“Pensado’s Place” Goes to Washington: An Interview with Dave Pensado and Herb Trawick
Pensado for President! Could audio’s most visible personality be plotting a run for the Oval Office in 2016?
All things Pensado are live and in person in Washington DC, this weekend.
The pundits here at SonicScoop say: it just might be possible. After all, Pensado’s Place is hosting a “Capital Jam” in Washington DC this weekend, and they’ll be playing to a capacity crowd at the historic Howard Theatre. The hit video show’s co-hosts, Herb Trawick and Dave Pensado, will be welcoming a star cast of engineers and producers in cooperation with the Recording Academy’s Washington DC Chapter and the Producers & Engineers Wing, along with Studio202DC.
It’s the latest development in a big year for Trawick and Pensado, who published their book The Pensado Papers, debuted The Pensado Awards, and have a lot more in the works.
What else can you learn from this dynamic duo? Start with the interview below by elite mixer/producer “Bassy” Bob Brockman – you’re sure to pick up a double shot of inspiration.
Bassy Bob: Today we’re interviewing Dave Pensado and Herb Trawick, the hosts of Pensado’s Place, about their new book The Pensado Papers. I just finished my second reading of the book night before last and I have to say congratulations, guys, it’s a fantastic book. Really insightful and doesn’t have to be a book just for young people, but for anyone who has been in the biz, so kudos for creating this.
Herb Trawick: Thanks, Bob. That means a lot.
BB: I wanted to start off by quoting something that you said, Dave, about being nice – the idea of befriending people all the way up the chain as opposed to just the executive that’s going to get you the gig.
Dave Pensado: I’ll expand on what the book says so as not to be redundant. Herb and I have always had a philosophy that to get something you give first.
Herb reminded me of a saying today “that in order to receive something, you have to open your hand”, and that’s been the foundation of not only my career but also the book, and everything Herb and I have done since then.
BB: And it’s worked out great for you, hasn’t it?
DP: It has its moments. You’re going to get some negative things. You’re going to loan some people money that you’re not going to get back, and this, that, and the other. But in order to get the blessings you’ve got to go through some negative things. You can’t evaluate life as all or nothing.
Our personalities, as you can tell by reading the book, are constructed in such a way that it’s kind of natural for us. It’s nothing we learned or planned, it’s just who we are.
BB: Do you share that ethos, Herb?
HT: Yeah, I think in some ways it has to do with the way you’re raised. We try and get up everyday and just be Dave and Herb. The fact that people have gravitated towards that is extraordinarily humbling for us. It really speaks to what I call an “analog” values system, which is be civil to people. And people have responded.
BB: Pensado’s Place has really changed the recording business in many ways. Particularly it’s created a community that’s more integrated than it was before. Did you foresee that when you started broadcasting and what were the original goals of the show?
HT: I think that Pensado’s Place started from a place of need and concern. At the heart of it was: “what could I do as a friend for a friend”? It became highly personal for me because before I look at it as an endeavor, it was just a question of “what would be right” because my friend got this incredible second opportunity.
And it was really about Dave just beginning to mix again, and what could he do in addition to that and stay at home and have this incredible, miraculous recovery, which Dave always understates.
The thing that triggered me into, as Dave puts it, “world domination thinking” is that about a month after we started doing this we started to notice schools were signing in on it. Once I saw that it had value beyond the value I thought it could have just for Dave, I kind of went crazy thinking about it and planning it.
BB: Dave said that you guys “stay in your own lanes”. What does that mean and how does that synergy work for you guys?
Dave Pensado in his element.
DP: After I said that, I thought that wasn’t the best metaphor to choose. Primarily what we’re talking about is that Herb knows what I’m good at and guides me to what I do well, and I reciprocate by doing nothing for Herb. [Laughs] I willingly let him do the things that he perceives he does well. Which is everything.
BB: Herb, it seems you had always been a strategic, behind-the-scenes management guy, and now you’ve transitioned to being a talk host and a content creator, where you’ve had to bring more new ideas into what you’re doing. Is that right?
HT: Yeah, it’s one of the things for me that’s extraordinarily satisfying. I’ll put it in management terms: I manage Dave, but Dave also manages me. And he’s as skillful in managing me, as I am in managing him. In managing me, he knows that I need runway room. And ultimately he’ll live through my mistakes because he knows, and I’ve hopefully proven, that there will be a home run right after the mistake.
We started our fifth year in January [2015], and we still get on the phone like little children. The fact that we keep it new and sort of stay in awe of it and still feel like we need to keep it fresh and keep it vital is incredible. And when people receive it that way and we get justification for doing it, we do it even more.
BB: In the book, you both spoke about the value of failure. Would you say that you consider failure a learning opportunity?
DP: I think that life doesn’t have labels so when we say that something’s a failure or something is wrong or something is bad, that has no meaning in the real world. I think one has to go through life and the things that are producing the results you want you continue and possibly accelerate those things. The things that aren’t producing results, you punt and move on.
HT: I recently spoke to a group of students from Ohio University and a group of students from Hampton College and in both instances the notion was simply this: when you’re in a period of struggle, or what people would deem “failure”, the reality of it is that’s when your biggest opportunity is, because you’re going to learn during that time period things that you won’t repeat and things that will keep you from making a mistake in the future.
Your challenge in that moment in time is to recognize that this is temporary and no matter what the pain is, it’s teaching you how to be successful. To Dave’s point, if you can approach it with some perspective, take the good out of it, learn from it, and move forward you’ll be better for hitting those hurdles.
And the last part is, everybody’s going to hit it. Nobody has a free ride up.
BB: Dave, you sealed your reputation early on in Los Angeles as being one of the hardest working guys—and you’re still a hard working guy—but we all know that you suffered a stroke in 2008. Is that right?
DP: Technically, it was a brain hemorrhage. It was actually something that probably had little to do with my health, but a genetic blood vessel that had a thin wall.
BB: So it wasn’t really related to long, long hours for years and years?
DP: I don’t know. My doctor said it was afterwards. I think the important thing is it happened and I couldn’t control it. I wouldn’t change anything about my life in terms of having lived it once.
But look at what happened – that could be something that would be considered a bad thing, and Herb saw an opportunity to turn it into a good thing. I don’t have a dimmer switch. If I were a light switch, I have an On and an Off. I don’t have a variable in between.
HT: There was a point in time where the doctors had decided that this was pretty bleak. The outcome did not look good. There was eleven days of an induced coma and this decision to be made at the other end. The reality of it is that the guy that you’re talking to now has had a stunning comeback. He’ll never say it, but I had a pretty good seat at the comeback. He never talks about it, and I talk about it when its appropriate, and its truly an inspiration for those who need it, and an inspiration for me every day, to watch this dude do what he does.
BB: A lot of business partnerships, particularly in the music business, tend to stay together along racial lines. You tend to see black guys partner together, white guys partner together, and you guys really have smashed that. I think that’s also inspirational.
HT: We met in an L.A. lobby and I’m a big guy in sweatpants and Dave is a guy with a mullet and his pants tucked into his Bon Jovi boots [all laugh], and we just hit it off.
Herb Trawick is on the set and on the scene.
An A&R guy says to me he needs a remix and was asking my opinion, so I said “I met this white dude, and he’s worked with James Brown and Cameo, he’s from Atlanta and really cool”, and there are certain folks who are comfortable in cultures, and Dave has always been a guy who is comfortable in a culture, and people who are comfortable in cultures are often comfortable because they are authentically who they are.
So, I refer Dave this production team and his career started off doing a remix for a hip-hop group called Bel Biv Devoe called Thought It Was Me that blew up. Now, he’s the most unlikely guy that you would look at and say “That’s the cat that’s gonna make this pop!” And from that point on, he’s had this incredible career. And part of his signature is the ability to take different genres of music, and particularly black music, keep its authenticity true, and make it accessible to pop radio.
DP: Herb is underplaying what he did for me. He gave me a career in L.A., which, means I had a career in life. The reason I came to L.A. is because I didn’t have a career in Atlanta, and that kind of faith and trust, to put his reputation and business relationship on the line for someone who he had never heard anything they did – I could have been lying to him. It was the proverbial pull the thorn out of the lions paw.
BB: There are two kinds of interaction today: There’s face-to-face and there’s digital interaction. Much of what happens in this day and age is digital. But I find greater value from going to clubs and hanging out with some of my peers for 45 minutes than in spending 10 hours posting things on social media. And it’s not an old-school vs. new-school thing, I just think there is more trust built in face-to-face interactions. What do you guys think?
DP: We do both. Herb and I like elements of social media. It’s a great way to stay in touch with people. It’s a great way to do commerce. It has its advantages—there’s nothing like the interjection of real people doing real things with real feelings inside the social media platform. You get the best of both worlds.
HT: I call it the “head down society”, and it has pluses and minuses. If you’re going to be a fully developed person, both in your personal interactions and in your career, you have to do both. You can’t be so out of touch that you’re uncomfortable with technology, but perspective is gained by sharing and interacting with people.
Context happens when you interact with people. You can’t learn how to read a room by reading your mobile device. So ultimately, it’s not an either/or battle like some people like to make it – you’ve got to do it all.
BB: You guys mentioned that there were some people who were really important to you when you were younger—some heroes that you had—and now you have the role of mentors and have your own set of protégés who have gone on to do big things. Can you speak to the value of that?
DP: I don’t necessarily view myself as a mentor. I’m trying to because I like the title and I like what it implies. I think the reason most of my assistants have been successful is that there is a component of sharing that we seldom discuss, and that’s ego.
Sometimes I share things not because it’s a wonderful gesture, but I’m just so damned proud that I did that, that my ego said, “If you don’t tell people about that, how are they gonna know?” [laughs]. Let everybody know how good you are! So it doesn’t always come from a good spot, but if the end justifies the means, then it’s a good thing.
I asked one of my more successful assistants once what he got from me and he said “Dave, don’t take this the wrong way, but the biggest thing I got from you was knowing what a good mix sounds like.” That really hit home because I thought he was going to say the way you EQ kick drums or your fastidiousness with vocals or the fact that you like complex effects, but no, if you don’t know what a good mix sounds like all the other stuff I learned from you has no value.
HT: Also, when Dave is mixing a record, that’s not when he’s mentoring. It’s when he’s not mixing, just hanging around. It’s the meals, it’s the discussions, it’s the philosophical stuff and not talking about records but talking about other kinds of things, it’s being stimulated. So what ends up happening is, these folks then get that and add their own thing to it and ultimately they are better prepared.
We get thousands of questions from people about what they should do with their career; what city should they move to, what school should they think about, how do they approach it, and that in and of itself is a huge responsibility.
BB: I’ve had conversations with very famous engineers about doing documentary or educational projects, and some of them have been very cagey about having anybody photograph them or sharing their plug-in settings. But I think you said it very prosaically in the book: “My mix is not my plug-in settings”.
207 episodes and counting on “Pensado’s Place”.
DP: Personally, if someone wanted to film me doing a mix start to finish, I’d be a little reticent because I don’t do anything. There are no big moments; there no orchestral playing in the background, there’s no drum roll when I’m about to do something big. It just goes organically from start to finish in a thousand little tiny increments that are so hard to make look impressive. If I were Ernest Hemmingway or William Faulkner, people aren’t paying me for my typing skills; they’re paying me for the novel that I write.
BB: In my own career, I felt like I finally started to make the transition from “thinking” to “knowing” after about 20 years of mixing. Where do you think the crossover was for you, when you were no longer guessing where the lead vocal needed to be or where the snare needed to be, but just knew?
DP: I mix out of abject fear and insecurity most of the time. I’m just always afraid that the client is not going to like it, that I didn’t do enough, that maybe I should have spent more time on this or that.
The problem is that the knowing part is not a static thing. It’s like the carrot in front of the horse; it keeps moving! The things you know could be five years behind the things you need. But I think what you’re saying it that now we have clarity about how the process is going to end whereas when I first started, I was as surprised as anybody when something turned out good!
HT: And I think that’s where the stimulus comes from, Bob. As much as we know, it changes so much that we have to stay on our toes to incorporate the next change.
You’re like a boxer, you’re on your toes and what going to come at you? It keeps you timeless in certain ways. It doesn’t become about how you ran out of gas or your tired, its about new stuff coming around the corner, let me get ready for it and figure out how to incorporate it into what we’re doing and learn.
BB: You mention in the book that you’ll often pop on the top 100 on Spotify or a popular playlist. What else do you do to fill the creative well, to keep your awareness and creativity moving forward?
DP: Well, I’ve never thought that creativity came in different forms. I’ve always felt that creativity is creativity, but how you apply it can be different. The beauty of the Internet will allow me to run over to Italy and go through the Uffizi Gallery and take a look at some Botticelli’s, or I can go to the Getty and see some of the great photography of our time.
So for me creativity comes from life and I’m always inspired and jealous and angry when I hear a great mix – I feel all those qualities at the same time. The [mixer] is always a friend of mine, so I have to be careful about the anger part, and I have to downplay the jealousy part, but I like the motivation of hearing something that’s better than what I can do.
BB: What’s next for you guys? Between Pensado’s Place, The Pensado Papers, and The Pensado Awards you guys have been firing on all cylinders for five years now. Can you talk about some plans that you have or some things you’re developing?
DP: I wake up in the morning and I’m blessed to have numerous options at my disposal and for 40 years now, going to a studio and being part of the record making process wins out every day. Every once and a while, once or twice a year, fishing will come to the top or I might jump on a dirt bike or an ATV once in a while, but 320 days a year I’m here. I just love the process as much as the end result, so I don’t think a lot is going to change on my mix side.
In terms of the show, I’m trying to get better at my responsibilities, which is a lot of fun for me. Herb and I work hard at the technical part and I can’t wait to see what unfolds next year because every year has just gotten bigger and bigger.
HT: 2014 was an explosive year for us. Dave has gifted me with being the leader of this team and I’m just hell-bent on making sure that we’re serving the community. I think that you can do well and do good.
We have eight off-show verticals; we have a convention business called Gear Expo, we have a concert series we call Mix Fest, we have The Pensado Papers, we have merchandise, we’ll be announcing a distribution deal that is global in nature and we’ll put our own curriculum in every big-box retailer in America, we just got our own television studio, which we’ll be announcing shortly, and think about that fact that this is a little Web show in its fourth year. I think if there is anything that people can take away from, it’s the fact that you can.
Bassy Bob is a multiple Grammy winning mixer/producer, Tech entrepreneur, and trumpet and bass player. He often lectures and teaches on the subject of the art of mixing. Bassy loves crawfish, and fried oysters, and fat mixes. Follow him on instagram at http://instagram.com/bassybob. He lives in New York City.
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