David Boucher on Working with Pixar, Randy Newman, Andrew Bird, & Bob Clearmountain
The Toy Story 3 scoring session, led by composer Randy Newman, records the musical score at Sony Studios on December 9, 2009 in Culver City, Calif. (Photo by Deborah Coleman / Pixar)
Discovering the best way to make initial contact with David Boucher took weeks. The L.A.-based recording/mixing engineer doesn’t have a website—a remarkable feat these days—and he has no interest in social media.
He does have an email address (two, in fact), but friends of his keep it close to the vest. When compared to the numerous audio engineers desperately spamming the internet for gigs on a daily basis, Boucher’s low profile is a refreshing change. And his lack of online presence certainly doesn’t appear to impede his ability to keep landing fantastic work.
Despite his inclination to stay out of the spotlight, Boucher has labored over albums by acclaimed artists including Andrew Bird, Aimee Mann, Indigo Girls, Randy Newman and Fleetwood Mac. He’s also credited for his engineering mastery on film scores and/or songs featured in Moana, Frozen, Monsters University, and Toy Story 3, to name a few.
Most recently, when we were speaking on the phone for this interview, he was working on Pixar’s next animated feature, Coco, about a 12-year-old aspiring musician named Miguel Rivera.
If there’s one lesson to be learned here, it’s this: Our industry still runs on connections made by people (often in person), coupled with a strong skill set, and a good heap of luck.
Boucher, who grew up in Atlanta but later began his career at Right Track Recording in NYC following college, certainly has all three criteria to thank: He has been refining his audio skills since the age of 13, a friend from college gave him a heads up about Bob Clearmountain looking for a new assistant, and it was a serendipitous event in a music shop that started his ongoing collaboration with producer Mitchell Froom.
Below, find out more about Boucher’s approach to film music, his early days assisting Bob Clearmountain, and his predictions about the future of mixing.
How did you first get started recording?
My first recording experience was with my band when I was 13. I had been enlisted to be the one to make the tape that we’d sell at our shows. We didn’t really have many resources —basically just the money that we made mowing lawns in the summer.
I bought a 4-track and a couple of microphones at a garage sale. [W]e even used a pair of headphones backwards as a microphone for the vocal mic because the singer could sort of wear the headphones on his face as he was playing the guitar.
It was really a circus because we didn’t even have mic stands. I had a Crown PZM mic in front of the drums. I actually jammed an SM57 into the side of the 4-track right into the XLR connector because I only had one mic stand, so we just used whatever we could in a makeshift studio in my basement.
I read elsewhere that you worked with your father on actually building a recording studio in your basement. Tell me a little about that.
Yeah, my dad is an interesting guy. He has all these skills that you would never know about. His father was really good with his hands and his father was a really good hunter and loved fishing and was a real outdoorsman, but my father didn’t seem to like any of that stuff.
He worked for IBM for 31 years. He was good at construction so we learned how to do plumbing together and electrical together—most of which he kind of already knew. He knew how to hang drywall and do that kind of stuff so it was our first real bonding experience outside of sports.
I remember it vividly because there was an unfinished part of our basement that was basically just the foundation, and we took a corner of it and made it a studio. It was not properly wired but it was a space for me in this sort of life that I would end up existing in. It was kind of wild to see him do it.
How old were you at that time?
13 or 14 years old.
That’s a pretty early time to get into recording.
Yeah, I don’t know what happened. It dawned on me that I felt like I was better at music in the recording and mixing world than I was in the performing world, even though I loved to play and I still love to play.
If I have an opportunity to play on a record, I will, but I soon met many people that were pretty scarily good on their instrument and I knew I wasn’t at that level of performance. I just wanted to continue to participate and that was a way for me to do it.
You eventually went to the University of Miami. What made you decide to go there as opposed to a more music-centric school like Berklee College of Music?
I don’t know if it was a prejudice of mine but I felt like the University of Miami was a proper education, where I would get a real music degree in performance and a real engineering degree—a minor in engineering.
I was a little wary of the idea of a vocational school, which is not a fair label to put on those places, but I was a teenager at the time, so my impression was that University of Miami was a proper school. I didn’t want to go somewhere just to learn how to do one thing.
We learned all the technical aspects of how to make things work. There were classes on how to solder and troubleshoot equipment and align tape machines—all the things that would go into someone who is a “tech” at a proper studio.
There was very little training there about how to be an assistant that would then help you move up to be a first engineer. It was all about being an island. I still fix all of my own gear, except for things that stymied me but the guy I go to [for repairs sometimes] was another University of Miami grad and he’s great.
Do you find music to be the most compelling part or the technical aspects of engineering?
I’m definitely a musician first, but I find that my creativity and my willingness to get deep into a project is enhanced by scratching that itch of the technical part. It’s almost a regenerative process to sit down and just work through your gear to fix the things that have broken through the process of production or the things that you found that could have been better.
I have a lot of vintage gear and some homemade gear and by the end of the project you’re like, “Oh, I wish this had a little more—I don’t know—of one particular characteristic.” Then you can take that time—while maybe the producer you work with is doing pre-production—to dig into that gear and make it better.
On the last album that I just finished with Mitchell Froom, one side of my EMT plate reverb just started making this horrible screeching noise like I was strangling a cat. It’s a mono plate on that record now, so it’s just one side. In this time off between projects, I completely recapped it, picked all new tubes for it, got it all sorted, and I installed it the other day and it sounds bigger and more beautiful than it ever has. So it’s pretty gratifying that you can put your hands on something and it can improve so much.
You’re currently living in California but you had originally moved to New York City after college. Why was that?
My parents are both from upstate NY and my experience with the world of recording had only been on the East Coast. I just figured New York was where it was going to be, and I knew that if I was feeling beat down I could get on the Metro North and go up and see my grandparents or my aunt and uncle and get a nice Italian meal and feel centered again.
New York is a pretty rough place. They’re pretty hell-bent on keeping the old “pay your dues” mentality, and in some ways I feel like they squander a lot of the young talent that comes there.
Yeah, it is difficult to move up the ranks at so many studios here in New York City. It’s fascinating though to learn your story about how you became acquainted with Bob Clearmountain. How did you meet him?
So I went to Right Track as a runner, and then they realized that my technical skills were enough to make me a tech. Meanwhile, I was first engineer at a studio downtown doing projects on my own and playing in a band and never sleeping, and all the glory of New York.
It’s just the most incredible place. I would recommend anybody at least spend a year there, because it really is invigorating in a way that is hard to put into words.
But there was no room for me at Right Track. They were not hiring from within. When assistants would leave, they would hire an outside guy because they hadn’t given runners enough time in the studios to move up.
I felt like I was going to be there for a decade before I even became an assistant, and no one gets into the business to be an assistant. There are some people who end up being assistants for a long time, and they’re some of the smartest and most influential people in the room a lot of the time. But, in a lot of cases, it’s just because no one ever gave them a chance to do it on their own. I didn’t want that for myself.
A friend of mine, Joey Raia, who worked for Apogee Electronics, gave me a tip that Bob’s assistant was leaving and I should apply. I sent my resume and Joey vouched for me to Bob and [Bob’s wife,] Betty. They were traveling to New York to spend some time at their home upstate and they stopped in New York City, so we had an interview and he offered me the job. Two weeks later, I was on a plane to Los Angeles. It wasn’t a very difficult decision.
Did you do a lot traveling when you worked with Bob?
We traveled occasionally. We did a Pretenders’ record at Bearsville, but I would travel with him and get him going because part of the gig was manning the fort while he was away. If somebody needed a recall or something like that, I would be back at the studio in Los Angeles to cover those tasks.
It’s one of the downsides of a studio in your domicile. People don’t really remember that if you leave it becomes empty. There’s no full-time person to field calls and dig up an archive or recall a mix or whatever. In the days that I worked for Bob, that sort of edifice had to still be there.
Was there something particular from the way that he worked that made an impression on you?
I was always surprised with how musical he was. He has an incredible ear for balances. You put up the faders every morning with the mix for him and there were some days you just go, “Oh my god, this is just a disaster,” and then he would start working on it and suddenly there was a pretty great record there. Not always, but it was remarkable what he could do to save the day.
He consistently got the artist happy. He never took on any sort of ego as to the way that he thought it should sound unless there was a moment where he just really felt strongly and then he would speak up, but he would try his best to follow the artist’s vision all the way through to the finish. I always admired him for that.
How long did you assist Bob?
I was there for three and a half years, which was sort of the idea the whole time. When I met Bob and Betty, they sort of gave me a not-so-subtle hint that three years would be right. I want to say that there’s no advancement in an organization like that. I never become Bob Clearmountain eventually if I’m at the company long enough.
He was a busy guy and for good reason. It was more of a moment. I picked a moment that was a life-changing moment in my life where I was getting married to make my exit.
I’d been there three years, I was engaged to my wife, and basically I gave him four or five months notice. I said, “Hey, I want you to come to my wedding? But I’m not coming back after the wedding…” and he gave me his blessing. I’m grateful for that. He knew it was time for me to go, and he knew I would help him find the next guy. It’s a family. There’s a handful of us now.
At that time, did you know what your next step would be, or was it up in the air?
I just assumed that I was going to try to find work through the contacts I had made with Bob and through going to see bands live.
It happened a little more quickly than I expected because people would ask Bob, “Can you recommend somebody to come record something for me?” and he would always recommend Ryan [Freeland] and I. When I was working for Bob, we would always recommend Ryan. Then, Bob would start recommending me or Ryan. It really accelerated quickly.
[T]hen I saw Mitchell Froom at a guitar store one day while he was waiting for his daughter to come out from a bass lesson. We started talking about making a record together. That was 15 years ago. We’ve made a lot [of records] since and it’s been a great partnership.
Give me an idea of what you now do day to day, generally speaking.
It all depends on whether I’m working on film music or album music.
To be honest with you, the days that I’m working on an album are almost always with Mitchell or a few other producers here and there. I don’t do much outside mixing for people. I really like to make records from blank tape to sending it off to mastering.
If I’m working in the album world, Mitchell and I start around 11:30 AM and we work until 6 or 7 PM—we can get an alarming amount of stuff done in that short period of time.
And what is your role with Mitchell?
I do all the recording, mixing, and I co-produce with him, which is really a nicety that he has bestowed on me.
In reality, the way I define production is more along the lines of what Mitchell does: Getting deep into the songwriting and doing all the arranging. He affects the compositions directly.
He’s not just picking musicians and organizing the project. He digs deep and his skill set is beyond that of mine, but I influence the production in an appreciable way through my choices of how to record things and also because he and I get together and listen to the demos to try to pick musicians that we think would be good for it. So, while I appreciate his generosity in calling me a co-producer, he’s the one that figures it all out.
Was it through your work with Mitchell and Randy Newman that you started to get into film music?
Mitchell and I made an album with Randy called Harps and Angels. When the next film that Randy was working on [came around], he needed some help with some of the songs that went into the movie—The Princess and the Frog. He hired Mitchell to help him with the production of some of those songs. So I started doing those orchestral dates. Now, at the moment, I do them all for Randy, which is a gift that I could never repay because Randy is on another level.
Quite an amazing guy. So when you worked on orchestral dates with Randy was that the first time you ever worked with an orchestra?
No, I recorded a lot of orchestra in college. That’s your main job as the music engineering student at Miami. You do all the recordings of the recitals and the school orchestra. [It was] not as intense as doing a film score, especially for animation, where you have instruments hitting moments on the screen, but you learn it pretty quickly when you hear these bands playing at school.
It’s a hard job but it’s super fun. Sometimes I would ask Randy directly for more out of a certain section or I’d tell him that I’m not really hearing something and then he figures it out. His experience with orchestras is obviously pretty serious. He’ll either put a second guy on it or he changes the arrangement enough to satisfy my needs in the control room. It’s also another incredible learning experience to know what you need but you can’t really push up a fader to get it so you ask your conductor and he figures it out for you…before you go grab at knobs and stuff.
Absolutely. So take me through a little bit of your process with music in film.
It depends on whether it has songs in it or not. If it’s just orchestra, then you get together with the music editor a couple of days before the work day and go through the cues to find out how many starts you have, how many musicians you have, then you have a setup day, and then the next day you record the orchestra and deal with any requests from the music editing department.
To me, the best part about recording orchestra is that you’re mixing live the entire day. They take those mixes and that’s what they use in the film until there’s a remix. I have been lucky enough to have the opportunity to remix all of my scores at the end of the film, mainly because it’s recorded on different days and you want to have sort of a consistency. They’re actually recorded months apart—you usually have one day for a teaser or a trailer, then a few months later you’ll have a couple of days for the first reels of the film, then a couple of months later you’ll have maybe four or five days for the remaining reels in the film.
There’s some wiggle room in the setup and the recall to get it to sound the same. There’s a difference of the sound of the scoring stage in October when it was so dry and in January when it had been raining for a month.
These guys document these microphones heights and everything about it was exactly the same, but the temperature of the room—the color temperature of the room—is very different. You have to use a little EQ to balance it all out. It’s sort of surprising actually how different it can be. My guess is that it was the moisture. We even had a leak coming from the ceiling in the cello section, which was a little freaky but at the same time okay. They fixed it.
That’s really interesting. So how do you typically approach the mix in that context? It seems like a massive endeavor.
I like going in the order of the film. If you move around too much, there’s less of an arc through the whole picture. You can easily be happy with it evolving over the course of the film but it’s less easy to be happy with it if it’s constantly sort of some facsimile of your original intention.
Fortunately, opening titles are usually pretty big. That’s how I can sort of shoe horn in what I think the sound of the orchestra should be for the film. From there, it evolves through each cue to accommodate either new instruments coming in or a change of the size of the band or whatever.
Most of that work stays pretty consistent throughout the film. A lot of the work on the cues after you get that first one really solid is just getting your balances so that you know things that are hitting picture or onscreen events…
Usually, they budget about one day of mixing for one day of recording. In reality, I can probably do two days of mixing for three days of recording, but that first day is always you setting up and re-familiarizing yourself with the tracks and the sound of the orchestra that day.
In addition to Randy Newman, who you’ve worked with for a little while now, you’ve been working with Andrew Bird a lot. Working from one album to the next, how do you keep things interesting from your perspective?
It’s a different paradigm than with anybody else I’ve worked with, because we’re the same age, we both have kids, and it seems like we’ve both been lucky in a lot of the same ways.
Our relationship has changed more from “I’m the recording engineer and he’s the musician” to “we’re going to make this thing together and we’re going to try some stuff.”
However we succeed or fail at that moment is just a snapshot of who we were at that moment. There are some things that I think I could have done better on a lot of his projects but I don’t know if they would have ended up musically as good had I belabored it in a sonic way.
He’s so good at singing and he’s so good at playing that for him to have a performance that he can’t meet is usually because he was either really tired or there was some sort of external stimulus that made him come out with something that is not normally him. It’s kind of nice to feel like if I didn’t get it right I could just make him do it again.
Right. He’s willing to experiment with his music.
Yeah, we’ve never done anything the same way twice. My tastes change and his tastes change.
Can you think of another artist that’s always been open to trying anything?
Most people are pretty open. Recently, I worked with John Legend. It was a single and he didn’t have a whole lot to sing in it so I decided to just line up a bunch of microphones in front of him and he was so game to just try.
He sang as if it was the final vocal on every microphone and any one of them I could have kept. They all sounded great, but one in particular made him more confident and made the people in the control room happiest. So, in the end, it was not a laborious job but it was something that I may not have tried with other singers that I hadn’t recorded before. He was a really good sport with it.
Are you finding that more people—more singers/musicians—are interested in the recording and mixing side of music?
They’re definitely interested in sounding like what they imagine themselves to sound like.
There are a few artists that I work with [who] in my opinion [could] have been mastering engineers.
The work that I do I think suffers when I listen technically and not for intensity and emotion. The reality of it is many great records were made on far inferior recording techniques and equipment and they strike you in this emotional way that is hard to put into words.
So, if I hear a microphone not responding to a singer when they grab a certain intensity, then I’ll go and I’ll change the mic and I’ll get it right, but if I hear something that is 90% there and the singer singing great, there’s no way of changing it.
I have a couple artists who will get all the way through a vocal and it will be a great vocal. They’ll go back and listen and they’re like, “Wow, that was great,” and then two days later be like, “I want to redo it because I think I want to try something with a little more ribbon sound, or a little more dynamic sound, or a little brighter top end,” and you’re just shocked:
Really? You’d give up that performance for something sonically that may in the end change the way you perform? So you give them a chance always with the agreement that if it’s not better we’re not using it. That’s the deal.
What is something that a lot of other engineers get hung up on that you just don’t care about as much?
I would never make less out of the thing that someone thinks they need to make a great record because I’ve definitely suffered from that. I have a collection of gear beyond what I need. I’m just slowly searching through things to find that which is going to make me happy in recording. The reality of it is, if I try and sell it–except for the vintage microphones–I’ll either take a loss on it or one day somebody will ask me, “Oh, do you have one of these?” and I’ll be like, “Oh, I used to have one of those,” so it doesn’t ever make sense for me to get rid of anything.
I would say that the thing that bothers me the most about a lot of people’s approach to music right now is still the level war and the way that people use perceived volume as a tool to impart greatness. Even some of my favorite producers and mixers are making things that just don’t read musically to me because of some sort of volume enhancement.
What I don’t understand is why they would do that and then give that to a mastering engineer who’s one of his main jobs is to get it up there. Why would you limit your dynamic range? I hear from mastering engineers all the time, “I had to turn down this guy’s mix.” Well, that dynamic range is never coming back. It’s not like he can uncompress it, and maybe that song functions on that level of compression, but it doesn’t emote in the right way.
I really encourage people, when they’re checking out mixes, to use ABX testing. A mastering engineer can get as loud as you want. If you want it louder, he can get that louder. It’s just one of those things that I still haven’t figured out why people are doing it. Either they don’t trust their mastering engineer or they don’t know what it will sound like once it gets louder.
Or the artist was in the control room going “turn it up!”
Yeah, maybe. Maybe they’re missing some excitement that should have been in the performance, or the tempo is too slow, but level is level. There’s a volume knob on people’s stereo for a reason. It’s the one control that we give to the listener—his overall level. So why make it worse?
Generally speaking, how do you feel about the music industry right now?
I think songwriting right now is really hitting its stride. I’m really excited by a lot of songwriters right now. I think that people are writing in ways that are compelling and thoughtful and not just churning it out.
I worry a little bit about the inability of people to decide if they like something or not within that world of in-the-box mixing. You can just keep opening it up and it sounds exactly the way you left it and then you can inch the ball forward or backwards whatever the decision.
Always tweaking.
Yeah, the endless tweaking ruins a little bit of what I was mentioning before, having that snapshot of where you are in the moment. I think about great films that I’ve seen. They’re moving pictures that are not doctored in a way where every little detail—I mean they’re looked into, edited, and tweaked—but they’re not micromanaged for performance.
I just don’t care for the idea that we have to work on something and make infinitesimally small changes to the degree where something sounds tidy or overworked. It’s like when you’re making bread. If you overwork the dough, it’s just tough. It’s not good. You got to let it do its thing a little bit. You got to let it breathe.
Do you have any predictions on how mixers are going to approach things in the future? A lot of big mixers like Andrew Scheps and Tchad Blake are primarily mixing in-the-box nowadays.
I talked to Tchad about [working] in-the-box and I think he has probably the healthiest view of it. Part of it is the fact that people expect you to be able to recall things all the time and he’s out in the middle of Wales and it’s just not possible for him to have a console that he would be constantly recalling. It would bury him.
The part that resonated with me was he felt like he could make good records on it and it actually gave him some freedom to be even more “Tchad Blake” than he already was.
He is an inventor and I think he’s a tremendous mixer. There are records that he has mixed that I think would have sounded better with him on the API back at Sound Factory B, but I might be wrong. I might be just waxing nostalgic about those days because of the records that came out of there. I would love to hear him on a desk now and again. I wonder if I’d notice the difference or not.
I think you have to approach each project from the aspect of what’s best for it. Sometimes my dogmatic approach to “it has to be on a console” may not be the right thing for the record. You can always use in-the-box functions while still on a desk. There’s never a restriction for that. But getting a control surface or a mouse to behave in the same way that a console does basically for what it pulls out of the mixer, I haven’t found a solution for that.
Though these guys are obviously succeeding and they’re making records that their artists are proud of, I am curious to know what it would be like if they were swimming in the pool a little bit more. They’re all really talented people and there’s a reason they are where they are, and it wasn’t because of in-the-box capabilities, it was what preceded that.
On a very different topic, I’m fascinated by your lack of social media presence. Many people feel that you need to be online to market yourself and make connections these days.
I had a little stint where I didn’t have any work and my sister said, “Why don’t you try improving your presence on social media?” So I got on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn but I feel like it was not just a time suck, but it was also dehumanizing in a way.
You inevitably [add] your family and friends and it’s a mixture of business, pleasure, and family stuff that in the end just becomes a chore. Then you get into people putting up political commentary and general less-than-respectful behavior through the protection of this piece of plastic.
I just don’t believe that’s a healthy way to communicate. For my 39th birthday, I gave myself the gift of getting rid of all of it. (I do have a Twitter account for my kid’s little league baseball team because sometimes I send out updates to practice.)
I actually was on Instagram yesterday with one of the mastering engineers I work with, Eric [Boulanger]. He took a picture of me talking to a squirrel under the rainbow at Sony Pictures but he asked me before he posted. He’s like, “Hey, you okay if I put this up?”
Well, that deserves to be online.
It was hilarious because this squirrel comes up to me and starts looking at me as if we’re having a conversation, and of course his phone is out immediately to take a picture.
My last question for you: What work do you have coming up that you’re excited about?
I have more scoring for Cars 3. Randy Newman on the stand in front of an orchestra—that’s my jam. I just love it. It’s unparalleled, in my opinion.
I also have a record coming up with Mitchell Froom with a woman named Jacqueline Govaert who is a Dutch artist and she is a real joy to work with and a really talented singer. Mitchell is co-writing some of the songs with her so it will be interesting to see how it compares to the last album. I’m looking forward to that.
I think I’m going to be digging into some Andrew Bird stuff this week for part of his Echolocations series which is a little more arty than song-specific, but I always love that stuff too. I love the idea of taking the sonic imprint of a space and that’s part of it. It’s one of the instruments in the production.
Other than that, there’s a few Pixar movies that I’m working on—Coco, which will come out in November. I think we’ll be doing a lot of orchestra this year. I did a lot of orchestra last year. It’s really fun to record something that is really out of your control all the time. It’s a giant acoustic space, it’s a giant group of musicians, and I just love it.
Michael Duncan is a music producer, recording/mixing engineer, and writer living in NYC.
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