Interview by Emmanuel Rivet / swer.net - November 2003


background...
I grew up in North-Eastern Colorado in a small town called Greeley. I moved to Los Angeles (with $500 to my name) in 1994 after graduating high school. I offered to work for free at a studio called Grandmaster Recorders in Hollywood, but they had to let me sleep in the lounge because I couldn't afford an apartment. I lived there for two years, and during that time I spent every waking moment in the control room teaching myself to be an engineer. I used to grab old 2" tapes out of the tape-vault and just mix them every way that I could imagine. There were Tool out-takes and some Rufus tapes from the 70's. During that time, Ben booked the place to make Fight For Your Mind.

Ben Harper...
So, I was the assistant engineer on Fight For Your Mind and we all just really hit it off. Had I not met Ben and JP, I probably would have moved back home that year. I was having a very hard time adjusting to Los Angeles, I was living in a pretty shady part of town and I really was thinking that I would be better off moving home and trying another line of work - not so much that I didn't enjoy the knob-twisting nature of the gig immediately, but more that I really was having trouble feeling comfortable in a huge city like LA - and I was dirt poor and living entirely on $0.99 hamburgers. I was so moved by Fight For Your Mind musically and by the gentle process that we made that album that I felt really clear (for the first time) that I was on the right path.

the way of recording...
My approach to recording, in general, is this: The recording studio is one of the most challenging spaces on the planet for an artist to be creative in. Now more than ever, artists are taking on the responsibility of buying and maintaining their own equipment (which is no fun) while still trying to be creative on their instruments. I try to be a buffer between the art and the technology - the two sometimes don't coexist easily. If an artist is obsessing on the fact that the guitar doesn't sound right to them, you will never be able to get a performance that is what you are looking for. And if an artist also has to obsess on WHY the guitar doesn't sound right to them and try to remedy the situation, the energy that was once going to be a great performance is now spent trying to understand the technology. Nothing has happened. But, if an artist can be presented with an unlimited number of options of that guitar tone and simply find the one that IS right, or at least a step in the right direction, the creative flow can continue and no vibe has been lost. I try to never, ever have a conversation in the studio that involves reasons why something can't happen - or why something that doesn't feel right to everyone in the room IS right - it obviously isn't there yet. The studio is an entirely subjective world, there is no right and wrong for any reason except personal taste. The biggest thing, to me, is never drudging and artist down in to the world of cables and math and reasons that a certain overdub or an individual tone isn't feeling like anything short of magic. If it doesn't feel right, we need to keep looking. period. The true art of what a recording engineer does is not so much the way he or she turns a knob, but how intuitive you are about finding that day's concept of "right." And let's not be stupid, a great tone comes from an artist's fingers and hands. The knobs on a recording console do very little compared to the way a person plays an instrument in to a microphone. Ben's records sound really good because he has a way of projecting himself in to his songs, and a way of projecting each instrument into a microphone.

   acoustic guitars...
There are certain microphones that I have found to be better than others on certain guitars - but really, I avoid getting my mind too wrapped up in any concept of any "best" acoustic guitar mic. There is a short list of places to start, but recording instruments is a process of presenting options to the producer and band and finding what everyone seems to respond to. And once you find the mic that hears an instrument in a way that moves you, you realize that moving the mic 2cm makes you feel an entirely different thing, so you find the right spot - sometimes the mic is right up on the sound hole, sometimes it is across the room.

   electrified lap steels & related instruments
As always, it has far less to do with the microhone than it does of finding the right instrument. lap steels especially, they all sound so different.

   electric guitars
Same thing, I have a short list if mics that I start with on certain amps, but it always an open-minded listen and finding the right tone by trying whatever anyone thinks up.

   weissenborns
Weissenborns are absolutely stunning instruments. There is such a wide spread of harmonics jumping off of every note that it can be a little tricky to catch them all. It is a little like recording a piano, in that I really find myself walking out in to the room and listening to ben play again and again and going back in to the control room to be sure that i am capturing it fully. And, like a piano, you never really catch the whole sound but you can get pretty close.

recording soft songs / rock songs...
That is the next step in making the sound of an individual instrument speak within the context of it's song. Sparse arrangements, like "Ashes" lend themselves to much more open individual sounds. Scaled down arrangements allow each element to really absorb a wide range of frequencies, so you really just look for nice wide harmonic content and know that you won't be dealing with frequency collision in the mix because no other instruments are battling for that same spot in the frequency spectrum. And the songs that are far more dense with instruments, you start eq'ing the instruments so that their primary harmonics are speaking loud and clear, but you make sacrifices for the greater good of the other instruments so that everything can be heard.

On Fight For Your Mind and The Will To Live Ben plays and sings a good portion of the records very lightly, so you hear his breathing when he plays acoustic guitar and you hear his right hand moving on everything. I love that about those records!

recording different music styles...
Some records you have a single, big picture conversation about the sonic landscape across the whole album. On Ben's records, we sort of find the landscape or "center" of each song individually, and then (hopefully) the songs also add up to something sonically cohesive as an album with whatever finishing touches happen while mixing.

The Will To Live (album)
On The Will To Live we did a lot of recording both a microphone and a Sunrise pickup. When panned hard left and right (like on "Roses from My Friends") they create a really nice spread. I think I used a Roland Space Echo to delay the pickup very slightly to avoid phase cancellation and create a wider stereo image.

Diamonds On The Inside (album)
Diamonds On The Inside is a bold move in to elaborate arrangements for Ben. And again, as you add more and more instruments it absolutely changes the part that each instrument plays within a mix. Ben has gotten intensely good at making 3 or 4 overdubbed guitars speak as one sound, you probably couldn't guess how many guitars there are from song to song on Diamonds On The Inside because he has such a beautiful way of interweaving them.

When you jump in to the studio the first thing that you do is develop a vocabulary. Music is hard to talk about, sound is even harder to verbalize. So, Harvest - Axis:Bold As Love - Blood on the Tracks - Zep III - Smells Like Teen Spirit - Folk Singer - Songs in The Key of Life - the list goes on and on. And it never has anything to do with copping this drum sound or that reverb sound, but more just a general like-mindedness and a way to imagine and communicate a sound before hearing it.

Glory and Consequence (song)
note : Ben Harper used an electric guitar in the studio for the very first time.
That was a really magical moment. Ben wasn't intending on doing anything that we would keep, he and JP just wanted to try out his new Tele. And there it is, it felt like history when it was happening.

Homeless Child (song)
Homeless Child was recorded "normally" to 2" tape and sounded much like the sonics of "Ashes" but JP had the idea from the beginning of running the mix thru a fender champ guitar amp in mono. and that is just what we did.

When It’s Good (song)
Anyone reading this has already read or heard all about the box-of-rocks that leon is stomping on. Ben and Leon just laid that down one afternoon. The Vocal sound is one of a bunch of old crystal microphones that I have from the 30's.

Todd Burke's notable recordings

for Ben Harper...
1 - Fight For Your Mind, 1995 - Assistant engineer
2 - The Will To Live, 1997 - Record engineer
3 - Diamonds On The Inside, 2003 - Record engineer and mixer
4 - Live at the Hollywood Bowl DVD, 2003 - Mixer
5 - Waymore's Blues(I've Always Been Crazy, A Tribute To Waylon Jennings, 2003) - Record engineer and mixer
6 - Love Gonna Walk Out on Me (True Love, Toots and the Maytals, 2004) - Record engineer and mixer

for some other artists...
No Doubt (Tragic Kingdom, 1995) - Assistant engineer
Red Hot Chili Peppers (One Hot Minute, 1995) - Assistant engineer
Johnny Cash (Unchained, 1996) - Assistant engineer
Jack Johnson (Brushfire Fairytales, 2000) - Record engineer and mixer
Donnie Darko (movie soundtrack, 2000) - Record engineer and mixer
...

more info on www.toddburke.com