Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music (26 page)

What began in the late 1950s as a small industry-only affair held at a Los Angeles hotel has become a grand production enjoyed by millions of people the world over.

Grammy producers Pierre Cossette, John Cossette, Ken Ehrlich, and director/producer Walter Miller consistently produce a program that’s both entertaining and reflective of the Academy’s commitment to the musical arts and sciences, and I’m especially proud of the Recording Academy’s contribution to television sound production. We were the first awards show to broadcast in high-definition, and to present a 5.1 surround-sound program on network television.

When we began broadcasting the Grammys in 5.1, the response was very positive. We’ve gotten to the point where we can receive e-mails from viewers while the show is in progress. “The left side sounds like it’s a bit lower than the right. Should it be that way?” and “The applause is coming from behind me—should it be that way?”

It was thrilling to communicate with viewers who are mindful of the technical feat behind what we’ve done. “Yes—the soundstage is correct,” I explain as they send in their questions. “We’ve set your
listening position at tenth row center, about fifty feet in the air. But you’ll notice that we sometimes bring you closer to the stage, too.”

We’ve come a long way from the mono sound of my youth, and it’s hard to believe that while I’m standing amidst a full orchestra onstage at the Staples Center or Radio City that the multidimensional sound I’m enjoying is also being experienced by millions of people listening in the comfort of their homes.

When I began my career as a recording engineer, mixing in surround for television was considered space-age technology—and light-years ahead of its time. I’m ecstatic that it’s become a reality, and that it’s affordable for the average consumer. More than this, I’m thrilled to be using it to produce music programming that allows everyone—regardless of time, place, or financial means—to hear it in all of its full-dimensional glory.

I’ll do anything to make a record sound better.

As a young engineer, I vowed to fight the limits of the existing technology and break the recording traditions that everyone had gotten to know. My mind-set hasn’t changed.

I’m
still
excited when I have the chance to test-drive an experimental format, or put a new piece of equipment through its paces. But the truth is that the equipment used to make a record isn’t nearly as important as how the engineer and producer use it.

Today, we can do miraculous things digitally, with the click of a mouse—things that were difficult (if not impossible) to do in analog. I saw the potential in digital recording and embraced it from the start.

The earliest digital recordings I made were in 1980 for Billy Joel’s
Songs in the Attic,
a collection of live recordings. The idea was to present a handful of tunes from Billy’s first four albums—records that while less than perfect in their production contained some of his most expressive songs.

We recorded Billy in a variety of settings—from clubs to arenas—on an early 32-track 3M digital machine that I dubbed “the DC-10” (a notoriously unreliable airplane). We mixed some of the album at RPM Studios, and the rest in a mobile recording truck rented from Le Mobile, parked in the driveway of my home in Pound Ridge, New York.

It was only a matter of time before Hollywood went digital, and the format won a starring role when I supervised the final mixes for Barbra Streisand’s
Yentl
in 1983.

The story (based on
Yentl, The Yeshiva Boy
by Isaac Bashevis Singer) is about a young Jewish girl in nineteenth-century Poland who has but one purpose: to attend religious school—a privilege that at the time was afforded only to Orthodox males.

The property couldn’t have been better suited to Barbra’s many talents, not the least of which were producing and directing. As lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman explain, “Barbra brings to anything she sings passion, intelligence, and vocal brilliance. In the case of
Yentl,
she performed with a total understanding of and immersion in the character.”

The recording truck used to mix
Songs in the Attic,
“Camp Ramone,” 1981. The Necam computer mainframe was run from the truck to the garage, where it could be kept cool in the summer heat.
Courtesy of Larry Franke

The complete score—instrumentals and vocals—was prerecorded on analog tape at Olympic Studios in London, with Michel Legrand conducting. Once the picture was shot, Barbra lip-synched to the tracks that had been prerecorded in London.

But after the film was edited, Barbra heard about the new twenty-four-track digital recorder (model PCM 3324) that Sony had manufactured, and she wanted to try it.

Since the movie was finished (and had been shot to Barbra’s analog vocal prerecordings), it was decided that Michel Legrand would go back to Olympic Studios and rerecord the instrumental score on digital tape, conducting to Barbra’s existing analog vocal track. Remember: Vocals for film are usually sung to a prerecorded music track, if not live with the orchestra. What Michel was asked to do was very unusual—and difficult.

The rerecordings were made on an empty soundstage with only the musicians and technicians in the room; the digital rerecording of the orchestra was glorious. There was none of the noise of the previous version, and no analog tape hiss. But when Barbra listened to the new mix—a combination of her original analog vocals and Michel’s new digital instrumental tracks—she wasn’t pleased. “That’s not how the orchestra phrased the score the first time,” she said.

We put up the analog instrumental tracks from the first sessions, and compared them to the digital rerecordings. Barbra was right: at some points, the tempos in the digital rerecordings were slightly different than on the original analog recording, and I understood why.

Just as Barbra phrases differently from take to take, Michel Legrand feels a piece of music differently each time he conducts it. While his new score matched Barbra’s vocal, the small (but perceptible) variations in tempo upset her.

“I want the
exact
orchestral note that we hear on the original analog recording to land in the
exact
same spot on the digital rerecording,” she said.

When the session masters were delivered to me at M-G-M in Culver City, I received three different sources with which to make our mix: the twenty-four-track analog recording of the score, the twenty-four-track digital rerecording of the score, and the analog recording of Barbra’s voice.

Accomplishing this in Pro Tools today would be a snap; we can easily move one section of the recording (a vocal) forward or backward until it precisely matches another (the orchestra).

But creating a hybrid mix from analog and digital sources at the beginning of the digital age was tedious.

We could edit the analog tape with a razor blade and splicing tape, but cutting digital tape could get you into deep trouble. The only way to accomplish digital editing was to use the same technique used for videotape editing, which involved making a copy of a copy to edit.

Integrating individual bars of music from the digital tape into the new analog master was time-consuming: It took nearly two hours to edit and capture sixteen bars of music. The master film for one particular song was shot at the incorrect frame rate, which affected the pitch of Barbra’s vocal, and it took me a week to get that one song into acceptable shape.

The engineer who had done the original recordings at Olympic in London came to Los Angeles to assist us, but quit after two weeks. I don’t think he anticipated the insanity of what we wanted him to do. “I can’t do this,” he complained. “I already did the job in London—I won’t do it again.”

I called Jim Boyer and asked him to fly in from New York.

As Jim remembers:

“Phil called, and said, ‘I need you to come out here—now.’ I went directly to the studio as soon as I arrived. We had a system: Phil worked in Culver City with Barbra, while I synchronized and edited the tapes at Lion Share Studio in Los Angeles.

“Engineering-wise I’d never seen anything like it,” Boyer continues. “We were distilling both analog and digital media to a single
analog master—for film and record. There was no time-code (the industry standard for linking multiple tracks together so they line up exactly), so we substituted a sixty-cycle tone to help synchronize the vocals to the music tracks.

“One of the pitfalls of the early digital technology was editing; they hadn’t yet developed computerized digital editing, so we used a razor blade to make the edit. But you couldn’t cut the tape or take it apart more than twice or it became unusable. We were constantly making safeties and backups so we could edit the digital tapes.

“I was blown away by Barbra’s memory; we had dozens of tapes, and she could remember specific words and phrases that she wanted from each in the final take. It was awesome—scary, really. When we matched the vocals to the printed music score, the unfolded vocal take sheet was the size of the console. This was before automation—if you didn’t write it down, it didn’t get remembered. It was the beginning of the digital age and Barbra, Phil, and Columbia Records wanted to be in on it.”

Here’s how a typical
Yentl
day unfolded:

Barbra and I would work on remixing the film soundtrack at M-G-M in Culver City from eight a.m. to six p.m. We worked straight through with very few breaks. Then, we’d get in the car and drive to Lion Share Studio in Hollywood, where we’d meet Jim Boyer and the Bergmans to mix the songs for the soundtrack album.

Marilyn and Alan Bergman were our guardian angels—they practically lived at Lion Share from the beginning to the end. They’d written the songs for the film, but the reasons for their presence ran much deeper: They were two of Barbra’s closest friends. She trusted them implicitly, and they were coproducers on the picture.

The mixing sessions at Lion Share ran until two a.m., and afterward I’d drive Barbra home. She’d unfailingly chide me for driving too slow.
“C’mon, c’mon
—
you can drive faster than this!”
she’d urge as the car wound its way toward Beverly Hills.

After dropping her off, I’d head back to my hotel, knowing that
in a precious few hours we’d be off to Culver City and another eighteen-hour workday.

Once the mixes for the picture and album were done, we went to A&M to record studio versions of “The Way He Makes Me Feel” and “No Matter What Happens,” which were arranged and conducted by Dave Grusin.

Yentl
is as strong—theatrically, cinematically, and musically—as anyone could wish a movie to be. I won’t soon forget the thrill of hearing Barbra hit and sustain a high D at the end of “A Piece of Sky” (the finale), or the elation I felt when she and I cut it to picture and watched it together.

Looking back, I’m not sure how Jim Boyer and I functioned—let alone survived. One night Jim left the studio and walked into the Beverly Hilton with a fifteen-foot piece of two-inch recording tape stuck to his shoe. He was so tired it took him a few minutes to realize why everyone was staring as he crossed the lobby.

Not long after I began working on
Yentl
, fellow producer Tom Dowd visited me. When he looped back through Hollywood a few months later, he was shocked to find that I was still at it. “Phil, you look green,” he said. “I’ve made two albums in the last three months, and you’re still sitting in the same damned chair!”

Although the original masters were analog, it was a real kick when CBS/Sony chose Billy Joel’s
52nd Street
to be the very first commercial CD ever released.

When Sony asked me to remaster the album for that first CD, I insisted on replicating the original two-track mix that Jim Boyer and I had made for the original LP. I didn’t want to use the LP assembly master that contained EQ and other processing; I wanted the first-generation multitrack mixdown tape, so I asked Columbia to give me the tape I’d originally handed in so we’d have prime sources for re-mastering. Even though Sony was their Japanese partner, CBS was reluctant to let the tape out, and agreed to do so only when I promised to carry it to and from Japan myself (it stayed on my lap the whole time).

52nd Street
packed a solid punch, and the CD remaster we did in Japan sounded much better than the LP, with improved clarity and strikingly deep bass. People don’t understand the physical limitations of vinyl, but we could never have translated the deep bottom end we heard on the master tape to an LP. Going from LP to CD was like going from black-and-white TV to color.

During my trip to Japan, I spent a lot of time with Sony executive Norio Ohga. Ohga gave me a CD player, and when I got back to the States I took the player and the
52nd Street
CD to WPLJ-FM in New York and asked if they’d listen to the new format. They played a couple of the CD tracks on the air, and the telephones started to ring.

“Why does what you are playing sound so much better?” callers asked. Even with all of the wires, antennae, compressors, and transmitters that an FM radio signal goes through, people could hear the difference.

Another example of how technology can be adapted to what we do in the studio is the EDNet fiber-optic system—a digital cable system that transmits high-fidelity sound from one studio to another using sophisticated telephone links, and Dolby encoders and decoders.

When I started talking about using fiber-optic phone lines to make Frank Sinatra’s
Duets
, my colleagues thought I was crazy. My response was, “The technology is there to serve. Why not use it?” With EDNet, a producer can record an orchestra in New York, a vocalist in California, and background singers in Chicago—all at the same time. How could that be bad?

The question I debated when considering the use of EDNet on
Duets
was “Can I make it easier for Frank Sinatra to be in the studio, and have a good time?”

Don’t forget: Practically everything Sinatra did in his career was live. Even his studio sessions were recorded live with the band, in front of a small, invited audience. In his prime, Sinatra was the guy
who said, “If we can’t get it within the first few takes, there’s something wrong with us.” His commitment to excellence taught me a valuable lesson about immediacy, and from the moment I met and worked with him in 1967 it became the core of my work ethic.

Recording Sinatra’s
Duets
wasn’t just about technology—it was about how to get the other performers attuned to
his
style of singing. I tried to make it as easy as possible for them to harmonize with Frank, even though he wasn’t in the room.

I created lyric sheets that broke down every line, so we could map out which lines the duet partner would sing (it’s something I do for all the duets I record). We adjusted the orchestrations in some spots, because when one vocalist sings to another vocalist’s prerecorded track the keys don’t always match. I remember Natalie Cole saying, “I thought I could just phrase with him so easily—it took me a half hour to figure it out.” Sinatra did musical things that no one had ever thought to do.