An internationally renowned producer, engineer, and mix master who has over 125 gold and platinum records and 50 top twenty singles. He has worked on dozens of Grammy nominated and winning albums, and has been personally nominated eleven times for The Best Engineered Album category, winning twice. He also has won an Emmy Award for Best Sound Mixing for a Variety Special and a Dove Award. Earlier this year he put out a book called, “Chairman at the Board: Recording the Soundtrack of a Generation.”
"The music community (in Nashville) is really great. And, funny enough, they do a lot more live sessions here than in Los Angeles these days."
"My studio (in Los Angeles) was a very big – it was a literal appendage of me – a very big part of my personality."
"My joke has always been that I want to drop dead in the studio, right over the console."
"He heard our stuff and liked it, called us in for a meeting and basically -- he had just made a deal with Decca Records, production deal -- and he signed us."
"When I came into the control room... to hear a playback of our first track, I remember looking up at those speakers and feeling something emotionally that I had never heard in those other great studios. And it hit me so much, it was a real a-ha moment for me, so much so that when the song ended I literally pointed at all the equipment and said... 'can you teach me how to do this'?"
"One day Motown calls up... and says, 'Do you have this Thursday open... We're gonna do some background vocals with The Jacksons' ... and I went and got them set up with the headphones and made sure everything was going good and then I went out in the foyer and hung out with Michael."
"He said, 'But ya' know, the record business as we know it was born in the '50s, grew up in the '60s, and peaked in the '70s into the '80s. It was a very short time, very iconic time, never to be repeated again, and you were there.' And when he said, 'you were there,' it dawned on me that I could tell stories that other people told me... and it was right then that I decided I was going to write a book."
"I've always thought of myself as a musician that mixes, that records, not an engineer that produces."
"My defining moment was realizing that good sound can really help the emotional content of music, can bring it to life, so to speak."
"Mediocre music well-recorded is not anywhere near as good as the opposite, terrible recorded great music, and historically there's plenty of those as things were being figured out in the recording process years ago."