August, 2001:

As I entered the control room, the hall of fame singer was singing - perhaps making her latest hit record. I had mastered over a dozen of her hit records, but had never met her. It was good to see her in my studio recording and the tune sounded like it was good.

The hall of fame songwriter/producer was sitting behind the console, next to the engineer. I walked behind him and started massaging his shoulders. He turned and said, "Hi Bob," where I said, "Your tune, Brian?" As he answered in the affirmative, we greeted with a hug. Would this production be his hundredth hit? Could be.

The engineer had a premium vocal microphone feeding into a special outboard preamplifier-compressor and then into a 256 track Pro Tools system. The SSL console was being used to monitor the session. This was the first of 20 hours of vocal recording to be done on two tunes, during a week's break in a live tour.

No one was expecting a final vocal, in fact the singer was just learning the tune. Her voice could have used a day's rest from the hectic tour schedule but it would probably would be crystal clear by the session's end. A bigger factor was that the singer was learning exactly how the songwriter/producer wanted the song sung. The engineer had the CD with the demo singer on a CD cued up, in case the singer needed to hear it for a reference and she started cutting vocal tracks. With the magic of Pro Tools, they could keep each and every pass that the singer did on the tune. The objective that night was to get a "decent" track down that she could listen to before the final vocal session on the tune.

I just sat back and watched the session proceed. The producer was working on the singer's timing and phrasing and they progressed though the tune with a few stops and pickups of the recording. When, however, the modulation toward the end of the tune occurred the singer needed to hear the CD to review how the melody went. The producer asked the engineer to play the CD.

The Pro Tools screens are just left of the console and the engineer began entering track name data into the computer as the CD started playing. The producer put his head down in thought and the engineer's attention was at the computer screen. My attention was on the singer and the whole scene. I saw the singer look up from the lyrics and start to motion to the inattentative engineer, I knew she had a problem. I considered alerting the producer but decided that it wasn't my place to do so. After the CD was done, we found out that the engineer hadn't sent the CD to the headphone system and that the singer could only hear a faint echo of the CD in her headphones. Wasn't the playback primarily for her anyway?

They would up continuing the take because the singer had heard it well enough that they just resumed the take, but hey, wouldn't she had felt more comfortable if she had heard the CD properly?

The engineer is a good engineer and afterwards the production people were happy that they did the 20 hours of recording with him. The problem was that the engineer is used to recording "local" clients and just wasn't used to a recording job at this level (the "national" level). He had his priorities backwards. The priority of such a session is customer service and client comfort. This comes first, and then the sound, and you have to be good at both. Its a matter of being professional.

What the engineer should have done is something like: 1) Get the CD going. 2) Look to see that every one is smiling or comfortable. 3) Get on to other work (like logging the takes). When the engineer saw the singer's discomfort, he could have nudged the producer or got up from is seat and opened the door to the studio to find out what the situation was.

Actions like this is what will get you brownie points. The producer knows the sound wanted and will tell the engineer if the sound isn't right. Usually special effects or unusual sound quality will be brought up in mixing and the producer just wants a clean sound captured on the session. The sound engineering is important but not the top priority.