Peter Doell Is One of the Most Talented Mastering Engineers Ever!

A complete transcription of the interview can be found below:

Warren Huart:

Hello everybody, I hope you’re doing marvelous today. Sitting here with my good friend Mr. Pete Doell. How are you?

Peter Doell:

I are good, thank you so awfully.

Warren Huart:

You’ve had a rather storied career.

Peter Doell:

I made it to the second story, anyway.

Warren Huart:

Made it to the second story? Well, the first one was decades long, that’s rather good. Well, that’s a good point, though, because you did start of … Well, I suppose three chapters. You’re a musician. Then you’ve become a recording engineer, and I’d love to get into some of those records that we were talking about earlier. And now, you’re here at Aftermaster and you’re mastering records on a daily basis.

Peter Doell:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). It’s funny, I think of this third incarnation, the third chapter here as like a new thing. But I’ve been doing this 17 years already. Isn’t that wild?

Warren Huart:

Yeah, I understand.

Peter Doell:

You turn around and 17 years have gone by. But they’ve been good.

Warren Huart:

Where did you start from? Where were you born?

Peter Doell:

I came from Rochester, New York. The joke about Rochester is, there are only three seasons in Rochester. June, July, winter are the three seasons. The good thing about growing up in a cold climate like that, it forces you to keep your ass in the house and practice. A lot of great musicians came from that neck of the woods. It was a fertile ground for me. I ended up getting a degree from Albany, the capital of New York state. I went to the university there. I got a degree in electronic music composition.

Warren Huart:

Wow.

Peter Doell:

I was playing in bands, and one day I was in the music building, and a door opened, and I see these multi track Scully tape machines. What class do I have to take to get in that room? Because I already, from playing in bands, and my older brother had already gotten me in the bog of building hi-fi. We built tube amps and … You know, for hi-fi. Not for-

Warren Huart:

Still amazing.

Peter Doell:

Yeah, but … Yeah, because he was a geek. I got the bug from him, and like I say, I saw these multi-track machines and I thought, “I know if I ever got in the proximity of all this technology, I too could learn how to make records.” Because that was really my avocation. People like John Cage, I got to study with him.

Warren Huart:

John was at the school at the same time?

Peter Doell:

Well, he’d be wandering through as one of the guest artists.

Warren Huart:

Oh, fantastic.

Peter Doell:

And whatnot. The guy who was my mentor, my professor was a guy who was another icon in that style of music, and a guy named Joel Chadabe.

Warren Huart:

Amazing.

Peter Doell:

Wonderful man, he’s still around. I got my teeth sharpened, if you will, on that kind of music, and learned a lot about how to record all kinds of music, not just electronic stuff. But the electronic stuff, now people talk about electronic music and it’s EDM.

Warren Huart:

Sure.

Peter Doell:

The stuff that I did, God, 50 freaking years ago, there was no keyboards. We weren’t trying to do vertical harmony. We already have orchestras to do that, right? We were trying to do more like what I guess, what you call today sound design. A really completely different, exploring new things. Then of course, because you’re making up everything, there was a lot of naïve, less than stellar music, because you had to make every decision, and not a lot of them were correct.

Warren Huart:

How did you get into that room? Did you actually go in there and study in there, and increase your degree?

Peter Doell:

Yeah. A guy in my band, he was already in the electronic music thing. It was through him that I got my foot in the door. My parents weren’t too thrilled that I took a left from my biology major with an eye on becoming an MD, and took a left and got into electronic music. It’s okay, Mom, there’s a master plan. Yeah, right.

Warren Huart:

I think you’ve done okay.

Peter Doell:

Well, I’ve been lucky. I mean, I’ve been out here in LA many decades already, and I haven’t been out of work a day, or more than a couple of days in all this time, that I didn’t take off. I mean, I am a lucky man. That’s for damn sure, as far as that.

Warren Huart:

You make your own luck. You work very had at it, and get great skills and it pays off.

Peter Doell:

No.

Warren Huart:

I’m sure you’ve worked many 18 hour, possibly day-night-next day sessions. I know I have.

Peter Doell:

Oh, man. I worked for Capitol studios here in town for 15 years, from ’83 to ’99. I worked 80 to 100 hours a week, every week, for all those years. I mean, the Skyscraper record, a David Lee Roth record which was I think the second one that Steve Vai produced-

Warren Huart:

I was about to say, I love the record, Steve Vai’s playing was incredible.

Peter Doell:

Yeah, he was a trip. But that record, I worked three months and it was 120, 140 hours a week. 140 hours a week means 20 hours a day on the clock. That’s not four hours of sleep a day. But you know, there were some memorable times. I mean, if I could remember them.

Warren Huart:

I bought the record when it came out. Is that, has Paradise on it? (singing)

Peter Doell:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Yeah, it’s a great song.

Peter Doell:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. And Steve Vai was a Zappa kid.

Warren Huart:

Oh, yeah. Incredible.

Peter Doell:

His idea of how he made a record was 30 hours on, 3 hours off. 30 hours on, 3 hours off. You know, rinse and repeat.

Warren Huart:

Well, it’s interesting. When I look around your room, for instance, and I don’t want to gloss over tons of stuff we’ve got to talk about. Of all the records that you’ve done, and there’s hundreds and hundreds of them-

Peter Doell:

Well, most of them are next door in the …

Warren Huart:

No, but you’re picking things that I think … The fact that Skyscraper’s over there. I’ve done a couple of those albums, one nine-month, one year-long record that are just … Take out your heart and rip it up in shreds. You’re like, “Ah,” you live and breath it. You can’t really … It’s going to be with you for the rest of your life. I understand the significance. There’s something quite incredible to the right hand side which I’d like to get to in a moment.

Warren Huart:

But let’s see if we can keep the chronological order going up, because you’ve got so many great moments, I would hate to miss any of them.

Peter Doell:

Well, when I left the birthing ground, electronic music at the university, I shortly thereafter moved to Boston. I was in Boston through much of the ’70s, and was playing music by night. I got into the recording studios there, and was occasionally playing on sessions, but mostly I was engineering.

Warren Huart:

What studios were there in the ’70s in Boston?

Peter Doell:

I worked at a place which was long gone, and now has been resuscitated. It was in Jamaica Plain, which is a very Latin part of town, and it was called Dimension Sound. The place has been resuscitated, repurchased and I’ve seen pictures on Facebook of it.

Warren Huart:

Incredible!

Peter Doell:

It’s really similar to the way it was umpteen years ago, except instead of having an analog audio designs console and a 24-track, now they have probably some Avid console workstation and it’s all Pro Tools and whatnot. But the look of the recording areas are virtually the same after all these years. I don’t know if it was frozen in amber, like in a receivership for a long time. Because I do know that the guys who owned it passed away and didn’t have any heirs, so it was possibly something like that. That that’s why it’s almost intact.

Warren Huart:

You were working there, what records did you make there?

Peter Doell:

This last year I got to master a record for Joe Perry, one of his solo records, and I reminded him that I had gotten to work with Aerosmith, this is like ’75 or something, back at that studio. A George Thorogood record that everybody would know. Of course I can’t remember the title of it. It had One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer, and-

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

Some other big ones that … Back in the halcyon days of big budget records, you’d spend months on a record, and you could remember lots of details. Especially now with mastering, it might be a day or half a day that I do an album.

Warren Huart:

Yep.

Peter Doell:

You know? Especially with this business the way it is now, stuff comes over the internet, it goes out over the internet. I rarely see a human being.

Warren Huart:

Sure.

Peter Doell:

It’s emails and uploads and downloads and stuff.

Warren Huart:

Well, it’s nice to be sitting here in your room.

Peter Doell:

It’s good to have humans.

Warren Huart:

So Boston, was there any memorable sort of successes from there, or did you go from-

Peter Doell:

Well, one of the fun things I did when I was a player there is … Well, in the studio, there was a client. Did the music for a couple of big TV shows that were on public television. Zoom and The Electric Company. They were both very successful, and we did the music for it. This guy Newt Wayland was the composer, musical guy. Before John Williams, when Arthur Fiedler, who had been the conductor of the Boston Pops died, and before they replaced with John Williams, there was a period of … I don’t know, a year or something where they were trying various guest conductors, and our man Newt Wayland got to conduct the Pops a couple of times. And I got to play with the Pops, play bass.

Warren Huart:

Wow, that’s amazing. For those of you who don’t know, the Boston Pops, as soon as you wiki it you’ll get a pretty good perspective on it. Pretty amazing.

Peter Doell:

Yeah, it’s … Yeah. But it was a very kind of unique thing, to play with a big orchestra.

Warren Huart:

Incredible.

Peter Doell:

I was just playing an electric bass, I wasn’t … Because when the guys in the section had to play electric bass, they would let you know that they didn’t like doing this by playing either the wrong notes, or the worst possible sound. To tell you, “I don’t want to do this.” So he was able to get me to … I just played a couple of times, but it was a hoot.

Peter Doell:

Other things, bass playing highlights, I got to play the Ice Capades once or twice.

Warren Huart:

The Ice Capades!

Peter Doell:

Ice Capades, and then when you get really toasted at the end of the Ice Capades, you would get on the Zamboni machine and drive it around.

Warren Huart:

Nice.

Peter Doell:

Bucket list. Yeah, that was fun.

Warren Huart:

Then from Boston? What was the next stage?

Peter Doell:

I had kind of run out of room in Boston. Engineering wise and playing wise, and I thought, you know, Jesus. When I went to the deep end of the pool and tried, with either the bass playing or the engineering thing, maybe one of them would take off. I moved out here to LA, and-

Warren Huart:

So you didn’t go to New York first. You came straight here.

Peter Doell:

No, and I looked at it, but first off it was every bit as cold in New York as it was in Boston. But what is big in … I mean, Broadway obviously is big there. There’s a bunch of TV. But most of the records were being done out here on the West Coast. I had a few friends who had migrated out here already, so it was easier to crash on somebody’s couch, and kind of get the lay of the land.

Warren Huart:

What year was this?

Peter Doell:

1980.

Warren Huart:

’80, okay.

Peter Doell:

When I arrived, it was in the midst of a musician’s strike. One of the things I had done in Boston, the last couple of years, I did a lot of society gigs. Play in a tux, and you play weddings or bowling banquets. Anything, you know. But you play with some great musicians.

Warren Huart:

Oh, I’m sure.

Peter Doell:

Great musicians.

Warren Huart:

Probably all sight reading.

Peter Doell:

I would do 10 gigs a week.

Warren Huart:

Amazing.

Peter Doell:

And I would make good dough. I mean, it was a fun time. So when I came out here, I had connections in that world, and like I say, the musician’s strike. You do a wedding, and here’s Shelly Manne and Lee Ritenour in the band. Because there were no sessions going on, right? So that was kind of fun.

Peter Doell:

But it was challenging because I remember, there were a lot of great musicians in Boston. Obviously tons of great musicians out here. But every knucklehead and his brother were out here, too. To find your way into the midst of something that was musically challenging and fun and that paid something was really hard. I remember, I had an audition with Weird Al Yankovic. Now musically, it’s a top 40 band. I mean, it’s all cover tunes musically, right?

Warren Huart:

Sure.

Peter Doell:

You know, I remember them saying, “Well, there’s really no money in it.” What do you mean there’s no money in it? He’s getting paid … He’d already had a couple of hits, and was playing-

Warren Huart:

He had massive hits, yeah.

Peter Doell:

You know, and it’s like … No. I’m not playing for free, for the honor of playing with this knucklehead. Like I said, it’s a top 40 band, other than his funny lyrics. There were some silly things to encounter. But I joined a band, and the singer’s husband … Mind you, the singer had a record deal. Her name was Karen Tobin. Still a great singer. I don’t know that she still has that deal, but she had a deal at the time, and her late husband Tim Boyle, this is so great that I got to mention him because his memorial is going to be Sunday.

Warren Huart:

Oh, incredible.

Peter Doell:

He just recently passed away, the poor guy.

Warren Huart:

Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

Peter Doell:

We were doing demos, or … yeah, demos for songs for her, at Wally Heider’s, this renowned-

Warren Huart:

Oh, amazing, yeah.

Peter Doell:

Renowned studio here in town, and Tim was on staff there. We hit it off, and you know, I knew my way around, so when I got done with my bass bit I’d help run the rest of the session with him. He helped me get my very first gig at Heider’s. Which I started, strangely enough, as a tech, and people were dying by the vine. Because a woman named Janna Feliciano owned the studio at the time. She was Jose’s ex-wife.

Warren Huart:

Ah.

Peter Doell:

When you’re the spouse of a blind person, she was his producer, his publisher, his manager, his power of attorney. She took him to the cleaner’s. That studio was doomed when she bought it. But it was a fantastic place to work for … I was there about a year before it went under.

Peter Doell:

But I made connection there, and I went … Left there on a Friday, started at Capitol Records on a Monday.

Warren Huart:

Incredible.

Peter Doell:

Worked there for 15 years, stopped there on a Friday-

Warren Huart:

When did you start on-

Peter Doell:

Oh no, I’m sorry. I went from Heider’s to Sunset Sound.

Warren Huart:

Oh, amazing.

Peter Doell:

I worked for Sunset Sound for about a year. Like I said, I stopped on a-

Warren Huart:

Who was over then, there?

Peter Doell:

Well, they had just purchased a smaller studio on Selma called-

Warren Huart:

Sound Factory.

Peter Doell:

The Sound Factory.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

I really worked there most of the time.

Warren Huart:

They unfortunately sold that a few years ago.

Peter Doell:

Yeah, actually about … Yeah. About two years ago.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. Loved that room.

Peter Doell:

Where we are today, talking to your audience, we’re at Cross Roads of the World, and we’re right across the street from Sunset Sound.

Warren Huart:

Exactly. It’s that way.

Peter Doell:

That way, yeah. It’s still a fantastic facility.

Warren Huart:

Probably my favorite place.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. I got to work with Prince over there. I used to play basketball with Prince, because outside the three buildings where the studios are, there’s a little basketball court.

Warren Huart:

I know, it’s still there. Same hoop.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. And I’m probably 14, 15 inches taller, or was, than he. But he could still dunk on me. He was great. Great musician, my God, one of the most unbelievably focused people I’ve ever been around in the studio. What a great musician, jeez.

Warren Huart:

That was a golden period. When he was there he did all of his biggest records.

Peter Doell:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Craig told me he used to have a bed in Studio 3.

Peter Doell:

Right.

Warren Huart:

There’s still a little bar area.

Peter Doell:

Oh really?

Warren Huart:

You know, where you could make drinks, and I think at one stage there was a refrigerator and everything.

Peter Doell:

Well, I remember … I must have been subbing, but I was there when he did 1999. He comes in at 9:00 in the morning, kicks you out of the room for a few minutes, calls you back in. You better have those drums tuned up and miked up. Played the shit out of it. Right? Then it started overdubbing, we start mixing by 2:00. 3:00 I’m running down the street to K Disc. Mastered the thing, back.

Peter Doell:

So from 9:00 AM, nothing, to 5:00 PM, mastered hit single.

Warren Huart:

Which song, 1999?

Peter Doell:

1999. That’s how unbelievably focused that guy was. I think that whole thing is 17 tracks. I mean, everything. You think today about how people have 40 guitar tracks and 20 of this and 16 of that. Just because he can focus and edit. You know what the finish line looks like.

Peter Doell:

After I was there for just a couple of years. Probably not even-

Warren Huart:

At probably the best time.

Peter Doell:

Well, they had just taken over the Sound Factory. That had been in receivership, it had been locked up.

Warren Huart:

Oh, it’s incredible to think.

Peter Doell:

The air conditioning had blown up, and both buildings overheated, so both API consoles had blown up. We spent the first couple of months refurbishing those two consoles.

Warren Huart:

That’s so sad. I mean, that room of course was Peter and Val’s room, wasn’t it? That L-shaped live room.

Peter Doell:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

They made all of the Linda Ronstadt records in there, and some of the best-sounding-

Peter Doell:

James Taylor.

Warren Huart:

James Taylor ’70s records were made in that little L-shaped room.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. A magic sounding room. And that board.

Warren Huart:

I hear it’s gone, yeah.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. But it had a sound. I remember, I did a rough mix. I was doing a record in there that I did a rough mix in like 10 minutes on that console. Then we did the real mixes at Ocean Way, on a nice Neve, and it took a couple of days to get something that was close to the immediacy and punch of the 10 minute rough mix we did in there.

Warren Huart:

I’ve had that same thing with APIs. I used to have a 20 channel API, and all of my roughs, I bring them back on my SSL. Took me hours to figure it out.

Peter Doell:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

And I called Shelly, and I told him the quandary, and Shelly’s like … I know he would track on APIs and mix on SSLs. I was like, “How did you do that?” And he told me, “Oh, I just insert API line amps in the SSL, especially on the low end, to get that punchy tight low end.”

Peter Doell:

Yeah. The transformer.

Warren Huart:

I’m like … okay.

Peter Doell:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Shelly’s smarter than me.

Peter Doell:

Well, it’s true. That’s one of the things, just as a very quick aside. One of the things that I like about some of the plugins that are available to us now is, these emulations of these consoles where you can take stuff that’s mixed in the box, and it just kind of doesn’t have a lot of character, doesn’t have a lot of punch. Depending on the kind of music. The UA stuff I love. Steve Slate and Fabrice Gabriel, he has a company. Fabrice does all the stuff for Slate, it’s the FG-X, FG this. That’s Fabrice Gabriel, who does all the under the hood stuff.

Peter Doell:

He has a company called Eiosis that makes some spectacular stuff.

Warren Huart:

We have naturally sort of moved into mastering here a little bit. How much-

Peter Doell:

Well, let me just say this about the mastering. When I started at Capitol Records, if you were in the engineering program, if they took you on and wanted you to learn the ropes, you started in mastering.

Warren Huart:

Oh, that’s very cool.

Peter Doell:

Geoff Emerick, any of his stories with the Beatles. That’s where they sent, that was the EMI way. You learned what the finish line is supposed to look like.

Warren Huart:

Good idea.

Peter Doell:

You know what I mean?

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

You see firsthand a lot of the issues, especially back then when they were cutting vinyl. It was the primary delivery thing, right? With things like sibilance and bass management and phase, all those things, were of paramount importance. Otherwise you’re going to blow up cutters, you’re never going to be able to make records and so forth.

Warren Huart:

Stuff sort of jump out, yeah.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. But nowadays, with just digital, I mean you can make a million mistakes or … Even just creatively, there’s things that you can do now that you couldn’t back then. Anyway, that’s … They wanted you to learn mastering to see what the end product could or should sound like.

Warren Huart:

I’ve said so many times that I’ve learned most about mixing from my mastering engineer.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Because I’ll say, “It sounds great. What did you do?” You had this weird kind of low bump, and to be honest the last three songs I got from you have this weird low bump. And I’m like, “Oh, I wonder where it is,” and I’m finding out what I’m boosting, where there’s some frequencies crossing over, where’s some mastering going on.

Peter Doell:

Occasionally I’ll get a repeat client’s work, and I call them up and say, “Did you get new speakers?”

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

Because I never had … This stuff sounds a little harsh, and I never would have said that about your stuff before. It turned out that they did get new speakers and a subwoofer, and the subwoofer wasn’t high passed, so it’d only get below 80 or 100 or whatever the number was. It was full range, so he had more fullness in the monitoring than he was actually putting in his mix.

Warren Huart:

That makes sense, yeah.

Peter Doell:

There’s that type of thing that can go on.

Warren Huart:

That’s a whole other discussion, because I love subwoofers for testing, but I’ll never mix through them. They just…

Peter Doell:

Well, in this room, because I have the speakers not only close to the wall, but almost in the corners because of the dimensions of this room, that … Lord knows, I don’t need subs. It’s very full.

Warren Huart:

I heard it earlier, it sounded pretty amazing.

Peter Doell:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

We’ll get to that portion as well.

Peter Doell:

Yeah, we’ll have to get to that in a second.

Warren Huart:

You have so much great history, though, so I don’t want to lose any of it. Okay, so where did you … Skyscraper, was that at Capitol?

Peter Doell:

Uh-huh (affirmative).

Warren Huart:

Which room?

Peter Doell:

B. I’ve spent most of my life in B. A lot of great stuff in that room.

Warren Huart:

What albums did you make in there?

Peter Doell:

I mean, some of the earlier stuff. Bob Seeger, Stray Cats, Steve Miller. Probably the high water mark for me was I got to work on a record with Miles Davis in that room. We did the Tutu record in that room.

Warren Huart:

We have to pause for Miles Davis Tutu. Insane. That record was a really important record for me. I had, through my father, his love of classical music and jazz only. I got into Miles Davis, John Coltrane, everything. For me, discovering music as a little kid in the late ’70s, all the way through the ’80s, this is why, now I’m buying albums as they come out. I’m buying You’re Under Arrest, and I remember buying Tutu, and then getting a pair of tickets for me and my friend John to go and see Miles play at Hammersmith Odeon.

Warren Huart:

I remember that tour. I remember him, on the ticket it said, “Performance starts at 7:30.” I remember we arrived at 7:31, and he was playing. He started at 7:30.

Peter Doell:

That’s wild.

Warren Huart:

He played for two and a half hours or something. The only time he turned around to the audience is when he would pick up this huge card with the name of the soloist on it, and he would hold the soloist’s name up for three or four minutes while they were playing a solo. At the front of the stage, so you knew who was playing. Then he’d go down and put it back down on the ground.

Peter Doell:

How fantastic is that?

Warren Huart:

Oh, it was amazing. It was like no ego.

Peter Doell:

Well, I saw him perform in the-

Warren Huart:

You saw him perform in the studio, so you’ve got me beat.

Peter Doell:

No, but I-

Warren Huart:

I’ve got my little bit in.

Peter Doell:

I saw, when I was in college, the Bitches Brew.

Warren Huart:

Oh, wow.

Peter Doell:

Band play.

Warren Huart:

[inaudible 00:24:15] as well, playing at that point?

Peter Doell:

Yeah, it was Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea.

Warren Huart:

Wow.

Peter Doell:

Airto on drums. Then I don’t know, a half dozen years later in Boston I saw him at Paul’s Mall or one of the jazz joints there. It was one of those where he didn’t face the audience at all. Spitting on the floor, it was at a bad period. Playing musically, it was phenomenal.

Peter Doell:

I saw him one other time, it was the Jack Johnson era, with John McLaughlin and those guys. That was amazing. But working with him. I was saving, Tommy LiPuma says, “Tuesday we’re going to do a day with Miles,” and I go, “Miles Standish? Miles Copeland? You don’t mean Miles Davis.” Yeah, Miles Davis. Yeah, okay. Okay then.

Warren Huart:

I’d be a little terrified.

Peter Doell:

Oh, well I was terrified. It was going to be one day, right, and Marcus Miller, who I later got to work on a bunch of his stuff and some other great things, but it was the first time I got to work with Marcus. Had been playing in Miles’s band, so they had a rapport, right. He had done the track that we were going to do. I’d been told that they had started to record at Sound City. They didn’t like the sound of the horn over there, so.

Warren Huart:

You’re in B again?

Peter Doell:

I’m in B, yeah.

Warren Huart:

Oh, okay.

Peter Doell:

Like with any vocal session, right. You might set up five or six very expensive microphones to capture the sexiest sound that they can make, and you’d say, “Don’t sing too good, and I’m going to hear a verse and a chorus in each, we’re not going to keep any of this shit,” right.

Warren Huart:

Yeah, yeah.

Peter Doell:

I did the same thing, you know. I had a 47, a 251, a C12, and an M249. It’s the different tube version of an M49. I’ve got my head down at the console, and he’s out there, and he immediately goes to the 249 and starts playing. Oh, I guess we’ve chosen the microphone. Because apparently, [inaudible 00:26:30] that’s the mic that Miles used on all those records that he did with him back in the day. He’s married to that, and … What even to say?

Peter Doell:

I mean, if you like that, I like that.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

And it was great. It was fantastic, and in fact like I said-

Warren Huart:

He probably knew how to work it, it was something that was familiar.

Peter Doell:

Well, not only that. Like I said, they didn’t like the sound they had gotten just shortly before, when they were test driving Sound City. But the next day they came in, they loved the sound of the horn they were getting there at Capitol.

Warren Huart:

Which is pretty darn important on a Miles Davis record.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. Like I said, we were supposed to do one track, and this is back in the cassette era.

Warren Huart:

I remember it well.

Peter Doell:

Marcus said that he had another song on a cassette that he wanted Miles to take home and hear. I’m working without a net here, so I made a cassette-to-cassette copy and I’m not policing it. I wasn’t paying attention, so like eight songs got over on Miles’ cassette copy to take home. He liked them all, so instead of one day, I got 12, 16 days. Because I [inaudible 00:27:43] up his cassette. Best mistake I ever made.

Warren Huart:

Oh, incredible. What an amazing album.

Peter Doell:

Amazing album, and probably two thirds of that record was done in LA, and then they finished it up in New York with people like Michael Urbaniak. You know, some great musicians and great studios and everything. I would have expected, being an East Coast guy, that the real shit, the real … Would have been the New York stuff. But it turned out, I think that with the test of time, that the stuff we did in LA … Maybe it’s because we did it first.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

Was the more gritty, more substantial stuff.

Warren Huart:

Amazing.

Peter Doell:

There were other tracks that we had recorded him on, that people had submitted, like Prince gave us a track.

Warren Huart:

I’m sure.

Peter Doell:

But it was all James Brown, like there’s all this huge horn thing. All Miles did was … We put a piano in, Miles did a piano intro on this thing. We never used it.

Warren Huart:

It makes sense that him and Marcus would do it together, because it has such a cohesive sound. That consistent writing from Marcus would’ve held the whole thing together.

Peter Doell:

There’s a book that I was just made aware of that Ben Sidran, the arranger and piano player guy, who I got to work with once before. It was a dream. Working with Steve Miller on a record called Born 2B Blue. It was all these blues tunes. We did that at Studio B at Capitol. Many moons ago too.

Peter Doell:

But he’s got a book coming out called The Last Waltz, or something, of Tommy LiPuma. It’s all about Tommy LiPuma, the producer who passed away a year or two ago-

Warren Huart:

So sad I didn’t get to talk to him.

Peter Doell:

He, in this excerpt, talks about that record, the Tutu. I’m thinking, man, this is so great, because I was there, you know. That I got to witness that extraordinary moment in time.

Warren Huart:

What kind of hours did they work? Love to know.

Peter Doell:

Oh, that was a dream. We didn’t kill ourselves. In fact, the best parts of the record, I would go out to dinner with Miles and Tommy LiPuma and myself.

Warren Huart:

Oh.

Peter Doell:

Can you imagine the stories?

Warren Huart:

I can’t even imagine.

Peter Doell:

No, you can’t. And Miles would talk about being in LA in the ’40s. There are these pockets where-

Warren Huart:

Lots, probably.

Peter Doell:

Where there was great jazz happening.

Warren Huart:

Amazing.

Peter Doell:

You don’t think of the West Coast jazz being that kind of burning.

Warren Huart:

I’ve read a few Miles biographies, and they’re absolutely incredible. The stories are insane.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. He was hysterical. The first day he comes into the studio, and it’s just Tommy and myself. He comes in and he takes off his jacket, and he goes, “I usually get a round of applause when I do this.” And LiPuma and I are going, is he serious? You know. Man, he was so much fun.

Peter Doell:

He’d come in for a playback, and he’d give me his horn, he goes, “Keep this warm for me.” Kept ahold of his horn while … What a dream. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

He was incredible.

Warren Huart:

The depth of his work is insane. The fact that he’s right there at the peak of be-bop, and he’s all the way through every different genre, comes in and out, freeform, you name it. When jazz and rock finally made sense together he was part of all of that. Yeah.

Peter Doell:

But harmonically, the way he heard. I mean, you’d be playing … He’d be listening to something that you were asking him to go out and play to, and usually he would play … Not surprisingly I guess, but most free players. The best shit happened early, you know. Not after multiple takes. You hit the button and out it comes, right?

Peter Doell:

He would play stuff, you’d go … How did you hear to play that? It’s brilliant, but that isn’t in those chords? You know what I’m saying, it’s like, where did-

Warren Huart:

I know exactly what you’re saying.

Peter Doell:

Where did that come from? Amazing.

Warren Huart:

I think the people that we admire, the musicians we admire like that, just have a grasp of melody. There’s so many people wrapped up in talking about all the theory side. His sense of melody is insane. Every single solo I think he’s ever played, I’ve tried to figure out on guitar whenever I … It’s just like, how do you think like him?

Peter Doell:

Well. It’s a lost cause. He’s totally one of a kind.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. And I don’t think it can be explained away by learning every mode and every position or whatever. I think it’s just that ability to have connection between his mind and his instrument.

Warren Huart:

Not to mention, I was thinking when you were talking about this. We talked about two of the most important people in music, Frank Zappa briefly, and Miles Davis. And both of those guys, as you were intimating with Steve Vai and with Miles and Marcus and stuff. Every musician that’s played with those two people has gone on … I mean, those are almost the two artists I think of, that that’s the sort of breeding ground for just insane amounts of talent.

Peter Doell:

They contaminated a lot of great musicians.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. Vinny of course, Terry Bozzio, all of these incredible-

Peter Doell:

Another one, Chad Wackerman is another one.

Warren Huart:

Chad Wackerman. Oh, it’s just … Yeah.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. There’s probably even more, drummers, but-

Warren Huart:

Oh, insane. After Tutu, was the phone ringing off the hook for jazz, modern jazz kind of gigs?

Peter Doell:

For a minute there I had a run of trumpet players.

Warren Huart:

I’m sure you did.

Peter Doell:

I got to work with a wonderful player, Marlon Jordan who is a New Orleans guy, and I got to work with Freddie Hubbard.

Warren Huart:

Oh, incredible.

Peter Doell:

I got to work with … I did a couple of things with Wynton Marsalis.

Warren Huart:

I was about to say, did you do anything with Wynton Marsalis.

Peter Doell:

Some people would poo-poo him, because he can do both the classical and the jazz.

Warren Huart:

Oh, I’m a huge fan.

Peter Doell:

Lots of people say, “Well, you shouldn’t be able to do both,” right. The classical people hated him because he could do this, and the jazz people hated him because he could do that. He did them both great.

Warren Huart:

Oh, unbelievable, yeah.

Peter Doell:

It was his younger brother Delfeayo, who is a trombonist, who played with Art Blakey. He produced most if not all of Wynton’s records. We had a-

Warren Huart:

Was the other brother, Branford, was he involved as well?

Peter Doell:

I got to do one record with Branford, that was amazing.

Warren Huart:

That whole sort of period of mid to late ’80s and early ’90s, in jazz. With exceptions, but most of that stuff was just so good. It was so good, it was such a great time for music. I loved it. You are very blessed to be working on those records.

Peter Doell:

Well, not only that. Being at Capitol, a lot of people came there. To work on that Natalie Cole Unforgettable record.

Warren Huart:

Amazing.

Peter Doell:

For people who don’t know, some of the backstory there. There were all these three track analog masters of her dad, and the beauty of it being three track meant that there was stereo orchestra and then an isolated vocal track. We could mix and match, which is what … It’s duets with her dad, who obviously had deceased a while. It was a beautiful thing. The challenge technically, for the arrangers, and for the engineering, was that whenever Nat was singing, there was bleed. You had to play the same notes as they played underneath when Nat was singing.

Peter Doell:

A lot of it was the road mapping, figuring out who was going to sing what, and then you could do whatever you’d like unless Nat was singing. Then you had to play, you had to write what was going on underneath him on those lines. Man, that was a lot of fun. Again, Al Schmitt, who is one of the greatest people who ever did, or do what we do. He’s the only guy who’s an engineer with a star on the Walk of Fame. 23 Grammys. But he’s still a regular. I mean, the guy’s, and we won’t mention how old he is now. But he’s still swinging for the fences and working a lot still, and still makes Capitol Records his home, at Capitol Studios.

Warren Huart:

I remember working on a record a few months ago, and I got the parking spot at the front, and the highlight of my life was … And Eric was with me, you remember? We pulled up, and we had assigned parking spaces. It was Al Schmitt, and you got next to him. Eric Gonzalez and Warren Huart, right there. I was like, take a photo. You did take a photograph of it, didn’t you? I was like, take a photograph of that. In front of Capitol Records, you’re parked next to Al Schmitt.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. It’s bucket list time right there.

Peter Doell:

Just as a quick aside, we are so lucky to have such a big tribe of great people in the audio community, here in LA. Nowadays a lot of people make records by … I don’t know if committee is the right word, but where you send files to people hither thither and yon, and they’re not all playing together at the same time.

Warren Huart:

Sure.

Peter Doell:

I mean, some music can be done tremendously successfully that way.

Warren Huart:

Absolutely.

Peter Doell:

Some not so much, but the bigger loss I think, is the lack of contact with your people.

Warren Huart:

I agree.

Peter Doell:

Your comrades, your friends.

Warren Huart:

We talk about it all the time. One of the great things about the Produce Like a Pro community is, there’s a lot of collaboration. That’s something we encourage all the time, because I feel like that’s the only way we’re ever going to grow. If you’re doing something, I’m like, “How did you do that?” And you’re like, “Oh, it’s cool, but how did you do that?”

Peter Doell:

Right.

Warren Huart:

You grow so much quicker when you have somebody to bounce ideas off. Even if it’s just two people. But like you’re intimating, having a band in a room, having an artist working with the band is a beautiful beautiful thing. That I think is music that’s difficult to replicate, trying to have a jazz quartet that’s sent to four different musicians.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. Even if it’s not jazz, even if it’s a pop record. Somebody will phrase one little thing this way, and then the guy will echo it, or the singer, or …

Warren Huart:

I agree, yeah.

Peter Doell:

You have something that, the sum is greater than the individual parts, kind of thing. Which you couldn’t do, or probably wouldn’t happen, if it was all a la carte.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. I think that’s a big part of it. Because there’s a lot of discussion I get, people discussing about the limitation of tracks. I actually don’t get too hung up on that, because I feel like there’s … We have a lot of discussions about, oh, people have 192 tracks now, and they only used to have 16 or 4. You can get into that world, but then I point out things like, yeah, you know. Bands like Queen, who I’m a huge fan of course, had 16 vocals on the left and 16 vocals on the right.

Warren Huart:

In defense of a kid making a record now, they don’t need to balance them. So they can just have 16, bus to one fader. 16 bus to one fader. I don’t get hung up on the track count as much as what we’re talking about, which is working in isolation. Which can be fun, don’t get me wrong. I love sometimes spending five hours trying to figure out a simple guitar part that’s going to work really well.

Peter Doell:

Yeah, and you don’t have people like …

Warren Huart:

Come on, Warren, we’ve been here four hours and you still haven’t got a good part! There is a beauty in that as well.

Peter Doell:

Surely.

Warren Huart:

There’s so many of the people we admire that have come up with it. But if there’s one takeaway from this little piece of the conversation, yeah, I agree. Collaboration is where you grow so much.

Peter Doell:

Also, we’re lucky to be in a hub like this, because there’s a tribe.

Warren Huart:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Peter Doell:

We have a big … You’ve been to my lunch. I throw a weekly … I call it the LA Audio Lunch Bunch, and we’ve been doing it for years. It’s not just engineers and producers, but people who are all allied to the music industry.

Warren Huart:

If you say where it is, you’re going to have to get the venue to be 10 times the size.

Peter Doell:

No, no. No, I’m not going to say where it is.

Warren Huart:

That’s what I mean.

Peter Doell:

It’s in sunny southern California. Speaking of which, though. Friends have just started one, their own branch, in Nashville.

Warren Huart:

Wonderful.

Peter Doell:

And I’ve got another one starting up, that just started up in Memphis.

Warren Huart:

That’s amazing.

Peter Doell:

Our friend Fab Dupont is trying to get one going in New York, and now I need to find a cadre of like-minded audio folks in the mountain timezone. Two weeks ago, the guys in Nashville FaceTimed us, because they’re two hours ahead, so they were-

Warren Huart:

Oh, amazing.

Peter Doell:

They were just winding down their lunch as we were starting ours. Passed the phone around, and it was hysterical, and I saw on the phone in Nashville, several people, a handful of people, who were at our lunch two weeks before when they were in town for the end of the Grammys and the-

Warren Huart:

Well, we’re going to be in Nashville in May for Summer NAMM, so we’ll make sure we go to it.

Peter Doell:

I’ve never been, but I think I may have to go this year.

Warren Huart:

It’s a wonderful place to go and hang out with musicians and producers and engineers, almost exclusively. I think my best way of describing it is the first time I ever went, we walked into the hall, and the first thing we saw on the first row was the Tape Op booth. Standing at the Tape Op booth was the owner, or one of the owners of the company, Mr. Larry Crane was just standing there.

Warren Huart:

I walked up, and Reid Shippen was there and Ryan Hewitt, and I just kind of went, “Hey, how is everybody doing?” Where else in the world, apart from one of your lunches, is that going to happen? Because you go to the Winter NAMM, and it’s so spread out. It’s so unbelievably massive. And yes, all the same people are there, but not. Summer NAMM is a great place to go and hang and interact with incredible people.

Peter Doell:

When I was at Capitol, in ’91, and we did Sinatra Duets 1, and then the 2 I think was the following year. But frankly, we would record … No pun intended. We had recorded enough for both records in the first set of sessions. You knew it was going to be great, and that okay, you’ve got Phil Ramone driving the bus, and Al Schmitt recording it. You know you’re off to a great running start.

Peter Doell:

But what was so political about it, this record was the first that Sinatra had done for EMI in years. Because he started off on Capitol, back in the ’50s and ’60s.

Warren Huart:

He famously had the top floor, or something, yeah.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. Then he jumped to Warner Brothers, and they made that label for him, Reprise. Or Reprise or whatever. He was over there for a number of years, and this was the first of the triumphant return to EMI, right?

Peter Doell:

So marketing whiz of the time, like I said, this was ’91. They were going to pair him up, do all these duets with people who were selling records at the time.

Warren Huart:

Contemporaries.

Peter Doell:

Yes. You know, people like Bono and … all those crazy stuff. Some of which was really genius, but when we were doing the recordings, we had Frank and we had the band. They didn’t know, not only who was the duet person, but they didn’t know what lines. It’s like, if we didn’t get a great line off of Frank, I guess we’re going to get the duet artist to do that line.

Peter Doell:

But we had set up a giant booth in the midst of the orchestra, right? This is at Capitol, where we could open the wall. We had strings in one room, one big room, Studio B, and then in Studio A we had rhythm and horns. In the midst of that room-

Warren Huart:

Incredible.

Peter Doell:

We had arranged to have built effectively, a big [gobo 00:43:35] so we could make … And a floor and a roof, that we could make a hut, to put him in, with glass all around it. So we could mix and match takes. Because we knew there wasn’t going to be any click. If Phil decided he was going to hire Frank’s rhythm section, his live rhythm section. Which was Chuck Berghofer on bass, not too shabby. Gregg Fields on drums.

Peter Doell:

Phil figured that these guys will know where the tempos are, so we can mix and match tapes.

Warren Huart:

Right.

Peter Doell:

If we had him isolated enough, so that was the reason behind the hut.

Warren Huart:

Smart.

Peter Doell:

The first night, and Pat Williams is doing all the arrangements, so we’re off to a great start, right? The first night, we spent the afternoon with the band, getting the sounds on the band, and all the nuts and bolts, the headphones. Then Frank comes down the hall with his entourage, and he walks in the studio with all the players and everything, we’re all ready to go, and he goes, “The hell am I doing here? I’ve done all these before,” and turned around and leaves.

Peter Doell:

This is how we’re starting the sessions.

Warren Huart:

Wow.

Peter Doell:

Oops! No pressure or anything. So Phil goes out and tries to, “Well yeah, of course you’ve done all these before. But this is now, remember, we’re doing this now for EMI. This is your triumphant return back to EMI.” He sort of blah-ed a bit. He goes. We’re not sending the band home, so we record takes. It was spectacular, right?

Peter Doell:

The next afternoon, we did get him to come back. We put him in the booth, we figure out which of the five or six $20,000 microphones he’s going to sound best on. Okay, am I using the single sided phones, or I’m using the doubles? Am I using the printed music or am I using the teleprompter, and if I’m using the teleprompter is it white on black or black on white? So we turn over all these rocks in order to get him … We’ve sorted all that out, figured out what mic, and start overdubbing on the stuff we had done the night before.

Peter Doell:

Just kind of laying there. I mean, he’s trying to tell, it was … This ain’t my thing, I’m not going to overdub this. This is … No.

Warren Huart:

He likes doing it live.

Peter Doell:

Right. 7:00, we’ve been working for a couple of hours with him, and we’ve sort of ready for the night sessions, where the guys come down. Here comes the band, and now Frank says, like I said, after we figured out what mic and the phones and the teleprompter, and the … “Well, I can’t be in here. I’ve got to be out there with the fellas.”

Peter Doell:

So what we ended up using is a handheld wireless SM87 and wedges on the floor next to the piano player. That’s how we did the record. Instead of the $10,000 hot with the … All the variables so we could have control. That’s how it ended up.

Warren Huart:

That’s amazing. But it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

Peter Doell:

Well, it’s a lot more live, but-

Warren Huart:

The interaction that he’s so used to from playing live shows.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. Like we were talking about earlier, the energy you get from one another by all being live right now, and there’s no going back.

Warren Huart:

Feeling it. Feeling the music hitting you, the physical thing.

Peter Doell:

Yeah, it was great.

Warren Huart:

The interaction, catching somebody by the eye and all of these.

Peter Doell:

Tom Scott played a sax solo, in the band, on whatever the arrangement was. And it was just unbelievable. I’m getting goosebumps just remembering, and I remember at the end of the take, the whole band stood up and gave him a big round of applause. Of course, Kenny G. They replaced him with Kenny G. Because Kenny’s going to sell some records. Tom Scott ain’t going to sell the records like Kenny G’s going to sell the records.

Peter Doell:

With shit like that happening, and there was a lot of other political stuff, like I said, about-

Warren Huart:

I’d love to hear that take.

Peter Doell:

Oh, I know.

Warren Huart:

It’s funny, because I have the same experience with Aerosmith. Tom played a solo in a song, and when we finished the song, he’s like, “Oh, do you want me to do some overdubs?” And we’re all looking at each other like, “Who’s going to ever play a sax solo better than the one you just did live?”

Peter Doell:

Right. Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

There you go.

Warren Huart:

He’s unbelievable. And a really easy guy to work with.

Peter Doell:

Oh, yeah. He’s a dream.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. If you ever hire him, and he’s remarkably affordable these days if you hire him, he’ll bring in all the best players, he’ll chart everything out. It’s amazing.

Peter Doell:

Yeah, he’s tremendous.

Warren Huart:

Amazing.

Peter Doell:

One of the fun things was, he was 77 or something, which doesn’t sound that old to me now.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

But he was kind of starting to lose it a little bit, and … I mean, not vocally so much, as just being a little foggy, shall we say. But he always had the carton of Camels and the big thing of Tootsie Roll pops. Oh, and the Jack Daniels. Those were the three accoutrements that were always table side for Frank singing.

Warren Huart:

Phil talks about that in his book Making Records. He just talked about how everything had to be just so for the artist, and how important that was.

Peter Doell:

Absolutely. The first gut things are typically the most true, the ones that are going to resonate with the listener and be the best. Especially now when we have technology, where if there’s a booger on a note, you can fix. But the immediacy of those early things, right. Which is why for example, I’m going to make a tangent here about one of my pet peeves in the studio. Is those self-mixers for headphones, for people. Most people can’t mix, you know? I go out and say, “Look. This is the mix from the control room. That’s all you need. Believe me, this is all you need. But if you think you need a little bit more of yourself, this is more of you. These other things, they say drums, or something. You don’t need any of that, right.”

Peter Doell:

Eight minutes later, “I can’t hear myself.” You go out and they’ve got every fader on 12. It’s like, I hate those things. When you hear people singing sharp, it’s typically they’ve got too much of themselves in the phones. You pull them back a little bit, push a little of the pitch, the piano or something. Suddenly, that problem goes away. They’re singing flat, usually means they’ve got a little too little of themselves. You can police the performance and get it right early on, if you recognize that type of thing. Anyway, that’s one of my pet peeves. Because people don’t know how to mix, come on.

Peter Doell:

But the Sinatra thing was a real eye opener. Oh, here’s another one. Like I say, they didn’t know who the duet artist was, and we didn’t do the duets. Almost all of them were done-

Warren Huart:

By the artists in their own studios.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. One of the ones that jumps to mind was I Got A Crush On You, which was with Barbra Streisand.

Warren Huart:

Amazing.

Peter Doell:

When she did her bit, she sings (singing). To espouse the illusion that they’re standing next to one another, and she’s singing to him, right? Phil and some other people from Capitol went out to Sinatra’s place in the desert, out in Palm Springs, with a little handheld recorder. “Frank, it would be great if you sang (singing).” “No, I’m not singing Barbra.” Thank you. They took him saying Barbra, pitched it and stretched it and threw it in. That’s what’s on the record.

Warren Huart:

In ’91, that wasn’t as easy to do as it is now.

Warren Huart:

It says Tom Dowd, Andy Johns, Eddie’s manager, solo in the wrong key slash cassette.

Peter Doell:

Well, that was a whole bunch of [inaudible 00:51:33] there.

Warren Huart:

No, I love all that.

Peter Doell:

But the very first record I got to work on as an assistant at Wally Heider’s, when I first blew into town, was an Eddie Money record. It was the No Control record, and Eddie had just passed away this last year, I mean …

Warren Huart:

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Doell:

What, nine months ago or something.

Warren Huart:

Very recently.

Peter Doell:

Not unlike the Miles Davis thing. I come from Boston. Tom Dowd, producing the record, had produced a bunch of great records in a lot of different styles of music, including John Coltrane. He only produced two Coltrane records, but they were Giant Steps and A Love Supreme, arguably, if you’re a jazz fan-

Warren Huart:

Unbelievable choices, yeah.

Peter Doell:

Arguably, maybe the two biggest records in jazz, period. Plenty of people would argue with that, but certainly-

Warren Huart:

Yeah, you could throw in Kind of Blue, Blue Train.

Peter Doell:

Pantheon of great records.

Warren Huart:

Yeah, they’re right up there in top 10, yeah.

Peter Doell:

They’ve influenced so many people. Anyway, so getting to talk to Tom on the breaks about all these things, he’d just … Like with the Coltrane thing he’d say, well, you know, Coltrane would say, “Man, I played this but I wish I’d played it over there.” He said, “We did a lot of editing on Coltrane.” What? I know people who would slit their throats if they heard you say this, right? Because they were practicing all these solos as if they came from Mount Sinai, from the mouth of God, this is how …

Peter Doell:

But no, it’s putty. Same thing, that was how Miles thought of the music. He said, “Do whatever you want.” Because he trusted you, that you’d make it better. He gives you all this raw material. That was the same thing with Tom’s story about working with Coltrane, is that once you had a rapport and he understood that you were going to make it better, let’s go.

Peter Doell:

Of course back ’50s and early ’60s, when Tom was working with those Coltrane records, it was all two-track tape.

Warren Huart:

It was a case of taking seven minutes solos and editing them down to a minute and a half of what they agreed was the best moments.

Peter Doell:

Distilling the most important, the most wonderful things, right? Just making it better. Not like [a chafe 00:53:40]. It’s just making it better.

Peter Doell:

One of the things people might not understand nowadays about editing, right. Because if you’re editing on a workstation, it’s just highlight, command-X, command-Y. All that stuff. Back then, you’re cutting tape. And to have seamless edits, you can’t do a cross fade like you can in your workstation. You’d have to do it with the angle of the cut, the physical cut with a razor blade. There was a company called Editall that made a block that had a couple of different angles that would get you through the majority of the thing.

Peter Doell:

But Tom said, all those edits were done with scissors. At Capitol, when I started there, there was a big magnetic box with a hole that you’d put your scissors in to demag the scissors, so you didn’t put clicks on the tape when you started editing tape.

Warren Huart:

Yep.

Peter Doell:

But I said, “Well how the hell did you make sure that, when you made cuts, that the angle was the same?” He said, “You turn your hand over as far as your wrist would go, and that was your angle.” Because that’s the same every time. Wow. Fascinating. He always told me about where to do the edits. You wouldn’t do on the downbeat. You do it on the hi-hat before, 16th before the thing. Because everybody’s looking for the edit there. Your ear is expecting it to be the downbeat of the next section or whatever. You always have to disguise it by doing it a little off from where people are going to be looking for it, and your ear is not going to detect it. A lot of good stuff like that.

Peter Doell:

An amazing opportunity, for the first record I got to work on when I came to town, and Andy Johns was amazing. But Tom Dowd was by far the most amazing producer. Not only did he design a bunch of stuff on the Ampex 24-track, but musically, okay. This is back in the era when people would be in the studio for months. They’d write the songs in the studio. It’s not like they’ve come after pre-production, and they blow it down three or four times and you’ve got the tape. You could be slogging away for a long time.

Peter Doell:

Tempers would rise when people would … these guys finally got their [inaudible 00:56:08] together and this guy keeps [inaudible 00:56:10] up. I remember, Tom Dowd would do things like, he’d go to the bass player and say, “Man, I [inaudible 00:56:16] up. I gave you the wrong part.” He never gave anybody … But he took all the heat himself, off of the players, and then suddenly the next take or maybe two takes, that would be the one. Because he knew, look, these guys are uptight. I’m going to take care of this. He was the most observant of not just music, but of people, that I’ve ever seen.

Peter Doell:

Speaking of music, I remember we were doing rough mixes on this record, in another studio because the studio we had been working on wasn’t available for this. It had a nice Neve console in there, but he hated the speakers. I think they were [Yuri 00:56:58] Timelines or whatever. Something he hated. He always had a notebook, like a loose leaf binder, with all the takes, with the charts and the lyrics, and minutes and seconds above the bars. He’d known from looking at the tape counter where he was in the song, right?

Peter Doell:

Hated the speakers. Going to do rough mixes, okay. We’re rolling quarter inch tape. Go to record, Peter. Okay. Turns the speakers off. Can tell where he is in the song. And it’s not just a static mix. He’s got echo bombs and big cross fades, the guitar solo ride. All this shit going on. Okay, let’s play it back. Turns on the speakers.

Peter Doell:

I mean, just to prove a point. I hate these things, they’re working against me. I don’t need them. Get them out of the picture. I’m not going to hear it, but I know where I’m at in the music, and I know where I’m at … I mean, how powerful was that?

Warren Huart:

That’s insane. What’s he referencing? Time code, where would he …

Peter Doell:

You know, the minutes and second counter off the tape machine.

Warren Huart:

Okay, he was using it from the tape machine.

Peter Doell:

With, it’s got a remote, the MM1200 had a little remote thing, so you could park it on the meter bridge, or put it right on your charts. He’d know right where he was musically by the tape counter.

Warren Huart:

Absolutely amazing.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. But I mean, it’s just like … We’d be finding all these excuses, “Oh I can’t do that, I hated this.” Screw it. If you don’t like it, get it out of the picture.

Warren Huart:

Incredible.

Peter Doell:

Amazing man. There was a DVD, This Language of Music, have you ever seen that? Yeah, that’s amazing, for your viewers who haven’t. You must go look this up, because not only was he responsible for all the Aretha Franklin records, jazz stuff. Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane and all that stuff. But all the great R&B stuff that Atlantic Records did. Then Cream.

Warren Huart:

Derek and the Dominos.

Peter Doell:

Derek and the Dominos, and the Rascals. I mean, just an amazing cross-section of stuff this guy did. But he worked on the Manhattan Project. His thing before music was physics. Hello! A totally unique and amazing guy. Just an amazing guy. Andy Johns, too, was quite amazing. I remember him on that record, he would get into these jags where he was bemoaning his … Glenn, rather. His elder brother, right?

Warren Huart:

I believe so, yes. Older brother, yeah.

Peter Doell:

Who is a renowned engineer and a famous producer himself. How he always mistreated him and stuff like that. It’s like, man, no matter how big you are, everybody’s got some baggage.

Warren Huart:

Got an older brother!

Peter Doell:

Everybody’s got some baggage. There were some really amazing times. But like I said, this was the era where people were in the studio for months.

Warren Huart:

Well, how did Andy work in the studio? What was his kind of process?

Peter Doell:

Well, we were working at Heider’s. The room we were in, Studio B, strangely enough, is a room that’s 75 by 50 by 35.

Warren Huart:

Wow.

Peter Doell:

Hello. I mean, you could do orchestra in there, right?

Warren Huart:

Huge room, yeah.

Peter Doell:

The way they did the smaller sized ensemble was they had curtains, so you could cordon it off. Quite often you’d have a big lounge area in the back with ping pong or something, while you did the recording in a cordoned off, smaller section of the room. Man, he got some great sounds. British guys really had a sense of how to make the room pop. Compressing the room in a way that I hadn’t seen … Well, like I say, this was pretty early on for me, so I hadn’t seen anybody get this excitement just out of the basic track. That was mind-blowing.

Peter Doell:

The consoles, both studios A and B had one of a kind Neve consoles called A230. They had the mic pres that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Huge. I mean, it was like … I don’t know, 56 in and an offline monitor. They took up a lot of real estate. They were big. Great sound, and … Anyway, it was eye opening. I’d never heard anybody get anything like that, Andy was really … And again, Tom Dowd let Andy … Tom obviously is an accomplished engineer on his own.

Warren Huart:

Absolutely.

Peter Doell:

But he definitely was more than appreciative of what Andy was doing with this stuff.

Warren Huart:

What an incredible … You get to work with Andy and Tom Dowd.

Peter Doell:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Insanely good.

Peter Doell:

Oh, yeah.

Warren Huart:

Incredible.

Peter Doell:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Pairing.

Peter Doell:

One of the drummers, Gary Mallaber, you know that guy? Because he’s still doing great records. I worked with him later, with Steve Miller, and I just heard his name the other day. He’s still swinging for the fences, that cat. Marty Walsh was the guitar player that I remember for that record. He’s still doing great records. I think he’s on the staff up at Berkeley College of Music at Boston.

Warren Huart:

Fantastic.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. A little note about the cassette. I remember, we had taken a break I guess, and they made a cassette of this one song for Eddie Money to learn to play a harmonica solo. When he came in to do it, he had learned it in the wrong key, because the cassette was playing off speed. That was pretty funny. You don’t have that [inaudible 01:02:34] happen today, normally, unless somebody plays a 48K session at 44.1 and don’t notice it. I’ve seen that happen.

Warren Huart:

I’ve seen that happen myself many times, yeah.

Peter Doell:

I remember one time, after Capitol I went to work for Sony Pictures, and I did a lot of movie scoring. Occasionally records would come in to use the big room to do an orchestra overdub. You know how when you turn on the Mac computer, it plays the little bah, the little fanfare?

Warren Huart:

The Sosumi?

Peter Doell:

Yeah. I said, “Oh, that’s a little flat,” or something. The arranger comes in after we got the tracks up and got the headphones all straight. He goes, “Guys, that’s the wrong key.” Because Mr. Pitch Perfect over here didn’t notice that it was a 48 session playing at 44.1.

Warren Huart:

Uh-huh.

Peter Doell:

Oops.

Warren Huart:

10% different speed is quite a lot.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Warren Huart:

Yep. I’ve had that happen many many times.

Peter Doell:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

It is one of the problem with, sometimes I get files sent to me that don’t have the .wav on the end, or .aif or something, so you don’t really know what it is and you guess. Sometimes the workstation will also guess, and guess the wrong speed.

Warren Huart:

One of the worst things I’ve seen, and it’s happened in a session I was working on many many years ago, when when you have a clock and you set the clocks to say 44.1, but inside of the session it’s set to 48.

Peter Doell:

But in the session … Right.

Warren Huart:

The only way to replicate, you have to undo it, go work backwards through it, but yeah. A real pain.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s an oops.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

I’ve had that happen too, and you don’t discover it until after you’ve done the master, and then you really have to start all over.

Warren Huart:

There’s a Miles Davis note here. We went through a lot of this. You were talking about the jazz scene in the ’40s, he was talking about that. Then you got percussion overdubs, exclamation mark.

Peter Doell:

Oh dear. So we’re going to do percussion overdubs on the record, and Marcus and Tommy LiPuma and myself, we were all voting for Paulinho da Costa. Who is one of the great … Is a Brazilian percussionist, done a million records. To me the standout resume item for Paulinho was Billie Jean, the Michael Jackson tune.

Warren Huart:

Fantastic.

Peter Doell:

Right? He’s playing the Afuche. But the way they recorded it, at half speed, so when you play it up at full speed it has this sheen, this overtone, right?

Warren Huart:

Ah, makes sense. Talking of speed, yeah.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. But the funny thing is, as you know. It’s hard to play at a slow tempo and have it feel not like a dirge, you know. It goes, you’re in the mud, right?

Warren Huart:

Yes, a mentor of mine told me you won’t be able to play less than 60 until you’re over 40.

Peter Doell:

That’s great. The fact that he could do that and have it swing, and have it not only just glue, but put this lilt in the track, that’s so great. That’s Paulinho. We wanted him. Miles thought he wanted to get the guy who played at that point in his live band. I won’t name names, because the guy is not only a great human being, he’s a great musician, right? But the guy shows up, and there’s 30 freaking road cases. It’s like Barnum and Bailey came to town. 30 road cases full of stuff. If you’ve ever done a percussion overdub, you don’t really know what the guy’s going to need, so he brings a lot of stuff. A lot of toys, and sometimes there’ll be congas and timbales, all sorts of larger stuff.

Peter Doell:

But this was a tremendous assortment of stuff. He gets it all set up, and now Miles is figuring out, maybe this wasn’t the smartest move. But is he going to admit that he made a mistake? No. He’s going to fuck with this guy, right? So he gets on the talkback, I get whatever, the first song up. He gets on the talkback and he goes, “Man, whenever you hear something to play, don’t play.” And he lets go of the talkback.

Peter Doell:

What? Okay. This is going to be interesting. Going to record, and the guy’s out there. Picks up the cowbell, remembers what Miles says, puts the cowbell down. Another 32 bars go by. Picks up something else. Remembers what Miles said, put it down. This is how we go through the whole track. The guy gets an idea, and then thinks better of it and puts it down. We’re dying, we’re dying in the control room. And Miles, this is all Miles. His handiwork, because he’s set this thing up. Because he’s not going to admit that we should have gotten Paulinho.

Warren Huart:

What did you end up getting?

Peter Doell:

One hit, once, in one song. That’s all we used from this overdub from this guy. And Paulinho did everything else.

Warren Huart:

Oh, so you did get your guy afterwards.

Peter Doell:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, no.

Warren Huart:

Oh, that’s amazing.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. Well, like I say-

Warren Huart:

Whenever you think of something to play, don’t play.

Peter Doell:

Don’t play. Yeah, that’s how he engineered his way out of an embarrassing situation. He just made it just be a complete farce, and it was hysterical. Like I say, to his very great credit, he’s a great musician. I won’t mention his name. But if I did, you’d say, “Oh, man, that guy’s great,” and you’d be right. He is great. But it was just hysterical, the way he got set up by Miles.

Warren Huart:

Lynyrd Skynyrd, mixing the Tom Dowd version of Street Survivors. Then you’ve got “Barry Rudolph!” With an exclamation.

Peter Doell:

You know who he is, right?

Warren Huart:

Of course I know Barry very well, yeah.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. I worked for Universal Music from 2003 to 2015, and somewhere in the middle of there, there was Guitar Hero and Rock Band, right?

Warren Huart:

I remember them both very well.

Peter Doell:

I mixed a whole bunch of those things for the game. We get the original multi-tracks, and a lot of times I would go to LAFX studios, here in town.

Warren Huart:

The Vicaris!

Peter Doell:

Dan and Anne are my dearest friends.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. For those of you who don’t know, that’s Tommy Vicari’s brother.

Peter Doell:

Right. The two of them just did an amazing job on the Oscars. They do all the music for the show. Well, record the orchestra for the show. I was there actually doing another thing, I was mixing … As you just read, I was mixing some … There was a version of, I forget which Lynyrd Skynyrd record, that was done soup to nuts by Tom Dowd, and then the band played it for Al Kooper, who I think maybe had produced an earlier record or something?

Peter Doell:

Al convinces them that it’s not happening, and that he redid everything. What’s amazing about that band, because I was familiar with the one that had been released. The solos are almost note for note, the dueling guitar solos. I mean, these guys were really something. But the Tom Dowd stuff, not only musically was it really similar, and good, it was just … It had never seen the light of day. This was an attempt to release it, to make some money off of the catalog stuff. We were mixing it.

Peter Doell:

I’m mixing it at LAFX, and Barry Rudolph comes in. His name’s on the box. He recorded this [inaudible 01:09:55]. He just happened to walk in. I mean, that’s pretty funny. He told the backstory of working for Tom. I don’t know if they did this at Criteria. I did they did this in Florida. Then when they did the record with Al Kooper, they did it in Muscle Shoals maybe, or somewhere else.

Peter Doell:

But yeah, I just think, this is another thing, talking about being in a hub of recording like we are here in Los Angeles. There are all sorts of interweaving things happen, right? Like the guy walks in who recorded this thing 20 years ago, and has all this story about it. It was fascinating.

Warren Huart:

Amazing.

Peter Doell:

But they had, there was another guy involved with that who Universal had hired, and he was some big expert on all things Lynyrd Skynyrd, right? He told a story about how, which is not surprising, if you worked for any of these big record companies. Artists would make their record, mix the record, go off on tour to promote the record, and forget about the masters. I mean, the mixes obviously got taken and made into vinyl and blah blah blah. But the multi-tracks could be left behind for years before somebody said, “Hey, guys.”

Peter Doell:

That was true with all sorts of artists I used to work with. Bob Seeger, we had to go through all sorts of hoops to try and find these old masters.

Warren Huart:

You go into studios even today that have tape vaults, and you just look at all these hundreds of reels of 24-track.

Peter Doell:

Yeah, I’m sure it’s the same thing with hard drives. People make a safety copy and leave it behind.

Warren Huart:

Yeah, I can think of a few records I’ve probably … I don’t have the only copy, but I have copies of the records I’ve done, yeah.

Peter Doell:

Sure.

Warren Huart:

What is this rather lovely framed art called here? It looks incredibly enticing.

Peter Doell:

Well, from where I sit, this was my high water mark, back in … God, I think it was 1986 already, that I got a chance to work on the Miles Davis Tutu record. At the time, he was constantly drawing. We had these Capitol memo pads by the phone, and he’d always be sketching and whatnot. One day, at the end of the session, I discovered that he had drawn one of me. This is Miles’ signature, this is me running around like a chicken with my head cut off, doing the session. This is him. Believe it or not, he had red hair at that point.

Warren Huart:

He had red hair? Nice.

Peter Doell:

Well, it was kind of burgundy, shall we say.

Warren Huart:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Peter Doell:

This is him saying “[inaudible 01:12:30] you, shut up.” Which is something he probably had occasion to say to more people than just me. But as I say, I just thought this was refrigerator art or something cool, because he was always sketching. My wife at the time said, “Hello, this guy has one man shows at the Guggenheim. This is spectacular that you have these.” So we had them, the preservation mat, the acid-free mat and the archival thing. It’s just a treasure, yeah.

Warren Huart:

Absolutely amazing. Wow, an incredible, incredible thing.

Peter Doell:

It was a great memory of the dates. But in addition to the memories, I have this to be thankful that I have. That’s just really great.

Warren Huart:

That’s incredible.

Warren Huart:

So let’s do some gear talk. Let’s start with I suppose the center section of your console here.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. I have a Manley, as in Manley Labs, our dear friend EvaAnna Manley. She made five or six of these things.

Warren Huart:

We love EvaAnna, yeah.

Peter Doell:

This is a … The master kind of switcher, where I have a number of monitor sources and a couple of different speaker options. The flow that would be if I was not working in the box, but actually working with the analog processing.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

I would have the ability to wake up this and play my source off of this incarnation of soundBlade, which is the Sonic Studios workstation. Play it through there. Then my converter of choice is most often the Prism. I do have a couple of other options, which I don’t have plugged up at the moment. Then out of that, it comes to this. This is my analog monitor thing that also has three different inserts, where I can audition three different types of analog processing.

Warren Huart:

Yep.

Peter Doell:

I have a little patch bay down here, so I can either insert stuff in series down there, or I can do them up here and audition them individually. This thing also has MS, where … MS, for those who don’t know. If you have stereo, and you just have two channels, the stuff that is common to both channels appears in the center. We call that phantom center.

Peter Doell:

The stuff that is not common, out on the sides, we call that, strangely enough, the sides. The matrix in this thing will allow you to make … If I’m in MS mode, this is no longer the left, it is now the center. And this was no longer the right, it is both sides. If I’m addressing a problem where say, the voice is sibilant, but yet the cymbals are on the edge of already being harsh on the sides, you don’t want to add EQ in stereo mode to brighten up the voice because you’re going to exacerbate the harshness of the cymbals out on the sides.

Peter Doell:

If you put yourself in MS mode, now I can address the center separately from the sides. I can brighten this up without making these worse.

Warren Huart:

Do you find you’re doing that often, or is that-

Peter Doell:

I do.

Warren Huart:

Oh, you do?

Peter Doell:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

Not necessarily for EQ, but sometimes for compression. Where I want to either punch up the middle and not make the sides more aggressive, or you want to bring detail up from the sides, and more sense of space. You can upward expansion from the sides, and leave the middle alone, and not mess with the balance of the stuff in the center. Maybe the bass in the voice. You can do it. It’s a very, very handy thing. You don’t have to go overboard with it. I must admit, though, when I first got this piece, which is a Rupert Neve Master Bus Processor. Among other things, it does have a fantastic MS capability, where you can have the compressors just doing the sides or just the front, or being linked or not.

Warren Huart:

Yep.

Peter Doell:

Another thing that it does, a character thing, is that the transformers … Iron gives us meat and potatoes on the sound. Especially necessary when so many things are mixed in the box that may or may not have a real character. Especially for pop or rock music. You may really want to be in the ballpark of other things that are in the marketplace, that are in that style of music.

Peter Doell:

This thing has two different kinds of windings on the transformers, so you can either have just a straight ahead transparent path, or you can have two different flavors of color. Two different windings on the transformers that gives you the blue. The blue gives us more meat, and the red gives us more of a silky top. Again, the more you get the stuff to have a musical character on the way in, the less stuff you have to do with EQ. EQ causes phase shift and makes stuff perhaps a little more blurry than it was until you reached for the equalizer.

Peter Doell:

It’s better to reach for stuff on the way in, to achieve what you want without having to put other kind of Band-Aids, if you will, on it. I have another A-to-D converter, which I don’t have plugged up at the moment. It’s a Bricasti.

Warren Huart:

Okay.

Peter Doell:

A Bricasti, you may or may not know from, they make a spectacular convolution reverb. Their converter, that’s a D-to-A converter, has these filter sets on it that make digital sources sound unbelievably beautiful, and there’s a handful of them. Again, you can make just the conversion be so revealing and so much more musical than just playing it back through maybe, something else, I don’t want to name anything else. But you know what I’m saying, it’s-

Warren Huart:

Yeah, absolutely.

Peter Doell:

It’s a different color. It’s a different arsenal in your toolkit that’ll give you a running start to something beautiful and musical and wonderful without having to do much of anything else.

Warren Huart:

Is there sort of a hierarchy? I see, these are your converters.

Peter Doell:

Right.

Warren Huart:

Then this is obviously how you’re selecting input source.

Peter Doell:

Right.

Warren Huart:

Monitor volume. Obviously VUs for visual cues as well. Are you usually going here directly after? That’s the first thing you’re …

Peter Doell:

The way most stuff works for me is to do any dynamic processing earlier rather than later.

Warren Huart:

Okay.

Peter Doell:

Because some of that, the logic that I feel is that it’s going to impart a tonal shift of its own rather than be surprised by putting that in later and finding that what you thought you liked and you just wanted to dynamically glue it together a little bit, has changed the tone.

Warren Huart:

Right.

Peter Doell:

I try to do that first. Usually that’s a successful approach, unless you have something that has a huge amount of low end on the way in. Then you might have to EQ some of that down so it doesn’t … The compressor isn’t reacting to only this …

Warren Huart:

Sure.

Peter Doell:

Huge amount of beef in the bottom. But a lot of things, including this. They have a sidechain high pass. This one is at 250 hertz, which is pretty high. But that means that the low end, the beef, will allow to roar through without aggravating the stuff … Usually the midrange is where all the magic is in a mix, where all the important stuff is, and the stuff that you may or may not want to glue and/or reveal stuff in the production that wasn’t so apparent. By high passing the sidechain to the compressor, you can allow yourself a lot more of a musical and happy ending.

Peter Doell:

This one has one, and this is a [inaudible 01:20:23] tube compressor. That one, and then I think that one’s about 120. On some of these other plugins, you can vary the high pass. You can get just enough of the roar to go through and sometimes making the music swing, by having the compressor, having the kick drum for example, trigger just a little bit. You make the whole track dance, or make it a little more punchy.

Warren Huart:

Amazing.

Peter Doell:

But just by a little amount. I’m not talking about a mix where they’re trying to crush it. But just a little bit of meter movement, at something like 1.5:1 or 2:1, some really low compression ratio, will suddenly make a thing that sounded pretty good sound really good. You’re hardly doing anything. But that’s one of the tricks we find ourselves using a lot.

Peter Doell:

Bob Katz, who was a great mastering engineer. In fact, he wrote the book about mastering. His expression is that mastering can improve the mix by one letter grade. You send us a B+ mix, hopefully we’ll send you an A+ master. But you can’t really send us a D mix and expect to get an A. I mean, that probably means we need to call you and ask for a remix, because the voice is too low, or the bass is too hot, or something.

Peter Doell:

We’re not trying to change the balance in somebody’s mix. We’re trying to change the way you perceive the mix. Sometimes that’s with little stuff like I was just mentioning, where you make the thing dance a little bit. You haven’t made anything louder, but you’ve enhanced the feel if you will of the track, without changing the guy’s balance. Mixers spend hours, sometimes days, getting to the thing that they’ve sent you. So you don’t want to just start from scratch and pretend that you’re going to assert your will on the thing. No.

Peter Doell:

There’s a lot of stuff in mastering nowadays that you can do that probably didn’t have to be done in the day when vinyl was the delivery medium. When everything was analog, and people were mixing records on large format analog consoles. Nowadays so much stuff gets done in the box, you know. It needs a little character, I would say.

Warren Huart:

Fantastic.

Peter Doell:

Probably most of the stuff, I would think that … If I had to characterize how much I do was analog and how much was all in the box, it’s probably 80% of the time it needs both. It needs a little of both. This stuff really can impart a broad stroke of color, you know. Of either sheen or muscle or what have you. But for real forensics, sometimes … Because this thing is half dB steps. In a room like I’m fortunate to find myself working in, a half dB is a lot. I mean, I find myself working in tenths. Quarter dBs is a lot, you know?

Peter Doell:

Especially on the monitors that I have in here, I’m really able … I find myself using less EQ, but broader Q, a wider area. You’re revealing stuff, rather than changing the balance and pointing something. You’re just kind of, this has been lurking there and now you’re much more aware of it. You just breathed on it. That’s what’s cool about some of the software, because you can really find … Like I said. When I used to work at Universal, I thought it had a great sounding room.

Peter Doell:

But in here, like I say. I can … A couple of tenths, or three tenths of a dB is a lot. I can really hear it. It’s not like, “Does that make it any better?” I know it’s making it better. You know what I mean? You have that confidence, because you trust what you’re hearing. I think for people who learn how to be engineers, heaven help us, mastering engineers, by looking at stuff on the internet. It’s incredibly important that the most important tool is your monitoring. If you can’t trust 100% what you’re hearing, how can you do anything that you can say with confidence is leaving the way you thought it was?

Warren Huart:

We’re segueing rather beautifully into monitor discussion. I listened to these off camera a couple of hours ago now, and they sound unbelievable. One of the things that Peter was telling me, and I felt, is ridiculous. If you sit here in the perfect listening position, there is an area about here where everything is completely in the center. But they’re so directional. If I move my head to the left, it’s suddenly really weighted to the left. I move my head to the right … It’s insane.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. You go an inch one way or the other and it’s like … There’s no vagueness. You know you’ve moved off axis.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

When you were … If you look, if you’d be in the sweet spot, it looks like the tweeters are aimed six feet behind me, like at the door. This is one incredibly important thing that I learned when we were at Universal. The room I had at Universal was easily six or eight times the size of this room. It was 30 by 20 by 15. I always thought that room was great, and why it was great was, we spent the first, oh, five, six days in there with the speakers a quarter inch this way, five degrees this way, half an inch.

Peter Doell:

Finding the physical placement of the boxes in the room. Now, in that room, they were probably six or eight feet away from the wall. In here I’ve got them right, almost up against the wall. But I did the same here, where I spent a long time getting the imaging and the height and the depth and everything to be great here with no EQ. There is EQ available on here. I have it out. That’s that old expression, get at the root, not the fruit.

Peter Doell:

If you get the speakers to sound true without EQ, then it’s so much easier to trust, and then you don’t have to put Band-Aids and put EQ, and … Even at Universal, we had some huge dips in some of the EQ just to make up for anomalies in the room to begin with. It’s a very, very important, and great time … Probably the best time you’ll ever spend as far as the return from the time is to get the monitors sounding great, and it’s just a lot of fiddling. Play music you know, and know well, and a couple of degrees this way, away from the wall you’re going to get more beef, more boom as you get …

Peter Doell:

These speakers are enclosed. I had some other speakers in here for a minute, Dynaudios, that were rear ported, and it was just a boom-tastic boom-fest. They sounded just God-awful in this room. In other rooms I’ve heard them and they sound spectacular.

Peter Doell:

Fiddle around to find, to get them to start to sound the best they can without doing anything as far as EQ.

Warren Huart:

Tell me a bit about them.

Peter Doell:

They’re made by a gentleman named Andrew Lipinski, and if you haven’t heard of him, I had never heard of him until at Universal, the chap in the other big mastering room, Erick Labson. He had actually a bigger system than this. His had, because it was at least twice the size of this room. He had two of these base modules, so there were a total of … Let’s see, another three. So that’s eight little woofers, and two subs. A lot of low end, but the room is huge, right?

Peter Doell:

They sounded great in there, and when I got in here, this room … Shelly Yakus had been working in here, but he didn’t have this. The room sounded awfully dry, really kind of muffled.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

So I thought, put a little wood underneath, not only to roll the chair around. But it also livened up the room just enough. I auditioned, I think I tried the Ocean Way, the HD2s I think they are.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Peter Doell:

Had those in here for a second, and I thought I liked them. In here, the midrange was actually too up front, and I thought, “Well, I’m going to start making wrong judgements if I use those in here.” You could learn them, but when I heard these in here, and I thought, “Oh my God.” It’s almost like … You don’t want to hear certain things, because you’ll fall in love with them.

Warren Huart:

Are they powered?

Peter Doell:

Yeah. They have Class D power amps built on. And when we were over at Universal, he had an earlier, I think they were AB. These are even faster than the ones he had at Uni. I think these are even more accurate. That’s another concern for people who are building their own studios, is, you don’t necessarily need the prettiest sounding. You do need the ones that are revealing. Back in the day, the big rage was putting Kimwipes over your NS10 tweeters.

Warren Huart:

Sure.

Peter Doell:

To make you work harder. Because they were kind of bright, and they made you think that you had enough top end, when if you believed that, you were going to end up with kind of a dull, soft sounding mix.

Peter Doell:

It’s a similar thing, that if you’re going to choose monitors, don’t necessarily choose ones that are the prettiest or the brightest when you go to the audio store and listen to speakers.

Warren Huart:

That’s interesting with the NS10s. Because I always remember that when I only worked on NS10s, if a guitar sound and a snare drum was incredibly offensive, then I knew it was going to okay.

Peter Doell:

Yeah, right.

Warren Huart:

It had to be like, [inaudible 01:30:26].

Peter Doell:

Yeah. I remember when Genelecs first came on the scene. I remember the first day, you put up the snare … I’m a genius! Listen to that! It sounded awesome. Because you’re not used to hearing stuff that sounded quite that good. It made you think you were done, when you weren’t.

Warren Huart:

We were listening earlier, at a dim volume, and then probably an 85 dB, and then a little bit louder, and they sounded the same at all areas.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. Well, some of that’s … Well, a lot of that’s the room.

Warren Huart:

Great.

Peter Doell:

Because you don’t have the room participating too much, and you can hear the linearity of the sound. Which, the way I work, I had my monitor at what I call loud. Never touch it, and the only other thing I do is hit dim. The phone rings, or when I’m printing something and I want to police it, I make sure that there’s nothing that stands out, or nothing goes bump in the night while I’m recording the file, I go to dim.

Peter Doell:

So I only have 12:00 and dim. That’s it. That’s something that all you people out there would do well to learn early, and that is to not start … Don’t fiddle around with the volume control, because you’re making … Because you turn it up, it’s going to sound better. You leave it at one of two positions.

Peter Doell:

Don Murray was, he was the guy who worked at Philadelphia. He cut (singing).

Warren Huart:

Amazing track, yeah.

Peter Doell:

Yeah. I mean … he was probably the first guy … Yeah. Anthony Jackson. The first guy I ever saw who ever did that in the mix. He’d come in, start the tape, park it there, and not touch it all day, except maybe dim to answer the phone. Because then you’ve not confused yourself. Believe me, it’s a very, very good thing to learn, to not fool yourself by fiddling with the volume. Leave it at one place, and then your alternate is dim.

Warren Huart:

Pete, thank you ever so much. I really appreciate it.

Peter Doell:

It’s been a real pressure working against you.

Warren Huart:

It’s been a lot of fun. And we could do more, and we probably should. Because we scraped the surface of a lot of amazing records that you’ve worked on, so I’m sure we can do some more.

Peter Doell:

Man, I … I’m up for it. I feel a little embarrassed you spent all this time with me.

Warren Huart:

No, it’s so much fun.

Peter Doell:

I mean, I’ve done a bunch of little interviews, but they’re usually 8, 10, 15 minutes tops.

Warren Huart:

Yeah, we like to go in deep. It’s fun. All right, please leave a bunch of comments and questions below. Having a marvelous time recording and mixing. You can check out, we’ll have all of the different sites, and of course Aftermaster and a whole bunch of other things. Have a marvelous time recording and mixing.