I realized that I've never known how you got your start in this business.
The start is always because of one particular record. Until then, you're just slaving away. Suddenly, one day a record comes out and you become successful, and people say, "Who is that?" For me it was kind of a slow ramp. I was at MediaSound; I got hired there in '76. I went from intern to head of the interns in the shipping department, and then assistant, within a year. Then I was staff engineer within two years. Back then, it really wasn't a stretch. You could become a staff engineer in a studio that had three rooms, with six or seven senior engineers. They had senior engineers and assistants, and eventually the assistants would move up into the engineering positions. That studio was well known for R&B.
Who was managing it back then?
It was managed by Susan Planer, a woman we all loved dearly who passed away. And it was owned by John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Bob Walters, and Harry Hirsch. John and Joel financed Woodstock. They needed a place to mix the show [movie and album], so they opened this studio called MediaSound.
When I interviewed Tony Bongiovi [Tape Op #127], he talked about mixing it.
Bob Clearmountain [#129, #84] went from intern to assistant engineer right away. He was one of the early ones there to be mixing. It was an incredible group of people. The success rate of the engineers that came out of that studio is really quite impressive. I was doing a lot of records. During the day, we'd be recording commercials. You couldn't make any records during the day, because all the musicians were getting paid double and triple scale [on commercials]. Between nine and five is when we'd be recording and mixing. Two days later, you'd hear it on the radio. From six o'clock to two o'clock, we'd be making records. We'd be doing double shifts, seven days a week. I don't remember what a weekend felt like. It didn't matter. I started late when I got hired there; I was 25. I'd been on the road with a band, and I didn't want that kind of life. I'd been out of college for a couple of years. You learn by starting to do overdubs. I started by recording Sesame Street. You had to start off being able to do Sesame Street, because it was all live; a room of ten musicians going right to 4-track and mono. Everything was done at the same time, and it was done live. That's how you really cut your teeth. Fred Christie was the senior engineer who mentored me and many others. Eventually there was a lot of R&B coming in. I was working with Luther Vandross during the day. He was the top jingle singer at the time. He was doing all the main ads; McDonalds, Coca-Cola, you name it. He was the lead on that.
He could just nail it?
He was beyond belief. There was the same group of background singers for all these dates. You saw them day and night. Same with these musicians. You'd see Will Lee in the day and again at night. You'd see Paul Shaffer, Allan Schwartzberg, and Bob Babbitt when he moved from Motown. Great musicians. The list goes on and on. I think I was one of the first to record Marcus Miller at Media when he was first breaking out. And great, great arrangers. It was just a wealth of beautiful, great music. We were doing record after record, day-in-day-out. It was mostly R&B. Van McCoy was there for a time. Fatback Band. Tony Bongiovi was doing all the big Motown and funk. Then one day this Italian producer, [Jacques] Fred Petrus, was producing this new act in the studio. It was just a band; they didn't have a name. If they became successful, then they'd put a band together. They were at Power Station, and they were having a tough time getting the right mix and couldn't find the right vocalist either. Yvonne Lewis, the vocal contractor there was a good friend of mine, because I would see her at work twice a day. She really liked how I worked. She recommended that they come to MediaSound, and that I record and mix the next batch of singers. It was Luther Vandross. He was holding onto the lyrics of "The Glow of Love" and "Searching," and we ran it down in the studio for a minute. He goes, "Okay." He walks out into the studio and he's literally holding it [the paper] and singing. That was the pass, on both "The Glow of Love" and "Searching." It was crazy good. Then I mixed it, and they loved the mix. From that point on, I was doing everything for the band, Change. I went to Italy to do The B.B.&Q. Band [Brooklyn, Bronx, & Queens Band] on [Fred's] Little Macho Music. It was just on and on with Fred. That is how Luther – hearing what I had done in recording and mixing the Change record – asked me to record and mix his own album. He was doing it on the weekends. We'd do two songs a weekend, and then three and four.
He was paying out of pocket?
Yeah. He was paying for the whole thing. I think he was shopping it around, but nobody was really interested at the time. Finally, he found Arista [Records]. Of course, his song, "Never Too Much," came out, and boom! That was really the beginning for me. I'd already heard a couple of things I'd done on the radio, but this was it. This was the first record that I completely mixed and recorded, from soup to nuts. Of all the records that have come out, it's still one of my favorites. It just feels timeless. Luther was a rising star. David Bowie had used him for Young Americans, but here he comes out on his own and he's singing like no one else. No one was doing that style. Right around that time, I was also working for Robert Wright, who was with RCA [Records]. I was doing a lot of remixing, like remixing the Hall & Oates singles, "I Can't Go for That (No Can Do)," "Your Imagination," and "One on One." Those were becoming very successful.
Were those mixes made for radio?
Yeah. That's what you'd hear on the radio. They were R&B, but they'd also move over to the pop charts. I did two or three of those. Word started getting out because of the success of those records. There was a point where I got a call to mix a couple of songs for the Rolling Stones on Steel Wheels. Then I ended up mixing almost the entire album at Olympic Studios, where they had all their big hits.
That was a really great room.
And a really great experience! So, it started with R&B and it went to rock with an R&B base with the Stones. That's all R&B, but then I started moving more towards rock. I wanted to spend five or six years on each different style. I was in no rush. I had my hand in production for a couple years, when I was spending a lot of time in England, but it didn't feel natural to me. I wasn't a songwriter, and I had felt that a great producer needs to be a songwriter. Otherwise you need to be dependent on a self-sufficient band who knows how to fix their own stuff and write their own bridge. The best I can be was always dependent on that. The great producers I work with are either helping write, or rewriting, the lyrics.
Someone like Arif Mardin who could do charts.
Exactly. If I really wanted to be at the top of my game, I'd never get there that way. I've never written a song in my life, and it's never going to happen. On the other hand, I really loved to mix. I did a couple of years of production, and finally said, "Okay, enough of that." I could see the writing on the wall. I used to love recording – the basics, the rhythm section, the horns and strings – but my love, almost from the get-go, was mixing. It was something that came naturally to me. But it didn't come around easily. I didn't hear compression for the first two years I was at MediaSound. Engineers would be like, "Give me the [Teletronix] LA-2A. Wait, give me the [Urei] 1176 instead." I'd be like, "Who cares? I can't hear any difference between the two of those." That's not a good sign, is it?
You've got to train yourself to hear compression.
When you're in there day-in-day-out, one day you hear the difference. "Good, I'll have a career in this!" There was something about mixing. I was in a band for two years on the road, and I really missed the feeling of being in the band. There's nothing better than being on stage with a crowd who's loving you and you're playing as one. The show's great. We were just a cover band, but it felt great. I missed that part, but I knew I had to leave that life. I actually imagined in my head – because I missed it so much – that when I was mixing, I was mixing live. I was performing. I always had this crowd in my head. When I go back and listen to those mixes, it always feels like I was performing. Like I was live on stage.
Was a lot of it manual mixing? Hands-on?
Oh, sure. All the Luther and the Aretha [Franklin] records. Luther was producing Aretha, so that's how I got to do the Aretha records. Two with him, and then one with Narada Michael Walden; "Freeway of Love." That approach turned out to work great. As a drummer, I knew all my cues for manual mixing. I didn't really need someone to help me. Maybe turning a snare on and off, or a reverb, or something. I really loved it. I'd stand up and mix. I'd be with Luther and all the boys in the room, and we'd be jamming and moving.
Mixes were a performance, in the analog days.
They were. They had to be. It was such a great feeling when I nailed it. I'd always print each pass I did. I never wanted to stop in the middle. I never edited it. It always had to be a performance, from beginning to end. It had to feel right. That way I knew how to build the dynamics.
At that point in time, how many people did you know that were full-time mixers?
There were very, very few. In our studio none of us were quite full-time yet. During my time, the senior guys were Michael DeLugg, Harvey Goldberg, Tony Bongiovi, Joe Jorgenson, Michael Barbiero, Alan Varner, Doug Epstein, Lincoln Clapp, Bob Clearmountain [Tape Op #129], Ed Stasium [#98], Godfrey Diamond, and Ron Saint Germain. Everybody had such a different sound and approach; it was great to watch. The ones who had the most personality really grew. You could see that they didn't have to have great talent, although they did. Artists were just so endeared to them. Others who didn't become successful had attitude. Even though they were really good, no one wanted to be with them. They went on and did other things.
That's sometimes the untold story of studio life. If you're not a good hang, who's going to sit in the studio with you for 10 or 12 hours?
That's how it is. Godfrey Diamond was hanging out in a club at 21, and he ran into Lou Reed. Lou Reed decides, "I'm going to make a record." Godfrey goes, "I'm an engineer at Electric Lady." He'd just been hired. Lou said, "Oh, we'll start tomorrow." Godfrey runs back and he's like, "How do you patch?" I think his assistant may have known more than him, but he pulled it off and nobody was the wiser. He was a great hang, and the record [Coney Island Baby] sounded good. He delivered, right? Sometimes an artist would come in with a lot of attitude and say their music was "the shit!" Godfrey would say, "I think I can save this!" And he would. Everybody had a different approach to working with a client – that was the great learning experience. It wasn't just about how to make a great snare drum sound; [it was also about] interpersonal communication between yourself and the artist, or the producer, and a room full of people who are trying to control the room. Tony [Bongiovi] always controlled. Every one of these guys always controlled the session. You could see the guys who didn't, and the band would take over. Suddenly it's like, "Who's flying the plane?" That personality comes across in the way they make their records.
What does your personality bring?
I think I try to stay pretty transparent. I think I can really bring out the dynamics and the heart of the song, to really build it up so you can feel when that chorus hits. The emotion of a mix. If a song is sad, I can make it really, really sad. If it's happy, I can make it really happy. If it's angry, I can make it super angry. Those emotions are part of my personality, and it comes out that way, but I'm pretty transparent. I don't put a big stamp on it.
I listen to your mixes, and I don't know if I've ever thought, "Oh, that's a Brauer mix."
Well, there you are. You've seen where they all kind of have the same snare sound or the same this and that. It gets cranked out. I learned a long time ago how important it is to try and be timeless. I produced a record for Roachford [on their self-titled release with the hit, "Cuddly Toy," in 1988]. Two or three years later I was listening to it, and I was shocked because it was so timestamped. The way the drums sounded and everything. You could almost tell what month that snare was popular.
The '80s had such an issue with that. Technology was shifting, and techniques were getting passed around.
Yeah. This was around the mid-'80s with the AMS reverb on the snare. I was really embarrassed. I remember it being such a great song, but the sound timestamped it. I don't want to do that. I really have to work to be as timeless in the mix as possible. Still keeping everything current, but not to give it such a "this is what was hot then" and "this is now" kind of sound.
Speaking of current times, what I've found with mixers is that the overall frequency bandwidth is wider. When you think about mixing Luther Vandross' first record, you were mixing ostensibly for radio and vinyl, right?
Not really. I really didn't think that way. I was always thinking as hi-fi as possible. Of course, I'd give it to Greg Calbi [Tape Op #86], and he'd do what he had to do on vinyl, but he didn't have to do too much. I knew my limitations, because I was using a compressor. Maybe too much back then. Back then, R&B was tight. I always used a [Neve] 33609 into a couple of Pultec EQs.
On the whole mix?
On the whole mix. That worked great, until Narada Michael Walden came along and wanted way more bottom-end on the Freeway of Love record. As I added more bass, Aretha's voice disappeared. I was using a stereo compressor. "Bring Aretha back up!" Then the bass would come down. He's like, "Hey, what'd you do with the bass?" It was one of those nauseous feelings, where it's like, "I'm up against the wall, and I may not get out of this. Is it possible I'm going to fail?" But that's what led to multi-bus compression.
Good segue. I was going to ask you when you started working that way.
Well, I survived it; right? I still have a hard time listening to that song. I physically remember the fear that I had mixing it. After that, I was thinking, "Will this happen to me again? What am I going to do?" I was mixing basically in pre-compression, and then hitting the stereo compressor, and every track was getting nailed at the same time. Records now have way more bottom-end, and we all know the bottom-end triggers the compressor, not the top-end. And whoever's on top is going down too. So, do I keep bringing down all the other faders? Then you lose the glue [that the bus compressor adds]. It was one thing affecting the other. I knew I never wanted to experience that again. I was mixing at Right Track at the time; I had just left MediaSound. Frank Filipetti was the senior engineer there. He had just gotten a new console for some of the film work he was doing; it was an SSL 6000. I was mixing on the SSL 4000. I'd grown up on the Neve 8068, so the transition from Neve to SSL was a frightening experience. I would put up my multitrack on there, and it just didn't come back the same way. The bottom-end was tiny. The snare didn't hit. Understand, this is the first couple of years of SSL. If you touch even the top-end EQ, you'd be screaming. It was harsh, and one little tweak was like 6 dB. They went on to do great things, and it became the 9000 console, eventually – my favorite console in the world. But Frank Filipetti was showing me the new console, the 6000. I asked, "What is this?" He said, "You've got three stereo busses now." I was like, "There's no such thing. There's only one stereo." He said, "No. You've got three sub-stereos, and they all sum to one." I said, "Yeah, who cares? Why?" He goes, "Well, you've got the music on one, then the dialog, and then the effects. You can separate everything within the film." My head just went, "Wait a minute! Separate? If I could separate the drums and bass from the vocals, I'd be set! This is the answer to my problem." That began the transition, slowly. All that I knew was that this was my salvation, if I could truly separate the drums or the bottom-end from other elements. It took me months and months of figuring out what combinations worked. Back then it was strictly multi-bus compression. If I could send the bass to A and B – say the B was just the drums and the bass, and the A was going to be guitars and everything else, and C might be vocals – maybe if I sent the bass to A and B it would sound really cool. Now I was into parallel compression. I didn't know what any of these terms meant at all. Nothing.
It wasn't commonly talked about that way.
Yeah. You could say "parallel compression," but that was Greek to me. I had no idea what it meant, or how it sounded. "Why? Who cares?" Some of the English guys would take the stereo mix on the 4000, and they'd have the stereo mix uncompressed, and then they'd mult in a very compressed mix underneath it. That was parallel compression. Slowly you'd get that "excitement" going on. The English engineers did a lot of that. Eventually MediaSound and all the other studios opened up to outside engineers, because, for years, they were staffed. A producer or artist wouldn't ever bring in their own engineer if they were from somewhere else. I slowly, slowly got a really cool thing going. I put compressor processing on [mix busses] A, B, and C. If I didn't have it loud enough, nothing was going on with the compressors across each sub-stereo, like on my drums. If I put too much in, it got small. The compressor was grabbing. And then there's the choice of compressors. Months and months of trial and error. I discovered that I could hear these ideas in my head. At the time I was a bike racer and I was putting in hundreds of miles a week. I'd be on my bike and I'd just imagine, "What if I put the drums in this compressor?" I could hear those ideas in my head, because I'd gotten to know my drums, and compressors, and EQs so well. If you imagine well, you can eliminate 99 percent of the gear. You can look at all your toys, scan them, and suddenly just go, "Boom." I'd come back into the studio to see if it worked. If not, "Well, okay."
Oops, bad idea.
That was how the multi-bus title happened. Someone put a name on it: "Multi-bus compression." I kept that term until it no longer applied, because I started quickly using parallel and send returns. But I'd been doing this almost ten years before your article [Tape Op #37]. At that point, I'd had enough success that people were interested. "What are you doing that's different?"
People were using facets of it, but you had a system going.
Nothing was original. The combining became original.
Do you still work in this fashion now?
Absolutely. It extended to not only A, B, and C. It went to D and the stereo bus. B was my drums and bass, generally. C was my guitars. A would be anything with sustain. A was what I originally mixed in, with my Neve 33609 going into the Pultec. But, at that time, it would be all my vocals, all keyboards, organs, strings, or horns. [Basically] anything that was sustain.
Non-percussive.
Yeah. Then I eventually moved over to Sony studios and got the SSL 8000 that had four sub-stereo busses. "I think I'll use the fourth one as a spreader." That had a spreading compressor on it. Then, when I moved to the 9000, I had four sub-stereos plus the desk stereo, so that was five. Then I could choose between processed and non-processed. That's when I started letting more of the transients through. Let's say the kick was going through B, but then I'd hit the stereo bus too, and now I was getting combinations. To this day, I still have A, B, C, and D, and I've got more gear in the back of my racks with the Pultec. Then B is [Empirical Labs] Distressors going into the Avalon E55 equalizers. C is the Pendulum Audio ES-8 [tube limiter], and then D is this [TFPro P8] Edward the Compressor. It's a spreader.
When you say spreader, what do you mean by that?
It's got a width control on it, and I have it all the way at 150 percent.
Is that like a mid/side effect? I don't know that device.
Kind of. It just takes everything on the left and moves it a little on the right, and then everything on the right and moves it a little on the left. You feel this spread, which I use for backing vocals and certain things I want to go a little wider. Right about the time, right before I first worked with Coldplay, my friend David Kahne mixed lead vocals by compiling them through four or five different-sounding compressors. I found that intriguing. His vocal sound was always fat and big, but the meter didn't kill. At this point, I'd already gone as far as I could with what I had done, and I had a million different options. That's what's so great about the multi-bus compression approach. I can always get out of any trouble with width and depth by going with this.
Just by reassigning things?
Yeah. If I want a little more level, instead of trying to bring a fader up, I'll send it through one more thing, like C. It was so much fun. But then along came this other idea. So, I played with that for a while. Then, eventually, I didn't have the lead vocal going through A, B, C, or D anymore. It was separate from all that. I'd send it to four different-sounding compressors: Fairchild 666, one of my Gates [Sta-Levels], the 1176, and a Distressor.
It was going through all of these?
Yeah, through the send. On the return I would form the vocal sound. Each one sounded different – one was a head sound, one was throaty, one was urgent – and then I'd have the Distressor on crush and sneak in a little bit of that.
So, you'd blend those all back to one signal with bussing?
Right. Then I'd EQ a little bit. Usually I took some 300 Hz out. I'd end up with this really incredible vocal sound. When I'm pushing the vocal, I'm sending the vocal into these compressors. I'd find a sweet spot in these compressors and then I'd bring them all back, so they'd all be compressing about the same, unless one was crushing. Maybe I had the 1176 on the British setting [4 buttons in]. I would also use the Federal [AM864U], which has this mid-range crazy, crazy sound. That combination could just turn a vocal that was dull and uninteresting into a vibrant vocal that didn't sound compressed.
Were you still using the original, uncompressed signal parallel against that?
No. That was it. All you're hearing is the return of those four or five compressors. I'd be mixing into them. I'd find that sweet spot where they'd be reacting beautifully. I never looked back.
