Robert Scovill

do his normal stadium run throughout the year. So we were in rehearsals. We were in Nashville and rehearsing for about six weeks total, and then right before we were ready to finish, I mean the day before we were ready finished, they said, oh, we're gonna have Kenny closed the CMT Awards, so we're gonna go do that. So everybody kind of dropped everything they were doing and said, okay, let's go get ready to do the c MT Awards. So they closed the show and uh, it kind of

went off without a hitch. It was a nice thing, but you know, you kind of get these curve balls thrown at you all the time. You know, so no problem there, let's go. So how do you interfaces Kenny's engineer with the engineer for the show? Yeah, it's it's an interesting thing, and honestly, every one of the award shows are different in how that sort of happens. I mean, as you can imagine, every band that comes on any of these shows. Uh, you know, has their own people

that work for them. But you know, depending on what city you're working in, you know, it can be heavily regulated by the union. Uh you know some Nashville or Tennessee is kind of a right to work state, so it's not necessarily union. But you know, if it's not too complex, you know, more often than not, you're just gonna be you know, kind of the backstop for the

engineer that is actually mixing the event to air. You're gonna kind of let him know, Okay, this is what's going to be hit and you here be ready for this. Usually there's you know, there's plenty of run throughs, you know, or camera blocking and rehearsal, so you can kind of get pretty well set where you feel comfortable with the audio that's gonna go to air and then the man's has got to get up there and performance, so uh, you know, so preparation is kind of the key to

it sometimes. I mean, I over the last couple of years, I've gotten my Union card, after you know, forty years in the business, I got a Union card so that I could actually be the guy sitting in the chair for some of these awards shows where I'm on the other end of it, where the band's engineers coming up and guiding me through it. So you know, I've kind of been on both ends of it. Now. Okay, so you're rehearsing with Kenny getting the sound right when he

actually does an award show. How much of his own equipment does he bring and how much of the sound from the stage are you responsible for before it feeds into the mixer for television? Right? Well, again, I mean, I hate to be so abstract about it, but it depends on the show. Like you know, obviously, some television shows are uh, you know, a pre record or you'll record it and then the band will get up there

and mime to it. Uh. Some of them are fully live, things like Rock and Wall Hall of Fame induction that is a completely live event. You know, everybody's performing at that. But you know, kind of depending on the producers you're working with or the show format, you know, sometimes it'll it might even be a hybrid of that, whereas prerecorded music. Band is playing to it, but it's all live vocals, you know, So it can be any combination of those things.

For TV UM TV is a very particular little animal there for doing live music for sure. Okay, so if you're doing it, do you record the live track and you do it before and how do you do that? Yeah? Well, I mean luckily, in this day and age, we're, you know, with the way we do live sound now, we're we're set up to do any kind of recording, any kind of multi track recording, any kind of to mix, etcetera. So what happened in this particular situation was, you know,

we were recorded it at rehearsals. I mean it was actually the band playing the player run through. You record it, then you remix that in a studio and bring in what are called stems, which are you know, one volume control basically for the drums, one for this guitar player, one for the other guitar player. It's kind of pre mixed and then that's what goes to air, and then

they put live vocals right on top of it. So, you know, television product and you know they're looking for consistency, predictability. You know, they've got to stay on schedule, you know, to the second. Really, so everything is really really highly scripted for those TV show, especially live TV for sure, you know, so they don't they don't allow a lot of flexibility there. Really for the most part, they want to know exactly what's coming at him and deal with

that accordingly. Okay, so if Kenny is doing live vocals, does he bring his own mic and do you sit there with the engineer saying set the board like this, this is how he likes it, Again, depending on the show. On the vast majority of shows, especially for a lead vocalist,

they can bring their own microphone. Sometimes it gets into a little bit of a problem if they want to bring a wireless microphone, because you know, wireless frequency management in this day and age is very very challenging, so you know, you'll you'll be under the strip confines of why he has to work within this frequency range for

the transmitter and the receiver, etcetera. But usually that's that's even acceptable, and we can kind of get that going and then they can be comfortable with their own mic, you know. I mean, you know, see a lot of artists they have their own mic blinged out and cutting jewels and be dazzled and all kinds of other stuff on it, so you know, it's part of their brand, so to speak. So they'll theyn't want their own mic, and and that's fine. I have no problem with that.

And then yeah, you'll sit there with the engineer and go, Okay, these are kind of the characteristics of Kenny's voice you need to look for here, you know, blah blah blah, and just try to help him be fast and get through it. So, okay, you mentioned the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You've been the overall engineer for those telecasts, correct. My first one was this year. I did the one this year after they you know, they postponed for a year. I was supposed to do it the year before, but

then COVID shut it down. So this was my first year handling that and it was really cool. I really loved it. I hope I hope they asked me back to do more of them. Let's start from the beginning. How did you get the get One of the um production managers for the gig knew me from touring years

and years ago. We toured together, and you know, just reputation carries a lot of weight in that situation, and they had an opening and he called me and said, hey, are you would you be interested in mixing and rock and roll Hall of Fame inductions? I said, heca, yeah, let's go. So, uh, you know a lot moving parts in that show, Man boy, I mean, it's a it's a big it's kind of a monster to wrestle to the ground from the musical end of it as well

as the rest of it. I mean, it's that's a big production to do, and especially given that they want to do it all as live performance. You know, there's there's no there's no miming in that show for sure. So that that's cool, That makes it. That's attractive to me. You know, I love being involved in those sort of things and taken on that kind of that kind of task. So you get the gig? How long before the recording date in that situation, Well, because of COVID, I had

it almost a year and a half before. But in a normal situation, you know you're gonna get in listed for that gig a good a good six months in advance because you're doing a lot of work in the background on that interfacing with every band that's going to get there. What you know, what are you going to bring, what instruments are you going to show up with, how are we gonna make it, who's going to be the

house band? And even in that situation, you know you're going to have, you know, that grand finale thing where you're gonna have multiple bands up on stage playing at the same time. So I mean it's you know, from an audio point of view and be a little bit like hurting cats, you know. I mean there's a lot you know, what do we do with three bass players during the performance of one song, or you know, six

guitar players, or you know all of those things. So you know, that gets very challenging to make that kind of you know, just go and work. So it's a there's a lot of planning involved for that, lots and lots weeks of planning for Okay, so in the weeks of planning, since you're the major domo, to what degree are you in charge? To what degree do they bring the wrong guy. Tell you to what degree do you

dictate to them based on television limitations. Yeah, in that situation, I'm the mixer on record and the mixer of records, so I will be mixing all the events. You know, their engineer is welcome to sit down right next to me and say, Okay, here's what I need to hear. Here. Uh, let's make this a little bit louder lessen. Don't worry about that. That's fine. You know, he can help guide me through it, for sure, and I welcome that. You know,

that's that's a very necessary element of that. But at the end of the day, you know, I end up having to be the one to mix it. I'm going to be the one that has to answer for it, et cetera. Again, it comes back kind to TV production where it's like, I've got to have predictability. I've got to I've got to have known entities there. You know, as many as many constants and known entities as we can create in television production, that's what is wanted. That

is what is desired by the producers for sure. So to get it right, how much rehearsal was there? You get quite a few run throughs with each act on the day before the show. Um, there is an off site rehearsal where you know, they'll have a musical director that will meet with the talent and they'll figure out whether they're going to sing with the house band or you know, it's going to be a band on its own,

like you know in that situation. You know, Food Fighters was one of the bands that went in, so they were going to play on their own for sure, but yet you know somebody like uh, you know, Mickey Guyton was going to do a piece and she was going to sing with the house band. So all of that is rehearsed off site. There are rehearsal spaces set up away from the show, uh, you know for weeks previous where they're rehearsing and working on arrangements. Who's going to

sing what, etcetera. And then I show up, you know really the day before the actual tape and airing, uh, and we have a full run through, and you know, a lot of time is spent with the artist on stage doing camera blocking, you know, like getting all the camera shots sorted out, you know, all the cues sorted out, etcetera. And they're doing run throughs of it during that that period, so you have a lot of time to kind of prepare the music and get it hopefully mixed properly for

the audience. You know, it's kind of a I mean, it's kind of nerve wracking mixing for that audience. I mean it's a pretty heavy audience sitting there listening to you present those those bands, you know, so it'll get your attention. So the mix you hear in the room, is that the same as the mix that goes over

the air. It is not. There is always a mixer that mixes to air, and there is always a mixer that mixes for the room, and just as there's there are mixers that mix for the artist on stage as well. You know, they're considered monitor mixers. So yeah, there's there's multiple mixing formats taking place at the same time, and it's all recorded in multi racked form. If they want to get back and remix it for the post for postwork before it actually goes to air, which they almost

always do there. You want to get it as good as you can before it actually is to air, you know, So every act brings their own monitor mixers. They can absolutely I mean most monitor. Most acts at that level and of that caliber have their own monitor engineer as well, and same sort of thing. He would walk in and work with that monitor engineer to get all their ear mixes or their you know, their speaker mixes worked out properly for the artists. They're going to know all the

artists sensitivities and sensibilities at that point. So yeah, you know, like I said, we welcome it as like bringing on. Yeah, the more info you can give me here, the better it's going to get. Just make my my world a little better here, as opposed to having to guests for an hour here and then figure it out at all the wrong times. So what's the difference between mixing for the room and mixing for television? Very big difference in

my opinion. I've done both, and you know, you're mixing for a very different medium when you're it's really no different than mixing the live p a versus mixing for uh, you know, for CD or streaming or any of that. You know, they are two very very different dynamic ranges. They're two very very different frequency responses. Uh, there's a a very different outlook on you know, volume in those situations. Etcetera. So you know, there are guys that have done both

at the same time. You know, in a pinch, I have done both in the same time, and it is really really hard to do and make them make them both great. You know, usually one suffers a little bit because of the other one, you know, in terms of you know, mixing life for the room versus mixing for air. You know, if you're trying to do both those things at the same time, that's hard, that's really really challenging to do. So something like the Rock and Roll Hall

of Fame, which is recorded before. Are you involved in post and how much work is done in remixing? I can only use this year's experience as the the basis of this conversation. I was not involved in post there. I don't feel like I need to be really uh, you know, the engineers that are that are mixing that thing are fantastic. I actually thought this year's show sounded fantastic over the airwaves, so they did a super John there.

I'd probably just be in the way if I was there. Okay, there's a lot of literature and a lot of knowledge of what's going on in the recording studio. Oh and automation, etcetera. Let's start, what is the board that you use to mix lots? Well, you know I'm old enough you and you can see on camera here I got enough gray hair to back this up. But you know, I've been around for a long time watching mixing console development here

over over forty years. So you know, the capabilities that we have in live sound today from mixing consoles are just incredible. I mean, we have reached really a really high degree of capability and mixing consoles there. Obviously everybody now is mixing for the most part in digital uh just because of all the capabilities, and it especially for things like you know, Rock and Hall of Fame and some of these other very complex shows. I don't think

we could do them an analog. If we did, we it would require two or three mixers at the front of house to be able to do that. But we can do that all in one console now. So the capabilities are absolutely fantastic. Um, But I work on a Are you looking for a name of a console or just sure? Yeah, I I work with uh an Avid sxl Avid Technologies and the live sound business. Now. I actually helped them get into the live sound business in

two thousand right around that area where we helped. You know, I was kind of enlisted to come in and help them conceive a console line that would work in live sound. So you know, we kind of came in and uh kind of reinvented the wheel a little bit in that world, you know, because you know, that was a world that was living in, you know, primarily in pro tools and video editing, and now all of a sudden we were

going to jump into live sound. So you know, they they've kind of done some things that have really reshaped the way people work in that market. Now, So what was our inspiration to get into live Soule? Well, I'll ask that. I'll answer that question with a question, what is anybody's inspiration to build any product? Bob. It's revenue, you know, they want to make money. But by the same token, they had a gentleman working there named David le Bolt. I don't know if you know David and

know that name. Um I met him in the early eighties. We were touring together with an artist named Lori Anderson, Uh, kind of doing a world tour. He was the keyboard player on the tour. I was one of the mixers on the tour and we kind of hit it off stop for a second, got in the whole rock and roll guy, How do you end up working with a

performance artists like Lorie Anderson? You know, I don't know, man, These gigs just come across the desk, and you know, you know, I would be lying to you if I said when I got asked to do the gig that I knew everything about Lorie Anderson. I didn't. I had to go study it and and understand who she was. But I'm just telling you. Once I got into that camp and worked there a little bit, I was completely on fire for it. It was so cool technically, I mean,

it was performance art, no no doubt about it. I mean, and you know, she was really pushing the envelope technically of what you could do on stage and and with audio there. So it was fascinating to be a part of it. And I think that's part of what drove this conversation that we're gonna have here, because David was really into it and being the keyboard player. I mean, it was right when Samplers and all kinds of things, we're really just starting to hit the hit the landscape there,

and so he and I hit it off famously. We did the tour, we went our way as at the end of the tour and he went off. He played with Billy Joel for a long time, and then I went on, you know, toured a bunch of metal acts and all kinds of other things. And at some point he actually went to work for digit Design. At that point, you know, who was developing pro Tools at the time.

This was pretty early on in the development of pro Tools, and he kind of drove all that technical development to make that a really, really credible product in the studio. I mean he he really brought a lot of that functionality and made it a credible product as a recording tool. And by the time the late nineties, you know, two thousand rolled around, I mean pro Tools was pretty ubiquitous

in the recording studio. I mean it was everywhere. And I get this call one day, I'm I mean, I'm at my home in Arizona and I get this call from David and I haven't spoken to him in twelve years. You know, Hey, uh, you know I'm working for digit Design, right, yeah. Yeah, we're thinking about putting together a live sound console. We want to use plug ins blah blah blah blah. You know, do you think we have to do it? I mean, this is something we got to do. And I just said,

absolutely not. Don't do it. Don't do it. We don't want that, you know, we don't want pro tools in the life sound. But you know, the conversation carried on and he kind of convinced me to come up to San Francisco and meet with him. So, you know, we sat around at dinner table when when night, kind of discussing what we thought a digital console should be in

life sound, and lo and behole. Five years later, you know, we released this thing called The d Show from digit Design, you know, a company who had zero brand equity, zero footprint, and live sound, and yet we took it really to be one of the most lauded consoles out there today. So you know, that was that was fun to be a part of that. That was kind of a new take for me, you know, to get in on the

manufacturing side of it. And you know, I've been working with digit Design well Avid now you know since officially since two thousand five on console development. That's been a lot of fun. How big a market is there are you're talking in revenue or just people or you know, I mean, I think of how many acts on the road. No, a lot of these things have consumer level video YEO editing and all this stuff. When I think of live sound, there's a limited universe for how many people are looking

for something of this capability. Well, it's funny you bring this up, because you know, I think this is h indicative of how people view live sound to begin with, right, um, where they think it's this kind of small thing that's off in the corner, and you know, compared to Apple or something like that. Of course it is small, right, but you know, just put something into your mind, just for a second. Now, on a given day, just in

the United States, how many shows happened. I'm gonna let you tell me, because I would say, I don't know. I've never been able to research, but it's it's thousands upon thousands of certain right, every one of those shows has a sound reinforcement need, It has a console need. Now buckle that into the concept, and I'll give you this number because I know how many. I know this one was accurate. From a few years ago. I was doing some research on the houses of worship market, which

was moving into production, you know, in their services. This was probably oh, this was probably mid two thousand's, you know, and I was kind of coming back to Avid and making a player for them. We should examine this market that stands up be a very rich market. And I kind of brought up the number. I said, you know, who knows how many churches there are in in America? And you know, I could see that kind of gears turning, and they, you know, they really weren't thinking too hard

about it. I said, today, right today, it's three d and thirty five thousand churches in America. Every one of them have a sound reinforcement need on Sunday and throughout the week. So you know, I mean, when you start putting the numbers together, all of a sudden you start thinking about it's like, well, okay, now let's make that a global number. It's pretty big number. It's pretty big market out there for this. You just gotta go find it.

You know. It's just not one of these things that are that is in everybody's windshield when you see it. You know. Okay, So since you're involved with Avid, how simple a product do they make for like houses of worship? We were us to play pretty far down into that market. But see, I mean even even what you say there, I say to you, hey, man, don't think of house

of worship as being a simple thing. I can I could name you sixty churches plus in America that have live sound, recording, studio broadcast type facilities that would rival NBC. I mean, they're unbelievably technically adept. You know. So you know that that whole house of worship market is a big thing now, big big deal man. Okay, So in terms of the console, yeah, I want to get one from Avid. Do they build custom depending on the number of channels where you have a certain number of products

and you choose from those products. No, they have a I mean again, we in our current product range, we don't play very deep down into the market. There are other competitors that play at the much much more inexpensive end of it. I mean, it's really a professional product

right now. But we kind of changed the game here recent they because we kind I think, you know, I kind of saw the writing on the wall and how this was going to go into the future, and we have this thing called I can't believe I'm going to

talk about this on your podcast. We have this thing called unified platform, right, which is basically a menu of products, so you can pick how many faders you want on your console, how how powerful of an engine you want, how many microphone preamps do you want to be able to and just kind of ala carte put together a huge system or a pretty small system, right, and you can kind of piece this together as opposed to making a small one, making a not so small one, making

a bigger one, making a bigger, bigger one, etcetera. Because the challenge that comes with that in software development is you end up having software that is specific to every product and you can't keep the development going. In our world, we create one piece of software that works on everything, all of our hardware interacts and can scale. It was the first first time this had ever been done for any kind of live sound product, you know, where you

didn't have an actual product per se. You had pieces that you put together into a product. And that allowed us to have one string of development with software. We developed one piece of software that works on everything we make. Okay, Traditionally, software that has a relatively small user base is buggy, So how does the software for av it? Well, every software has bugs. I will say that, but you know, we're also very cognizant of the fact that we work

in live sound. Right, this is live events. You cannot be sitting in front of sixty people and have a software bug to take your show down. You can't do it. I mean, you just can't be allowed. Now that that said, no one's perfect, and you know, I've it sounds uh, what's the word, kind of contrived and rationalized, but I've said to people at times, Okay, look, this is the world we live in. Here. It doesn't matter how much money do you spend, or how much how many of

the great people you get to work. Sometimes the space shuttle crashes, sometimes the space shuttle blows up. You can have the best people in the world, the most money in the world working on it, but things happen. The thing you have to be able to do is be able to respond to the failure. Right, It can't be a failure that just well we just got to stop the show. You know, you've gotta have you gotta be

able to respond to a failure and keep the show going. So, you know, we we're pretty adepted at doing that kind of thing. It it took time to get that. But that was one of the calling cards of our our product when we first came to market was that it was very reliable, I mean really really reliable and you could really count on it. So and it sounded great, so, you know, added bonus. So you have a lot of experience forty years. What kind of problems have you had

in the middle of the show. Oh man, it's a long list. I mean, you know, there's lots of times where it you know, it has gone sideways, no doubt about it. I mean, you know, I mean I've said this to artists trying to get them to calm down a little bit after a mishapp is like, hey, relax, I've messed up way bigger shows than yours. Okay, so you know, just take it easy. It's gonna be fine here,

We're gonna get through this, you know. But yeah, you know, everything from microphone failures to console failures to p as on fire. I mean, you know, I mean, after forty years, you know, you can feel like you feel like you've seen it all. You definitely haven't, but you can feel like you've seen it all. So let's assume you have a misshap did you ever have to end the show or do you always have a way to patch it back up for extra equipment. I personally have never had

that happen. I know of shows that have had that happen where they haven't been able to continue the show, you know. But you know, in fairness, I've seen that happen for a litany and reason. It's not just an audio failure, you know. So there's all kinds of things that could cause that. But you know, Bob, I mean, and this may take us down a deeper conversation here. That's the beauty of live sound, right, It's the beauty of it. Everything's at risk. It's at best when it's risky,

when when things might just go haywire. That's the juice. That's the juice everything. When everything is all sort of out and predictable and all the bows are tied on the knots and everything, you know, that can be pretty vanilla at times, that can get kind of stale. I actually think the desire to do that is has driven us into some bad corners and performance and live event, you know, where we try to make it too safe and too predictable and too perfect. It's like, hey, let it,

let it ride. Let's go, you know, let's have some juice in the room here. Let's get back to that. But first let's talk about the console. What makes a live console different from a studio console. Yeah, okay, so h a live console has to have way more h oh, guess we're gonna get we might get geeky here, go geek absolutely go geeki has way more summed outputs on it. Like, um,

let me see how I want to frame this conversation here. So, in a studio, you're primarily concerned with either getting individual microphones and sources, two tape tracks or in this case this time of the world, into pro tools tracks where you might have you know, a hundred tracks of instruments, and then you are mixing that down to a single stereo or five point one or surround. You're mixing that down to a single format, a single pair about puts

out of the console. And the other thing that the live sound console does very very well is it allows you to do that and provide monitoring to the musicians in the studio right where they can hear their mixes, they can you know, they can sing, do everything that they need to do during the tracking phase. Right, So recording consoles are very adept at that. Live consoles, on the other hand, really don't aren't thinking necessarily about providing you know, you know, mixes back to the musicians at

the front of house position. I'm talking here, he's really just worried about mixing. Period. In this day and age, we're multi tracking at the same time, but he's really primarily worried about mixing. But he's going to send out puts to multiple places, multiple speaker systems, He's going to have all kinds of stuff that has to do with that p A system, not just a pair of control room monitors now, so he's got a whole lot more

on that console to deal with. And um, there are different types of automation, Like in the studio, you would have what's called run time automation, where we can record something into the recorder and then play it back and start doing moves on the console. That and the moves on the console are also recorded into the d A W. And now when I play back, it's not only playing bout the audio, but it's playing back all my moves. I can adjust those, I can edit those, etcetera. That's

that's really rare in life. Sound. You don't see that very often in life sound unless the act is using a lot of playback. If they're relying on almost entirely on playback, then you can kind of get that going.

But more often than not, live sound consoles have what's called snapshot automation, right, which is okay, for this song, I need to get the console in this state to get it ready for me to mix it right, And I might need to get it in forty different states for forty songs, depending on what instrumentation is being played

at a time. So really that's kind of one of the main kind of junctions of difference there is that in the studio we're typically working on one song at a time, and live sound we're working on thirty or forty songs at a time. Right, We've got to be able to prepare to be able to mix thirty or forty sometimes really intricate songs and really intricate changes bang bang bang bang bang. That's rarely the case in the studio. Okay, when you mix on your desk, how many channels do

you use? As many as I got, I'll use them all now, uh you know, I mean, I'll give you an example for and really this kind of thing is really shifted over time now with digital consoles because we have the ability to have way more inputs into the console. So for Kenny Chesney right now, which is you know,

three guitars, bass, drums, keys, five vocalists. I mean, that sounds kind of simple, but by the time you really get it mapped out and do the things you want to do, that's that's approaching a hundred channels, you know, probably a hundred and ten, hundred and twelve, uh inputs. Now. Part of that is also the way we're recording, Like I record probably upwards of probably upwards of fifteen sixteen

audience mis to be used in post. Like I'll record a five point one mic, I'll record spaced microphones for the audience, so that when they get it to post, if they want to mix it in five point one, they have the ability if they want to mix it in stereo, they can use the other audience mix things like that. So channel count can grow, you know, pretty dramatically based on the based on your inputs. I mean, probably the most famous you know concept of this was

you know, when I was mixing Rush. I mean that was a hundred and eighteen channels for three guys, you know, but one entire console was the drum kit, you know, I mean that was that was Neil's kit. So you know, the input count group pretty pretty big there. Okay. You know the more modern recording studio boards have a lot of effects built in as opposed to outboard gear. On these Avid desks, are there any effects old in or

any other digital effects? Well, it was kind of our calling card at at Avid right because you know, they were the first guys to ever really kind of you know, I dare I say invent, but you know, they brought plug in architecture to the recording market, you know, where you could have emulations of all of this really great analog gear. And you know, it's kind of when we

kind of brought that. I was kind of one of the things when David was talking about bringing into the live sound that was the point where I went, okay, now wait a minute, that could be really really something here if we could do that in live sound right where you could have you know, some of these really coveted piece you know, Poltch eques and fair Child limitars, these things that you know, you can't you can't even buy them. You at the time, you couldn't even buy them.

But if I could get plug in versions of that and use them in live sound, Wow, what a what an incredible thing that would be, right? So, yeah, all, at least for my shows, nearly I'll say ninety eight percent of the processing is inside the console. I don't use outboard gear anymore. And it's just such a luxury. I mean, I'm just so spoiled with it now. Where we can you know, as opposed to going out and spending thirty two dollars for a single channel of fair

Child compression. Well, I can have an emulation of that, you know, sitting on the console, and I can use as many of them as I want to use if I want to use it, do it, you know? And is it exactly the same as it of what a that fair Child thing is? No, of course not. But there's a practicality that has to come with with live sound. You know, you wouldn't go out and rent, you know, a hundred thousand dollars worth of processing to take with

you on the road. I mean, it's just impractical. Uh. So, you know, there's a practicality that comes with digital that is really, really enticing for life sound. So I love it. I'll never go back, honestly. Okay, so give us the old digital compared to analog wrap. Well, it's way more complex than anybody makes it. I'm telling you right now. It's not a binary argument. You know, which is better analog or digital? And I'm famous for saying it, and I totally believe it. I need them both. I need

them both. We can't just say it's either one or the other. I need them both. They both have their elements that we need to go with it. And I think the argument is actually much deeper, deeper than sound quality. And I say this about the studio as well, in live sound and other elements, because I think what people miss a lot of times. I've even used albums as the example here. You know, albums compared to CDs, compared to streaming. What people miss is the analog experience, right,

the workflow, you know. I mean, I'm one of those guys. As part of why I love albums, I love opening that album, I love reading credits, and all of that element is part of the experience for me. Well, it's very similar in analog recording. You know, where I want to see tape rolling. I you know, I want to work at a certain pace. You know, analog allows you to work at a much slower pace or demands that you work at a much slower pace than in digital.

So you know, there's there's just all kinds of things about it, above and beyond sound quality that play into it. There's an analog aesthetic you know that works there. But you know, with with the digital technologies that are out there today, I'm on record to say in this and I stand by it, I can take a digital piece of technology and I can make it sound more analog than analog if you know how to do it. You know, you just gotta have the skill to do it, have

the tools to be able to do it. It's very analogous to what we see now with film right where I can take the sterileness of video and make it look like the oldest film you ever saw in your life. You know, all of that possibility is there. And I think that argument of analog versus digital and audio is very comparable to the argument of film versus video. For a storyline, you know, if you watch something in video and you watch something in film, something that has film

look on it or that looks like film. It evokes a different response. There's no if stands robuts about it. It does. And the same thing applies to analog versus digital. Analog evokes a different response. Uts it evokes it because we have been programmed to listen to it that way for the last sixty or seventy years. We're emotionally tied to that analog sound quality, and we want it. We don't. We didn't realize we wanted it until it was taken away and I was like, oh, wait a minute, that

that's not what we like. Let's have some of that back. But you know, so analog is really really important. But what I trade away all the digital capability just to have an analog signal path for life sound? I would not. I would not just staying on analog digital for a second. There are some engineers say that what you're really hearing

in the analog is distortion. And then there's the experience of putting on some c ds in some vinyl records and you feel a warmth in the analog that you don't feel on the c D. Tell us, from a professional viewpoint, what's going on there? It is distortion. It is it's very very well managed sometimes poorly managed distortions, but it is what we love about it, right, and most people don't realize it. And I'll just at risk

of letting the cat out of the bag. You would be, I think as a consumer, would be mortified, maybe is the right word to understand and watch and see how much distortion is intentionally injected into music today to get it to have the vibe that it had thirty or forty years ago. I mean, it's it's breathtaking how much it is, you know. I mean, it's going to get maybe even drive us into this conversation of what is good audio, what is great audio? I mean, it's such

an open ended palette now, especially in music. Music is such a unique animal for this discussion, you know. But you know every sense Rocket eighty eight and Ike Turner and Jackie brett Ling, brett Ling, you know, we've had distortion in play, intentional distortion in play because it evokes an emotional response. You know, it has a statement to it.

Think about what rap and hip hop music would have been like in the eighties if it wouldn't have come from the boom box era, which was just horribly distorted audio, But that gave it the sense of being urban, right, that was the urban signature. That was the thing. This came from the street, right, It didn't come from a big, glossy studio. You know. There's all these sonic signatures and little tip offs to let you know where that music

came from. You know, I mean so many, so many artists don't want to look shiny, you know, because there's no street cred in it from an audio perspective, I'm talking right. Okay, Let's assume an act is going on the road. Most of these acts, other than the reamplifiers and their guitars and through other instruments, rent the equipment, you know, in arena level rock at these big tours,

who owns the actual avid board? The sound company. So there's an entire sound company industry now that's been rocking and rolling and going strong now for you know, thirty forty plus years now. I mean it started out certainly as a cottage industry. I mean when I got into the business, and but as a fledgling I mean, we were only ten years rood from Woodstock at that point.

You know, it was amazing, you know, I was looking at a post on Facebook the other day for cal Jam Too, which I remember seeing as a kid, and you know, I had this kind of lightbulb moment. I was like, Okay, look at what's going on here technically at this thing. This is only about eight or nine years removed from Woodstock. I mean, look how far this industry has come just in that seven eight nine years, you know. And that was all just sole proprietorship people

just pulling it together and getting together. You know. It's when we really started to see the emergence of JB L you know, as a professional audio company, because they provided a lot of the speaker system for that that show. You know, Meyer Sound was really really influential in in in the growth in the development of what that industry

has become. So to kind of circle all the way back to your question, Yeah, there's a sound company that would provide all of that technology, all the speaker technology, all the mixing technology, etcetera. To the act. The act would lea set out for the the course of the tour, and then when they're done, they move on to another another act. You know. Okay, so do you personally own any equipment that you might use on the road. Yeah, yeah,

I mean I own microphones that I use. I mean, I used to own my own consoles, and and there are artists are there are mixers out there that do own their own consoles and still use them out there today. I used to own a lot of my own effects processing. I mean, I was one of the one of the earlier guys in the eighties that was taking a lot of studio processing out on the road and trying to make that happen out there. You know, we were kind

of trying to make that transition. I mean, there was a period of time in the late eighties where you know, some of the front of house positions, probably mine included, would arrivaled most studios, especially when I was mixing Rush or or Deaf Leopard for sure. You know, those were big front of house positions that were very technically complex positions. Okay, so let's assume you get hired for an act. Let's leave Chestney out because he plays stadiums, which is a

whole another ball game. We'll get to that. That's adult audio there. Man, that's a whole another thing. That's right. Okay, So let's just talk and arena act. You get hired to do the gig, this is the first time you work with the act Do you go and hire all the equipment? It depends. I certainly would could. I mean, if they've brought me into the gig, then I want

to have influence on what gear we're going to use. Yeah, So you know, obviously there are fine there are accountants that get involved in budgets that have to be honored, etcetera. But you know, there's certainly preferences. I certainly have preferences of speaker systems and companies to work with out there. For sure, you're gonna put me on the spot like that. Certainly with the speakers, people are always interested in that. Yeah, well,

speaker and speaker development, man has really come a long way. Man, hearing about about the last twenty five years. Man, there's been some phenomenal advancement and speaker technology. But you know, I mean there's the big companies out there. I'm working with Claire Brothers for Kenny Chesney, which is you know, I'm Claire Brothers is the undisputed champ of sound companies. They are the biggest one by far. They probably they probably address sixty the clients out there in the world.

To day. I've used sound image with great effect there out of Southern California down an Escondido. Really great company. Who else? I mean, there's so many good companies going now. Okay, so forget the intermediaries. You're dealing with a company. You're on an Aerweena tour forty dates. What do you need? Do I gotta know what kind of music we're trying to present? You gotta know? You know, are we going to make something that's freaking loud and impactful? Here? Are

we looking for intelligibility? What is the act? Is it adell or is it a Metallica? They're going to require very very different PA systems and very different capabilities for that room. So you know, I've got to know that first, I've got to understand it musically, what what what the fans are gonna expect there, And then you do a design that you have to kind of in these in this day and age, you have to fit into lighting and video production because you're your third in line. Now.

You know, the first things that get done our video production and lighting production, and then we try to squeeze in some sound in there and get it in hopefully in the right positions to address the geometry in the room. So all of that comes in place very complex formula of Okay, if it's going to need to be this, it's going to cost this much, it's got to fit in here. How does it impact the production schedule? You know, are we going to have time to put it up?

And you know, all of that gets put into a hat and shake it up and hopefully come out with the answer there. You know, you work very closely with you know, the production team, meaning the lighting designer, the video designer, and the production manager, and then the accountants come in at some point and tell you that's going to cost way too much and we can't do it. Okay,

you're interested most and getting the best sound. Do you ever butt heads with these people and say, well, I hear what you're You know, with the classic thing, you know, couples have a living room and one of the members of the couple doesn't want anything to show, and then the other person's well, I want the big speakers and all the equipment that lights up. So these are different considerations video and audio. So to what degree is there a battle? That's a strong term, but every every here,

I mean it's a knockdown, drag out fight. I'm not exaggerating it. I mean it's a battle every tour, honestly, go into stadiums, it actually gets a little easier because the you know, the places where you're gonna be able to do things in the structure that's going to hold it is a little more forgiving than what you're going

to do in an arena. But you know, you look at the complexity of some of these arena shows now and trying to get speaker systems fit into that that can actually properly address the geometry and make it where everybody can actually hear what's going on. It's in the way, it's in the way. You know, it's hanging in front of the video screen, right, so it's gotta move, we gotta go higher, whatever we gotta do, you know what

I mean. There's all kinds of parameters that get put into play there to make that work, especially especially so for television. I mean Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a great example of that, where you know, the camera shot is the whole thing. There can't be p a hanging down in the camera shot. You've got to have a p A system that can go high, aim low, cover the geometry etcetera. You know, it's there's a lot of a lot of moving parts there, like I said, that have to get into play. So I mean, I

hate to give you the stock answer. Well, it depends, but it depends on what are we doing TV. I'm sure every situation is you need. But you know, videos king right now, you know, I mean, it gets all the consideration right now. So let's just go to the extremes. Adele and Metallica. Literally, what brand of speaker would you want to use and what brand of amplifier? Well, I don't know, is the honest answer. I mean I have

ones that I would lean towards. I mean, you know, there are some of these very very dsp driven, very accurate speaker systems that can cover i mean to the seat. You know, you can build in these these polar patterns for these PA systems where you know the p A is the sound from the p A is literally not hitting any of the walls, it's only hitting the seats. So you know, from for Adele, I would choose something

that had that capability. For Metallica, you know, you want something that has a little bit of that capability for sure. You want to be able to be precise with it. But man, it's got to have some balls to it. I mean, it's going to have to have some oomph to it because there's gonna be a volume element to that, and a punch element to that and impact element to that.

That is absolutely vital for the show to succeed. Right whereas Adele that's gonna be there's gonna be some elegance to that, there's going to the vocal is going to be It's going to be all about the vocal there. Really, how do I get this beautiful, tall, elegant, highly addictive vocal that every person in the room can understand every word that she sinks? You know? Two different really agendas there to really two different agendas there. Let's talk about

the speakers. Are these brands consumers would be familiar with and probably not now they're really I mean short of you know, JB. L. I'm I'm sure that's ubiquitous enough that everybody would know it. But you know these now these are very uh, you know, brands that are focused

really entirely on professional sound. Not to say that they don't go down into the consumer market with some of their products, but their primary focuses on and a couple of the names us for the record uh AL Acoustics, which is a French company that kind of they really are responsible for kind of changing the whole game and going getting us to go to this thing called line Source where you here's you see speakers hanging in a straight line uh E, A, W D and B Audio

Audio Technique U JB L. Of course, you know those are probably the big big players in it right now. Claire Claire Brothers makes their own proprietary boxes called Cohesion, which were very, very good. So let's talk about what was the breakthrough exactly of the French company. It's called line Source. So if you have a memory of looking back on shows and you paid any attention to speaker systems in the past up until about let's call it, I'm going to call it the mid to late nineties,

was when we really started to see the shift. Previous to that, you saw a lot of speaker systems hanging in a horizontal way. We kind of called it a golf ball. Look right where you would see they would be four or five cab it's deep, and then they would kind of wrap around the corner. You know, you would see this just this I mean it was almost like looking at a whole bunch of little cabinets that

made it look like one big speaker cabinet. And we generally refer to that as a horizontally arrayed p A system. You know, we're worried about it going in this direction. Now, the downside of the horizontally p A system was that it was very hard to cover steep geometry. If you had to cover very high, like you had seats that were steep or high, you didn't have enough angling in that horizontal p A to be able to get it

up there and and direct energy up there. It was very difficult to do, especially for a hanging p A system. It was if it was a stacked p A system, you could kind of get it, but still that that had its own limitations as well. So in the nineties, uh, we had some development in speaker driver technology that came to play, and it allowed for us to do vertical hanging of these speaker systems and and then these vertical line sources. What's really critical to making it work is

the spacing between the speaker components. So you know, if you took the grill cloth off of one of these line source speaker systems. You would see too low frequency devices, and then you would see some mid frequency devices, and then right in the center you would see a whole line of high frequency devices. And that high frequency line of devices might be thirty ft tall. Right, But what that allows for is that mathematically that line of speakers is working as one speaker. To the ear, it appears

to be one speaker. That's the goal there. Now the challenge with it is how do I then how do I expand horizontal coverage? How do I get coverage around the corner where you have to hang more lines around there? So if you were to go to a show today and see it, you would probably see on either side of the stage, you know probably two maybe three line sources. And the other big advantage of line sources is very

easy to cover the vertical geometry. If I need to cover high, I need to cover a steep Remember I talked about TELEVI in production when we might want to fly high but then shoot audio straight down. I can do that with a line source very effectively. Right, So that that the game really changed in the late nineties once those came to bear and we were able to amplify and have these components, these smaller components that could handle the amount of power and have the amount of

output available to them. Then line source became the thing. And unlike any time I've ever seen in the history of sound reinforcement, the entire industry just kind of stopped on a dime and went, yep, we're gonna go a line source. Here we go. And you know, from that point on you hardly saw any horizontally ran pas for

a long time. And what are the amplifiers that are used? Man, super super high power networkable amplifiers now where we can get audio to them off of an audio network, but you know, thousands and thousands of what's available to you because headroom is what you want there. You want to be able to do really push things up and not have it distort and and blow up the speaker component. And what are the brands used in the amplifers. Most of the companies are making their own amplifiers at this point.

Alocoustic makes its own amplifiers. DNB Audio Technique makes their own amplifiers. Uh, you know, Crown Amplifiers works in conjunction with J B. L Um who else There's I'm probably missing a ton of them here U E. A W has their own amplifier package made by power Soft. I believe this Powersoft may and it might have moved to a different amplifier now for the and your riggs. But you know it's all in house, and you know they're making their owns now that you wouldn't necessarily go out

and buy them off the shelf there. It's all part of the system design now. So if you go to Claire Brothers, they have all of this stuff and you pick and choose what you want. Yeah, especially Claire Brothers in in this day and age, they used to be

really they've kind of changed their model now. They used to be a proprietary company where you know, in the early eighties they were one of the few companies, one of one of two or three companies really, Claire Brothers, Shoko I probably put Britannia Row in there, maybe Concert Sound over in Europe in there that we're making their own boxes because the manufacturers weren't really able to manufacturer a box that could could do that. Yet Alter Sound

out of San Rafel was great. You know, that was the Grateful Sound company for the longest period of time. But they you know, they were they just decided, Hey, we're gonna make our own boxes, make our own speaker systems, you know like that. You went to that company because they had the technology and the technical infrastructure to go out and do these huge tours at the time, you know, I mean I think back to show's you know, like Live Aid and you know, the the first rock and

rios down in you know, in South American stuff. I mean, there was only a couple of companies that could have even possibly pulled that off, you know, and today there's you know, you can you can go out and buy a concert sound system off the shelf and call yourself a sound company. You know. So I am old enough to remember two things. One, when the venue provided the sound reinforcement to that the only thing going through the

p A was the vocal. Yeah. So at this point is every instrument might, every amplifier might what's going I'm there for rock and pop music, yeah, absolutely every I mean it's very much like studio mixing at the console,

and you're just bringing it to a big p A system. Now, if you if you go all the way down into something like you know, if you get to jazz things like that, then then you're really you're not necessarily not necessarily putting everything in the p A system, you know, you're you're back to what we would kind of label a sound reinforcement methodology there right where, Okay, let me take what I can hear on the stage and then just fill in the holes with the p A you know,

and try to make it very organic feeling. You know, you don't, especially for things like symphony and pops. You know, you don't really want to experience p A system there. You know, you want it to be more like I'm experiencing the orchestra here, right, So, even though you might have all the inputs and all the mike stations of an orchestra get up, you really don't want it to be a parent that it's coming out of a p A system that wants to be very invisible for the listener.

There so different sensibilities depending on the music for sure. So being like Petty you worked with for forty years, or Kenny Chestney, how many mikes do you need? Well, how many instruments you got, you know, and and how many like some of the guitar players you know they may play like well, Kenny Greenberg has got two different amplifier packages that he uses. John's got a couple of different amplifier packages. Uh. You know, Uh, Danny, the stage

left guitar player, is working completely on amplifier emulation. He's using these things called fractals, which are no live amplifiers. It's it's all digital. But it sounds fantastic, you know. I mean they work really really good. So you need something for every instrument. You know, on the drums, I've probably got in there fre just you know, probably upwards of sixteen eighteen microphones in play microphone channels on the drums. So it just depends on how many, how many inputs

you got up there, how many instruments you got up there. Okay, once you showed up in the rehearsal room with Chestney, how long did you take you to get miked and ready? Just miked and ready? You know, we were ready the first day. And again it kind of comes out of preparation, right, I mean, before I ever got there. I mean, this is kind of where we're adding sound reinforcement these days. You know, this is uh, you know, that whole concept

of virtual sound check that is in play now. You know, I took they had recorded tracks from the twenty eighteen tour En Tour, you know, pro tools sessions that were recorded right off the live sound console. I brought them into my place here. I have console and p A system set up at my place here. I brought that in and I'm mixed that show in preparation of showing up for rehearsals. And when I showed up my console, a lot of it was already set and ready to go.

Is just plug in the microphones and bring in the band, let's go. You know. So, you know, the the amount that you can prepare now today compared to what what it was, you know, twenty years ago, twenty plus years ago, is dramatic now, I mean, I can, I can come in. I did the same thing with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, even though I didn't have the bands there. You know, I could use tracks to kind of prepare the console to get ready for that show, and when the bands came in, I was way way far ahead

of the game. You know. Okay, if you were a regular recording studio, setting up mike is getting the sound can sometimes take a week. So in this particular case, are you literally going on stage and setting up all the mics. Well, I have somebody do it, but I I have total providence over where those microphones get placed.

Like you know, I even have some alignment procedures, some very specific alignment procedures that are used on certain microphones to get them exactly in the position I want them to be in. And you know that part of it is really not that different from the studio. That that piece of it is very similar to what I would do in the studio as well. You know where we're

working on microphone choice, we're working on microphone placement. We're working on getting the right instrument into the right amplifier to get the right sound. Is that the pickups we want, is that the strings we want? Is that the guitar we want to use? For that part. I'm involved in all of that with musicians more often than not, in picking what drumheads are we going to use? Okay, are these how many PLA shells? Is this? Is that what we're gonna do there? Okay? Yeah, alright, okay, yeah, I'm

good with that. On the kit, what symbols are you using and using heavy light? All of that plays into it because you're gonna mix it. You know, you're at the end of the day, you're out of the responsible for what it's gonna sound like. So, you know, the guys that I've worked with in my life. I'm not necessarily preaching that every guy needs to work this way, but I know for the guys that I've worked with and been around in my life and that that mentored me.

I picked up on it very quickly that the guys that knew audio the best didn't necessarily know how to operate the console the best, but they knew how to get the sounds. They knew. Okay, you want that guitar sound. I need that guitar with that pickup and those strings on it into that amplifier through those speakers, and we're going to use one of these two microphones here, and that's probably going to do it. You know. That's the

things they knew. And then once you get to to the console and it's just about mixing the thing, you know, I mean, it's just about getting it together. Okay, tell us about virtual sound check. Yeah, that's kind of my pride and joy there. You know, I've been kind of credited as you know, developing this whole concept and and bringing it to bear. Um. I mean I'll give you

the reader's digest version of the story. So you know, one of the things, one of the challenges we have in life sound previous to virtual sound check is the only time you, as the mixer, ever get to work on the audio like practice, work on sounds, make changes, experiment. The only time you ever get to do that is when the band is on stage or the audiences in the room, and the band is on stage, so you know it. It makes it where there was a whole

lot of guesswork. I mean, you could kind of hear instruments and stuff, but you couldn't really mix anything until the band was on stage and playing. And you know, to ask a band who's getting ready to a concert, Hey, I need you to do this song about ten times for me to get it ready, It's not gonna happen. It's not going to happen. So you know the reality of what happened with that, I mean, there's two realities, stark realities that happen as results of that. One is

previous to virtual sound check. You were gonna learn the show on the road during the SARTs. The show that I mixed two weeks from the first date is going to be infinitely better than the first show because I'm still learning it. I'm still understanding what to do on the console still. You know, any experiments I gotta do, I'm gonna have to do showtime and figure it out and get it going right, so that happens over course of time. Now, add to that, you may have people

that are very inexperienced mixers in life sound. They're gonna learn their craft in front of the audience. It's going to happen over time. I mean, I think it's part of why live sound kind of got a got a bad rap over a period of time and is considered not very good because you have a lot of very inexperienced people in there, you know. I mean, you know, when I've taught mixing clinics and you know, things like that,

I've always tried to get across people. Look, you want to learn how to mix, Get in the studio and learn how to mix when there's nothing at stake, right, get in there and learn how to do all the ear training and learn all the audio cues that you need to learn to get out and then do it under pressure live. You don't come out live and just learn the craft over five or six years of really

bad mixing right and put the audience through it. So all of this to say, we needed another way to do this right, And this really all came to bear. You know, it's all down to timing of technologies. So I got invited into mixed Petty live around Wildflowers. They had just finished Wildflowers and we were going to do the the Dogs with Wings tour. This was well, as luck would have it. I'll give the little sidebar here, as luck would have it. Right about that time, these

small modular digital multi track recorders came out. They were called a DAT right, which was a VHS cassette that did eight tracks of digital recording and you could cascade them together to make forty eight tracks, sixty four tracks of digital recording, whatever you wanted to do, right. So I had those in my studio already, had been using them, been recording bands. You know. That was around the time I was trying to get my label together and and get that whole part of my my my empire one.

But I got invited to do the Petty thing. Now, you know, Petty has already been together at that point, you know, about you know, fifteen years maybe, and the band knows each other, you know. I'm in rehearsals and I'm kind of set up in another little room because it's a pretty small rehearsal space, and I'm kind of set up in another room with my consoles and some control room monitors, and I'm just gonna work on mixes in there while they're rehearsing to get ready for the

first show. Well, and you probably know this from you know, being around the Heartbreakers and that stuff. This was Petty and the Heartbreakers. I mean we we did five days of rehearsals. I never heard one Petty song, not one. It was all covers. It was just like, oh, hey, let's do uh, let's do this Johnny Cash thing, you know. And they would dig into that, so, you know it. It became kind of the treehouse where they would just

go hang out and play music. It wasn't really rehearsals per and I kind of had this moment of abject fear of thinking, oh my gosh, I'm going to get to the first show having never heard Tom Petty song through this console. You know, it's I'm gonna get to that show and it's going to be nothing like what I'm doing. Right now. So this was like on a Thursday Friday, and again just kind of as luck kind

of have it. You know, I was working on a particular style of console at that time that would allow for this kind of thing to happen, and I had this kind of lightbulb moment of just thinking, you know what, I've got to create a studio workflow here. I've got to be able to record this because I'm gonna bet next week before we leave, they're going to run through the set once just to kind of make sure everybody's

on point and make sure everybody's okay. And you know, not not the least of which that was Steve Ferroni's first time with the Heartbreakers, so he was panicking the same way, you know, thinking I'm gonna get to the first show, we're not playing any of these songs. So I literally called my wife and I said, Honey, I need you to go grab a screwdriver, and I need to go in the studio and I'm gonna have you pull out all these digital recorders and I'm gonna even

send them to me. So over the course of the weekend, she sent those to me and we were able to interface them to the console in a way that it was very much like a studio workflow, where I could the band could play, I could record it literally, rewind, put the machines in play, and practice mixing that audio through the console without the band playing there right. So we didn't we didn't know it was called virtual sound check at the time. The name for it didn't come

along until years and years later. But I spent the next probably six eight years developing that process, you know, with analog consoles and digital recorders. At some point I switched over to pro tools and all kinds of things, and you know, I knew we were onto something at the first gig because you know, I mean, I don't know how much your listeners or anything you know about

this kind of process. But for years of the process for getting the p A system to sound right in the room, would will play some prerecorded music, We'll play our favorite CD, try to get the p A system sound right, and then we'll mix and try to make it sound right. And especially as the nineties war on, you know, mastering and equalization of recorded music changed dramatically.

I mean it's way brighter, way more compressed, way less dynamic range than anything you're ever going to be able to make happen in the p A system with live microphones, right, So those two worlds kind of diverged where you could get get the PA to sound really good and then have the microphones come online and wouldn't sound very good, wouldn't be representative of it at all. But the thing I noticed with virtual sound check right away was, oh

my gosh, we've got the most relevant source for the show. Now. If I hit rewind and hit play here and get that to sound really good in the p A when the band walks on stage, it's going to sound really close to that, right because now we're just trading tracks for microphones. We're just trading them off and saying which one are you listening to right now? Tracks or microphones? Now?

So you know, I'm I'm really oversimplifying it. But that developed over a period of years and really the I think for me, the validation came one day, and this was about two thousand five. This was after the first you know, once I got to digit design, I remember started thinking, okay, we could actually make this a valid product feature and really kind of completely reshape the industry here. So we released the ability to do that and called it virtual sound check with the one of the first

digit design consoles. And we were sitting in rehearsals in Sony or it was actually on the Paramount lot, I think, full production, the whole nine yards and Tom and the band had been in the day previous, and I had recorded the entire set and was going to come in the next morning and just go into virtual sound check, tear it all apart and see what I wanted to do with it. And I haven't mentioned it, but keep it up in mind. Tom had no idea I had this ability to do this. I mean I kind of

kept it secret for the longest amount of time. He had no inkling that we could do this. I would always virtual sound check, then the band would come in and do their actual sound check, and then we would do the show. So he I came in the next morning and again was going to break it all down and try to get, you know, really dig in and

see what I needed to do on this. And I didn't realize that as time, but he was in the building and he was sitting on a couch about thirty ft behind me, off in the corner, waiting to do some interviews and he tells the story way funnier than I could ever tell it. He said he was sitting there on the couch and kind of had this panic moment of, well, wait a minute, that is that my band sound checking right now? Why am I not? Why

am I not there? And then he heard his voice come through the p A and he was like, Okay, now, wait a minute, here's what's actually happening right now. You know, there was this kind of pause moment. So he kind of came up to the console and we were talking about it, and I kind of revealed what I was going on, and you know, I mean, he was he was such a smart guy. I mean, he just he

just got it. You know. He was like, Okay, wait a minute now, so you're telling me that for the first time ever in my life, right now, I'm going to be able to sit here and listen to how my show sounds in the in the venue, just like when we're playing. I said, yeah, you want to hear it? Here we go, you know, and sorry, and and we sat there and had this just incredible bonding moment of you know, he was just like, I I've never heard

it sound like this. He goes, this is just the greatest thing I've ever experienced in my life, you know, I mean he was just over the moon about it, and it changed our relationship from that moment on. I mean, you know, he I think he understood where I was coming from in terms of what I was trying to accomplish with it, and you know, all of a sudden he was married to it. He was like, oh, this is great. And then he had the ultimate epiphany of well, wait a minute, can you do this for monitors to

for the monitor console. I was like, yeah, of course we can. So that was in two thousand five, and from that point forward to the end of our time together in two thousand and seventeen, that bend. That band was never in the building again for a sound check. We only used virtual sound check to get ready for shows.

And you know, of course I didn't see all the the positives from it at the time, but I actually think that process actually extended the life of the band over a period of that over that period of years, because you know, Tom is famous for saying it, you know,

we don't sound check. It can only break up the band, you know, because everybody's in you know, three o'clock in the afternoon, they're in a horrible mood, and then when they're done, they gotta go sit in some danky dressing room and listen to a horrible opening act and then come on stage. You know. I mean it just grinds on you, absolutely grinds on you. Over the course of

a tour, well, that all went away now. I mean there were nights where we would be at the set change between the opening act and tim going on, and they still weren't in the building. I mean they would literally walk off the bus, walk up on stage and start the show. And I noticed it really really early on. It was like, wow, these guys are so focused right now, like they're just playing on fire now, you know. It changed the dynamic of the show. Everything, everything just became

a positive as a result of it. It was just such an amazing time and an amazing experience, you know. So that that to me was the ultimate validation of that process. Does everybody do this now? A lot of people do? I mean it it really changed the industry. It changed the mindset of a lot of people. Yeah, I don't think as many people do it as should. I'll be honest about it. I think more people should do it because I think it's a the ultimate way to get your arena or your club or whatever it

is ready for your show. Like I said, it's the most valid thing you can play through the p A because it's gonna be if it sounds like that way with the tracks, it going down that way with your band. Okay, So let's see you're doing rehearsals with Chestney. How many rehearsals are there? Well, I mean when you get ready

for something like this. And we had some unique circumstances with Chesney this year because he's got two new band members, Like they replaced the drummer and they replaced one of the guitar players, so they extended the rehearsal time to make sure that the new guys were going to be, you know, up to speed with the songs, et cetera.

So I took full advantage of that. But we had about, oh gosh, I'm gonna say about three weeks of what we would call band rehearsals, right, which is in a smaller place where just the band is set up with their band gear and everybody's just learning the songs and getting familiar with them. And then we had about two maybe three weeks of what I would call production rehearsals, which we moved to a much bigger facility. Excuse me.

We have a p A system, we have the lighting system, the video systems up, and then all the production elements are working on the songs at that point in rehearsing their pieces of it. You know, Obviously, lighting guys got to know other cues. I've got to know how to run the set and you know, make all my changes song to song to solong. Excuse me. Video guys have

to have all their content together, etcetera. So that's the production rehearsal, and then we're gonna go down to Tampa next week and do the two about three or four days in the stadium to get everybody acclimated to that, and then after that we just go, you know, and then after that there's no more rehearsal periods. Okay. I guess what I'm asking is what recording do you use for the virtual sound check last rehearsal or you're recording

all along the way. I'm recording every day, and I always use the most recent version of the songs, so um, you know, like every day of rehearsal, if I was coming into work on my on what I would need to do on the console, I was using yesterday's audio, and the same thing will apply on the tour. I'll

always use the most recent version. So when I get to Tampa, I'll be using on the first day of rehear, so I'll be using audio from the first day of rehear or the last day of rehearsals, and then the second day in Tampa, I'll be using the first day of rehearsals in Tampa as that basis. And then it

just keeps leap frogging as you go along. And the beauty that you get out of all this this this is the other head of benefit as you create an archive then, right, I mean this this was one of the once I once I got Petty to buy off on this one and his management to buy off on it, then the light bulb really came off. It came on. It was like, guys, you know, we don't have to

erase this every day. Let's keep these multi tracks and put them in your archive, right because you can remix any of this and and put it out for product, especially now, you know, I mean, Kenny's got no Shoes radio, you know, Tom had serious you know, you know the Tom Petty Show. On Tom Petty Radio Show. You can just you're just gonna be so flush with fresh material if you want it, you know, And I'll tell you something, Bob,

I mean really. One of the underlying agendas for me, this was a personal one for me, was being able to do this because the technology allowed us to do it right. The technology allows us to do this inexpensively. Now, this concept of multi tracking our shows and archiving it. One of the things for me was I love live music. I love live recorded music. I mean I grew up I had every live album known to man, you know,

from nineteen Let's let's start for one second. What are is the best or the two best live recordings in your book? Oh, you're gonna put me on this, Okay, I'm gonna say Allman Brothers at the film wore that that is got to be right up at the top of the heap because it's just such a magical set of performances and recording. I mean, Tom doubt but just

just killed it. And then I'm going to say, because the thing you have to put with live recordings is there's an audience capture that needs to take place as well, So you know, the audience recording is a big piece of it. And I still to this day say Frampton Comes Alive is the best audience engaged recording I've ever heard today. Now there's one that's close to that, and it's Buck Owens Live at Carnegie Hall. That's an incredible

audience recording there. But you know that that is what makes live albums work for me, is when you can tell that's the actual audience that's recorded and they are fully engaged with that artist. You can hear it. They're just hanging on every word. And I've yet to hear anything that matches that with Frampton Brampton Comes Alive. You know, next time you listen to it, just pay attention to

the audience. It's just incredible. I guess for a long time people said that Live It Leads was the best live album, but I didn't hear the audience, so it didn't work for me, And there's some truth to that. Although that's very high on my list. I mean, I mean that one kind of set the bar for me for a long time. I'm I wore out multiple opies of that one, but the other one, and I know you worked with this band, Tesla five Me and Acoustical Jam. I was piste off because I didn't get to mix that.

But that's a whole another story. We'll save that for another episode. But you recorded that, No, I didn't. I didn't. I was on that tour and kind of mixed a bunch of the tour that was radio great, radio controversy. And then they went off and did that. Oh, forgive me, I'm going to forget. The guy who recorded it's Dan. Oh gosh, guys, forgive me. I'm spacing his last name. But he worked with the band for a long long time and he recorded it and mixed it and did

a phenomenal job on it. And you know, I'm sorry to say he's not with us anymore, but he was great. He was one of the you know, he's one of those long time guys that have been with the band for a long time, and they let him do it and it came out great. Okay, let's go back a chapter.

I have been at the venue. I know the people at the venue, and they were there at sound check and one act I don't want to mention the specific name here, they said that guy can't sing it all yeah, and it's all effects or there's another household being I'm good friends with these people and they say, all the backup vocals are on hard rock. Okay, how do you do that? Do you want to know how you do it or why you do it? Both? Yeah? Well this is a well and it's going to play into what

I was going to promote here. You know what I'll get to this. Just hang with me, bear with me here one second. You know, one of the things I like, I love about live music and live albums was this sense of, you know, kind of getting to hear what the band could do before you go see them live.

I mean, that was always the thing for me. But as I matured and I got older, you know, I started to realize, you know, and I got exposed to production techniques, etcetera, that some of these live recordings that I grew up loving, we're actually just completely redone in the studio with audience added to him. And I was like, well, wait a minute, that's that's not live. That's not live. I don't want I don't want my live record to

be you going in and singing perfect vocals over it. Now, you know, because the thing that happens with that from production point of view, and I've experienced this, you know, mixing some of these products, is that, well, the audience mix that are out there are also picking up what's coming out of the p A to some degree, so they can hear those audience mikes can actually hear you're

very poor vocal. So now if you go in the studio and you record a perfect vocal and we tried to add the audience, you can hear the bad vocal behind it. So what ends up happening is we start to pull the audience farther and farther away off of the record and maybe even putting canned audience on it. So now it's not even the live audience anymore. It's not the live performance or the live audience. I was like, well, and and I mean, you've got to keep it in context.

Right at that point in music history, you know, live records were kind of throwaway kind of they were Sometimes they were done to complete record contracts so I could move on to another label, you know, all those kinds of things. So and you know, it was very expensive at that point in history to record. So you know, if the truck your two thousand dollar a day, you know, plus crew, plus expenses. If that showed up and recorded a really bad show, well guess what you were keeping

it and you were going to go fix it. So part of my agenda, I promise you, part of my agenda with kind of developing this whole multi track archive thing was what that's going to allow us to do is record every night, not just certain nights, record every night and then go pick the performances that are worthy of being mixed and released. And that's you know, with Petty's Anthology, that's what happened there. You know, we had enough recordings where we could kind of go through and go, wow,

we don't have to fix anything there. Let's let's release that sucker, mix it up and let's go you know, and then it becomes very pure, right, I mean, then it becomes really what you're stating that it is right and that that's always been my goal on it. And you know, one of the other sidebars I would give you on that is and I watched this happen with every act I've ever worked for. I don't care how

proficient they are. I have seen this happen in the days before multi track archiving, like I've tried to develop here. If you had the truck show up and say, okay, we're gonna do Los Angeles next week and we're going to record it, hopefully get a live album out of it. You could we do with the band where you've done sixty shows together just overall, just great shows. And the minute that truck shows up and that red recording light goes on, they turned into a different band. They're just

a different band. They're playing different, they're they're over trying all kinds of things, and you just walk away on that, ain't it? That ain't the one we wanted. Well, multi track archive eliminates that process because they don't they don't have red light fever. Then the red lights on every night, they get used to it, and you get the smoking performances. You know, you just gotta be able to go in and mind them out of there and find them right.

It's it's awesome, it's absolutely awesome. Well that's the live then, but let's go to the acts on the other end. You want to cover. Yeah, we were gonna get back to that, right, Sorry, I promise you we get back to that. So, I mean, I'm so I'm so mixed. About this and and got to keep it in context at times, I think, right, I mean, I'm okay, I I promise you I'm okay with using tracks with backing tracks. What I'm not okay with is people miming to backing tracks. Now,

I want to keep this in context here. I want to keep TV out of it and talk about only the concert hall we're paying to go see the band perform, right when that is all tracks and just sit people lip sing it, sinking to it so that they can do other things or what are maybe they can't sing and they feel like they're insecure, I have to sing to the track, etcetera. I'm really uncomfortable with that as like, I mean, that just feels really really misrepresented to me.

You know, it feels very phony to me, and you know, there's it's like and I just am uncomfortable with that. But by the same token, I look it and go, well, that's a function of the industry that we have right now, the record business that we have right now. Right think about this now. The record industry is upside down. It's completely backwards. Now. The first thing we do as an artist now is make a record and then go out

and learn how to perform it. You know, artists today don't have that crucible of performance in front of an audience where they have where they learn how to sing with nerves and in front of people, they learn how to develop their charisma, all of these sorts of things, and then go make the record that's completely upside down. Now they just don't have to go through that crucible anymore.

And we see it all the time where you know, people make their record at home, whatever they the thing blows up, they do really big, and now they're playing in front of Lollapaloosa and they don't have the chops. They don't have the chops to do it live. But on a technical level, you're working with an act they want to use canned backup vocals. How do you literally do it? It's done in a digital audio workstation, which is like pro Tools. There's lots of other ones out

there like Ableton and etcetera. Where they bring in the tracks from the record, put them in there. Whoever the band is playing to a click track, and at the proper time in the song, those backing vocals come up and they come into your console. You turn them up and they sound just like the record coming through the p A system. Okay, I know what a click track is,

but from my OEMs, explain how it works live. A click track is I mean another word for it is a metronome, right, But in our world we have recorded versions of that where you know, it's recorded as a specific tempo. Everybody knows where the the first beat of the song is and it just starts clapping. It just starts ticking, right, So the song is going along and it's going this is the tempo that we're playing the song too. And at the you know, at bar or

whatever it is, here come our backing vocals. You know. So Petty played the super Bowl. Were you involved in that? Ye? So how did you do that? Dude? It's the scariest fifteen minutes of your life. It's it's the most intense pressure. I think I may have ever felt that a gig, you know. So the way you do that is honestly very similar, you know, and they do it in a

really cool way there. I like how the super Bowl, at least I'm assuming they're still doing it the same way where you you prerecorded on the day, the day's leading up to the event, and then the band plays along with the tracks, and you have the choice of using as the mixture. You have the choice of using the actual mix or the tracks. And you know, the lead vocal can be all live, it can be partially live. You have the choice of doing it because they know

that that. You know, if the lead singer forgets the lines or whatever, you know, the guitar player misses the part mrs the solo, you just lean on the track and finish out the song. So again, it's it's down to that thing. It's so time driven and so like the brackets have got to be perfect around that. It can only last this long. We cannot have any mess ups here, etcetera. You know that is about predictability, etcetera. So I you know, I don't. I don't think it's

a huge secret what goes on there. But you know that said, there have been live performances on there, you know, I mean a lot of part of the Petty thing was live, for sure, part of the Prince thing was live. You know, I'm playing guitar. Were you literally control or was one of their engineers in control for the broadcast?

Is one of their engineers for the house? I was, well, I was, it was a similar sort of thing where you have a house engineer who's doing it, who's a union guy, and you're sitting right next to him saying, yeah, let's do that. Yeah, you're you're guiding there. Okay. One thing about live sound is every building is different. Indeed it is. Okay, so are you saying now? With virtual sound check, it makes it so much easier, whereas before

you were just on the flaw. Yeah, because you can take actual band audio that's played at the right dynamic everything, send it through the p A system and really take your time and figure out how good is my PA coverage? Am I actually getting all the way up to those seats? You know, what does it sound like up there? What is what does my band sound like sitting over in these seats? Right now? I can go evaluate it and

adjust it. You know. The biggest piece of positive I think for virtual sound check is it gives you the ability to practice when nothing's at stake. You can experiment, You can try things, all kinds of things without the band sitting on stage, you know, being freaked out by a bunch of weird sounding audio or the audience not not having to do it in front of an audience. It's very very analogous to a studio workflow where you're working on mixes, you know, like in virtual sound check.

I'm no use kidding as an example, because the most recent thing, you know, I might I might spend one entire day of rehearsals working on one song, you know, for the set, trying to get it to be what I wanted to be. So you know, you could never do that that was not just simply not possible in

pre virtual sound check. Okay. In an arena show, how long we'll it take you to set up depends on the size of the production, but usually usually you'll start at six in the morning and bring in that entire production that day and be ready for a Show'll be ready for the doors to open by six pm. How much of the time are you there, Well, I'm usually in there in the morning, working out early in the morning, so I'm available, but my my process doesn't start until probably,

you know, somewhere between eleven and one o'clock. And it also depends on how many bands we have on the bill. You know. Stadiums is a very very different thing. You have about a week to load in for a stadium. There's a lot of steel build that has to take place, a lot of stuff has to go into place in the stadium, a lot of delay speakers, etcetera that go out in the far reaches of the stadium. All kinds of stuff. Is very like I said earlier, it's adult audio.

It's very very complex, very challenging. So let's assume it's an arena thing. You're there, you're working out. Once you stit in behind the board, how long does it take

you to get it right? If I've done my job in the process called system tuning, which is kind of equalizing the p A and make sure the distribution of it right, It'll usually take me about I don't know, maybe thirty minutes thirty forty minutes to just kind of check things and make sure they are where I want them to be, because you know, the the cool thing

at least this is my approach. Once I get the console kind of set and and know all the moves that are going to take place during the show, that's kind of a constant, right, So like you know, if we start that process and I'm on song three and it sounds right to me and everything is responding that way, then I'm confident that the rest of the show is going to work as well, you know, unless I need to go really dig in on something and work on it and say, oh and I need to get that better,

you know whatever. So yeah, forty minutes. Tell me about the equalization. Well, we have all kinds of possibilities now with equalization, I mean, and really it's just I mean, it sounds like a big flute word, but it's just really trying to get this thing totally balanced so that it sounds like the music you're trying to present, right.

So you know, if it's I mean, if it's Metallica, you can bet there's going to be a huge based drumb element, a huge bottom end element, along with some very loud, bright guitars and you know, a big vocal. I mean, it's going to be in your face, you know, whereas I mean, we'll just keep using it as the example here. If I was mixing Adele, very very different profile through the p A system, they're much more focused

on intelligibility and elegance, you know. Needless to say, in the days of your you would go to the gig and the sound was bad, okay in the arena, in the stadium, if you knew the songs, you knew what they were playing, you'd fill in. And it has certainly got better. You certainly have the Forum in l A which is dedicated solely to music, but generally speaking that

is not the case. I mean, I've certainly been at gigs where the front of hall mixer, you know, and it sounds good right where he is or she is, and then the rest of the room sounds terrible. Yeah, that can happen, although I'll say that happens way less today than I think it's ever happened. I mean, we've

gotten that so much better now. Certainly the Petty, the p A system that I had on Petty, I think was the best ample of that where I was really really confident that however it sounded where I was sitting was pretty much how it sounded everywhere else in the house. You know, from a tonal point of view, it may not be the same volume everywhere, but tonally it sounded that way up there. You know, the things I was doing on the on the console would translate to big

pieces of the audience, you know. So that was that was a big move forward. That that PA system was a big jump forward. Well, actually, I know. I saw that gig on the final weekend and I was very close and I was astounded how good it sound, because I go to a lot of gigs at the Hollywood Bowl and you know, you know that the act is there, but it's not crystal clear if you're sitting fifteen rows back.

You know, I remember you. I remember reading one of your letters where you commented on this, Bob, and I actually wrote you back. I don't know if you hear this, well I do. That was all around the time that you know, Tom died and then Tony used what I wrote at the memorial service. But moving on from that, you were talking about the speakers that can direct lead point someone. Have you heard the demonstration for the sphere,

the Madison Square Gardens sphere. I haven't heard the demonstration yet, but I understand the concepts behind it and irrelevant of the finance. Some people think the venue is too large or whatever. Does it work? I mean it works in the demonstration, you know, but that's a small scale thing. Well, you know, I think it can work, certainly, you know, but I think it's gonna be how do I want to say this? And you kind of say it the

right way. It is all gonna come. It's gonna work better for certain styles of music than others, no doubt about it. I can't foresee certain styles of music actually benefiting from that. But the technology in and of itself and the functionality of it and the capability of it is super impressive. I mean, it's super impressive. It's going to get used in lots and lots of places. But you know, live music is a it's a particular animal, you know, especially live rock music, lave pop music. You know,

it demands sir and things. And I'll be very interested to see how that translates in that style of venue, you know, with that kind of kind of approach, because they're making a lot of claims there where I kind of where I kind of brace myself a little bit and go, wait a minute, I'll be sure about this here. Okay, I need to hear that before I'm gonna sign off on that, you know. Okay, for those out of the loop, this is a concept where every seat gets to their

own individual sound. Just reference why different types of music would be better or worse under those situations, you know, I mean, if I read the thing correctly, you know, the idea is that I can have a set of speakers that are focusing one thing into a zone of the audience, while you can be sitting a couple of seats away and not hear it at all. Right, I mean you can do this, I mean abject localization of audio. So that's where I kind of come from it as well.

That's a very very powerful concept. I mean, I can see where that can be used very handily for a lot of things. But is that really what we want for concert sound? Right? I mean I I you know, I want the audience to have dare I say a unified experience here? Right? I want them all to be relating to the music that's kind of the same way. And it's you know, I mean, we we're never gonna get it. I don't think where every scene in the house sounds exactly the same. And I don't even know

if I would want that. It's like, not every seat in the house looks the same. Why would I want it to sound exactly the same over there? I don't know. I'm a little I'm a little iffy with that at times. But you know, what I want is consistency. I want I want, you know, the engagement from the audience to

be really, really good. And I can tell you as a concert sound mixer, I spend the night looking around that a building, and you can tell whether people are having a good show where they can hear a good show up there or not. You can tell but just by their engagement whether it's right. I don't need any microphones or any instruments to tell me whether the coverage is good. All I gotta do is watch the people. They'll tell me whether it's good. So how do you

place the audience microphones in our arena? Well, typically they're placed there's a set that are placed up along the front plane of the play of the stage. You know. I'll typically have four to six microphones spaced out to kind of pick up the front field of the audience,

and then I have some other ones out where I'm at. Like, I'll usually put a five point one mic which is a kind of a head, you know, it looks kind of like a head that's sitting right in the middle of the arena, and it picks up left, center, right, and surround in the rear, all in one microphone, and then I'll kind of support it with some other microphones out there so because it's it's one of the harder things to do in big arena sounds, get a good

crowd capture, you know, a good crowd recording. Okay, let's go back to the beginning. You know, you sent me an article talking about an influential experience with Russell Pope, who was mixing Super Trip. I mean that album, you know, and there's a half speed Master version trying the entry, and that album is just, oh man, unbelievable what it says, what it sounds. It changed me. I mean, I mean the record changed me, and then the concert absolutely changed me.

So was that really the lightbulb moment? Yeah, yeah, no doubt about it. Like I said that, that was the moment where because again you gotta keep it in context, right, this was V four Now, I mean I was a freshman in high school. Is at the Fox Theater in St. Louis, and you know, I mean I was a kid. I mean I was a kid who wanted to be a musician at that point. I mean I wanted to be Mitch Mitchell and the Jimmy Hendrix experience at that point,

you know, that's who I wanted to be. And I didn't really know anything about production other than kind of what I've been able to kind of glean from, you know, pop rags and Rolling Stone and things like that. I mean, he just had no sense of really what it took to do that. And by that chance meeting with Russell, I got to see an actual mixer and you know, understand that there's a p A system up there. Now you know it's not you know, it's not just the

guitar amps up there playing. We're actually miking it and mixing it back to the PA. So you know, it was this huge, huge awakening moment. And you know, kind of like I said in the article, I walked there and walked out of that thing and just going, oh, I know what I want to do, no question about it. I don't want to be a musician anymore. That's what I want to do right there. So how did you

fulfill that dream? Well, that's a that's an interesting story for a night, you know, because by the time night rolled around when I was graduating, uh you know, I mean I remember going to my high school counselor and saying, Okay, this is what I want to do. I think I brought in some recording magazine It wasn't even a recording magazine. It was a magazine that was talking about right, had a recording console on it or something. I was like,

this is what I want to do right here. And you know, at that time, you know, there were no recording schools, there was no there was none of that. I mean, it was truly truly cottage industry at that point. And he kind of looked at me and goes, well, it looks technical. Maybe should go in the army. You know. I was like, Nah, I'm not gonna in the army, dude, No, No.

And you know, funny enough, you know, around that time, I mean this was eight, This was right at at the time that Boston came out with their first record, right, and all the mags we're running the story of Tom Schulz, which I just recently kind of rediscovered him here again recently, and you know, I for some reason, I got on fire with that. I was like, oh, this is so cool. I mean, here's a guy who was really technically adept.

He's also a musician, you know, kind of a renaissance man, really right, you know, technically adept musician made this incredible record. And I remember when that record came out. There was two records that came out kind of that year or that era. It was that one and the first man Halen record, where it you know, really crystallized in my brain. At some point I was like, Wow, these records don't sound like any other record, Like, what is the deal here? Man?

I mean, these things sound amazing, you know. And you know at that time, you have a stereo, right, I mean I remember just cranking that stereo up and listening to those those albums and just being the greatest thing, you know. So it was like, I've got it. I got to know how to do this. This is what I want to do, you know. And you know, as I mean, it's just you know, an episode of incidents, you know that that transpires. So we decide, and I think this is partly based on the Tom Schuls thing.

We decide, Okay, what we need to do is go to an electronics institute and get you a degree there. That's what we need to do, right. So I signed up for this electronics place called Missouri Institute of Technology is one of the varie institutes, and I was going to go get a double E and electronic engineering, right, And I figured, well, this is the way you get in. So I'm I'm there for a good year. I mean, I went right out of high school. I was seventeen.

I was in college by the time that summer even started, and you know, I was probably I don't know, maybe just a few months away from my bachelor's degree. And remember thinking this ain't it. I mean, I'm not doing I'm not learning anything about recording or live sound or any of this kind of stuff. I mean, this is

this is not it. And it just so happened. On the bulletin board of the school, a local sound company in Kansas City, a company called Superior Sound, posted a one ad for people to come down and help out with these big concerts that they were doing down in this place called Brush Creek, which was right down in the high end district of Kansas City shopping district down there, and they would have ten, twelve, fourteen thousand people on

a weekend for a free concert down there. So they needed help putting up the p a system, stage, everything. I was like, Okay, yeah, I'll go do this. So I go down there and I show up for the first gig, and you know, they they were excited about having me there because they was like, oh, electronics guy, Okay, he'll be good, he'll be able to help us out. I was horrible. It was absolutely horrible. I blew up a couple of amplifiers, all kinds of stuff, and they

didn't invite me back. I wanted to go back the next weekend, and I was like, they didn't invite me back. And I was just heartbroken, you know. I was like, I've blown it, you know, that was my shot. So I just kept showing up. They wouldn't call me, but I would show up every weekend. And I did that entire summer series, just showing up. And by the end of it, you know, it was me and two or three other guys. We were the guys that were there every week and I knew the sound system as good

as anybody by the end of the summer. And they ended up giving me a job after that and and going to work for them, and and it's luck have it would have it. I mean, I worked with an incredible set of mentors there. They were just those guys were really really knowledgeable. They understood how audio worked and

really bread that into me. Thank god. Uh And and then then the next step of that was you know, uh, this band called Shooting Star out of Kansas City and you might remember, and they were did four or five records for Virgin Virgin Atlantic. Um Gus Dudgeon produced their first record. Ron Nevison produced one of the records. Anyway, I got hooked up with them, uh you know, from doing demos and all kinds of other stuff, and ended up going on the road with them, and we went

out our first tour together. I mean I was nineteen twenty years old, barely I wouldn't even old enough to drink yet. You know. We were opening for Journey, we were opening Razizi Top. We wrote in a Jefferson starship, et cetera. And I was lucky enough to part lay that into a career. I mean I met everybody and and got exposed to a very big, high level concert experience at a really really young age. I mean I didn't really come up through the clubs. I mean I

started out at that level, you know. So I was very very fortunate, very lucky. What'd your parents say about your dreaming career choice? They were not too impressed. You know. It's funny, you know, my mom and dad were not impressed until there was two things that made it kind of okay. I went off to do some shows with Tammy Wynett. It was like, well, anyway, you're working with Tammy. Okay, wait a minute, and I'll tell us more about this, you know. Then all of a sudden it was it

was kind of okay. And then my dad was you know, he was kind of an engineer guy, mechanical engineer. I mean he was really kind of a savant mechanically, uh, and worked on all these this heavy equipment, all this

kind of stuff. And I invited him. He never got to go see a show until I was working for Deaf Leopard, which was in the late you know, mid in the late eighties, and he showed up one day and once he saw all the semi trucks and all the all the chain motors, you know, putting all this style of stuff out and play, then he was all in. He was like, oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. Can you get me some of

those chain motors? I need some of those. It was pretty cool and where they were great with it from then point on. Obviously, Okay, if you're working with Shooting Star and you're cutting demos, was there ever a time you said, well, maybe I should work in the studios sup post to live. Well, I did a lot of studio work during that time because I needed to make

a living. So there was studios in town that I was working in at the time, and kind of moonlighting in the studios, kind of moonlighting at the sound company, etcetera. But you know, I mean it was a great learning experience, and that's why I always promoted you know, it's like, hey man, you want to get in and learn how to listen and learn how to hear because you know, I'll say it right here, I say this all the time I'm mixing clinics. Mixing is not a technical skill.

It's a listening skill. It's not a technical skill. You're just using the the technology to present a vision that you have in your head. You know, you have to if you want to mix music, You've got to understand music, not technology. You've gotta have music sensibilities. You gotta understand why I go for this sound in that genre music, and I go for this sound in the genre music. You have to be well studied in music, not technology.

I mean, you still have to understand how to operate it don't get me wrong, But the guy that are guys that are really really excellent edit understand music and understand how to present it, you know. So, uh, that's what the studio will do for you, you know, you because you're digging in at such a finite level there, you know, at such a detailed level there you you understand what makes music tick. You have to in that situation. And if you can go out and start applying that

in live sound, you're you're going to be good. You're gonna be really good. The guys, the best guys that I see that do this job usually start out as musicians and that builds their music sensibility, and then it's a matter of expanding and broadening your taste into production techniques, you know, which speaks to your ears and your hearing, you know, just jically, everybody loses a certain amount as they get older. To what degree are you conscious of that?

Protect yourself? Worried about it? Well, I've had this discussion a couple that I actually didn't had this discussion on another podcast with another group of mixers where we were talking about this. And you know, when I was living in Los Angeles, I used to get my hearing checked every year. I mean, and I still get it checked regularly. I'm I'm probably about two years away from my last check.

But what I in doing that, I had a regular audiologist and he really explained a lot of things to me and set me up for really great success with my hearing. And I've put this on other people as well, and his his his take on it was really interesting because he was also a guy who did audiology for a lot of mixing engineers around town, like he did a lot of scoring engineers and a lot of other like rock mixer guys. I just have to ask this

at the house clinic, where'd you find this guy? And my tax guy referred to me believe it or not, because you know, if he knew all the all these other people from doing their taxes, but you know, the thing pointed out to me. He says, Look, you know, everybody's worried about you concert guys, you know, and the volume and everything. He said, I'm not worried about you guys. He says, your hearing is going to be fine because you're only exposed to it for short amount of short

amounts of time. Even though it's high volume, it's not high. You know, it's not at these deafening volumes entirely for two hours at a time. It's it's in peaks and valleys, he said. The guys that have the most trouble are the guys that are sitting in fair of a in front of a pair of small speakers for eight ten twelve hours a day, he says. You know, he says, I got, I know. Scoring guys that are doing symphony, he said, that are working, you know, eight ten twelve

hours a day, he says. You would not believe how bad they're hearing is he said, And they're listening in just at moderate levels. But it's repetitive, he says, it's worried, it's just constantly working. So one of the things he advised to me was that try to stay away from headphones. So that's the first thing, uh, he said, at the

end of the night. If you know, if your ears are tired, put in some of your plugs so you average in some really really quiet time and give your ears a chance to recover, he says, And you're you're gonna be fine over time, he says, if you can just stay away from high impulse things. He says, if you go to the shooting range, make sure you double protect, he said, do twice as much protection as you think, because that impulse is the one that's that's going to

kill your hearing. For sure. It's a gunshot. That kind of impulse would do you in. It's about drummers have a really typically have a bad time with with hearing, you know, because it's very high impulse, high impact audio a little bit slower. How did you get from Shooting Star up the ladder? Well? Uh, like I said, Shooting Star was opening for all these acts, and uh, you know in those days, I mean, you know, you kind of had to be a little bit of a jack

of all trades. So not only was I mixing, I was also the drum road on the tour, you know, set up the drums and tune him everything. Uh. And that got me a job because I think we had done some some um tour, some shows with John Mellencamp at that point early eighties there. Uh, right when John was getting ready to go out and do the Pink Houses tour, one of the guys that I knew from that tour called me and said, Kenny Arnolfs looking for a drum guy. You want to come out and do it.

I said, yeah, I'll come out and do it. So I was Kenny Arnolf's drum tech for about a tour. And during that period, you know, there was a sound company working on the thing, and you know, what am I gonna do when I'm when the drums are set up? I got nothing to do until we get ready to go back. So I started working with this SA guys on the sound crew and helping him put up the p A every day, you know, blah blah blah blah.

And that led to a job with that sound company, and then from there, you know, convinced them a little bit, a little bit slower. In your legacy information, it says you were the monitor mixer and you got fired by Melon cap Oh. I did, Yeah, I mean that was that was a watershed moment for me. I mean, no doubt about it. I mean, and so, how did you become the monitor mixer? Was that just after you were

the drum roady? Yeah? So I did drum roading on the Pink Houses tour and then the next door they were going to move to another monitor engineer, and I lobbied for that position. I said, I can do that. Let me do that right, And technically, I mean I was more than capable of doing it without a doubt. But you know, I actually had a guy and go through a little bit of a crucible there, and I learned something about myself there, because I mean, John's reputation

kind of precedes him. You know, everybody knows he's a very very difficult guy to work with. And you know, honestly, of all honesty, I was not mature enough for that gig. I was not mature enough to handle him as if you're going to handle him, but just not mature enough to deal with him properly. And he saw it. I mean he saw me as being a little weak and he was going to go out and do a big tour there, and he was just like, I can't have

this guy sitting on the side of the stage. I gotta have somebody I know has it together here and can and can deal with me. And I wasn't that guy. I just wasn't mature enough yet to do it. And you know, I had to kind of have a little look in the mirror there and kind of go, Okay, dude, if you're gonna do this work, you know, there's more to it. Then just being able to technically do it. You've got to be able to interface with people and work with them and deal with them on their levels,

you know, and that is not a technical level. That's a personality thing. You've got to learn to hang and and be able to do it. So, you know, it kind of reshaped my thinking and what I was watching and what I was doing from that point forward. I used it to great effect when I went to work for Prince said that all came right around and I used every lesson I learned on that tour on that Prince Store. Okay, if you go to a recording studio, the engineer, generally speaking, is quiet and a yes man.

He is not an individual with character saying no. That might be the producer. So as a front of fall engineer, you know, what kind of personality do you need? Do you know that, Hey, I can't push too much. That's just not my role. You've gotta be able to read it. You gotta be able to read the person and see where you can go with it, you know. I mean where I ended up with Tom Petty versus where I started with Tom Petty were two very very different places.

You Yeah, it's it's earned, it's not given. You know, you have to you have to earn that voice in that room for sure. Well, you tell the story in one of your publications about telling Tom to change his money and he says, the last guy who said that it's no longer here right before he was gone. Yeah, So you know, luckily I was smart enough when that happened to go, you know what, Tom, We're just gonna

give that mike another try for a little bit. We're gonna we're just gonna work with that one for a little bit. But I mean it's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. You know, I tried to come in probably a little too heavy handed there, and but but over time, you know that that completely turned around where you know, Tom was very reliant on me for what we were going to do, and you know he was I mean, I'm very proud to say he was on record as saying, I'll never do it without that guy.

So if he's not available, I'm not available to go on the road. So that was probably the highest compliment I've ever gotten in my life, that's for sure. Okay, so you ultimately got him to change the mike. How did you do that, well, you know, again, you have to get a you end up having to have some credibility at some point. And uh, I mean, I'll tell the story. So we were that first tour had finished

and we had stayed on the particular microphone. I won't name names here, so but it was just the wrong mac phone for the application. So we come around to the next tour now and we're in production rehearsals, et cetera. And I was like, Okay, it's either going to be the mic or me. I'm not going to survive another tour with that microphone. So I had another microphone that I thought was gonna be a really good choice for him.

So I just went up and put it on the stand and plugged it in, and I said, to the monitor guy, do what you need to do. This is going to be this way until he tells me that we need to change it. All right, I'm just gonna see where we're gonna go here. So he came in and he, you know, immediately was like, wow, what what the heck is this? You know? And I came walking from the front of house up to him and I said, look, I want I want you just to try this, I said,

we're really in early in rehearsals here. Just give it a try, see what you think. If it starts to feel good, then I want you to give it a try. If you hate it, then we'll go back to the end of micro alright, So but just give it a try. So the band kicks in. They do two or three songs, and I can see he's still kind of processing, you know, he's I can see his head kind of working, going is this really as good as I think it is right now? You know what's going on here? Can I

really trust this? And luckily, I mean I think it's what saved me and the whole thing almost as it was happening, you know Howie and Scott Thurston both chimed in together at the same time and said, wow, we can hear you really really clearly over here right now, like it's so easy to sing to your voice right now. I mean, they were and it was totally imprompted and unscripted. I didn't ask him to do it. It just came out of, you know, organically, out of the conversation. And

from that moment on we were on that microphone. We didn't change that microphone for years. You know, Okay, let's go back. So you're with the Sound company. You know, you you finished Smith Mellot Camp, you go with the sum company. What's the next step after that? Next step after that was really going to work for the Sound company. I went to work for this company called Electrotech, which was kind of uh an after version of t f A Electro Sound, one of the more famous stalwart companies

that kind of started this industry. They were out of Canoga Park, California. So I moved to California. I went to work for the Sound Company and was just taking gig any gig I could get my hands on at that point. And then another gig came up to mix for the Go Goes, So I took that I and had a really great time on that. It was very

successful on that. And then the next thing that came my way mixing wise, let's say I did Rick Springfield in there for a period of time, and then really the next the next kind of big opportunity that came my way, and it really just kind of fell in my lap because nobody else wanted to take it. Ironically, at the time, I was mixing Alice Cooper and this was right when Alice was trying to make her comeback.

You know, this was he had been down and you know, out of the business really for a period of years there. This was I think something like that at eight five it was you know, Nightmare Returns where it was his first time back, and I jumped all over it. I wanted to mix that so bad. I was a huge Alice Cooper fan when I was a kid. It was one of one of the very first concerts I ever got to go see. My mom took me to go see it when I was a young teenager and I

was totally hooked on him. I just thought they were the greatest records and still do to this day. There were just those those early bob Ezrian records were just sensational from him. I read a review that raved I didn't know if it was a joke and Rolling Stone, So I bought the record. I dropped the needle and I heard under my wheels. I was closed instantly, Am I right? So absolutely? I mean it was just and I can go back and listen to those records today

and relive them. So long story short, I mean I jumped all over it. I was like, oh, I will do anything to mix that tour, you know, and okay, so you'll get the whole DNA here. So on that tour, one of the opening acts was Tesla. So that's my first interaction with Peter Mention and Cliff Bernstein, right, So they're out hearing me mix on this tour, and you know, I mean it was pretty kind of a low rent production. I mean, it was tough to make it sound really big,

and we didn't have very much PA system, etcetera. But you know, I in those days and I still do it to to this day. You know, I'm always recording what I'm doing on the console. At that point, I was recording to cassettes, and you know, i'd go back and listen to it at the end of the night and kind of review what I was doing and go, Okay, I know what I need to do there now. And

so it was just study tapes. You know. Well, during this period, somehow, and I've said this before and I still don't know how, but somehow, during this period, Joe Elliott got ahold of one of my desk tapes, one of my board tapes. It might have been through Ross Halfen. The photography was after shooting Tesla. It might have been I don't know, I swear to you, I don't know. It might have been through Brian Wheat. He might have

gotten it to him. I don't know. But you know, the tour ends and I'm kind of working on thinking about what's going to be my next move. You know, Deaf Leppard is in working on Hysteria now for god knows how long. You know, it's getting ready to release. But you know, I'm not really visible to that, and but I know that Cliff and Peter are also doing They also managed Docking at the point at that point, and I remember thinking, you know what I'd love to

mix doing. Maybe I'll call Peter and see if you, you know, consider me for Docking. In the meantime, in the background, there's this conversation going on between Joe and Peter where Joe is going, that's our guy, whoever mixed this tape, that's the guy we need to mix our tour, that's the guy we want. And he is really all about the vocal performances on it. He was like, the vocal sound unbelievable on this tape. You have to get this guy, and Peter was kind of going, are you

sure this is the guy. I'm not listening to this every night. I'm not. Are you sure this is the guy we want? And Joe God love him. I mean I owe him a dead of gratitude like nobody's business. And he was like, Yeah, that's our guy, that's the guy we want. So I get home a week later and there's a message on my machine from C Prime, you know, and I'm thinking, fan fuckantastic. Carry this. I'm

going to get docking. I know they're going to give me the dock and kid, hey, we think we want you to do Deaf Leppardy interested in doing Deaf Leopard And I was like, yeah, okay, I'll do deaf Leppard. So off we go to London and the rest is history, as they said, Just so I know where does Tesla fit in this game? They were the opening act for Alice Cooper on that But you worked for Tesla too.

That was afterwards. That was after Okay, I gotta ask, Okay, you are the front of whole Guy, but especially on that Deaf Leopard tour, there are a lot of shenanigans. You're gonna put me in the TMZ zone here, aren't you. I don't really need that level of detail. I want to know to what degree did you participate. Oh my gosh, dude, I'll just say I met my wife on that tour. Maybe we'll just leave it there. Actually I met her on air supply. I shouldn't say that I was mixing

air supply at that Okay. The other thing is very hard to be part of a traveling entourage with raw. It's worse for the performers themselves. They played for twenty thousand people. They can't calm down there with the same five assholes they've known since they were twelve, and a lot of them, you know, turned to substances to cope. How did you cope? Well, I mean, I'm not impervious to the partying that happened in the eighties. I mean,

I mean that was just a different time. I mean, you know, sex, drugs, and rock and roll was in. It was going ten miles an hour during the eighties and the very early nineties, and until you know, the AIDS epidemic, put the cope, put the cabbage on it. I mean, that kind of shut the whole thing down there for your period of time. But you know, again, I'm I'm always stressed in this, man, You've got to put it in context. This is not rationalizing it, but you just have to put it in context. That was

an accepted piece of the puzzle out there. I mean, if you were going to be out there, you were going to be a part of that lifestyle. I mean, it's just and you know, I mean I still say this about touring to this day. You know, you've got to be able to hang. You know, you're not going to survive on these tours as the outlier very often, you know. I mean, you've got to be able to hang.

And it doesn't mean you've got to give in and participate on everything, but you've got to be able to survive out there from a cultural point of view and you know, kind of a social point of view. I mean, you've got to have a personality that fits into that lifestyle out there. And it's not for everybody. It is just not for everybody. And it's a I mean, we're starting to see all the statistics come in now. You know, it's a stressful lifestyle. Traveling for a living is stressful

and it takes its toll on people. Man, it's that bill starting to come do. Now we're starting to see it in our industry. Now, okay, let's just go through the litany. You work for Death Leopard, then you go to Tesla to take us through the acts. Actually I went from I went from Death Leopard to Rush, and you know I got that through Peter. You know, Peter introduced me to Getty one of the Death Leopard shows and we kind of hit it off. And that was the dream gig for me. If there was every one

gig that I always want, it was mixing Rush. That was I was the Rush fan that got to mix the show. I've said that many times. So that was that was the brass ring for me during that period, no doubt about it. But I mean in terms of the time frame, yeah, I think it was Deaf Leppard hysteria, then onto Rush for a little bit, and then to to some testless stuff, and then back to def Leopard and then back to Rush. I mean it was it was just just constant. I mean I was always on

the road during those pretty years. And at what point did you go independent stopped working for the Canoga Park Company. Oh, that was with def Leppard. Right right after def Leppard was my first truly truly independent gig where I was not working for the company, so from night late night on, I've been independent. So how did you end up working

with Prince? You said, Yeah, that was just the you know, the phone rang one day and you know, one of the guys that I had worked with on Petty Uh, he was one of my systems engineers, was out on prints and kind of just said, Hey, I were in Phoenix, you want to come down and see the show. I was like, yeah, coming and see the show. So I'd love to see Prince. So I go down there, and I mean, not for nothing, man, I mean it it

sounded bad. I mean it was just like who I mean it was, but you know, I mean you got to kind of know all the again, all the ins and outs of this, but I mean it was just like, Wow, this is not working. Whatever they're trying to do right here, this is not working. I mean I left after about six seven songs, and after I left the place, I kind of went out for a couple of drinks whatever. By the time I got home, there was a message on my machine from UH, from the tour manager saying, Hey,

Charlie tells me you're available right now. Is there any chance you would want to come out and mix this for a while, you know. And I was like, oh boy, I mean, the dude's reputation kind of precedes himself. I mean I kind of heard what was going on. I was like, I don't know, it's like, I'm right in the middle of a record project right now. Said I don't think so, man, I'm you know, blah blah blah. And then they started throwing out money. You know. I was just like, Okay, that's a lot of money. I

was like, okay, all right, well here's the deal. You know, I'll do it, but you know, I mean again, you know, Prince was known for just churning through engineers. And I said, I want all the money up front. I said, I'll come out, but I want all the money up front. I'll take a break from this project for two or three weeks, kind of bail water off the ship out there and get everything squared away, and then we can turn it over to somebody else if you want to do it. And he fully he goes, okay, be in

San Antonio tomorrow. I was like, oh my god, but a long story short on it. You know. I got out there and really just the mixer and the p A system was a mess. I mean, really, that's what it was all about. Because the performances, the music, and the musicians were off the freaking chain. I mean, it was so good, you know, I just I had that kind of moment at the show, just thinking, Wow, look

at these players. Why does this sound like this? And I mean, I want you know, it's not an effort to talk ill of the dead or anything like that, but you know, between the engineers that were there kind of mean and a yes man for Prince and his input on the console and his input on the p A systems, things were just just completely out of whack. And I it took me about three or four shows to get him to really trust what I wanted to do on the console and with the p A system, etcetera.

But after a period of time I got him to trust it and we ended up having some really really great shows. We you know, we went from having three and four hour sound checks that were holding the doors to doing, you know, one song, two songs, Okay, that's great, let's go, you know, get it going on. So you know, he and I actually at the end of by the end of it hit it off pretty good. We it was to the point where I could go talk to

him when I needed to talk to him. You know, I didn't have to go through his bodyguard or anything like that. And you know, it convenient to say it now, but you know, if I had to go back and work for him again, I would have gone back in the heartbeat. You know. We we we got to a point where we got some mutual respect built and then then it then it went swimmingly. It was really really good and a fantastic show man. My goodness, what a set of players. And how long did you end up

working with them? It was only about three or four weeks. Wasn't long. Like I said, I was right in the middle of a record project I needed to get back to. So it's like I kind of bailed water on it for a little bit, got it all kind of sorted back out, and and really it's not even like we turned it over to somebody else. The the tour was coming to a close, so I just went in and

closed it out and then we moved on. Okay, if you look at your CV, you work with certain acts for like three or ten years and then it ends. So you know, you work with Alice Cooper for six years, worked with Jackson Brown for three or four years. Why did these relationships end? Well, I mean sometimes it's just

a matter of scheduling, you know, where you can't. I mean I was really fortunate to be able to really kind of buttressed together two or three acts there during the nineties, where I was if I wasn't working with Rush, I was working with Petty. If I wasn't working with Petty, I was working with Matchbox twenty, and just the round robin just continued. But at some point, you know, especially after Rush shut down for a little bit and then they were going to come back, that's I had a

scheduling collision then, and I couldn't do both. I just they just was going to be impossible to do both. So I had to pull the record on one of them. And it was heartbreaking to do it. I mean, I I felt like I could have retired mixing Rush. I just loved that organization and those guys so much and loved that music so much. But it wasn't to be, you know, it wasn't to be. Okay if also, you're known for being an exercise junkie, and the thing that stuck out to me was the swim from Alcatraz to

the shore, so illuminate that. Yeah, well this all kind of you know, this whole thing kind of started. You know, when you turn fifty, you know, weird things happened in your brain, you know. I mean, you know, when when I was growing up, when I was a kid, I was I always struggled between two things. Don't want to be an athlete? Who want to be a musician? I want to be an athlete. I wanna be a musician, and I you know, going through that as a teenager.

And finally, you know, rightly, so it settled on music than goodness, because I'm not an athlete. I mean, if you looked at me, you were just going, yeah, not an athlete. But that said, you know, touring in and of itself is a physical activity. I mean, it is something that requires I mean, if you're gonna do it well and stay on top of it, you know, there's a physical element to it. And it's part of what I love about it. It's part of what I love about it more than being in the studio, which is

very sedentary. But I like me and moving. I like my windshield changing every day, all of that kind of stuff. But It's physically very, very demanding. And I got kind of turned onto this by a friend of mine here in town. You know, a neighbor friend of mine who

was doing this. I was at a party. We were just chatting one night, and I was just about to turn fifty, and somehow this subject came up of swimming Alcatraz, and I was like, hang on, hang on a minute, hang on, you're telling me that they actually let you do that. And he was like, yeah, yeah, they hold

a race every year. They they do it as a biathlon, and then they do this thing called the Escape from Alcatraz where you swim from the island into Golden Gate Park and or down to the Aquatic Center down there. I was like, okay, I'm all in. I am all in. I want to do this right now. I've never been a competitive swimmer, never been anything even remotely like that. I thought, okay, I'm going to train to do this, and and sure enough went and got a trainer and

started doing it and did the swim. I mean it was you know, if you kind of read this, I kind of revealed this a little bit in my CB. So I've always been this way in my life where I've and I think it served me well in my in my job as a mixer as well as I've never backed down from anything. Right, if you put it in front of me and tell me I can't do it, I'm probably gonna find a way to do it. I like running at challenges, and all of the events like that that I do are like that. They're just things

where you go, why would anybody do that? And it's like, well, I want to do it, because I don't I'm going to be uncomfortable doing it. You know that whole concept of get comfortable being uncomfortable. Man, that's that's concert life in a nutshell right there. You know, you've got to be able to manage your emotions and and get comfortable being uncomfortable. Right. Okay, so we've all seen the movies, etcetera. Supposedly you couldn't escape from Alcatraz. So how hard was

the swim? Well, it's freaking hard, but you know you're doing it in a wet suit. I mean, you've got all the things in your favor there as opposed to be in a prisoner. You know, some malnutrition prisoner who's gonna try to swim and those I mean freezing cold water to try to get there, you know, try to do that without a wet suit. Although I mean, I'll tell the story because I love telling the story for

some reason. You know, when you go out there, like you you march down the street and you get on a big barge and they take you out, you know, to the southwest portion of the island and you jump off into the water and you tread water there for you know, fifteen twenty minutes until the race starts. So we're on the we're on the barge and everybody's in full wet suit everything, you know, because it's I mean

it's cold water. And there are three girls on the barge with us, and we're looking at them, going, well, they're wearing one piece bathing suits. What the heck is this all about? These girls aren't gonna last five minutes in the water. They were Olympic swimmers. They were Olympic swimmers. They did the swimming about twenty five minutes, you know, I mean, they just beat the hypothermia. It's like, yeah, I feel like such a man right now. This is this is great. How long did it take you? And

how bad are the currents? The currents are for real, and you've got to know where they are and and know how the currents because they do the race two times a year and the currents are different for each one, so you've got to study the currents a little bit and know it. And there's a guide boat out there, so you can kind of stay focused on the guide boat, but you know, you you kind of site toward the Transamerica building in the city and then let let the

current kind of help you. But you you've gotta gotta swim. You kinda kind of edge against the current because if you miss the entrance to um the Aquatic Park down there, it takes you down underneath the ridge and you're out to see and have to go get rescued, you know. So you gotta pay really close attention to it. But it's hard, man, especially if the wakes are up there. That is a that is a challenging swim. It's just just under two miles, so you gotta you've got trained

for it. You gotta be ready. So how long does it take you? I I did really well. I did surprisingly well. I mean I was right. I think I have on the wall out here somewhere. I know, I think I was something like forty nine minutes. So I finished in the It was a thousand people in the water for the start, which that in and of itself is just pure survival. But once they get started, you know, and you get going. But I finished, you know, top three hundred, top four hundred in it, which was really

I was thrilled. I was like, there's no way I'm going to finish that high in this, but did great with it. So how often do you do with challenge? What's the hardest challenge you've done. I've been doing them every year since I turned fifty. I mean I've probably done in that time, I don't know, maybe fifty triathlons something like that, and I you know, I love doing these for periods of time. I was really into doing

these tough mutter events, so I've done. In seventeen, I did this thing called World's Toughest Mutter, which is a twenty four hour race where you do I think it was twenty two obstacles on a five mile course. Uh, you know, all kinds of water, all kinds of really crazy obstacles, you know, electro shock, all kinds of things like that, and you do as many lapses as you can do of that in twenty four hours, so uh, and get as high on my allege as you can get.

So I've done that twice. Those are really challenging. I think probably one of the most challenging things I did, probably short of Iron Man. Iron Man is really really a challenging event. But it was probably the Great Wall Marathon. I did the marathon on the Great Wall, and man, that was as close as I've ever come to not being able to finish a race because it's it's a full on marathon and within the marathon itself, you have essentially two two hundred and ten hundred fifteen story stair

climbs inside a marathon. One happens at mile five and the other happens at about mile te and man, I didn't think I was going to finish it, but any it's a time limit, you have so much amount of time to finish that. But that was the hardest, probably the hardest thing mentally I ever had to tackle. Okay, So at this point in time, what are all the

activities you're working on. I am currently well working for Chesney obviously, and you know we're really only doing about two shows a week on that we do a stadium every Saturday, and sometimes they'll throw in a shed show on you know, a Thursday or something like that, so it's not a terribly demanding schedule. And then the other times I'm working for avid Um, you know, doing the

console design and development for them. So I've been you know, that's been kind of my stability gig, which I really love. I love working for the company and and love being able to contribute that piece of it to the industry, so that that's a lot of fun. And then you know, the rest of the time is just picking up other odd jobs. I love doing the award shows now, those are really fun to do. I recorded my first opera this past year. I did opera called The Copper Queen

recorded that here in Phoenix, the Phoenix Eymphony. That was really fun to do. So, you know, there's no lack of work. Okay, So in the old days, you're going from tour to tour to tour. How much do you want to work now on the road as much as you can or you have a limit. I certainly don't want to work at the schedule I was working at in the late eighties and nineties. I mean, you know, I just I just don't want to work that much. I'm very selective about what I want to take and

go out and do on tour. I mean part of the I mean I I really enjoyed the Kinney Chesch has anything. I really do. It's an incredible band. I mean, what an incredible group of players. I mean it's like, you know, mixing a studio band every night who is also a really good live band. But you know, the thought of getting out and doing trying to conquer all the stadiums. I really wanted to get out and do that.

You know, I've done that. I've done a lot of stadium work in the past, but not to this level where I have my hands on it every single night for a stadium. That's like I said, that's I said it multiple times here. That's adult audio, really challenging to do really, really well. So I I was looking forward to take that on. Just to stop there one second. When Kenny play stadium, there's a retinue of acts. Do you mix all those acts? No? Just Kenny, just Kenny.

I have done that in the past, like for one Tom Petty tour where Jackson was opening, I mixed both Jackson and Tom for the show. But that's that's pretty rare. You don't get a chance to do that very often. Okay, so you pick and choose. So at this point in time, you're on the road. How much of a year. I granted we've had COVID, but generally speaking, yeah, well, I mean, you know, Petty, you know, worked at a really civilized schedule.

I mean, he wouldn't do more than you know, really rarely did more than three shows a week, four shows at the outside, So you know, that was a really civilized schedule. It was really civilized travel. I could do my I could do all the avid work while I was on the road because I'm an remote employee for them anyway, So it doesn't matter whether I'm working from my office or I'm working for the bus or working

from a hotel room, and just doesn't matter. It's all kind of task based, you know, as long as I can get the work done, doesn't matter where I do it. Uh. As far as touring itself, you know, I'm a lot more picky about who I work for now, and you know, what the show is going to be, what the setting is going to be. So I'm I mean, I'm very blessed to be able to kind of be a little picky about who I choose to work for now. I mean the Chesney. Part of the attraction to the Chesney

camp is it's just the greatest group of people. It's very much like the Petty camp in that regard, where you know, these are people you would hang out with off tour, you know, not just on tour. So you know, they're very enjoyable people to hang around with. So that that makes the whole thing even better and even more easy, you know. And do you have any children and what have you sacrifice being on the road all those years.

I have three children who are all grown now. I have a twenty six year old daughter who is doing fantastic and fashion uh and designed. She I actually had her out on the last Tom Petty tour. She was one of the wardrobe stylists for Tom Petty for the last tour. But she's gone on to do other photography and styling work for commercials, etcetera, just doing fantastic. I have a middle son who's twenty three, who is completely

wrapped up in the skateboard world. He is an incredible skater and a videographer now, him and a buddy have started a company called Liquid Chicken where they do all these I really just fantastic skate videos. He's got a really cool thing going on there. And then my youngest is probably the most musically inclined to the bunch. He's drummer, bass player. He'll end up being a producer by the time it's all said and done. But he's actually thinking

about getting into folly work. He wants to do fully. I think he's kind of gotten the bug from doing all the gaming and everything. He's you know, he's kind of come to me and said, tell me about tell me about fully. How do you get into that? So that's that's pretty cool. He's he's just out of high school. He graduated last year. And you're still married to the same woman I am thirty five plus years now something like that. Yeah, we're kind of an outlier there. We've been.

We've been together since day one, since we met, and I mean it feels as strong now as it's ever felt. She's actually looking forward to be going on the road because she's an empty nester now and she can come out and and to her now, so she wants to come out, you know, which was what we did in the early days. You know, we kind of you know,

I think we were as a couple. I look back on it now, ago we were smart enough to do some really smart things there with our relationship, Like we were smart enough to know that, you know, if we were physically apart from more than two weeks, three weeks, three weeks was really outside, then it was just cost of business. She has to come out, we have to be together, continue bonding, etcetera. So that was kind of the rule up until the time we had, you know, until we got up to two kids, and then she

was pretty homebound. From that point on. It was hard to bring the kids out on tour, and I'd end up in Arizona, you know. You know, I was in l A for the longest time, working there, you know, again, doing studio work and life sound work there. Uh, you know, working out a did a fair amount of work out of Keith Olsen's place good Night l A. You know,

working with a bunch of people there, excuse me. And then at some point, you know, I started realizing, you know what, I don't need to live in l A to work in l A. So, uh, you know, we decided, you know, I was going to live somewhere else, someone that was less expensive, that's for sure. And both me and my wife were really big fans of the Southwest. I mean we looked at we looked at Taos for a little bit, and you know, places in New Mexico, and but at some point it was just like, Wow, Scottsdale,

it's just such a great fit. I mean, it's so easy to get in and out of Los Angeles if I want to do it. You know, I had a I just kept my phone number, uh my l a phone number for the longest time, but lived in Arizona. And you know, if somebody called me up and said, hey, we got session brewining, you want to come in and do it, I'd said, give me a couple of hours and I go jump down on jump in Southwest Airlines

and get there and and go do the work. So but you know, one of the things that drew me here at the time was, you know, like I kind of mentioned earlier, at one point, I was trying to put together my own studio and my own label. And you know, at that time, this was around the time I guess the gin blossoms were breaking out of here and some of the other people were coming out of Phoenix, and there was a lot of metal bands coming out

of Phoenix. Um, I think Megadeth. Think. I think Dave was still here and he was doing a lot of Megadeth stuff out of here. And I was looking to come here and really cultivate some talent out of this area and start a label here. That was my goal. Uh, And I did okay with it. I did okay with it. I got probably five six bands signed to the label and then was trying to move them up. I had some inroads into Atlantic. I was trying to get them

signed in there. But you know, at the end of the day, it was a lot of money spent, and you know, I just kind of had this epiphany at some point. It's like, you know, this is not my thing. As much as I wanted to believe I could be a producer, I just didn't really have the right chops for it. I mean, I didn't have enough musical acumen to really be a good producer. And the whole role even of a producer was changing during that period. The music industry was kind of upside down at that point,

and it just kind of pushed me away. I just thought, you know what my thing is going to be live, and I know I have some things to contribute to the life sound world that are going to shape it and change it a little bit. I could just feel that coming, you know, So I really just kind of pulled the record on the studio and that whole kind of thing. Even though I was I was still mixing

a lot of stuff there, I stopped tracking. I mean, I had a little mobile recording trailer that I would pull around and do events and stuff here and and do some mixing and stuff. But really I kind of got away from the label dream and just focused entirely on live sound. And you know, as as it's turned out, it served me very very well. How lucrative is it being a front of the house engineer depends on how good you are. Bob, Well, you're an elite player. I

make more than I ever dreapt. I would make at it, I'll tell you that. I mean, I remember in the very early days of this, in the early eighties, just thinking, man, if I could just make if I could just make seven fifty bucks, maybe a thousand dollars a week, I could do this forever. You know. Needless to say, we've we've moved on past that figure. So yeah, no, I I've lived very comfortably. I mean, I'm not a high maintenance guy. Not I don't require a lot in my life.

I can. I think I could actually live very simply, and I think that comes from living on the road. You learn how to live simple and and entertain yourself, you know. So, I mean I have a beautiful home here, etcetera. Don't get me wrong, but I don't think I have to have that to survive. So you've achieved so much. Any dreams left, goals left, people you want to work with. I mean, so many of the bands that I dreamt about working with, you know, I really don't exist anymore, etcetera.

You know, there are still bands that I would I would love to go out and do and really try to put a really interesting spin on doing it, like do it really unique. I mean, there's there's this whole movement now and p A systems and and mixing consoles to do immersive work in in the life sound space. I'm really excited about trying to do some of that. I mean, I would love to go out and mix somebody like tool uh, you know, and do that kind of thing. Um. I mean, certainly in my heyday, I

would have loved to mix Queen. I would have loved to mix the who you know, any of those bands that would have been just my dream gigs. But like I said earlier, I really got to mix my dream gig. Brush was my dream gig. That's the one I always

clamored after to do. You know, what is this immersive thing you're talking about, Well, think of it like, although this is gonna probably confuse the issue more than than actually explain it, but think of it like atmost but for a live sound that's that's what it's gonna end up being. It's this thing called object mixing versus bus mixing for a live sound, and it stands to really really do some amazing things in sound production live sound production for sure, because you know, at risk of going

into all the geeky part of it again. You know, stereo, as we've known it is great really for the majority

of things that we do in our world. You know, we listen to almost everything in stereo still to this day, but large format stereo by the time you get up to arenas and by the time you get to stadium where you have these very large distance between the left and the right of the stereo can cause lots of problems in terms of coverage and consistency in sound stereot large format stereo is is really not the ideal thing to do in large format live sound, and the concept

of doing it uh in an immersive speaker format is highly desirable, highly desirable. But we again this is again where the technology and we're just at that point in history where the technology is going to allow us to actually do it. The consoles have the capability of doing it. We have the ability in in these big DSP processors to build an immersive environment. We have the speaker system

capabilities to do it. You know, all the pieces are falling in place to do it, and certainly the music is lending itself to it, you know, so it could be it could be very cool. Before that, when you mix, you're essentially mixing mono or are you mixing stereo? I call it kind of a wide modo. I mean, it's it's not mono in the sense really model by definition should be one speaker cluster, right, So stereo with everything pan to the center is kind of model, but it's

not really model. So you know, I kind of for large format concerts, I'm kind of doing what I call wide model. Sure, there are things panned out left and right to do things, but for the most part, the most important information is at the center and is modeled because you want with the entire room to be able to read it right. You don't want people on one side of the room not hearing other things on the

other side of the room. Just to go back a chapter, if there's twenty thousand people in the arena, actually most of them are a little bit smaller, but let's use twenty thousand, and you're using the sphere concept. Everybody there is getting a different sound. But if you're using the immersive concept, are I going to hear something completely different? If I'm you know, up in the rafters as opposed

to on the floor, you could. I mean, in that situation you're gonna do, You're gonna have areas of seating that are going to be optimized for the immersive. Right, they're gonna this section of seats, maybe this is the floor seats, and the first bowl might be optimized for immersive where they get the immersive experience, and then people up in the upper things still can hear the show, they would hear what would be we would term a

folded down version of the show. Right, they wouldn't experience the spatial element of the immersive, but they would still still hear all the elements. Right, So it just becomes phil speakers in that part of the arena, and they still hear the show and still hear every element of it, they just don't experience it immersively. Right. And your favorite buildings?

Who favorite buildings? Um? I think my favorite sounding building that I've mixed in in the past ten years is probably the new FedEx Place, FedEx Dome or whatever you wanna call it in Memphis. I think the place in Memphis just sounds absolutely fantastic. Whatever they've done to it, you know what, have treated it however, they've done it absolutely fantastic. Um. I love me in the Gorge. I love Red Rocks. I love mixing at Red Rocks. I

like the Hollywood Bowl. I'm actually fine at the Hollywood Bowl. I like I like how it sounds there, and I like the PA installed they got there. So um, I mean there's there's a lot of good places now, you know. I mean the architects are doing really good jobs with

the places. That. Honestly, the places I hate the most are the places that are actually designed to do performance, which are the indoor outdoor sheds, you know, I think those are the those are some of the most challenging places to do, which is really unfortunate because they're designed to handle performance, you know, just because their indoor outdoor and there's a roof, low roof, yeah, just the well, you know, you would you would be tempted to think, well,

it's outdoors, there's no acoustics, blah blah blah. You know, but yeah, there is lots of acoustics because of the coverage of the audience. It's usually all very hard material, very reverberant down under the under the roof. So then

you have you have to address both worlds. You have to addres us a world that is outside the roof, which is outside, no reflections, no ambience, no anything, and then a very reverberant space down where all the seats are, and usually a stage area that sounds less than optimum, we'll put it that way. So to me, they're very, very challenging to do and very challenging to get speakers in the right places, in those right positions, in those places.

So those are the most disappointing places to me. It's like, gosh, man, Fellas, if you're going to design it to do performance, how about we take these things into consideration. You know. Well, Robert, I want to thank you for taking so much time. I could listen to you all day. This is all really interesting stuff, because you know, you go to the show and you want to know what's behind the Other thing I want to say is you sent me the article that you wrote about Russell Pope. Yeah. I was

stunned how well written it was. Oh well, thank you that seriously. I mean, I read for a living and most people can't write. I mean, so when someone writes, well, and this is not blowing smoke because it didn't have it. I'm literally reading, I'm shocked because most of this stuff is unreadable. Oh my gosh, thank you. I mean, that's that's really kind. I mean, I I kind of pride myself on it. I mean I've written, you know, dozens and dozens of articles and you know, obviously been featured

in quite a few. But I mean I enjoy writing. I do. I I mean I enjoy putting blogs together things like that. So yeah, thank you. That's that's very kind. I'm very appreciative that you said it's hard felt. In any event, I want to thank you taking for the time. You've just been fantastic, so thanks again, Well, thank you. I mean it's you know, I was a little uh, you know when when I was asking to be on your show, I was just thinking, oh my gosh, what is this sound guy going to talk about on the

Bob left Side Show. I was like, what are we going to cover? Man? But you know, thank you for making it so easy. And well, I say, there's so much we didn't cover. They go deep in the weeds, but I think we got a pretty good s mortgage board of what's going on. So Robert, thanks again. Hey, thank you and thanks for your letters. I mean, I enjoy your your thing. And before this I didn't even know you had a podcast. So now I'm really glad I can I can listen to you while I'm working

out now, so it would be good. Absolutely until next time. This is Bob left Sex m