20 Years in the Industry: Ryan Freeland on His Studio, Career, and the Impact of Sound

Ryan Freeland at his home studio.

Ryan Freeland is the classic audio triple threat: A recording engineer, mixing engineer, and producer.

“Each day is really different, which I really appreciate,” he tells me on a call from his personal studio. “I don’t know if I’d want to just do one or the other.”

His legacy to date—which comes from over 20 years of working with artists including Aimee Mann, Bonnie Raitt, The Milk Carton Kids, Loudon Wainwright III, Aaron Neville, The Carolina Chocolate Drops and Ray LaMontagne—is probably the best indicator of how much dedication Ryan has for a profession he wasn’t sure was even possible while growing up in the Midwest.

His early interest in manipulating music (adjusting the treble and bass knobs on his record player) led him to the “City of Angels”, where he learned from the legendary Bob Clearmountain, and won four Grammy Awards. “I loved the sound of music and the way that sound made me feel. That’s why I wanted to do this.“

Below, Ryan talks about his present-day studio, assisting Bob Clearmountain, collaborating with artists, and the ever-shifting music industry.

I was just looking at some photos of your studio—it’s so nice and pristine. It has a modern look to it and there is so much sunlight, which is a rarity.

Thank you. Yeah, it’s a custom-built studio. The land is so expensive in L.A., so I had to do a two-story studio because I couldn’t spread out. So the whole second story [ended] up really high [because] I wanted high ceilings too.

With the windows, you can see the day go by and the sunset and you just feel more connected. I don’t mind being aware of the outside world and even hearing a little bit of it from time to time as long as it doesn’t interfere—which it usually doesn’t.

You get a little bit of this or that, but I’ve made plenty of recordings where you could hear the birds singing outside. It just gives you the sense of being in a space or in a time even more for me. That idea of isolating yourself and keeping everything really internal is not quite what I enjoy about recording.

Yeah, hearing anything in the background, even if you’re not conscious of it can give a recording some real authenticity. How long have you been working out of this particular space?

Well, I’ve been in L.A. for 20 years. I built this studio four years ago. It’s my third studio in L.A.

An unobstructed look at Freeland’s home studio rig, located behind his Los Angeles home in what would have otherwise been a detached garage.

Is it an extension on your house or a separate space?

It’s a backhouse, basically. There’s a full three-bedroom house in front and then this is what would have been the garage.

On top, there’s a structure that’s bigger than the [first floor] garage…that has 6’ overhangs on either side. You get quite a bit more square footage, and you can do super-high ceilings which is really great. It’s got a separate entrance and it’s soundproofed enough that I’ve had full bands just blasting away in here and nobody has ever complained.

It’s nice because we’ve all had those experiences where you’ll be in the middle of something and somebody starts banging on the door or calls the cops. You know, it’s like, “Aw, I was feeling really good about myself and feeling artistic and now I feel like I’m a public nuisance.”

Right. “But I’m trying to make a difference in the world here!”

“Don’t you understand? It’s my art. I must express myself and it has to be loudly!” [Laughs]

Exactly. So this being your third studio in L.A., how did you approach building the new space?

Most of it is limited by space and budget, which are usually the major definers of what you can and can’t do. This is the first one I’ve had custom-built. I got to actually design it and put walls where I wanted them, so that part was great.

I’ve worked in major studios, but I’ve done a lot of work in people’s houses and my own living room. I just always felt that it’s more relaxed that way.

Working in big studios, I think we create an environment where people feel really free and comfortable, but when you’ve got an environment that feels more like a home, as long as it sounds good and people can hear what they’re doing and you’ve got good headphones systems and your playback system is good and all that, I kind of like it when it feels more like it could also be a living room or a bedroom—it doesn’t have to feel like it’s only a studio space. You can put a couch in there and it’s not just a studio couch; it’s like an actual couch that people sit on and hang out on.

We spend hours and hours in studios and it would be a shame if it wasn’t comfortable. I’ve got a window that looks down on my living room and I can watch my kids playing. Those little things matter throughout the course of a day. If you need a break, you can go downstairs and help out.

That’s one of the great benefits of having a home studio. Sometimes it can be a distraction too, but typically being part of something more than what you’re obsessing about audio-wise is usually really good. When you get too stuck on one thing, you can get really down or get obsessed if you don’t give yourself perspective on what you’re doing.

Just another day at the home office.

A lot of times ideas come to me just by stepping out of the building for a second. I’ll be outside and take a little walk and be like, “Oh my God, what if I did this? That could solve that problem.” And you might not have thought of that if you just kept forcing yourself to listen to the song over and over again.

Things get worse if you keep digging a humongous hole for yourself.

It’s almost like a microcosm of the macro of making a whole record. It happens with an artist on a whole record if you don’t get it done in a certain amount of time. Like, six months later, you listen back and think, “Oh man, I don’t want to do it that way anymore.”

It’s maybe not that it’s right or wrong, it’s just that every six months you have a set of different ideas about what you might want to do. If you don’t make some decisions and commit, after a few hours even if you find something that’s really great, you won’t even like it anymore. You’ll be like, “I’m bored with this. That was an idea from this morning.” [Laughs]

Totally. So, I noticed that you have a wonderful array of mics. At this point, do you continue to scout around for more or are you really comfortable with what you have?

I love microphones. They’re such a fun part of the whole thing. I’ve [acquired] a lot of the old, classic stuff over the years.

Microphones were the one thing I was like, “Wow, I just can’t find microphones that I dig as much as when I go to the big studios and use all those old Neumanns and stuff.” Nothing ever seemed quite as vibey as those. But now I feel like there’s so much great stuff. There are a lot of great companies that are still making great mics.

When I hear stuff I really dig, I always buy a pair. That’s always the killer for me. It’s like, “Oh, I love this. And it’s expensive, and I need two. Damn it—it’s really expensive!”

Pictured above: Racks of gear at Freeland’s home studio. Fortunately, he does not always buy two of each of these.

[Laughs] Yeah, but two is always best. So let’s talk a little about the time you worked with Bob Clearmountain. What was your role?

Well, I was his second engineer from around ’94 or ’95 to about ’97 or ’98. I just got lucky. I did six months in Memphis at Kiva Recording Studio and heard through the grapevine that he was looking for an assistant. I just called him and somehow got the job, which was a life-changing event.

He had just built a studio in Pacific Palisades, which was great, and it had only been running for about a year. By the time I got there, he said that he just wanted it to be the best studio it could be and that any thoughts I had on how to make it better were more than welcome.

I don’t know about your experience or other people’s experiences, but most studios I worked at or people I worked with before were like, “My way or the highway. I don’t want to hear about it. Just keep it to yourself. This is how we do it here.” Bob never did that. Bob was very much, “Let’s make it the best we can and anything you can think of is welcome.” He was great to work for.

He wasn’t super talkative about his techniques or any of that. You had to learn by watching and analyzing and kind of studying him. I wasn’t exactly asking him questions and having him give me advice. It was basically: Oh, what’s he doing with that? Oh, I see he uses that piece of gear all the time for this and it solves a problem in this way.

I’d get the rough mix up on the console. I’d work on it until he came down, and all I could do was faders—I couldn’t do EQ or compression or anything because I would have all that zeroed out for him. Then, as I was doing the other parts of the assisting job, I would watch him and see what he adjusted to my rough. You learn a lot watching that. He was a fantastic boss and I still consider him a close friend now.

What was the most frustrating or stressful thing at that point in your career?

Freeland at the console, away from home.

You would just be so tired all the time. The hours are crazy. People needed stuff when they needed it.

Now, that doesn’t happen to me much anymore. It might still happen out there in the world. But when I’m mixing, I’m at my own studio, so if I go, “Man, I’m tired. I’m not feeling creative anymore. Is it okay if I deliver you the mixes tomorrow afternoon instead of tonight?” They’re like, “Oh, yeah. Sure.” Instead of staying up until 4 in the morning, I go to bed, wake up, and then attack it fresh the next day.

Those time constraints did also have benefits in the past, but I didn’t sleep much. I was always tired and it was hard to feed yourself. I remember just driving home from the studio super-blurry and being like, “This is a really terrible idea. I have not slept.”

Yikes, that is dangerous. What do you miss most about working with Bob back then?

The camaraderie was great. It was great to have somebody that you knew every day you were going to go in and work with on really interesting, creative stuff.

Having a steady gig too. When you’re an independent engineer, you’re always wondering what the next gig is going to be. I didn’t have to worry about that. He worried about that, but I just got to show up and work.

It was a fun place to work, a great studio, and his family was great. I miss that. Here, I’ve got my own family, but for the most part I’m here trying to keep myself entertained. [Laughs]

And before you started working with Bob you were in a recording program of some sort, right?

Yeah, I went to Interlochen Arts Academy for high school, but that was mostly for piano. They didn’t have an official recording department but you could record bands and performances.

I had been doing recording on my own for a few years before high school, actually. I had as much gear as I could get at the time. I just loved it. There was something about it. There’s something about the combination of the technical, the artistic, and the musical. The gear, the mics, all the knobs—just everything about it was really, really fun to me.

And then I went to California State University, Chico for a bachelor’s degree in music and a minor in English. I got to work in the studio there. They had a great program. They had an electronic music component to it that was great. The teachers were great. They taught us a lot of the real technical stuff.

Where do you think that initial interest in music and the technical side came from for you?

Freeland’s studio features natural lighting and a living-room-like atmosphere.

It was just always there. I started with classical music when I was really young—I started playing piano at 6.

I didn’t really get into much pop music or modern music until a few years after that. I started like a lot of people do with The Beatles and I was a big fan of Queen records. So much of it was really responding to the sound of the records.

I don’t even know how aware of it you can be when you’re 10 or 12 years old but it was the way the music sounded coming out of the speakers. I had this turntable that has a bass and a treble control and I’d put the speakers on both sides of me and I’d sit there, put those records on, and I’d mess with everything. Just to envelop myself in the sound like that really made an impression on me.

People would talk to me about really great bands and sometimes I’d listen to their records and be like, “I don’t like the sound of this record.” So I wouldn’t listen to it. It could be a great song but if it didn’t sound great I wouldn’t listen to it.

I loved the sound of music and the way that sound made me feel. That’s why I wanted to do this. I loved playing piano but it didn’t feed me that same way. I would feel really creative playing piano but it didn’t have the same impact on me. But it was the sound of records that made me go, “That’s what I want to do. I want to work on records.” But nobody knew what that job was in the Midwest in Ohio. Luckily, my parents helped me figure it out. [Laughs]

Are your parents musical as well?

Neither of them are musicians. My mother always worked with musicians and she’s the one that got me into piano. She’s a very musical person. Now she’s taking piano lessons, all these years later, which is fun because she’s playing pieces that I started with and I get to listen to her play stuff that I remember playing.

My dad was an airline pilot for United Airlines. He was a captain, by the end. That job is very technical and very knob-based. I think I got all that from him. I got it from both of them. I hadn’t really thought of it this way before, but I took the parts of both of their aspects of those things that I really liked and I turned them into something I liked.

It’s a perfect combination of skills.

Yeah, I remember when my dad first came to L.A. to Bob’s studio and he stood there at the big SSL console. When I saw him in that context, I was like, “Wow, that doesn’t look that different from sitting at the controls of an airplane.”

The actual use of those knobs couldn’t be more different. [Laughs] But the fact that you’re surrounded by knobs and gears and meters and things giving you information about what you’re doing is kind of the same.

Maybe in another life you would’ve switched places! Coming from the Midwest and not knowing much about the music business, did your parents think you were a little crazy to want to break into this industry?

They didn’t think I was crazy, but I think they were fearful, as any parent would be.

It’s not an obvious job like other things that have more clarity on what exactly you’re going to be doing and how much money you might be making.

But they never really made me feel funny about it in any way. They were always focused on giving me options but they really did take my lead on the things that I [enjoyed].

What happened after you moved on from Bob? What was the next step for you?

I went straight to being an independent, which was scary as all get-out. There’s probably more I could have learned [from Bob] but I was starting to feel like I was stagnating a little bit.

I was getting a little too comfortable in the job. It wasn’t as challenging as I wanted my life to be at that point. But it’s scary because you don’t have a lot of clients, and you’re trying to find clients and get enough money to pay rent and get food.

I’ve got 20 years here, and the first five years I starved, the next five were kind of okay, the five after that were better, and the last five of them are better now.

You just keep plugging away but it’s not like there’s an obvious trajectory. You’ve got no guarantees. You don’t know year to year. The music industry keeps shifting and you’ve got to keep thinking about it and reinventing yourself.

During those first five years, where did your clients end up actually coming from?

The first two or three main ones were people that I had met at Bob’s, like Aimee Mann and Jonatha Brooke. It worked really well because they needed to record to then have Bob mix, so they would hire me to record the stuff.

I got to kind of stay connected while pilfering clients. [Laughs] That’s kind of how it started and then you build a reputation. It’s all word of mouth. That’s the tricky part of it.

When you started working with Aimee Mann, what point was she at in her career?

She mixed Bachelor No. 2 with Bob when I was assisting him. That’s how I met her. She had just gotten out of her record deal.

It was the early days of starting your own record label. So she was starting a new record, which became Lost in Space, and she wanted to try recording some stuff. I had all this gear at my apartment so her and her producer Michael Lockwood would come over and just try stuff.

It was a really fun time. We’d come up with loops and sometimes we’d hire a drummer. They always had this thing where they wanted every guitar to sound like a keyboard and every keyboard to sound like a guitar. We did almost 80% of that record in my apartment and then we went to A&M Studios, which is now Henson Recording Studio, to do some drums.

From there, you’ve continued to work with Aimee quite a bit.

Yeah, I ended up with four mixes on Lost in Space and then every record since then, I’ve recorded. Well, except this last one—Paul Bryan recorded it and I mixed it. Everything between those two, I recorded and mixed everything on.

Is there any change in approach or your process from album to album?

It’s very collaborative. Typically, the time and place and people dictate the whole thing. But there are definitely things where you go, “Okay, I know she likes this kind of vocal sound and I know she likes this kind of aesthetic.” You are kind of mirroring back to what you’ve done in the past, but it also really depends.

What are the differences between going into an Aimee session and going into a session with Bonnie Raitt?

Freeland with Bonnie Raitt and co.

I don’t know if it’s that different. They’re both amazing musicians that really have a love for sound. They both really know what they want and are focused.

I don’t think of it as that dissimilar. They’re both artists that are really fun to collaborate with because it’s really important to them too. It feels very important. You’re trying to do something meaningful and that’s one of the things I like about working with both of them.

Aimee writes most of her stuff. Bonnie writes some of it but is also picking other songs that people have either written for her or that she likes to cover. That’s probably the biggest difference.

What about when you’re working with a duo like The Milk Carton Kids? How does having two people in charge change the dynamic?

Every set of variables changes things. The Milk Carton Kids, especially on [The Ash & Clay], had pretty different ideas. I was kind of thrown in the middle of it.

Normally, you listen to what people are saying and figure out how to do things. On that record, there were definitely times where I was like, “I can not solve both of those problems.”

It was just the two of them—two guitars and two vocals—and they would come up with these competing concepts. I would say, “Those two ideas can not exist in the same sonic world.”

There were some cases where I was being pushed to make a certain guitar barely heard, but there’s only two guitars. So we had those type of discussions.

I just saw them recently. They came and sang backing vocals on a Joan Baez track we just cut, oddly enough. It was really fun to see them and catch up.

It seems like you’ve really found yourself in this world of working with all sorts of folk, traditional, and adult contemporary artists. Were these specific genres that you chased or just fell into?

It was super-fortuitous for me because I really dig Americana and folk. I grew up playing in folk groups, and musically, Americana has always been probably dearest to my heart.

I don’t know how I got so lucky to get into it, but it wasn’t intentional. I was just taking work as it came to me. I think I got a reputation for a [certain] sound. I don’t even know how to describe it. But I’m happy to do anything, really. I don’t have any limitations on myself like that.

Bonnie’s records are kind of a prime example—she’s considered Americana, but this last record has some super-trashy rock things going on. Stuff really slamming away is really fun for me too. Any of it’s fun, as long as it’s music. I don’t really think of it in a limiting way. I’m open to all possibilities and taking my aesthetic to any genre that will have me.

Do you remember a first album that you were super proud of working on?

Probably not at the time. [Laughs] I think the engineering mentality and artistic mentality in general was always kind of like, “Could I have made this better or is there something I didn’t do?”

You’re always thinking of the things that you thought you maybe screwed up at the time. There’s plenty of things that I listen to five or ten years later that I go, “Wow, that’s different than what I’m doing now and I really dig it.” At the time, I remember really struggling with it though. But now, I might listen and go, “Wow, I feel like I really nailed that.”

You do reach limits where you don’t know how to make something any better. But it’s the ones you feel best about that get nominated or people write you about them. Then, I’ll go, “Oh, people seem to like this. Let me see how I feel about it.”

That kind of dictates part of it. You can’t survive in a world where you’re the only one that likes it. There has to be an audience somewhere, even if it’s not a big audience. It can’t just exist in a vacuum.

I’m sure every week is different, but what’s a typical day like for you?

It depends on the day. Last week, it was crazy. We did three different sessions in the same studio. I did a live band to 1/2″ tape. Final mixes with a full live band. The few days before that were all basic tracking in the same room for different artists. And I did a full string session. That was kind of a crazy week. This week, I’m mixing all week. Each day is really different, which I really appreciate. I don’t know if I’d want to just do one or the other.

Do you try to set hours for yourself, like a typical 9 to 5?

That’s the great thing of working at home. I basically work until dinner time, which is around 4 PM at our house. Then, I go back to work at around 6 PM.

My wife goes to bed early so that’s usually a really creative time slot for me. I’ll work until I don’t feel creative anymore, which is sometimes 11 PM or midnight. It’s hard to do much more than 10 hours a day for me.

How many of your clients come over to attend mixes nowadays? Is it mostly just sending mixes online?

It’s mostly online. Aimee likes to be here. Her and Paul Bryan will be here for basically every minute and decision that’s made. There’s a real value to that, but it’s not realistic for most records. The unattended stuff is quicker. I’m fine either way.

I’ve had people say that they would like to attend but have heard that a lot of mixers don’t like when people are in the room. I don’t know. If you want to come, come. It’s your record! [Laughs]

Any thoughts on where you see things going, generally speaking, in this industry?

Well, it’s really hard for me to know, because I’ve been so focused on just working. Admittedly, I haven’t probably spent enough time examining things. I am confused by it all now. It started when the internet took over and people stopped buying records. That was a weird thing for me. I felt like I was making something that people don’t buy anymore. It’s still useful to them, but they’re not buying it—they’re just consuming it. That was a weird shift.

There was a time when something would sell a couple million copies and that could be a really big success for you. That doesn’t happen anymore. Two million YouTube views doesn’t mean anything for the engineer. And album credits don’t really exist—the amount of work it takes to find out who recorded and mixed an album these days is pretty exhausting. So that concerns me.

There’s definitely a shift of money to quality that I’ve seen happening. The amount of money people are willing to spend for the amount of quality they get has kind of shifted. They are like, “Well, it doesn’t have to be X amount of dollars good. I’m happy to just have it be half that good.”

“Just work half as hard.” [Laughs]

Yeah, that part is always weird because you don’t get into this business to just plow through a bunch of mixes and half-ass them just to get twice as many done so you can continue to pay bills.

I’m still doing work I really care about. At the moment, there’s still enough of it to keep me going. I don’t know if it will always be that way.

Those kinds of questions have always plagued engineers. I remember even Bob—20 years ago—was struggling with that daily. “I’m fine this year but what about next year?”

I always say, half-kidding, that I’m looking forward to being able to mix with my mind one day. Are there any sort of advancements in technology that you foresee coming soon?

It’s such a great time for gear manufacturing. All the touch-screen stuff and the way things interact and interface. That stuff is all really exciting and I think really beneficial to music-making. Those products will keep getting better and better.

Hopefully, the care that people put into music and the sound of music and the emotion of it will continue. I hope that it’ll still be meaningful to people and they’ll still seek it out and they’ll still be emotionally moved by it and make a difference in their lives.

This is going to be a really stupid story, but I’ll tell it quickly. I’m a big sci-fi fan and I used to watch a lot of Star Trek. In so many of those episodes, they’ll be like, “Computer, play me jazz” and the computer plays jazz. “Computer, give me a Spanish guitar.” Well, that’s just a sad way to think about the future. I don’t think of just [a genre]; I think of the artist. It’s not just a random stylistic thing where everything just becomes, “Apple Music, play me current pop hits.”

Computer, play me music. “Sorry, we don’t have that.”

Yeah. “Music? What is that?” [Laughs]

But I think music is always going to be around. There’s always going to be a need for it to be recorded and mixed. It’s hard to know how it all plays out. We will all have to wait and see.

Michael Duncan is an up-and-coming producer/engineer based in NYC. He has assisted several notable producers, including Andrew Maury, Dan Romer, and John Siket.

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