SYLVIA MASSY: The art of producing people, lessons from Rick Rubin, and finishing records on time

Eyal Levi (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. And now your host, AAL Levy. Welcome to the URM Podcast. Thank you so much for being here. It's crazy to think that we're now on our fifth year, but it's true, and it's only because of you, the listeners. And if you'd like to see us stick around for another five years, there are a few simple things that you can do that would really, really help us out, and I would be endlessly appreciative. Number one, share our episodes with your friends. If you get something out of these episodes, I'm sure they will too. So please share us with your friends. Number two, post our episodes on your Facebook and Instagram and tag me and our guests too. My Instagram is at al Levy urm audio. And let me just let you know that we love seeing ourselves tagged in these posts.

(00:00:55):

Who knows, we might even respond. And number three, leave us reviews and five stars please anywhere you can. We especially love iTunes reviews. Once again, I want to thank you all for the years and years of loyalty. I just want you to know that we will never, ever charge you for this podcast, and I will always work as hard as possible to improve the episodes in every single way possible. All I ask in return is a share post and a tag. Now, let's get on with it. Hello everybody. Welcome to the URM podcast. My guest today is a real legend. Her name is Sylvia Massey, and she's undoubtedly one of the most famous names in the audio engineering world. Her resume includes work with acts such as Tool, Johnny Cash system of a Down, smashing Pumpkins, Fujis, red Hot Chili Peppers, and a ton more. I mean, it's pretty safe to say that more music listeners have heard or work than have not. And not only is she incredible, but she's known for her super, super unique take on production that we're going to talk about today. So without further ado, I introduce you, Sylvia Massey. Alright, well, Sylvia Massey, welcome to the URM Podcast.

Sylvia Massy (00:02:11):

Hey there.

Eyal Levi (00:02:12):

Hey there. So are you locked up right now?

Sylvia Massy (00:02:15):

Locked up? You mean in lockdown? COVID lockdown,

Eyal Levi (00:02:18):

Yeah.

Sylvia Massy (00:02:19):

Yeah, pretty much. But then I'm kind of a house cat anyway, so it works out for me.

Eyal Levi (00:02:23):

Yeah, I mean, right now I'm talking to you from a hotel because the internet at my place went down. But one thing that I feel like is pretty common in the audio community is that people's lives haven't changed all that much. They don't normally go anywhere anyways. We

Sylvia Massy (00:02:44):

Rarely go outside. I did go for a drive yesterday though. It was nice. Good weather.

Eyal Levi (00:02:51):

How often have you done that? I've done it once a month, once

Sylvia Massy (00:02:55):

A week, maybe once a week, yeah.

Eyal Levi (00:02:57):

Yeah, it's kind of weird. Have you been staying busy though?

Sylvia Massy (00:03:05):

Absolutely busy, but not my typical working routine actually. It's been a lot of mixing and no tracking. So typically I would be doing projects. I would also be traveling this time last year I was in Europe and I would be in Australia right now if it wasn't for the pandemic. But I have done so much traveling, I actually don't mind being at home for a while.

Eyal Levi (00:03:33):

How much travel per year do you normally do? How many months would you say that you stay away from home?

Sylvia Massy (00:03:41):

Six months out of the year at least.

Eyal Levi (00:03:42):

So it's a serious amount.

Sylvia Massy (00:03:44):

Yeah, it is.

Eyal Levi (00:03:44):

Do you enjoy it?

Sylvia Massy (00:03:46):

I do enjoy it, yeah. I travel a lot to Europe and to South America and Eurasia, so yeah, I'm blessed with the work I get to do. I mean, it's not even work. It's a joy.

Eyal Levi (00:04:03):

I feel like travel for work is the dream. However, I will say that no matter how awesome it is, it still takes a physical toll. It's still exhausting. I travel every single month for work, so this has been my first break in five years, and I do miss it. So I actually feel more at home in this hotel room that's a mile down the street from my house than in my house. But I was ready for a break, a serious break.

Sylvia Massy (00:04:34):

Yeah, me too. This break has given me an opportunity to do some serious artwork too, because typically if I want to do some painting, I'll actually purchase some brushes and paints and little canvases in the hotel room wherever I'm staying, and I'll do some painting while I'm on the road or in sessions even. But here at home, I have huge giant canvases that I'm working on right now, and it's really fun. I never get to do this, so I'm real glad about the break too.

Eyal Levi (00:05:09):

When you're painting on the road, do you feel like you're at all limited just because of the amount of room that you can have in a hotel room or just because of the schedule of having to work with a band and hit a deadline?

Sylvia Massy (00:05:22):

Well, you know what, that's exactly it. If I'm painting, I have, I'll usually bring the canvas down to the session and then there's a time limit on how much time I can put on that canvas because in essence, I'm channeling a lot of the music into the artwork. So when we're done with the music part of it, it's really hard to complete that painting if it's not completed at the end of the session. So I scrambled to finish a canvas before the end of the session deadline.

Eyal Levi (00:05:58):

So when you say that you're channeling it, are you seeing it seeing the music visually or is it more of a feeling thing?

Sylvia Massy (00:06:06):

It's really a feeling thing. I usually, when I'm doing painting during a session, my mind is actually really concentrating on the task at hand, which is producing the artist. And so the painting is just an ILE thing that I'm doing with my hands.

Eyal Levi (00:06:24):

While you're recording?

Sylvia Massy (00:06:25):

Yeah.

Eyal Levi (00:06:26):

Oh, interesting.

Sylvia Massy (00:06:27):

If I have an engineer, I'll be shouting things out to the engineer and I'll be communicating with the artist while keeping my hands busy with a paintbrush. And it works for me. I think I have a obsessive compulsive disorder in a sense that my hands need to keep busy. So painting keeps me from eating or doing other bad habits.

Eyal Levi (00:06:53):

Does it help you focus?

Sylvia Massy (00:06:55):

Oh yeah, it does. And sometimes the canvases really turn out spectacular, and then sometimes they're not that interesting and sometimes they don't get finished. So it's really a crapshoot when I do the painting on the road and it's really not a focus, it's not the actual focus of what I'm doing, but now that I'm at home with the COVID situation, I really, really am concentrating on the artwork.

Eyal Levi (00:07:24):

So you're saying that now the actual focus is the art when you're doing the artwork, when you're creating it in the session, what it sounds like to me is that you're saying that whether it gets finished or not isn't the point. It's more that it is helping you do whatever you need to do for the audio, for the music, and somehow it helps your mind get to that place it needs to go to, but now that you're not tracking?

Sylvia Massy (00:07:52):

Yeah, it really does help me focus and it keeps my hands busy.

Eyal Levi (00:07:58):

So you said that it keeps you from, I guess, straying. Do you think that if you weren't doing that, that you would be less, it would just, not saying that you wouldn't put out a great record or something, but do you feel like you might not be at what you feel is your best or most in it?

Sylvia Massy (00:08:17):

Yeah, I think because it helps me. It's like, well, if I was smoking and I quit smoking, I would be smoking. I would be chain smoking during a session just because it's such an intense time that I am really running on all cylinders and everything is firing. And so I would be chain smoking or be eating chips or something and just like, but this way with a paintbrush, I keep busy and I don't have those self-destructive tendencies.

Eyal Levi (00:08:52):

So just out of curiosity, now that you're working on a painting for the sake of the painting, are you having to do anything to a secondary action to keep yourself focused on the painting?

Sylvia Massy (00:09:07):

Well, that it's a challenge because finishing a large painting is a huge challenge I've never had to deal with before. I've never done large canvases, but I have one now that's like 10 feet long and four feet high that I did finish. And it's astounding that I'm really proud of it. And I just had another one just sell. I had my first canvas cell a few days ago, and it's also a very large canvas of a snail, a giant snail.

Eyal Levi (00:09:39):

How a giant

Sylvia Massy (00:09:41):

Snail that's basically taken over Paris.

Eyal Levi (00:09:45):

What's the size of the canvas?

Sylvia Massy (00:09:46):

Oh, it's about a four by four.

Eyal Levi (00:09:49):

It's pretty damn big.

Sylvia Massy (00:09:49):

Pretty big. And it's a giant snail with slime. And then there's a crowd of people surrounding it because they're curious. And then also they want to eat our escargo. They're in Paris, so it's called Escargo, and they're pretty excited about the giant snail.

Eyal Levi (00:10:05):

So do you look at any sort of creativity as the same thing coming from the same place, just that it expresses itself through different mediums or do you view audio and, well, you were saying earlier that it's kind of the same thing, but now that you're working exclusively on painting, do you feel like it's coming from a different place than the audio ideas come from or you feel like it's same place, same thing, just different medium?

Sylvia Massy (00:10:33):

I think that there are parallels to the visual world and the audio world in that when I'm thinking of ideas for productions, I'm using the same parts of my brain and I'm actually visualizing the sound or the dynamics that I want to create in a recording, in a musical recording. And things were a little more challenging when we were working on tape only. But now pro tools, you can visualize the whole thing as waveforms, but I also visualize density and openness and those types of things in creating the audio part of it. I do like dense productions.

Eyal Levi (00:11:21):

Are those words that you've always used to describe audio? I mean, have you always thought this way about audio or is this something you developed more recently or is it just kind of like a natural thing that just happened?

Sylvia Massy (00:11:35):

The whole idea of music production for me was a bit of an accident in that I was working on my own music with my band and I learned how to use the equipment, so I would be doing my own work, my own music. And the recordings turned out well enough that other people asked me to start to work on their songs too. But I had never had any formal education as far as production or engineering even. So I would kind of make it up as I was going along, and that was the mechanism that I would use to think about the production. And I could actually take a sheet of paper and I could draw the curve of how a song would start and then build and then drop and then build and taper off on the end, and you can actually draw a picture of how a song would be laid out and just on a piece of paper. So that's how I managed to think about the song production.

Eyal Levi (00:12:55):

It's interesting that you say that because when I was in high school, I had a music teacher that was brought to the school just for me. So I was the only person in the music class. It was just a weird deal. I worked out with the school, but that was one of the first things she made me do with the orchestral pieces was to draw them, forget notation, forget traditional structures, forget all that, just draw the structure and the dynamics and everything. And it got me thinking about music in a whole different sort of way. It allows you to see the big picture in a, I don't know how to say other than a different sort of deeper way almost than notation itself. I think

Sylvia Massy (00:13:42):

It's amazing how important teachers are in developing your ideas.

Eyal Levi (00:13:50):

I agree. I think without her, my trajectory would've been very, very different. So you say that you had no formal training and recording, but how did you figure out the technical side? Not easy stuff.

Sylvia Massy (00:14:07):

Well, I grew up in a household with a father who is a mechanical engineer and a mother who is an opera singer, and my father would build stereo equipment and tape recorders for his personal Hi-Fi system. So I was familiar with what he was. It was kind of like a natural thing for me to be interested in those things. And when I went to university, I took broadcasting classes and got involved in radio production, so I did learn how to use the multi-track recorders in those classes, but radio's quite a bit different than music. Recording radio is not necessarily about the music and more about the advertising. So I fell out of love with radio and just used those skills. The few skills that I did get from broadcast to start recording music,

Eyal Levi (00:15:07):

I feel like that would be a really good way to get technical skills under your belt because you can't get distracted by the music. All you can do is get the technical part.

Sylvia Massy (00:15:18):

And the other thing about radio production is that it's fun to use sound effects and to create sound effects and to think outside of the box as far as creating pictures with sound. So yeah, I think it was a great way to start and I appreciate radio production, but it's definitely not where I needed to be.

Eyal Levi (00:15:41):

Yeah, I understand. One other question about radio production is did the extreme timetables help you out at all with developing a workflow for later? I know that in radio, especially news radio, everything, it happens so fast. It's like a live show pretty much.

Sylvia Massy (00:16:02):

And I did read news for a while, and yeah, you can time copy, you write copy, so it's timed to fit in a certain length, like a 62nd commercial or 15 second spot. And then also being handed a work order in saying, okay, here's what you're doing tonight. And being able to get that done and out on the air the next day is a really good way of getting used to the schedule. It's a big part of production, music production and being a music producer, one of the biggest jobs is to land on the runway and to finish that project on time and within budget if possible. I think that that also helped me to really gain those skills.

Eyal Levi (00:16:57):

I actually think that that's one of the things that a lot of up and coming producers or mixers really shoot themselves on the foot with is being able to just get the job done or not regardless of their talent or skills. I feel like that ends up being kind of the thing that separates a lot of people from who ends up progressing in their career and who doesn't. At the end of the day,

Sylvia Massy (00:17:23):

So many musicians really have a hard time finishing when they're doing their own productions at home. It's very difficult for them to call it finished.

Eyal Levi (00:17:32):

So do you feel like as a producer it's easier for you because, well, A, because you have a more objective viewpoint on the art itself, but B, because you also have that deadline and you know how to deal with deadlines?

Sylvia Massy (00:17:44):

Yeah, well, I try to help the artist to find the finish line because it could go on and on and sometimes they can't see it. Even when I say, okay, this is done. This is as good as it's going to go, and if you keep working on it, it's going to only get worse, it won't get better. Sometimes they don't believe it and then they continue and then we back up. It's a lot like mixing too. The mixing, oftentimes I'll send a mix and then we'll get a bunch of notes back and I'll work on those notes. And then ultimately the finished mix is the first thing that I sent.

Eyal Levi (00:18:28):

Do you have a way that you approach that, say you're dealing with a very strong-willed and super prolific amazing artist, but who contrary to popular belief is still a human and it's done. They don't know it's done, and you're having to convince someone who is an ultra alpha musician that chill. It's great. Do you have a way of communicating that or just depends on the situation?

Sylvia Massy (00:19:00):

Well, it does depend on the situation, but typically I let the artist make those calls and I follow their lead just because I have to trust that they will know something about their own music that I don't know. But then I'm open to continuing something, but then I also save everything so I can get back to where we were before and I might try to convince them, but I'm not going to push very hard. It's their music. I can't be precious about what I'm doing.

Eyal Levi (00:19:33):

Fair enough. I remember once I saw a long time ago, 20 years ago or something, Eddie Kramer came to talk at my school and somebody asked him a question along those lines of, what do you do? And Jimmy Page has a bad idea or something, and his answer was Just give him enough rope to hang himself with. So don't just let him do it. And who knows, he might not end up hanging himself. It might be an incredible idea. And you never know with these great artists because they're great. So it would be kind of counterproductive to just shoot them down. So if it's a bad idea, let them find out for themselves. And

Sylvia Massy (00:20:18):

Now on the other hand, if we're running out of time and there's an absolute deadline because the money runs out, I'll push and I'll remind them that there's this pressure. And typically I'll try to create an event that is kind of like a carrot on a stick for the end of the project. And what I mean is I'll set aside one day in the session at the end of the session to go do something outrageous and crazy and then let's go and record in a subway station or let's go in a cave, or let's record in the back of a van driving through San Francisco or something. So just like I'll make a suggestion of something, we'll kind of brainstorm on ideas. We'll save that last day for this special recording. And then I find that with that to look forward to, things go smoother. Like guitar players don't get hung up on their guitar sound and don't spend eight hours on getting a sound. We can get into it and get things finished a lot quicker because I think because people are looking forward to this thing on the end of the session, so they're really working towards that. And it helps to kind of lubricate everything.

Eyal Levi (00:21:50):

It's almost like it puts just a subconscious limit on the session, adds a structure to it, basically

Sylvia Massy (00:21:58):

Adds a structure. And then also it's a reward and there's kind of a joy in that reaching that goal and then having this opportunity to do something really crazy whether or not the audio actually is useful in the album, in the finished album, it doesn't even matter. That's

Eyal Levi (00:22:16):

What I was wondering. Yeah,

Sylvia Massy (00:22:17):

It doesn't even really matter. It's just more about doing it.

Eyal Levi (00:22:22):

And also I feel like that probably would end the session on a really memorable shared experience.

Sylvia Massy (00:22:29):

Oh my God. And so many times that has happened. Recently I worked with a band called Hydro Formm and they had a song about pirates and they wanted a cannon sound. So I thought, well, on the last day of the session, why don't we go out and we'll blow some shit up, we'll create a cannon sound by blowing up. What we did is we went and got a bunch of tannerite and put it in a can. If you know what tannerite is, it's explosive. When you shoot into it, it's pretty explosive. So we made a huge explosion and recorded it, and it actually worked so well. It sounded just like a canon shot, so we used it in the song, but that day of being out in the field blowing up tannerite was something that none of us will ever forget, and it was a real bonding experience.

Eyal Levi (00:23:30):

So can I ask you a little bit about what went into actually recording that? So say you were in a field, were you at all worried about damaging the mics?

Sylvia Massy (00:23:39):

Well, I was using an Aston Spirit mic, which is a pretty sturdy mic. It's a British mic. And yeah, there was the opportunity to hurt some mics, but in fact, the Aston didn't get damaged at all and it was down in the barrel with the Tannerite when it blew up. So

Eyal Levi (00:24:01):

Oh wow. I guess it really is sturdy.

Sylvia Massy (00:24:04):

That's a great mic.

Eyal Levi (00:24:05):

That's like something you would put in a commercial or something to advertise how sturdy it is. Do the artists ever get disappointed if the stuff from those days isn't usable, or is everyone kind of on the same page that it was such a cool experience that whatever, if it works, it works.

Sylvia Massy (00:24:23):

So far, there hasn't been really any disappointments, and the only time when it was kind of sad that we couldn't use it was when we on a project, the band was Machines of Loving Grace, and we had a sacrificial guitar that we started the session with this $50 guitar, and then everyone carved and painted and did something special to it because it was the sacrificial guitar and we were planning on the last day to throw it off a cliff. So it was quite beautifully decorated. And then we dragged a Marshall stack up to the edge of a cliff in Malibu. It was at a studio called Indigo Ranch, which isn't there anymore. But yeah, we dragged the whole rig up to the edge of a cliff and got a really long instrument cable and then got a great feedback tone and threw it off the cliff and recorded it as it was tumbling down, and it was just a cacophony of noise, and we dragged it back up the hill and recorded that too. And it, dang it, we took, it didn't work. It just didn't work. We tried it everywhere in the album and it just didn't work. But again, it's one of those things we will never ever forget. And actually that broken guitar was mounted on a frame and the studio owner put it in the control room.

Eyal Levi (00:25:58):

I mean, I guess that's kind of the deal with experiments is the nature of an experiment is that it might not yield the results you would hope for

Sylvia Massy (00:26:08):

Or it might yield or

Eyal Levi (00:26:10):

Anything,

Sylvia Massy (00:26:10):

And it might yield something that you never expected.

Eyal Levi (00:26:16):

That experimentation. Do you find that it's key for you or it's just something that you have found to be so useful that you like to do it?

Sylvia Massy (00:26:28):

Well, I love to do it, and I find it is useful, but it's not necessary. I mean, there's certain projects where there's just no room for experimentation, but whenever I can schedule it into a project, there has to be some elbow room with the budgets to do that. The client has to be willing. But yeah, when it works, it works fantastic.

Eyal Levi (00:26:58):

I guess the reason I was asking is because I feel like I've heard some people say, and I don't agree with them, that you have to always be experimenting. I don't think that that's possible. It's not a practical thing, at least in my experience in life, is that, except for when you're super young and there's no real pressure, so you can just experiment all the time. You have to plan for it and make it a point to be able to do it. You can't just do it all the time if you actually have things to finish and pressure and deadlines and budgets and real life basically.

Sylvia Massy (00:27:36):

Right? Yeah. If we were experimenting all the time, we'd never get anything done. So yeah, I think it's important to schedule that time for experimenting towards the end, so you make sure that everything else gets finished, and if you run over, then you eat your day of experimentation. And that's okay. I mean, at least you're getting everything finished.

Eyal Levi (00:28:04):

How structured is the schedule for you typically on a record or a mix? Do you plan it out meticulously in advance or is it kind of like a suggested schedule that then morphs?

Sylvia Massy (00:28:19):

Well, I consult with the client on the way they like to work before we set up a schedule, but typically I like to start around noon. I like to end around 10. I don't do all-nighters anymore. I used to do a lot when I worked with Prince, but that'll burn you out

Eyal Levi (00:28:41):

Prince hours.

Sylvia Massy (00:28:42):

Oh, boy. Yeah, that's

Eyal Levi (00:28:43):

What I've heard.

Sylvia Massy (00:28:44):

So yeah, noon to 10, I can start earlier, but I don't like to start earlier than noon. In 10 hours a day is plenty enough. If we're going to do work, we can get a lot done in 10 hours.

Eyal Levi (00:29:00):

I think a friend of mine said that noon is 8:00 AM studio time, basically. I agree with him. One interesting thing about all-nighters is, and I don't know the answer to this, I'm curious what your opinion is, is I used to do them when I was younger. I think everyone did. Anyone who's been super motivated or passionate about making music or art at some point probably had a crazy schedule like that, like 36 hour long sessions and all that. And then as they grow up, they stop doing it. And for me personally, I'll never do that stuff again. So much more productive when I'm rested. But what I'm wondering is do you think that when you're in those formative years that it's better to go nuts like that? Because I kind of feel like it's almost like the only way to get to the level you need to be at. If you want to be world-class, you have to go that distance that a lot of other people won't,

Sylvia Massy (00:30:00):

And then you can gauge yourself because you'll recognize just how much you can handle. I realized over how many years I've been doing this now 35 years, that if I work more than 10 hours a day, my productivity just falls off after three or four days, and then I'll just be completely toast. And it's hard for me to make a noon downbeat. So yeah, I can do a lot of work. I can get everything done if I pace myself, I think, and it's to the point where I will pull the plug on a session, even if we're being productive, even if we're kind of on a roll, I'll say, look, we got to stop right now because we need to pace ourselves and then we pick it up the next day and rarely does it. Rarely do we really lose anything by doing that. And if the artist really, really, really wants to keep going, I'll just hand it over to my engineer and just say, here, you guys keep working on it until you just knock yourself out.

Eyal Levi (00:31:16):

So it sounds to me like your priority is keeping yourself in the best mental and physical health to be able to do the job at whatever optimum is and

Sylvia Massy (00:31:27):

Your ears get tired too, and pretty soon you can't really trust your ears. Sure. What,

Eyal Levi (00:31:31):

Yeah. And then burnout. I feel like I know exactly what you're saying. If I go past a certain number of hours, multiple days in a row, it's like my ability to care, whatever that is in my mind that lets me really give a shit about what I'm working on, it just goes away and I just can't. I literally can't. I do, but not really. And it's burned out and don't ever want to get that way on a project.

Sylvia Massy (00:31:59):

No, no. You want to be a hundred percent for your client.

Eyal Levi (00:32:02):

Yeah. So have you ever been in a session and you just realize you're like, I'm not really here right now, need to stop?

Sylvia Massy (00:32:14):

Oh, yeah. And that's when I will pull the plug on a project, but typically now I just insist on, okay, that's it for today.

Eyal Levi (00:32:26):

You just don't even let it get to that point.

Sylvia Massy (00:32:27):

Yeah, not anymore, no. And again, I'll hand it over to the engineer and maybe they'll just stay up all night and they'll be all toasty in the morning when I get there, but sometimes that works.

Eyal Levi (00:32:40):

How many years of not so hours, at what point did you start pulling down the throttle on those?

Sylvia Massy (00:32:50):

I'd say wow, probably 20 years of those crazy hours. The worst was doing work with Prince because he would always have you on a tether and would call you day or night and say, come down to the studio. I want to record it's four o'clock in the morning, or just leave you at the studio not knowing whether they're coming back to do any more recording or just kind of on call all the time. And that was very difficult because I had to be a hundred percent all the time, but there was the lack of communication really hurt. And sometimes I would be just blotto, just barely there at all during a session, but I'd have to snap out of it somehow. Those were hard days. And then there's projects where things are going so well and you don't want to slow things down and you're really kicking ass, and then you take that chance and you're going to burn yourself out. And then there's the decline of productivity that happens, but you did get that. You got those good nights in, so it all balances out, I guess. But I find in general, it's a good rule to just limit it at 10 hours a day. 10 hours is a lot,

Eyal Levi (00:34:19):

10 focused hours is a lot,

Sylvia Massy (00:34:21):

And you have to really concentrate. You're using everything. You're using your ears, you're using your eyes, you're just, and communication skills, you have to be on it and you have to have answers all the time. So yeah, it's exhausting. It can be completely exhausting if you let it.

Eyal Levi (00:34:39):

One thing that I realized as I got older is that when I would do insane sessions, maybe when I was super young, I was focused the whole time, but I couldn't honestly say that I was really at my best the entire time. And I started to realize that eight to 10 super focused hours is way more intense than people realize when they think of 14 hours or 16 hours or 20 hours as a real workday. I think it's definitely a quality versus quantity thing. I mean, the amount you can do in 10 minutes if it's the right 10 minutes could be life changing.

Sylvia Massy (00:35:24):

And that's something I learned working with Rick Rubin too, is that you don't have to be in the room the entire time either to make good decisions. In fact, sometimes staying away from it and getting a perspective and listening fresh is the best way to really know what's going on. He would come into sessions, he would give us work to do, like I'd be engineering and working with the band like system of A Down, and he would give us a list of things to do and then we would work on those. We wouldn't see him for a while. And then he would pop in for a couple hours, he'd listen to what we were doing and he'd know immediately what needed to be done, and he'd rattle that off and then we would continue, and then he just let us create and then come back and check again. So I saw that that was important in how he could have a fresh perspective every time he walked in the room and be able to say just what it needed.

Eyal Levi (00:36:36):

I feel like a lot of people who don't understand that have criticized his method. I've heard a lot of dumb stuff said about him lazy or not really doing his job, and I always thought that was the dumbest thing because the way I always saw it was this is a guy that knows exactly how to pick the right people for the job, and he's an excellent team builder, and when you have the right team, you don't need to micromanage them. And he's eyes always on the big picture. And that to me is amazing. So I've always thought that people don't get it.

Sylvia Massy (00:37:13):

Yeah, you've nailed it because he's a team builder and he'll put the right people on a session with the right drummer, with the right engineer in the right studio, and then he kind of just lets things happen naturally. And he also is just expert at choosing the songs.

(00:37:41):

He'll ask for an artist to write a hundred, 200, 300 songs for one album, and then out of those songs, he'll pick the best 24 to record. And you can imagine if you have 300 songs to choose from that you're going to pick some really good songs. The whole album is going to be all great songs. If there's 25 recorded and you maybe only release 15 or 12, then you've got a whole other record waiting for the next release if you're doing albums like that. So I thought it was very clever how he would put things together like that, and obviously his track record proves that.

Eyal Levi (00:38:31):

Well, you definitely are getting the odds up of creating a great song when you create that many songs

Sylvia Massy (00:38:38):

Because you can combine songs too. You can take the chorus of this and the verse of this, and then you just say, Hey, try putting an intro on this and do a new bridge on this, and then we've got something really special.

Eyal Levi (00:38:54):

I also think that there's this other benefit to that where it will make the artists less precious about things if they have 300 songs. I mean, subconsciously, they already have had to part ways with about 275 of them, so they already probably go in there knowing that a lot of stuff's going to get cut. And so I feel like when people write less material, they get more precious about every idea because there's less of them. So they mean a lot more when they have that many more ideas. I think it's probably a lot easier for the producer to do their job because the musician is maybe a little bit more objective, can never be totally objective, but maybe a little bit more.

Sylvia Massy (00:39:42):

Yeah, you're so right. It's always a disappointment when you work on a project and they present you 12 songs and you're going to record 12 songs. Oh, these are the only songs that you have. And then their latest song is the one that they like the most, and it may not be that great of a song, and there's not a whole lot you can do except to send them back to write. Sometimes even when I'm limited with material and I think that there could be better songs, we will begin recording, but I'll say at the end of the first night, I'll say, okay, you guys go and write two songs tonight. And they're just like, what? We can't do that. And I'll say, yeah, you can just write something, bring it to me in the morning, and maybe 50% of the time what they bring is something so new and exciting that we wind up recording it and it turns out great. So the pressure is also a good thing, but I like to start with a lot of music before a project. It really does help and bring up your chances of having a great record.

Eyal Levi (00:40:56):

I feel like in this day and age, there's no excuse. We all know that every single band has at least one or two or three people in there with a DAW, so there's no excuse now, I think maybe in the nineties or something, they maybe had a few more excuses for not writing that much, but now, especially if they're full-time, why can't they write a lot of songs?

Sylvia Massy (00:41:23):

The big problem is finishing. It's like if you get on, some artists just get on a song and then they put everything into this song and they can never say it's finished and they never move on.

Eyal Levi (00:41:36):

Yeah. I know referencing what you said earlier about how part of the job is sticking the landing, even if you are sticking the landing and you saying this is done, do you ever still kind of feel like, yeah, could just keep going deep down inside kind of thing?

Sylvia Massy (00:41:56):

I like finishing actually, and then I get used to the sound of it. Maybe there was, what is the saying that the project is not finished when the ideas run out? There will always be ideas. You have to know when something is finished and let those ideas go because it'll just keep going on and on. I do dense productions, so I'll put as much into it as I can and get away with. But yeah, the ideas will continue,

Eyal Levi (00:42:29):

I guess. That's true. I mean, that is kind of the deal with a creative person. Their mind is always going to be creating, so I didn't think about it that way, but you are absolutely right. Why would the person who wrote all that stuff just suddenly turned that off?

Sylvia Massy (00:42:49):

Right? Yeah. It don't ever turn off keep. It'll always be going, hopefully.

Eyal Levi (00:42:55):

Do you find that artists are generally appreciative of when you say This is it?

Sylvia Massy (00:43:02):

Some artists have a hard time with that, and again, like we talked about before, I'll follow the lead of what the artist is. The artist says, absolutely. Give me one more chance to sing this part. I'll let them do it. And then it may be obvious at that point that, yeah, your voice is gone and we're not going to get anything better out of this part, but I'll let them find out for themselves. Like Kramer said, give 'em enough rope.

Eyal Levi (00:43:35):

That's what I was just thinking. So at the end of the day, it sounds like you still consider it their record?

Sylvia Massy (00:43:41):

Oh, yeah. It's something I had to get used to is my ideas.

Speaker 3 (00:43:45):

How so?

Sylvia Massy (00:43:46):

I can't be precious. It's not my music, it's not my album. I'm helping the artist to realize their idea, but I don't want to stamp it with my sound without them embracing it. So I'll throw out my ideas if they don't want to follow my ideas, that's totally fine. It's not my album, it's not my music. I have my own music that I'll express myself with.

Eyal Levi (00:44:13):

And the paintings.

Sylvia Massy (00:44:14):

And the paintings, yeah.

Eyal Levi (00:44:16):

Do you think that maybe the paintings that the ones you do in session are also a way to kind of limit whatever side of you that would be, that want to, I guess take not technical ownership of the song, but an emotional kind of ownership over the art?

Sylvia Massy (00:44:36):

Well, incredibly. When I look at some of these paintings, it does bring me right back to that moment of the music in the studio, and as well as when I listened back to that music, I think of those images. So there is a connection there, and that art is really mine. That's my pure expression. It's frightening to expose that sometimes, but as far as the music goes, if's someone else's music, I'm fine to have them take ownership of the work that I'm doing on their music. Absolutely. I'm really just a conduit for them and their ideas.

Eyal Levi (00:45:19):

You said that that's something you had to kind of learn how to do though. Can you talk about that at all? Is it one of those things where, I guess again, in more formative years, maybe the enthusiasm, I mean, you're super enthusiastic now, but what I mean is, is it one of those things when you were in the formative years when this was such a brand new thing, the fact that it was brand new and the fact that it was so exciting you couldn't help but get precious about it?

Sylvia Massy (00:45:54):

Yeah, well, you become really enthusiastic. You're collaborating and you have a million ideas, and

Eyal Levi (00:46:07):

How do you not get attached?

Sylvia Massy (00:46:08):

Yeah, it's true. Yeah. So there have been times, oh God, there was one time I was working with a really big band, actually, I won't name them, but while they took the night off, I went in the studio and I created all these backing parts, and this is something that I typically do on projects is I'll write harmonies and backing parts, and then I'll record them, and then I'll have the singer if they like the parts, I'll have the singer rerecord with their own voices if they like the parts. So I did an elaborate vocal arrangement for this artist, and I played it for 'em the next day, and it was just crickets in the studio, and I realized, oh my God, they hate it. And yeah, I had to check myself there again, it won't always be accepted, and you can't be disappointed when your ideas don't get accepted.

Eyal Levi (00:47:15):

You can't be. But I think it's natural to be, at least until you've done it enough to where you kind of almost desensitize yourself to the disappointment

Sylvia Massy (00:47:26):

A little bit. You have to be able to continue to throw out ideas and continue to be shot down. You have to be ready to be rejected. There is a certain amount of rejection that comes when an artist is more interested in their ideas and doesn't really, you don't click that way all the time. So I'm okay with that. I'll keep throwing out ideas, and a few might land and a few might not, but it's okay.

Eyal Levi (00:47:56):

Yeah, again, it's kind of like with that Rick Rubin write 300 songs thing. I feel like the more ideas you throw out, the less If you are always throwing out ideas and you make a vocal arrangement and they hate it, well got another idea the next day.

Sylvia Massy (00:48:12):

Yeah, that didn't prevent me from having more shitty ideas.

Eyal Levi (00:48:18):

What would you say the ratio is of shitty to? Pretty good to awesome.

Sylvia Massy (00:48:24):

I think they're all awesome ideas, but the acceptance is maybe fair enough. I think I get 80 to 20, 80. They're accepted, 80% is accepted and 20% is rejected. Oh,

Eyal Levi (00:48:41):

Wow. That's a really high ratio actually.

Sylvia Massy (00:48:44):

Yeah.

Eyal Levi (00:48:45):

I thought when you said 80 20, it was going to be the other way around. I think that's really high.

Sylvia Massy (00:48:50):

Yeah, I pick my fights carefully.

Eyal Levi (00:48:53):

Do you think that's a big part of knowing how to handle artists, is knowing when to pick your fights?

Sylvia Massy (00:49:03):

Absolutely. And when you first meet the people you're going to be working with, I'll sit in the room with them, we'll start talking about ideas, and I'll look around the room and if it's a group of four people, I'll figure out as soon as I can, who's the boss? There's always a boss,

(00:49:23):

And that's the person you need to communicate your ideas to because they make the decisions. Maybe it's a democracy, maybe they all have to say yes to an idea, but there's usually one person that carries the most weight and you need to identify them right away. And then I'm always looking at that person and thinking, well, what would work for this person? What parts of the songs have they written? If it's rhythm parts, drum parts or something, then I'll throw out ideas that will cater to that particular person first and then gain trust. It's all about everyone being able to trust you, and the more they trust you, the more they'll consider your ideas. Sometimes if there's an idea that they don't understand, I'll just say, Hey, let's just try it, and if you don't like it, then we'll scrap it. But I don't like to waste a lot of time. I like to make sure everything gets done. So it depends.

Eyal Levi (00:50:32):

Do you find that, I guess the more they know your work in advance, the less trust building you have to do?

Sylvia Massy (00:50:41):

Yes, absolutely. However, I try to get outside of the genres that are typical for my production style. Let's say if there's a choice of three projects coming up, I will choose the one that is unlike the most popular records that I've worked on, let's say. So country swing is something that I haven't done a whole lot of. So I did a country swing record last year, and I love it. I am trying to get into, I always want to keep my feet outside the circle, touch into all other different types of music if I can.

Eyal Levi (00:51:32):

And I guess when you're going into uncharted territory, that kind of trust wouldn't necessarily have been built up the way that if you went to an artist from the same exact genre that you have like five hits in a row from.

Sylvia Massy (00:51:48):

And so I think I'm good at building trust. I think I can do that. In fact, that's one of the better things that better qualities that I have, is that I can build trust with an artist no matter what genre.

Eyal Levi (00:52:04):

How did you go about it in the earlier days when you had no track record?

Sylvia Massy (00:52:10):

It was actually working with no pay for a lot of genres that I was unfamiliar with so that I would get to kick around some ideas, and if it worked out great, if it didn't work out, no one's out of any money on that. So I would volunteer myself for certain jobs so that I could get my feet wet in different genres. But yeah, the building trust is it's case by case basis on what you have to do to get there. I think that I have the ability to disarm clients, whereas when you start a project, everyone's a little bit or everyone's got their guard up a bit, but I'll walk in and if it's appropriate, I'll just start cursing right away. And yeah, and pretty soon it starts loosening up. We start having fun right away. I think we should all have fun and make it something enjoyable and not a stressful session if possible.

Eyal Levi (00:53:17):

I think sometimes artists will bring in the baggage from whatever happened to them last time they were in the studio, and not every producer believes it should be fun. A lot of, I don't think they want it to not be fun, but they don't specifically make enjoying it a priority. And there can be some pretty tyrannical producers, and I call it Studio PTSD. So I feel like sometimes musicians will, they'll have had such a strong experience whether the album came out great or not, just something that left some sort of a bad mark. And they'll come into the new session, even though you're a completely different person that maybe they're meeting for the first or second or third time, they'll still kind of be a little fearful of that the last thing they experienced, which is unfair to you. But still,

Sylvia Massy (00:54:13):

The singers are the ones that I believe have the hardest time with trust. And because I was a singer in my own projects, and I still do sing, I try to make them feel comfortable with me as soon as possible. And there's ways that I'll do that. When we are doing vocals, I like to have the microphone right next to me. If I'm sitting at a console or with the equipment, I'll sit at the controller and have the microphone sitting right next to me and the singer singing right next to me in the same room. We wear headphones and we have instant communication. There's no glass between us. And that way I think that it helps with the fear that singers get when they see mouths moving on the other side of the glass,

Eyal Levi (00:55:10):

Judging them. Yeah,

Sylvia Massy (00:55:12):

They're being judged all the time. And when they're being judged, it's not just the fact that their instrument is attitude, no, it's their self. There's something wrong with them if they can't sing. So I feel like I can get really comfortable with that artist by being in the same room and we communicate right away. Another thing that I'll do is if there's a part that a particular melody that's difficult for the artist, the singer to get, I'll sing it onto a track or I'll sing it to them, and I will not use my best voice. I'll make sure that my singing is a little crackly. It'll be in tune, but it'll be a little crackly. It will be

Eyal Levi (00:56:03):

Worse than theirs.

Sylvia Massy (00:56:05):

Yes, absolutely. And then they listen to that and they go, oh, I could do that. So

Eyal Levi (00:56:11):

How did you figure that one out?

Sylvia Massy (00:56:12):

Well, that was just from years of working with singers, and so if I sing a part and record it, except for a few times, the singer really appreciates it, and then we do those parts and it works out great.

Eyal Levi (00:56:30):

Did you by any chance, learn the hard way when you first tried that by singing it better than the singer and making them even more insecure?

Sylvia Massy (00:56:38):

Well, I noticed that this was happening with drummers in particular because the same thing goes with drummers. I like to have the band, if I'm working with a band with a drummer, I like to have the drummer sit aside and not hit the drums for our mic test. I think it's a big waste of effort for a drummer just to go don don dunk and wear themselves out with hitting the kick drum a half an hour. So typically I'll say, Hey, go sit in the other room and then I'll have the assistant or a runner in the session go up there and do the drum testing while I'm checking mics. I just want to save the drummer's energy.

(00:57:29):

But you get these little hot shit assistants or runners and they just wailing on the drums and they just show off, and then the actual drummer comes in the session and is just like, oh God. So I don't want anyone to do that. I'll make sure that the whoever's testing the drums absolutely must not play anything fancy. Don't show off. Absolutely not. And I'm not going to show off either. And it seems to help, because not everyone that I work with is a fantastic musician. They might have good ideas, but maybe the execution needs some help, and I'll help that with what I can do with recording.

Eyal Levi (00:58:18):

I feel like no matter what level of band you're talking about, there's all levels of skill involved from virtuosos to people that you can't believe they're in a big band. How did this happen? You realize that they're the one who has all the connections or somehow they keep the band together. There's some reason for it. But just on a pure musicianship level, you have the whole spectrum. I think that sometimes people think that once you start working with bigger bands that you stop having. Some of the problems that you do with smaller bands are shitty musicians, and I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think that there's always going to be a wide range of abilities at all levels.

Sylvia Massy (00:59:03):

Absolutely. And yeah, there's a lot of fixing going on. It's easy to fix mediocre performance these days.

Eyal Levi (00:59:12):

Do you feel like there was always some sort of fixing going on?

Sylvia Massy (00:59:15):

Well, back in the analog tape days, it was much more difficult. I think there was better musicianship when it was important for the drummer to be absolutely on time and singers to be on pitch. Yeah, it was a lot more difficult. You could fix things, but it was a lot more difficult. I worked with Johnny Cash and did his vocals, and this was on analog tape. I did a comp from several tracks onto one track where I had to just copy over just syllables of words to complete the performance, and it was a lot of work, and I had to run the vocals, also certain words and certain vowels through Eventide H 3000 to adjust the pitch. There were some parts that were so off, and ultimately it worked out. I mean, he wasn't that bad a singer, and plus his voice is legend anyway, so I didn't have to do that much repair, but it was important. And those fixing skills in analog were much more primitive, but they did work. Boy, it's so much nicer now.

Eyal Levi (01:00:36):

Yeah. Also though, I got to say back then, it seems to me maybe the ability to fix things wasn't as advanced, but there was also a whole industry of session musicians. So instead of fixing the drums on the grid, that just changed the drummer and not put the session person's name in the liner notes. But still, I think our desire to make things as good as possible isn't something that just came about now, but the technology is what allows us to fix people. But I think that in older days, if they weren't up to par, it was more common to just replace them with someone else.

Sylvia Massy (01:01:19):

There were also other things that you could do to improve performances with bands that were actually really good in editing. So analog tape editing, if we did five or six takes of a song on the tool record, we would take five or six takes of a song, and then I would cut together a master using verse one out of take two, and the first chorus out of take one in the bridge out of the last take, and just assembling it all with a razor blade. And I think because of that, I think of doing modern digital editing differently than someone who didn't have that opportunity to work on tape. So I always think of takes and pieces and takes instead of trying to punch in something or trying to get it or trying to fix something that it exists on another take, but just cut that right into there. So I do a lot of assembly and pro tools now the same way that I would do it on analog tape.

Eyal Levi (01:02:28):

It's just faster

Sylvia Massy (01:02:30):

And it's better.

Eyal Levi (01:02:32):

Just out of curiosity, how often do you get to work with a band where you feel like every single person is firing on all cylinders? Everybody in the band is awesome at playing, executing. They all work together like a machine, and the writing's incredible. Just literally everything is just awesome.

Sylvia Massy (01:02:54):

Yeah. There are those bands,

Eyal Levi (01:02:56):

They do exist.

Sylvia Massy (01:02:57):

Yes, they do. One group, was it last year? Maybe it was two years ago, Molotov, there's a band from Mexico City, big Mexican band, and I did a MTV and plugged with them where they were playing all acoustic instruments and we did this huge television performance, and I produced the music and the stage for that, and those guys just are just killing it all the time. That was a joy to work with them. So good. So there are those people out there, but everyone's okay though. I mean, ultimately we can make anything work these days, and it's all about the songs. So if you've got good songs, we'll fix all the rest.

Eyal Levi (01:03:49):

Has that always been your mentality? It's all about the songs and the rest is just means to an end.

Sylvia Massy (01:03:56):

Yeah, I think so. Mean going to be. It starts with the songs. If you don't have the songs to begin with, then you can have a really beautiful but empty sounding album.

Eyal Levi (01:04:06):

I feel too, if the songs are incredible, it's not that I don't mean this to say that the Mick shouldn't be great, but I feel like it's far less important if the songs are great.

Sylvia Massy (01:04:18):

Yeah, you're right. Yeah. The Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, when they would sit down, they would play a song one time and it was brilliant. And hopefully the mics were set up and recording because

Eyal Levi (01:04:30):

Hopefully,

Sylvia Massy (01:04:31):

Yeah, because that first time they're probably not going to play it again. And the magic of the moment is really obvious in that what they did. So yeah, if you didn't quite get the best sound, that's totally fine. It comes through in the performance.

Eyal Levi (01:04:52):

When you approach a production now, knowing that a lot of modern bands don't necessarily even play together when writing, do you try to get that sort of thing happening? Where as default try to see what magic they can make together? Or is it something where you'll adapt the way you approach it based on how they even exist and operate in the first place?

Sylvia Massy (01:05:19):

Well, I have to consider how they've done the writing, but I'll try to get them all in the same room. And I like that type of energy and communication that happens with musicians when they're in the same room. I find that, well, it depends on the music, because there's some music where it doesn't matter if no one's actually in the same room. Sometimes it's just one artist, one person is making the music. But when I can, and if there's a group that can feed off of each other when they're performing, I'll put them in the same room. I'll give 'em headphones and make sure that they're all standing close to each other. So they can have that eye communication and that special communication that happens between musicians. I'll isolate the loud amplifiers, the speakers in a separate room, but typically I like to have 'em all in the same room, including the singer. And I'll capture scratch vocals right there in front of the drum kit and the singer being a part of the initial tracking will help the other musicians to really find the dynamics in a song.

Eyal Levi (01:06:26):

We're doing this for real.

Sylvia Massy (01:06:28):

Yeah.

Eyal Levi (01:06:28):

I feel like one thing that, and I'm a huge fan of modern recording, I love technology, but I feel like with every advancement there's always going to be pros and cons, and I feel like one of the cons to the way things are often done now is that has a little bit more of a dentist office kind of feel to it, as opposed to we're doing this together for real type of feel. And I think that as opposed to that's just the way things were done because of the technology in a certain era, now you have to actually make a point to make it a group effort.

Sylvia Massy (01:07:08):

Well, one thing that illustrates that is the fact that a lot of music is written with sample instruments, so you're not actually using an acoustic instrument anymore. And I think it's kind of laziness. If there is a piano available, use a real piano. If there is a Hammond available, use a real Hammond if you're using someone else's recording having been sampled. It just kind of takes the life out of it. It just makes everything very generic sounding. I think that's part of it. So yeah, I agree that there is a clinical kind of feeling to music now. I think that's part of it is that people aren't really creating with acoustic instruments like they have in the past.

Eyal Levi (01:07:56):

Yeah, because I think the human tendency is to take the path of least resistance always. That's just what people naturally do. So if they can just pull up a brass section and they want to hear a brass section on a song, just pull it up and get the piano role going, that's a much more direct path to something that's maybe 80 or 85% as good as the real thing as opposed to way more work to hire the right people, mic them up, have a good arrangement, all that stuff.

Sylvia Massy (01:08:34):

Yeah, that's right. The sample instruments are great tools for composition for writing the music, but holy cow, if you can get a real horn section,

Eyal Levi (01:08:45):

There's

Sylvia Massy (01:08:45):

Going to be all kinds of crazy things that happen in mistakes that you'll want to keep and new parts that just come to mind that happen. So you're limiting yourself. And I think that there's a bit of laziness there too. Of course, it is hard to find a horn section now on,

Eyal Levi (01:09:04):

Especially a good one,

Sylvia Massy (01:09:05):

Right? But wow, there's nothing better than the real thing.

Eyal Levi (01:09:10):

What does a pre-pro look like for you, saying that one thing that you'll try to do at the beginning is figure out who's the boss and understand who you're working with. But one thing that we didn't define is what the beginning is. Does that mean day one of recording or does that process start way earlier for you?

Sylvia Massy (01:09:29):

Typically these days I live in Oregon and oftentimes I'm not in a place where we can get together for rehearsal studio.

(01:09:41):

So I'll ask for recordings to be sent to me from their rehearsals right away. So we can do a song choice for one thing. I'll start guiding them with pre-production in the month in front of a session. I might have them write some new songs, but we'll choose the songs. And it is very difficult to know exactly what's going on with parts being played long distance. So it's not until we're in the same room when it's wherever we're at, if we're in LA recording or in Europe or at my place or whatever. But once we get in the same room together, I'll listen to these same songs, the song choices, and if there's a lot of work to be done on the drum parts or they need to write a new bridge or something that we didn't catch before, then I'll give them time to do that in front of the actual recording. But typically, if we're in pre-production, let's say I'm going to have every mic set up, it'll be in the studio, we'll be recording everything in pre-production as it would be when we're tracking. So if there are magic moments,

Eyal Levi (01:11:01):

Which there will be

Sylvia Massy (01:11:02):

And there will be of course, especially when there's a song that's fresh, new parts that are fresh and they're just learning it for the first time, there's an energy there that you just can't get by rehearsing the life out of it.

Eyal Levi (01:11:16):

I think one of the biggest mistakes that I was taught early on, but then thankfully one of the first awesome producers I worked with changed that for me was that pre-pro matter. And it ended up, I learned the hard way. I ended up with lots of situations with my own music where I'd have a really shitty sounding great part on a demo played in a way that could never be recreated or a set of effects that just were special, but they sounded like shit in a way that was not acceptable, not like cool shit, just sad because there's no way to ever do it better. And then I was taught to take pre-pro just as seriously as the real thing because of those moments,

Sylvia Massy (01:12:05):

Because

Eyal Levi (01:12:06):

They're only going to happen once.

Sylvia Massy (01:12:07):

And then there's the sad thing where you're hired to produce an album where the demos were recorded so well that it's going to be hard to beat what they already have. Because what I love is when someone sends me demos and they're just the most horrible sounding demos. I can hear the song, I can hear the parts, but it's not something that I'm going to have to really work to convince them that this is a better recording than they've already done on their own.

Eyal Levi (01:12:46):

Is that something that happens a lot more these days now that everybody's got pro tools?

Sylvia Massy (01:12:52):

Well, surprisingly, no. I mean, people might have pro tools, but they're not recording really well.

Eyal Levi (01:13:00):

So what was the scenario where this would happen? Would people go to a pre-pro studio or something?

Sylvia Massy (01:13:06):

Sometimes their recordings are really good and they've really worked on 'em. Let's say they've been working on an album for six months to a year and they've been working and working and working on this particular song, and they got all these parts and they rerecorded them five times and it's a demo, but it really is more than a demo. It's really something that's finished. Now I have a week to make something as good as that, that's a challenge. And so I try not to fight it, and I'll actually import parts from their demos. If there's a solo that just can't be recreated and everyone is so attached and they've been listening to this demo for a year and they can't get beyond what's on the demo, then I'll import their parts and we'll work off of their parts and we'll embellish that.

Eyal Levi (01:13:56):

See, that same producer who taught me to take pre-pro seriously was also the first person I saw doing that, taking demo parts and using them. And I remembered that before that I had been around bands who thought that if I had the inclination to do that, that I was trying to get out of doing work, and it pissed me off because in reality, I felt like there was no reason to do it. When something's already great, why fuck with it? It's already great. Would you ever get any pushback from artists about just using something from the demo? Just because I feel like sometimes people don't feel right unless they're doing work, whether or not the work is productive or unproductive, they need to feel like they did something in order to feel good about it.

Sylvia Massy (01:14:48):

Yeah, some artists appreciate the fact that the work that they did before is being used on the album and that we're just taking it and incorporating it into the final. Some, like you say, are more interested in trying to improve it for some reason, and then I'll let them, we'll take time. If we have time, we're going to take time and we're going to try. Maybe they beat it, but typically it's really hard to beat some of those early recordings on a new song.

Eyal Levi (01:15:19):

I wonder sometimes if they've been working on a song for six months and they've rerecorded it five times, what do they think is going to happen on the sixth?

Sylvia Massy (01:15:29):

Right. When something is so ingrained in someone's head, their demo, it's hard to hear them any other way. One thing that I'll be very, very careful to do is to match the tempo of their demo, and then that helps if you vary the tempo, suddenly it doesn't sound right. So we start with, if we're going to rerecord it, we have to start at that exact tempo.

Eyal Levi (01:15:55):

And when you're getting presented with a song that's that far in, does your focus then become more about just the best sounding recording possible rather than taking a creative role in the song?

Sylvia Massy (01:16:10):

Well, I will make sure that I get everything that they've created in that song up to that point, and then add more and cross my fingers. Sometimes a challenge, sometimes I'll even match the sounds as close as I can to the demos. And this is something that I'll do with mixes too, and there's an artist that will send me an album to mix, and I always ask for rough mixes before I start because I want to see what they're expecting from the song, the music, from the mix. And there have been those projects where the mix is so good that I'm just trying to beat their mix and I'll get there. But sometimes I wonder if they're not just using me just to stick my name on their mix on their mix because what they've done is already finished. They don't really need me, but they need my name. Maybe

Eyal Levi (01:17:26):

You're not the only person who I've heard say that I've been in the room with certain mixers where they get the rough and they're like, what exactly do you need me for? This sounds great. I'm not trying to talk myself out of a job, but really, this is awesome. Why are we redoing it?

Sylvia Massy (01:17:48):

Yeah, there's that, and I'll play the game. Sure.

Eyal Levi (01:17:53):

Well, I mean, why talk yourself out of a job,

Sylvia Massy (01:17:55):

Right?

Eyal Levi (01:17:56):

I guess though, when it is that good, do you ever run into the situation where maybe not that it's not possible to beat, but that it is so good coming in that the artist has a really, really hard time accepting it differently? Not exactly the same thing as demo itis, where they get used to a part, but more like they had the final mix already. They just didn't know it was the final. In their mind. They had attached themselves to it as though it was the final. And then you're kind of dealing with that.

Sylvia Massy (01:18:31):

Yeah. Recently I worked with a really young artist who has only known working on a, in basically in their bedroom

Eyal Levi (01:18:42):

The New Way,

Sylvia Massy (01:18:44):

Creating amazing songs. And the mix was good, but it was very thin sounding. They didn't have real quality monitors in their little home studio. So I tried to match as much as I could their mix, and I added a few little sparkles of things, some extra throws, some delay throws, and some, I added an extra synth part because it was really kind of wide open, which is a style, but I kind of had a feeling that they're not going to want to do anything except what they did. They don't want to hear anything but what they did on their own, which I can't blame 'em. And ultimately, I didn't get the mix job. Basically, they went with the original mix, and that's okay. I mean, especially for young artists that are really intense into their work that let them go all the way with their music and finalize that vision. And I know that kid is going to be great in 10 years. Oh my God, we will probably hear all about him.

Eyal Levi (01:20:05):

One of those people that does everything themselves start to finish one of those freaks,

Sylvia Massy (01:20:10):

Billie Eilish and her brother kind of thing.

Eyal Levi (01:20:13):

They are incredible. They, it's so weird to me that I feel like there's this contingent of people who want to tear them down, and I don't understand because I feel like they're two of the most talented kids to have come around in music in ages. Everything they're doing is so fresh.

Sylvia Massy (01:20:35):

Yeah. Yeah. Even at the convention, the Democratic Convention, Billie Eilish sang a song called I'm In Love With My Future, and I thought it was fricking great. These young artists that really have great ideas and they're doing it on their own, whereas I kind of want to look at them and say, Hey, well, why don't you need me? It doesn't matter. It's like, let them be in love with their future.

Eyal Levi (01:21:06):

Well, I mean, haven't there always been artists that are kind of able to do it all? I mean, I think of Trent. I know that he's always had his partner, but it's always pretty much been Trent and Atticus the entire time. So I feel like there's always been those artists that are just kind of a self-contained unit almost.

Speaker 3 (01:21:30):

Yeah,

Eyal Levi (01:21:31):

I think there will always be a need for producers and mixers, but at the same time, there's always going to be artists who just don't need anyone, just the nature of the game. But wasn't the Billie Eilish record the most recent one mixed by somebody awesome?

Sylvia Massy (01:21:46):

Oh, I don't know.

Eyal Levi (01:21:48):

I'm pretty sure that it was, but though he did say that he barely had to do anything, that the tracks that Phineas created were so good that he just had to balance them a little and do whatever. But it wasn't like surgery or anything like that. It already sounded amazing, apparently.

Sylvia Massy (01:22:08):

I wouldn't doubt it.

Eyal Levi (01:22:09):

Yeah, me neither. So I have a few questions here from our listeners, if you don't mind me asking you, George Lever, who's actually a really awesome producer out of England, says, if you had to start from scratch in 2020, what would your first decisions be?

Sylvia Massy (01:22:27):

Start from scratch. I think that every production that I do in the studio, I would have a video component to. I wanted to have video connected to everything that I do. So the visual I think is more important than ever in creating music today, which seems odd. But yeah, the visual component I think is more important than ever.

Eyal Levi (01:23:04):

It's interesting you say that because I've been thinking about this a lot lately where, and I feel like this is true for musicians or producers or really anybody in music on the creative side of it, I feel like at one point in time, it was just the job requirement was that you did your job. If you're a guitar player, just be a really awesome guitar player who can hang. Then somewhere in the past 15 years, it's almost a requirement to have a basic ability to use a daw, not to be professionally amazing, but to be able to get your ideas done enough to be able to communicate with other musicians who do use daws or aren't local, because I think bands aren't necessarily local anymore the way that they used to be. And then I feel like the landscape shifted again to where now being able to record a little and just being able to play your instrument are assumed. And the new thing that everyone needs to have at least a basic working knowledge of is video. So actually, I think you're absolutely right,

Sylvia Massy (01:24:23):

And inviting people into your world through web casts is going to be a part of everything that I do. I'm pretty sure that that's what the future holds as well as for what I have actually planned to launch this fall, which will be in 2021, is a Dolby Atmos mixing, which I'm super stoked about. So I'm going to be doing immersive mixing here and for music, and that in my creative way is going to be an expression of a new way of expressing these mixes with some of these artists that I've been working with, especially electronic artists where I can place objects everywhere in the room and have this entire experience listening experience, which I'm super stoked about.

Eyal Levi (01:25:28):

It's including your seat too, right? Oh,

Sylvia Massy (01:25:30):

The vibration and the seat, yeah.

Eyal Levi (01:25:32):

Now

Sylvia Massy (01:25:32):

I don't have that, but I do have a 9.2 0.4 system being installed now with the four above and all Genelec monitors, and it's just outrageous. So it'll going to be a great year. Next year is going to be a great year.

Eyal Levi (01:25:54):

I feel like a Dolby Atmos is the one thing as far as movies go, that really makes going to a movie still worth it, like seeing a Chris Nolan movie in an atmo theater, just that experience is unbelievable. I feel like I would love to hear what music sounds like through that.

Sylvia Massy (01:26:17):

I mean, it could be novel and maybe the novelty will wear off after a little while, but honestly, I think that it's going to be, at least for some of the music that I'm working on, I think it's going to be just bring it up to a new level.

Eyal Levi (01:26:35):

Awesome. I'm excited to hear what that sounds like. Huge fan of Dolby Atmos. So Alex Estrada says, I would love to hear more about the Microphone Museum project she's been working on.

Sylvia Massy (01:26:49):

Oh, wow. Yeah. My partner, Chris and I purchased a museum. I don't know how it happened, but it happened. I've been collecting mics for my entire career, and I have some really nice vintage mics, but we were tasked with writing a book for Hal Leonard on vintage microphones. And during that writing process, I met an old gentleman in Milwaukee who had his own microphone museum, and that was Bob Pickett. And through a series of events, we wound up buying his museum. He passed, and we wound up buying the museum. So now all these mics are here in this new studio that we're building, and it's called the Museum Studio because it's basically in a museum with 2000 vintage mics from all the early American mics, which I was not as familiar with as the German. The imports, which are the German mics, are fabulous. Well, there are also really amazing American condensers that are kind of overlooked, but are equally as wonderful and useful for recording.

(01:28:08):

We have the range of microphones from the very first, from 1876 and 1878, which are the first carbon, the liquid and carbon mics from Bell and from Hughes all the way through the twenties when there was an explosion of new technology, when the dynamic mics were developed and the condensers were developed and the crystals were developed. And we have the full range from the earliest to the later mics. I'd say no new technology has been made in microphone building since the eighties. I think it kind of, maybe even the sixties, because there was phantom powered condensers that came in late fifties and sixties, and then pretty much things stopped advancing. There hasn't been any real new technology since the sixties, since all the manufacturing went offshore and it went to Asia, and then things haven't really changed since then. But yeah, this microphone museum is astounding and I still can't believe it. And I'll be starting a little web series called Mike du Jour, and I'll take one at a time and describe them, talk about the technical details of them, and then plug it in. And we'll listen to it one at a time, one every day or one every week, depending on how many of these I can do. But this series will go on for years because there's just so, so many mics.

Eyal Levi (01:29:56):

How do you plug in a mic from 1878?

Sylvia Massy (01:29:59):

Well, surprisingly, the 1878 mic that we have is a carbon pencil made by David Edward Hughes, and it has two posts on the ends of the carbon pencil. And the carbon pencil is basically a burnt stick that's compressed and it's hard. And if you run a current through it, which is basically a six volt DC from a battery, and then you talk into it, the variable resistance is translated through the wire, through the electric wire, and then it's then translated into a little speaker, a little earphone that you can hear. So you can have a wire traveling from one room to another and talk into this basically a burnt stick, and you can hear it on the other end. And I had no idea that that was like, that's the first carbon microphone and carbon microphones. You will recognize that every telephone has a carbon microphone or anything. Up till through the early nineties, landline phones usually had a carbon button in the mouthpiece, and those carbon mics had a granulated version of this carbon technology, but the earliest one was a stick. And then the other crazy thing is that crystal mics, which there's a popular crystal mics by a static, the JT 30, which is the bullet that the harmonica players use all the time, that generally has a crystal element in it. And crystal mics were similar in that here you're not yelling at a stick, but you're yelling at a rock. Basically,

(01:31:46):

It's a slice of crystal, a very thin wafer slice of crystal with a diaphragm touching one end of it. And as the diaphragm moves with sound, it bends the crystal and the crystal when it's bent, puts out a little charge, and then that charge is read as audio signal and it's pizo electricity, pizo electricity, electric signal. So I had no idea you can grow these crystals. They're basically originally salt crystals that were grown.

Eyal Levi (01:32:24):

How did somebody figure this out?

Sylvia Massy (01:32:26):

I know with the brushes, the brush, the father and son brushes in their laboratory, they figured this out. And piso electricity is useful in other ways too, but yeah, you yell at a rock and you get a mic, you yell at a stick. Did you know this? I had no idea.

Eyal Levi (01:32:46):

I didn't actually, I'm hearing this for the first time. Part of what amazes me too is the fact that the stick mic was preserved. It sounds fragile.

Sylvia Massy (01:32:55):

Yeah, we have it. And actually the carbon is pretty tough. It's pretty hard. It's almost like a rock, but it's really just burnt and compressed. Some people call them coal mics because basically it's like a chunk of coal

Eyal Levi (01:33:10):

Just blows my mind that people figure this out at some point in time

Sylvia Massy (01:33:14):

That Me too. And since we got this collection, this museum in December, I've taken each mic one at a time and studied each one and documented what it is and the technology behind it. And I've learned so much, and I'm not even finished with the documentation yet. And so we had to put off releasing this book for a while because there's all this new technology that came in. It will be a very important book on vintage microphones that will cover more than just your tunks and your AKGs, and it's going to really show the history and technology of microphone building right from the beginning.

Eyal Levi (01:34:03):

Did I read this correctly that you have around 2000 microphones? Yes.

Sylvia Massy (01:34:07):

There's more than 2000 vintage mics,

Eyal Levi (01:34:10):

So it's definitely going to take a while to get through the video series.

Sylvia Massy (01:34:14):

Yeah, yeah. I'm excited to start. It's hard to choose what mic to do first. Yeah, I mean, right here I'm using, for this recording today, I'm using a little old Sennheiser MD 21, which is, it looks like the MD 4 21. Can you see it? But it's smaller and it's made of metal. And it sounds great though. I mean, this is a great mic, and I bought this for $50 in Berlin. You can find these mics. They're fantastic mics. So that's another reason why I want to share the knowledge about these vintage mics, because there's good quality mics to be found that you wouldn't even expect would be high quality production mics

Eyal Levi (01:35:05):

That aren't $15,000.

Sylvia Massy (01:35:06):

Yeah.

Eyal Levi (01:35:07):

So, alright, last question. This one is from Renar Magnusson, and he says, I remember a story from a DVD of one of my favorite Norwegian bands from the nineties that you produced. The band's name is pronounced Simon, where you had the singer run outside before vocal, take his heavy breathing is a big part of the song and it wasn't planned. How do you know when to push artists and have them do things like that? Has it ever backfired and made people angry?

Sylvia Massy (01:35:36):

Yeah, it has backfired, but sometimes it doesn't help to make a singer comfortable. Let's say you're doing music that's angry. You want to have the singer with that anger, true anger in their voice. Well, then you just have to piss them off somehow

Eyal Levi (01:35:52):

Apologize later.

Sylvia Massy (01:35:53):

Exactly. After you get your part, you have to get your take. But sending 'em outside to run around in the snow is one way of pissing off a singer and getting them to scream when they come back in with the real genuine emotion. Manipulating a singer like that does backfire sometimes. I had sge from system up and down, hanging upside down when I was doing vocals with him once. I thought this would be a good way to get a special performance. And he started screaming because there was a part in the song where he was supposed to scream and his face got really red and his eyes started bulging out, and it was just like, oh, no, no, no. You have to stop. We're not going to do this. So I don't want to kill anybody. But yeah, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Eyal Levi (01:36:39):

I mean, like we said, that is what experimentation is. You don't know what's going to happen. Yeah,

Sylvia Massy (01:36:45):

That's right.

Eyal Levi (01:36:46):

Well, Sylvia, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to come on. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Sylvia Massy (01:36:53):

Sure am. Thank you. Well, thanks for inviting me.

Eyal Levi (01:36:55):

Thanks for doing this, and I'm looking forward to hearing the Dolby Atmos stuff for sure. Okay, then another URM podcast episode in the bag. Please remember to share our episodes with your friends, as well as post them to your Facebook, Instagram, or any social media you use. Please tag me at al Levy URM audio. And of course, please tag my guests as well. Till next time, happy mixing. You've been listening to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. To ask us questions, make suggestions and interact, visit URM Academy and press the podcast link today.