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My guest today is Steve Marcantonio, a Grammy winning producer, recording engineer, and teacher from Nashville TN. He is also a member of NARAS, a Leadership Music alumnus, and winner of the ACM Engineer of the year award.

Steve Marcantonio started his career at the Record Plant Studios in New York City in 1978.

While at the Record Plant he worked with such artists as The J. Geils Band, Aerosmith, Kiss, Heart, Graham Parker, The Blues Bros and John Lennon.

One remarkable and heart breaking story is that Steve spent 8 days in the studio in December of 1980 with John and Yoko. After they left on the night of the 8th John was killed. Quite a shock for a 21 year old who just started in the business 2 years prior.

Steve’s credentials include Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Reba, George Strait, Alabama, Restless Heart and Deana Carter. And In recent years Steve has done records with Brantley Gilbert, Thomas Rhett, Band Perry, Taylor Swift, Hank Jr, Steven Tyler and Cheap Trick.

And though he didn’t include it in his bio I know Steve is also dead serious about cooking real Italian food!

Keep Your Promises

Roy Cicala hired me off the street. I didn’t know anything, so he wanted to teach me his way. I learned a lot of valuable lessons from him. One of which is when you’re booking time with someone you have to keep your promise that you’ll work with them, even if you get booked by someone else who’s a much bigger name. You don’t go by the name, you go by the booking. I was actually involved in a project with the Blues Brothers. I worked on the soundtrack of the Blue’s Brothers movie. It went on for about 6-7 months. I don’t think there was a budget because we spent a heck of a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of other things. Along the way I got to learn about a very valuable piece of equipment back then it was called the BTX. It was this white little console that held two tape machines together. Well in September of that year Jonny and Yoko were working on Double Fantasy and they booked the studio and they wanted me because I knew how to use the BTX. I thought for sure that the producer of the Blues Brothers having worked with me for 5-6 months would have said oh sure. He said, “No, I need you here with me.” At the time John Belushi was very famous, the Blues Brother’s movie was going to be huge, but I’m thinking to myself man I have the chance to work with John Lennon. I didn't make any fuss, and as it turns out I missed that chance, but I got my chance late afterwards. You can’t get too bent out of shape with names, you have to keep to whoever it is you’re working with.

John Lennon at the Record Plant

Gretchen Peters

I would say my number one highlight besides working with John Lennon is I got to record a song with Gretchen Peters. She’s probably one of the most amazing artists I’ve ever worked with. Great singer, great songwriter, she doesn’t write with anyone except for Brian Adams. She had a song she wrote called, “When You Are Old,” and it’s about getting old and tired and grey. My mom had been getting old and she was into music and said, “I want bridge over troubled waters to be played at my funeral.” I gave her this song and she said, “That’s the one I want played.” So sure enough in the funeral home, we played that song and there was not a dry eye in there. That’s one of my major accomplishments besides the grammy. Having that song played for my mom that I recorded was incredible.

                    Gretchen Peters - When You Are Old

Running a Great Recording Session

Obviously you have to pick the right mics to go with whatever instruments you’re using. In order to get a good mix you have to have good sounding tracks. You’d be amazed at some of the stuff I have to mix, I’m not sure where the producer was when they were recording it. In order to get a good sound, you have to have a good sound on the floor whatever instrument you’re recording. Is it in tune? Are the heads changed on the drums? Are they in tune? Does the drummer hit the drums with the right velocity to get a good sound? These are all elements that you’re dealing with as a engineer. I have go-to mics for certain things, but I’m not opposed to trying new things. I have to keep up with the times. I realized in order to stay current I have to try these things. And I love it, I think it’s great!

Secret for Mixing Great Vocals

Country and pop vocals tend to be louder than rock records. What I use mostly in ProTools is RVox, it kind of evens out the vocal. A lot of times too I’ll mult the vocal into where there’s different EQ or compression on it and I’ll use it in different spots in the chorus or verse. And also most female vocalists have an EQ point somewhere around 1k-2k that really hurts your ears during specific spots and a multiband compressor can take care of that or you can just scoop out that EQ. As far as recording vocals, my favorite go to vocal mic is an SM7. It has everything you need. There’s no real, real lows or sparkling highs and the artist can get right up on it. The best thing about it..it’s cheap. When a vocalist says big, most of the time it means a lot of reverb. I tend to use delay most all the time on anything instead of reverb just to give it that width. On a vocal the delay has to be used differently in the verses than the choruses. Instead of sending it to a delay, I duplicate the vocal and I put the plugin right on the vocal. So instead of having the send go up and down, I’ll just clip gain the vocal up or down. I think you have better control over an effect

Tips for Stereo Bussing

When I first started, we never put anything on a stereo bus. These days I start with my slate mix rack which has the meter on it so that I can see, and then I use the virtual console, then depending on the song I go to API or Neve. You can strap the virtual console on groups like all the drums and you can just affect it with just one plugin so they all see the same thing. I don’t use individual faders these days, I’ll bus all of my drums to a master subgroup and on those busses I put my virtual console and I also use a compressor. Sometimes The SSL compressor but lately I’ve been using the Slate virtual bus compressor. When you put a plugin on in protools at first you should always bypass in and out to make sure you’re just not hearing it louder because whenever you hear something louder you instantly think it sounds better, so you should always set your unity gain on a plugin. Having said that with virtual bus compressor its louder because its compressing and limiting and what have you. The last thing I put in the chain in a tape machine.

Q - Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- Drums are my favorite thing to record. I think a lot of people hire me because they love my drum sounds. When I’m recording a room sound, the UREI 1178 is my go-to. I hit the bottom button and the top button and I just slam it. I get it to where it’s blended in a little bit, but I love having heavy duty compression on my drums. Another thing I’ll do is take a mic, the Buyer 160 or any other kind of ribbon mic or maybe even a 57 and I’ll put it right above the kick drum facing the toms and the snare and just compress the snot out of that too. It really adds a nice effect to the overall drum sound so those are my go-to things in recording.

My guest today is David Thoener, a multi Grammy winning producer, engineer, and mixer with a true rockstar list of credits to his discography. In fact David made many of the records that I grew up with that help define rock music for me.

David started his career in 1974 as an assistant engineer at the Record Plant in New York City, and learned his craft creating Aerosmith "Toys In The Attic," Bruce Springsteen "Born To Run," David Bowie "Young Americans," John Lennon "Walls and Bridges," Electric Light Orchestra "Face The Music" and Richie Blackmore "Rainbow Rising."

David then moved on to engineering and mixing records in 1976, and has since enjoyed a thirty year run of hit records including classic records for AC/DC "For Those About To Rock”, John Mellencamp "Little Pink Houses", John Waite "Missing You", all the hits from the J. Geils Band, Matchbox 20 and many others.

In 2000, David won two Grammys -- Record of the Year and Album of the Year -- for recording and mixing "Smooth" by Santana featuring Rob Thomas.

David has mixed hit records for Jason Mraz, Faith Hill, and Sugarland, and has made records all over including South Africa, Sweden, Australia, Mexico, and Japan to list a few.

I am very lucky to be able to have this interview in person since he lives right here in Nashville TN. Please welcome David Thoener to Recording Studio Rockstars.

Thoughts on Recording Schools Today..

​With all these schools now, a lot of guys that are going to these schools think that they are going to walk out of school, and going to sit behind the board, and going to be working with Jack White on his next record, and that’s just not going to happen. It never has happened that way! Every place that I would go when I would deliver these packages, I would fill out an employment form... I’ll clean the toilet for you, I’ll do whatever. Persistence and luck. And I have to say 50% of being successful in the music business and especially as an engineer is luck. It’s being at the right place at the right time, or some musician that you’ve worked with in the past, that just happens to say to another musician, “Hey, you’ve got to work with this guy. He’s really good, I think you’ll like him.” Then all of a sudden, it happens. It’s getting those relationships together. I want the listeners to realize that you just don’t walk out of school and walk into an amazing job.

Do you see similarities for music releases now vs back then?

Acetates in those days were not to be used for manufacturing purposes, they were just used to take your record around, because every A&R guy and every label had a record player. They didn’t necessarily have a tape player. Acetate was the medium they would play your music on. So I would cut acetate discs of a couple of songs for artists and I would make tape copies. They would take those acetate discs and tape copies around to different places like RCA and CBS. It was hitting the pavement and walking around and trying to make appointments with A&R guys, and sitting down, and they would put your record on, and then give you the thumbs up or thumbs down. And then you’d walk out of there and go to the next place!

Really the consumer is the winner now-a-days. As opposed to an artist or the people that are in the position of making the record, because you have iTunes now, and iTunes takes a fairly decent percentage of the sale of your single. I don't even know what some of the sites like Spotify and Pandora pay. I mean you're paid pennies, to my knowledge, on the amount of records downloaded.

I think there are more one hit wonders these days. There are a lot of bands that I listen to on some of these streaming mediums that I think ‘man that’s a really great song!’ I’ll check out the record and I’ll find several songs that I like a lot. And I would normally become a fan of this band, but a year goes by and they’re gone. I find that more these days. I guess it’s a combination of being able to go in and do a record way, way less expensive than it used to cost, so the bar is lowered. 

Q - What was holding you back at the start?
A - Really nothing held me back, I knew what I wanted to do. I had a mission. I just had the focus in mind of getting there as fast as possible, whatever that took.

Q - Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- If I’ve got one, an ELAM 251 Telefunkin microphone, which is very hard to get.