My guest today is Cameron Henry a mastering engineer at Welcome to 1979 Studio specializing in vinyl mastering. He has mastered over two-thousand LP & 45-single releases, including Bela Fleck, John Mayer, Sturgill Simpson, Bonnie Raitt, JD McPherson, Spiritualized, Steve Earle, Dinosaur Jr., John Prine, The Rolling Stones, Whitney Houston, and many others.

And since Cameron's mastering room is located in a full-on recording studio, Cameron & studio owner Chris Mara have been able to record direct-to-disk releases for artists such as Pete Townshend, Josh Hoyer, and a handful of others.

One of the very cool things that Cameron also does here is to host a "vinyl camp" at Welcome To 1979 Studio, which is focused on teaching the basics of disk cutting, with hands-on demonstrations, using attendee's music, & a chance to participate in an actual direct-to-disk recording session. The goal of the camp is to provide knowledge to mixing engineers & producers so they can have the foresight to properly prepare an album for a vinyl release.

The cutting stylus on the lathe cuts the groove and is vibrated by the music so that when you put the playback needle on your turntable into that groove it vibrates the same way. A record is cut in a midside fashion where all of your center information is causing a lateral, horizontal groove to be cut on the record. And anything stereo is happening vertically.

When a record is pressed, there’s a hot hockey puck sized piece of plastic that goes between the two stampers. The stampers push down with a bunch of pressure and the plastic spreads outward, much like waffle batter.

Q - What was holding you back at the start?
A - One of my biggest things was thinking that if only I had the ability to go into a real studio to make a record I would totally do that. I grew up in Toledo, OH and had a port-a-studio and two mics and would make records on that thing. At the time I didn’t realize that what I was doing was super awesome and important to understanding how recording works, by just working with semi-pro equipment. There were times where I thought we could do this song, but we might need this other piece of gear to do it, and that’s the wrong attitude to have.

Q - Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- A fun hardware tool is actually a unit by Behringer called the Combinator. It’s this multi-band limiter, equalizer, compressor that was actually intended for live purposes so you could shape music to the room you’re in. It’s an awesome piece of gear.

My guest today is Chris Mara owner of Nashville’s Welcome To 1979 recording studio, and owner of Mara Machines; the largest analog tape machine restoration company in the world.

Chris’s passion for recording led to founding the analog-centric Welcome To 1979; which has clients such as Pete Townshend, Eric Burdon, Brendan Benson, The Features, North Mississippi Allstars, The Protomen, John Oats, and Jack White’s Third Man Records among many.

Welcome To 1979

Chris shared the journey he took to start his own unique analog tracking facility. Located in an old record pressing plant, his control room is a whopping 1,200 sq ft featuring an MCI-428 built in 1987.

Welcome to 1979 Control Room 

Vinyl Mastering 

Welcome to 1979 also has a beautiful cutting lathe and vinyl mastering department, making masters for Sony Records, Warner Records, Compass Records and Concord Records, along with many independent artists. 

Chris learned from Hank Williams what the vinyl mastering process is and what a cutting lathe is. His studio now uses a Neumann VMS70 to master vinyls in real time. The masters are turned into metal and hot pressed into the vinyl record.

Neumann VMS70

Mara Machines restores analog MCI tape machines in use all over the world: Canada, Mexico, Greece, Vietnam, England, Brazil and of course, the United States. Mara Machines clients include Pete Townshend, Arcade Fire, Live, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, Ryan Freeland, Greg Wells & Justin Niebank.

Recording Summit 

Rockstars this is something really cool that you will want to know about. Welcome To 1979 is also ground zero for a yearly Recording Summit inviting you to meet panels of experts that have included inspiring producers like Vance Powell, Richard Dodd, Mitch Easter, Gary Paczosa, Larry Crane, and mastering engineer Hank Williams during previous years.

Chris wanted to bring "AES" and "Potluck" to a more intimate level. His summit has 60 spots consisting of business and music panels, that talks a lot about day to day challenges such as  “the art of production and taxes."

Tape Camp

Chris also hosts a regular event called Tape Camp where you can spend a weekend in the studio learning all about analog tape, from aligning the machines right through recording a session. He shares how people would email him asking to learn more about tape machines, so he started a camp twice a year where they invite ten people the weekend to come get hands on learning experience recording to tape. A special third day set aside for tape alignment. 

Student at Tape Camp

Q - What was holding you back at the start?
A - I’d say Wisconsin. Being 7 hours North of Chicago, there was no industry or connections, so I moved here (to Nashville).

Q - Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- I rarely record without a DBX 160. They make sense to me. I love to use them on kick, snare, guitars vocals, bass, background vocals. Lately I’ve been putting one behind another compressor as a limiter on a vocal especially. When I first started recording, I just became fond of the sound.