Transcription of Bob Ludwig for the show Music Mastery #187
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 187. Music Mastery, airing for the first time on Sunday April 12, 2015. Music in Maine is alive and well on many levels. We have long head talented musicians but we also have those whose work involves fine tuning the music once it has been recorded.
Today we speak with pre-eminent mastering engineering Bob Ludwig. Who’s Grammy winning work is recognized the world over. We also speak with musician and award winning singer/songwriter Sam Chase whose making his mark on the Maine Music scene. Thank you for joining us.
It’s always interesting for me to hear about an individual over the years and think, “I wonder if I’ll ever meet that person because they’re doing something pretty amazing that not many people in Maine are doing.” Today I get to meet one of these individuals.
I’m a little star struck, I must admit. This is Bob Ludwig. He’s laughing at me already. Bob Ludwig is a Grammy winning Mastering engineer, whose been in the music business for over 40 years and has mastered countless gold and platinum records.
He’s worked on records for Neil Diamond, Janice Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Pearl Jam, and many more.
Bob: And Frozen.
Dr. Lisa: And Frozen, oh my goodness I can’t believe that we forgotten that. I freak out in song right now. This is …
Bob: Let it go, let it go.
Dr. Lisa: I’ll just going to do it for us. I love it. This is, it’s so interesting that you have created this space for yourself here in Maine of all places. You’re working with people all over the world really.
Bob: Yeah we’re really lucky. Went to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester and when I was finishing up my master’s degree. Phil Ramone was a very famous music producer and engineer came up to teach the first recording workshop there. I was his kind of assistant at the end, they asked me if I want to work for them in New York.
I’ve been playing trumpet with the Utica Symphony Orchestra. I was also in the recording department at Eastman. Even in high school I couldn’t decide if I wanted to go into engineering or to music and thank goodness my high school music teacher convinced me to go to Eastman it was the most fantastic experience for me.
Any rate, I have been playing with the Utica Symphony Orchestra enough to know that I was ready for a change. Phil asked me to come, I decided I was going to do it. As the old saying, if you can make it New York, you could make it anywhere. I worked very hard at A & R Recording Studios where I first started. Then several years later, a new mastering an independent mastering facility was established in New York called Sterling Sound, and I was their first employee.
That’s where I did Led Zeppelin too in Houses of Holy and Jimmy Hendrix and all those people. Then the Sterling Sound was bought by a public company which started another studio, mastering studio called, Masterdisk. They are both owned by the same public company and at one point it worked for me to move from Sterling over to Masterdisk.
Then I was there for many years, and then for a long time. Well for my whole career, when I was at Sterling a lot of people thought I owned the company which I didn’t. At Masterdisk people thought I own the company which I didn’t. I finally was convinced to start my own studio. We had a lot of thoughts, Gayle and I, my wife were thinking like, “Gee we really can’t go North of 96 street in New York and had all these concerns.”
Then once we decided, “Well we could do that, then we thought maybe we should go to Woodstock, or maybe we go to Stanford Connecticut because my folks lived up in Stockton Springs.” My sister still lives up there now, and we’ve been visiting them for many, many years we decided that Maine would be the perfect place to start a studio.
Because the actual design of the studio that I wanted to do demanded 20 foot high ceilings which like a New York City if you’re in a high rise which almost everybody is. That’s out of the question that have anything that high, that wasn’t super expensive in the multi-million dollar range to build something like that.
Maine we found a place that’s now by the Weston Hotel, and Joe Wishcamper own the spot and he was ready to sell one of the commercial condominium and we look at all the other spaces and we decided we wanted his space. He agreed being the good sales person he was, and so he had a lot of the infrastructure was pre built but there are this huge, huge area that had over 20 foot high ceilings that it was the perfect place to build the studio.
We kind of have this great architect … Acoustical architect do the conceptual design for the studio. Before we moved up here, we knew how bigger space we needed to be in. We look at all kinds of places, the old porches building which is now the Maine College of Art, and many other buildings in Portland and found that this was the best spot.
It worked out great, and I have never ever regret it. Maybe the time we have that ice storm in the ’90s when all the infrastructure collapse except for that I’ve never regretted moving up here. It’s really, it’s so beautiful.
Dr. Lisa: How did you and Gayle meet?
Bob: Gayle and I met around 1970. Gayle lived on a commune in upper New York state. She’s Canadian from Montreal and she ended up in this commune called the ZBS. She was married to another guy there. They used to do a thing called artist and residence.
Which they had a little recording studio there, and Gayle is a recording engineer and producer. They had people like … They had a tutor Phil Glass and Lorie Anderson and other artist like that would come up to do these recordings that were funded by the New York State Council of the Arts.
My cousin happen to be the treasurer of the place, it come from a out in Vietnam, and was the treasurer and I came up to visit him several times. Met Gayle there just as a matter of meeting everyone there. It was a pretty large group.
Then years later when the [coming 08:57] was kind of folding up, the CBS still exist. They still do radio shows there. Everybody had left, and so it was just Gayle and her then husband and she decided they’re going to be splitting up and my cousin said, “Be sure to go see Bob in New York, if you’re going to go look for a job.”
I was at Masterdisk and Gayle walked into the studio, and it was one of those really magical things. It was like, “Wow I don’t remember Gayle being like that.” Apparently she had the same thing, and so we had lunch in the studio, and started dating after that. It’s been very magical.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been working together for most of that time.
Bob: Well since we started Gateway. I met Gayle in … What was that, 81 I guess it was. We got married in 84. It wasn’t until 92, that we started building Gateway and we open our doors in January of 93. It was a while there that she didn’t work for me.
She was … She did a degree at Fordham during that time. She was Laurie Anderson’s kind of personal assistant there, and had other jobs. It was all really good.
Dr. Lisa: What’s it like to have this be such a collaborative process. She’s now the manager of your studio, of your … Of Gateway and you are obviously this essential part. What’s it like to work together?
Bob: It’s really good, and it’s easy because I’m sequestered in my windowless studio for 12 hours a day. She’s out in the front office with all the other engineers and the people that schedule me, Rachel Higgins is just a wonderful women who schedules me. She answers all the phone calls that I couldn’t possibly answer.
Take care of things, and Gayle keeps everything sane. It can be a very insane kind of environment with everybody wanting something now. Especially with the internet. When we started Gateway we are figuring that we do everything by FedEx because the internet really hadn’t happen yet.
Then when the internet started happening, we started getting more and more projects over the internet. In fact it was a Mariah Carey record that was the very first project where she was in Italy. Her producers Terry Jam and Lewis were in Minnesota.
Everything came into me electronically over the internet. The mixes, and so we send something in from Minnesota. I had mastered it and sent it to Mariah in Capri Italy where she was. That was the very first session I did were not one physical piece of anything came in or out of the studio.
It was all 1s and 0s coming in and out of the studio. That was a big event, to do that record. That was really quite something.
Dr. Lisa: It’s interesting thing to think about that, that you have all these names that you’ve worked with. I’m sure you met many of them. You’ve also just have the opportunity to kind of work with data, to have work with pieces of that have come from people.
Sounds that have come from people, and people’s instrument and to try to fit them all together.
Bob: Mastering is the final step. In other words after they have recorded it and they mix it down in a good studio usually with some people we work with, usually world class mixers then the question is can it sound as any better than it sounds, because it’s very competitive out there if you’re in the music marketplace trying to sell your music and make it sound great.
Sometimes what we do, we don’t have to do too much because it’s already sounding amazing The good news is if we do … If something comes in sounding really amazing if we do the smallest thing to it, it sounds like we’ve done a lot. That’s good news for us. Then the kind of the average project that we get now sounds almost worse than it ever has, in my whole career.
Because of the collapse or the record industry there’s no more budgets for most of the record. People are force to work in studios, or be recorded by their neighbor who just bought a pro-tool systems and thinks they know what to do with it.
The average mix comes in sounding pretty radiant. The mastering step which is trying to make it just sound as good as possible can really make a silk purse of a sow’s ear so to speak and do something really dramatically better to what we’ve been given.
We kind of went in both ways. If the sound is good, we can make it sound a little bit better and the people are thrilled. If it sounds horrible just to make it sound normal makes people thrilled. We do work with a lot of people that are in a very heavy state of paranoia and high expectations.
Gayle really is able to and Rachel and Tom that do the scheduling or really able to deal beautifully with these people.
Dr. Lisa: Give me examples of some of the things that you would do, with something that came in, sounding either really great, or really ready. What is it that as you’re mastering. What are you tweaking?
Bob: Like last year, I got a Grammy for Album of the Year for the Daft Punk record. Thomas from the group came in with the engineer who mix that record, Mick Guzauski. Mick and I go back a long way. He comes from Rochester New York. When I was at Eastman, Mick was the young super engineer at a local studio in Rochester and so I got to meet him while I was at Eastman.
I’ve known him since the late ’60s. He became a world class engineer. He did all the … In fact he mixed a lot of those Mariah Carey records. He mixed the Daft Punk record out in Conway in Los Angeles. He did of course a great job on it, but the group was just like insanely interested in the finest detail.
Like there’s no detail that they overlooked. I used to say that with the collapse of the industry there are no more million dollar budget record. This was one that I don’t know for sure but it had to have been over that. Normally you mix to either pro tools to analog tape.
In this case he mixed the 5 different formats, he mixed 2 I think called direct stream digital which is super high resolution digital. He mixed the high resolution normal digital and pro tools. Then he mixed to 3 different kinds of tape machines with either half inch wide tape recorder inch tape.
Running at 30 inches a second, we’re running at 15 inches a second. Then fortunately Thomas and his partner there listen to most of those formats, and decided mostly in advance which one sounded best for each particular song. Then when we met at the studio, we still went through that exercise of listening to the different formats and choosing which one sounded the best.
It’s just a lot of detail, and a lot of times spent doing that comparisons. Then when we started mastering it. He had apparently had gone somewhere else before and was disappointed because it sounded kind of distorted didn’t meet his vision.
I said, “Simply you don’t need to make a record that sounds crazy loud, what you want is quality.” We made one that had maintained all the dynamics that he had done in the mixes, and so he was really thrilled about that. Then once we had a baseline set as to how good the record could sound.
Of course when I’m listening to it, if something sounded a little dull we have equalizers that we can brighten things with. Or if it needed more bass, or less bass or needed more mid-range we could add that. The most of the equalizers we have are similar to the bass and treble controls you have on your pre-amp except we can choose any frequency in the spectrum and booster cut at it any sharpness or broadness.
Once we have the basic record, then there is a decision that well he wanted to come back a little bit more and make a little bit more louder and be a little bit more present and then your face sounding. There’s different compressors that can be used to make a record louder so examine all those and then we ended up mastering the entire record was one of them.
The entire record with another one. It was rather endless, and Thomas came back several times. It’s so interesting because I have to confess when the session was booked, I had never heard of Daft Punk. I don’t know about their work with Tron and all that that they were very successful.
When he came to the studio, he wasn’t without the helmet that they always wear. Daft Punk the group always wears a helmet in public, and I didn’t know anything about that. It turns out it was a big deal, but I had seen them without the helmet.
They’re just a very nice guy actually, very particular and I completely respect that, and I’m right there with the artist. I’ll dig down as deep in any level of subtlety that you want. If you got the time to do it. I was happy to do that plus Something About that Daft Punk music had a lot of life energy in it.
I notice that working on that music, I always felt uplifted at the end of the session rather than tired from it. There is something special that those guys created so that was very, very good. Then after several months of working on that record.
Off and on like they would do it, then sometimes they’d call me up and do several things and then Thomas would come back again and book another session and he’d fly here from either Paris or Los Angeles and we’d spent time together refining this or that, or changing the mix or whatever we were doing.
Then we finished in December, and then the record wasn’t due out until May and so I taught Thomas how to do some engineering things and he bought one of the pieces of gear that I had and I knew he was going to go to France and full at some more take my work and work with it some more.
He did that, and when I’m … It’s one of the only time in my life and ironically it was a Grammy that I share with another mastering engineering from France who helped them do the very final extra compression that they added at the end.
It’s brief rundown of what we do. In other cases we do a lot of … When we get to hear a record normally. The sequence hasn’t been chosen. Let alone the title of the record of the artwork. There’s lots and lots of records that I’ve done that people asked me if I’ve done them, and I said, “I don’t know.” The reason was, that the record wasn’t titled when I did it.”
If they sang me, and told me a title of the songs or sang a little bit of it, I would say, “Yeah I did that or no I don’t think I did that.” That kind of thing. That remains to this day, I still don’t … Most of the record I’m doing right now, I don’t know what the titles are, or I mean the title of the album or what the cover looks like.
Although sometimes with the internet, the groups will post that on their site. Sometimes we learn more from going on the internet and seeing the group’s website that we do from the record label. Because everything we do is usually very secret like the Daft punk record was just a total secret for over half a year.
Same thing with some of the Radiohead records. I did … I do a record with them and then the producer Nigel Godrich would say, “It’s all set but we’re just going to sit on this for a while.” We know that this incredible records there out, waiting for the world to hear, and all our staff knows that they can’t talk any of the projects that we’re doing and we can’t have interns or job shadowing because we don’t be at many tours either because every time we do a tour we got to hide everything. People don’t see what we’re working on. It kind of goes that way.
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What was it like for you to go from being a player, trumpet player? To being I guess master of mastering, I guess.
Bob: Well, as I said I was finishing up my master’s degree, and I was simultaneously the first trumpet in the Utica New York Symphony Orchestra. That was super exciting to do that. One of the things was that as a trumpet player, one of the … My goals in the far future was to play the very high trumpet parts in the bach B minor mass.
In the Utica Symphony all of the sudden one day they said “We’re going to do the bach, B minor mass.” I go, “Really? I wasn’t ready for this for 10 years.” My trumpet teacher loan me the Piccolo trumpet that Eastman owned that I did nothing but play that trumpet for a month, and really got to learn it. We had several performances in Utica and it was broadcast on the radio it was very successful and the whole thing.
Then when it was over, I really had this feeling of like, “Wow I just accomplish this big goal that I had set for myself and wasn’t expecting that have had happen so fast.” I think that’s one, why when Phil Ramone asked me if I want to come and work for him, I was more receptive to that that I might have been.
Left Eastman and went to A&R Recording which was on 48 street in New York City. It was a very famous studio that already done work with Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick, they’ve done lots of records by then and as … I was Phil’s assistant so I would do setups on the studio which was great.
Because I got to meet all the artist, just as setting up the mics, and all of that. I met any guest engineers that worked there and we also did work for ad agency. I got to just like Mad Men. These are exactly those years that Mad Men was on actually. I got to meet all the major music directors from the different ad agencies in New York. [Foot Golden, Cole & Bending and Algaphe Matters 00:24:46] and all the other big ad agency and saw how insane that was.
Their whole life I mean I remember doing a Noxzema commercials. There are 3 different people that would argue as to how to pronounce Noxzema was Noxzema or Noxzema. I quickly realized that I didn’t want to do that. Then as part of the regular training for an apprentice at the A&. Everyone had learn how to do disc cutting.
Everyone did a stint on that, because to be a really good mixer, especially back then before vinyl disc technology had evolved to where it did in the mid ’70s and we’re ended. Up until then, you really had to know the limitations of disc cutting in order to do a good mix on a record. You had to make sure that the singer wasn’t too sibilant because that’s very difficult to cut on to disc.
When I got on to the disc cutting thing, I was like genetically predisposed to it somehow. This attention to the most [mynutia 26:02]. The mynutia and having patience where you could cut a record for 20 minutes and the vacuum stops sucking up the part of the record that it cut and will go over the record and would ruin everything and you have to redo it again.
You have to not lose your patience, and so I was very patient and for some reason I just gravitated to it very shortly. Because I knew how to read scores from Eastman School of Music A&R Recording started attracting clients they would have attracted like non such records.
Non such records became my … One of my oldest, and to this day client of mine. I’ve been working with them since the late ’60s and still work with Bob Hurwitz and I work with Steve Reich and all the other great artist that are on none such.
This is a orally long story how I got it from the trumpet. Trumpet is not like piano where if you’re sick you can just go back and play chords and it sounds nice. With trumpet as soon as you’re seeking for a day your embouchure, you can put the mouthpiece against your mouth and blow into it.
Those muscles get weak very quickly so you have to kind of do long tones, and spent a lot of time getting your tone back. Even if it’s a short amount of time. Once you give it up even for a week, your embouchure goes very quickly and then when you pick it up it’s very unsatisfying.
You have amazing technique but you sound like a 5th grader for a while. I just … I was having so much fun during the recording especially as an assistant because we do setups for the Vienna Boys’ Choir. A [zilean 27:51] kids in this room and singing Joy to the World.
I felt … then the other side of the coin is 2 other things. When I came into A&R. I mean this was in the days of 4 Track Recording. A Track was just coming in, and the studio musicians that they chose were just the most crack a jack musicians in the planet. I swear I worked at A&R for 6 months before I heard any brass player missed a note.
This is site reading, all the charts. I swear I never heard a miss one note in 6 months. There was the level that these guys played at was so high, I knew that my bar had now gotten set so high, I knew I could never do that. Giving up the trumpet wasn’t so hard …
Dr. Lisa: I like it, I think it’s interesting just for me to think about … I mean there’s such different parts of your sensibility. You have your embouchure on your mouth and your musician training and then you have … Your training that goes along with musician training but just it’s just … It’s different, it’s a different way of approaching music.
Bob: Yeah, as an engineer. Even though I was in the recording department to get into that fine ability to listen very, very carefully. There was 2 clients in particular that really trained me. I used to work … When I was at A&R I used to cut records for Enoch Light who when High Five first came out, he had these records called Persuasive Percussion where to highlight the stereo there be the bongos on the left, and then the bongos on the right.
What was called ping pong stereos so that everything was … They’re trying to do as much as surround sound as possible with 2 speakers. His daughter Julie Klages who was the producer on the records, have this immense attention to detail and she really helped stretch my ears and made me focuses to what she was hearing and then later on the very famous song writing theme a believer installer, who did Hound Dog, The Coasters material in Yakety Yak.
Those records I did Peggy Leigh Record that they did and those 2 were so tuned in to what they did. It was just amazing and so those 2 clients really taught me how to listen very, very carefully.