Listen Up!

Chris Howard

Description

Mark Howard, a record producer/engineer/mixer and a trailblazer in the industry, will take you through the star-studded world of recording and producing Grammy Award winning artists. Listen Up! is an essential read for anyone interested in music and its making. Along with the inside stories, each chapter gives recording and producing information and tips with expert understanding of the equipment used in making the world's most unforgettable records and explanations of the methods used to get the very best sound. Listen Up! is both production guide and exclusive backstage pass into the lives of some of the planet's most iconic musicians. Writing with his brother Chris Howard, Mark Howard provides a rare glimpse into the normally invisible, almost secretive side of the music story: that of the producer and recording engineer.

Sujets

• Music

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773053479
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

Listen Up!
Recording Music with Bob Dylan, Neil Young, U2, R.E.M., The Tragically Hip, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Waits . . .
Mark Howard with Chris Howard





Contents
Prologue
Introduction
Chapter 1
The Neville Brothers at Emlah Court
Chapter 2
Bob Dylan
Chapter 3
New Orleans with Brian Eno
Chapter 4
Soniat Street
Chapter 5
Dylan’s Oh Mercy
Chapter 6
The Start of Kingsway Studio
Chapter 7
Back in New Orleans
Chapter 8
Kingsway
Chapter 9
Iggy Pop and R.E.M.
Chapter 10
The Birdhouse
Chapter 11
The Tragically Hip
Chapter 12
Casa Dracula
Chapter 13
Emmylou Harris and Billy Bob Thornton
Chapter 14
Dylan at the Teatro
Chapter 15
Dylan’s Time Out of Mind
Chapter 16
Iggy Pop
Chapter 17
Willie Nelson
Chapter 18
Marianne Faithfull
Chapter 19
The Red Hot Chili Peppers
Chapter 20
U2
Chapter 21
All the Pretty Horses
Chapter 22
The Paramour Studio
Chapter 23
Lucinda Williams
Chapter 24
Sheryl Crow, Eddie Vedder, and The Waifs at the Paramour
Chapter 25
Tom Waits
Chapter 26
Sam Roberts in Australia
Chapter 27
Recording around the World
Chapter 28
Mumford & Sons
Chapter 29
Robert Plant
Chapter 30
Neil Young
Chapter 31
Joni Mitchell
Chapter 32
Rickie Lee Jones
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Selected Discography
About the Author
Copyright


For my daughters, Fiana and Thea, the greatest inspirations in my life.


Prologue
This is a backstage pass into the lives of some of the planet’s most iconic musicians. Moreover, it’s a rare glimpse into the normally invisible, almost secretive, side of the music story: that of the producer and recording engineer. These pages will take you to a star-studded world of recording and producing Grammy Award winners in which Iggy Pop shows up to record clad in see-through plastic pants, no underwear, and Bob Dylan will only record at night. You’ll learn about Tom Waits’s strange vocabulary — and what “put a little hair on it” really means — and discover that because Neil Young will only work on the three days before a full moon, it takes six months to make his record.
This is also a production guide for anyone interested in music, providing an understanding of the equipment used in making the world’s most unforgettable records and explaining the methods needed to get the very best sound. Each chapter gives recording and producing information and tips, including inside stories about the making of great albums.
Upon accepting his Grammy Award for Album of the Year, Bob Dylan thanked me, saying, “We got a particular type of sound on this record which you don’t get every day.”
For the first time, readers can learn how.


Introduction
I left Westdale Secondary School in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, in grade nine. My guidance counselor told me that if I dropped out, I’d end up in prison. All these years later, I am embarrassed to tell people where I ended up. I can’t have a conversation about my occupation or latest projects without it sounding like I’m name dropping, because I ended up working with some of the most famous people on the planet, in amazing locations around the world.
Leaving school at a young age didn’t limit my education; instead, I got my English degree from Bob Dylan, who didn’t have notes, so I’d sit at the console and transcribe his lyrics while he sang in front of me. Many musicians read the classics and draw on them for lyrical content, like Robert Plant, who carried the poetry of William Blake into the studio. I’ve been exposed to a lot of literature despite leaving school. My education occurred in other ways, too, as I developed math skills managing both enormous and limited budgets.
I was born in Manchester, England, but in 1967 my family moved to Hamilton — sometimes referred to as “Steeltown” — when my father found work as an electrician as part of an incentive program for skilled workers. My dad was extremely athletic. A boxer during the war, he was the featherweight champion in England in the late 1940s and early 1950s. After moving to Canada, he became the coach for the Canadian wrestling team and then an official at the Olympics. Although I grew up surrounded by sports, I wanted nothing to do with them — I thought they were boring. I know my dad was upset that I didn’t choose sports, and he definitely didn’t approve of a job in music. I once asked him to come down to a grungy bar on Locke Street in Hamilton to see what I did for a living. Unfortunately, a punk band was playing, and with the racket, the fighting, and the blood, he wasn’t impressed. He told me to get a real job. It wasn’t until years later when he had my Grammy on his shelf that he finally accepted my career.
I did try to hold down conventional jobs. From a young age, I was interested in architecture and design and had filled a notebook with sketches. After dropping out of school at sixteen, I walked into an architect’s office and showed him my drawings. He was impressed and told me to go back to finish grade twelve and then he’d hire me. I had no intention of going back to school, so I found a job as a layout artist for gravestones.
Yet I was always drawn to music. I studied the conservatory program for drums as a teenager. When I was fifteen I took over our basement, and after turning the pool table into a drum riser, I filled the room with amps, posters, and black lights, and it looked like a club. Although perhaps unusual for a teenage boy, I added rugs and lighting, focusing on a design aesthetic. Looking back, I realize that was actually my first studio installation, where I realized the gear and sound are only half the equation — that the look and energy of a room mattered, too. To this day, no matter who I work with, I set up the gear so it isn’t intimidating or the most obvious thing in the room. I never have cables lying all over the floor like they do in so many other studios.
In my late teens, I worked in the local Hamilton music scene, mixing and doing live sound, but by age twenty I’d had a serious motorcycle accident on my 1971 Norton 750, which left me unable to continue due to back injuries. Adversity equals opportunity, and with the brashness of youth, I marched into Grant Avenue Studio, a local recording studio.
“The government will pay half my wages if you pay the other half,” I told them. I was hired.
Because I’d had so much experience on the road doing quick setups and sound checks for live shows, I was able to transfer those skills to the studio, and I was faster than a lot of studio guys, who are usually laid-back because they feel there is no time crunch.
In the years that followed there were only a few times I was tied down by a studio, such as Kingsway or the Teatro, but I simply don’t work like other people, so a typical studio wasn’t enough. I like high ceilings and interesting locations, and that’s more difficult than ever to finance. Essentially, the bottom has dropped out of the music industry. CDs no longer sell much, and many young people expect music for free or as part of an online subscription. Everyone in the music industry needs to be more inventive now, and we’re all being pushed to break new ground.
Luckily, I worked on timeless records. People who focused on making hits in the ’80s were riding high, but it’s hard to have longevity. The last record gets you to the next job by word of mouth.
The installations I set up to record individual albums are ideal, without the overhead needed to maintain a studio long term. Instead, I find a cool space, create the atmosphere, load it with fantastic gear, and then focus on the art. Sometimes I’ll take everyone who is working on an album to a cottage — everyone has their own room, and I hire a chef — and the musicians live, sleep, and eat in the same place. Something about everyone being in close proximity for a period of time encourages the creative flow. I find that creating an installation studio — setting up an entire studio in a chosen location to record an artist, then dismantling it and moving on to the next location and the next artist — is ideal for maximum collaboration and creativity for both me and them.
I often think that rules that have been set out for making music — the ones taught in recording programs — were all made by people who simply couldn’t figure anything else out. Whatever recording technique is taught in a college program, I generally do the opposite. I record drums in the control room; I don’t isolate artists. The truth is anyone can record in their bedroom these days and make it sound good. That said, I’m anti-computers and programs like Pro Tools and GarageBand. I don’t like the sounds and I don’t find them musical. I want to push Record and begin, not mess around with drop-down menus or with a computer crashing — otherwise magic is lost. Essentially, you wipe out the performance with the technology and it actually makes things slower. Everything is being compressed these days, with no dynamics, but I think it’s better if I am the human compressor. Everything in my mix is me.
I tell young people to get off the computer and get an old 4- or 8-track cassette recorder. Often, I hook up some of the older iconic singers with cassettes, and then I put them on my iZ Radar (multitrack recorder) to play with. Tom Waits recorded mouth rhythms in his bathroom. I’ve had a million dollars’ worth of gear, but nothing can touch the punchy sound of a cheap cassette recorder.
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