STEVE ALBINI: The Process Over Goals, Serving the Artist’s Vision, and The Case for Analog

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast,

Speaker 2 (00:00:04):

And now your host, Eyal Levi.

(00:00:08):

Welcome to the URM podcast. Thank you so much for being here. It's crazy to think that we are now on our seventh year. Don't ask me how that all just flew by, but it did. Man, time moves fast and it's only because of you, the listeners, if you'd like us to stick around another seven years and there's a few simple things you can do that would really, really help us out, I would endlessly appreciate if you would, number one, share our episodes with your friends. Number two, post our episodes on your Facebook and Instagram and tag me at al Levi URM audio and at URM Academy and of course our guest. And number three, leave us reviews and five star reviews wherever you can. We especially love iTunes reviews. Once again, thank you for all the years and years of loyalty. I just want you to know that we will never charge you for this podcast, and I will always work as hard as possible to improve the episodes in every single way.

(00:01:10):

All we ask in return is a share a post and tag us. Oh, and one last thing. Do you have a question you would like me to answer on an episode? I don't mean for a guest. I mean for me, it can be about anything. Email it to [email protected]. That's EYAL at m dot A-C-D-E-M-Y. There's no.com on that. It's exactly the way I spelled it. And use the subject line. Answer me Eyal. Alright, let's get on with it. Hello everybody. Welcome to the URM Podcast. My guest today is Steve Albini, who is a legendary household name in production and he's been a journalist, guitar player, songwriter, and record engineer for over four decades. He's amassed the known real back catalog of knowns and unknowns, such as Foxy, Shazam, Nirvana, Pixies, the Breeders, the Stooges, helmet, cheap Trick, neurosis, and a ton more. Steve purchased electrical audio around 1995 in the Chicago area where he still works today, and he stays true to his model of working actively to not exploit the artists. He remains to this day one of the highest quality, lowest priced a-list engineers that you can possibly work with, and that's by design. This guy is the definition of integrity. I hope you enjoy the episode. Steve Albini, welcome to the URM Podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:02:36):

Thank you for asking me.

Speaker 2 (00:02:38):

It's an honor and a pleasure to have you. Let's just get right into it. You said that you've got no time for the argument that music is no longer as good as it used to be, or that artists are no longer as enthusiastic about the art that they create. And I thought that it was interesting that you said that because that argument annoys the shit out of me too because all I see are musicians that care.

Speaker 3 (00:03:03):

It's just profoundly lazy. It's an outgrowth of this sort of permanent nostalgia cycle that we're in where each era of the past is sort of serially and ritualistically elevated into being some kind of a ideal. And then the people who made their living during that period are sort of treated as sage old wizards or something where that they had secret knowledge that the rest of us don't have now or that they were working in a unique era that had unique greatness imbued in it into it. And none of that's true. It's just since the first caveman banged two rocks together, he was fucking passionate about it. And now when you have kids using, I say kids, but it can be anybody, you're using their laptops and their iPads to make records that are exhilarating to them. The process is different, but the enthusiasm is exactly the same.

Speaker 2 (00:04:10):

I've always thought that it's just people making the most of the tools that are available to them.

Speaker 3 (00:04:16):

Yeah, the argument that I hear is that there's some sort of qualitative lessening over time because you have fewer professionals doing it now that in the era of the major label system, you had professional arrangers with professional orchestras and professional musicians and professional songwriters and professional artists who were sort of groomed as performers and they had this craft was conducted around them and that was somehow the pinnacle of the art. That perspective, that specific perspective is a really grotesque and capitalist one that I just can't indulge. It's like it's only legitimate if you have an industry doing it.

Speaker 2 (00:05:04):

I think that those types of practices makes sense given the limitations of that era. If that's what you needed in order to be able to make the most of what there was around you, plus obviously the budget to do it, then yay. But I definitely do feel like technology has advanced to a point where not all of that is even necessary anymore to make amazing sounding products, results, music.

Speaker 3 (00:05:35):

Yeah, I mean the amazing sounding thing is an entirely relative thing, right? If you're a person whose sole experience with music was going into a concert hall and having a choice box seat in a concert hall and hearing one of the top orchestras of the world play fresh or adventurous symphonic compositions written by geniuses, if that's your soul frame of reference, then hearing somebody sing over a pop combo is going to sound trivial and it's going to sound like that is a lessening of the musical experience to you. So when people make these relative assessments, they're making those relative assessments based on a frame that's purely temporal and purely circumstantial. Like you happen to be alive when a certain kind of music was on the radio and that formed your sensibilities or you happen to be alive during a period when music was primarily being made in a homemade environment.

(00:06:40):

There are people who came of age during the quarantine during the COVID era, right when no recording studios were doing very much business when record labels weren't putting out new records when the only music that was coming out was stuff that people were doing at home and they were just posting up on Bandcamp or YouTube or whatever. So there are going to be some people who look nostalgically on these grainy YouTube videos as being just the peak musical experience of their lives. And I don't think that that perspective should be seen as any kind of a law.

(00:07:14):

You're allowed to appreciate music however it comes to you, and you're allowed to have whatever perspective on it you want. So I don't have any time for people who say that music now is not as good as it used to be, or the way people are making music now is not as valid as the way people used to make music. You're born when you're born and you experience the things that roll out in front of you and you have no control over any of that. Your sensibilities and your appreciation of music is all going to be shaped by that random roll of the dice about when you came out of the chute. So I have a particular affection for the music that I discovered when I was a teenager and I was first passionate about music, but I also recognize that passion in other people who are now discovering music for themselves, and I don't want to cheapen that experience for them at all. I don't want to denigrate that experience for them at all because I remember how fucking exhilarating it was for me. The experience was going to a record store and thumbing through a bunch of records until I found a record cover that intrigued me, that made me willing to risk my $6 or whatever, and then I'd bring it home and an hour and a half later I would drop the needle on it and I would find out whether I made a good investment or not.

(00:08:31):

The exhilaration of dropping the needle on a record and having a new favorite record for the next couple of days that'll never leave me, and I recognize that same thing in other people when they're discovering things.

Speaker 2 (00:08:42):

In my first experience with that attitude that you're talking about was when I was 14 in 1993 and I went to the studio for the first time to get my band recorded and Guns N Roses were one of my favorite bands back then. And I said that to the engineer and he got mad and he was like, oh, it's just the Rolling Stones all over again. They're just caught. It was like that same thing. It was better back then. I think people liked to hang on, like you said, to the time period that they feel the most attached to, and they just developed, I'd say an irrational super emotional bond to it where they cannot accept anything that came after. But what I wonder is we know people who don't do that. What do you think it takes to free yourself of that or to not let yourself go in that direction? I don't think that people who do that are trying to do that.

Speaker 3 (00:09:43):

No, no, no. You just need to be charitable enough to let other people have the same experience with music that you had your experience with music is not universal, so the things that animated you, like you just talked about how Guns N Roses were your favorite band at 14, right?

Speaker 1 (00:09:57):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:09:58):

I was in my thirties when Guns N Roses hit and I thought they were atrocious garbage retrograde bullshit

Speaker 2 (00:10:06):

Like the engineer? No,

Speaker 3 (00:10:07):

No, no, no. He thought that they were recycling

Speaker 2 (00:10:10):

The stones. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:10:11):

His hard rock heroes and therefore that made them illegitimate. I thought the whole rockstar thing, the hairspray la metal scene was atrocious rockstar bullshit from go. I hated all of it, and that might be from a perspective that I picked up from being forged in the fire of punk rock where the whole notion was to reject these norms of fame and significance and the hierarchy of music. And it seemed to me that that music was elevating these people in the same exact same rockstar fashion that all of the people that punk reacted against were.

Speaker 2 (00:10:52):

It's hard to disagree with that

Speaker 3 (00:10:54):

Stylistically music. I hated the music. I genuinely can't think of worse music than that LA hair metal stuff. I genuinely can't think of a worse music or a music that I respond to less. Let's be in the most charitable about it. I cannot think of music that means less to me or that I would be more comfortable openly mocking than that kind of preening rockstar bullshit. For me. It's ska. Yeah, ska at least comes from somewhere. Scott comes from the party music of Jamaicans in the 1960s, and I think that that music, the roots of that music are fucking amazing.

Speaker 2 (00:11:33):

So what I think is great though is that regardless of your opinion on certain artists or certain genres, you're not trying to take that away from anybody.

Speaker 3 (00:11:44):

Exactly. My point being that you were animated by music, by this music that I consider trash, but your enthusiasm for music is no different than mine. And the aesthetic fingerprints of that music that first gripped you are going to be in you in the same way that the music that first gripped me has imprinted itself on me, and your experience with music is just as legitimate mine. Where we differ is on which things we like and don't like, and that to me seems like a trivial detail.

Speaker 2 (00:12:17):

It is a very trivial detail. Why do you think that so many people try to make it a non-trivial detail?

Speaker 3 (00:12:24):

Well, it's the one way that they can stake out their identity. I'm the guy that likes this, this, and this, and you're the people that like this, this and this, and that creates a tension between us and I can either enjoy or bristle at that tension, but that's where the tension comes from. It's like they say a difference of opinion makes a horse race. My life straddles a lot of different communities in a band. I run a business, I am recording engineer, I'm a poker player, so I cross paths with all different kinds of people and in the poker playing and gambling community, when people have a difference of opinion, they just bet on it and one or the other of 'em is right and wins the money. It's a very rational way to resolve these arguments. You think it's this, I think it's that. Let's put a thousand bucks on it and we'll go find out. I think that's a perfectly reasonable approach to resolving these things. You can't do it obviously with the taste in music, with taste in music, but you could certainly do it with things like how many people have climbed Mount Everest? I have a guess. You have a guess. Let's see which one of us is right.

Speaker 2 (00:13:33):

Do you think that the approach to music should be boiled down to those types of questions, at least between people? I

Speaker 3 (00:13:41):

Think everybody should just wallow in whatever they enjoy. They're your ears. You're only going to be around so long. You should indulge yourself, listen to what you want to listen to. When I was younger, I was very aggressive about trying to find new things to latch onto and stimulate me. I felt like I was learning and growing. Every time I discovered a new band or a new kind of music or whatever, I felt like that was a big developmental step for me, right? Educational step, developmental step. Then as I matured and I started carrying on with my life beyond just being a fan of music, but actually having to earn a living and cover my mortgage and then eventually run a business and pay my employees and be responsible for bigger and bigger things, then my experience with music has become more passive just because I simply don't have the time or the energy to go out and investigate things on aggressively.

(00:14:37):

But I do as a very nice perk of my profession. I do have new music coming in the front door every day, so I'm constantly exposed to a stream of new original music from people and constantly I'm embedded in the community of musicians. So I hear their conversations. I'm influenced by their tastes. I'm influenced by the things that they're listening to and they're talking about, and the key for me is in this passive situation for me to be open and appreciative when I discover new things as opposed to me being defensive of that territory that I described earlier where I like this, this and this, and that's my can and I'm not going to step out of it. I feel like every time I stumble across something new that stimulates me, still elevates my character, it still educates me a little bit, makes me a little more open-minded, enriches my life. So I am trying to be grateful for being exposed to new music all the time.

Speaker 2 (00:15:42):

So out of curiosity, you were talking about having to do bigger and bigger things, and earlier you definitely talked about the rockstar bullshit from la. So one thing that I've always been curious about because I've followed your career and you've been very outspoken about things that you think are bullshit and things that you don't think are bullshit. I know that when a lot of people experience success in something that they've been working on a long time, they get there and they think that's all it was. Like this is empty. Out of curiosity, when your record started to get pretty fucking big, were you stoked about it or did you not care? Is it one of those things where you got there and you're like, this is empty, or did you not even care in the first place about them doing that? You're just making music and then what happens happens afterwards?

Speaker 3 (00:16:40):

Yeah. What you're describing, this emptiness is a result of being goal focused, goal oriented in your life. I want to achieve a certain thing. Then once you achieve that thing and you're holding it in your hand, the guiding force in your life, the striving toward that goal gone, and you have nothing to focus your attention on because you did the one thing that you've been sort of obsessed with, is now satisfied that one craving is now satisfied and you don't have anything else. My approach has always been to be part of a process and appreciate the process, and along the way you make records and play shows and you receive some benefit from those. You get paid for the shows and the records and eventually some other people will like your music and that sort of thing. But what I'm doing is an everyday thing.

(00:17:36):

What I'm doing is getting up every morning and carrying on with a continuum, a spectrum of activities that are in total intended to enrich my life, the culture, the world at large. I'm trying to make things better, right? Goal, I mean that's the ultimate rationale for the process is I'm trying to make things better. So if you're involved in a process like that, then when things happen along the way, you can take note of them, you can bask in them for the moment. You can appreciate them, but you're still in the process. You keep going, you keep doing it, and I think that's the difference between wanting to have achieved something and wanting to be engaged continuously in a creative process, which is the way I've always looked at it.

Speaker 2 (00:18:28):

So do you think of the success more as just a gauge that maybe you are making things better?

Speaker 3 (00:18:35):

It's an external consideration and I genuinely don't care. I honestly can't tell you how many records any of my bands have sold. I can't tell you how much money I've made. I genuinely don't know if I have any records that I've worked on. Well, that's not true. I know that for sure that one record I've worked on has been nominated for a Grammy. There may be others, but I don't know because I've just never checked. All of those things are signifiers of external approval and they don't matter to the process. I'm going to keep doing this no matter what.

Speaker 2 (00:19:11):

They don't matter to the process and not just that. If your self-worth hinges on that, then what happens the moment that that stuff goes away? It's disastrous. Can be,

Speaker 3 (00:19:21):

Yeah. I don't know exactly how to gauge my success as an engineer. I know I've had good and bad years in terms of income, and I know that some of my better years in terms of income, I felt like creatively there wasn't that much going on in those years. And then some of the years where I was the most engaged, where I was the most in the moment, excited about everything that I was doing, some of those years I didn't earn that much. So I think that's a terrible gauge of my success or progress in music.

(00:20:00):

For me, I'm doing it every day and ideally I'm too busy to take note of what other people have to say about it. But you do cross paths with it. You do hear it, and I guess it can be enlightening like every now and again, you'll hear something critical where someone will say something about your working methods or about your creative output or whatever, and that's an excuse or that's a reason for you to investigate and interrogate those things and see if maybe you've overlooked something. If somebody else notices something about your work or your behavior, it's worth just doing a quick check to make sure that you're still the person you thought you were, but I just don't care what other people have to say about what I do.

Speaker 2 (00:20:50):

So how do you internally then know that you are successful at this pursuit? What's the gauge for you?

Speaker 3 (00:20:58):

The gauge for me is that I get to keep doing it.

Speaker 2 (00:21:00):

Makes sense. I

Speaker 3 (00:21:01):

Started dragging a four track from practice space to practice space to record my friends' bands as demo tapes, and then eventually I had a home studio, and then eventually I had enough work as an engineer that I could quit my job. So those were all steps along the way toward me being embedded in the music community. As an engineer studio guy, when I quit my job, I knew that I had enough work to keep me busy for the next several months, like three to four months. So I wasn't certain that I'd be able to make a career out of it, but I knew that for the next three or four months I'd be okay and if I needed to, I could go back and get my old job or I could get another job, whatever. I could get a job if I needed to. And it just turns out that I've never needed to.

(00:21:51):

But at the time, I was more than willing to just pack it all in and say, well, yeah, didn't work out. I guess I go back to being a working stiff. That didn't seem like a failure to me. That just seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to approach things. Now, I mean, I've got this big fucking studio that I built and all the money I'll ever make is tied up in this enterprise. So I'm much more vested in the survival of electrical audio as a studio than I ever was vested in my own personal independence as an engineer. And there's a staff of people that work here that I love. They're guys that I would take a bullet for, and I don't want this to fail and leave them at sea. I want it to continue. I want it to become a permanent institution that every musician from now until the sun dies can count on as a resource. That's the ideal. That's the goal. I can't ensure that. So all I can do is just keep going, just keep the process working. I know that we treat our clients well. I know that we give them value for their money. I know that we do a good job for people, and you just try hard every day and that's all you can do.

Speaker 2 (00:22:59):

Do you think that, I guess the same switch in your head that allowed you to leave the job with only three months of guaranteed work is kind of the same thing that allows you to play poker? I

Speaker 3 (00:23:11):

Mean, you do have to be able to evaluate the risk of a situation versus the reward of it. I tend not to draw parallels between the different sort of magisterial of my life. I don't think that playing in a band is anything like running a business, running a session, running a recording studio or playing cards, and I don't think that playing cards is anything like being in a band or running a studio. They're distinct enterprises, they're distinct things, and I try not to draw any cross references between them because I don't think that they're valid.

Speaker 2 (00:23:50):

So the propensity towards risk, even if both enterprises require a propensity towards risk or a tolerance towards it, it's different. It's

Speaker 3 (00:23:59):

Completely different stakes. For example, if I'm playing cards for money, I have a bankroll that I use for poker that determines what stakes I can play that determine whether I'm winning or losing, determines whether I need to move up in stakes or move down in stakes, or whether I need to stop playing for a while and work on my game, do some study. But that's a sequestered amount of money in my poker bank role that doesn't affect the rest of my life. I take profits out of that bank role and use that to live my life, but it doesn't interact with the rest of my life. I guess the best example is in poker playing. I'm trying to be inscrutable. I want no one to know what I'm thinking while I'm playing. I would like the other players at the table not to pay any attention to me whatsoever so that I can use deception and perception, like I can figure out what they're trying to do and thwart it, and I can prevent them from figuring out what I want to do so that I can execute it right in a session.

(00:25:13):

For example, I'm trying to be completely open about everything. I have no secret methods. Anybody who wants to can run up and play with the faders on the console. I'm not trying to be secretive or deceptive or inscrutable. I want everyone to know what the process is and what I'm doing precisely and why. And if somebody asks me a question in a session, I just answer it. If I want to know what somebody else is thinking, I'll ask them and I assume that they're telling me the truth. Now that's diametrically opposed to my behavior at a poker table

Speaker 2 (00:25:50):

Could be any more different.

Speaker 3 (00:25:51):

So I think it's extremely dangerous to draw parallels or try to make any kind of correlation between that kind of behavior and this kind of behavior. They're different things.

Speaker 2 (00:26:04):

It's interesting that you say that just because I think so many people do try to draw parallels between every single different thing that they do.

Speaker 3 (00:26:14):

Yeah, I mean, another obvious example is I'm in a band and my band has perfect freedom to make whatever kind of music we want. So we make the music that suits us. We make a somewhat perverse rock music. When I'm in the studio working for another band, my aesthetics, the kind of things that I like don't come into play at all and they shouldn't. So when that band is working on their music in the studio and I'm in charge of the session, they should feel free to make whatever perverse kind of music they want to make without worrying about whether or not it pleases me without worrying about whether or not it suits my tastes. So imagine I'm in a session with a band of people who came of age at a time when their aesthetic was formed by having Guns N Roses as their favorite band. That's their archetype. That's what they want to emulate with their music. On a professional level, it shouldn't matter that that music doesn't speak to me. I should still be able to do a good job on that session. I should still be able to knock it out for them, and it should never cross their minds. Whether or not I was a fan of Guns N Roses, that whole thing shouldn't even be part of the game.

Speaker 2 (00:27:30):

So do you consider yourself more of a conduit for their vision?

Speaker 3 (00:27:35):

I'm just a facilitator, like literally, I'm a facilitator. When a band comes into the studio here, they can expect to be treated with care. They can expect their music to be taken seriously and their aesthetic to be taken seriously. They can expect everyone who works here to try to satisfy whatever their aesthetic is. They should not be concerned about whether or not they're the right kind of band to record here with us because we should be able to do anything.

Speaker 2 (00:28:04):

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Members also get access to one-on-ones, which are basically office hour sessions with us and Mix Rescue, which is where we open up one of your mixes and fix it up and talk you through exactly what we're doing at every step. So if any of that sounds interesting to you, if you're ready to level up your mixing skills in your audio career, head over to M Academy to find out more, where does your decision-making come in to the situation? I mean, none of us are truly impartial or a hundred percent objective with anything that we do. We're still going through our own filters. So there has to be some degree no matter how small, some degree of you in your decisions. So how do you balance that or how do you gauge that or how do you define that?

Speaker 3 (00:30:41):

The main thing that I have is experience. So if a band can articulate a sound that they're looking for, I likely know how to execute that sound. I likely know how to make it happen. Or if the band is having a problem with something, I may very well have a solution to that problem just based on time on task, just based in the fact that I've made a shit million records and I have already had this problem that you're having right now. I've had that problem a thousand times and I've had to solve that problem a thousand times. So that's what I bring into a session and where my choices come in are in the initial starting point for a lot of things, like the band isn't necessarily going to have a preference for bass drum microphones, but I definitely have a preference for base drum microphones, and then when the band hear it, if there's something unsatisfying about it, then I have a reason to change away from my preferences.

(00:31:44):

I have a routine where I can get microphones up on a session and get things started without having to grill them about every detail. But every session starts with a conversation like, what kind of music are you playing? What's your, give me broad strokes of your aesthetic? Who are some bands that you emulate or that you admire? Do you have reference material you want to play me? All of those things happen at the beginning of the session before we do anything irrevocable in the session. Another expression of my tastes is the fact that we're in this studio that was built by me and my friends to satisfy what I thought was an ideal environment for making records. So they, they're in an environment that I built to make records to suit me.

Speaker 2 (00:32:30):

What is the process when the band's aesthetic is something that is completely foreign to you?

Speaker 3 (00:32:37):

That's an opportunity for me to learn. I take the sounds as they are. This happens all the time. There will be a band that has equipment that's unfamiliar to me. I don't know anything about this gear from memory. I wouldn't have the experience of recording this particular homemade instrument or whatever. So the first step is to just listen to it and see what it sounds like and see it, use your sense memory of the relationship that the sound has to microphones to pick out some microphones to capture it. And then you try to be as faithful as you can to what was happening in the room so that the band gets to hear things pretty much as they were, and then they can tell you from there what you got wrong. I love it when there's some freakish music that shows up that I've never heard before that I don't know anything about, because chances are there's a story for how the music got to be that way. And chances are that there's a whole scene of that kind of music that I don't know anything about, and I have an opportunity to learn about it.

Speaker 2 (00:33:34):

So how much direction are you willing to give a band or if there is any direction, how does

Speaker 3 (00:33:41):

That work? Essentially? No direction in that term. I ask a lot of questions, are you happy with that? Do you want to move on? Did you want to try that again? Or if I notice some irregularity, I'll say, I noticed this thing. This sounded weird. Let me play it for you and you tell me if you want to fix it or not. That sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (00:33:59):

So in some ways, it's almost a prerequisite, correct me if I'm wrong, almost a prerequisite that a band coming to you should have a very defined vision of what they're going for.

Speaker 3 (00:34:09):

Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine spending the money to come into a recording studio if you don't know what you want to make. That seems like a fairly obvious thing. You've been working on this band for some time. You've been rehearsing, you've been playing some kind of music, presumably you know what that is and what it should sound like. And so I take you at your word that that's what you want it to sound like, and I'll help you do it.

Speaker 2 (00:34:34):

I guess what I mean is I know lots of mixers, for instance, will get tracks to mix, and the instructions are do your thing, for instance, just whatever that means. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:34:46):

I'm not specifically a mixer and I don't have a thing.

Speaker 2 (00:34:49):

So if a band comes to you and says, we just want you to do your thing. I mean, maybe that never happens.

Speaker 3 (00:34:55):

It's literally never happened. But I rarely mix other people's recordings during the pandemic when people can't come into the studio and they're doing a lot more stuff at remotely. I've taken on more mix only projects, pre pandemic. It was extremely rare. I maybe would do one every two or three years where there would be something that I would just mix for somebody. But now I'd say it's maybe 15% of my work. It's critical for me that the people who made the music be there or be linked up and communicating with me the whole time, telling me what I'm getting right and what I'm getting wrong, describing their aesthetic, describing what they want things to sound like, describing the relative significance of different elements in the mix. I'm not going to know what this odd overdub is for unless somebody tells me. So it's incumbent on me to find out what they were shooting for when they put that weird overdub on tape.

Speaker 2 (00:35:46):

In your formative years, did you ever have an experience as a musician going to a studio, or what came first you recording or you being a musician?

Speaker 3 (00:35:58):

I was just in informal bands with my friends. And then when I moved to Chicago, I sort of insinuated myself into the punk scene here, the underground music scene, and was doing all of my recording on borrowed four tracks, that sort of thing. I didn't get into a proper studio until sometime in the 1980s, the early 1980s. I was able to, I recorded the first big black record in my apartment, but I mixed it at a proper studio because that seemed like having a good listening environment seemed important at that stage. So all the recording was done just plugging things in and listening on headphones and hoping it sounded good. And then when we got to the studio to mix it, I was able to figure out what things actually sounded like. After that, I developed a relationship with that studio and a few other studios where I could bring bands in that were going to record a demo or something, or a single or something. And I would sort of mediate between the staff at the studio and the band because I was familiar with their music and I was familiar with their aesthetic,

(00:37:11):

But I wasn't technically skilled enough to conduct a session by myself. And that lasted for about a year, and then I started doing sessions on my own. And then by the time Big Black was recording its last record, I bought enough equipment to build a studio and my home studio, that was the beginning of me owning a recording studio. So that would've been the end of the eighties, 19 86, 19 87 I think is when I bought all the gear that we used to record the last Big Black album.

Speaker 2 (00:37:41):

Got it. The reason I was wondering was because I know for example, that a lot of the prominent metal producers started because they went to studios in the eighties or nineties or whatever with their bands and Nice studio, of course, but the staff didn't know a fucking thing about the genre or the aesthetic or anything, and they got sick of wasting money on things that were going to come out sounding wrong. And so people just decided, I'm going to learn how to do this. And then little by little, they would record metal bands who also got sick of going to studios, and one thing led to another. And

Speaker 3 (00:38:29):

Yeah, I mean, that's a very parallel development with the underground music scene, the punk music scene. A lot of the other, in every town during the eighties, there was a guy who made himself available to the local underground scene to do recording for those bands, partially as a way of participating in the music scene. And in Chicago, I was one of those guys in Minneapolis, there was a guy named Brian Paulson who did the same thing. He was a band member. He played in bands, he was a guy on the scene, but he also bought some equipment and started putting a studio together and finagled ways, creative ways for bands to make records with limited resources as a way of making himself a resource for that community. In Madison, Wisconsin, you had Butch Vig who eventually started Smart Studios and then became a world famous producer.

(00:39:28):

There was a guy like that in every town, and I happened to be one of, there were a couple of guys in Chicago, there was a guy named Ian Burgess who was at it before me. There was a guy named Brad Wood who started a few years after me, and then there was a guy named Chuck Tita who specialized in the hardcore scene in Chicago, and then there were equivalents in other subcultures as well. That's a very common thing is if you're embedded in a musical community, you understand it, you know what they like and don't like, you know what their needs are, so you're going to be more sympathetic in the studio to them than someone who comes from an advertising jingle background or a pop music background or whatever.

Speaker 2 (00:40:08):

I think that it's not so much of an issue anymore now that people can record at home and they can learn how to do it through the internet to a degree, but especially in the eighties and nineties, those guys in every town, were the only solution for bands from subcultures, basically.

Speaker 3 (00:40:26):

Yeah, and I mean, I think that's a healthy and normal part of the development of any scene is that you have the people playing the music, but there's a greater support network that needs to grow around those people in order to enable that. So you need places to play. You need venues, you need promoters who are willing to risk their own money to set up shows that might not break even. You need people who are willing to invest in making and selling records so that you have some documentation of it. And Chicago had those things in fits and starts, but that's also true. That's true everywhere, every town there was some version of all of those different elements

Speaker 2 (00:41:16):

Mean there had to be. So speaking of, you were talking about the support network. Some people could say that that is basically another word for music industry, but you were saying in your 2014 faced the music keynote speech that you were satisfied and optimistic about the state of the music industry as a whole.

Speaker 3 (00:41:38):

I don't like using the term industry because that implies a kind of formal structure. I much prefer using the term seen because that's the way I always thought of it as a loose network of people like independent promoters, venues, faning people. In this day and age, it would be people who have enthusiast websites and support websites, everything from guitar shops and coffee shops to people who will book tours for their friends' bands. And there's an extraordinary number of different roles for people to fill, and that's what I think of when I think of the music scene. I don't think of companies and their share price, which is what I think of when I think of the music industry. Fair

Speaker 2 (00:42:25):

Enough. So let's just say music scene, but you mentioned that you were optimistic about the state of things back then. Do you still feel optimistic about the state of things?

Speaker 3 (00:42:36):

I mean, the resilience that the music scene has displayed during the quarantine has been kind of incredible.

(00:42:43):

The way people have, my band basically ceased functioning. We were in the middle of a tour when COVID got really bad and cities started closing down, so we just shut it down. It was like said, fuck it. Let's not do this right now. And we just went home and we haven't been in the same room since. So that's over a year now since we've all been in the same room. And so my band just hasn't functioned. We've done some Zoom chats and we've kept up on our email correspondence and stuff, but we haven't made any music. But other people have been doing wood shedding projects where they made records at home, solo records or records by correspondence where they've done stuff as a kind of chain letter between different musicians that admire each other. So the resilience of the music community is incredible when you see how people have managed to survive through all of this. So that makes me slightly optimistic, and I feel like some form of a live music scene has to come back, and when it does, the whole rest of the music scene should revive behind it.

Speaker 2 (00:43:56):

I've been talking to people who mostly mix, they have been telling me that their workloads have exploded in the past month, two months, because all these records that were postponed, postponed, postponed, postponed. Now everybody wants them done. Now there's hard deadlines because now everybody has a tour coming up or in the works. So I definitely think at least maybe I'm overly optimistic, I think it's going to be an explosion pretty soon here.

Speaker 3 (00:44:31):

Yeah, I mean, that would be great, would be, I've been busy and I've been broke, and I much prefer busy.

Speaker 2 (00:44:40):

Busy is definitely better. So on a different topic, you said that I'm going to quote, the key to excellence as an engineer is a comprehensive knowledge of your tools and went on to say that if someone walks into your studio and points to any knob or slider on any piece of equipment, that you can give them a detailed explanation of what it does. I'm just curious, how do you feel that that level of mastery has been diluted in more recent years, or has it been diluted? Has it just transformed?

Speaker 3 (00:45:10):

I said that in response to a question about the difference between recording digitally and recording in an analog environment. In an analog environment. The engineer's proficiency depends on him being able to use all of the tools at his disposal expertly in a digital environment, the absolute best, most, the guru of pro tools, like the guy that is the deepest into it of anybody has ever been on earth, I guarantee you, I can find something in his system that he's never touched, doesn't know anything about and couldn't tell me what it does. I guarantee you that's true, and every time I observe a digital session, I see an engineer pull up something that they've never used before and try to figure out what this slider means.

Speaker 2 (00:45:58):

I know you're absolutely right, because when I had to learn pro tools for, I got my, I would say my first real studio job. I had been recording the basement for a long time, but I had to learn pro tools for a big upgrade career wise. And so I decided I was going to take Pro Tools certification where they try to give you a broad look at everything, and it seemed like a big waste of time because then when I got to the studio, I didn't know the things that they actually needed me to know. So they sent me to somebody who could just tutor me for five days on the 5% of pro tools that were going to be used

Speaker 3 (00:46:41):

95%

Speaker 2 (00:46:42):

Of the time.

Speaker 3 (00:46:43):

That's the thing about digital systems is that they're so unfathomably complex that absolutely no one is an expert on them. There are people who can use the range of tools that they use on a daily basis. They can get the most out of those tools, and occasionally they incorporate something for a specific problem, but they have to go down a learning path to figure out how to incorporate that new tool to solve this specific problem. In the analog world, all of these things have been around for a very long time, and they're all known quantities. I know what they all do, and I know when one of them is germane to a problem that we're having. So I think that's the key difference between an excellent analog engineer and an excellent digital engineer, is an excellent digital engineer, is kind of winging it a lot of the time, but is familiar and comfortable enough with that environment that winging it doesn't seem like a fraud winging, it seems like you're still trying to get the work done. You're still trying to solve the problem in an analog environment. You either know what you're doing or you don't.

Speaker 2 (00:47:51):

It's almost with the digital environment winging it successfully comes from a background of understanding how software works, though understanding the capabilities of software and that having a mind for the types of things you could possibly do. I don't think it's haphazard.

Speaker 3 (00:48:07):

No, no, no, no. It's not haphazard. But if you open up a new plugin that you've never seen the interface for, you open that plugin and it presents you with a bunch of terms that you've never encountered before, and there are default values and you don't know what the range of those values is like, okay, I've just opened this new equalizer and it's given me, there's a slider here for focus, like what's a nominal focus value 50 10,000? What does focus mean? Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:48:40):

What does this even mean?

Speaker 3 (00:48:41):

And is there a way that I can make it so there's no focus? So I don't even have to fucking think about the focus slider. That's my point is that digital tools are built in a way that if you learn that tool, you can be an expert at that tool, but as a system, as an integrated system, it's extremely difficult. No one has a comprehensive knowledge of every single thing in his pro tool system. Literally no one does that.

Speaker 2 (00:49:14):

Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 3 (00:49:15):

So I'm just saying the scale of it is so different. The scale of a studio is quite manageable. I'm going to be dealing with maximum 24 tracks, and if they need more sounds than that, I finagle a way to fit more than that onto 24 tracks. It's rare that a digital session comes in with as few as 24 tracks. The difference is that an analog system is all comprehensible and it's all manageable with two hands and a relatively small physical layout. A digital setup is in a limitless virtual world where you can have 10,000 11, 76 s active on your virtual studio, whereas it would take you a very long time to adjust 10,000 physical 1170 sixes.

Speaker 2 (00:50:06):

It sure would. The thing that I've noticed with the most efficient pro tool operators or DAW operators, the guys that just churn out amazing work fast year after year, is they have imposed some sort of limitations on themselves. They get their process down to a T, but what's interesting about it is that their process is not dictated to them by somebody else or the physical rules of the environment. It's something that they came to on their own by figuring out a collection of key commands, shortcuts, templates, like all this stuff that they've hot rotted it.

Speaker 3 (00:50:47):

That's what makes a good engineer. Yeah, a good engineer adapts their setup, adapts their working methods so they can work efficiently so that they are in a familiar environment, and so they can get results quickly without having to learn things on the fly. In the digital paradigm though, there is an inevitable amount of learning on the fly whenever you encounter something that you've never dealt with before. Whereas I can go into any studio in the world and see any tape machine in the world, tape machines I've never seen before, and I know how they work and any mixing desk anywhere in the world, I know how it works.

Speaker 2 (00:51:22):

Now. Do you think that for people who came up exclusively into the digital environment that this is a disadvantage?

Speaker 3 (00:51:30):

No, it's a different working method, and I think they are as different. Digital recording is as different from analog recording as painting is from photography. They're just completely different exercises.

Speaker 2 (00:51:46):

The thing that bothers me about the whole digital versus analog thing is I've thought for a long time that it doesn't fucking matter. And kind of going back to what we started this conversation with about everybody loving music relative to when it imprinted their minds and forming their own sensibilities, how you create music is sort of the same thing. You grow up in a time period where there are certain tools available to you, and you learn how to work with those tools and you make the best of them and you do your thing. And

Speaker 3 (00:52:23):

I

Speaker 2 (00:52:23):

Don't think that there's a validity to one way or another, and even though we have been talking about it, I think it's a waste of time for people to worry about it too much.

Speaker 3 (00:52:31):

Well, I disagree fundamentally that there's no difference. Obviously, I've maintained working as an analog engineer because I think there's a critical difference, and the critical difference is the permanence of the recorded masters. I know that I can record a master tape for someone and put it in a box and put that box on a shelf and come back in a hundred years and take that box off the shelf, and I can play that tape and get that music off and resurrect the session completely. I know that because I do it every day, not every day, but regularly. We get tapes that are 40, 30, 40, 50 years old, and it's a trivial process to get the music off of them. So that for me, that's the reason that I maintain working as an analog engineer. I feel a heavy obligation to the bands that I work with, to the people that are depending on me to make their life's work survive and outlive them.

(00:53:31):

And that obligation can only be satisfied by making analog masters in the digital world. There's no equivalent to putting something on a shelf and taking it down off the shelf in a hundred years and being able to play it. And so I've thought about this essentially my entire career because my career when I started making records was at the very dawn of the digital era, and I recognized all of these problems like, oh, you've got this proprietary setup here. What's going to happen in a hundred years when someone tries to play back this tape that there are only three machines on earth that can play it back Now, do you think any of those three machines on earth are going to be available in a hundred years? No, of course not. That makes that a non-permanent solution and the way the computer industry operates, computers change so much from era to era that you cannot expect a future computer to be able to do anything with a session that you've got now that conforms to the norms and demands of a computer of contemporary design, and we're already seeing this. We are already seeing that early digital sessions are irretrievably lost while analog tapes that were made 10 years before that you can just string 'em up and play 'em. No problem.

Speaker 2 (00:54:51):

Oh, I've experienced this. You're absolutely right.

Speaker 3 (00:54:53):

So from just from a historical perspective, I would like my friend's music to survive. I don't particularly care that Taylor Swift's music won't survive, or that I don't particularly care that pop music won't survive. Guns, n roses won't survive. It doesn't particularly bother me that that will disappear. But my friends' bands and the bands that hire me to work on their records, I have an obligation to them. I want their music to survive. I want the future to know what our music sounded like, and there's no way to ensure that other than using a mature format that is open, that is not proprietary and where everyone can have access to it.

Speaker 2 (00:55:41):

What about the degradation of tape?

Speaker 3 (00:55:44):

I routinely work on tapes that are 20, 30 years old and the sound does not degrade. What happens is that some formulas of tape become sticky in storage, and they need to be baked before you can use them, but once you bake them, you can use them like normal.

Speaker 2 (00:56:02):

Got it.

Speaker 3 (00:56:03):

And when I say bake, I mean they need to be dehydrated, and you dehydrate them by putting 'em in an oven at a low temperature, and that drives the water molecules out of the tape binder, and then you can play them like normal.

Speaker 2 (00:56:12):

So that's kind of a myth then that over time they degrade because a lot of people do think that.

Speaker 3 (00:56:18):

Yeah, I mean, a lot of people think they have a lucky number as well. Yeah, tape does not degrade in the box. The sound will be there. You may have some trouble getting it off if the tapes have been mistreated, if they've been in a flood or something. But we do a lot of archive work here, so we're regular. Just yesterday, we got a reel tape from a guy from 30 years ago, and he wants us to make a transfer of the multi-track because he wants to work on his music again. Now that he's got time on his hands, he's retired now. He has time on his hands. He wants to work on his music again. So we got a reel tape in the other day, and we're expecting to get a couple of dozen reels in today from another client that we're doing a restoration project for, an archival project for, we do it all the time. It's a significant part of our business now is taking other people's old tapes and transferring them to a digital format for convenience. It's extremely rare that we have a tape that we can't recover the music from. Extremely rare. I can only think of one or two instances over the lifespan of the studio where that's happened.

Speaker 2 (00:57:30):

That right there is the most compelling reason I've heard so far.

Speaker 3 (00:57:33):

It's literally the only reason for me, literally the only reason. It would be so much easier if I didn't have to maintain this big fucking studio and all these machines and I didn't have to pay for tape and yada yada. It would be so much easier if I could just default to doing things in a digital paradigm. And the majority of sessions that are done in our studio that I'm not on, the other staff members, they principally work digitally. Everyone can work in the analog domain, but most of their sessions are digital sessions. And when we have visiting engineers, the majority of the visiting engineers, their sessions are digital sessions. So I do feel a little bit like the last of the Mohicans here, but I haven't been wrong yet about this thing. And it concerns me that I may never be wrong. So I'm just going to carry on doing things in a way that I know is conservative toward the music and toward the future. I know that people will always be able to play the recordings that I make. That's enough for me.

Speaker 2 (00:58:33):

Well said. Well, Steve Albini, I want to thank you for taking the time to hang out. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Speaker 3 (00:58:40):

No problem.

Speaker 2 (00:58:41):

Well, that was cool. What an honor to get to talk to someone, Steve Albini. And you know what I really appreciated about this episode? He's known as a very outspoken person. Anyone who knows anything about him knows that. And as you heard on the episode, he is definitely outspoken. He is not afraid to say what he thinks, and I really respect that. And what I thought was especially cool was that he can tell you what he thinks, even if his opinion is different than yours and not be an asshole about it, which is very rare these days. And so I hope people listening picked up on that, that we were able to disagree about things and have a perfectly cool, awesome conversation. I hope that that's possible for those of you listening in your lives, and I wish there was more of that in this world.

(00:59:40):

Guns N Roses was not my favorite band. I don't think they were hair or metal. I don't think that they were the worst thing to ever happen to music on the planet. We don't agree on lots of stuff, but so who cares? It doesn't matter. We still had a great conversation and I encourage all of you to try to have those kinds of conversations with people you disagree with. Alright, 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 and Instagram or any social media you use. Please tag me at al Levi URM audio at URM Academy, and of course, tag our guests as well. I mean, they really do appreciate it. In addition, do you have any questions for me about anything? Email them to [email protected]. That's EYAL. At M do acm y and use the subject line, answer me a. All right, then. Till next time, happy mixing.

Speaker 1 (01:00:40):

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.