7-Time GRAMMY-Winning Engineer Darrell Thorp on Audio Work Ethic & More

Darrell Thorp, pictured here posing with his Atlantis microphone in a shot from Lauten Audio.

Darrell Thorp is a 7-time GRAMMY Award-winning producer, mixer and engineer who has worked with artists such as Foo Fighters, Beck, Paul McCartney, Jay-Z, Radiohead, and many more.

In this interview, Darrell talks about what he found most difficult when starting out as an assistant engineer, which skillsets are most important to working in a studio, what he would do if he had to start over today, and what he wished he would have done earlier in his career.

You were in the Navy before you pursued a career in audio. Was there anything you learned there that helped you in the studio world?

The Navy prepared me for the terrible hours I was going to endure in the studio—especially working as a studio assistant. Being an assistant, it was normal to do a 12-hour session, plus a 2-3 hour setup and teardown, then be ready for the next setup. It was pretty brutal.

Was that one of the harder things you experienced in the studio?

The schedule was both insane and intense so you are trying to keep your head above water and get enough rest. However, as I have gotten older, and maybe a little bit spoiled, my clients are not doing the 13-14 hour days in the studio anymore, they are shaving it back a little bit, which is nice for all parties involved. But I’m sure some of my friends that are up-and-coming are still putting in some serious hours.

How did you handle the hours back then?

Coffee! Lots and lots of coffee.

Did working those kinds of hours ever affect the work you did?

Well, there were definitely times when I was so exhausted that things slept under the rug, and I wasn’t at my best. I remember one session where I was doing tracking for 5 days and we finished at midnight on the last day. However, the next morning at 9 AM there was a new session coming in. So, it took me 2-3 hours to tear down the previous session and at 3 AM I started setting up for the next session.

I barely finished the setup, laid down on the couch for an hour, then the other client showed up. I woke up and I was in a daze, but I had to align the tape machine. I was half out of it, so who knows if that alignment was correct or not—I have no idea. It sounded good though. When I came home that night after a full day in the studio, I just crashed. Luckily we didn’t start until 11 AM the day after. Also, knowing myself back then, if I had to be at work at 11 AM, I would wake up at 10:40 AM, take a shower then head to work which would take me 15 minutes. That’s how I pushed the envelope back then.

Are there any specific habits, skills, or even a mentality that you had that helped you climb the ladder that others might not?

In certain respects—and it’s all across the board—I feel some people don’t have the same attention to detail or the same work ethic that I have. However, I still work in a fair amount of studios in Los Angeles, in the Hollywood area, and I have my guys that I work with all the time because they are good at what they do. They always got my back and are always going beyond their call of duty to make sure things are correct. That’s a big plus in my book. For example, making sure that stuff is labeled correctly, that microphones work, and so on.

I’m not in studios all the time, so I’m not sure how they train newer assistants, but it is a huge ordeal to be an assistant because you have to pay attention to a lot of stuff. Although, in some ways, it’s easier now compared to when I started out because you are not dealing with tape machines, DA-88s or ADATs or whatever recording format that would show up on the day. It was such an ordeal in how we had to achieve a large track count, you would constantly change patches to change inputs and you were constantly cross-patching, whereas now it pretty much stays the same. For example, the vocal or kick drum usually stay on one input, it rarely changes with a DAW. It makes it easier on the assistant but it doesn’t mean you can slack off and stop paying attention.

What do you think makes an assistant able to progress to a senior engineer?

First and foremost, you got to be ready to jump in the chair and make it happen. You will make mistakes along the way—I know I did—but you’ve got to be ready. You can’t learn this job in a classroom or by reading a book. You have to jump in and get your hands dirty. You have to sit behind a console and stick your head between the speakers, crank it up and start figuring out frequencies, compression, de-essers, delays and reverbs. It’s all these nuances that I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing and figuring out. It’s a slow learning process and it takes years.

I’m 21 years in the business and I have been engineering full time since 2003, and I feel like it’s only in a recent couple of years where my engineering has expanded greatly and I hear things a lot different now than I did a 3-4 years ago.

In what way?

I’m much quicker at listening to tones and figuring out if it’s usable or not in a recording environment. There are a lot of questions that arise in those situations. For example, is it me, the microphone, the microphone placement, or does the instrument itself and the microphone sound very good, but I just have to add some EQ to brighten or thicken it up? It’s judgment calls like that which are hard to make. However, it’s a skill you constantly hone and develop.

Also, with experienced engineers or drum techs, drummers, producers, and the like, they can hear a snare drum in a room and think it sounds good, but I can hear it and go “No, that’s not going to record well.” To which they usually go, “What, you are kidding me?” “Yeah, you are hearing the room, stick your ear next to the drum.” Or, I will record it completely flat and ask them to come into the control room to listen. This usually proves the point that what they are hearing in the room is the snare drum with the room ambience, but when you stick your ear up next to it, which is how we record nowadays, it’s a completely different animal.

Is that something you have specifically trained to be good at or does it come from you being in the studio every day?

I’m really lucky and fortunate, and I know how blessed I am with the fact that people are paying me to get better at my craft. I can’t say just how amazing that is as far as a job goes. A weird way you can think about it is that the client, or the artist, are my guinea pigs, as far as me getting better at what I do.

You mentioned that the most common way you have gotten clients was through referrals where people have recommended you. Do you have any tips on how people can achieve the same reputation?

If I had the answer to that, I would write a book. Honestly, it’s just about being at the right place at the right time and having that one friend of yours that recommends you for something big and that you are available to do it. You’ve got to be ready to take the seat too.

I say this from experience because I was a very confident assistant, and the last place I assisted at was Ocean Way Studios, which is now United Recording Studios, and I knew those room so well and it was so easy for me. However, when I started engineering in other studios, it was daunting and scary because I was afraid I was going to screw it up.

If you had to start over today, and with there being fewer assistant opportunities in studios, what would you do to try to break into the industry?

Darrell Thorp inside his Los Angeles-based studio, 101 Recording, pictured here in a shot via Universal Audio.

I would still try to go the same route, as in, try to get a job in a studio, as a runner, and work my way up. When I was coming up in this business, in order to work and learn you had to mess around in studios. Fortunately, a lot of the studios I worked for would let you go in and mix or record if the room was empty. That being said, you had to wait for a room to be available and a lot of the times they weren’t.

Nowadays, with the advent of a DAW, whether Pro Tools or Logic, you can sit at home and work on mixing all day long, either on headphones or on speakers. It’s not the same playing field anymore. For example, I worked with an artist a couple of years ago and the guy had done everything in Ableton. He was self-taught, and he just used the 8-inch output of his laptop, and some of the sounds he got were insane. It was electronic music, but nevertheless, it was just him sitting there with his headphone-jack making these crazy sounds. It’s up to you because you can work on your craft or record projects on the side, or if you work in a studio, you can record during downtime and bring it home to mix for a couple of days.

Many people are struggling with perfectionism, therefore endlessly tweaking their knobs or not releasing their music at all. Is this something you have experienced and how did you deal with it?

That comes from experience. When I do a mix for a client, I mix it to the best of my ability. However, there are times when I feel like the mix is done but I just want to hear it again from top to bottom, then I will turn up the vocal a dB, listen again but then think the vocal is too loud so I turn it down again. Sometimes I go back and forth like this with the snare as well, but that’s when I stop.

When I reach that point, where I’m just micromanaging every little sonic decision within a mix, I step away for a minute. That’s usually where I send it over to the client because I want to get their feedback and be reassured that I’m going in the direction they are looking for.

With a DAW you can work on a mix for a year if you want to, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It would drive you crazy. It’s a self-confidence thing where you just have to go, “Man, this sounds really freakin’ good and I know it does. Are there things I can tweak on and change? Yes. Am I doing the song justice? Yes. Is the client extremely happy? Yes. Then I have done my job.”

Do you have a specific routine you do before going into a recording or mixing session to be able to do your best work?

The only preparation I do is that I get on the phone with the client or artist to try to figure out what the vibe is and what they are looking for. Sometimes they are a bit naive when it comes to studio terminology and how things are done, so I have to decide what they are trying to convey to me.

I’ve had a lot of situations where a client asked for something really big and roomy but when they heard it, it’s not what they were looking for. Instead, after I muted the room track of the drums, they were happy, and told me that’s what they wanted. They literally asked for the opposite of what they were looking for.

This can be a challenge, therefore, when I get a phone call about a session, I try to do as much chatting with the client about the direction they are looking, such as drum, bass, and guitar sounds. Also, trying to figure out if they want to track live and cut everything at the same time, or just bass and drums at the same time.

Is there anything you experienced when going freelance that you wished you had considered beforehand?

The one thing that I wished I would have done earlier in my career was to get a studio going. I waited until way too late in my career to find a studio space and it became an issue for a while.

Fortunately, I have a great space that I just mix in nowadays, which has been great. If you are assisting and you want to do more freelance, you just got to figure out how to get a space to work in, whether that’s in your house, separate building or whatever will work and start putting it together. Especially nowadays, as a freelance engineer, you have to have your own space to work in.

I feel pretty fortunate that I spend a fair amount in recording studios, especially for tracking, but most of my mixing takes place in my own studio because clients don’t have the budget to allow me to sit in a studio to mix a record. And quite honestly, most of my clients are not around—they are all around the world, so I’m mostly sending them stuff through the internet and we are communicating through Skype, email, text and the like.

Looking back on your career, are there any moments where you thought, “This is heaven, can’t believe I’m working with this artist or project”?

Honestly, I have that a lot of times, but last year, when I was in the middle of the Foo Fighters’ Concrete and Gold record, I couldn’t believe I was working on that project. They are amazing people to hang with all day long and they are so talented. We were also sitting at EastWest Studios for months which is a rarity, and just to feel like a real engineer at a real studio all the time was amazing.

Looking at the other side of the coin, have there been any moments where you thought, “I can’t do this anymore, it’s too hard”?

The unfortunate factor of being a freelancer is that the phone and email will go off the whole time, then a month later nobody is calling nor emailing and you are scratching your head. It’s the various ups and downs of this business. Everybody goes through it.

How do you handle those quiet times?

It’s funny, a lot of times when I’m working on big projects my friends leave me alone, and when it’s slow, my friends start calling me asking if I can mix their records. It’s a total bro favor which I love doing. A lot of my friends who are artists are so talented, they are unfortunately not as fortunate as, for example, Foo Fighters or Beck. However, I like to work on my friends’ projects and it’s a great way of experiencing new music too.

Niclas Jeppsson is a freelance sound engineer who lives and works in London. He has worked with Manon Grandjean, Mandy Parnell, Jon Moon, Cameron Craig and writes library music that has been used by the like of Audi and more.

For more from Niclas, including interviews with Andrew Scheps, Vance Powell, Michael Brauer and the free guide, “How To Get Work And Become A Freelance Sound Engineer”, visit him at https://youraudiosolutions.com

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