Louis Austin - Engineer Producer

Paul White Hello, I'm Paul White and this is the Sound On Sound podcast, where we're talking to Louis Austin about his long and varied career in music recording. So Lou, how did you get into this thing in the first place? Were you in a band and then decided recording would be fun, or did you take a different route? Louis Austin No, the total opposite. I was a motor mechanic for Saabs. I loved music but you know, I had no dreams of being in anything other than just listening to it. But my wife, my late wife, dad was an arranger for Andrew Lloyd Webber. He did Cats and a few other things and he was quite influential and he got me an interview at De Lane Lea in Kingsway and I went along, dressed very inappropriately I might add and had the interview, got the job as a tape op at Kingsway. PW When you started as a tape op under Martin Birch, did they have you doing all the tedious jobs like making the coffee and aligning the tape machines? LA I was literally the tea boy. I used to do that very well, tea and coffee, I was always there, sorting the band's needs out in more ways than just tea and coffee as well. What I used to love was being shown how to mic things up because moving a mic across an instrument can make a dramatic difference and I never realised even, well especially when you're recording something like an acoustic guitar, where you place the mic and what sort of mic you use is absolutely the key to it all and so that was always interesting. And of course, a wind up for, you know, lesser individuals for instance, a new tape ops that came was, you know, asking to the mic set up studio, ‘cause we did a lot of cover hits and you know 60, 70 piece orchestras. So set up, oh yeah, we've got two French horns there and it was always amusing to see how someone would mic a French horn up and they'd always get it wrong basically, unless they'd been told. So yeah, those sort of things were quite amusing. But yeah, it was about, I suppose it was all about mic position and what you could get away with. Lining machines up, I didn't really do that till much later. I hated it. PW So what was the first session that you did where you were let loose on your own? LA Martin was going on holiday or something and he gave me Country Joe McDonald and I did an album with Country Joe, he was a very chilled guy. I recorded it, it was very good, but as I said earlier, I hated lining up tape machines and it was all lined up too soft. So it could have been another 10dB more. So the signal to noise was not great, but it sounded alright. I learned a lot from Martin because I suppose in those days, there are a lot of people from working class backgrounds that didn't have much education and I certainly had zero education. I mean, I'm pretty smart, but I didn't have any formal education. A lot of people came from that background I think really, because in those days it was a good way of making money and making an entry into doing things you loved. I quickly loved the whole scene of recording and it was more like a hobby really but being paid so that was great. Long hours and all that stuff but it was, yeah, very formative. PW I understand that you ran some of those early sessions with Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac. I mean, how were those? LA Oh my goodness, he was absolutely stunning. He was very, very prolific and he was the boss, basically. But he was a very egalitarian, lovely guy. He was never shouted or did anything, he just got people to do it because they all believed in him and I learnt from that. Oh Well, there was a screaming part in the mid and that was done in the underground garage with an old Tannoy and a couple of speakers because Martin was very into ambient noise and we had an EMT plate but it was nothing like that. The reverb time was sort of four or five seconds, it was massive. From that I learned a lot about acoustics basically, about having openness around whatever you were recording, especially drums. I was doing a pop band called Sweet and did a lot of albums with them, they wanted to do a remote recording, I think it was Clearwell Castle in Wales, all dungeons and stuff. It was right up my street, so we just set the band up in the old dungeons and did them all remotely with a Maison Rouge mobile, which was a really small mobile, but it was great fun and it really taught me about acoustics, which doesn't exist now because everything's samples and it's all done electronically and you've got reverbs that do everything, but actually nothing beats the real world in my opinion and it was a very different way of recording because you recorded everything individually, multi-miking often and it was a bit of an art. I mean, if you go back to the old days when, you know, Frank Sinatra stood in front of an orchestra, he got a balance with one mic and that balance was against the orchestra and he sang and it did it. It was a very much like that. Of course, we got into multi tracking and dropping in and even dropping in whole drum kits and things but the inception of it all, it started off simple, you know and recording like that. Go Man, Oh Well, Green Man, Leashy, etc. Whilst fixing my bosses, that was Martin, Martin Birch, we bought an old Chevrolet and I was changing the gearbox in the garage, just out the back in between takes. He let me do this and I've got to come into the studio in overalls and stuff, you know, whilst I was working. PW You also got to working with Queen in their early days. LA They were a guinea pig for when we first moved to De Lane Lea in Wembley, which was an awful studio with zero atmosphere. But they were a guinea pig and I could put them in whatever room I wanted to check the separation between the rooms and all that sort of stuff. The only place you could get a reasonable sound was in the giant room, multi-miking and miking, you know, feet away to try and get some sort of reverb around them, some sort of openness. I suppose really, that was the key to, you know, my recording and how I used to do it. PW That would have been Queen's early days before they became really big. LA Their first, it was the first album. I’m credited on it, but they took it away and some flashy engineer came along and mixed it, etc. But yeah, I did all the original tracks and it was great fun and they were a good bunch. I don't really remember too many details because we're talking, you know, 40 plus years ago, but they were a very nice bunch. PW Easy to work with. LA Yeah, very easy to work with, but of course there was no pressure. I was sort of in control of where they were going to record and how we were going to do it, but they had everything sorted. All the songs were written. They really knew what they were doing and they were practicing stage shows, even though they'd done no gigs at that point. PW So you could see they were very serious about things. LA Oh, right from the word go, yeah. PW What was their approach to working in the studio? LA They never recorded in multi-track, or definitely not being in a big studio like De Lane Lea. They always got ready to do a guide vocal and in a little vocal booth or close by, but it was all overdubbed, all redone. And of course, when they took the tapes away, a lot of it was restructured. But the basis of the old backing tracks were originally and were mine, actually, so, and still used. They were sticklers for perfection, basically so they'd work and work at the harmonies. PW Would they record as a band and then add the guitar solos and the vocals afterwards as overdubs? LA Oh solos later, definitely. I mean, we're right into those days now where multi-tracking was being used as a tool and I'd never remember the drums being redone, but definitely, yeah, guitars, vocal, yeah. Typically we'd be talking about a backing track, so we might have a vocalist, just so they got them in the headphones, but it wouldn't be anywhere I could hear them, you know, within the band and then we'd go back and assess all that and oftentimes we’d, you know, leave it all but maybe replace the rhythm guitar and all that. The basis, it was the backing track that was the key to it all. PW I would imagine that a band like Queen were very tight in the first place. LA Oh yeah, they were, very tight. But of course I wasn't privy to how they cut it up later. PW Who else did you work with in that studio? LA In Wembley? Oh such an awful studio. It was dead as a dodo. So the rock, inverted commas, studio was like working in anechoic chamber, you know, it was so dead. I did Thin Lizzy in there, Shades of a Blue Orphanage. So I did a various amount of bands and things from very big orchestras for film stuff. I did for instance, I did The Wicker Man, which turned into a cult movie and it was really good fun, but I got very disillusioned because it was not, it wasn't, it was a good studio in many respects for film etc, but for what I was doing it was totally inappropriate and I had a long association with Martin and Deep Purple and at the time I was doing some Ian Gillan stuff, he was the singer at the time and we clubbed together an idea to buy the old Kingsway and we did that without De Lane Lea realising that it was us doing it. But Ian had the money, obviously, but there were three of us, Martin, myself and Terry and we bought them under their noses. They would never have sold it to back to us. And we had a very successful couple of years until we got served an injunction. Ironically the Civil Aviation Authority took over the building and because we made a lot of noise, obviously, in the basement, it was never a problem up until then. It did become a problem for them and they stopped us working before six o'clock in the evening. And, of course, this crippled the business, although it still, we were still busy. But then I had an offer from a band I was doing, Sweet, to go abroad, I think it was Toronto somewhere. So I went freelance and then worked all over the place and because of my association with Purple and heavy metal stuff, I did stuff for Roger Glover, I did lots of heavy metal stuff, Nazareth by Judas Priest, I did five albums with Priest. So a wide variety of heavy metal stuff, including Michael Schenker, Accept and people like that. We did Judas Priest album in Ibiza and there was a Eastlake studio which were all in vogue at that time. They were built by a company called Eastlake which was an offshoot of a company called Westlake. But they were all set to a standard formula. They were very, very dead and they were actually, like The Eagle’s sound, it was a dead duf duf, you know, it was, there was no ambience at all. Anyway, this studio in Ibiza was unusable for heavy metal band like Judas Priest, they wanted full-on stuff, but he was building another studio. So I set up the drums in the empty shell of the new control room, which was literally an empty shell, put breeze blocks up to make walls for separation for the guitar and the bass, etc. Oh yeah, no, the only thing we recorded was the bass in the studio because it was nice and dead, that was the only thing we recorded in the studio, but we were there months and they weren't very prolific in writing. They liked the golf course. I love the Island but did pretty well no work and then we went to Orlando in a complete rush to try and finish the album. And then we mixed it at Bill Simzik's place, which is on Eagle Connections in Miami, in a complete mad rush. That was with a producer called Tom Allum, really good guy, and he's still a very good friend. PW Over the period you've been recording, how had the actual recording process changed. I mean, presumably when you started, it was probably what, eight track or even fewer than that? It winds up at 24 track. LA Well, it was four track when I started with Fleetwood Mac, although quickly moved to eight, which was a revelation. And then for years it was 16, then we jumped to 24 and I did quite a lot of work at Townhouse Virgin Studio and they had a Telefunken 32 track, which is woo and of course it cost. Cost was absolutely astronomical but I got a lot of work because I was very good at operating SSLs and I loved SSLs. So Townhouse was a lovely studio and I did spend a lot of time there with a variety of bands. So I was doing a lot of freelance work, all sorts of stuff, from orchestras. In the early days, education didn't get you a job, it was about your dedication and your enthusiasm really and that's why I did well, because I was extremely enthusiastic and I worked hard. But as it went on, people that were educated, you know, they'd gone to public schools, etc. Their dads suddenly realised there's money in this and so we started getting quite a lot more educated people and computers came in and you started fiddling around with a basic recording. So in the old days, I got a lot of work because I was good at getting drum sounds but this was no longer relevant. You know, you get a John Bonham sample, put it in a DAW, move it around a bit, there's your drum kit. In fact a lot of people don't even know how to record a drum kit. So that's how it changed and it changed dramatically. Now one thing I was never great at, I wasn't a good musician of any sort but if you we’re a good musician and you could use this technology, you know, look at the Pet Shop Boys for instance, cause they rode on the eighties crest of multi-tracking and technology. Tears for Fears, another good example. Bands that really embraced it and it worked really well for them. But when you got into things where somebody couldn't sing a note and everything's stuck through a harmoniser and you can look at the bars on the screen and suddenly you can pull everything into the key of C or something, it’s very simple. Of course, what it does do is it removes the initial feel of something. When you see a real live band playing, actually playing, you can sense and you can feel that it's a unit, you know, nothing's wrong with that sort of music, but a lot of it is, you know, once you quantise something, it's all a drum machine, a sophisticated drum machine, but it's a drum machine, it's lost all its initial feel. And suddenly you've got the ability to, ooh let's move that snare back up a little bit and you move the snare back, suddenly then it's tom tom rolls, you start fiddling around, this actually removes the actual… PW Humanity. LA Yeah, that's the word. PW And click tracks are a similar thing. LA Yeah PW It stops people speeding up, but you can end up losing all the feel. LA Absolutely. I did a lot of work at Ringo Starr's place called Starling. I met Ringo many times, I did do some demos for him actually. Ringo, he didn't need a click track and his timing was absolutely perfect, always was. Starling, but I did a lot of stuff there and it was a lovely place. PW I know that you also did quite a bit of work with the pop band Sweet. Was there anything special about the way you approached recording with them? LA The harmonies with the key with Sweet and they were absolutely, at the time unparalleled for the harmonies. They were very, very good and they used to build them up and track them up so very accurately. They were a good band, but they were beset by, they were a bit of a pop star band and they spent a lot of money on worthless time in the studio when they could have been doing something quite positive. But they actually, they did some very good songs. A very underrated band in my opinion. PW The guitar sound was a big part of Sweet. LA Yeah, I mean that chord sound, that was encapsulated by Richie's heavy chord sound and I learnt that from Martin actually. A combination of things you shouldn't do really, putting a mic, something really crappy like an SM58, well it’s not crappy but you know, it's a very cheap mic, right on the cone of the speaker. And just moving a centimetre or two away from the centre used to change the sound massively. But that one was the first sound and then the next one would be something like a 67 or an 87 about a meter and then another one slightly different depending on the room where you were putting it and then room mics so it was a combination of all those things and a lot of people that were more technical they used to say to me, oh what about the phasing Lou, oh you know this could be an issue. Never cared about it, it always worked you know, if it didn't sound quite right I pulled the small mic down a bit. It was very rough and ready, but it worked you know, and I got a lot of work from guitar and drum sounds and getting drum sound especially was very difficult. PW So what would you say is the secret of getting a good drum sound? LA You need, first of all, you need a drummer that can tune his drums properly. That's obviously, a lot of people don't know how to tune a drum set and when you ask a drummer to stick tape on his snare and things that, often people really don't like this but you know, you fiddle around. I can remember spending at least an afternoon or more on one drum sound and of course that doesn't exist anymore because you've got, oh I don't like that drum sound, oh let's try that sample. And you get a sample, oh the hi-hat’s a bit loud, oh we'll pull that down. It's all so easy. But in those days, it wasn't easy and you had to keep plodding on until you got exactly what you were after. And I was lucky because I used to kind of know what I wanted, but a lot of artists didn't know what they wanted, thought they did and they weren't good at conveying what they wanted. So yeah, it was interesting. PW So what was your approach to miking the drum kit? LA Multi-miking was my key. I often had two or three mics on a snare, for instance. Yeah, I always used to do it in, I had a pretty set formula with fairly set mics, especially on the hi-hat, I always liked a really crisp mic on the hi-hat that I could pull out, you know, and overheads were, you know, the key to it all, especially if you're recording in a big room, it’s so great to get the ambience, you know. Look at Led Zeppelin, Bonham, you know, I was always dreaming of that ultra big Bonham sound, you know. PW So in a big live room, would you put room mics out as well? LA Oh gosh, yes definitely. The first thing I'd do, especially because I used to work all over the place, it sounds a bit naff, but you know, I'd go in and, you know, kick or slap or bang something, just to get an idea of what the reverb was in the room. And I can remember doing, I was doing an album for Ian Gillan, Purple, Clear Air Turbulence and we went to Montreux because he had a big thing about, you know, what was it, Smoke On The Water. So he wanted to go back to Montreux. Again, we had another Eastlake studio and it was so dead, it was, actually, when you close the door, I used to get a bit of a headache and couldn't get a guitar sound in me at all. And then I was getting someone to play chords and then somebody opened the studio door. Suddenly the amp jumped. It was like someone had taken a cloth off it, because the room compression was so high that the physical thing of having the door shut meant that the speaker cones couldn't move properly. It was that basic. Lovely position, Montreux, the casino, but the studio, oof, no. PW Well, luckily the era of over-dead studios seems to have passed us by now. LA Yeah, well it all came from The Eagles, didn't it and the West Coast, you know and that was very, you know, Hotel California. You just wanted the drums to go dumf dumf, you didn't want any splashing, banging, you know? So yeah, they were very suitable for that and he followed that formula without fail all over the world. Of course, when I started doing Heavy Rock, this was not actually where we wanted to be at all. Moving on to another thing was that location recording became a real thing because the studios were so unsuitable often that you went to a, that I was talking earlier about Sweet in Clearwell Castle, was a big castle in Wales with a mobile parked outside. You had your own studio you could design to your own spec pretty well the minute you started so that, I love the whole fact that you could just bespokely build a studio and one for the drums, one for the bass, another one for the vocal, just choose where you wanted to record, it was very good and in fact I got from that, I had the idea to build a mobile and I also built a mobile. It ended up being called the Fleetwood mobile and funny about that anyway, it was Fleetwood Macs ex-manager who put the money up for it and we spent a lot of money on this, but it wasn't a live mobile, it was always designed so I didn't have multiple multitracks, I only had one multitrack, but it had tiered seating so you could get six or eight people in the control room comfortably and it had a little kitchen out the back and it was really for these sort of long duration, parked up things. It was not suitable for live recording because you just couldn't change the tape. In those days, you needed to change tapes every 20 minutes, so that was not physically possible, but it was a very interesting thing and I think it's in Germany, still in use all these years later. PW It sounds like you enjoyed your time working in mobile studios because you could pick the acoustics of the venue you wanted to record in. LA Definitely. I loved the whole concept and that's how building one came about. Yeah and it was, you know, it's very interesting because often you went to a studio where you had to adapt the studio to suit your needs, whereas on the mobile, you had all the technology with you and you just use what rooms you fancied. Little living room for an intimate vocal, you know, it's all there, basically. PW We've spoken about some of the sessions that you've worked on, but in your opinion what makes a good recording engineer? LA Yeah, you have to be good. You have to know what you're doing and have a good ear but I always thought the most important thing was about handling people and it was about making people comfortable and you know, you've got a lot of egos in a room, oftentimes people that are, let's say of doubtful character, in my opinion, but they actually wholly believe that they were the best ever, you know? And so their egos became, often became a big problem and you had to sort of calm this down with the other members of the band, et cetera, et cetera. Especially if there were drugs involved, you know, a lot of bands were very much into cocaine, which is a nasty drug for creating strife, shall we say, the opposite of, you know, ganja or rasta band who are all really cool and comfortable. But when you've got an ego and a lot of coke, it’s a nightmare basically, becomes really quite difficult and so you have to kind of find a baseline where you steer your way through all this and still come out smilingand trying to keep everyone else smiling. PW Did you ever have any particularly difficult session? LA Yeah, I did quite a long album in a place called Eastern Sound in Toronto. A very, very, well not straight, but a regimented studio that were, you know, doing sort of dance bands and things like that. Anyway, Sweet actually they always thought they were heavy metal, heavy band. Actually, they were, but perceived as a total pop band. Andy had a fantastic guitar rig. I mean, very good and it was loud and he loved playing it loud. To get the sound, I have to say, you know, you needed it, that that sort of sound they wanted, you needed it pumping and Eastern Sound, we were in Studio One and we were in there, I can't remember for how long, a month, well over a month. And the next studio, of course, when Andy played a chord, everything in the studio rattled. I mean, it was so loud and of course all the other studios, two and three, they couldn't work at all while we were making the racket. It caused a big problem and the studio manager came storming in one day and said, oh you know, you've got to stop this, I can't tell you. The response from the band, you know, needless to say we carried on, but it was very, very tough. PW Eventually you left the recording business, why was that? LA It was the fact that I was stuffed by my own success in a funny sort of way, because I was so busy, I was away for months and months and I had a young family, little daughter, two, and it got to the point where, yeah, I wasn't enjoying it like I had. It was definitely, money came into it, you know, I was often thinking about the money rather than the music and my wife persuaded me to quit and start selling equipment. And I thought I had a head start because I had so many rich rockstar buddies. I mean, I sold the first stuff to Alvin Lee after I'd just done an album with him actually. And so my career drifted off into another phase. PW Thanks very much for talking to us, Lou. Sam Inglis Thank-you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.