George Massenburg

about half of what it states is fact wrong. That is code that doesn't work or code that causes things to crash, and code is code. I mean you have to run code, and if it's wrong, it crashes. So we have to be as careful as we are with AI generating code. We don't do any generative AI with code. We use it to wire controls in some of these development applications.

make music better, communicate what they're trying to say. And by the way, that presumes that artists always have something to say. And you may have an opinion on that, but the bottom line is we love making music. This group of seven of us, and you've interviewed half of us, I think, but I've lived a life of music in its group Bob, It's brought me tremendous joy when I stumble on something I've been working very hard at and finally I make it work or it clicks or it

has some magic, and it it affirms my life. It's the best thing I could, best way I can put it. I love music. Okay, that's your general philosophy. But just restating the question, why does AI music sound so bad? Well, here's the list. I'll work my way from the bottom up. Missing the feel.

groove is a story between musicians and time. Musicians for me, musicians in the studio where a great guitar player proposes a groove to somebody else in the room, and it's what can you do with this, Bernard or whatever that might be. Groove is a story in time, and you hear groove that's written to me everywhere. Mariacchi, you know the feel of mariachi is the feel of the groove. How something to the uninitiated sounds a little bit like a lurch off the forela, and that's groove, or in

one way of looking at that's groove. And AI doesn't do groove. Now maybe eventually you could learn. But the very heart of AI, the heart of AI, is nothing but a machine that does a comparative analysis and a thing called correlation, auto correlation, relative correlation. And the reason it soaks up so much power is the way I works. And you've heard it put this way. I know where you take two call them data sets, and you sort

on the correlated parts of two data sets. I'll get I'll get a lot simpiler in a minute, two correlated parts of data sets, and you're building a large model library. By the way, that's the expensive part of AI, is building the large model library. But all you're doing is finding commonality. And you're doing on more than this, but

it's very core. You're finding a commonality between data sets and what I would propose in its most rudimentary form, it's turning all of these different data sets looking for commonality into mush into beige mush. Nothing too surprising. It doesn't do anything terribly extraordinary or terribly Monday. Actually it's all Munday, and if you want to look at it that way. But it's selling some kind of genius that

I'm just not seeing. I think there's been tremendous room for we practitioners who use AI to take an idea, see what AI has to say about it, and then adds something of our own. And one thing that I would suggest is there's a lot of room to add it of our own feeling and knowledge. And it's sets of music and joy. There's no joy. Yeah, AI doesn't do joy. Oh god, I'm sorry. I'm running on of no no, no, no no no, I have these is all going to get cut.

I haven't talked to Tom in a couple of years ago, and I would say that he's a thinking man's producer. He's the thinking man's producer with a great, great field. Now I'm surprised you haven't haven't heard that he's out with us.

I see what you can do with it. And he feels the same way about AI that yes, I feel this, Ye, it will have us, but it's not going to replace the underlying music.

But that's that's a lie. It does recycle data because it does need to study its recommendations and make sure it's not echoing one of those early completely racist AI agents that put out like the worst recommendations, the worst language, hateful speech. And you've read about that, and it may have been early Meta that did that, just hateful, hateful speech, and they went in and started fishing for ways to limit that, they being the few programmers that really understand

how the AI algorithms were. So what I would what my mind jumps to is is how great Prince was because he you know, we all worked with Prince. In fact, you remember Cavala Ruffalo, they managed Prince and they got me the gag mastering some of the Prince stuff because Bernie Grutman couldn't deal with it what Prince was making him do. May he may rest in peace because he's he was the genius. He was on with true independent inspiration.

But but that thing that he discovered because we saw him use the drum machine, he used stock Lynn Lynn Allen one. We saw Ellen one when when David David Foster asked Roger Lynn to show it to him. So that was that was number one where it was still breadboards and uh boy, you could you could see the possibilities. And Prince saw it in three D. He was musically and I want to say, emotionally and technically a study in real creativity. Let's go back to the beginning of George.

So where do you grow up? All over the place. My father was an Air Force surgeon, so I grew up in four or five different cities. My father was from Macon, Georgia, mother was from at that time Pennsylvania. My grandfather was a mukeeting bucket Exxon which was called

Standard Oil. And so the most memorable times in my life were going to after they divorced, visit my father in Macon, Georgia, and have this experience with Southern radio that changed my DNA at the very heart is growing up listening to when I was in Macon, listening to race radio, listening to early black radio, and as near as I can figure. My father was a surgeon for the better part of the black community of Making, Georgia. I don't know whether he was the surgeon for notable musicians,

but he might have been. So I've got something you're going to have to cut out. My father was the only surgeon in town that would put his hand up a black man's ass to check for growths. And why do we have to keep out? Oh? I love you more and more, Bob Okay, use it. But he was. He was. The quarter of his year was charity surgery. He was, in my mind, a hero. Even though he was a terrible alcoholic and hated being a doctor. He

did use it. But growing up in Making, Georgia expose me to the early bird groups and I would turn on the radio and I as a seven year old, which is her raw sex pour out of the radio, And I said, well that's for me. I didn't know anything, but I loved music, and that was a side of music that I wouldn't have heard any other way. So that was Making. And we were also Scottsfield, Arizona, and be fifty twos flew Over and my brother and my

nephew are service families in the Navy. My nephew is an air boss on an aircraft carrier, and my brother rose to I'm so proud of my brother. We grew up miles apart. My brother went into service and was in naval Rotzzi and interviewed with Rumsfeld. He was one of the top ten guys in service. And we never spoke for years and years and years, and then when we did, we realized how much we loved each other.

But now I'm really getting farfield. I was a family and I was you've interviewed ry Cooter would refer to him as I was always a George. I was always a marginal person. I felt that way. It was always marginal. I was a terrible student. It was horrible.

why was it so hard to reach students. I wasn't silenced early, but I assumed that I could change the agenda. And I came to McGill having just started doing video in the studio, because at that time I had already demonstrated as well as I could that video directors. We were missing a lot, and so I wanted to do it on my own. So I bought some professional cameras and started taking doing video and the recording studio. This would be very quick, don't worry. Started doing video on

the recording studio. My second engineers would double as videographers. Would take one let's roll. They would put down their clipboard and pick up a camera and shoot the session. And I had a completely different experience with video, where I focused on the music and the performance and not what I came into it as a producer. Angry, an r person or whatever forces push a session over on its face. So I took that to mcgil where I was trying to make clear that we had a tremendous

resource at mcgillan's and Music. We had some extraordinary performance and we had recording facilities one of the pre eminent recording programs in the world mcguil Sound Recording, and I

tried to put it together. We had a tremendous director of the opera, Patrick Hanson, and we had wonderful donors Joe and Ivory and gave me discretionary use of some funds and so I could buy enough video to do pro video, and we changed video in Canada, I would submit where you know, we would keep keep it as research. Everything about about what I learned was about research, conducting research and doing it poorly, I mean, not good at it. But and I'm inconsistent and I'm lazy, But I did

find that musicians were far better videographers far better. And this is way before anything Instagram or TikTok or anything issues. Make better videographers because they follow the music. They follow the music, and as videographers on a live presentation, they're irreplaceable because they know where the music is going, they know where the action is going in opera, and this is lost on the better part of the school and a professional context. You know, I was not very well accepted,

and maybe it was my attitude. I still have a bad attitude.

their idea what an education was or is? And what I needed is for students to pay attention and survey your academics bomb and ask them what their biggest problem, the biggest problems were and are. And it's the challenge in my mind and my book is the challenge of getting students to pay attention. That's extraordinarily difficult. And when I could capture the attention of and this is this

is a graduate level course. Sound recording is a master's degree, three year degree, which is when I could get somebody on board with how to think about telling a story in video, because it's all about telling a story, same thing as music. We're there to tell stories. And that idea of coherence over time that first thing that an AIA agent has to deliver. On that list I sent you coherence of a story over time? How to get

a story to hang together? I turned a couple of my graduates into the direction of being professionals, and they're all working and they're making a fuck ton of money. I think they are. But the ones I could reach I did extremely well with. So I was encouraged to think that this Jacqueline Hide demeanor would get a student's attention and allow me to move it move. The conversation on that was just mean, Okay, if.

I was so impressed with Billy Joel, and I've did a record with him and didn't see certain sides of him as far as writing went, and was very close to Phil Ramona, and I know what Phil brought to

Billy Joel, and it wasn't always Billy Joel's idea. But to fill the point I was trying to make, or trying to lead into, is the idea that there's so much noise out there, and the industry is smaller and in competition with sports and with video games and with God knows what that you're likely to draw off how to find that brilliant person again, find that what on terms that I could I could relate to this, This person, Jimmy well Web is a good example of somebody, ah

who I am in awe. The way he puts moving tones together and by the way he puts music, he puts lyrics together is idiosyncrasies. And there are men, there are many others that you and I have known that we would have to call brilliant, but they're harder and harder to find. I did. I started a record Tammy Emmanuel, who is that kind of idiosyncratic, complete genius, independent way of expressing himself and God knows where it comes from, but you know right away that this is a transcendent artist.

So that's the problem. And the other thing is nobody picks me as a producer anymore. You know, I have this thing that I do where I'll do it once. When I got out of Earth Wind and Fire many many years ago, I had a lot of offers and I did a couple of them and realized that they didn't want any innovation whatsoever. They just wanted me to repeat what they thought were my ideas with earth Wind and Fire. And I didn't do the heavy lifting with her from the Fire, Marys wife did and I couldn't

fulfill that dream, so I stopped taking work. I still won't answer the phone. But Tommy Emmanuel persisted, so I had to work with him. Also, he was brilliant, so I had to work with him. Linda persisted. A lot of these artists persisted, and that worked with him.

Bob you wrote some checks. People would pay for that in the sixties and seventies, and then people tried to simplify it and gave it to accountants. With the turn of the nineties and the experience of having artists like Michael Jackson go for what did he go for forty points to Walter forty five points? You know, and the artists took control, they took their music back, and they didn't they couldn't do that formula anymore where one out of twenty would fund the other nineteen. But you know,

Michael wouldn't allow that. And then Braca, you should interview John Braga Braco wouldn't allow that.

nasty drugs. So before the Wednesday night show at the Rainbow, you could see loll in the lobby with an armful of T shirts selling T shirts for half price so he could make enough money to buy blow. And And that was the story of the the downfall of the production of the Rainbow.

John Starling, the leader of the Seldom scene. You probably never heard that name, but he had the great bluegrass and I come out of bluegrass. Bluegress in classical music and the bluegrass were a lot of these early bluegrass artists. Live to two track, where I really learned how to mix live to two track for Rebel Records, Country Gentlemen, the Osborne's Seldom Scene and and John Starling was no was throat doctor. And when Linda fell ill on the road,

she went to stay with she. She canceled her gigs and this is seventy four. Canceled her gigs and went to live with John Starling and his wife, Issue Starling, also wonderful singer. And during that time We'll quit Little Feet, I'm out, fuck you guys, and was hanging out with Linda and so Lowell on this hiatus from Little Feet, wanted to get a song with Mike Aldridge, the dobo player, and he had this wacky tune called Everybody Slide is

all about slide guitar. And just hung out and that's how I met Old George and we got to be friends. He was impressed that, rather then yelling at people to be quiet in the control, that I put on a pair of headphones and carried on. Nothing stopped me. And had proposed that we worked together, and we did a lot.

gotta know he's one of the greats. Jimmy Douglas and I are doing a podcast, and I'm and I tell this story, and he said, wait a second, that happened to me too, And as a three year old. As a four year old, he was wondering how light bulbs work. So each of us had the same experience where we unscrewed the light bulb and stuck our finger in the socket and got blown down, blown on our backs, but

experienced the universe. I don't know how to make it more trivial sounding, but we learned a lot about electricity. So I was always impressed with this great power that electricity had. It. When I got my first piece of shit tape recorder, it was five years old, and it was just.

It's horror. I mean I was already doing sound in Baptist Church and I was away from my follower and moved up to Baltimore. I was at a church and they lost their sound engineer.

thought was a miracle. And that's where I wanted to quote enturity, because his, his, his, his, his, His line was the music must be a miracle to be able to put that feeling through a wire. And that resonates me still with me still, Okay, I was. I wasn't good at anything. Wait a second, I don't want to claim to be good at anything. I didn't. I mean only occasionally when I fixed something and it was by accident.

Baltimore had the greatest jocks in the world. They had a guy named Fat Daddy Paul Johnson, I think it was his real name, and you would have heard of this guy who was the hot DJ W W I N. And I remember coming home from when I was still in college, and this is a good story and so but I'll make it quick, coming home from the late night card game at AEPI API. Mostly we smoked pot and played cards, but I remember an all night poker session and I wasn't particularly good at poker, but I

didn't lose too much either. But I remember coming home at six point thirty in the morning, driving home and Paul Johnson was playing Stay with Me Baby Lorraine Ellison and played it over and over and over again, five six times in a row, and every time just raved about what a great record. But it really struck me as how to connect how to connect that kind of performance with radio, because I know you remember the song. Everybody remembers the song, and everybody tried to do it.

Linda tried to do it, and nobody could quite do Lauren Nellison. And by the way, that's a whole interesting story because that was a Phil Remont record where Frank had the studio booked. It was an early an R on forty eighth R recording and an ar got the call to do this session for Frank Sinatra, and so they booked an orchestra a band because it was all about room. And the day before.

off the off the floor. But that's one of the great stories of Lorraine Allison was in the right place at the right time and knew the right people, and Frank was going where Paul Springs to get married. How's that for a story that one I haven't heard?

and I didn't. I didn't get to really appreciate the Beatles until until Sergeant Pepper and what they did with that record, and then I got to work with him and we did a Boy. One of the records we did was got to Get You Into My Life. And I had known George pretty well by then because I had built his automation system for uh their at the Oxford Circus, and he had sued Neve. He among others, had sued Neve form ninety six, and so I was famous in the business for having got up in these face.

But I don't think I gave him what he wanted on that record that he was with the Beg's and Peter Frampton, which was the first record I knew of to return platinum. Yeah, and you know the record it was not a good record, but it was a copy or an emulation of a pooky Valentine to the Beatles, where they just kind of copied Beatles arrangements and copied the Beatles sounds. And we did, we did got to get You into My life and from scratch arrangement, and

we did it. I remember playing it for George, who immediately took it to Paul, and Paul listened to it over and over and over again for a whole Sunday, just listening to Maurice's vocals and the arrangement. And now I'm way off track, But the but the I didn't really like the Beatles until until George and realizing how much influence Georgie had, and for a while that was who I wanted to be. See. I think the notifications

are a gift from God. Every time I say something I could really state as a fact, it goes off. I'm sorry, not the middle of the screen.

And one thing he did was to offer me, however much money to buy my company, and then when I would sell it, he collected enough money from Joe Martinson to just copy my system, and that fun A little bastard. Joe Martinson tried to patent one of a broad array of ideas. Because we were building from scratch. We hated DeCamp ninety six, so we built the fader from scratch,

built the hard disk processing from scratch. I programmed a Unix like automation system from scratch so that whenever you rolled tape, the system would locke into where you were, which, among other ideas, turned into ideas that stuck. And I didn't patent that. It was like the equalizer. I didn't patent the parametric I didn't know it was worth patenting. I should have. And then rained Olemy came along and copied parts of it, and that was another story, another nightmare.

So all of these, I think at some point you're going to say, this guy is so full of shit. So I did bring my paper on autom and so I can show you that. I could show you the parametric equalizer paper that I delivered at seventy two.

and would have made it patentable. And it just came up. I came. I was recording music at that time I had done. I was running a directed two track studio. What did I do that you would have heard it? I did the demo for arthur' connelly that he took to Memphis and Steve and he wrote sweet soul music. But the demo that he went with where you lead me,

I will follow. So that's the record we sold to Stacks and I did that in Baltimore, directed to track and so I was doing music when I wasn't doing commercials, and that was my recording studio experience. When I dropped out of Hobbins, I got a job doing commercials for Lean Shapeer, Golding Bank and car commercials, package commercials and learned how to how to work in the studio, but a lot of it. We invented the mixer. It was a two mixer that sounded great. Listened to Philadelphia records,

listened to New York records. Early all the pop records were bell sad and a handful of studios. Later, an R much later, An R And figured all these records sound great because there's some piece of equipment that I'm missing. And so I built all this stuff. And it wasn't the equipment. It was the musicians and the arrangements and the writing, the songwriting. So I learned a lesson there. But there was a studio called it I Studios, Recordings

in corporate and then it TI. So I'm really jumping around. So this must be very hard. Stop making excuses. You come up with the idea of the Pyrami metric equalizer with these other guys. Did you then have it manufactured? Oh no, I did it.

my equ and I did it. I did the hard the almost impossible to realize how to vary the queue with a Vernier.

of a piano. So that was the gig is. I've got to build my own equalizer because we didn't have any money. We couldn't afford anything. And I built my own four track just because I needed one. But I didn't learn it from anybody. Got to work.

and that's what people think a limitter does. Any rate back to an equ so the EQ was going back to the RCA Radio handbook and picking out a circuit called a te filter two resisters two capacitors, and all depending on how far apart the pastors are spread, you can make a sharp notch or a broad notch or broad them to a very wide range and move the game up and down on the notch and you have variable Q. Well, nobody had tried that before, and that was where I got into trouble at Hopkins, because I

wanted to learn something in my first year systems course and the professor was, ah, was what I hear lately? Real warfare? Stupid? I mean, these the assistant professors were just fucking idiots, and I just had to get out of there. But I knew what I had already done, and he said, well, that's a possible and I use a circuit variation called a gyrator to turn a cheap capacitor into an adductor. It trans transforms is not the

right word transforms. Reactants turned a deductor, which is why are around the back accord into a capacitor, which is two plates. He said, well, you can't do that, that's only a theoretical abstraction. Well, I've got one, and you're an idiot, so that wasn't very good. I didn't say you're an idiot under my breath. But all this stuff is there, Bob. You know everything that you see smart

designs in plugins, it's all there. Apple and these other companies put it out there, put the tools out there for free, and you had to do something with it. So we built plugins. It's changed a lot, business has changed a lot.

much better. The first digital machine I heard was Tom Stockin's Honeywell data recorder with a really awful front end, and I remember playing something back for Jeff Bercaro and at Sunset Tom Stockher was trying to make a business out of digital and there's a story before that, but at any rate, we Jeff would walk into the control and say, hey, man, where's the high hat And we had to say, well, it doesn't go up that high yet, Jeff,

because it didn't. It had a fifty k badwidth sampling and high hat didn't sound like I had and it was sixteen bit, so all of that digital direction that I took was in response to hearing something that sounded awful emas awful awful fiddles didn't sound like fiddles. And I had just come out of real musicians playing on great microphones to an Ampex three hundred through a console that we built tube console using high trans conductance twelve A y sevens. It's pureless K two forty one D

had put transfer. Its amazing And I remember this shit and it was immersive and small eye immersive, and I'm getting chills still remembering going out and doing remotes at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where I'd take out a couple of mics and do a feed, an FM feed to WBL, the FM station in town, and nobody listened. So I could do anything. I could put the microphones anywhere I wanted, and the experimenting with an orchestra, I'd never lost that lust of experimenting with dorks room.

So I knew right away that they were all fucked, and unfortunately I would have to tell them and made friends of the Ajax men of science who thought they knew everything and they didn't and couldn't because they were blocked blocked in they're thinking. So I got a better converter from Renee at DBX had done a different kind of converter, and I bought blocks from what we made our on converter. It started to sound better. But that's all I ever hoped for is if you can work better.

I have a direction, that's what hey round up the posse. That's where we're going. I know the direction now it's not there yet, but I know where we've got to go with it. And so I'm working with Serus Semiconductor these days, who are really great engineers and sort of discovering the border borders of where I can go with design and digital. It's still is not there, but I love three eighty four. We did the Tommy Emmanuel one nine two, and I can say that I feel the difference.

So I've got let me brag for a minute. So I've got the best headphones I can get. These are automatic research and I've also got well you've seen Audies. I'm a big fan of audis and all these are these guys that our audience can't see them, but I can flash them. These guys are you've seen these?

So you know, I'm friends with those guys. If I help, If I help these guys that have built something brilliant get the word out there, we're friends for life.

engineer at Sony that I got to like. Cold Taka was the smart guy at the Shubora Jubbara factory and he was the that it talks on you Sodia to putting money into this black project in the corner of the factory. And we both discovered that the very earliest good converter, which was a crystal something crystal converter was

a company before it was Cerrus. And discovered that one of the pins was the output of a modulator and if you took that pin, that one pin out of the chip and just ran it into a filter, that was the DDA converter was a resistor and a capacitor. It was the DDA converter coming out of a digital digital stream which was pulse with modulation, and so a talk and D show turned that into a product before uh Shaboya the Home office was ready and set the samp or a too fucking low. So there were better

DSD processes that came out that were faster sabary. But here's the takeaway is that no matter how fast we went, and of late we're doing three eighty six and DSD times sixteen, which is sixteen bits wide at sixteen x fs sixteen times two point eight megaarants sixteen times, you can imagine the data rings and it's pretty fucking hard to hear. So I'm gonna have to say that eventually it'll get there, and maybe there'll be another way to

do the converters. But the guys at Cerrus are about the best I've heard so far, So I mean, I'm liking digital. It's so much more convenient. If you have a mistake, we've learned how to LaVey attract together to fix one little mistake that casts this long shadow over a performance. But she had she had one note wrong

in the chorus, and that colored her thinking. And I'm talking about a female artist, now you can guess that colored her thinking about the whole track, and a lot of artists are like it that you're one thing and forget about the track. So so early on I got really good at and I'm going to brag about it because we all got good using a Sony thirty three

forty eight edit takes together before there were workstations. Before there was It's about the same time as Sodic Solutions, So there was a Sodic Solutions workstation, but it was very expensive and the converters were terrible, but I stayed friends with him. For you, that's Andy Moohr, who was one of that handful of digital engindeers that invented everything.

Andy Moore sort of the when he worked for George Lucas, he invented this machine called the sound Droid, and he did it so that he could do one performance of the deep Note. You remember the Deep Note the t checks. He that was Andy Moore, the musician said now I could if I just had a powerful enough computer. So he got George to invest in Sprocket Systems and he was going to build at the edit Droid, at the sound Droid, and uh, he's he's really my bottle of

a great university professor. He was at Stanford for all those years, and everybody remembers, and he wrote the basic papers. We still talk and he stole a musician. The point is is that he was always pushing the boundaries and it was an inspiration. There was always something better. So I'm constantly throwing the baby in the water.

It later had two fabels and two fine builds in the dirtiest environment ever in Pratt and Paki Street in downtown Baltimore, and I did labels and jackets wherever there was a need, I say, well, I could do that, and learned printing in graphic arts because I had to do it, and process photography, you know, the big cameras of the whole rooms process photography. In other words, anything that came along that interested me. I would try to

fill a need and build something or make something. And I'm bragging, but I don't know any other way to put it. I learned how to press records. We learned how to master records of very automatic variable pitch systems. We had a better system, and eventually was Jerry Block who really came up with the working system. He was chief engineer of Sigma Sout for a long time. What you're getting under the idea that this life is in

the technical world is a world of relationships. And I can't stress that about all of these different ideas were relationshipships that we had with other energy. The latest relationship, let's balance the one thing that the okay, but this latest relationship that is in an actually relationship. Barcodiari who was head engineer at Real World for Peter for a long time. Okay, carry on.

theorized how many people are on your level? Who can you talk to and have a fulfilling conversation.

and hey mc seventy five five. And so I had a conversation now four or five weeks ago with Chris and Mike, and you couldn't get us off the phone. We were talking about old designs that made Mackintosh special, especially the output transformer. And there aren't that many guys to talk to, And I want to say. I keep looking for them because I did find a young kid three years ago that was recommended to me as an analog engineer. The kid wants to be an analog engineer.

All I want to do is take him to lunch and say, are you fucking kidding? You know that you'll never make any money. Nobody will understand a word you say. And he and I have been working together on new designs. So I have to invent the people to talk to. I have to go out and find somebody that I could train. And this this kid is brilliant. He's brilliant. Somebody will seal him.

one of the few things I didn't make money. And Kyle bought the idea and it wasn't his idea. It came from an art the record company. Generally, I'm not keen on talking about record companies in any kind of positive way, but had the idea, well, why don't we try to do that? But we do it right and right meant that Randy had to be involved with the song. So we're circling back to AI. Randy had to be involved with the song and it had to get past

Kyle because Kyle it's an old analog engineer. It's not old, but he's in my my group. Mike Reid, you've certainly heard of Mike Read and one day you should interview Mike Reid. I'll tell him about it because we've all listened. We talked about it. Mike Reed, you recall, is the guy that went to uh Penn Penn State with Paterno and was writing string quartets and playing football. Mike Reed went to the what team did he go to? But head played three seasons in the NFL and then wrote songs.

Was and still is a songwriter and a the funniest guy I've ever met in my whole life. And so we get together every Friday morning with Bill Stay. I'm surprised Bill didn't talk about this. I see Bill every Friday morning. We used to get together in Los Angeles every Tuesday and then every Thursday night. Now we get together here and have coffee every Friday. So Bill, Bill is if you'll allow me to rave about Bill, He's He's who I would like to grow up to be.

Is Bill Stay is a mixer because he is all musical, bustle, Every twitch of his fingers, every twitch of his body is musical, is performing. He's my hero.

my wife read that you have to be invented. My favorite platform would be a super high rate converter one two, three four with actually with an analog app that we've just built for the back end of a d d A, so it has yet to be invented. It's called a DAC follower. It is that little piece of linear gear, linear silicon go on the other end of digital analog converurner and everybody does it with the same circuitry, and we think we can do it better at doing it analog.

So is there a place for analog? Yep?

James Shaunston. He's a really good scientist. Data scientist. Carl hides is hopeless. But it sounds like shit. And they did it based on what's called perceptual coding. Everything that's wrong about MP three's is because they depend on perceptual coding. You want to guess what that is, I'll just tell you. It's that you know, it sounds enough like music so that we can pass it off if a listener isn't listening too carefully, that's perceptual coding. Perceptual coding is a

little like how many animals are in this picture? Well, there's a bear behind the tree, isn't there? That's perceptual coding. And it just sucks. And at the bandwidth and data sizes or capabilities that we have now, there's no reason for it, and they're still doing perceptual according the best work I've heard has been Morton Lindberg at L two Records.

L two Records. So you run through you were you see the immersive Gravvy Ive wought a couple and I'd have to say that Morton Ledbergh, that's the best work in the field, and he is relentless about quality and nobody knows it. So next time you see Morton Lindbergh, imagine that you could get one of his productions and listen to it. But that's what I'd use. I'd use a Morton Lindberg inspired system and a Morton Lindberg source.

and our ears and our hearts. That was Shining City on the Hill and it was so good, and he was such a good live mixer that he could capture that off the floor. So there's so many stories I couldn't even beginuse. You should get built to tell them. But all our audience were high fi stories back when there was such a thing as a high Fi store, and that seduced us into thinking that it could be

possibly the difference could possibly be heard by anybody. Now at the same time we're trying to do this, we're

trying to do great music. So we have a couple of different tracks here that we're trying to satisfy because we learned pretty quickly that if it's just a technical presentation of some piece of shit music, then it's hopeless that it has to the music has to be there as well, which means everything about the music, the writing, the arrangement, the performance and the recording all have to

all have to work. So here's where we come to the part in our story where John McBride at Blackbird Studios and you've been here, have you seen my play?

You know, I did not. I arrived here on the back of the trio record, which I think to this day is a marvelous record. Is Dolly, Linda and Emmy, which I produced, is a marvelous record, and so many stories, And so they hated me when I came to town. They thought that I was could acclaim that I could make this kind of record for anybody. There were a couple of artists that did roots records. Mary Chapin Carpenter did that kind of record. Others did that kind of record.

But they're just not getting back to getting back to some kind of innovation, and they're still making these god awful records, these god awful country records, and the business is long gone, that country music radio, the radio record, that radio hit record long gone. You know that you've written about it, and they just won't let go of it. So finally there are a couple of vacus. Oh what

is Jack White? Jack White recorded in the room next to it, and he loved showing people around the room the studoc when he was doing some of those other records that he did. He's a good guy, by the way, Jack White. I love Jack. He invests from his heart to your original question about about Blackbird is John has poured his heart into it, and I don't I think that he is really delivered on his promise because I

didn't delivered to John McBride what I promised him. I promised him that the studio would work, and it did. But what it did best was to provide a listing room in a totally immersive environment, a diffuse, a purely diffuse room. And it wasn't my idea. I mean I had an initial idea. Peter D'Antonio of RPG, and I seeded his thinking early on, but he did the best he could do. I did the best I could do, and that's what I decided to go teach because nobody liked it, nobody until recently.

Romanoski to do her catalog. And it was Anne Mitchelli whose vision it was to remix her catalog and it was hideously hard to do. That's that's that's a recipe for failure, trying to remix multi as immersive interfuse. I did my best, and I think I failed so much that I owed a lot of money because I think I failed and it's my responsibility. I told him we could do it. We didn't, So I'm sorry, and I'm

sorry Alicia. And by the way, if you haven't interviewed Alicia, she is the most extraordinary artist of the geniuses that I mentioned, she's at the head table. She is completely brilliant.

Is completely the opposite of what it was designed for. And it took a while, but it took guys that were particularly inspired to see the possibilities of having variables frequency and be able to tune a dip equalizer to take out a harmonic that was just driving you crazy, or a fundamental of a guitar, or the fundamental of a snare drum, so you could get that big fat snare drum. You're welcome.

And so the way Peter Asher and I busted that is Boostin had a party at his house post Medata, and I fed Peter Asher, who was also very smart, exactly what that was, what HRTF simulation was. And the day before or maybe it was Lenny, one of the two had to sign the contract for points on Q sound.

Peter went to a dinner party at most it was Christmas, He's Jewish party and told them that it really wasn't worth it, that the idea had already been patented by roland In RSS, and that was the end of that. So that's something that I love, really love to do, is the guys that are disinclined to be honest about inventions, disinclined to be clear about where IDs came from, disinclined to be respectful of patents. A boy, I'm at their throats. I think that's my job.

as a writer. She married San Francisco Bay Captain talking about Captain Noah, very captain, nice guy. Her second marriage was to Jim Gordon. Her third marriage was to Jim Horne. Her fourth marriage there was a woman in here somewhere, so she married a woman in there. But fourth and fifth marriage was me and then she married a stock and security salesperson. So I've had a personal life all along. I just kept going for it. I can't but for the X two, the X one was loved by life.

When just after I had designed the equ and we no longer did that, it was the next of years. I just had to get out of the country. What to do well? We moved to Paris and I lived in Paris for two years. Couldn't speak French to save my life. Do you speak French? Mom?

fucked up. I had I have spinal synosis from lifting all that ship for all those years, and had two procedures and a labinectomy in a ten eleven hours day under propofault, and she coaxed me back to life, but I didn't want to do it. Take the exercise, will whatever it was, take the this horrible drug that they got paid. So I'm just coming out of that and I owe my life stenosis.

him whatever he needs. Or my young assistant Kasrie Orrai, who I taught at Berkeley, and she said I'm going to move to Nashville and get a gig, and that was almost thirty years ago, and nobody would hire her, and I had to hire her, and every time I gave her something to do, she would excel at Kasri, could you learn photoshop? Yeah? How about my next Friday, Casri? How about Final Cut Pro?

We're of like minds and like hearts. The way we mix and the way we the way we listen, and I just have so much respect for him that he'll never suggest anything that I say, I can't do that. Never, never, I can't think of the thing. So we got together in this group run by another buddy, kind of a manager of the group, and the seven of us, all seven would get together have meetings that we'd have actual meetings at ah shows and then we'd have virtual meetings.

But every time we got together there would be endless laughs, especially for med Journey, who's the funniest guy on earth. Before that Al Schmidt and before that Phil Ramon, and it all came from you know, at the show one year in two thousand and too, Phil mentioned it to a bunch of guys and then Al said, yeah, that'd be a good idea, and then and helped move it

to Narris to the Recording Academy. Now it's the P and E Wing, But that group that we got together exists today as the Meta Alliance Music Engineers Technology Alliance and Elliot and I did a book that Jim sort of liked the idea. I don't think it did very well. It was the Drum Book How we all did drums.

Thought that was going to be be great, didn't make any money, And then we did in the studio with the guys and we do demos back when Ed and Al Schmidt were participating, and then and then Phil died and looking for other people, and I chose Nico Bolas and and not in the pushy ways. So nobody thinks

it's my idea. It was my idea, and Nico, you know, did Neil for all those years Bill Young and and then and then after Ed died, I've always wanted to invite Jimmy Douglas and had also talked to Sylvia Massey and they weren't ready, but then they were ready. So the seven of us now include Nico, Bolas, Jimmy and Sylvia Massey. And in the studio with the guys didn't work. So Elliott and I proposed doing sitting on stage and telling stories, which everybody hated. So Elliott and I said,

this is a great idea. Let's just do it without the guys, and so we designed it and funded it, and eventually the guys fell in line, and we did a show at Bridgefield a year at the Ridgefield Playhouse in in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which we designed. We kind of we kind of scripted, but we scripted in the sense that we organized telling stories. I kept them on a spreadsheet and could work off a spreadsheet. And it was successful.

It was the proof of concept, and I would be surprised if you hadn't seen it, because we were encouraged to do it by everybody we talked to, including my next door neighbor Gary Getzman, from when I lived on Valley Vista in Sherman Oaks. But we never really we never pursued it until we did it at Richfield, and then Elliott and I said, well, what the fuck, because we're both old, We're two old guys, and I had to do it. And so that's what Machine Center. The

thing at Machine Center is a boy, Bob. If you could help us do anything, we would be in your debt for all time.

that fixed time. And this time, in one of the promo passes, we asked the audience if they had anybody that they'd like like to hear about, and some gentle souls said Phil Ramond. And we've each of us got about ten Philramonds stories, including that one I told you

about Stay with Me Baby. So the way we do it is we get together on these calls and we just entered tain each other, and I write down a short version of the idea on a spreadsheet, and then we get together and decide which ones to be serious about and which ones to rehearse. And once we rehearse them, we know what kind of time they'll take and how

to fit them in. So we're doing this, this show, and we're basically at living it, which just about everybody has told us won't work, and we don't think they're right.

We finally got down to every one of us has to have at least eight shows, where we could rotate them if we feel so inspired, or we add one, but we give ourselves a break in that we've got one that's well rehearsed and we could just roll that story out, because you know, at the end of the day. That's what we did in the studio. We could tell stories and because you had to make people, there are a couple. Here's one of the things that AI doesn't do is it doesn't know how to tell a joke.

So I started with AI asking an AI agent to tell me a joke, and it couldn't. But it could say, no, you tell me a joke, which meant that it was taking my joke and stealing it. And so I didn't tell any jokes. But AI doesn't do certain things at all. It does not do well this thing of coherence of a story, like a song, where you can have a last verse that wraps it up like a Jimmy Webleer, and I love you more that says, and I love you for all time. It's bad English that he famously repeats.

But it's something today I couldn't do. I love you more than need I love you more than need you, but I and I need you for all time A. I couldn't do that because it dismays the laws of grammar. Couldn't do that. I can't do good vibrations, could not do good vibrations. Even if it did good vibrations. It couldn't imagine the way Brian Wilson put that together. So we can tell a story, we can tell sort of

fucking Phil Remond, you'd be working. We did the second Duets record Lennon Segon some frack tracks, and we got started with with Phil Remone. Came to Northern California, we started recording, or we thought, but no. Bill Vermont started telling stories at eleven or twelve in the morning, and about the time six or seven o'clock rolled around and said, well,

we got to eat dinner. We'll finish after dinner. Got back to it, hadn't recorded note one and Phil turns to us and said, well, are we going to get anything done today? So that kind of story. I've got a Linda's story about Linda eating a cherry pie off the floor, a cherry pie with a lard crust that she had the cook that we had in Northern California bake and do you think there's a lot of lard in Northern California. So I mean, we've got stories. So we've got stories.

for it. And we'll go back to Gary, and we were well positioned to pass the idea off and have somebody else do it. But I've never had that kind of involvement with a director where I trust them, because they all fucked me over the largest largest portion of my career. One thing I could say is that every video director I've ever worked with should be buried under thirty feet of sand at the bottom of the marrier

this trench. They're just got off and I keep trusting them, and I've said I'm not trusting director any well unless it's certain classic guys. So well, so we decided to do it on a all but we didn't have enough money, so we thought put on a show.

of it and spread the word. What you were doing is unique, But you're first going to appeal to an older demo that is hard to reach, who we're going to be unaware of it. So you have to literally do everything you can to reach these people. Don't hold anything back, Bob.

people are gonna find it. And if you find something you like, you're gonna tell other people. You have to give yourself a fighting chance.

record whenever we could a bigger track. So if we had one phrase that was wrong in the first chorus, we would never spin it, fly it a copy it from courts to chorus. We would also encourage the singers, which were Lola Jackson, to sing it from the top every time, even if you have just one line you need to fix, get lost in the song, sing the song again. So I could get on today and tell that story and get people to listen to it, and you would still cop and it became the Handley Cop.

And there's a story in doing Handley Cops because he was just I mean, if Jackson was obdurate, Handily was crazed. Guys was JD. Southern And there's no better voice in the world than Henley. But boy, working for it is a drag. Never say yes again. But I can't say that. They never speak to me again.

I'm talking to Irving and I said, what did Don have to say, because you and me both know Don's a perfectionist, and he said, Don said that the monitor mix wasn't perfect and the horns were too aloud on a specific song. And I was very close. There's fifty thousand people there, and I could hear it a little bit. So I say to Irving, I say, you know, I heard that a little bit. I don't think anybody would notice. And he said, those little tiny things what make the

difference between good and great? What makes it to like it average? To it really touches you. And I'm telling the story years later because yes, as my psychiatrist says, sometimes you change one thing and the whole picture changes.

you change everyone's mind altitude. But you know what what this goes back to with Don is he was right, exactly, He's right. I've done vocals vocals with Don where he do a hard like a bizarre harmony that he would write that just me, you know, like a Jimmy Webb harmony.

you eventually interviewed Larry Dunn. And they didn't sing in tune until we really got a hold on how to direct their performance in the studio. And of course they're brilliant performances. Don't get me wrong, I can't sing, but why do I have it here? From pitch and for harmonies and how to make harmony's buzz. So so getting those right had a lot to do with that sound of earth, which let me go way out the limb.

Change the sound of R and B markedly and quickly R and B was one thing before we did Earth Wind and Fire and another thing after not quickly. It was a different game. You know.