Silas Brown on Classical Techniques, Video Game Sound, Audio Education & the Future of Virtual Reality

Silas Brown at work.

Silas Brown grew up in “the middle of nowhere,” as he likes to put it.

His parents were artists and the family scraped by with little to no money. Thankfully, you don’t need to be wealthy to fall in love with music. First finding solace in his piano lessons, he quickly became captivated by synthesizers.

“Instead of pictures of sports stars or half naked people on my wall, I actually had my entire bedroom wallpapered with pictures of synthesizers,” Brown told me over the phone from his mixing and mastering studio in Westchester County, NY.

“That’s painful to admit but it’s unfortunately true—I can still picture a lot of them. And so I became kind of obsessive about that technology.”

Now an accomplished engineer and educator, Brown no longer needs to be embarrassed about his childhood bedroom. His companies, Legacy Sound and Legacy Mastering, have been going strong for over 20 years. A few GRAMMY Awards don’t hurt, for one. However, he’s quick to admit that nothing tangible can beat a fantastic performance:

“I’m addicted to those incredible moments when the musical performance just gels in a way with some great composition. You start to hear something you’ve never heard before or you’re riding a wave of this emotive connection that the performer is making and you just get goosebumps galore.”

Over the past two decades, Silas has worked with an incredible array of artists, ensembles, and orchestras in studios and on stages all over. Some of his credits include the Chicago, Albany and London Symphony Orchestras, John Zorn, Anne Akiko Meyers, Renée Fleming,  Imani Winds, Paquito D’Rivera and Jonathan Biss, just to to name a few.

Below, we talk about Silas’ work with wind ensembles, creative aspects of mastering, recording scores for games like Battlefield and Assassin’s Creed, the future of VR, his masterclasses at Purchase College, and more.

I’m curious about the challenges of recording, mixing, and mastering a wind ensemble. I come from the world of rock and pop, and although I actually used to play flute, I never recorded myself playing. What are the challenges that might be different with wind instruments as opposed to other instruments?

Yeah, that’s a great question. The classical arena has its own aesthetic range that you really have to be very invested in to understand.

Every player of every instrument usually has a way they want their instrument represented in a recording and obviously they want it to sound like themselves, but you have to sort of dig deeper, usually through experience of not doing a good job on some recordings and figuring out why.

Even from wind instrument to wind instrument—you said you’re a flute player so I’m sure you’re aware of this—there are frequency ranges that can make you sound like you have better embouchure or worse embouchure.

Certain microphones sound that way and so it’s not just a timbre-balance thing, it’s affecting the representation of the player’s technique among their colleagues, which is pretty vital when they’re making a recording.

But it’s different—it’s different for flute, it’s different for clarinet, it’s different for oboe, or English horn—and then, of course, what ensemble they’re in.

The basic approach is a lot like other classical recording where there’s an expectation that the musicians are really making the sound and the balance on the stage that they pretty much want.

So the funny part about our role is we have to capture it the way it is happening on the stage—but in reality there’s the other side of the coin which is we also have to allow for us to adjust the balance after the fact.

Silas Brown’s view from behind the glass, recording at Air Studios in London.

You earned a “Best Engineered” GRAMMY nomination this year for the album Shadow of Sirius by Jerry Junkin and the University of Texas Wind Ensemble. How did you approach recording that one?

[On that] recording, all the pieces were…written for surround sound. They were written for not just immersion, like a very traditional surround sound where there would be reverb in the back channels, but there were musicians spread throughout the space.

[In composer Steve Bryant’s piece] there was a point where there was basically dueling ensembles between the stage and between balconies and musicians sprinkled throughout the hall, trading phrases

David Frost produced it and I was the engineer along with Charlie Post who is now the engineer for the Chicago Symphony.

We ended up having an array of five microphones that pretty closely represent the 5.1 speaker setup and then there was other spot mics carefully sprinkled in the percussion and spot mics on flutes and instruments that might not always be able to compete with some of the brass elements as a just-in-case.

We ended up having an array of five microphones that pretty closely represent the 5.1 speaker setup and then there were lots of other spot mics carefully sprinkled in the percussion and spot mics on flutes and instruments that might not always be able to compete with some of the brass elements. There was also another main pair and spots on the groups in the audience.

If there was one phrase where we needed to help out something in the texture, we’d be able to, but essentially we had to make it sound right in the five main mics in the main array—all DPA omni mics.

Basically, we start our soundcheck by listening to the five mains, and we can’t really go forward unless those five mains basically sound like a record. They’re not room mics; they’re the mains. They should be 80% of the mix and then a sprinkling of spot mics to taste, but that should just be salt and pepper.

The producer David Frost deserves lots of credit here.  He has incredible ears and is always methodical about getting it to sound as good as it possibly can in the main mics.

Let’s talk about creative aspects of mastering. Some people don’t view mastering as being very creative sometimes. Are there any kinds of creative things you think or find yourself bringing to mastering?

Silas Brown at Legacy Mastering.

Yeah, that’s a really tricky balance, because I think you have to somehow have your mind and your body in two places at the same time.

Mastering requires, truthfully, an obsessive level of detail-oriented care.

As a mastering engineer, I feel like your absolute first primary responsibility is cutting a clean master. That’s what it’s always been in history. You’re kind of then responsible for all the thousands of copies, whether they’re digital or physical, that are made and so you have to be a bit obsessive about that. So there are lots of different little technical aspects and kind of like chain of evidence things that you have to worry about in the way you make things.

At the same time, there’s all the visceral [aspects]—like listening with your gut, waiting for your goosebumps, [noticing] what makes you more engaged emotionally in the recording. I actually really enjoy that balance. It’s hard and it’s frustrating sometimes, but making sure you’re being obsessive about every little detail and sometimes just kind of turning the knobs until your goosebumps stand up, and making sure those two [goals] don’t ever push each other out of the realm of your awareness.

If you fuss too much—well, you have to fuss a tremendous amount about details—but you can’t stop listening to [yourself say] “Oh man, that makes me want to sink my teeth more into the recording” or “my goosebumps are standing up more when it goes that way.”

It’s that weird combination of things you almost can’t talk about and things you could endlessly obsess about. I like both of those things. I like thinking about the texture of a recording as well as being obsessed about flavors of dither or chain of evidence handling with the master.

Not everyone gets obsessed when it comes to that kind of stuff, so it’s good to have people that like it.

People often talk about the black art of mastering or how mysterious mastering is. I think a lot of that is because—like with anything—when you get to a certain point of involvement with it, nothing’s really definite or definable.

I don’t necessarily reach for my compressors that are in my rack to change the dynamic range of a recording. I’m often using the compressors to change the temporal palette of the recording and I’m certainly affecting the dynamics of a recording when I reach for my EQ.

So, you’re getting these weird ranges where you’re utilizing the gear and you’re trying to maximize what it can do. But you’re really talking about visceral, colorful, textural elements.

Most mastering engineers, yes they can do lots of surgical things and they’ve got really amazing ears in that regard, but they’re also talking about this kind of palette of colors and impacts on the recording. Maybe that’s the mysterious part, which isn’t so mysterious; it’s a lot of fun.

What is important to consider when mastering a classical record that might not be as important when mastering a pop or a rock record?

Well, this is true not just of mastering, but I would say one of the biggest distinctions is that as a mastering engineer or as an engineer [on classical recordings] you basically need to sound like you were absolutely never there.

[With] rock records, often technology can become kind of a fifth Beatle: There can be some really interesting production decisions you can make that are obviously not acoustic or didn’t occur naturally in the room.

The best classical recordings, in my mind, transport me and give me a complete suspension of disbelief, and I feel like I’m right there with the artist.

In order to accomplish that, there’s many things you often need to do, but ultimately, you don’t want to violate that line where you feel some sort of sense of technological manipulation, [where] you feel like something’s a fader ride or something doesn’t sound like it’s in its natural space.

I’m not opposed to doing whatever’s required on a classical recording. I’m not a purist by any means, but I do try to observe that line. It’s like the suspension of disbelief in film. Because it’s classical music and it’s almost entirely acoustic, at least the traditional classical stuff you want the listener to be transported into that sound world and too much manipulation can break that.

Let’s talk about budget constraints a little bit. How is the industry doing in your eyes? It costs quite a lot of money to go out and still do everything properly.

It does, it does. That’s something we’re thinking about all the time. I would make a distinction here:

The classical music business is terrible. I think I can also say probably that the jazz music business is also pretty terrible. Sometimes I joke with friends that we’re basically spending our lives devoted to the two genres of music that fight it out for the bottom 3% of sales every year, which is pretty accurate.

The music world of classical music and jazz however, is incredible. There’s endless amounts of tremendous innovation and creativity.

On one hand, you can have this tremendous goosebump experience from a new recording of Beethoven and at the same time you can turn around and listen to something that’s so-called “alt-classical” or “post-classical” that’s completely evidence of the total destruction of genre and it’s this fascinating new sound world.

So this has been years now that this strange duality exists where there’s less and less support and less and less awareness of this community, but it hasn’t dampened the creative output in my opinion. I actually take a tremendous amount of solace in that somehow, and a little bit of pride that this community that I’ve played a small bit in for 20-something years that they are so incredibly innovative with tremendously little support.

I don’t like to call these musicians Olympic athletes but there’s some analogy there—they really are that distinctive and that accomplished. But they’re practicing an art, so it’s even deeper in some ways. But so few people seem to be aware of it.

I’m not sure if there will ever be a solution to that. In classical music, at least, there is some grant or institutional support to some degree, but it’s really lean and mean.

I am forever grateful that when I’m working on a project, the idea of making money or getting rich on this thing we’re working on together just never even enters anyone’s mind. And so the only reason anyone is doing this is because they’re absolutely devoted to it. That’s actually a fantastic environment and I’ll do that happily till my grave.

So what got you interested in not only classical music, but also audio in general?

I grew up in the middle of nowhere and we had little to no money. When I was growing up, my parents were artists and we sort of scraped by. I took piano lessons and I became really interested in synthesizers and that was just as MIDI technology was being implemented everywhere.

This would be late ‘70s, early ‘80s. Instead of pictures of sports stars or half naked people on my wall, I actually had my entire bedroom wallpapered with pictures of synthesizers. That’s painful to admit but it’s unfortunately true—I can still picture a lot of them. And so I became kind of obsessive about that technology.

Then, I went to Purchase College and I was a studio composition major which was the only kind of untraditional major they had at the time. While I was there, I was struck by a number of contemporary classical compositions and started becoming interested in writing for acoustic instruments. It was one of my work-study jobs, as part of financial aid, to record recitals and faculty concerts. So I heard a lot of music that I never would have listened to.

Something happened there at Purchase where I was exposed to stuff I wouldn’t have been. I was doing some engineering and also I was sort of the “key boy”—they would rent out the recital hall and no one [on staff] wanted to be there to keep open the room, so they would hire a student to do it. So I was a fly on the wall on a tremendous number of classical recordings that were done in the early ‘90s in the recital hall at Purchase in the music building.

I got to know a number of independent labels, producers, and some engineers. I got to know Adam Abeshouse, who’s an amazing producer and engineer—I was his assistant for many years. I learned more than I can imagine from Adam and we’re still very close to this day. He’s off working with all kinds of amazing artists, such as Joshua Bell and Simone Dinnerstein.

Was it when you started working with Adam that you realized you could do this as a career?

Maybe. Honestly, I had tremendous confidence problems early on. I started out taking editing work for a couple of different producers in the area. It was basically all subcontracted work. I was interested in engineering but I didn’t really have any training. I was Adam’s assistant and I had assisted a number of other people on sessions, but I sort of stumbled into engineering more. I wish that I had studied it more, honestly. But you learn in the trenches, that’s for sure.

I used to literally stay awake all night sick to my stomach worried about the fact that I was working with these musicians who were so much deeper of an artist than I could imagine being and how was I going to make sure that the sound of the record was representing everything they were doing? How was I going to get them happy with the sound of their record? I spent probably ten years pretty sure that I would never be able to do that and that I wasn’t doing it on a daily basis. I was driving myself insane slowly.

Right. Has it got a little better since then?

Yeah, to a certain degree. Adam is always so focused on the fact that all the answers are in the music.

If you’re listening with your gut and an understanding of what the artist is trying to convey, and you can speak that language with them, the answers are there.

You just stay in the score, you follow your gut, and hopefully that combines with a set of experiences with that kind of music that allows you to keep up with some of these amazing artists.

How did you come to join the faculty at Purchase College?

I got to know Peter Denenberg, and also Joe Ferry, who has just recently retired.

Peter is a successful rock producer and current Chair, and Joe was involved at Purchase for a very long time and actually started the Studio Production program there. He was a teacher there when I was a student, and is a very accomplished producer and musician in his own right. They’re both models of what a mentor and teacher should be in my mind.

I did one or two guest lectures there and then was invited to come as an adjunct. I’ve always had a connection to Purchase, obviously I went to school there, and I also met my wife there—one of the best things I got from Purchase.

Even after leaving Purchase, I was going back and making recordings there. You can rent the Performing Arts Center and it’s one of the most frequently-used concert halls for classical recording. So I was there a ton, and I’ve always appreciated the culture at Purchase.

I love the faculty there. There’s so many people that I’ve worked with there professionally who I respect enormously. I really like the environment. There’s a collegial, friendly group of people there that are amazingly accomplished, so I love being around them fundamentally.

So what are some of the topics that you touch upon in your classes?

Well, in some classes, it’s ever-changing. I teach a number of sections of masterclasses, and those are kind of freeform. They are usually focused on live recording. Peter and I, over the years, have also been teaching the students a little bit about video production because I think you almost have to be fluent in both. If you’re an audio engineer who’s really great at audio but also understands video, you have that much greater of a chance of employment.

We’ve started doing some live streaming from Purchase that is a little bit ad hoc. We roll lots of equipment into wherever the performance is going to happen and hope that we can connect to the net and we’re live editing multi-camera video and capturing multi-track audio of classical and jazz performances and streaming whenever we can.

We’ve also started dabbling in audio for games and VR a little bit, which is a world I’m very interested in. I’m learning a little bit about ambisonics and binaural approaches to recording.

But it covers the gamut because I have one class that’s all of our freshmen every year and so that class is much more about the things we really want you to know or understand as you begin this journey—it’s the nuts and bolts of how things work.

Then, there are some music theory classes where we’re trying hard to improve people’s musical vocabulary and their skill set.

Most of the people at Purchase want to be producers and engineers in the rock world or across the so-called popular music spectrum. It’s really important to us that they’re as multifaceted as possible because it’s so hard to make it in this business. The only way you’re going to do it is if you’re omnivorous and if you have a dozen skills that you’re really good at.

So, for us, we want you to play an instrument. We want you to be able to arrange something. We want you to certainly have a technical background, but you also need to be able to speak the musical language.

What is the most difficult skill or lesson to teach in a classroom setting?

I really want our students to graduate with a tremendous amount of hands-on experience.

When you’re in the trenches, particularly when you’re in the trenches on a live event, there’s somewhat intangible skills there. Sometimes it’s the skill of staying out of the way, sometimes it’s the skill of thinking a couple of steps ahead—that’s usually a big one.

The best audio crews are the ones who are thinking a couple of steps ahead and have basically already solved the problem before the producer has realized that there is a problem.

I actually had that experience with a bunch of students in the city. I was doing a live recording of the music of John Zorn at Miller Theatre and I opened it up to some of my masterclass students.

It was, for us, a very complicated setup because we were moving from these large ensembles of 13-15 people onstage that were not necessarily a chamber orchestra—it was a very unusual setup with tons of percussion and all of a sudden the next piece was like an electro-acoustic trio and the next piece was a solo piece. We were banging through these crazy input lists and we had to make a number of changes as fast as possible.

Long story short, we were literally making a change over from piece three to piece four and I realized I’d made an error on my plan. I go into these things with a lot of pre-production in place, especially something like this, where it’s very complicated, so there are stage plots and input lists ready.

I try to anticipate everything but there was some sort of miswiring in my setup. I ran back to the control room because I could repatch it in the DAW instead of doing it on stage and still solve the problem. I walked in, and probably half screamed to one of my students at the time, “ Crap, I made a mistake. I missed this input change. We’ve got to fix it in the mixer.” He very calmly looked at me and said, “Yes, I saw that already. I fixed it.” Literally, as he finished that sentence, the piece started and so there was no time to screw this up.

That person was Jeremy Kinney, who’s now an audio engineer in the New York area. That was one of those moments where it was like, “Jeremy, you’re hired forever!” I don’t know how you develop that skill to be looking ahead.

I’m not sure you can be taught it completely.

Yeah, I think you can certainly acquire it, but usually you have to make a bunch of mistakes and have some sort of self-reflective nature where you look back and say, “I could have done that better if I had only thought of that.”

Let’s talk about the future of music and the field that we’re in. You were mentioning before your interest in VR. How do you think VR and music are going to intersect?

I can only speak to my personal connection to it. I’m addicted to those incredible moments when the musical performance just gels in a way with some great composition. You start to hear something you’ve never heard before or you’re riding a wave of this emotive connection that the performer is making and you just get goosebumps galore.

That’s the reason I do this. I think that’s the reason why all of us do this—we’re addicted to that hit, you know? The “you are there,” the immersion that VR offers as a new medium gives me that hit.

There are a lot of difficulties with the medium, but people are figuring it out. On the filmmaking side, almost every workflow for traditional filmmaking doesn’t work in VR, so what I’m interested in is the musicians we work with. They’re already telling these amazing stories.

How do we make the VR medium convey that as if basically you are there? I think there is enormous potential but we have to find that way of making this direct connection to the emotive content of what’s happening without a lot of artifice.

Whenever new mediums come out, there’s always this tremendous amount of junk media created where people just show off. When quad came out, there were a lot of whole albums released where people were just bouncing sound around the four speakers, basically making you sick.

I think the same thing is happening with VR. There’s some kind of unpleasant and horrific rollercoaster ride VR experiences which might be fun for a little while but there’s also the potential to have that absolutely amazing experience where you feel like you’re the only one in the concert hall or the stadium or the club and you’re just completely connected to what’s happening musically. That’s possible in VR in a way that I have yet to experience in other mediums.

So I think it’s only a matter of time. I really would love to be one of the people who figures it out, can’t say I have yet, but I’m working on it. I’m excited by the possibility.

Do you have any predictions? Some people are saying within a very short amount of time, maybe just 10 years, we’ll have this whole new world that we could be living in.

Yeah, if not sooner. I have an Oculus Rift here and I’ve also played around with Google Cardboard. Most of the time, once you experience it, people get it pretty quickly. So it wouldn’t surprise me if it happened fairly quickly.

As a medium goes, I think it’s catching on faster than other ones that I’ve seen. When we moved from cassette to CD, there were these huge amounts of new recordings and new labels that popped up, and reissues. It’s bigger than that. It’s absolutely a new medium and not just a different, shiny plastic disc. But I think it’s happening faster.

Yeah, absolutely. On a somewhat related subject, there’s technology now where you simply upload a track and an algorithm takes control of mastering your song for you. Are you afraid of those services becoming more popular?

No, I think those things are out of our control. I haven’t tried any of them or listened to them much myself. Maybe someone is cooking up an algorithm to master classical music and I’ll be out of business next month, but I doubt it.

But it’s our immediate future on every front. All of these automated processes will be taking over more and more elements of our life. I don’t think that necessarily means there isn’t still room for the boutique and tailored approach to things.

I guess I still feel some security in the fact that no algorithm will ever be able to understand my goosebumps. The algorithms will always be tremendously coarse in that regard.

You’ve become more involved in recording scores within the gaming world recently. What have you been working on?

Yeah, it was a little different in each case. I love doing it because I’ve had to learn a lot more about it. You have to think very differently about game scores and how you record them.

The first series ended up being two Battlefield games. Composer Mikael Karlsson, who is New York-based, has also written a lot of classical pieces and written a lot of music for ballet—it’s really fascinating and just beautiful music.

I got to know him and his team originally because we had friends in common, so when he was reaching into the classical community, he found my name one way or another. It was very important to them to have a real orchestra on the soundtrack for those games. So we ended up recording kind of a pickup orchestra with Alan Pierson, the conductor. We recorded it at Clinton Recording Studios, which is no longer around, unfortunately. Then, we mixed and mastered it together.

Silas Brown recording for the Battlefield video game series at Clinton.

More recently, I worked with Olivier Deriviere, a Paris-based composer. He’s a really fascinating guy who primarily does work in game and film. It was just a word-of-mouth connection again.

I think they were looking for an engineer with some acoustic background and I’m thrilled that they landed on me somehow. And that was for the Adéwalé song portion of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. That we did at Avatar Studios in Studio A.

They had found in New York a traditional Haitian drumming group and choir in New York, some of the music comes from Haiti during slavery times so is very relevant to the game. I really admire that they found a group found a group that understood the culture and the musical connection and played traditional instruments. Then a soloist, Monvelyno Alexis, sang some traditional songs [and] they went to Europe and recorded an orchestra afterward.

Awesome. Is that something you want to do again?

Absolutely. I love the non-linear elements—the fact that you’re no longer in control of the musical script the way that you are with traditional compositions or performances.

I find it really interesting, artistically. Someone is going to come along and do some really fascinating things that are purely musical but perhaps using a game engine as a compositional tool.

To wrap up, is there anything coming up for you or that you’re hoping to do soon?

That’s tough. I tend to forget whatever is not the next deadline, which is a terrible habit or deficiency in my mind.

I’m mixing Anne Akiko Meyers’ next recording that we captured at Air Studios in London.  It’s with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Kristjan Jarvi conducting and is deeply moving music-making.

I would love to underscore what [David Alan Miller] and the Albany symphony is doing. There’s a recording of Michael Daughtery’s compositions [with] Evelyn Glennie that we’re finishing up now. They had a Christopher Rouse recording that was really extraordinary and a great George Tsontakis recording that will come out this summer.

They have this tremendous output of incredibly thoughtful, deep, and varied stuff that really represents an entire sector of new American music that sometimes gets overlooked. Deeply creative masters of music, these guys. I’d love people to listen to those recordings and have those experiences.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for chatting with me.

My pleasure. I’m so thrilled when people are interested in this world. Much appreciated.

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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