Have you been busy?
Yeah, there are lots of different things going on. I've been doing a lot with Alan here at ParSonics. I work at another studio in Montecito [Secret Garden Recording Studios] as well. It's the farthest away, yet in the same town, as you could get from each other. [laughter]
They're on the north and south sides of Santa Barbara.
Yeah, you know. Often, the client wants to go in at Secret Garden, but they have an engineer. I've got to go down there, and then, when they're done, I've got to go back, lock up, and make sure everything's cool.
Is Secret Garden a private studio?
It's semi-private. It's owned by Ben Margulies who co-wrote and co-produced Mariah Carey's big hits on her first [self-titled] album. He built the studio in 2000 or so, and I met him a few years back. The studio had not been changed since then and it was out of date. I convinced him to upgrade. Another studio that I used to work at, in Carpinteria [just south of Montecito], ended up selling off all their gear. They had bought the same exact console that Alan got here, the [Rupert Neve Designs] Shelford 5088. I said, "You're never going to get a better deal on this console," and I ended up convincing him to buy it. I basically rewired the whole studio with the builder that built Alan's place, Jared Stansill, and slowly got all the gear back up and working. I know where all the buttons, patch points, and everything are now. Nothing can happen there without me, which is job security, but...
It's hard to make a studio completely intuitive for freelance engineers.
Definitely. Everybody's workflow is a bit different, like, for instance, the ways they want to use the console or headphone system. But, luckily, it's many of the same clients that always come back. Once they get it all figured out, I only get the phone call if something bad has happened.
When something breaks! What was your path leading to working with Alan Parsons?
I'm from Goleta, in the Santa Barbara area. I got the bug for this in high school and ended up going to Hollywood to go to Musician's Institute. I did their one-year program and got the foundation of most of what I know, but L.A. was not cut out for me. It was much too cutthroat. I'm glad it didn't work out there, because I probably would still be running and getting food at a studio.
Were you interning in L.A.?
I was looking for a spot, but no one was biting. Right after MI, I ended up getting an internship back here in Santa Barbara, at a studio downtown that's no longer there [Playback Recording Studio]. I worked a six-month internship there, and within three months the main engineer, and basically everybody else on the staff, quit to go work for Sonos. The owner was like, "Okay, you're up." I jumped into the deep end. My first session there was with Kevin Costner doing a voiceover. I worked there for close to three years, with all kinds of different talent on everything under the sun, doing audio books, TV, voiceover commercials, music, and radio. All right around the end of this studio, because it was struggling as the commercial real estate was way too expensive. The owner was looking to get a partner or sell the studio. Alan, at that time, was thinking about buying a studio or building one. He came in and they were working on a deal, but it didn't really make sense for Alan, so he ended up backing out. The studio ended up closing and they destroyed the place, sadly. Maybe a month or two later, I heard through the grapevine, "Alan might want you to go work up at his place." I sent him an email, and he said, "Yeah, come up next Monday." We met at his house, and he was in the stages of building ParSonics. It was just getting drywalled.
He told me that the previous owner installed generators in it for an end of the world, Y2K scenario?
Yeah, definitely. There were some weird things. Everything had that barbed wire across the fence.
Like razor wire?
Yeah. I met up with Alan on a Monday, and he's like, "Alright, come back on Wednesday and we're going to start working." Alan had a studio in his house that was there when he bought it. An old, funky studio. We started work up there while this place was getting buttoned up. I helped wire and test everything here. It was a natural process, "Okay, now we've got to bring all the gear down to the studio." That was 2017, and that's how it all started.
Alan Parsons is an amazing producer and engineer. But he is also one of the most gracious people I've been around.
Absolutely! Such a humble human. He's the kind of person you want in a session to make sure everything's going to be okay. There's no bad energy. It's all going to work out, and everything's going to be cool.
A calm demeanor.
Exactly. So many producers are synonymous for yelling at people. It's the opposite here.
What was some of the first work that you did with Alan?
The first thing we did was his album, The Secret. I was thrown into that! We had just wired the studio, and nothing had been tested. His whole band and all this crew came in, "Okay, we're in now and it's got to work." Otherwise, everybody'd be sitting around. That was a long process of, "How does this all work?" Sorting out the workflow, the console, and dialing all that out. Then we were working on multiple sessions. We started doing the remixes of Al Stewart's Year of the Cat and Time Passages [that Alan had produced]; we did both of those albums in surround and stereo. That was a blast to do. Those multitracks are absolutely incredible; just perfect. Obviously, back then you couldn't see the waveforms as we do now, but I throw them into Pro Tools off those tapes and I'm like, "Gosh, those are beautifully perfect waveforms." Everything is exactly where it should be. We'll pull everything up and it's 90 percent there. Which was such a lesson. You don't need to put a million plug-ins on or do anything else. Just get it right, then and there. We're not having to jump through hoops to get somewhere from nothing.
