Even among recording, mixing, and mastering engineers, Richard Dodd's career has been a unique one, covering many styles of music. His work began in the early '70s and continues today. In that time he's recorded hits like (Carl Douglas') "Kung Fu Fighting," and artists such as Boz Scaggs, Stephane Grappelli, George Harrison, Clannad, Roy Orbison, Wilco, Green Day, Steve Earle, Delbert McClinton, Robert Plant, the Travelling Wilburys, Freddie Mercury, Placido Domingo, and the Dixie Chicks. On this occasion I had the opportunity to join a group of attendees at a Welcome to 1979 Recording Summit, where we had a listening party (off a DSD, Direct-Stream Digital, master) of Tom Petty's Wildflowers and then a live interview with Richard to discuss his mixing of this Grammy winning album.
How did the job come to you? You told me earlier that Jim Scott [Tape Op #75] wanted to mix it.
Yeah, and he would have done a fantastic job. I know, because I copied most of his rough mixes. I came to it cold, having not heard a thing. The smartest thing to do was listen to any roughs that existed [in order] to know what was on the multitrack. "Crawling Back to You" was the first song that we mixed.
Did they pass it around to anyone else to mix before you?
Not to my knowledge. I think it was a simple thing where Tom said, "Richard's mixing it."
Did you have a relationship with Tom Petty before that?
I did both the Traveling Wilburys records and then [Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers'] Into the Great Wide Open, through Jeff Lynne [Tape Op #92], though I didn't have anything to do with Full Moon Fever. We got on well, and consequently Tom made the assumption that I'd be mixing it.
What monitors were you using?
Depends on who was in the room with me. If it was Rick Rubin, the producer, then it would be [Yamaha] NS-10s extremely loud. The studio we were in, Andora, was a very dead, smallish control room. To get them to work, they ended up using two Studer 600-watt amps, each mono — one amp on each side.
Nothing caught fire?
Nope. The other set [of monitors] were Tannoy PBM 8s. If you put the two [monitors] together, you end up with an approximation of what we just heard, without any low-end.
How did the record arrive to you?
On 24-track reels. On some of the songs there ended up being two reels. The ones with strings we had slaves for, and those are also the ones that we used automation for on the mix. Everything else was mixed manual.
Did anyone here notice the tape hiss occasionally?
Yeah. I'll take responsibility for everything, except for the fades. I didn't do the fades that you heard there. That's part of the system of going to DSD. It was kind of a bit iffy. Everything had to be done remotely on a 16-bit version, and they'd apply it. Sometimes it would work out all right.
The DSD version is off 1/2-inch tape masters?
Yeah, the 1/2-inch masters.
So when you put this together, you obviously had to sequence it to put it in the right order.
Yeah, Sony did that. They had a setup at Airshow Mastering in Boulder, Colorado. It was very comfortable. The monitors weren't known to me, so I did the obvious thing, which was nothing, with the exception of one track with a kick drum. They'd really extra-compressed it in mastering for the CD, and I made the call that if the public heard this, they'd get used to that; and it had become part of the vibe of the song, so I mimicked the mastering compression.
Stephen Marcussen mastered the original CD for that.
He did.
There are not a lot of effects or room ambience on the lead vocal, but sometimes you get a bit of a sharp consonant or an edge to that. Is it also like that on the CD or the vinyl version?
It's even worse, I think.
Was any work done to attenuate that?
No doubt they did some in mastering.
But this is a straight cut, except for the compression and fades?
Yeah. It was early days for this DSD thing. The idea was that it was going to be as good as analog. I didn't have any instructions or requests, other than, "Let's have it on DSD!" Twenty years ago my ego was even worse, and I assumed that what I'd done was good enough for everybody else. I wasn't comfortable enough in the environment to make any judgment calls, so I just did transfers.
When you were mixing it, did you have any compression on the mix bus?
Generally a pair of black face [URIE] 1176s.
Linked?
No. I would have linked them, but they didn't have the link box. I just put some program [music] through each one to see if they locked up similarly; if they did, then great. I don't do very much half-left, half-right panning. It's usually left, center, right, and incidental stereo. If it's going to pull [the stereo image left or right], it's because something's happening.
I did notice the guitars would be completely panned left or right.
Yeah. Because of that, you can hear it. If it were muddied by the middle, you might miss it. It's a nice way to mix for me. It helps with mono comparability, to some degree. It's ironic because the half-left, half-right is the best way to make it mono compatible, but I don't know. I think it becomes compatible because it's out there and exciting, so it's probably mixed a bit too loud, which makes it compatible.
What console were you using for this?
That was a Neve 8078. We were mixing to [Ampex] ATR-102s, a 1/4-inch and a 1/2-inch. We mixed to both from [Studer] A800 MKIII multitracks.
Who picked the studio?
I did.
Did you move to another studio at some point?
I did for one song; I think one of the ones from side two, at what I know most recently as Cello.
EastWest.
Thank you. In Studio Three I did a mix of one of the songs. I think it was because we couldn't get anyone to like the mix I had, so they had me try it somewhere else.
How attended were the mixes? How often was Rick there?
He was there when everybody else had signed off. When Tom was happy, Rick would come in and then Tom wouldn't be happy.
In what way?
Well, he would be happy, but he would be less happy. He had it the way he liked it, and Rick would come in and just want everything louder, basically. That's the truth. You'd start with drums louder, then, of course, the vocal has to be louder, and we can't lose the guitars.
What happens with that fight?
Well, the keyboards and percussion lose out quite heavily.
When Rick left, did you pull it all back down a little bit? How would that work?
I'd go in and get it to a point either when I'd call and let Tom and Rick know it was ready to listen to, or they'd give me a time, until three o' clock or something.
Would they leave you alone to get set up?
Absolutely. If I ever requested to be left alone, it was never denied; but I was being paid a daily rate, so they wanted it done in a day.
You had a day per song to mix?
Yeah, really. It was only ever one day, unless we failed on a mix, which I think was only the one song.
So you had a couple of weeks?
I was originally booked for two weeks. It took four weeks, because we mixed 23 songs. It was meant to be 22, but on one I set up Tom at his house [to record] and he ended up putting it on the record. That was Tom recording on an ADAT, and Mike [Campbell] coming over to put on some extra acoustic guitar. Tom came in with his ADAT, and I remember him saying that he needed to edit out a bit. That was a learning experience. Do you remember ADATs?
I avoided them like the plague.
There were two ADAT machines, and there were two remotes. The [Alesis] LRC — Little Remote Controller — and the BRC — Big Remote Controller. The BRC you could use for editing. You could program it to do all these edits. They weren't working out. I discovered that Alesis had very cleverly covered their tracks. Based on the timecode, you'd give it an enter point and an exit point for the edit, and the edit would go wrong. When you'd go back to investigate everything; the numbers all correlated on both machines, and you couldn't figure it out. Eventually I wrote down my edit numbers, and, lo and behold, after it went wrong, it updated the request with new numbers. What it did was apparently what you told it to do, but in fact it was lying! I solved that problem by mixing the track first, then dumping it on to 1/4-inch, and editing it in ten seconds. That was a struggle.
The only ambience I hear on this album are a couple of drum tracks and the strings.
The strings were dry too. Just the room.
You mentioned the rough mixes Jim had done, but was there an overall mandate from Tom and Rick to keep things dry and present like that?
They'd been influenced by Jeff Lynne, either directly or indirectly. Jeff had shown them that if it's good, it doesn't need anything. I think that Jeff gave him some confidence to do that. When you've got somebody as good as Tom Petty, they do the effects into the mic, you know? They sing the effects. Not too many people know how to do that.
Were there any overdubs you had to do during the mix sessions, like they'd hear something and want to fix a part?
No. Pretty much working with Tom, he'd change vocals because he changed the lyrics. That's the reason.
Not because of pitch or a take?
Well, there have been occasions when he hasn't been on his game, but generally you change it because it needs to be changed, not to perfect it in any way. Nowadays, out would come the pitch correction.
You didn't have that?
No, it was the next one [Echo] that we had the pitch correction available. We didn't use it, but we had it. It was a standard analog in, analog out Antares Auto-Tuner. It was handy.
These arrangements, in a lot of cases, are very sparse. Did you find they came together easily, or were there things you had to do to massage them into the right perspectives?
I think, if there was any input from me... the challenge I was given wasn't to sort out the content. It was to satisfy two masters, Tom and Rick. That was the challenge. Occasionally, but very rarely, you might subdue a track to make one other part louder, but, as you know, there's only so much room for it. If there are two guitars in the same place, you might need to get rid of one.
The vocals sound like they used a condenser mic. Were you adding any top end to it?
I didn't like the console that much. The EQ sucks on the Neve 8078. But the general mix bus was good, so I'd patch in past the EQs, in most cases. I would definitely put some more limiter on the vocal.
Do you remember what it was?
There is more than one limiter?
So how many 1176s were there?
Four. I'd typically have two for the mix, one for Tom, and then another in case I needed it.
The bass guitar holds up in the picture really well, and the notes feel even.
That was a real bass player [Howie Epstein].
Do you remember having to do anything to the tracks to get them to sit in the mix?
I remember wanting to, but the best thing to do was just to leave it alone. It had its place. Sometimes you put too much effort into something and create a problem trying to make it better than it is. You can always make it different. At some stage, everyone was happy with the way it was. I felt that my job was to find that place. Before I was given the job of mixing, someone had said [the album] was ready to mix. So, under those circumstances, you can believe that they do want to use everything that they recorded. They were happy with it, which is where Jim's roughs came in really handy. It was an example of where Rick was happy with it, at least to a degree, where he'd gotten to the point that he said, "Yeah, the song's there." That was a challenge to find that place. It's great when you do.
