Ross Hogarth talks about mixing ADKOT

[riggodrill44]

I liked this...

the goal was the upgrade of certain elements — giving Wolfie his own voice as a bass player, giving the bass a voice or sound that people go, “Wow, haven’t heard that before, haven’t heard that on a Van Halen record before,” but not to the point that they say, “That doesn’t sound like Van Halen.”

Interesting sentiment because I think that's what he (they) did... goal achieved.

Still love it (ADKOT) and Outta Space has the most plays on my iPod with She's the Woman and The Trouble with Never not far behind..

[envy_me]

I liked this...

the goal was the upgrade of certain elements — giving Wolfie his own voice as a bass player, giving the bass a voice or sound that people go, “Wow, haven’t heard that before, haven’t heard that on a Van Halen record before,” but not to the point that they say, “That doesn’t sound like Van Halen.”

Interesting sentiment because I think that's what he (they) did... goal achieved.

Still love it (ADKOT) and Outta Space has the most plays on my iPod with She's the Woman and The Trouble with Never not far behind..

I like China Town

[lesfunk]

He could have somply said " I just compressed the shit out of it. So much so that the album only sounds good on an Ipod or car Stereo

[Hardrock69]

He would have been giving a massively incomplete explanation, as that would only be one small aspect of it...

[Hardrock69]

He coulda just said "I sat in a chair and pressed 'record' while texting my ho".

[ZahZoo]

He could have somply said " I just compressed the shit out of it. So much so that the album only sounds good on an Ipod or car Stereo

Now don't go clouding the conversation with the honest truth...

[Seshmeister]

Ross Hogarth on the art of the mix and recording Van Halen

From The Examiner 15th July 2012

Ross Hogarth on the art of the mix and recording Van Halen

BY: ALISON RICHTER

Edited version



Grammy-winning producer and engineer Ross Hogarth has a simple yet effective philosophy about recording: “Whatever works.” It served him well during his years as a guitar tech, on the road with the likes of David Lindley, Ry Cooder and Fleetwood Mac, and in the studio, recording everyone from Ziggy Marley to Motley Crue. Hogarth applied his theory to Van Halen’s A Different Kind Of Truth, bringing a wealth of engineering experience and techniques to the band’s long-awaited album.

Hogarth was born and raised in New York. His father, Burne Hogarth, was respected worldwide as one of the greatest illustrators of the last century. Through him, Hogarth gained an appreciation for art, creativity and self-expression. He discovered music at an early age, and his parents nurtured that passion. He studied several different instruments and found his niche on guitar. After high school, he left home for California, where his career took off, first as a roadie and then as an engineer, working his way up the ranks from staff position to independent success. That trajectory took him from the upper echelon of touring technicians to in-demand producer and engineer.

Today, Hogarth records wherever makes the most sense with bands he’s producing, and primarily mixes in his studio, Boogie Motel. A Different Kind Of Truth took him to Eddie Van Halen’s 5150 studio, where he was hands-on when the band prepped to record the album and again when it was time to mix the tracks.


How did your musical background come into play with A Different Kind of Truth? It is a diverse album. Did you draw from your vocabulary while engineering?

Musically, people place Van Halen in a category and call it heavy metal, which I think is absolutely, completely misplaced. Their essence, if you take the stylistic influences of the members of Van Halen, inclusive of David Lee Roth, there’s such incredible classic influences, considering that Ed and Al were brought up as classical piano players and some of their favorite music is Led Zeppelin or Eric Clapton or classic blues. And then you take Dave, where he comes from musically. So for me, being brought into a Van Halen record was in a lot of ways a comfortable musical bed to lie in because there was no part of this record that felt foreign on any level. Like you say, there are so many influences and elements that go from heavy hard rock and prog to classic music, and Dave’s quirky tongue-in-cheek lyrics, like the intro to “Stay Frosty” or whatever. There’s so much that I could make a meal out of, and that’s an amazing place to be as an engineer and a mixer and a person that loves what I do. To have a project that I could literally make a huge meal out of was like Thanksgiving dinner, so there was nothing foreign to me about working on this music.

And it’s your classic three-piece rock band, too — the concept of making instruments big and not have to fight through a zillion overdubs to figure out where to place stuff. It’s like, how do you give each element of the band a voice of their own? That’s the thing that’s always made Van Halen, and on this record, the goal was the upgrade of certain elements — giving Wolfie his own voice as a bass player, giving the bass a voice or sound that people go, “Wow, haven’t heard that before, haven’t heard that on a Van Halen record before,” but not to the point that they say, “That doesn’t sound like Van Halen.” The intention was to give each member of the band the voice they have, and from a mix standpoint, don’t take the familiar away from the listener, but don’t make it sound so familiar that it sounds like you’re trying to emulate something from the past. Do something that sounds effortless. I’m not blowing my own horn. I’m talking about the intention. I’m not one to judge the result. I’m talking about coming into something as an intention. This is a classic band that’s in the DNA of the world’s music. You can’t deny that, so when you’re living into that legacy, the whole intention has to be, “What can I do here not to screw it up? What can I do to embellish it?” It was a pleasant and incredible challenge on a good level. This amazing groove, this great guitar player, you’ve got Dave singing great lyrics, he’s hilarious, he’s deep. Every time I heard the songs, I would find a new lyric. Like “The Trouble With Never,” just the title — how many people talk about never? Never going to do that again. Never see me there again. Never going to talk to him again. “That’s the trouble with never” — just the concept of never. Then he gets into “selective amnesia” and that whole breakdown. How do you take it and make it sound cool and not too campy? How much delay do I make swim around everything? How Twilight Zone/Rod Serling do I make his voice? That’s fun, that’s a blast — give me that any day of the week.

Does your background growing up as the son of an artist affect how you produce or engineer in any way?

It’s about imagery. My dad brought me up around a lot of art. He walked me around museums around the world when we were fortunate enough to have people pay for family trips to have him go sign books in Italy and in Paris. He was an incredible art historian and he’d explain to me what was in the paintings, so I’m very visual as an engineer/mixer/music-maker. I like to close my eyes and just push “play.” I like to close my eyes, period, and make sure that I can see inside the mix and see inside the songs. So this was a blast because of the three dimensions of music that are occurring with this all the time. Van Halen is a very three-dimensional band. There are incredible dimensions to each and every aspect of the instruments, the people, the dynamics and the history. There are all these dimensions and you have to live inside of them. It’s not a simple task of “go mix a record.”

Starting with the sonics, Alex loves John Bonham’s drums and wants his to sound like Led Zeppelin, but Led Zeppelin never had the amount of distortion and the amount of size and the guitars that Eddie has, so right off the bat, just getting the guitars to fit into a drum sound that sounds like John Bonham — because we all know that Alex is like the torch that John Bonham left, and there’s an element to Alex that’s like a mixture between Keith Moon, John Bonham and Elvin Jones or some jazz kind of thing. They’re coming from the same place. He plays a double-headed, 26-inch kick drum, and that’s a lot of resonance, so how do you get that to speak through heavy guitars but still not sound like heavy metal, where all you hear is the front attack of the beater? When we listen to modern, heavy rock music, kick drums are like the sound of tack-tack-tack, and that’s not Van Halen. So you have to have an articulation in the sound, and that’s a challenge. Anytime there’s a double kick drum, that’s a challenge to get it to speak, and to record it and to mix it. It’s a challenge to record rock guitars, heavy rock guitars, and have low end but not too much low end, and have mid-range. These are always challenges, period, as an engineer, so to get those things captured and have the band’s opinion, when someone specifically says, “I want it to sound this way,” you have to live within the confines of what can and can’t be done. John Bonham’s literal drum sound would never work with Van Halen because of the size of the guitar, the size of the bass, the amount of distortion on the bass. John Paul Jones never had that amount of distortion. So those are interesting challenges.

How did you work to give each musician a voice?

With Ed, two heads and two cabinets. The Royer ribbon mics were a big part of it for low end. I love the Royers. I love what they do on the mixture of low end and midrange that I cannot get out of a dynamic mic. I’ve used ribbon mics for my whole career. I was fortunate when I started recording that there were good RCA and Beyer ribbon mics in the mic cabinets, particularly at Rumbo, the Captain and Tennille’s studio, one of the first studios I had a staff engineering position in. I’m on record as saying that with Motley Crue we were blowing up the ribbon mics on a daily basis. I brought them into the picture on their Girls, Girls, Girls album. The ribbon mics do something that dynamics mics don’t do: they have harmonic distortion that they create by the ribbon vibrating, so on electric guitars they’re particularly amazing, but they can’t be used on heavy guitars because you blow them up. Most older ribbon mics you can’t put next to a Shure SM57 — you end up blowing them up, so you have to put them farther back and then they’re out of phase. Royer came up with a microphone and a ribbon that can be put right in phase with a 57 and you don’t blow up the microphone, you’re not stretching the ribbons out. I brought those to the party with Ed and they did something that he hadn’t yet done because he’d never made a record with those microphones on his cabinets.

Which Royers did you use?

The 122V, which is the tube ribbon they have. [http://www.royerlabs.com/R-122V.html] It’s the same system as the 121 and 122 ribbons. They took that same design — the difference in those two mics is phantom power is applied to the 122 — and they decided that they could upgrade the 122v to a tube. It’s a great concept because now you have a tube amplifier and it gives it a whole other level of detail and it can be put on a rock cabinet. I brought that to the table, and I brought a certain upgrade to the bass sound just by virtue of wanting to be part of helping it as far as understanding distortion on bass and how important it is.

Could you elaborate?

Eddie and Wolfie were definitely working on the bass sound together when I arrived, as far as a Marshall or an EVH, and what they were using and how they were distorting it. When you have a lot of distortion, sometimes you don’t have low end, and you have to capture low end too. As an engineer, I brought my experience in making all kinds of records, particularly as far as the bass. I did a fair amount of really hard rock and heavy metal in the last decade, producing Coal Chamber and Devil Driver, and when you’re into low tuning, you’ve got to have a lot of distortion on the bass to cut through. Being a drummer and having classic rock ears, when Alex is telling me what he wants out of the drums, I totally get it. Now, how do we capture it? There are probably a thousand guys out there that might be the right guy for the gig. I’m just the guy that got called. Call it fate or good luck for me. I have to say, man, what a pleasure. I started in early 2010 and they brought me back at the end of March 2011. I was on it until I finished mixing it, and in late fall we finished mastering at Bernie Grundman’s.

What was involved in engineering/mixing this album?

One of the things I’m most proud of is the guitar and bass on the record. I feel I had a lot of involvement in both of those areas, particularly bringing out Eddie’s width, the stereo, how wide his guitar sound is, but it’s still one performance. I’m super-proud of working on that with him and getting something that I hope he really likes. I think he does. At one point in recording, it was, “We don’t want the guitar on the left with the reverb going on the right, like it always was.” It may be urban legend and not a totally historic story. But as the story goes, somewhere after the first record came out, they were listening to the record and someone’s left speaker was not working. The main guitar was panned left, so there was no guitar. They were listening to the record with no guitar and Eddie was freaked out. How many people don’t have a left-side speaker? But if the guitar is only panned to the left and the speaker is broken, you’re not going to have any guitars, so he never wanted that again. There were things that they didn’t want, or wanted, and one of the things that Alex said was, “If the guitar is going to be mono, I don’t want it just coming down the middle too. I want it to have dimension.” It was sort of like, “Where’s the happy medium?” So Ed, throughout his career, had worked with how to split his sound with delays and harmonizers.

I came in and I had a different concept. I said, “Let’s use two heads and two cabinets and let’s try these ribbon mics, which I don’t think you’ve ever used.” I came in with a concept of something to try. If it didn’t work, he would have said he didn’t like it. I wouldn’t have been the guy saying, “You’ve got to use it.” I came in, created an atmosphere of open-mindedness and I tried something, and we worked and honed it to the point that he was really pleased with it. Because Ed’s not going to do anything that he doesn’t like. He can make his own records; he doesn’t need me or anybody, really. Ed is a brilliant engineer and producer with amazing instincts. I’m not so unique as to say that I’m the only guy on the planet who can make a Van Halen record that Eddie’s happy with. Eddie Van Halen can make his own records. He doesn’t need anybody. He’s brilliant. But I came in and I brought something to the table that he liked.

And then Wolfie said, “I want more low end out of the bass.” I said, “OK. You’re using this one amp, but if we use that amp and we mic a port on the back end, flip it out of phase and try that, you’re going to get the sub low that you don’t ever get.” We tried that and he thought it was cool. So that’s my gig: to assess a situation and not rip it up and start over, but to build on what they had in my own way with, “Let’s try this and let’s try that.” So the thing I’m really proud of is that relationship. That was awesome. It has been one of the high points of my whole life to work with one of the most influential bands, for me, just as far as music I like, as far as considering Ed one of the greatest guitar players ever to be born on this planet. I believe him to be, without waxing too poetically, whether it be the Mozart, the Beethoven, the whatever of our day and age. He has done things that no one ever did before he ever showed up. To work with someone like that, and also he’s a sweet and great and cool human being, man, that’s like having my cake and eating it too. Alex is an amazing talent, as a drummer and a brilliant person. He’s an incredible conversationalist and always has something fresh to talk about every time I talk to him. Alex and Ed so amazingly complement each other, and then there’s Wolfie, and man, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. That kid is an amazing drummer, an amazing guitar player, a terrific singer and an amazing bass player. He absolutely is a very crucial part of the band now. His musical vocabulary at that young age is incredible, and to go into that situation with those guys … . Then you add into the mix this record coming out with David Lee Roth for the first time in that many years — my whole attitude was, “What do I do to keep this successful? What do I do to keep this moving forward?”

What did you do to keep it moving forward?

Show up. Take everything in stride and take nothing personally. Literally, you show up and you talk straight, act straight, and you look people in the eye. These guys see through bullshit. There’s a side of the Van Halens, and Dave, that has been there and done that and they can see that. You show up, and you don’t show up when you’re not needed. Don’t put yourself somewhere you don’t need to be, don’t put yourself inside conversations when you don’t need to be there, and don’t overstep your bounds when you don’t need to. I didn’t go up there and say, “This is what you need to do.” You do it bit by bit and time and place. You’ve got to know your situation.

When you began producing and engineering, people listened on home stereos and in their cars. Now they listen on mobile phones, computers and through earbuds. Has this changed the way you mix? Do you mix for different mediums?

I mixed A Different Kind Of Truth back to Pro Tools at the higher sample rate, which is 96k, even though the record was recorded at 44.1/24, so I tried to capture the mix at a higher sample rate, which is better, regardless, through a good Burl converter. It’s got kind of a fat transformer sound. I like the Crane Song also. I use that at my studio, but the Burl seemed to be a good choice, it’s highly recommended, a lot of people think it’s cool, so I tried it and it sounded good and we were happy with it. So we did 96k and you have to reduce it to 44.1/16 — those are CDs. That’s where we’re at; we got stuck there a long time ago by the video guys who all decided that music sound should be at 44.1/16 bit, and now they’ve changed their minds and they’re using 48.1/24 bit and we’re still stuck at 44.1/16. It sucks because it’s definitely already bit reduced, and if you buy on iTunes, you’re buying it at 256 AAC or MP3. It used to be 192 MP3or AAC, which sounds a little better, but if you’re on a PC, you can’t play AAC, so you’re stuck with MP3’s. And so what am I mixing for? Am I mixing for the lowest common denominator or the highest common denominator or somewhere in between? It’s definitely a problem these days. I honestly do not have an answer. It’s like, what am I actually doing here? Am I mixing for people with earbuds? For people with home stereo? There’s still people who have 5.1’s, so what’s going to happen when my stereo mix gets derived into a 5.1 mix? So I try to just mix for the most solid stereo high-resolution sound, knowing that when I bring it to mastering, he’s going to put level on it and not crush it to the nth degree so that it completely changes the mix and it sounds like your mastering engineer mixed your record for you. You want it to stay and sound like music until the end result, but I have to say that no one will ever hear a record like it was mixed and recorded these days unless you have vinyl. When it was just vinyl, we knew what vinyl was going to do, so you could always cut a vinyl ref and know exactly what it was going to do. For the most part, the world is listening on their computers and earbuds and little speakers, so you have to make sure that something translates down into that world, but if we’re just mixing for the lowest common denominator, then I might as well throw half my engineering skills out the window and say, “Forget it. Why should I even care if it sounds good?” because the compressed sound of MP3’s is pretty bizarre. Or can be pretty bizarre. It can take a lot of size and dimension away from a mix, so you definitely have to know what’s going to happen when it does that, but if you’re just mixing for that, then I think you’re still missing the boat too. It’s a tough one.

Let’s talk about mastering. With independent bands producing and engineering their own CDs in their home studios, maybe they’re not spending the extra money to have it mastered.

I’m an absolute firm believer in mastering. I truly believe that the doctor can’t operate on himself, so for the most part, when the mixer thinks that he can slap any standard limiter plug-in over his mix, pump up the gain and squash it, I don’t subscribe to that. I don’t do that. I believe in mastering. There are guys that I absolutely believe add something to the process, and whatever that amount of money is, I think it is so well spent and I will push for that on just about every project I do. There are guys that are amazing, and whatever the price is, somehow you make it worth it to do it, because when you deal with a really good mastering engineer, it’s always been the final stage in making a record, where they put that extra little thing on it that makes it truly sound finished.

I think a lot of mixers today are mixing as if they were mastering. They take a lot of the dynamics out of the mixes to begin with, and there’s really nothing the mastering engineers can do when they get those mixes. The mastering engineers throw their hands up and go, “You’ve already squashed it through the roof and there’s nothing I can do with this. I actually need to turn it down because it’s already distorting a little bit.” I’ll never be that guy, because I learned so much when I went to mastering on every record I did in the early days, when I would take it to Bob Ludwig or Joe Gastwirt or Bernie Grundman and watch what they did. I realized no way on earth that I can ever put that extra little magic on this. Now, a lot of cats that are just on the computer that have never witnessed that and only deal with what they deal with, they just do it themselves because they figure, “Well, why should I pay anybody else? I’ll just save the money.” For me, there’s still that thing of I want it to be great, and I think that it can’t be great unless I get someone else afterward to take that last look. You can’t always think that mastering is going to save your record, but nine times out of ten, I am happier when I get something back from the right mastering guy because they’ve put their little extra love on it.

How long have you worked with Bernie Grundman? Was he your choice, a band choice or both?

This was definitely a band decision because Bernie and Chris Bellman, who is one of Bernie’s engineers, did the Van Halen catalog a few years back. The band had experience with them. Bernie’s an incredible veteran. His catalog speaks for itself, so when we came to the point of needing to master the record, the band was asking me but telling me, like, “How do you feel?” and I said, “He’s great.” He hasn’t mastered a ton of my stuff, but he’s mastered a fair amount, just like a bunch of guys that I feel totally comfortable with because there’s quality control there.

Musicians entering a professional studio for the first time don’t always know what they’re doing or are overwhelmed. What can make the recording experience a little easier for everyone involved?

If you’re recording an amplifier or an instrument, if you’re an engineer, get in front of it, listen to it and make sure that you know it sounds the way it’s supposed to sound at the source. If it doesn’t, you’d better change it. If the snare drum sounds perfect in the room but not in the control room, then something you're doing in the miking technique is occurring to block that. So get it right at the source first. If the musician doesn’t hear himself well in the headphones, he’s going to play a certain way. If they’re playing really hard, really heavy-handed, they probably don’t have the right headphone mix. If you have crappy headphones and you’re working with musicians that aren’t skilled, your headphones are going to dictate that they play badly, because they don’t hear themselves well and they don’t know how to deal with that or communicate that. A lot of times, as an engineer and producer, the performance you get is only as good as what they hear in their headphones. You’ve got to put the headphones on and listen to what everybody’s listening to before you even listen to what you have coming out of the speakers, because really, it’s what you’re recording, and it’s not how good a mix you have up right now in the room and how much you're going to impress the people in the back of the room. It’s what they’re going to play. So make sure that the headphones are good, that they hear themselves well, and that the source is good.

Do you have any simple philosophies or insights on mixing?

When you’re mixing a recording that you feel good about, make sure that you work quickly to at least get some sort of balance together. Mixing, for me, is about finding the DNA of the song, whatever it might be. If it’s instrumental music, what’s the lead instrument? If it’s a vocal, how are the instruments going to affect the vocal, and what is the type of style, too. So when you mix a record, make sure you find the DNA of whatever it is.

With Van Halen, there’s lots of DNA. It’s Eddie’s guitar, it’s Alex’s snare and kick, it’s Dave’s vocal. Dave has to be loud enough that you hear his lyrics, but not so loud that he’s overpowering the track. You have to put him in a place with whatever kind of reverb and delay you do so that it doesn’t sound overt, because there’s a classic Van Halen sound with Ted Templeman and Donn Landee that has a really long plate on it, and we didn’t want to recreate that same thing. It wasn’t something we felt was going to make or break the record, like if you don’t have that really long plate reverb, there are going to be people who miss it. Finding the right placement of Dave’s vocal was very important. I play with a lot with different delay settings and reverb settings throughout the course of a mix. I create different scene changes so that it captures the ebb and flow of the emotions of a song. You have to be in touch with that.

Mixes tend to be very one-dimensional if you're not moving faders and taking things up and down, but don’t do it in a way that becomes what we call “desky.” Desky is a term where it sounds like someone’s hands are on a desk and you’re moving it and it’s very overt. There are desky moves that you do that are intentional, but for the most part, desky mixes for very honest, organic rock bands are embarrassing moments where it sounds like an over-ambitious engineer. We’re not doing dance remixes or that style of music; when you're doing that style, anything goes, all rules are thrown out the window. I do a fair amount of all styles of music, so I’m able to bring a diverse vocabulary into whatever I’m working on. Again, it is really important to keep the DNA of the band and of the songs, but make it sound interesting and exciting so it doesn’t just sound like I pushed the faders to one level and pushed “record” on the two-track and said, “OK, that’s a mix.” No, that’s a balance. Get a great balance and then mix your record. In rock music, you have to have a balance that sounds like a band playing in a room, which it was, but then you’ve got to mix it, push the vocal up, take the guitars and change scenes, and when he stops singing, turn the guitar up — sometimes it can be 6dB, 10dB. On a drum fill, turn the toms up really loud, louder than maybe they were hit, so that they really explode, and then turn them down in another fill or accent around the vocal. These are things you do as a mixer. You are constantly keeping focus on the things that need to be focused on. You’ve got to move the faders on the things that need accentuating so that you keep them exciting. That’s the difference between a balance and a mix. You are trying to translate emotion, not the technical, so keep that in mind. Close your eyes and push play. When you forget about the individual parts of the mix and it sounds like music, you are headed on the right path.

Read more of Ross Hogarth's interview here: http://www.guitarworld.com/interview...s-mixing-van-h...

Visit Ross Hogarth's website: http://www.HoaxProductions.com/

Learn more about his father, Burne Hogarth: http://burnehogarth.com/blog/

[ELVIS]

Those Hogarth interviews are a bunch of bullshit...

The guitar and bass on ADKOT sound like shit on most of the songs...

[Hardrock69]

It's ok. You don't have to listen to the album if you hate it so much.

[Hardrock69]

Here. From the current issue of Tape Op magazine. The finest magazine for engineers and recording enthusiasts in the world.
I want that halfstack.

[SunisinuS]

I have seen Elbow in shorts in that picture he posted....believe me...you do not want that chicken legged Yuppie in charge of anything important...opinions or otherwise. Lol old man belly sticking out like the bottom of a fruit bowl.

If Elbow had it dialed.....he dropped the phone like 25 years ago.

That is all.

[Dan]

Those Hogarth interviews are a bunch of bullshit...

The guitar and bass on ADKOT sound like shit on most of the songs...

You Must Be Out Of Your Fucking Mind If You Think That.

[SunisinuS]

as an aside.....nice little earthquake we just had here....probably 4.9 local....but....who knows right now (2 minutes ago) if someplace else we had a bigger one 11:06

[Hardrock69]

You at SoCal? NoCal? Memphis? NW?

[Hardrock69]

Interesting. A Quake off the coast of New Zealand an hour ago, at the same time as one in Northern California:

1 hour ago 5.2 Offshore Northern California
6 hours ago 5.1 Offshore Northern California
7 hours ago 4.0 Off the coast of Oregon

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/Strong-earthquake-hits-off-east-coast-of-New-Zealand/articleshow/15072953.cms