude and you want all that stuff, it's going to happen in one, two or three takes."
Ross Hogarth moved from the road to the studio while he was working with guitarist David Lindley as a guitar tech. "David was working on a solo album, and Jackson Browne, who he had been with for years and years, was producing it. Jackson's engineer was working on the stuff and then they had something else to do, so David was basically left with me and an assistant who was more trained than me, but I was more trained than David, so I was plopped into the chair to basically run the tape machine," Hogarth recalls. "It was a very strange position, but it was a lot of fun and very exciting. I hadn't yet made the total transition and I was still sort of considered a road guy, so I went out of town and did some more gigs. Then, I got a gig with Don Gehman on a record that he was producing with a guitar player (Who Am I? by Todd Sharp) that I had worked on the road tuning. It was a great place to be, you know; it's where I wanted to be."
Gehman had a special affinity for Hogarth's position, because he had gone from working on the road with Stephen Stills as a live-sound mixer to the studio. "I was really burned out on this 301-nighters-a-year schedule," Gehman recalls. "Stephen saw that my heart was really into music and not so much in this travel thing, and he offered me an opportunity to help finish a record that he was working on at the time (the 1975 release Stills). So, I did it, and he thought I was good and had the right personality, and he set me up at a place called Criteria Recording Studios in Miami, which at the time was like Atlantic South–Tom Dowd, Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin were all there. The Bee Gees came in. The Eagles. It was just a great place to be for most of the '70s, and it was where I kind of cut my teeth on how to produce records."
Not only did working at Criteria give Gehman an understanding of how to work in a studio versus the road, it put him at the right place at the right time. John Mellencamp, who was then working under the stage name John Cougar, had been brought to Criteria to work with the legendary producer Tom Dowd, but Dowd was busy with a Rod Stewart project. "Tom thought that maybe the Albert Brothers (Howard and Ron), who were another set of producers there, might do well with him," Gehman says. "So, they made a record with Mellencamp where I did most of the work, and out of that situation, John came back to me to co-produce records with him. That's really where people began to really know me as a record producer." The first Gehman- Mellencamp production was the 1982 offering American Fool, an album that featured the break-out songs "Hurts So Good" and "Jack and Diane."
This was excerpted from Producing Hit Records: Secrets from the Studio by longtime FOH contributor David John Farinella. More information on the book can be found at www.producinghitrecords.com.
