Cross-Country View: Ed Cherney on L.A, NYC, and Career Quality Control

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK CITY: A GRAMMY and TEC Award-winning engineer/producer, Ed Cherney has had the kind of illustrious studio career that puts him in the pantheon of greats to have ever twisted some knobs in this business. Iggy Pop, Bob Seger, Bette Midler, Bonnie Raitt, Wynonna, Eric Clapton, Jann Arden, Jackson Browne, Keb’ Mo, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, are just a few of the legendary artists that Cherney has worked with.

Ed Cherney’s experience has revealed an uncomplicated career road map for the complexities of 2012.

I had the opportunity to rap with him up on the rooftop at the now-legendary AES SonicScoop/Flux Studios party this past October. We traded war stories and talked about the state of the union in the music biz today, where he came from — and where he sees it all going. He had some wonderful insights so I asked him if would be into doing an interview, which he graciously agreed to do.

Cherney is Los Angeles-based, but his wisdom transcends geographical boundaries and certainly resonates here in NYC. Here’s what went down:

What are you working on right now?

I’m mixing a Don Felder record.

What’s he up to these days? Is he on a label?

You know what? He’s not. We may license it to put out on a label. There’s a bunch of offers on the table, and he’s been out starting the touring, and working weekends. We’re really just starting to build this thing. You know, when we finish this record, I think we’ll go to town then but there’s a lot on the table. I can’t say what it is yet, but it’s a great record. He’s a great artist. I mean, he wrote “Hotel California” for God’s sake.

Yeah, yeah, I think I’ve heard of that. What do you think of the new songs?

I think the songs are great. He’s a great writer, he’s a great artist.  And what a great musician.  He knows what great music is about. He’s been making it for thirty some odd years. Everything has a certain familiarity because you’re certainly familiar with this guy’s work. You’ve been hearing it in the Eagles sound for however long now.

I always tell people a funny road story when I was out there with Joe Walsh. We were playing Miami one time. So we flew in, got into the van and there’s always that van driver that wants to blast music because, you know, they think rock and roll guys really want to listen to rock and roll wherever they go, right?

Yeah.

So we get in and he immediately cranks up the music and what’s playing on the radio but “Hotel California.” So eventually as it’s approaching the guitar solo, the van guy gets up the nerve and he turns around to Joe and he’s like, “Look man, I just gotta ask you…” And Walsh, not missing a beat goes, “Felder, me, me, me!”

laughs

And the guy’s like, “What did you mean?” And Walsh goes, “You were going to ask me, like, ‘Who did what guitar solo,’ right?”

Cherney checks into Santa Monica’s The Village to mix.

So where are you spending most of your time these days, Ed? In L.A.?

Yeah, I have a studio. I have my own mix room that I built and it’s at the Village.

And what gear are you working through?

It’s Pro Tools-based. I’ve got a Yamaha DM 2000 console, a lot of tube and iron outboard gear. It actually sounds pretty good, you know. I’ve done shootouts with myself where I’m taking the same song and mixing it out on a Neve and then mix it up here. And listen, you can hear what a Neve is, but I can get pretty close.  You know, having your own room, you get tuned into it and you figure out how to do it. So I’m spending a lot of time in my room mixing.

Did you have a natural talent for the studio or did someone have to teach you?

You know, you walk into a studio, a bell goes off and you know that’s what you want to do. But I don’t think anyone has a natural ability to just be able to go in and make a great recording or mix. You have to learn how to do it, and typically, by trial and error. And a lot of error. (laughs)

What was your first studio gig?

I was working live and learning electronics, but I was making the rounds to try to get a job in the studio in Chicago. It took like 3 years of making the rounds. I looked at it as a job. Once a month I went to every studio in town. One day I showed up at a place and there was a guy named Bruce Swedien, who I’m still very close with, who became my mentor. He had a recording class.

There weren’t schools back then. So I saw an advertisement that he was having this little school in the studio in Chicago and I went and signed up for it and became close friends with him.

You know, he knew what my desire was so I took this recording class from him and coincidentally, after three years of banging on studio doors there was a place called Paragon Studios. So I knocked on the door that day. He happened to be working there and somebody had just gotten fired. And I got a job that day as an apprentice engineer, which meant showing up at five in the morning, cleaning toilets and cleaning headphones.

But, it was a true apprenticeship. The owner of the studio was like a drill sergeant and you learned from the bottom, from making tape copies to running for food. You’d better get a food order right cause you’re not moving on to the next thing if you can’t do that. I think two and a quarter an hour was what I was being paid. And you know what? I didn’t go home. They got me in that studio and I didn’t leave that place for four years. (laughs)

Bruce Swedien showed Ed Cherney that audio engineering is a business.

Let’s talk about that: mentors and apprenticeships. So Bruce was your mentor. What was the most valuable thing that you learned from him that stuck with you through your career?

You know what? He had a certain professionalism about him and for me, the way I started was kind of like a party.

But he ran his career like it was a business. And that had a very profound effect that you’re a professional and you run this thing like you’re running a business. It was nothing casual about it. And there’s a certain work ethic that, you know, I carried his briefcase around and watched him work and got what a real professional was about.

You know, this isn’t fucking around. This is a real deal. You want to be a pro, you act like one and you operate at a very high level in terms of running it as a business and in terms of what your skills should be and in terms of the integrity you need.

So how’d you get your big break? You’re working in the studio, you’re living there, you’re learning the craft…

My big break — you know, I worked my ass off for twelve years, thirteen years. Just at the bottom, and I’m telling you, I started cleaning toilets at five in the morning at the studio and two months later I was promoted and they gave me a brush. But that was it.

You started out with how to move a microphone, how to make tape dupes, I did everything. How you run a cable, to aligning tape machines, to the proper etiquette. You know, you just learn those things. You had to, and if you didn’t learn them, you were fired. I saw a lot of people go by just doing and saying the wrong thing.

So I worked through Chicago and I started as the assistant to the assistant, and running for food and worked my way up to being the assistant engineer. I remember the guy that owned the place. There were only four assistants. And I remember him giving us all a tape and giving us a couple of hours to go and mix a song, and it was going to be like, “Oh, this is my big break. I’m going to do this.” And it sounded like shit. And I was disappointed, but then it dawned on me, nobody can do this on a knack.

These are skills that are learned over a long period of time and a lot of it too is sitting behind people that are great because you start to understand, sonicly, what a hit sounds like, what great music sounds like and what you’re trying to accomplish sonicly. So you have something to base what you do later on those things that became kind of a sonic imprint on your DNA that you got early on.

Quincy Jones added to Cherney’s audio knowledge.

I spent time sitting behind Swedien and Quincy Jones making a lot of hits, so the later work I did, I had something real specific that I could base what I was working on now and compare it to what that was.

We now live in a time when everyone and their grandmother has got a recording studio on their laptop and you’ve got an industry that’s in a downturn. Would you say that the sense of the classic apprenticeship is kind of done and what effect might that have had on the recording process?

Well, the classic apprenticeship still exists and it probably exists at the same level as it did 30 years ago. You know, a way to come up is to start running in the studio and working your way up to an assistant, and sitting behind some guys that really know what they’re doing that are really great. Guys that don’t go through that usually aren’t too good. (laughs)

I deal with a lot of stuff from guys that started with a laptop and Digital Performer or Logic or something like that, and maybe they’ve had some success and made some hits. But you know, listen to what music sounds like right now and it’s not good. We’ve got the highest definition video you’ve ever seen and the capability to have high definition audio and for the most part people are listening to compressed shitty audio.

You know, budgets aren’t so big so I get handed a lot of guys that recorded these albums themselves down here that haven’t served an apprenticeship and I’m dealing with some of the awfulest sounding recordings you ever heard. So the trend for the last few years is they record this shit hard and dark, all muffled and at the same time it’s so bright it gouges your eyes out.

How the fuck do you do that? I know how you do it. You overprocess everything going in. You overload the converters going in and you’ve never sat in a studio or you’ve never put your ear around what great music sounds like in a room being played by a great musician.

I remember Swedien, he insisted that I go to the symphony. Even though I was working on rock music and R&B music but he was absolutely right. In a great sounding acoustic space with great musicians and great music that you begin to understand what dynamics are about, what harmonic structure is about, musical balances, timbre, reverberation and things like that.

I see a lot of people, the only way they’ve ever heard music is through their laptop. Through some samples and some overcompressed and over EQ’d shit, through a shitty microphone, listening through some shitty speakers.

Amen. I write a lot about that concept in my column. You’re mostly in L.A. Do you have an opinion, as far as the regional differences today between the L.A. studio scene vs. Nashville or New York?

Cherney sees an L.A. scene that’s grown to global proportions.

Well, you know what, the way I look at it, the L.A. scene isn’t the L.A. scene. The L.A. scene is the world scene. Here, there’s still great studios and if you go to the San Fernando Valley, every other house has a home studio and that’s just the nature of things.

But I see people and I have friends that come from all over the world to be here, to collaborate. They may be in bedrooms writing songs, but I see the world meeting here in Los Angeles right now and some of them are in great facilities but I just see people getting together from all over the place. From all over Europe, Latin America, Asia, and all over the world convening here. You want to make it? They’re here in Los Angeles. So, the L.A. scene is just a really international scene.

Nashville?

Nashville is Nashville. You know, Nashville when times get tough, they circle the wagons. You look at a lot the Nashville stuff, it’s a lot of the same songwriters, a lot of the same musicians, a handful of producers, a very small handful of engineers that are doing everything.

So I see Nashville as more of a regional, very provincial kind of scene, and especially as the business contracts, or has contracted, a lot of the work stays in a smaller circle of people who tend to be able to control it.  The quality of the musicianship, production, and engineering though, is extremely high.  These are some really experienced and competent people that are still driven by quality and integrity.

God only knows what’s happened in New York. You know, there’s obviously a lot of hip-hop, and pop a lot of urban things, and always spectacular jazz musicians, but there aren’t the great recording facilities that there were in New York in the 50’s and through the late 90’s, but you have a scene. You have the Dap Kings. You know the whole scene coming out of Brooklyn is fucking unbelievable. The music that’s being made there in that scene is world-class as far as I’m concerned, and game-changing.

And what’s really cool about it is people with really unique outlooks and really unique perspectives that aren’t worried, that pay attention to the business but pay more attention to the music and the individual artistic voices that they have. I think that’s really healthy and I think that’s really cool.

You know, there’s an interesting correlation here. You’ve got the whole Occupy Wall Streetthing going on right now. People might look at an Ed Cherney and go, “You know that Ed Cherney, he’s one of the 1%.” He’s a legend and then there’s the other 99% trying to make a living in the industry. And yet, here you are saying there’s not that much money in projects even at the level that you’re getting gigs at. So I guess, is it basically back to the love of the music?

With budgets down across the board, an ongoing passion for music is the equalizer.

That’s exactly what it is. Listen, the arc of a career of an artist, and I’ll include an engineer and a producer and a musician and a writer in music, but I think it equates to all art, is up and down. Peaks and valleys. That’s just what it is. You go into favor and hopefully, you have that harmonic convergence where you’re at the same place where the majority of your culture is, but that doesn’t last. You know, look at all great artists.  For the most part they have two, three, four albums or they had a five year window where they were really hot and then they’re kind of gone. They’re doing nostalgic tours or corporate gigs.

As a mixer, it’s kind of the same thing. The window opens. There’s the opportunity where what you’re doing is meshing with what’s popular and then you ride that and hopefully it’s part of your soul. You’re expressing a part of your soul when your moment is there, which goes back to, if you’re going to run it like a business, save your money. Recognize that it doesn’t last forever. Save for the future ‘cause you’re going to need it, because the arc of your career is going to change.

I must add an epiphany that came to me recently.  The only thing I have any real control of is the quality of my work.  I can’t fix the business or make the budgets larger, or any of those kinds of things, but I can dedicate myself to making the best music with the most integrity I can muster.  If I can just do that, hopefully all the other bullshit will take care if itself.

What advice would you give to someone starting out today in this climate who wants to have a go at a career?

Any advice that I could give to anyone starting out… the truth is you have to worry about money at some point, but all of us, the thing we all had in common is you get bitten by this bug and it takes any kind of choice out of it. You know what you’re supposed to do with your life and in the best of times, it’s never been easy. It’s never…ever…ever been easy.

And you’ll have a lot of assholes talking about, “Well, in my day…” It’s bullshit. It’s never easy, and starting out I saw dozens and dozens of guys just like me that dropped out and fell by the wayside and I’m talking producers, engineers, very talented musicians and writers, performers, that couldn’t, for whatever reason, make a go of it.

More than anything, I think it was just sheer tenacity that makes you become successful and being knocked down, because this whole thing was designed to knock you down. Being knocked down and how you recover from that and what you do.

The truth is, you do it for the right reasons. You don’t worry about the money. You do it for the love of it. You do it for the art, you do it to express yourself. In the case of engineering and producing, you serve the musician, you serve the song most of all. You serve the music. If you do that and you do it well, I think the rest is going to take care of itself.

I would totally agree with that, and if you’re going to leave us with anything, what would one Ed Cherney trick be to walk away and go, “Just that is going to make your song sound so much better.” What would it be?

That’s a really good question. You know, I never do things the same way. It may end up that way. But however you can find the emotion in it, get the technology and all the bullshit out of the way and find the raw emotion and the meaning of a song and however you do that, it could be a vocal and just a guitar, even though you’ve got a hundred tracks in front of you. To tear it all down and find the basic thing that works and moves you and reminds you you have a soul and makes you feel something.

Go to that basic thing and find that, and then you can start cramming all the shit on. (laughs)

Wow. That’s great advice. Ed, I don’t want to take anymore of your time. I can’t thank you enough. You’re a gentleman and a scholar.

You’ve got it, Mark. Hang tough.

— Mark Hermann

NYC-based producer/artist/engineer/more Mark Hermann spends his life in the professional service of music. He has toured the world with rock legends, produced hit artists, and licensed music for numerous TV/film placements. Hermann also owns a recording studio in a 100-year old Harlem Brownstone. Keep up with him at his homepage.

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