The Steven Wilson Interview: The Modern Rock Producer

Stephen Wilson is the lead singer guitarist songwriter and founding member of the band Porcupine Tree he's also an acclaimed solo artist in addition to being a great engineer producer and mixer many of people have asked me to have Steven on the channel I'm a huge fan but before we get started don't forget to like and hit the Subscribe button here's my interview so I became aware of your music with Porcupine Tree actually back in probably 2005 with the dead Wing record one of my friends played it for me actually my assistant Ken um was like you got to check out this record it's amazing and and not only are the songs great but it sounds phenomenal can you talk about your background with with with record production when I fell in love with music I was very young and I fell in love with music via my as many people do via my parents record collection and I was very lucky because my my Dad loved conceptual rock music um you know he didn't go massively deep but the few records he had were things like dark side of the moon or tubular bells and also my parents had those classic Donna Summer Giorgio moroda uh late 70s records which in themselves a very conception is like long pieces which go off in very unexpected directions um there's that sense of Journey about them and I think you know very early on that was what appealed to me as a very young kid you know I was probably not even you know into double figures you know I was listening to records hearing records by proxy you know because my parents were listening to these records so eight nine years old I'm being brainwashed by this um you know quite sophisticated music I mean uh you know as I say I was very lucky in that respect my parents had quite sophisticated taste there was never of any Beatles albums in the in the house for example so I grew up completely ignorant of The Beatles but they had things like they had things like Electric Light Orchestra albums and Frank Sinatra albums and so all of these you know very um I thought beautiful sonically abused I mean I wasn't thinking in those terms at the time but they're all they all have one thing one thing in common sonically they have a degree of Excellence uh the Saturday night secret soundtrack is another one that was always in the house always being played you listen to the production on that record now and it and it's it's just awesome you know yeah I grew up um very much surrounded by these these beautifully recorded records and really fell in love with the notion of making records rather than being a musician I I wanted to be an altar I wanted to be this you know I would look at Electric Light Orchestra albums and I would read Jeff Lynne producer writer guitar player I'm like I want to be that guy he does everything you know um and very often what's interesting about those guys The Producers or the Autos is they're not always the best musician in the room and quite often the worst they're the worst rage in the room um they surround themselves with fantastic musicians and they're like the guys having the ideas the captain of the ship if you like so I think very early on I fell in love with the idea of being Jeff Lynne or being Roger Waters or you know or I mean I was also a big movie fan as a teenager so I love the idea of the director the author you know the Stanley Kubrick or the the Bergman or whoever all the Fellini these people that just had this vision and had all of these people running around you know creating helping them to create their Vision but everything was stamped through with their identity and their personality and I think still to this day those are the records I love the most and those are the records I try to make I've never been trained as a producer or an engineer or a mixer I've learned by my mistakes and I've learned by listening and I think that one of the things people ask me a lot young people ask me a lot is how should I go about you know finding a career in the music industry being a producer being a mixer and my answer is always listen listen to as many records as you can and listen to music you don't necessarily have an affinity with as much as the music you do have an affinity with because there's always something to learn I mean I was fascinated as a kid you know as a teenager with going to my local library I don't know if it was the same in America but in the in the 80s you used to be able to take out records from the library you know oh yeah books yeah right so I discovered I remember just going down and picking out records you know karlhein stockhausen that sounds weird I'll take that home Philip Glass that sounds weird I'll take that out anything that looks interesting or strange um I would not always like it but I would be curious enough and fascinated enough in it to try and decode what it was that this music was trying to give the listener so my message is always the same I said just listen because that's how I've learned to make good sounding records it's not because I went to school and trained to be an engineer or to understand how a compressor or a Reverb or an EQ works and the truth is I still don't really understand how those things work but I know how to get the most out of them now just by trial and error really if you go back to the early 2000s did you start making records on tape and then transition to to working digitally around 2000 or so yeah kind of but not in the way you would think um I started making records on tape because my dad was an electronic engineer again a very good piece of good a very good piece of Good Fortune is my dad was electronic engineer and he very early on in my life I mean I must have been 12 or 13 years old he built me a little Porter studio um okay he got I think he got a schematic or something from one of these Electronics magazines and he bought the tape head and he bought a cassette machine and he he put took the stereo head out and he put this four track head in and one Christmas he said here you are son here's a here's uh you're interested in music Here's I've made you this little Porter studio and it had a little built-in mixer for potentiometers that allowed you to change the no EQ or anything like that but it enabled me to start experimenting with and understanding uh the concept of of multi-track recording and over dabbing so I was doing that very very very early on and I think later on in my my teens I transitioned initially to a 16 track reel to reel and then very quickly after that to Aid at I mean I think it's fair day I am definitely a product of just about a product of the the computer recording generation because uh you know by the time I was actually making records I was definitely working with computers I had an Atari St um I think I was probably still using some degree of tape at that time but pretty early on I transitioned to to using what was the the precursor to logic which is what I use now which was called creator notator um right and you know I I think I had just enough understanding of having worked with tape that it was useful to me but I didn't I certainly never made records using type but it's funny now because a lot of the time I spend remixing albums 16 track 24 track in the case of Tears for Fears three 24 track machines synced up together 72 tracks but still on tape so again I'm I'm learning a lot about how that whole kind of philosophy of recording on tape that I perhaps didn't learn myself early on in my own career um what do you what do you think about that what do you like what do you like about that or what have you taken away for example for mixing Tears for Fears at 72 tracks of analog what what what is it about that that that you have learned or taken away from well I think the main thing I mean Taste of phase is is perhaps normally here because it's kind of very much of the cusp of digital recording and analog recording but if you go back some of the albums I've mixed from from even going so far back as the late 60s or the early 70s or the late 70s some of the the XTC records I did the the main thing you learn is of course what every great musician understands is that imperfection is personality uh commit commit commit and a lot of these tracks were not recorded obviously to a click track a Tempo track right and that is what makes them exciting if you listen to a drum I mean I mean I mixed a lot of the King Crimson records and Bill bruford incredible drummer but couldn't stay at one tempo to save his life um and that's what makes him amazing so you have this natural sense of speeding up and slowing down all the time and the band kind of hanging on by their fingertips and it makes it absolutely thrilling to listen to and of course I think I kind of intuitively knew that but it's when I actually started mixing these records I'm like oh yeah that's why that's exciting because it is slowing down and speeding up naturally so I mean that's just one very small thing but I mean there are lots of little lessons like that I think you learn from from going back and sort of um I mean I'm essentially deconstructing and reconstructing these recall I mean you're doing them in 5.1 right that's how you're doing so the mixes that's what that's where it started but actually what happened was a lot of the time the my process is always to recreate the stereo as closely as possible before I even think about breaking it out into surround so what happened was I was doing I was recreating these stereo mixes and trying to get as close as I could I mean this is what I talk about learning you know trying to listen to the signature even of things like the reverbs they were using oh yeah and now I can listen to something and say oh yeah that's an emt-140 or or that's a lexicon 224 and you know just learning by listening and understanding that these all these all these units had their own personality so my task always is to recreate the stereos closely as possible and a lot of the time the artist and me would sit down and listen to that new stereo and feel like you know what this is worth releasing too there's something about this it's not like trying to replace the original mix but something about it that offers an alternate perspective so certainly with things like XTC um uh yes um uh Tears for Fears also we've released my new stereos as well so that then becomes the starting point for doing 5.1 but actually it's no longer 5.1 it's all Atmos now I did a breakdown of Mayor of simpleton a couple years ago and I got your 5.1 mix at the time the Pro Tools uh version of it and I had to actually put it back into a stereo mix but I heard the recreation you did which was very um faithful to the original I'm a huge xdc fan so very faithful to the original I always wanted to ask you about that about the process for how you would start these things out when you pull up these songs for the first time and you're listening to them what is your process for doing them okay you're doing them in Atmos now but what do you first do when you get the tracks in so I mean I get raw multi-track files unmixed morality track math track files so usually they've been transferred at 96k or 192k very high resolution transfers of the analog types done by people that that's all they do they special socialize in doing tape transfers and they do a beautiful job so I get these pristine but unmixed files wave files the first thing I do honestly is load everything up and identify what is actually used in the original stereo mix because a lot of times I'm getting multiple takes there are things on the multiple there are things on the multi-tracks that were not included in the Final Mix so the artist or the mixing engineer made decisions okay you know what I'm not going to use that cowbell part that we recorded uh or you know or I'm going to use this vocal take as opposed to that vocal tape so a lot of that is really just detective work constantly it's and it's tedious right it's very tedious it's funny because people say to me quite a lot of the time I tell them you know I've just read me I've just done Van Morrison's Moon dance for example I was telling my friend I've done that I've just done Van Morrison you see oh my God that must have been such an such an incredible thing to be open those multi-tracks and it is for about 10 minutes and then it becomes hard work it's really worked right right because you are you I mean it's essentially you have to be very very concentrated and very focused to make sure you hear every little thing in the in the original mixer was done oh that little guitar phrase has just been brought out there by the engineer and now it's back in Mexico and if you miss any of those things the fans will crucify you and I'm not sure and I have missed things like that to my cost and the feds have the the great the great sort of anecdote I like to tell is how if you get if you go and read if you go and read an Amazon review of something that you've you've that I've remixed you'll see comments like he's done an okay job but I noticed that on track four the hi-hat was slightly further over to the left than it was on the original mix one star one star desire disaster but that's what fans are like that's what right because you're you're kind of messing with their memory you know you're messing with that childhood um so if you notice that you've used the wrong take of the backing vocal on chorus 3 they'll give you one star you've got everything else perfect but that one so so that's what I mean by a lot of detective work so really just identifying what the right takes what the right elements to use in the mixer and then the next thing I do is I start to do stereo positioning and level basic levels and trying to find the right reverbs for you know for the tracks in question it's it's hard work and you have track sheets that go along with these typically very rarely um sometimes nothing um sometimes track sheets that the engineer got bored filling in halfway through the session so there's like you know you can see where the drum space and and you know the basic track is but then they haven't bothered to update it when they've been doing the final overdubs very rarely do I get a a pristine you know a perfectly accurate uh track shoot to go on let's say we go back to the early 2000s and the thing that always impressed me I love your drum sounds right you very natural really punchy uh great snare sounds always sound like it was you know no Samples used or anything like that whether there was or not they always sounded natural and Powerful right great guitar tones everything well balanced beautiful stereo Imaging um how do you know what a great snare sound is for a record like your own records so you know I think again it it's it's really all about that listening I did for the first you know 10 years of my music career I was still this I mean you know again it's worth pointing out I grew up in the 80s and I was a massive trevorhorn fan I mean I was buying all the record that came out as ATT if you want to understand anything about beautiful recording at least we're using using a combination of electronic and acoustic equipment there's a great starting point and I say that advisedly because this is obviously the you know some of those older records they're using ham and organs and things but they're not using pure electronic sound a lot of the time so the guys Trevor Horn and his guys were in court were integrating a new generation of sampling technology synthesizer technology with beautifully recorded acoustic instruments whether it was drum kits or strings and I learned so much from listening to guys like Trevor and Steve Steve Lipson did the propaganda album that came out in the mid 80s these records again I mean I talk about this thing Sonic Excellence again these these albums absolutely fall into that category they sound absolutely beautiful and you know there's a caveat to all this which is sometimes I love records that are horribly recorded you know I also grew up loving Industrial Music and listening to throbbing gristle records which were recorded on you know a bad you know out of alignment stereo cassette recorder and loving that Lo-Fi aesthetic too and then you get someone like Trent resner who's very good at putting both of those things together beautifully recorded albums but taking that low-fi aesthetic I mean I think that's his great innovation in a way is bringing that kind of low-fi aesthetic into mainstream beautifully produced records um anyway I'm digressing slightly so yeah I mean I I listened to records like that and what I loved about those records was it was striking a beautiful balance between the organic and the electronic world and I still love that and it's interesting you say you said I don't know if you use sample drums triggered some but I can't hear that you do well I do but I love the fact you're absolutely right I try to make sure you can't hear it it's the same with tuning I do use melodyne but the moment I think you can hear that I'm using it I'll back it off if you know what I mean I can't stand hearing those records where it's like Steve walking is on the vocals I can't I can't stand it right I can't say because unless they're using it as a deliberate effect and of course there are there are examples of that but where you just know that these people just don't know any better they've just put melodyne on a hundred percent and they think that's okay um but that's a feature not a bug I I personally can't I can't stand that it offends my ears you know I like to hear what it feels like a natural performance and by all means you know use the techniques and and the tools that are out there but it's almost like you know the moment you can hear that you're using those tools the magic the the spell is broken at least it is for me I uh did a breakdown of um Kiss From A Rose uh seal which is a trevorhorn production and um steel sent me the tracks that he got from Trevor and um when I pulled them up in Pro Tools and I just put everything you know just leveled everything out there was the mix it was the most incredibly well recorded well the the Imaging everything about it was Perfection the stems were done perfectly I had never heard anything like that and I said to seal he said he said to me he's like man I never realized how well recorded this was and I think it is it's just so genius Trevor Horn is just and when you hear records that are done like that that are just beautiful recording like like what you do with your music I think it's that to me is the ultimate yeah I have the same experience I've only mixed one record that Trevor did which is ABC's lexicon of love which is a very early one in in his production career um and a very similar experience it was like you almost I mean I wish everything was like this it but it is the Inception it is absolutely the exception to the rule most albums are you know I'm not saying they're badly recorded but they're certainly not recorded to the extent that you can just literally load in the stems and the mixes there you have to do a lot of work on them um but this yeah but this this guy is is exceptional in that respect um and it's funny I did I did a session once for Trevor as a guitar player God knows why he hired me but he did for a session many many years ago and what was really interesting about Trevor he is he is old school in the sense that he doesn't touch any equipment himself he is just listening and analyzing and commenting now I I grew up as someone because I'm you know part of the the next generation of producer engineer I grew up with the notion that there is this kind of very blurred line between the producer the engineer and the musician because these days we're all sitting at a laptop or a workstation and we've got a guitar on our knee and a microphone next to us and we're simultaneously engineer producer musician and I think that's the norm now at least certainly most people I know are like that but I think Trevor was one of the last generation of old school producers that actually barely touched a piece that didn't touch a mixing disc himself at all he had great assistance that would do that for him but he was the one that was listening analyzing commenting suggesting and I love that because it what a what a joy to be able to just make records by just not having to worry about the technical side at all just being able to listen I did a show this past weekend in Chicago and I do some song breakdowns and I did a couple Beatles songs and um some people came came up to me afterwards and this and said I did um uh I'm the walrus and they said wow can't believe how massively big this stuff sounds now you know 55 years later it's it's incredible to see how well these things hold up you know Dark Side of the Moon these some of these records so just just so and I think a lot of that does come from the the limitations I mean you have to understand and I know you do um that when you're recording on four channels of type you're having to commit to things that you don't have to commit to anymore so these days I mean one of the things I get fed up is I get sometimes I get sent tracks to mix and it's like the engineer or the band haven't bothered to get a good guitar sound tone so instead they've just tracked the guitar 10 times well that's going to say I will track it ten times no why don't you just get a good guitar sound to start with and then you don't need to track it at all right um and of course in in those days working on Four Track eight track 16 track I mean I've mixed so many records where the drums like I've done who's next recently as well the drums on that album are very often just on a mono track a mono track they sound huge and they sound yeah and they sound great and the mono track is that's the sound okay I had to add a little bit of Reverb to it right that's it that's the sound and you think well okay they must have spent a long time making sure that it sounded phenomenal because they knew that they would have no recourse to go back and adjust anything later now what do we do these days we record drums across 30 channels and we don't bother really to make it sound as good as it should at least that's the way I feel um right so and I'm guilty of this too you know I'm guilty of this too ending up fixing things in the mix so this I mean this goes back to your original question about what can you learn from you know analyzing those old old albums well there's a great example you know get a good sound spend the time getting a great sound and then you won't have to worry about tarting it up in the mix you know Glenn John's when when I I saw a uh I saw an interview with him and he talked about Mike and Keith Moon's drum kit all the symbols all the times and everything and then using just a very simple three or four mic miking system all the stands are out of the ways just getting the thing and he said oh it's really simple to do of course it's not simple to do uh to to make sure the balance is right but the uh but the drummers back then knew that they would instinctually know by going back and listening to the playback that they had to balance the the parts right on their own right that that was a big part of this and a lot of the drummers that I talked to um I interviewed Bernard Purdy this past weekend and uh he and I had interviewed him in the past and we talked about uh that you had to balance everything in the room and and a lot of the drummers that I've interviewed that are all older that that you know are 50s 60s 70s 80s years old talked about the importance of that of balancing the drum kit in the room because there was not you didn't have individual mics on everything that that was an important thing that's why they would hire these session guys to come in because they would just naturally do that and you'd get a great drum sum all the hits would be consistent there'd be no you know missed snare hits or anything like that right but nowadays 30 channels of drums you can go back in you can replace whatever you need to yeah buddy stuff around well obviously there are advantages to that but it but it does seem to be quality over Quant quantity over quality a lot of the time none of the mics individually sound that good um you know when you put them all together you try and get something that sounds pretty good but you know the the the other thing I've noticed also about going back to some of these old records I know we're going down the sort of remix Rabbit Hole here but hopefully we'll come back to my music in a minute but um one of the things I've noticed about these other remixes projects I do is when you load up the drum kits sometimes on an album say record in the early 70s and you listen to the drums in Solo you're like that doesn't sound that great really and then you put everything else in and it sounds perfect it sounds exactly what it needs to sound like and of course the the reason for that is that everyone else has played to everyone else so there's a band playing in a room and there's a kind of symbiotic relationship between all of those players so the guitar player has adjusted the amount of drive on his guitar to fit in with the sort of you know the Gestalt entity that is the sound of this band so if you start homing in on individual things as I do of course I have to when I'm remixing some of these old records I think well that's not particularly good bass sound uh that's not a particularly good snare sound so you know and the first thing I do if I was recording now is I'd start tweaking with it and putting Triggers on it and all that stuff but of course the thing is that it is it it is the composite thing it's when it when you put everything together the drum kit may not be the greatest drum set in the world but it's the glue that everything else kind of It kind of glues everything else together so there's something about that too you know that it's not always about getting the most impressive you know I remember in some of my early early bands when I just starting out working with not so great engineers and the Hallmark of a not so great engineer for me is that they start analyzing individual things in the mix and spending an awful lot of time making that thing in isolation sound glorious and then wondering why when they put it back in the mix it sounds like again and so you know doing a mix is kind of like a little bit of that pushing things on incrementally in relation to each other not in isolation so again something I think I learned from you know from listening to those records I mean I don't think some of those sounds on those Beatles albums are amazing and I mean maybe I'm wrong you know I've never but I imagine if you listen to Ringo's Kick Drum you might think that's not a particularly great kick drum sound put it in with the rest of the back I was listening to Guthrie's solo on the song regret of yours okay so so you're working with someone like Guthrie is Guthrie a session guy to you like how why how did this this how did you and Guthrie get hooked up and um tell me about working with players like that with your own music when you're working with people that are kind of would you call them session players it's not a word I would have used in a way I mean you know I I I made a couple of Records um five six seven years ago I made a couple of Records where I wanted to be like you know I was saying earlier not earlier on the conversation I wanted to be the worst musician in the room I wanted to harness the power of an incredible band that the kind of zapper thing you know although zapper himself was an amazing musician but his thing was he would always have musicians in his bands that were absolutely class and I think I made a couple of Records like that um and I really enjoyed making the I've moved away from that to being more kind of self-sufficient again but I enjoyed that and I think part of it was wanting to be you you ask it's a very valid question do I think of them are session musicians no because I want them to contribute and I want them to have ideas and I want them to blow me away and surprise me um and there's no point having someone like Guthrie in your band if you're not in a way going to let them loose you know um so it's more a question again of steering you know great just trying to point them in their own direct the right direction then just letting them go um I mean Guthrie is is extraordinary I mean I've never I I think there's nobody like him possibly the most gifted I mean in my experience the most gifted guitar player that has ever been I mean he's on that level just it's insane I mean it's insane um yeah and I've played with a lot of great guitar players but Guthrie is just on another level um and you know that's not always what I want but I definitely wanted it on those two records and some of the solos he play I think the great thing about Guthrie is that he's not he can shred but actually he also has this incredible soul and I hate Traders I love sugar does I cannot stand the whole phenomenon of shredders to me it's like turning music into an Olympic sport um and it doesn't impress me and I don't enjoy listening to it you know the analogy I always give is if you're I mean like we're talking now we're communicating and a lot of the communication of my words is not actually my choice of words it's the way I'm saying them it's my body language it's the intonation in my voice you can't get any of that in if you're shredding or you can get literally is the information of the note you're playing so that's like me communicating all my answers to you in this way with no intonation and no communication at all through and that's what shredding is to me but Guthrie isn't there he's got something else that a lot of shredders don't have he can do that he can put well I don't want to interrupt but he can play phrases that that he plays beautiful phrases and ideas that suggest other ideas but he's also the greatest Shredder out there too that's the funny part of this is that when it comes to that he's pretty Untouchable uh as a shredder too but his what you're talking about is his soul his sense of his melodicism his phrasing he he's a beautiful blues player I mean he's just but his the way that he plays one idea that suggests the next idea the suggests the next idea he's just uh he's like Sonny Rollins or Miles Davis so to the extent a lot of times the solos you hear on the records are the First Take uh just unbelie I mean there's a there's one of my songs called drive home that he takes an extended solar the last two minutes it's a very it's a very sort of Comfortably Numb type trajectory the song has and he and his goes out with this incredible solo yeah he picked up a guitar that I'd just been sent over to the studio um and as he started playing that solo the E string slipped out of the saddle and he couldn't even play that string so didn't matter it didn't matter he still produced one of the most lyrically beautiful and Soulful solos I have ever heard in my life um playing an instrument which was frankly inadequate for his talents you know um and one string he couldn't even use one string it reminds me of that story about Keith Jarrett doing the colon concert do you know that story about how he hated the piano register or the high register so instead he went out and he played the whole show in the middle register and he kind of made that work for him and of course it became one of his most celebrated recordings you know that whole thing about limitation being the mother of invention and I think that the Jarrett and Guthrie that solo is exactly a good example of that too tell me about how your songwriting process has changed over the last 25 years has it changed do you do things you know when you're you obviously are sitting in your studio there at your house and what is that where you write do you uh do you start with a guitar part you start with a drum part or is every song different what do you do how do you come up with your ideas especially things that have that are not necessarily songs that start with guitar that have have Ambience parts and things like that so how do you what do you what's your processing the answer to that question is kind of all of the above really um I think a song can start from anything a texture a sound a chord a keyboard a sound a a Groove but that's a bit of a cop-out answer so I'm going to give you another one um these days I definitely have moved away from the guitar and I'm much more excited about the possibilities of electronic sound that doesn't mean I'm making electronic music but it certainly become a much bigger part of my of my musical palette and I find I'm more likely to be inspired by turning on my profit five and switching on the arpeggiator and messing about with some knobs then I am by sitting with an acoustic guitar on my lap and I think part of that is because I'm so limited as a guitar player I mean listen if I was Guthrie govern I'm sure I'd never get bored but I I bore myself with my with my very limited abilities I find I'm boring myself with the guitar these days so I still use the guitar but it tends to be something that gets added later on as a color rather than the fundamental of a song now which is much more likely to be keyboards or an electronic sound of some kind and the other thing that I think has been very much a big shift in my thinking certainly over the last seven or eight years is I'm no longer interested in the idea of genre at all um now I like a lot of people have been a musician for a long time have a um a sort of reputation um in the media in the fan base that I make a certain kind of music I'm not I'm not going to say the word but we know what it is and I increasingly kick against that um and I'm very excited the album I'm working on right now my next solo record is is a 64 minute musical Journey which goes through so many different Styles and I think back again to those albums I fell in love with one of the things people sort of never never really acknowledge about Dark Side of the Moon for example is that there is gospel music on that record there is Soul music on that record there is Funk on that record there is music concrete on that record it is a record that exists purely our genre which is why in a way it's managed to transcend the genre that a lot of people try and put it in all the time but it's obviously gone way beyond that notion of genre um and in my own little way I think I'm excited about making records like like that now okay since Atmos is something that you've you've done some of these Atmos mixes does this come into your uh do you strictly make stereo versions of your own music nowadays or are you always thinking about this kind of or are you making too simultaneously different it's a very good question in the back of my mind these days I have to say I am always thinking in terms of spatial audio Yeah so it's not only Atmos of course it's also 360. there's L Acoustics have their own space floor there's all these spatial audio formats these days and I I'm fascinated by them and this album I'm making now is definitely an album I am making for spa not only of course I will make a as good as Ceramics as I can but I'm very much conceiving it for playback in spatial audio now you're going to ask me well what does that actually mean what do you actually do that you wouldn't normally do in a stereo uh recording okay so you might track an acoustic guitar part four times instead of twice um now I understand this is a contradiction to my earlier point about don't track things too much but sometimes when it's a it's a big block of harmonies or a big block of acoustic guitars if you're if you are going for more of a Phil Spector approach sometimes it's nice to think in terms of what will be good in surround so track something four times uh tracker tracker backing vocal you know four times rather than twice and you know when you get to surround you get to mix in surround you're going to be able to create a really impressive immersive um you know kind of feeling uh in the music so I think a lot of that sort of mindset has entered into this record I'm working on now yeah do you find do you think that that's the future is this surround mixes uh you know whatever the whatever it is 360 Atmos whatever the I mean is that is that where we're headed or will there always be just two track St you know stereo mixes and the other things I think we're heading in two directions and they're kind of Polar Opposites so my belief is that that convenience always wins out over quality of experience anyway so things will increasingly move towards people listening to music on their phone you know that in mono or some you know whatever stereo the phone can produce there's no way that that's going to change YouTube streaming platforms MP3s I mean I would have thought MP3s would have disappeared by now because there's actually no need for them anymore we we you know we have we have we have the bandwidth on our Wi-Fi connections we don't we we don't need mp3s and yet seemingly they're as prevalent as they ever were um now I know of course there there is also the alternative for audiophile sites where you can download stereo mixes in 96 24 or 192 24 but they're very much a niche for real audio files so I think it's interesting because the the spatial audio Market is growing apple for example have seen spatial audio streams go from 3 to 13 in the last 12 months that's incredible that is incredible now I'm not sure how many people actually realize that some people are listening to stuff by accident you know but the bottom line is that the spatial audio is definitely certainly since Apple have adopted it has become a big thing I said to you earlier that no one asks me for 5.1 anymore that changed almost overnight when Apple adopted Atmos everyone suddenly wanted Atmos and I love it I absolutely love it and it's great that there are so many people that are hearing spacious audio I mean okay it's not properly discreet surround in the sense that you are listening to a kind of binaural you know mixed down of a surround mix but it does sound good I have to say I mean I've obviously I listen to all my all my Atmos mixes I do go on my phone and hear what they will sound like through the spatial algorithms it's great it's definitely for me a step forward from you know regular old stereo but of course there will always be purists that will always just prefer you know some people still prefer mono after all you know so there you go uh how was your your mix down like your room there set for like like what what is the speaker configuration that you will when you're doing these when you're splitting it out into all these different channels yeah so my app I mean for those that don't know Atmos is basically endlessly configurable you create a mix and it should be able to adapt to any speaker configuration the standard seems to be certainly in the industry for mixing seems to be 7.1.4 so that is seven speakers around you in the horizontal plane the two at the front two at the back the center speaker which I usually use for for lead vocal and then two in the um in between the front of the sides and then the point four two are the four elevated speakers so that's the other thing about Atmos is you're now mixing in the vertical plane as well as the horizontal plane so you have you can put sound above the listener so two in front and two behind uh as well when you when you see in front behind you mean uh in front above and then in back behind not directly above but no so you don't have to I don't have directly below I mean you could have a 7.1.6 system and then you might have another pair of speakers pretty much right above you but I and I think most people I know that mixing Atmos at the moment we're using the 7.1.4 which is so two two speakers above you pretty much above your fronts and two pretty much above your your rear speakers in the in the back yeah are there phasing issues with things like this that uh that you come into I've never I've never I wouldn't I wouldn't know where to start with something like that I don't understand that stuff if it sounds good if it ain't broke don't fix it I the simple answer your question is no I've never come across anything like that this new record since you're that you're making now is a conceptual record conceptual record in Vault would involve I would think that you're going to use the latest technology and this is going to be a record that's going to have an experience of spatial audio right that's a big part of this yes yeah very much you know and I'm one of the things I'm going to do with my next record is I'm going to hold as many playback sessions as I can because I think I recognize I mean you have to recognize if you're mixing in Amos that very few people will ever actually get to hear it the way you heard it when you mixed it most people don't have a 7.14 system in their front room so one of the things you can do that is that's now part certainly for me has become part of the promotional process is to book great playback rooms whether it's in London we have Dolby have their Cinema down in SoHo there's a great L Acoustics room here also in North London which I think is like an 18.5.12 system so I'm I'm booking those rooms and I'm doing as many playback sessions as I can and just sending out invitations to fans to Media come along and hear This Record turn your phone off we're going to turn the lights off and you're going to hear a record the way you used to listen to records the way that you don't anymore and I'm the same you know I never find myself listening to a record the way I did when I was 15 years old putting the putting the record on the turntable turning the lights off just laying back and listening to because none of us have time to do that anymore the speed of you right so we just don't have time but it's great to get people along and literally get them on bean bags or chairs or whatever it is in a great Atmos room or L Acoustics room turn the lights off tell them to turn off their phones and just take them on a musical Journey if I said to you okay you want to listen to something that you come back to all the time a record that you come back to or a song that's not your own what's something that you revisit a lot is there are there any records that you revisit there are um they're not the obvious one you know I'm I'm not um I'm not really a classic rock Cannon kind of a guy um I guess this goes but right back to my childhood I was always more interested in the failures than I was in the success I say failures and inverted commas the ones that the albums that perhaps people would always dismiss from people's back catalog I would always go and say oh that sounds interesting go and search that out you know so like my favorite Pink Floyd record was or who's still my favorite band overall but for sure was always I'm a Gummer because everyone always would say to me what a terrible yes that record's awful what are they thinking I was absolutely fascinated by it I thought it was extraordinary I mean it was like something somewhere between 20th century classical music and music concrete and rock music and just the sense of draw I just loved it so anyway I say that by preamble to what I'm going to tell you is the album I come back to more and more and more again more so than any other any other in my collection is a record made in 1972 by Tangerine Dream and it's called zeites and to me it is the Proto ambient record it was a double record with four sides of me four pieces of music one on each side nothing happens nothing happens on this record right it is I know that record I love it I can never get bored of it for me whenever I put it on it changes the feeling in the room it's like what I say about ambient music it's like perfume it's almost like just creating an atmosphere which changes your relationship to the space you're in I love this about ambient music it's why I've always loved pure texture you know music pure ambient music so this is a record I come back to I think I listen to at least once every month and I've been doing so for the last 40 years um the records I come back to as a producer that still dazzle me are probably the Abba records as well as well as things like dogs I think I don't need to hear Dark Side of the Moon ever again I've heard it so many times it's almost like implanted in my brain it's like a microchip in my brain that just feeds Dark Side of the Moon DNA into my creativity I don't need to hear but I come back a lot to um to the great Abba records because here's an example of a band that we're totally committed to um the power of a perfect piece of pop music but that strove also Benny and Bjorn strove to make those records sound as good as the Beatles oh The Beatles and beach boys records that they adored and they took it to a whole nother level I think and and I I just constantly in awe of particularly the last you know the second half of of the Abba career when you're working on these remix records versus working on your own music what what takes priority at this point like what are you working on right now I know you've been out touring again and uh yes that's right so I just just finished with Porcupine Tree we went out we went out on tour for the first time in 12 years maybe the last time we'll do it again but it was it was a lot of fun um to play the old music and to be a bit nostalgic for once although we did make a new record too so right now I mean I'm it's funny because one of the one of the the words that gets thrown at me quite a lot is workaholic people think I'm a workaholic um because I seem to be always doing 10 things at once um and part of part of the reason they think that is because it's true but another reason another reason yeah another reason they think that is that I I think I work very quickly um people people are amazed how quickly I work when I'm doing things and part of that is because I've spent so much time doing it now I think very intuitively and like I said I wouldn't I couldn't be I couldn't explain to you how a compressor or a Reverb or an EQ works but if you play me a record by somebody from 50 years ago 40 30 years ago I'll listen to it and I'll say oh I know how to get that Reverb and I can do it in about 30 seconds because I've been doing it so much I don't want it to sound in arrogant in any way it's and so one of the things I love to do in a way is constantly change it up and I love to go to the studio one day and say you know today I'm going to work on my record but then tomorrow I might say okay now I'm going to go back and work on this you know this whole Chic record I've been remixing or something um and just that being able to just do different things different days is is part of what makes it interesting in a way um so I don't tend to be someone that focuses the answer question Rick is I don't tend to be someone that just focuses on one I have to have all these balls in the air at the same time maybe I have a little bit of you know I'm a bit um hyperactive in that sense working in digital you know working on computers now since you can just open up a session and you can you can actually go between things it's actually very different than it was if you were set up to make you're making a record making a solo record making a band record whatever producing a record you know you tend to stay on these projects till they're finished whereas now you can pretty much open up anything and move between things oh I'm gonna mix this today that you know something that I worked on three weeks ago and you just go one sign a time so actually that's where digital and working you know in Daws makes it a lot easier to do that to jump around agreed absolutely you know and I'm I'm an incredible apologist for digital a lot a lot of people from my generation they still you know are very much hankering after the analog days and I love you know there's certain things I love about analog but I absolutely love the fact that I'm making music and I'm doing mixes and I'm making records now because I love digital absolutely love it partly because I'm not a particularly great musician so to be able to have the tools to capture and not particularly good performance and actually make it sound the way I want that's great but not only this it's also and this is kind of something you alluded to I think in your question or the point you made is that you can work towards a Finnish record incrementally now over a period of time and you can put something away for a month and I do frequently put something away for a month and then come back to it and it's exactly where you left it and hear it with new ears and A New Perspective and realize something about it that you could never have realized when you were too close to it so that that ability to be able to make records I mean I've been making this new record incrementally over the last two years this new solar record I'm making and this is something else I'm in awe of when I go back and I work on these old records is to realize they made some of these records in three weeks from beginning to end right it's insane yeah and then they would go then they would go and do a week of you know a month of shows and then they'd be back in the studio making their next record that is insane right I think it's insane to everyone we've you know we've we've got to a point now I mean I'm telling people that I'm making this new record and they're going do you ever rest and I'm like well hold on my last album came out two years ago it's amazing how people's perspective has changed because when I was growing up out you know in the early 80s bands would make an album every year without every year that's right and the previous record that was just you know you look at Elton John two records a year through it through his Imperial phase it's amazing I met Elton in 2004 we were working at the same studio and um he invited me and the band I was working with who he was a fan of I was producing this band he invited us in after our session so we go into the into the a studio the studio here in Atlanta where I live and um Bernie Thompson was there and his band that he's you know we talked we talked for about an hour and a half and he's and I asked him about this and he said yeah we would spend two weeks making a record writing it and recording it then go out and tour for six months and come back in and make another in two weeks make another record and go do that can you imagine anyone doing I mean there probably is someone out there doing that but but in terms of mainstream artists now I think there are several reasons why several reasons why that doesn't happen now the first reason is that bands are expected to tour for much longer um so the world has become a smaller place and touring now pretty much means 12 months of your life if you want to do it properly and the other reason I think is that the stakes have gone up when you release a new album now it's almost like it has to be a hit it has to be a hit or your career is over so you spend so much longer second guessing yourself and I and I can't I guess in a way I envy those guys working in the early 70s where you know it didn't matter if if one album was an experiment that didn't quite you know commercially resonate because the next album was only six months away anyway and I love that I you know I still maintain that Elton John's run of albums from Elton John through to Blue moves is the single gr and I'm including the Beatles among I'm not the biggest Beatles fan as we've already established so I'm including the Beatles yeah the Elton run of albums from Elton John through to Blue Moose is the single greatest run in terms of quality that anyone has ever produced and it blows you gotta remember 10 albums and two of them were doubles I mean that in itself is mine is a mind yeah no I mean Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and blue moves are double albums that that's something I could never imagine anyone doing that again what do you think about the music industry Outsourcing the music promotion now to things like Tick Tock do you have a view on on these things what do you think of things like Tick Tock this social media platforms it almost doesn't matter what I think um because it's it's just now become part of what you have to do you know I I have to be present on social media and I've learned it's interesting my last record was called the future bites and it was almost like presenting a record the way that um a high sort of high design Concept in the form of a high design concept using social media in quite a deliberately kind of crass way but in quite a conceptual way to Market something as if it was a product um it came out in the middle of covid so it didn't quite work unfortunately it wasn't what I think people wanted at that moment but anyway it was an interesting concept and part of that concept was kind of reconciling myself to the fact that this is this is where we are now this is where we are radio has no influence anymore TV has relatively no influence I've lost count of the number of people have said to me oh yeah we just got our band on Letterman or Jay Leno or whatever it was or Conan O'Brien and we saw Zero uptick in our sales following it I mean it's extraordinary is it nothing they see no upswing in their cells at all and yet if and if you get the right tick tock thing going and that something goes viral or it's massive it's massive so I think the answer question is I don't know what I think I'm you know I'm 55 years old so it's obviously not going to be something I'm naturally going to gravitate towards um but I see how my kids do gravitate towards it I see how they engage with with pop music and one of the other things that's been very hard for me to reconcile but I have had to accept it accept this is that nowadays things have gone back to being and maybe you've done some podcasts about this but things have gone back to being about the song not the cult of personality my kids know songs and I'll say to them they'll say to me dad can you put on this song on YouTube and I'll say well who's it by they have no idea they don't they don't know because my kids the reason they don't care is they have no interest in their artists beyond that one song so the thing that the thing that you and I had of having a sort of cult of personality following a band being a fan of ABBA orb Zappa or Pink Floyd or Elton John or Black Sabbath or whoever it was knowing the names of them the members of the band knowing the discography understanding the trajectory of their career oh then they change direction and they did that and that was an experiment they're not interested in any of that they just did one song that's the one song and that's really hard for me to accept as someone that's grown up in the 80s loving music from the 60s 70s 80s even the 90s I thought music was great in the 90s too it was still about the cult of personality it was still about almost having an allegiance to an artist and following what are they gonna do next are they going to surprise me going out and buying the record the day it came out bringing it home and thinking oh I'm not sure if I like this but I'm going to listen to it five more times because I really have respect because I bought it right yes and then finally understanding it you know I I miss all that and I think kids will never they'll never have that because that's not the way they engage with music to me but of course you know the one great thing and the the thing that we have to acknowledge is good is that music keeps evolving and it keeps changing it may not be evolving in a way that we personally like but it is changing I mean I've had I've had to witness the marginalization of rock music in favor of Urban Music almost completely over the last 20 years rock music has been marginalized by Urban Music completely now I mean although I like some Urban Music I feel more of an affinity with rock music of course I do so I may not like that but I also can acknowledge that there's a lot more exciting stuff going on in Urban Music than there is in rock music sadly I don't know why rock music has become so stuck in its ways but it doesn't seem to surprise anymore and yet there are constantly artists that are doing even the way they promote records you know just this thing with Urban artists just dropping their album at a day's notice and I think a lot of rock musicians are still tied to this idea that oh you release a single six months before no if you do that people will be they'll have stopped listening by the time you actually drop your record that's the reality well I think that they're still part of the you know if you're on a major label you know oh we got this we're on the Spotify playlist or something and there there's they're still thinking in that way the playlisting part of it and that's like as as a another arm of the label or or that's kind of how promotion is done now and they still they're not thinking like people that do Urban Music are thinking that use social media in a completely different way and they know how to promote their music it's an incredible learning curve if you've brought up if you've been brought up understanding the the music business Works in a particular way the new model is incredibly hard to get your head around I mean I you know when I I'm now assigned to Virgin Records for my solo career when I signed to Virgin or Caroline as they were five years ago the first thing they did was they sent me on a Spotify seminar to learn about Spotify because I I really didn't understand you relating to spot Spotify the way the way it works the way there are things that Spotify look at list their listeners as Lean Back listeners and lean forward listeners and the vast majority are the lean back listeners these are listeners that put on a playlist called music for coffee break or music for yoga and they don't even know the names of the songs that are in the playlist and yet these songs are racking up millions and millions and millions of of streams and yet no one would buy the record if it came out on physical no one would buy the record and there's a whole generation of artists right that are making a living from being those kind of artists that are getting in all of these you know music friends so you know there's there's the great irony music for insomniacs music that people don't even hear because they're fast asleep and yet the streams are racking up and racking up millions and millions of them and this this is a whole different world and a whole different you know philosophy of of how somebody can make a living from being in the music industry which I was completely ignorant of until they sent me on this seminar and I will I will never completely get it of course I won't I'm not supposed to I'm not supposed to I'm 55 I'm not supposed to completely get it but at the same time in my own little way I'm trying to think now about how how would someone like me release a record now and I don't think the answer anymore is to release one song six months before another song three months before and another song a week before the album comes out because all that happens the engagement does this that's all that friends that's right doesn't work anymore yes it does not work anymore Stephen this has been really really fascinating I encourage everybody that's watching this to go check it I mean there's to talk about your career you have so many solar records you have your uh Porcupine Tree records I mean there's just so much stuff you've done you're a producer you're an engineer you're a mixer you know we we couldn't even find the time to talk about all these different things is there something you want uh that you want to save for people to check out well you know it's it's a very hard question to answer because I like to think all my albums are different and it very much it depends on the agenda of the person that's asking so I I would you know I would say if you like old school Progressive there you go I've used the word after all if you like old school progressive rock then go and listen to the albums that Guthrie and I made with Guthrie and Marco which are called The Raven that refused to sing and hand cannot arrays they're very much in that vein if you like more electronic maybe more Radiohead style approach to music my last record the future bites was more like that Elton John was a guest on it as well if you were to to bring the conversation background again to Elton um very graciously he guessed it on that record um if you like music with a slightly more metal Edge that would be my band Porcupine Tree we we have a sort of metal element to our to our vocabulary as well I make ambient music as basically it's the point I'm making is it's very hard to no you're incredibly diverse you're one of the most diverse musicians um and I think it's probably because of your uh that you wear all these different hats you know as far as Beyond being a a singer songwriter you're also the you know you also work as an a producer and a mixer and things like that you you are really and and that's I think reflected in the versatility of your writing you know something I wrote about in I I also published a book earlier this year just to add another thing to my my list of things I do um I published a book and there's a story in the book I tell about the first day I went to high school or secondary school as we call it here I realized there were all these musical tribes so there was the kids that only listened to what was the new wave of British heavy metal there were kids that only listened to the new electronic music like Gary Newman they were the kids that only listened to the mod bands like The Who and and and and the jam they were the kids that only listened to the the scar music like the specials and the madness and it blew my mind because I loved all of it and I didn't understand why you couldn't just love it all and at the same time I was saying going down to my local library taking out stockhausen records and Miles Davis records and loving them too and and I think that Natural Curiosity and that inability to recognize the notion of genre has actually been one of my greatest strengths but also my biggest Achilles heel because how do you sell something this is the industry I'm talking about here now how do you sell something and also how do you keep Faith with a fan base that you're constantly disappointing I do that all the time I do it all the time I I upset and disappoint my fan base because I you know like I go off and make a pop record when they're expecting another big conceptual progressive rock Masterpiece or whatever but that's I love making those records just as much and and I think that makes it harder to be um successful and the the the the the best example I can give is Bowie because Bowie through the 70s changed with every record and he paid a price for that he was never as successful as a lot of his contemporaries in the 70s the Elton John's and those kind of he was never successful he was only really people forget he was only really massively successful when he went pop in the 80s with Let's Dance those reps in the 70s I mean records like Heroes and low were considered terrible flops by the label now we think of them as the great masterpieces of this chameleon-like genius that constantly reinvented himself but my point is and I'm listen I'm not comparing myself to Bowie he's he's on another level of course he is but but I love the fact that someone like that existed and is the poster child for that idea that you never stand still you confront the expectations of your audience you don't cater for them but you do pay a price for being that kind of person this is a very low answer your question about what album I should tell people to go and listen to I think you just have to go and just listen to a bunch of things and decide what it is you like about what I do if anything Stephen pleasure talking to you today look forward to uh to meeting you in person absolutely thank you so much Rick nice to speak to

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 400,530

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, Steven Wilson, porcupine tree, progressive rock, the raven that refused to sing, guthrie govan, marco minnemann, hand cannot erase, progressive rock instrumental, steven wilson interview, Opeth, mikael akerfeldt, storm corrosion, Interview, guns n roses, november rain 2022, November Rain, Steven Wilson Routines, steven wilson drive home

Id: 03vThmG46A8

Length: 69min 44sec (4184 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2022