[upbeat music]   - He started his   career at age 16   as an intern at Sun Studio,   and about 20 years later,   he's now a Grammy   award winning   producer and engineer   working with the likes   of Jason Isbell, John Prine,   and the music of Elvis Presley.

He's a native Memphian   with a deep appreciation   for the roots of rock and roll.

I'm Darel Snodgrass   from WKNO-FM,   and this is a Conversation   with Matt Ross-Spang.

[upbeat music] Hi, Matt.

- Hey, how you doing Darel?

- Good.

We should mention to our listeners, our viewers, I should say, that we had intended to have this at your new studios, which you're still in the process of building but the epidemic puts you a little bit behind, so we're coming to you now from another historic place in Memphis, the Sam Phillips Recording Service, which you've worked here a lot, I know.

- Yeah, this is probably, maybe one of the greatest studios ever built and one of my favorites to record in, so it's not a bad second choice.

- We're gonna talk some more about your new studio a little bit later, but I wanted to get to something that you've been involved with lately that I know that our friends are gonna be interested in is you've been working with Sony, with some remastering and some re-releasing of some Elvis Presley material in a way that we probably haven't heard before.

So tell us what's going on there.

- Yeah, so typically Sony Legacy does one big box set a year, and so, I've been fortunate to do probably five or six at this point, so the first one we did was the Jungle Room Sessions.

So Elvis got tired of recording in Nashville, he wanted to record out of Graceland, so they turned a bread truck into a remote music truck, it broke down in Jackson, they towed it to Graceland, and they made a couple of records there, and then actually, apparently the truck stayed there until after he died and they're not sure what happened to it.

And then we kinda jumped forward to, jumped back to '72, and did some stuff for that HBO documentary.

Then we did, '69, after the comeback special he played Vegas, and we did about six or seven concerts there that came out two or three years ago, and then the last box set was 1971, Elvis recorded about 42 songs in 7 days, six or seven days, in Nashville.

And we took it and it was with a great band and then they went and later and put all the extra overdubs on it, we actually remixed it and gave the outtakes without the overdub, so you just hear him in the, it'd be like, would have been like to been in the room for those six days, and it's really special.

- That's pretty exciting, I assume that you had access to the original multi-track tapes?

- Yeah, so everything's been digitized at this point, the tapes are in Iron Mountain, and they send me a digital copy of the tapes as well as the photos of the actual tape boxes.

And then one of the producers Ernst, him and Rob Santos over at Sony, they are massive historians on this stuff.

So Ernst usually comes in and sits with me, and Rob does too, while we mix.

And Ernst can tell you, you give him your birthday, he'll tell you what song Elvis cut on that day and where, he just knows everything.

And it really is amazing to, I'm an Elvis fan, but for Ernst to go, we're about to re-mix, "Make The World Go Away" and you gotta think that him and Priscilla's divorce has just been finalized and he's blah, blah, blah.

In any kind of gives you this little preface before he start mixing and then it just makes it even more powerful.

So it's really great to have those guys and that level of knowledge while you mix, so.

- That's exciting, I can't wait to hear some of those.

As we mentioned earlier, you are now in the process of opening a new studio, building a new studio, and it's in Crosstown Concourse, which I think is very important it's called Southern Grooves, so tell us what you're doing there?

- Well Crosstown if you guys, you know, and most folks know if you don't know, please go see it.

It was a Sears distribution center in 1900 and it's been repurposed now as this amazing kind of creative cultural center in Memphis.

And it's got everything.

It's got restaurants, it's got several venues of bar, it's got apartments, a lot of great nonprofits are there, Church Healthcare is there, the YMCA's there, it's a, my buddy calls it the young folks home.

[laughing] But right next door to me is Craig Brewer, the wonderful Memphis director.

And then also the Memphis Listening Lab, which is one of a kind, it's John King from Ardent and donated his entire music collection.

We're talking 35,000 45s, 20,000 LPs, 20,000 CDs and untold number of books.

I'm on the board for it, it's a nonprofit and we hope everyone comes in every day, especially kids from school to come and listen to music and appreciate the physical nature of it.

There's also a 10 to 12 private turntables that you can listen to records.

And then a Hi-Fi room with Egleston speakers, which is one of the best speaker companies and they're out of Memphis.

And they donated a pair of their most expensive speaker that's just incredible.

And so we can do listening events in there and public events.

So that's next door to the studio and you know, I've always wanted to have my own place and when I met the folks at Crosstown, I thought this is the place to do it, it's most studios like this one are kind of in the farther bits out of town.

You don't necessarily want a bunch of people to know where all your expensive equipment is located.

And you're not really looking for street traffic, but you know, we spend 16, 17 hours a day in here and if I'm working with just with you and the rest of the band's kind of waiting for the next thing to do, they don't really have anywhere to go, there's not a whole lot of stuff to do in here and that's what's great about Crosstown.

And also, back in the heyday of recording, I'd say in the '60s, '70s, '80s, studios had multiple rooms and you would go to maybe the coffee room to get a coffee and you'd run into blah, blah, blah, a great bass player, great PB, hey, would you come play on this track while you're here?

And there was a lot of cross pollination that doesn't happen anymore.

And that's why I think about what's great about Crosstown is you'll see Jamie Harmon, a wonderful Memphis photographer, you'll see WYXR the great radio station.

And so all these things can happen with us while we're recording and we can kind of feed off each other's energy.

And that's super important to me, especially now with music is more kind of computer-based and stuff.

- Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that because what we've seen over the last several years is sort of a move away from studios and more into home recording type situations or personal studio situations and that has some advantages, I guess, but are we seeing now more of a resurgence of people going back to real studios to big studios, to big rooms like yours?

- Absolutely, I think, you know, Les Paul had a home studio in the '50s, so home studios had been around a long time and I think it's great.

I personally can't do anything at home, I tried, especially during COVID I tried, but you know, I have to feed off other people's energy, you have to be around folks, I need to have all these things that motivate me to work and to be inspired and sitting at home, it was not possible for me.

But some people operate great at home and there's a couple of artists that I work with that we will come to the studio, we will record a bunch, they might go home and do a couple of things that they would prefer to do at home and experiment like background vocals, or extra instruments and they'll send it to me and I'll apply it to what we've already done and we kind of work from afar and that works fine.

But yeah, people are more excited about coming back to real studios again, I think they are starting to appreciate again what a physical space and the people there can do with their music and stuff.

So it also is genre specific but yeah, I think a lot of people now are realizing that it's great to get out of your space and go work with someone else and learn and cohabitate.

So it's a wonderful time to be, I think it's the best of both worlds right now for making records.

- Yeah, for a long time, of course back in the '50s and '60s, there were people who'd only record in certain places that they had their rooms that they wanted to go to.

And then we got into a later period when things started being really close-mic'd, and they started hanging soundproofing all over the place.

So you didn't really have a lot of room sound, but now we're sort of moving away from that and we're getting back to the sound of individual spaces.

- Yes, the '60s was big reverberate echoey rooms, Seventies recordings was tight and dead like Steely Dan, Al Green, in the '80s was just, we could skip the '80s and '90s for most things I think.

But a being nowadays people wanna record on tape again, they wanna use vintage equipment, they wanna use real, you know, all this stuff, piano B3 keys.

This is gonna be a computer program now, but playing it at a computer is not like sitting here and moving it and hearing it and also these things act up, you know, this thing goes out of tune.

This thing has noise one day and that's what makes it awesome.

You know if everyone used the same digital piano patch, records would get boring real fast, but like, this is one of my favorite pianos in town.

So if I know I'm going to do a piano song, I will book this studio for this because of that piano.

And then, you know, if you wanna do horns, you go to Royal Studio, if you wanna do strings, a bigger string section, maybe you go to Ardent or wherever.

So it's really, you go to studios for a reasons and it really beats all the digital options out there.

- Yeah and you can, to a very great degree, sort of play the room itself.

I mean you can move various sound absorbing devices around, you can pull the curtains or you can push them back, you can play with that sort of thing.

So it's not necessarily one room, one sound, it's how you use that room.

- Yeah, how you use the room, how you mic it, the artist, the song, you know, and just like this room, even if it didn't sound good, the history and the vibe of this room is gonna pull something out of the artists and make it itself being an instrument that even acoustically you can mess with later and stuff too.

But people come in here and they want to create, they wanna hang out, they don't wanna leave.

Some studios are very clinical feeling and you don't feel like you're at home, you don't feel like you can open up, you don't feel like you can put your Coke down or put your guitar there or anything, but this room is kinda got the, it's got the best of both that you feel like you can put your drink down anywhere, but you also respect the fact that Johnny Cash probably put his Coke down there too.

- Right, now going along with that, and this is something that you've actually involved with for quite a while is the use of vintage equipment.

I know that you were very much involved at Sun Studios in getting some of that original equipment back and working and refurbished and doing that and you're doing that in your own new studio, aren't you?

- Yeah, it's kind of, it comes from my real life too, like my home is a old, 1957 mid-century modern ranch home I found in Memphis, that's all original.

It's got the original tile, original toilets, everything.

And I just really loved that stuff and I think that stuff inspires me, and I feel like it's got such a unique style and I don't know, it just something about that stuff.

And like, even recreation's of that stuff, there's always something wrong with it that drives me nuts.

I'm very particular about that stuff.

But equipments like that too, I mean, I still use a lot of modern pieces of equipment, but there's something tangible and tactile about some of that old stuff like I, you know, I didn't get into music to hunch over computer all day and move a mouse, and I do that a lot, but you know, nothing makes me feel smarter, or actually, should be called an engineer except when I'm putting on tape on a tape machine and I'm aligning and doing on the trim, I don't know what any of the math or the science of it is, but I know what I'm doing on that regard and that's when I actually feel like, yes, I'm an engineer instead of like a computer nerd clicking on music stuff.

So the vintage stuff is just, even when it messes up, I love it, it just there's something about it and then all my favorite recordings were typically made on that.

And now people are starting to realize that and they're starting to go back and get some of those things, but it's amazing.

I mean, if you look at any great artists, they're probably playing a vintage guitar, they're probably paying a vintage keyboard and stuff like that.

And that stuff was built so much differently than it is now built to last and for specific reasons.

- Yeah, as matter of fact, a lot of that vintage equipment was built right here in Memphis.

And I think you have been acquainted with the work of, his name is a Welton Jetton, who actually put a lot of this stuff together.

- Yeah.

Welton Jetton-- - Excuse me.

- You're fine.

I probably been saying it wrong too, Welton Jetton, help start really helped STAX and Ardent early on, he was more I learned about in the more I'm fascinated by it because he not only built recording consoles, but he was also good with acoustics too.

And what did the thing that blows my mind about Sam Phillips and Chips Moman and Jim Stewart and all these guys is, they didn't learn from anybody else, They're kind of the first, they're like the Yoda of the like Jedi.

and he just recall tunes like they worked in the cotton fields and then they went into and built a studio and out nowhere, they knew what they were doing and they made great records and they discovered all these people.

And that was kind of Welton too, he built these amazing consoles with the help of this company called Spectrasonics and that stuff still to this day is some of the best sounding equipment I've ever heard.

A big thing happened once we came out with digital and so we had integrated chips and we had all these things.

So if you think about your voice or your music before it would go through tubes and transformers, and it would be called discreet, and it'll be a really short signal path.

They were trying to get as close to being the sources as it could, and all these things will color the sound a little bit.

Then they could figure out how to do it with solid state technology and they put all these ICs in there.

So my board has four capacitors in every channel and two big transformers, and the transformers are what you want.

A modern boards, don't have transformers and you go through maybe 120 capacitors in a single channel.

So your voice has gone through all this circuitry and they're just kind of, band-aids on a gunshot wound really.

And they have not a pleasing sound to me, there are times when you wanna like overload them and get kind of a weird sizzle sound that they do it.

But the older stuff is just, it's incredible.

It's kind of like in film too, when you watch, you know, like Star Wars, the original Star Wars movies, the makeup isn't the greatest, but it's still a real guy walking around with Han Solo or something like Jabba the Hutt and then you watch the newer ones and it's CGI and it just doesn't feel there's a disconnect with me.

And so, even though it's kind of grainy and it's, whatever, it's just better.

So I'm kind of, that's how I am.

- Well, you see that a lot with guitar players, especially wanting to use tube amps because of the specific kinds of overtones and distortion that they can get just from tubes so that you can sort of fake that with solid state amps, but you can't really get that sound.

- Yeah, the stuff is more musical, it really is more musical is the best term and you can abuse it.

They didn't build this stuff for you to be able to abuse but if you think about like Aretha Franklin records, she's overloading all the stuff, but it sounds incredible if she had overloaded a digital piece, it would sound terrible.

- You'd hear that clipping.

- Yeah, they would, they would have redone the take and not had the magic takes.

So yeah, it is an adds up if you talk about, if I just do one thing that makes something 10% better, when you apply that to every instrument, every song, every album, it really adds up it's really a big thing, especially when you go down the process, so.

- Now you've worked in a lot of rooms here in the Mid-South, as well as other places so tell us what your room is gonna be like?

What's gonna be some characteristics of that room?

- Hopefully it sounds good, we have not recorded any music in there yet, but it feels good.

And I think that all of the studios, like you said in the Mid-South, a lot of these guys were not, didn't have a lot of money, B didn't know fully what they were doing.

And then just kind of winged it with whatever limitations were in the space or with their money and stuff like that.

Sun Studios at 18 by 30 room, he put up acoustic towel 'til he thought he had sounded good, Royal Studio Willie took that over from another guy named Ray Harris and Willie put just raw insulation up everywhere until he got the sound he wanted.

And you hear that on "I'm Tired of Being Alone," is the first time he felt like he got the sound right.

And that's just putting up in burlap and insulation, cheapest, acoustic material you can buy until he got the thing.

And then Ardent was like a pristine studio, you know, music and art is more of like a pristine studio.

And then you had American, which had even when Elvis was there, rats were running up and down the rafters, but it sounded incredible.

And so, I met with several acousticians and I played it on my good friend, Steve, who I'd known years before that and he's originally from Memphis and he helps maintain Fame in a lot of other classic studios.

And he grew up in that time, he knew Welton Jetton, and he saw, he knew all the Memphis dudes he was friends with Chips Moman.

So he gets the funkiness that I wanted in like the kind of spirit of the Memphis studios which is like not scientifically or mathematically, always correct, but they have a feeling and a sound in 'em that's what I wanted.

There's a lot of people that go by certain ratios and certain exact things.

And it might tell you you're gonna have a great sound, but that's not always true.

So it was kind of, I told him, I wanted to go, you were mentioning deadening things like, this is a 1960s studio, but they, in the '70s they put carpet down the add these booths and that really kind of deaden the room.

So I kind of wanted to be slightly less dead than that, I wanted to be a '60s live studio that's meant for people to record live together with just a little bit of burlap up so it deaden it a little bit but not too much.

And then that's what we really did, so we kind of pulled from all my favorite, not just Memphis studios, there's a lot of Muscle Shoals Studios in that room.

And it's all to me, completely unique, it doesn't take one too much from one thing it's just kind of like hinting at some of my favorite design ideas and stuff.

- Yeah, that's a good point about the live versus dead stuff, because you don't wanna really live room because then you're gonna have to deal with all those echos and reverberations, but you don't want a totally dead room because that's, for one thing it's very uncomfortable.

So yeah, it's a balance between those things.

- Yeah, and you can always deaden things if I have a live tile floor, I can always put carpet and rugs in areas and deaden things, and then you can put like these movable walls around, but it's hard to take a dead room and make it livelier.

You can always add reverb and stuff to it, but you can't get a splashy kind of sound.

But I also have a long hallway in there 'cause I love to record in weird spaces like the front lobby at this studio, I put drums in there all the time, even though it's not a recording space, it gives you a crazy sound.

And there's times where you wanna sound like Steely Dan and perfect, and there's time where it should be like Tom Waits and sound like you're recording in a weird bathroom.

And so, I put stuff in the bathroom or the hallway.

So I designed the hallway to be kind of ugly and splashy.

And then I designed, we have an echo chamber and we have all these other rooms that are various forms of splashy that I can hopefully recreate that stuff.

- Yeah, you sort of glossed over this you have an echo chamber and I don't think that's something a lot of people are familiar with.

Typically nowadays, when you hear an echo on a recording, that's generally generated electronically, but this studio here and your room will have an actual echo chamber.

So tell our friends what this is.

- Yeah, so the way they did actual big reverb and stuff on the date so Sam Phillips made tape echo, so that's like if you think Elvis with the repeat that's echo and they call them echo chambers, they're more reverb in a sense, but they would design a physical space.

Atlantic actually used a bathroom for all the early Aretha stuff.

But every studio across the America and Europe had echo chambers in the '60s.

The best example would be, "Be My Baby" by The Ronnettes.

So at any Phil Spectre production, but that boom, boom, boom, caaw.

that "caaw" is the drums going through an echo chamber.

And it's a physical space that's designed to be, you still don't wanna have parallel surfaces because you want the reverb to be pleasant.

So you don't want it to cancel itself out, but you're designing a room with like maybe a concrete floor, cinder block, plaster or whatever you got, something shiny and bouncy that would extend the sound so it sounds like you're in a cavern and you could put someone in there and record them but then you can't control it.

So typically you have the speaker in two microphones or one microphone.

I would sing your voice from the studio into the chamber it bounces around the room and the microphone picks it up and returns it back to the mixing board.

And then you can play with it.

And there's great examples, Paul Simon and Garfunkel, the boxer, that's actually an elevator shaft they use for a chamber 'cause they are in New York.

But there there's three chambers at Phillips and they're, one's about six seconds long, one's about three and a half and one's about a second and a half.

I only had space to do one chamber and mine's probably about four, which is I'm really pleased with.

'Cause you can always shorten it again.

It's hard to make it longer, but you can always shorten it.

- You mentioned this just a second ago also and I wanna come back to it, no parallel walls, because when I was designing the new radio station for WKNO 11 years ago, before we moved out to our new place out east, that's one of the things that I insisted on was no parallel walls and everybody looking at me like, huh.

So these are kind of strange shaped rooms when you go out and look at them, but there's a reason for that.

So tell us what that reason is 'cause I want this to be on tape.

- Well, yeah in here, you don't want any, really any symmetry.

So these rooms are always kind of weird trapezoid.

Everyone's rooms different.

But yeah, you wanna try and avoid 90 degree angles and parallel walls because the sound can bounce can hit it and come right back and then if you think of a sound as a waveform, if your initial source is going up and the rebound is going down, they'll actually cancel themselves out and some regards you'll cancel out whole frequencies or you'll just, some stuff will sound thinner or ringier or stuff like that.

So you really wanna kind of get the sound to bounce a different way every time.

So yeah, you really wanna stay away from parallel surfaces and 90 degree angles.

So that's why like this ceiling in here is jagged when the floor is flat, this wall curls a little bit, this wall is kinda more flat stuff.

And that's why these doors are here, Sam designed these doors.

So you could close those doors and it'd be more bouncy if you open them up, like you see that one, it's a burlap, chicken wire and then insulation.

And that soaks up sound and so you can open different ones up and angle them and get different bits of diffusion.

- I read an article that in the Flyer that you, you did an interview for a few weeks ago, and one of the things that you said was that you wanted, and I'm gonna get this wrong.

So you wanted a unique sound, you wanted a weird sound, but a good, weird, so what do you mean by that?

- I think a lot of people, when they design studios, like I said, they follow the math and they do this or that.

Memphis studios you always knew, you could tell where something was cut.

A lot of that's obviously the people like Willie Mitchell, you know, it was High Rhythm you know it was Willie Mitchell, you even know when it's Al Jackson on drums versus Howard Grimes on drums.

But, you know, a Willie Mitchell recorded song from a mile away, you know, a Sun Records song from a mile away, you know a STAX song from a mile away, you know a Chips Moman song from a mile away, that's the players, that's the producer, that's the engineer.

It's also the room.

And I think a lot of times now we try to make these neutral rooms, you know, and they don't really sound like anything, they sound fine, but don't go that's blah, blah, blah.

And so I really wanted a room that not only evoked something out of somebody, but had a sound, I wanted to have a sound.

And so it's an identifiable thing.

And that's kind of the thought on that.

- I know that you've done some initial work there in your studio, but will it take you a little while to actually tune this room to figure out what the sound is gonna be there?

- Yeah, that's the fun part of going any room, you have a basic, I've over the years, I can look at different things that go, I bet I'll use my ears and kind of talk and clap and hear where things are, frequencies are piling up or where stuff's too bouncy and stuff.

But at Crosstown every 17 feet is a 3-foot thick concrete column, so the control room and the track room have three foot thick columns.

There's no way to acoustically account for cylinder column because you move a millimeter, it's gonna bounce 10,000 different ways.

So that thing's always gonna make it interesting.

But yeah, it's fun to, most it'll take years.

I mean, I still learn stuff in this room, if I put this over here and then it bleeds into this and what would that create?

So, you know, if you just record piano, you can put it anywhere in the room, it's not gonna change too, too much, depending on how far the mics are.

But if I record piano there and I put the drums there and I put the vocal there and they're all bleeding into each other, that's when you get this amazing thing.

And then when you move them around, you kinda find some of the sweet spots and what works and what doesn't work.

And that's some of the really exciting part and then it's a new, not only is it a new room, but it's a new wiring and a lot of new equipment I've custom built for the place so it's gonna be a whole lot of clinching for awhile.

[laughing] - Well, this has been fascinating, I warned our producer before we went in that I could probably talk to you all day about studio design 'cause I think it's a fascinating subject and I'm so looking forward to hearing what comes out of that room.

- Yeah, come back when it's done.

- Maybe we'll do a little follow-up here and find out about that.

Matt Ross-Spang our guest today on a Conversation with.

Matt, thanks so much.

- Thank you Darel.

[upbeat music playing] [acoustic guitar chords]