Who's your favorite engineer? Producer? Mastering Engineer?

The producer/engineers I study everyday:

  • Ron "Saint" Germain for his early work with 311. Producing/Engineering
  • David Botrill for his work with King Crimson, Tool and Silverchair's "Diorama". Beautifully produced and engineered stuff.
  • Although he's fucking nuts, Phil Spector for pioneering the exaggeration that is the wall of sound. It's the only excessive thing that seems ok by my standards. Some good work with the ramones. Even if it wasn't their best timing.
  • Rich Costey for his producing and engineering on Muse's Absolution and Black Holes and Revelations. Honestly, black holes and revelations is a little muffled for my tastes, but really good composition work.
  • The two famous rivals Andy Wallace and Chris Lord Alge. I think together they managed to define what is the "modern sound" post 80s heavy metal. Mudvayne's L.D. 50 was my introduction to Andy and let me say that to this day, very few engineers can mix like that.
  • Jerry Finn (RIP) who in a big way shaped the modern "pop punk black/red themed" bullshit emo/punk we hear on the radio today. Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Blink 192...you name it. I'm a fan of his technique, not so much the revolution he shaped.
  • Al Shmitt by far. Bit of a fossil to me, but I think the man is a living legend. I mean Ray Charles, Toto..come on.


Engineers and producers are like the NFL. I mean you have to study what's out there to even step up in this game. :)
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
Well, I'll admit that I did buy one of the APP albums unheard. I believe it was "Turn OF A Friendly Card", and it actually turned out to be perhaps my all-around fave album from the Project. But that was because I had already had his earlier albums and liked the music as well as the supreme engineering. I was lucky enough to have a couple of record stores in the area at the time which allowed preview listening. That's hard to find these days, especially for vinyl, which all my original APP purchases were.


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G.
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I have to wonder if other engineers got to do stuff like the APP if all of the records would be as good?...giving them creative control with the best session artists they know...could be genius...but the kids wouldnt buy it.
 
LeeRosario said:
[*]David Botrill for his work with King Crimson, Tool and Silverchair's "Diorama". Beautifully produced and engineered stuff.
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Not to mention his amazing work with Peter Gabriel and Coheed and Cambria. I took over for him as King Crimson's engineer. Talk about big shoes to try and fill.
 
darrin_h2000 said:
I have to wonder if other engineers got to do stuff like the APP if all of the records would be as good?...giving them creative control with the best session artists they know...could be genius...but the kids wouldnt buy it.
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One of my favorite discs is a one-off project of something like that, except with multiple producers, engineers and artists, different ones for each track. It was a project called "Rhythm, Country and Blues" back in 1994. I mean, when you can include Don Was, Bob Clearmountain, Alan Toussaint, and Chick Ainslay (I've probably forgotten someone else) on one disc, and give them some of the most famous Nashville Cats to back oddball pairings of some of the best R&B, country, and blues legends of all time, and you really get a lesson on how things *should* be in the studio when you have professionals working every aspect of the session.

Some of the tracks are a little pushed in the mastering stage, but not too God-awful-badly, and considering what went into the disc before that, one tends to be a little forgiving of the over-enthusiasm. But I am kinda disappointed that Don Was, who pretty much managed the whole production, let them push in mastering at all. That's Nashville for you. Had they done it in Memphis, it might have been different (;))

Video was shot of these sessions and broadcast as a special on PBS back in the 90s, but I haven't seen or heard of the video since. It's pobably floating around somewhere. It didn't have much showing the engineering, but it was still a nice look in on the sessions themselves.

G.
 
I'm surprized, or just showing my age, but am I the only one who remembers Tom Dowd? If it had not been for him we might all still be recording on two track basic stereo gear. Tom Dowd brought multitracking from it's idea stage into the recording world that we have come to take for granted.

While I have never bought recordings just because Tom Dowd's name was listed in the credits, his name kept showing up on credits lists on album after album of much of the music that i did buy. A few artists Tom worked with were The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Allman Bros. Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Cream and many others. The work he was probably best known for was Eric Clapton's Layla, and in mho that was indeed some pretty smoothe engineering.
 
Dani Pace said:
I'm surprized, or just showing my age, but am I the only one who remembers Tom Dowd?
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Good ol Tommy Dowd. The manhattan project right? He was some type of scientist or engineer for the government before he switched over to the music industry. He falls in the likes of Al Schmitt to me. Amazing producer.

Funny you mention him, his API console was bought by a studio here in orlando called Phat Planet.

If I owned that console, I'd be too scared to use it. Probably be sitting in seran wrap in a garage somewhere.
 
LeeRosario said:
man that must have been so wild. What albums did you work on?
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Kind of hard to keep track. Depending on how you do the math I worked on over 15 King Crimson albums if you add up the stuff for virgin, plus their collectors series and some archive stuff. A few of note were Cirkus, Vroom Vroom, Deja Vroom, almost all of the "Projekcts albums, I also did the alternate mix of the USA album which is floating around and a bunch of other stuff. It was a pretty amazing few years. I love those guys and I had a great time. I have not done a King Crimson album in a while but I still work on records with some of the members quite often.
 
Ronan said:
Kind of hard to keep track. Depending on how you do the math I worked on over 15 King Crimson albums if you add up the stuff for virgin, plus their collectors series and some archive stuff. A few of note were Cirkus, Vroom Vroom, Deja Vroom, almost all of the "Projekcts albums, I also did the alternate mix of the USA album which is floating around and a bunch of other stuff. It was a pretty amazing few years. I love those guys and I had a great time. I have not done a King Crimson album in a while but I still work on records with some of the members quite often.
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That's really cool man. I'd love to look out for your work and see what new things are coming out of the Ronan's insane laboratory :D.

I've got your page bookmarked.
 
Ronan said:
Kind of hard to keep track. Depending on how you do the math I worked on over 15 King Crimson albums if you add up the stuff for virgin, plus their collectors series and some archive stuff. A few of note were Cirkus, Vroom Vroom, Deja Vroom, almost all of the "Projekcts albums, I also did the alternate mix of the USA album which is floating around and a bunch of other stuff. It was a pretty amazing few years. I love those guys and I had a great time. I have not done a King Crimson album in a while but I still work on records with some of the members quite often.
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I have met and hung out with former bassist Jon Wetton when he was with Asia...Geoff Downs from the Buggles was there too.
 
Hummm, I think this discussion is a bit flawed. Are you people really naming producers and engineers you really like, or albums you really like, and hence music and bands you really like? Put another way, can you fully appreciate the work of a producer or engineer for a piece of music that sucks? For example, I think Britney Spears is well produced and engineered, but...

For what its worth...echo Brendan O'Brien (also listen to recent Bruce Springsteen and latest Pearl Jam)...Eno/Lanois/Lillywite (U2), Flood, but then again the music they produced and engineered is really good, which brings me back to my first comment!!
 
RichJ said:
Hummm, I think this discussion is a bit flawed. Are you people really naming producers and engineers you really like, or albums you really like, and hence music and bands you really like? Put another way, can you fully appreciate the work of a producer or engineer for a piece of music that sucks? For example, I think Britney Spears is well produced and engineered, but...

For what its worth...echo Brendan O'Brien (also listen to recent Bruce Springsteen and latest Pearl Jam)...Eno/Lanois/Lillywite (U2), Flood, but then again the music they produced and engineered is really good, which brings me back to my first comment!!
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I think they go hand in hand. Can't really talk about the engineer without applauding what it is they actually did



I dunno, I was taught to think that way. :D
 
RichJ said:
Hummm, I think this discussion is a bit flawed. Are you people really naming producers and engineers you really like, or albums you really like, and hence music and bands you really like? Put another way, can you fully appreciate the work of a producer or engineer for a piece of music that sucks? For example, I think Britney Spears is well produced and engineered, but...

For what its worth...echo Brendan O'Brien (also listen to recent Bruce Springsteen and latest Pearl Jam)...Eno/Lanois/Lillywite (U2), Flood, but then again the music they produced and engineered is really good, which brings me back to my first comment!!
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I picked mine based on what I thought the best single piece of work....but If I had one that Id most admired it would have been Alan Parsons...or Bob Ezrin...but Im a classic rock guy.

Theres guys that I hate too...like Jeff Mutt Lange...the guy that ruined all those Def Lepperd albums...they even took one that they did before he got involved and let him remaster it and ruin it too.:rolleyes:
 
RichJ said:
Hummm, I think this discussion is a bit flawed. Are you people really naming producers and engineers you really like, or albums you really like, and hence music and bands you really like?
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Well, a couple of things about that. First, the answer to that question depends greatly upon the responder's depth and breadth of knowledge and interest in the various genres of music. You can't blame someone for mentioning only engineers or producers who specialize in Tuuvan throat singing if Tuuvan throat singing is the main type of music they have listened to or researched.

Personally, I had given a list that included folks well-experienced in rock, pop, jazz, classical, orchestral, country, contemporary, synth, R&B and many variations and combinations thereof, though they have produced or engineered a LOT of artists I don't necessarily like to listen to all that often.

But perhaps more important is the original premise and question; who has purchased music based upon the engineer or producer. As far as I can tell, the virtually universal answer has been "no". So, in the desire to participate, many are answering with the only engineers and producers they know they admire, which will the ones who made the albums they have indeed bought because of the music.

Are they specifically answering the OP question? Not necessarily, but taken as a collective, this thread should give the OP plenty of folks and productions stuff to research and (hopefully) enjoy.

Unfortunately, if it goes much longer, we'll have named every engineer in the business in the last half century, which doesn't exactly narrow it down for the OP very much ;) :D.

G.
 
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