GC PRO ADVISORY BOARD: Eddie Kramer

What can I say about Mr. Kramer? He is synonymous with the history of Rock ‘n Roll. His passion and energy has not diminished one bit since he started making records over forty years ago. I have been fortunate enough to be in the studio with him on several occasions and his absolute love of music never ceases to amaze me.

This board's knobs should feel honored to be twiddled by Mr. Kramer. "I don’t give a crap what you recorded on. I don’t care. If the song’s great and the performance is great, it could be a hit. You and I can talk for hours about all the technical stuff with the digital, analog…who gives a crap? It’s the song, in the end, that sells it." Eddie relaxes behind the desk at Bernie Grundman Mastering... ...and then treats us to an air guitar performance of "Purple Haze" while the original analog master plays loudly in the background. Bernie smiles and Eddie clowns in front of Grundman's classic record lathe. This lathe has cut more great records than you can possibly imagine. Even if you have a great imagination. You can always tell you're in a cool studio if there's an old thing on wheels that you're scared to touch. A stylish lounge area at Bernie Grundman Mastering. Bernie and Eddie: it's a good thing guys like these are around. Otherwise, who would remember how to use that lathe?

GC Pro: We’re talking to Eddie Kramer at the legendary Bernie Grundman Mastering- EK: Now, I have a question for you (indicating interview recorder): is that analog or digital? GC Pro: (laughs) It’s actually analog. We’re going straight to tape. EK: I love it. GC Pro: First of all, I’m really excited to be here with you today. I took some photos (left) while you were dumping analog masters of Hendrix at Woodstock to super hi-res digital. What are you guys working on? EK: We’re working on a project for a company that does highly-specialized vinyl, 180-gram, top-of-the-line vinyl. The most quiet, the most sensational sounding vinyl you’ve ever heard. If you’ve ever heard a really good system with this kind of vinyl and this attention to detail, where we go back to the original analog master, you’ll be amazed at how punchy it is in comparison with any CD that you could play. Mike Hobson has this company called Classic Records. We’ve been doing this for a few years, and every couple of years we’ll get together and do Woodstock, or the Band of Gypsies or something like that. GC Pro: Is it Jimi’s entire performance from Woodstock? EK: It’s the entire performance from Woodstock, minus a few bits and pieces which…aren’t very good (laughs). But basically the whole thing. GC Pro: People are all familiar with your background with Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and Kiss, but what are some of the obscure things from early in your career? EK: Obscure things? Oh Lord! Um…oh! I can think of one that probably was the beginning of heavy metal. It was a band called Blue Cheer. They were one of the loudest bands in the world. They were so loud that we had to record them on a pier in New York, in the harbor. They had like ten Marshall cabinets each. It was stunningly loud. But if you look at the discography, on the web site www.kramerarchives.com, there’s a list of stuff. And it gets pretty silly. There are some very oddball things. Classical music. An artist by the name of Jobriath, who was the first sort of android crossover -- like a David Bowie but even more freaked out! There were some oddball things…Sir Lord Baltimore. I mean, I can go on and on. Go to the web site and you can see all kinds of crazy crap. GC Pro: Give us a brief history of you when you got into engineering in London, how you rose through the ranks as a house engineer and what led to this wild career that you’ve had. EK: Well I started off in England as a tea boy…"tea boy" being the schlepper, the gofer, whatever you want to call it. It literally meant you’d carry the tray of tea, ten hot steaming teas. "Me ‘ave more sugar in that, mate?" "Oh, a’right love." Right. And then they’d kick you out, and then you’d go and clean the toilets, or you’d run a message. So you really learn from the ground up. Fortunately, the guys who taught me were wonderful. They were some terrific engineers, some of the best engineers in England. I was fortunate enough to work with a guy named Bob Auger, who really kind of took me under his wing a bit, I guess. Since there were no engineering schools in those days…Berklee, Full Sail or anything like that…one would really learn by observation and by doing. In some ways, that’s probably a better education that one could get going to school. However, I will say this: for the time, it was perfect, because the technology wasn’t quite invented yet. As we were working, technology was improving so rapidly, and we were contributing to that development. The use of mono, initially, then stereo, then three-track, then four-track, then eight-track, then 12-track, then 16-track and so on. So we were part and parcel of that technological development as it came. So, for instance, in ’67, every time we worked with Hendrix we were recordoing onan Ampex four-track. We had to make do with the limited number of tracks, so obviously we had to be inventive in another way. The comparison between the U.S. way of recording in ‘67 and the English way, was that we had limited number of tracks. America had 8-tracks already; we didn’t. But our consoles were very advanced. We had the most advanced consoles in the world. When the American engineers came over to England, they’d freak out and say, "Wow, why don’t we have this in America?" Correspondingly, English engineers would go over to the States and say, "Wow! Eight track! I wish we had eight-tracks!". So there was this disparity, we used to admire American sounds. We used to die for American records to come over. We couldn’t wait to hear the latest Bob Dylan or whoever it was. "How the hell did they get that bass sound there?" We would spend hours analyzing American records. Fortunately, as I was saying, we had these very advanced consoles. The first board done by Dick Sweetenham, who started the company Helios, and had the first integrated, transistorized board where the module pull out and break down internally into other modules. When you looked at the console, it was everything that one could dream of. It’s basically the same as what we’re doing today, with a few modifications. There was echo send on six channels. There was multitrack switching. There was a lot going on. EQ, reverbs and 36 inputs, and the console was very elegant and ergonomically designed. So we had the edge, I think technologically, limited only by the number of tracks. So we had to figure out, "Alright. How the hell do you take four tracks and make them sound like eight?" Well, you’d record on the first four, and then dump those four onto two tracks, mix it down to two tracks on another four-track machine- GC Pro: In other words, commit to things… EK: Commit to things as you were doing it. EQ, compression, reverb, the whole thing. And then you’d fill up those two tracks and now you go back again to the first machine. So you went four-to-four-to-four. All the Hendrix stuff was done that way. Only by virtue of the fact that we had a great-sounding room, an amazing artist of course – that should come first – and a console that was capable of delivering very subtle – and not so subtle! -- EQ. GC Pro: And the signal routing necessary to do that. EK: Yeah. I mean, maybe it was a little noisy, but the tonal quality that came out was pretty amazing. So that was some of the technology that went on behind the scenes. We were farting around and experimenting. I was fortunate enough to work with the Beatles twice, and on one of the sessions, we asked George Martin, "How do you get that phasing sound?" He said, "Well," in his lovely, proper, British voice, "You chaps can look at the BBC Radiophonics Handbook from 1949 and you’ll find it in there." And it’s absolutely true. Sir George used to work at the BBC, and that’s how he got his background in technology. He would record a show called the Goon Show. It featured Peter Sellars, Spike Milligan and it was a comedy show. And he needed special effects for this half-hour show that he would do every week. This show became a huge hit all around the world, and I used to listen to it as a kid in South Africa and was amazed at the special effects. What Sir George would do would be to go to the radiophonics workshop which was a special wing of the BBC where all these guys in white coats with the pens, you know and the glasses and the beards and the hair standing up, the typical English boffin. And they would experiment with all kinds of shit. And he’s say, "Well, look, I need a backwards sound, or I need an XYZ sound, or a sped-up sound or slowed-down sound. And they’d come up with it and pre-tape it and give it to them, and they would slot it into the show. So they figured out how to do phasing. So cut to 1966 or ’67, when he’s doing phasing on the Beatles, and he pulled that out of the hat because he figured, "Ah! I know what they’re looking for!" GC Pro: That’s fascinating. EK: If you look at what the Beatles did, the thing they came up with, automatic double tracking, ADT, when you expand that idea it become phasing. What he had done with the Beatles, he had done it in mono, but we decided we wanted to do it in stereo. It had never been done in stereo before. So we experimented for a couple of weeks and we came up with this stereo phasing. Very tricky to do. Everything had to be spot-on perfectly aligned. And we brought Jimi into the studio one day and we were in the middle of doing "Axis", and we played him the portion of the song where you hear the drums going, "Ka-kang-kong-kong, ka-taka-taka-taka-taka-taka" and breaks into this enormous amount of phasing. He was sitting behind me, and I remember he freaked out! He lost his mind when he heard this phasing for the first time. He fell off the couch and was literally on the floor, writhing on the floor. He said, "Man, that was from my dream! How did you do that? You guys are out of your minds! Wow!" Jimi wanted to hear it on everything! So, this type of experimentation went on daily. We pushed the limits because there was nobody to tell us that it was wrong. One of the classic statements that his producer/manager Chas Chandler, who used to be the bass player in the Animals by the way, and discovered Jimi in America, what he used to say was "the rules are, there are no rules." GC Pro: Perfect. EK: And it’s so true for what we were doing. Jimi said, "I’m hearing this particular kind of sound." And I’d go, "Okay" and twiddle a few knobs and put some compression or EQ or reverb, or we’d try reverse reverb. More often than not, the sound would emanate from the studio in the sense that Jimi would be out there banging on the guitar, doing some kind of wacky shit with his guitar, and I’d go, "Wow, that sounds cool." And then I’d do something to the sound and improve upon it, and he would come in the control room and go, "Wow! That’s cool!" that would up the ante, so he’d want to top what I just did… It was cool because we got excited about the creative process. That’s the key element that can be missing from today’s music. I’m not saying it is in entirety, but it can be. GC Pro: It can get lost with the luxury of all the tracks, saving everything- EK: That’s the point. I mean…when your choices are few and far between, you have to make decisions that carry you through to the end. You hear a sound and go, "Ah! I know exactly what that should be." A lot of this has to do with making a commitment. Today, with the luxury of Pro Tools, you can end up with a hundred and God knows how many bloody tracks. Now what do you do? Alright, well that’s very nice, I’m glad you’ve got all these tracks… GC Pro: Let me ask you a question in that vein. The period of time your discussing is probably the height of that experimentation… EK: You’ve got me going on a roll, by the way. Sorry… GC Pro: …that’s okay, we love it! It’s one of the most exciting periods in the history of recording. You worked with some of the most influential artists and made some of the most amazing records of all time. Now today, in 2004, you’re still engineering and producing as much as ever. What is your perfect scenario these days in terms of the use of analog and digital? How do you use each medium? EK: What I’ll try and do in today’s recording sessions is marry the two technologies. That is a way to get the very, very best out of the analog world and out of the digital world, and try and lock those two together. Have them complement each other. I think that for me and a lot of other producers out there, cutting analog, tracking to tape is the way to go, because as good as Pro Tools or any of the digital mediums are for storage of the actual signal, I still don’t feel that it has the necessary warmth or punch. The fact that I use vintage gear…I like to use vintage Neve consoles where possible, lots of tube gear, tube preamps, tube equalizers, tube limiters, tube microphones, great dynamic mics, great ribbon mics. Yet, if you look at the gear that I use, it’s a broad cross-section. It’s Shure microphones for the most part, including the newest stuff that I’ve helped them design. The 141, the KSM-32, the KSM-44, the SM91s and 98s, the 52s, the 56, that entire range…that’s my drum sound right there. And then I’ll fill in with two 47s, or C-24s. It’s a mixture of old and new. That’s my philosophy, mix old and new. If you can do that, I think you come up with a really big, fat sound. I record at 15ips, Dolby SR, 24-track or 16-track depending on what the budget’s like. Now I’ve got all this big, fat sound on tape. What do I do with it? Now we’re going to go into the digital world. But the steps you have to take in order to get that analog tape to sound good in the digital world… One: the most important thing is to have the best A/D converters that money can buy. Now the HD system in Pro Tools is very good, but there are some alternatives too. Apparently, our friends at Apogee have come up with this thing that will bypass the electronics of the HD system which allows you to use Apogee or some other kind of data converter which I’m very much in favor of. The second most important thing is word clock. I cannot stress how important word clock is. I either use Rosendahl or use the new Big Ben from Apogee. My feeling is the Apogee Big Ben is probably the best thing on the market. All the guys over at NRG Studios, where I work a lot here in California, agreed that this is the killer system. That’s how I transfer all of my analog, using 24-bit, 96K. And it works. I’m reasonably happy with the end result. My feeling is that I like to keep to a minimum the amount of stuff I do in Pro Tools. There are some things that you can do in Pro Tools that you can’t do in analog, obviously. It’s a great storage medium, a great editing medium, and a flexible tool. A lot of people say, "We don’t want to bother with tape. It’s too expensive, it’s too unwieldy, we want to go straight to Pro Tools." That’s fine. But I think what’s happening is when one looks at the type of music that’s being recorded in Pro Tools, whether it’s rap, pop, folk, you name it, heavy metal, whatever it is…for me, it depends largely upon what you’re recording. For rock and blues you need a little grit… GC Pro: A little emotion… EK: Well, emotion can be carried across no matter what medium you’re in. But it’s the sound of tape it’s so critical to just allow that to dissipate into the digital world. You have to be so damn careful. I don’t think you can go straight to digital and hope to make it sound big and fat and crunchy. I like the fact that there’s a little bit of gradual distortion in the analog tape, tape saturation being the way we describe it. When it comes down to mixing, there’s so much out there to use. The Lexicon 960 is an incredible reverb unit. The TC 6000 is a fantastic unit. There are so many great little boxes. I’m not stuck in the analog world by any stretch of the imagination. I am firmly in the generation that says, "Look. There’s a 50 or 60-year history of recorded music. Let’s take advantage of that. Let’s take advantage of how people used to record 40, 50 years ago. Utilize that technique for recording your drums, or your orchestra." One of my great memories is recording a 90-piece symphony orchestra with three U-47s, left-center-right, on a three-track tape at 15ips, and it sounded amazing! That’s part of how I record drums, using a left-center-right apparatus, including the close mics. So now I have the flexibility. I can be vintage, or I can be very contemporary, and I can blend the two together. I have choices. That’s part of the exciting thing about being in the studio. I love being in the studio because I’m learning stuff every day. You can’t sit back on your laurels and say, "I know it." I don’t know it. I don’t know everything. I’m hearing stuff that young engineers are doing today…I go into a studio, and I like to get the youngest engineer there, and I go, "Show me what you’ve got. Let me see what you’ve got. I want to see what you can do." And sometimes I’m surprised. Sometimes I’m appalled (laughs). But sometimes I’ll say, "Yeah, that’s a very cool idea, I’ll try that." And then they’ll look at me with some of my technique and go, "What? You did that how? You put the mic where?" GC Pro: I’ve visited you at studios probably four or five times while you’re remastering another Hendrix thing, and you seem to have the full passion you’ve always had for the art you helped create back then. You don’t seem to ever get tired of it at all. EK: Never. You and I were both at the Grammys, and somebody said, "It’s all about the music," and it’s so true. GC Pro: Queen Latifah said that. EK: She was correct. Because it has never been about anything else for me. It has always been the music first. And to make a quick commentary about all the technical stuff I just talked about: to me, I don’t give a crap what you recorded on. It could be in your basement on a four-track Tascam. I don’t care. If the song’s great and the performance is great, it could be a hit. You and I can talk for hours about all the technical stuff with the digital, analog…who gives a crap? It’s the song, in the end, that sells it. And the performance that’s contained therein. GC Pro: Do you think in this day and age that recording professionals are going to need to diversify more into scoring or video games or learn surround mixing? EK: Well, there’s no question about it. I feel very strongly about that particular item. Diversify or die. Because this industry is going through tremendous upheaval. It is now fairly easy for any person to make a record. It is certainly within the realms of possibility that any person with any modicum of intelligence can go to Guitar Center and pick themselves up a digital box that they can attach to their computer, and for a couple of hundred bucks you can record something. Whether or not it’s going to sound good, that’s another matter for discussion. But on the other hand, it’s just as easy for every kid, as we all know, to download the stuff off the Internet. That is causing tremendous grief in the record industry. Now, who’s at fault? Can anyone blame the record companies? Absolutely. Can one say that they are dumb, stupid and full of corporate greed? Absolutely. Can one say that the kids have the right to download the stuff for free? Yes…but the caveat is, those kids are taking money out of my pocket and my artists’ pocket. Forget about the record company for a minute. Being purely selfish, it’s money out of my pocket, taking bread off my table. So how do we fix this? Well, go back to the record company. The record companies in their infinite wisdom should have lowered the price of CDs five years ago. They should have come down from $19 to ten bucks right off the bat. The lawyers and accountants look at the numbers and say, "Well, we have to satisfy our shareholders." So what does that mean? That means the drive within the company is to make a profit, and the hell with creativity. And I think that’s what happened. Companies are no longer in the business of letting an artist get in the studio and create, or spending a year or two developing the act so that you see this creative curve so that the artist starts here and 18 months later, they’re on another level. Today, the artist never has a chance to get out of the starting gate, because if their first single or first album does not take off, the band is dropped. So, to me, that’s self-defeating. There’s a lot that’s wrong with our business today, and there are a few things that are good. When you see a band like the White Stripes which spits in the face of convention, I like that. I like the energy and I like the devil-may-care attitude, which is basically what rock and roll is all about. It’s about being a revolutionary. Of course, in every era, you’re going to get exceptions to the rule. I mention the White Stripes only because it’s fresh in my mind. But there are many…Josh Groban, is it? GC Pro: Mm-hmm. EK: John Mayer, there’s another fine artist. You’re always going to get good artists. But even these guys, they’re throwbacks to an earlier era. If you listen to their music, one has to, as an artist, look at the past, take from it what you can and make the rest of it yours. There are very few truly, truly original-sounding artists. I mean, one can say that Jimi Hendrix is a truly original-sounding artist but even he, if one looks at his history and influences… GC Pro: The blues influence… EK: Yeah! Where does it come from? It comes from two obvious places. It comes from the chitlin’ circuit and the funk and R&B of the day, and it comes from blues. It actually comes from blues first, and then the funk later. But there’s an example of an artist who had this unique ability to take all of these influences that he heard and funnel it into his own very distinctive style. And that’s unusual. So what came out, from collecting all these disparate sort of influences, whether it’s Bach and Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart and Handel -- which he listened to, incidentally, he loved classical music – to folk and country and R&B and pop and all the rest of it. I mean, Jimi was a musical sponge, and he absorbed all these things. What, to me, is amazing is the synthesis of the squishing and compacting all of these wonderful influences into the singular voice that comes out and plays, and you go, "Oh my God, where is that coming from?" And if one listens to his music, you can hear all of these things. The jazz influence. When he plays octaves, it’s like Wes Montgomery. It’s a direct steal from Wes Montgomery. So, the point I’m making is that there’s nothing really original under the sun unless you are that strange individual who can make it. So, I don’t know where the music business is going today. I just hope that it survives this. I tell you one other thing that worries me is that kids today listen to MP3s, listen to their downloads and have no frickin’ clue what the original sounded like. It has no bearing on what the original was, not even close. GC Pro: They don’t even have a reference point. EK: We’re raising a generation of kids who have no basic knowledge of what good analog should sound like. Well recorded music, what does it sound like? And you bring any of those kids in here after having listened to MP3s for six months through little headphones, and you play them some music and they go, "Oh my God! This is really what it’s about." GC Pro: Let’s talk about surround. EK: I love mixing in 5.1. I’ve done quite a few of them, five movies now. I think that 5.1, when it’s done properly, is phenomenal. It just kicks your butt. Where I think it really works is when it’s in conjunction with a moving picture. That’s when it really comes to life. When you see Jimi Hendrix on the screen, for example, and you see him play and then you hear the impact of what he’s doing on the stage, and you hear the reverb on the speakers behind you…you feel like you’re sitting center row. That’s what I try to create in some of the stuff I’ve been doing in 5.1. GC Pro: That stuff is amazing. I was fortunate enough to be at Kampo Studios in NYC when you were doing "Red House" in 5.1 for the Isle of Wight DVD and it was mind boggling to see the picture being married to a full surround mix for the first time. EK: I remember that. GC Pro: What are your outside interests? What else are you good at? I know we share a passion for motor sports. EK: Well, I was gonna go there. If I was not doing this, I’d be on the racetrack at Limerock, screaming around the track in some kind of souped-up vehicle, BMW or anything that goes quickly. I share a passion for motor racing with you, and you and I have done our little bits and pieces. My son, as you may remember, is a race car driver. GC Pro: We went out and broke several laws together in a turbo Porsche. EK: Yes! But we can’t say any more about that (laughs). GC Pro: We gotta talk about photography. You obviously have… EK: That’s my other hobby. I don’t do it anymore. But the years that we were referring to, from ’67 through ’72, the golden years of rock and roll, I was fortunate. I took up photography as a hobby and I used to keep the camera sitting right next to me in the control room. Whenever there was an opportune moment, I would whip the camera out and just snap off a few pictures. I kept these photographs in a box for about 25 years, and recently decided to have them worked on. GC Pro: The first time I saw them, which was very early on, when you’d first pulled them out, it was an unbelievably emotional experience to look at these pictures during Led Zeppelin sessions, at Mick Jagger’s manor house, inside of countless Hendrix sessions, Steve Winwood…it was completely mind boggling. Aren’t many of them displayed on the www.kramerarchives.com website? EK: Yes. There are about 400 pictures there. You can go on the web and have a look… GC Pro: People are required to go there! It’s a must-see. It’s sectioned-off by bands, and to see these pictures that are all candid shots is absolutely mandatory! EK: You’re kind to point that out, thank you. It’s an insider’s view, a little sort of window into the creative process. You can see artists -- Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Traffic and all these guys – basically with their hair down and recording, and not giving a damn. Which was another thing that I wanted to bring up…this attitude about being in the studio, in those particular days, where the Beatles would come and hang out with the Stones, and the Stones would hang out on Hendrix’s session, and Traffic would hang on. So there was this wonderful family of… GC Pro: …like-minded people? EK: Yeah, just the fact that they were all in it for the same purpose. They were there to make music and have a great time. And so for them to come and hang out at each other’s sessions was a no-brainer. "Come on, mate, give me a hand over here." "Not a problem, I’ll be right there." There were no record companies or lawyers to tell them, "No, you can’t do that." Even the managers kind of encouraged that. So it was a different time, and I’m not sure one can do that with ease today. I kind of miss that. It was great interaction. So go there and enjoy the photographs, and if you want anything, I can certainly personalize it for whoever wants to… GC Pro: Arrangements can be made. Well, thanks for taking the time out of your day. EK: Yeah, I’ve got to go back to mastering. GC Pro: Back to mastering Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. Amazing!