Bil VornDick was one of the great unsung heroes of American music. He never obtained the name-recognition of some of the more high-profile American engineers and producers from New York and Los Angeles, but he was famous and treasured in Nashville, where his skills steered an amazing 46 recordings to a Grammy Award nomination, nine of which won the Award.
VornDick finally received his own Grammy Award in 2013, in the Best Bluegrass Album category, for the self-titled debut album of The Earls of Leicester, a group founded by dobro legend Jerry Douglas.
Vorndick’s credits include internationally famous artists like Bob Dylan, Béla Fleck, Doc Watson, Dolly Parton, Alison Krauss, Joan Baez, Chet Atkins, Lucinda Williams, T-Bone Burnett, Don Henley, Amy Grant, Pat Metheny, and Jesse Winchester.
Vorndick also worked with countless artists at the heart of Nashville’s country and bluegrass music scene, including Ralph Stanley, Earl Scruggs, Rhonda Vincent, Gene Watson, Jim Lauderdale, Claire Lynch, Craig Duncan, and The Nashville Bluegrass Band.
ALL-TIME GREAT
VornDick was the go-to engineer for anyone looking for exceptional recordings of acoustic instruments, and Jerry Douglas has credited him for being “responsible for the sound of bluegrass and for setting the bar for its quality.”
“He was like a painter,” Douglas added. “He would paint these pictures and he did it with microphones. He did not try to do it with outboard gear later, he would start painting right away.”
In addition to helping to shape the modern sound of bluegrass and country, VornDick also worked in genres like jazz, folk, cajun, blues, soul, rock and electronic music. For example, in the early nineties he mixed the groundbreaking first two Béla Fleck and the Flecktones albums, which combined bluegrass with jazz, rock and electronics.
VornDick passed away in July 2022, at the age of 72, and below we’ll be looking at his long, influential and wide-ranging career, and examine some of the recording and production skills that made him one of the all-time greats of American music.
FROM SONGWRITER TO ENGINEER
Bil VornDick grew up in the fifties and sixties in northern Virginia in a musical family. The young Bil was classically trained, and learned to play drums, guitar, piano and trumpet. While in high school he played guitar in a rock ’n roll band, and he started to write songs, which he recorded on a Wollensak tape recorder.
When he was 19, VornDick signed as a songwriter with Cedarwood Music in Nashville, and he would regularly travel to Nashville. VornDick got to know the legendary Chet Atkins, who advised him to move to Nashville and attend Belmont College.
VornDick obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in Music Business from Belmont in 1979. He continued to be active as a musician and songwriter, but his engineering activities became increasingly important.
He worked as chief recording engineer at the studio of country star Marty Robbins, and after Robbins’ passing in 1982, VornDick became chief engineer at Stargem Studios in Nashville, which later became Curb Studios.
Vorndick also founded The Music Shop, and set up Music Row Audio, which was dedicated to acoustic recording. In addition, he started Mountainside Music Productions, a production company that included seven publishing companies, and set up Mountainside Audio Labs studio, just outside of Nashville.
IMPACTFUL
In the US, the seventies saw the emergence of what was called the “new acoustic music” genre, which blended folk, bluegrass, jazz, and world music, and which was spearheaded by Béla Fleck, Michael Hedges, Leo Kottke, John Fahey, Tony Rice, New Grass Revival, David Grisman, and many others.
VornDick became closely associated with the genre. He had a desire to make acoustic music in general and bluegrass in particular sound as modern and impactful as the rock music of the day, as he once explained.
VornDick worked on several solo albums by Béla Fleck, engineering Deviation and Double Time in 1984, and engineering and mixing Inroads (1986), Drive (1988), Tales from the Acoustic Planet (1995), and The Bluegras Sessions: Takes from the Acoustic Planet Vol 2 (1999).
In addition, VornDick mixed the two aforementioned Béla Fleck & The Flecktones albums, which were the band’s self-titled debut (1990) and Flight of the Cosmic Hippo (1991).
THIRD DIMENSION
VornDick very deliberately distanced himself from the traditional approach to recording acoustic instruments, which usually involved just a few microphones placed several feet away from the musicians. Instead, he liked to put two mics on each instrument, using the 3:1 rule, which requires three times as much distance between each of these two microphones as between the microphones and the sound source, and prevents phase issues.
“Double-miking adds a third dimension to each instrument,” stated Vorndick in an interview. “I try to get one microphone on the lower side and one on the higher side of each instrument. On the low side, I tend to place them where the picking arm wraps around the instrument, between the elbow and the shoulder, the other where the neck joins the body of the instrument.”
VornDick stated that the choice of microphones was especially important because he tried to avoid using EQ. Instead he used high-pass filters and mic preamps to achieve the coloring he wanted on the sound.
In addition to choosing the right microphone and pre-amp, VornDick also stressed the importance of finding the place in the room that work the best for the overtones of an instrument, or in the case of bass, for the axial response.
FOLLOW YOUR DREAM
Despite VornDick’s obvious love of analogue gear, he also was one of the first to embrace digital equipment. VornDick’s recording approach changed over the years as he gained in experience, and the equipment changed. However, he always stressed that the gear was secondary.
“Just follow your dream, spend time on your art. The microphone doesn’t make the hit record. The plugin doesn’t make the hit record. The artist and their performance. Our gig as engineers is to try to help them through it.”
VornDick’s exceptional ability to guide musicians through the recording process and make them sound great was particularly needed
in 1998, when he recorded and produced a double album for bluegrass and banjo legend Ralph Stanley.
Called Clinch Mountain Country it featured duets between Stanley and Bob Dylan, Vince Gill, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch, Ricky Skaggs, Dwight Yoakam, Tim O’Brien, and almost thirty other artists. It became the top country album of the year, received the Record of the Year award of the International Bluegrass Association, and a Grammy nomination.
The exercise was repeated in 2001 with the Clinch Mountain Sweethearts album, which featured Joan Baez, Dolly Parton, Lucinda Williams, Iris Dement, and many others, and which received the same bluegrass Record of the Year award, and again a Grammy nomination.
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
During this century Vorndick remained as active as at any time during his career, and he was involved in the making of recordings by Rhonda Vincent, Jim Lauderdale, Janie Fricke, Claire Lynch, John Oates, the aforementioned Grammy-winning The Earls of Leicester album, and many more. He also recorded and mixed an amazing 105 albums for Craig Duncan.
Vorndick was involved in countless organizations in later decades of his life, doing his best to educate young engineers and support musicians and the studio industry in any way he could.
At various points was he the chairman of AES Nashville, an adjunct professor at Belmont University, a founding member of the Nashville Engineers Relief Fund, instrumental in the creation of the Sound Health Insurance cooperative for musicians, and playing a role in another dozen institutions and originations.
In recognition of his achievements, the AES posthumously honored him with a lifetime achievement award.
Vorndick was active until right before he passed away, supporting budding engineers and producers to follow their dream, so they could be, as he once expressed it, “the person in the background who makes musicians realize their dreams.”