Tag Archives for " Steven Tyler "

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 Roger Alan Nichols, a producer, recording engineer, rock musician, and songwriter from Nashville TN.

He is owner of Bell Tone Recording in Berry Hill where he produces great sounding rock. In fact when I recorded my record Skadoosh which includes the track "American Winter" on the Mix Master Bundle I turned to Roger for guitar tones, borrowing the Bogner, and Bassman guitar amp heads for my sound.

Roger started out in Nashville with his band Dreaming In English as an artist and later moved to production and engineering after Pro Tools made it possible for him to create professional home studio. He has since moved to this beautiful commercial location at BelTone Recording and records with many country and rock artists.

Some of the Rockstars that Roger has written for, performed with, produced, or recorded are Paramore, Mix Master Mandy, Seal, Ryan Humbert, Robben Ford, The Mean Tambourines, The Campaign 1984, Tyler Bryant, and Steven Tyler

Touring Professionally Early

With technology providing opportunities for people to record and to write and to create art, the thing that is always in the back of my head is just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. That I think is one of the biggest obstacles right now with music. The fact that technology has allowed us to create really great sounding stuff with no filter. Now from an artist's standpoint, I love that, that’s the way it should be. The way the business is now the gatekeepers are gone and everyone applaudes that. But the bad news is is the gatekeepers are gone. So there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s really mediocre. A lot of stuff that is put out that should be developed better.

The way records are made now is we send files around. I’ll get a track and record a guitar part and I’ll send it off to someone else and then they’ll add something and whenever they start to mix it, whoever mixes it you end up carving the hell out of it EQ wise to make it work in the context of the mix. The way records used to be made is the band would set up in a room, decisions were made about placement of amps and mics and so forth. Then the snapshot was taken. If you solo’d the guitar or something, it might sound really shitty by itself, but in context it would sound amazing. So it was about the complete photograph as opposed to the individual in the photograph

Being A Producer 

As a producer one of the easiest failures to make is to not listen to the artist. I think that is a common mistake especially if you have artistic visions or perspectives. It’s easy to go "Well really what you need is this." I have learned the hard way that is not a good thing to do. You want to be good at what you do, and you want to be able to contribute to the vision, and a lot of times you just stay out of the way and help facilitate the vision. It’s not about contributing to the vision from an artistic voice, but it's creating an environment for the artist to find out what their voice is.

Q - What was holding you back at the start?
A - How things were done. When I was learning how to play, I’d put the needle on the record, listen, play, needle on the record, listen, play, etc. There was no YouTube demonstration of how to play the chord voicing or how to connect these devices with this. You had to find the local hot shot at the music store and ask him how it’s done or sit and observe. There’s something to be said about being able to hear a song and go, “I know what those voicings are, I know what those chord changes are,” because your ear is developed to that point.

Q - Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- I used to take a polaroid camera and I would take snapshots of everything: mic placements, EQ settings, etc. Then I would have a notebook and give it to the drummer to sketch out his kit and mark the size of his drums and what heads he was using and where mics were placed and keep track of lyrics. It was basically a journal of the record. For me, that was a way of keeping track of the process.