Favourite analog producers/engineers?

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WarmJetGuitar

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Hey guys!

Who's you're favourite analog producers or engineers? They don't have to be all-analog but they need to be using a fair share of tape. On my list there's a great number of guys who recorded themself. And lots of reverb and leakage!

Mine would be:

Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine (not all analog I know) for recording lo-fi masterpiece "Ecstasy and Wine" and analog-digital fusion "Loveless".
Roy Halee who recorded and produced Simon & Garfunkel
Lee Hazlewood for most of his 60's and 70's stuff, especially the first one with Nancy Sinatra.
Jason Pierce and Peter Kember of Spacemen 3
Delia Derbyshire of White Noise among others
Joe Byrd of The United States of America and Joe Byrd and The Field Hippies.
Martin Hannet who recorded and produced Happy Mondays, Joy Division and Orchestral Manouvres in the Dark (not all analog)
Brian Eno - especially on "Here Comes The Warm Jets". Masterpiece when it comes to 70's rock and engineering.
John Cale for producing Nico, Happy Mondays, his solo recordings and lots of other great stuff.
George Martin - enough said.
Paul Oakenfield and Steve Osborne for producing "Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches" by Happy Mondays.
Whoever recorded Middle Eastern psyche outfit The Orient Express. Totally unfair that he is not credited on the cover.
Conny Plank for recording Neu! and other great 70's German spacerock.
Anthon Newcombe for all the Brian Jonestown Massacre albums. A beam of light in the dark ages of the 90's :guitar:
Robin Guthrie for Cocteau Twins and Lush.

I might have forgotten a few.
 
And Lee Scratch Perry of course. How could I forget the king of spring reverb.
How come that Delia Derbyshire is the only woman on the list? A pity so few women do engineering.
 
Here's a few lesser known ones:

Gary Kellgren on 'We're only in it for the money' (Mothers of Invention) - I think they all had way too much fun there. He also did the creepy whispering throughout the album.

Greg Watson of The Orange Alabaster Mushroom. The first six songs on 'Space and Time' were recorded on 4-track cassette, and mixed with the tape running too fast giving him a slightly bizarre high pitched voice. It's sometimes difficult to believe it was recorded in the 1990s.
In fact, it probably deserves an example: The Orange Alabaster Mushroom-(We Are) The Orange Alabaster Mushroom - YouTube

Norman Smith, particularly on 'SF Sorrow' and 'Defecting Grey' by The Pretty Things, both full of bizarre psychedelic effects. He also produced 'Saucerful of Secrets' through 'Ummagumma' for Pink Floyd, and engineered the Beatles up until 1965.

Peter Howell, known better for his 'Greenwich Chorus', the incidental music on 'Hitchhikers' Guide the the Galaxy' and the 1980 rewrite of the Dr. Who theme music, had a small side job engineering and recording for the group 'Ithaca' until the early 70s when his BBC career took off.
Their album "A Game For All Who Know" had some pretty fascinating engineering tricks given that it was AFAIK recorded in his parents' house while they were out.
Ithaca-Journey - YouTube (see around 0:50 - and remember they didn't have any synthesizers so it must presumably have been done through some kind of tape manipulation)
 
Producers:
Brian Wilson
Lee Hazelwood
Jan Berry
Emitt Rhodes
Phil Spector

Engineers:
Stephen Desper
Chuck Britz
 
Alan Parsons...starting with his work with Pink Floyd and then the Alan Parsons Project
 
Steve Albini. Still keeping the all-analog alive. Check out Joanna Newsom's Ys. Pretty amazing considering he recorded The Pixies and In Utero (among many other things)...
 
He's not analog anymore, but Terry Brown's career with Rush comes to mind.
 
Eddie Offord although he was not analog by choice (there was nothing else around back then)
 
Yeah, The Orange Alabaster Mushroom is very underrated stuff.
And how could I forget Spector?

Albini produced quite a few good albums but almost as much as I like his choice of bands and analog over digital I dislike the lack of reverb on most of his recordings.
 
Does anyone know how Lee Hazlewood did that excellent reverb on "Fridays Child"? Plate, room or something fancy I have yet to learn about? My ugly voice could use some of that :-)
 
WarmJetGuitar said:
Does anyone know how Lee Hazlewood did that excellent reverb on "Fridays Child"? Plate, room or something fancy I have yet to learn about? My ugly voice could use some of that :-)
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Most of Lee Hazlewood's reverb was chamber. But for some of his very early Phoenix stuff (Duane Eddy era), he made a reverb tank out of an empty grain container which was set up outside the studio. He recalled they would have to re-cut on occasion due to pigeons making noise on it.
 
WarmJetGuitar said:
How come that Delia Derbyshire is the only woman on the list? A pity so few women do engineering.
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Let it be known that this is known by those in the know as a question that contains it's own reply !

jpmorris said:
Norman Smith, particularly on 'SF Sorrow' and 'Defecting Grey' by The Pretty Things, both full of bizarre psychedelic effects. He also produced 'Saucerful of Secrets' through 'Ummagumma' for Pink Floyd, and engineered the Beatles up until 1965.
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Norman Smith also produced Floyd's debut album, "The Piper at the gates of dawn".
He's an interesting guy. I've felt for years that some of his editing is some of the worst I've ever heard. There's an awful snip on the Saucerful of Secrets version of "Set the controls for the heart of the sun" and "Jugband blues" and on some of the stuff on Floyd's debut like "Matilda mother". And on SF Sorrow, the lame editing on "Baron Saturday" is lamentable........but I can't criticize Norman Smith because in my opinion, he was one of the great engineer/producers of the psychedelic era and I'm dumbfounded that his name never comes up when the groundbreaking music of the late 60s is discussed. This is a man who presided over the first two Pink Floyd albums and the two Pretty Things meisterworks, "SF Sorrow" and "Parachute". The track mentioned earlier, "Defecting grey", while taking a bit of getting used to is mesmerizing and is every bit as far sighted and far reaching as "Strawberry fields forever" and "I am the walrus", contemporories from 1967. He did lots of interesting things but to sum him up, just listen to "Interstellar overdrive" from Floyd's debut. Live, it could go on forever and become a boring drug freak out. But he recognized it's inherent accessibility allied to it's avant garde possibilities. He got the band to play it through, live on two tracks of a 4 track machine. Then 4 months later, they overdubbed live as a band on the other two tracks although I read that the original take had been bounced to one track. Either way, it was ~even for then~ an astonishing way of recording a song. And it's not boring. It's packed with movement.
He seemed uniquely in tune with the times even though he was as Geoff Emerick put it, "an older man".
 
WarmJetGuitar said:
Robin Guthrie for Cocteau Twins and Lush.
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Amen. Guthrie is a genius.

George Massenburg for several Earth, Wind & Fire albums (not to mention inventing the parametric equalizer).

Robert John "Mutt" Lange for the massive layered sound on the Cars' Heartbeat City and Def Leppard's Pyromania and others.
 
lonewhitefly said:
Most of Lee Hazlewood's reverb was chamber. But for some of his very early Phoenix stuff (Duane Eddy era), he made a reverb tank out of an empty grain container which was set up outside the studio. He recalled they would have to re-cut on occasion due to pigeons making noise on it.
Click to expand...

Stupid question maybe, but what is the difference between chamber reverb and a reverb tank?
 
grimtraveller said:
Norman Smith also produced Floyd's debut album, "The Piper at the gates of dawn".
He's an interesting guy. I've felt for years that some of his editing is some of the worst I've ever heard. There's an awful snip on the Saucerful of Secrets version of "Set the controls for the heart of the sun" and "Jugband blues" and on some of the stuff on Floyd's debut like "Matilda mother". And on SF Sorrow, the lame editing on "Baron Saturday" is lamentable........
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I didn't notice the jump cut on 'Matilda mother' until you mentioned it, the other one I don't know, and I can't honestly see a problem with 'Baron Saturday'. I thought the production was pretty decent on that one, personally.

The track mentioned earlier, "Defecting grey", while taking a bit of getting used to is mesmerizing and is every bit as far sighted and far reaching as "Strawberry fields forever" and "I am the walrus", contemporories from 1967.
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'Defecting Grey' was edited down from something like 5:45, it still ended up 4:30 long. It makes me wonder if the cut in Matilda was a symptom of the same process ("Make it shorter!" "But...")

I will have to get 'Relics' or 'Piper', though. Probably both. I haven't heard 'Interstellar overdrive' for some time now.

Incidentally, I was wrong about Peter Howell working on 'Hitchhiker's Guide' - that was actually Paddy Kingsland. However, I did ask him about the Ithaca album and if he doesn't have a problem with it I might post some of his reply here.
 
Ethan Johns has done some good stuff. For recent analog. He's done Ryan Adams, Kings of Leon, Ray Lamontagne.

Also Jeff Lynne.

Other than that there's so many great records it's hard to say. I really like the way Jethro Tull's recordings sound. I have no idea who produced them.
 
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