Bruce Swedien

Coming of age

At 65 Bruce Swedien talks about old studios, new mics, Dinah Washington and Michael Jackson with equal enthusiasm. Richard Buskinmeets the man who witnessed the introduction of mag tape but still has his hearing

^'THERE'S A TENDENCY in music to think that we're educating people or coming up with a cure for cancer, but we're not,' says Bruce Swedien. 'The only thing you can do to music is listen to it, and I have always felt that the real value of what I do as an engineer or as a producer lies not in the technical or acoustic sense, but in what the music signifies to the people who listen.'

Swedien does not regard himself simply as an engineer, for as someone who also produces, arranges and composes he is not quite so easy to define. Indeed, among his 13 Grammy Awards (starting with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons' single, 'Big Girls Don't Cry', in 1962), there was one for his co-writing of 'Jam', the opening track on Michael Jackson's Dangerous album, and one of three songs which he has thus far composed with the King of Pop. Swedien also recorded and mixed 11 of the tracks on Dangerous while co-producing five of them, so there within a single projectseveral of his skills were put to good use.

Born in Minneapolis in 1934, he is fast approaching his sixth decade in the recording business, and the credits keep rolling in--from pop to classical, jazz to blues and almost everything else in between, Swedien has lent his talent and expertise to projects with Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Oscar Peterson, Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Miles, Muddy Waters, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Nat 'King' Cole, George Benson, Barbra Streisand, Herb Alpert, Donna Summer, Patti Austin, Lena Horne, Natalie Cole, The Chi-Lites, Edgar Winter and Jackie Wilson. He has won Grammys for his engineering of Michael Jackson's Thriller, Bad and Dangerous albums, as well as for Back on the Block and Q's Jook Joint courtesy of his long-standing professional relationship with Quincy Jones, and he has also worked on the scores of movies such as Running Scared and The Colour Purple.

It has been quite a career, yet Swedien is not ready to wind it down just yet. 'What else would I do?' he asks, before musing, 'I guess I could drive a tug boat. You see, I'm such a junkie. I love this business just as much today as I did the first day I walked into Studio A at Universal when I was 20 years old.'

Adding to the list of legendary blues artists with whom he has worked,Swedien is currently scheduled to record BB King together with a large orchestra. This is the kind of music that he has a passion for, having been instilled with the spiritual sounds that reverberated around a black church which he and a friend used to sneak into as children.

When he was just 10 years old Swedien was given a disc recording machine by his father, and, in his own words, '10 minutes later I decided on music recording as a career'. To that end he acquired an evening-weekend-vacation job in a small basement studio at the age of 14, and after graduating from high school he then bought a Magnacord PT-6 pro tape recorder. Entering the University of Minnesota, he studied electrical engineering with a minor in music, and at the same time worked in and around Minneapolis recording jazz groups, choirs, polka bands and radio commercials.

A job running the Schmitt Music Company's recording facility led to work assignments with major artists such as Tito Gulzar and Tommy Dorsey, and eventually Swedien bought out the business and relocated it to an old movie theatre, where it would evolve into a world-class studio. In 1957 he and his family moved themselves to Chicago, and there for the first 11 months Swedien worked for RCA Victor's facility and recorded the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Then he transferred to Bill Putnam's new Universal recording complex and he remained there for the next nine years, working with the aforementioned luminaries in the world of jazz.

'Bill could be called the "father of recording",' he says. 'Many of the techniques that we use today originated in his mind. He believed in me as a kid, and for the first few weeks at Universal I would follow him around, bring him his coffee, set up mics, and generally try to learn how things were done. I would sit down and get the song started and Bill would finish things up. Well, we were doing a Stan Kenton session for Capitol and he must have arranged something with Kenton, because at one point Bill said, "Bruce, come on, you sit down and do this song. I've gotta go take a leak." I didn't see him again for five years. So that was my baptism of fire. Evidently he thought I was ready, and so did Stan, because I did the rest of the record.'

That was in 1957, yet it was several years earlier that Swedien first became truly inspired by the thought of recording and mixing.

'I didn't really get excited about pop music until I discovered that it was possible to use my imagination,' he recalls. 'That came with a record which I myself didn't work on; Les Paul and Mary Ford's 'How High The Moon' in 1951. Up to that point, the goal of music recording was to capture an unaltered acoustic event, reproducing the music of big bands as if you were in the best seat in the house. It left no room for imagination, but when I heard 'How High The Moon', which did not have one natural sound in it, I thought, "Damn, there's hope".

'You see, being a Scandinavian from Minnesota, it was okay to like your life's work, but not to get too excited about it. Well, Iwas absolutely in love with music and with what I was doing, and when I got to Universal in Chicago and did the first couple of albums with Duke, and I had the chance to talk to him and to spend a little time with him, all of a sudden he made me realise that it's perfectly all right to love what you do. So, things evolved from there and I did some experimenting with Basie's band, Ellington, Woody Herman and Quincy Jones, and they were all very supportive of what I was trying to do, which was to include a bit of myself in the recordings. That evolution took a long time, and, as a matter of fact, it was when I started working with Quincy again in the late seventies that I began to realise reality was not an important part of music recording and probably wasn't even desirable. I kind of see my mixes as sonic sculptures--I would like them to be in this world, but not of this world.'

Nevertheless, having been present for many of the revolutions that have taken place in the studio--starting with the switch from disc recording to tape--Swedien feels that technological advance hasn't necessarily played a large part in helping him to realise this goal.

'Does digital multitrack recording make it possible to produce material that is devoid of musical errors?' he asks. 'Or, more importantly, does digital technology make it possible to produce a recording that is free of technical errors? I think the answer lies somewhere in between, yet what is more important than all of that stuff put together is being able to use my imagination; to create a sonic canvas that could not exist in reality, only in my mind.'

In that respect Swedien cites Quincy's Back on the Block album as, perhaps his most well-realised project, and the title track in particular as an example of a 'sonic canvas'. What's more, he also regards music mixing as an extension of arranging, and as if to back up this theory he points to the arranging credit that he once received on a Sergio Mendez album. Indeed, it's not so much the equipment that he uses, but the way in which he uses it, as well as his willingness to extend the accepted boundaries, that has placed Swedien in the esteemed position that he finds himself today.

'I learned early on with some of the older ribbon mics, like the RCA 44BX, that moving them from a vertical plain to a more horizontal plain added more high-frequency response,' he recalls. 'Gravity put a little bow in the ribbon and brightened the sound up. This was when we had little--and, in many cases, no--EQ in the recording path. Well, that was a great time to be working. We were learning so rapidly and things were moving so quickly.

'I remember in the late fifties, early-sixties, when the moguls of the record companies said there was no future in stereo, and they took it to the point where they'd refuse to pay for the tape to record some of these incredible bands in stereo. So, a bunch of us guys--myself, Phil Ramone, Al Schmitt and so on--paid for the tape ourselves. In fact, I have a lot of stereo recordings of Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington and all of those major artists that I worked with in Chicago, and now the record companies come to me, of course, to see if I have a certain recording and I'm always happy to sell it to them.'

It was in 1969 that Bruce Swedien went independent in order to concentrate on album recordings and film scores, and shortly after moving to Los Angeles in the mid seventies he encountered Michael Jackson while working on the movie, The Wiz, with Quincy Jones. The rest, I suppose you could say, is HIStory.

'I can't be in the control room when Michael listens to a mix,' says Swedien. 'He plays it so loud. We'll be in the middle of one of our huge mixes and he'll turn to me and say, "Bruce, hurt me!" So I'll turn up the speakers and leave the room. He'll then leave me a little laundry list, signed "Love, Michael" at the bottom.'

Leaving the room when Jackson asks to be hurt brings me to another interesting point about Bruce Swedien; namely, the fact that his hearing--even at the top end--is still intact after so many years in the studio. Now, considering that some of those years happened to be the 1970s, when people often monitored at outrageous levels, his present state of well-being is all the more remarkable.

'I have been very, very careful,' he says, 'and I have very critical monitoring parameters that are set up in the studio before I start. For near-field speakers I use Westlake BBSM8s and Inever run them at an SPL above 87 or 90 at the absolute most. Then there are my Auratones which will never be above an
SPL of 83. I've worked that way for 25 years.

'Of course, when we're doing an R&B track or a big kick-ass thing I like to play it loud once in a while, but if it's at an SPL of over 100 I'm very careful not to listen to it for more than five minutes out of the hour.

'About 15 years ago I did make a major change in terms of the way that I listen, in that I previously used three parameters; large studio monitors, near-fields and small-scale. Now I've eliminated the large studio monitors and I go just with the near-fields and small-scale. I love my Westlakes, not only for their accuracy, but also their imaging which is to die for. You can tell probably every 15 degrees of position in the panorama, and that's pretty amazing. At the same time they have low impedance in the mid-range, so they're powered by four amps out of Norway which are fantastic. I also love Auratones; I have a lot of them and the older ones are the ones that sound really good.'

As for microphones, Swedien does not experiment too much during a session these days, being able to pretty much discern what will work best with a specific voice as soon as he hears the artist speak. 'As the saying goes, 'The first million hours in the studio are the hardest, and after that it gets easier,' he quips. Nevertheless, he does still like to move the mics around himself, and in his home studio in Connecticut, where he has been based since 1994, Swedien continually experiments with new equipment.

'I'm lucky in that--because of my visibility within the industry--people constantly send me new equipment to try, often before anyone else, so I'm able to remain on the cutting edge,' he says. 'You should see the gear that I now have--Quincy says moving me around is like moving the 5th Army. I have two 7ft racks of effects and some very esoteric equipment, and wherever I go Ibring my own monitors and my own wire; monster cable, which looks a bit like garden hose. On top of that I have 17 cases with microphones.'

Some of which go all the way back. Listen to old Nat 'King' Cole performances and, while the orchestrations may adhere to the kind of sonic standards that you would expect from 1950s recordings, marvel at how the velvet-smooth vocals often jump out. Several of these were captured by Swedien with a Neumann U47.

'Nat was great,' he says. 'I'd place the microphone in the studio, hit the button on the tape machine and he would do the rest. It was so easy. I still have the 47 that I used on him, and in fact I also used it on Michael.'

Still, while the 47's enduring qualities are beyond dispute, Swedien recently took a strong liking to another brand that he was introduced to while lecturing in Germany.

'I was in Munich, and I met a guy over there named Dirk Braüner,' he says. 'He has come up with a hand-made series of condenser tube mics, and I have never heard anything better. He gave me one and I brought it back and used it, and it's just phenomenal. It sounds like the best U47 that you've ever heard in your life.'

In his home studio Swedien has a Harrison 32 Series console that is similar to the one that he used on Thriller. 'It's absolutely beautiful,' he says. 'I bought it from Roy Clark in Nashville, and it's like the day it came out of the box. Still, being that it only has 32 inputs, I'm looking for a second one in the same kind of condition so that I can put the two of them together.

'On the other hand, I also love the SSL 9000 which; although I don't like to make predictions, is probably the last big analogue desk. They just went all out with regard to the quality and durability, and it's fabulous. In fact, there's no other modern analogue desk that compares.'

MEANWHILE, pointing to his work with the likes of the aforementioned Mr Jackson, as well as with Messrs Jones, Ellington, Basie et al, Swedien modestly describes his role in the studio as that of 'the fortunate student'. As for the teachers, it is Quincy who stands at the head of the class.

'Music has only two categories; good and bad,' says Swedien. 'Working with a great artist and great material brings more responsibility to a project, and I think the most important thing that I've learned from Quincy is never to take that lightly. We've worked together for over 40 years, and I promise you there is no one like Quincy in terms of the quality, and the musicality, and the good taste, that he brings to every project. In the beginning I was 21 and he was 23, and one of the first recordings that we did was Dinah Washington's 'What a Difference a Day Makes', which was not a bad start.

'There again, both Quincy and I bring all of our experience to every session, and so another thing I've learned from him is that the kaleidoscopic approach is really where it's at. When you play one of my mixes, for instance, you can hear it in a certain way, but then you can play it again and listen for something else. I mean, they're still trying to figure out some of the techniques that I used on Thriller, and I've got stuff buried in there that people will be studying for years.'

Indeed, having conducted a master class in music engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and conducted lectures and recording seminars for numerous universities, colleges and industry organisations both in America and overseas, Swedien is more than happy to disclose his work methods.

'I don't believe in secrets,' he asserts, 'and I'm criticised by both Quincy and Michael for that. Michael especially. He'll say, "Bruce, you can't go telling people all this stuff", but I don't believe in that, the reason being that I have yet to find anybody who really understands what I'm talking about. As a result, I am more concerned about finding people who will understand my approach to what I do than I am about anyone stealing ideas. That's never been an issue. So, microphone technique, multitrack recording technique, I go through all of them.'

In that case, what techniques did Swedien use on Thriller and what kind of sounds are buried in there? After all, he did just say that he doesn't believe in secrets, and as for Michael, well, he'll get over it...

'There's the title track, for instance,' comes the immediate reply. 'On the intro there's a little rhythm track that commences the music, and I purposely limited the bandwidth on it so that as you listen to it your ear adjusts to that spectral response. Then, all of a sudden, the real bass and kick drum come in and the effect is really startling. So far I've told people about this but nobody has verbalised to me how it actually happens.'

Maybe, but hasn't he heard anyone else imitate the effect?

'Oh yeah. I love that.'

So there's a little titbit about the title track, but what about one of the other hit songs on Thriller?

'Well, when we recorded 'Billy Jean', for instance, Quincy told me, "Okay, this piece of music has to have the most unique sonic personality of anything that we have ever recorded". Now, that's a hell of a way to go into a recording, so I thought and thought about it, and when it came time to do the rhythm track--consisting of drums, bass and so on--at Westlake Audio on Beverly Boulevard [in LA] I did everything I could imagine to really make it sound unique, even to the point of calling my old pal George Massenburg and borrowing a super-high-quality small recording console from him.

'That was the first time that I began using a specially-built, 8ft square, plywood drum platform, courtesy of the carpenters at Westlake, which is a great studio by the way. I also had a special bass drum cover made, and I took the front head off the drum kit, put cinder blocks in there to hold it still, put the cover on and slipped the microphone through. Then I made a special little isolation flap that went between the snare mike and the hi-hat mike in order to give much better imaging. Consequently, I think that track really is unique, see if you can think of any other piece of music where you can hear the first three drum beats and know what the song is. That's what Icall sonic personality.

'Separately these elements are all small things, but as Quincy told me early on when we began working together, everything is important. Every little detail. Anything you can do to enhance the image is important, and I admired that approach so much early on that it's kind of become a part of my everyday life, and it drives people crazy.'

This amounts to spending a lot of time in the preparation, but not when the musicians are around. For, once a session is underway, Swedien is intent on retaining the spontaneity.

'Something else that Quincy brought home to me is to learn to listen to my instincts and believe in them,' he says. 'Also, from Duke Ellington I learned a lot about listening for the primitive elements in music, and being sure that none of them are overlooked. Primitive is important, and I would hate to be the first person in the world to make a perfect record. I don't think that would be very interesting.

'It's all about feeling responsibility to the music that we're working on, because anything that we do in a studio is, for all practical purposes, carved in stone. I mean, it will be there forever if it's important enough for people to examine, and like a good photographer I always like people to look at my best pictures.'

CONTRARY TO the popular proverb, Swedien asserts that the older he gets, the more he knows, and he also states that, in his experience, the bigger, more successful artists are also nicer to work with.

'Michael is a doll in the studio,' he says. 'You could not possibly ask for anyone better to work with. At the same time, I'm an only child and I would love to have Quincy for a brother. The same goes for Burt Bacharach. Oh man, the list just goes on and on.'

Although there are a few choice names that didn't make it on there...

'Sometimes I think that I would have loved to work with Sinatra, but Quincy's worked with him and so did my pal Phil Ramone, and as a result I think that it's better if I just remember his music. I recall a time when Quincy and Phil were working with him while I was in LA producing a band named Missing Persons, and they called me and said, "Bruce, just be glad you're not here".

'Other than that I usually hear from Phil Ramone on my birthday. You see, we have an old joke. We used to call each other at Christmas and say, "Up is louder..." and hang up.'

Bruce Swedien's favourite recording environments

* 'Definitely not a live venue. I will do anything to avoid doing a live record. I think I must be a control freak, but live recording is too unpredictable and there is a part of my psyche that hates surprises!'

* 'Carnegie Hall [New York]. I've never recorded anything there but I love the sound of it.'

* 'Studio D at Westlake in Los Angeles. I've used it quite a bit for choir recordings, also for [Jackson's] 'Man in the Mirror', and I love it there. It has a little bit of resonance that peaks around the D below middle C and that provides a wonderful warmth on vocal recordings.'

* 'Studio One at The Hit Factory. I love that big room.'

* 'There are a couple of rooms which are gone now that used to be my favourites: Studio A at Universal in Chicago was incredible, and Studio A1 at A&R in New York was absolutely wonderful.'