This month, our US correspondent speaks to producers and engineers who have had to broaden their horizons in order to keep up with the ever‑changing music industry.
It's the 100th celebration of the late President Ronald Reagan's birth this year (you'll recall he made Margaret Thatcher look young), and much emphasis is being placed on how good Reagan was at reinventing himself. The one-time local baseball announcer moved into movies, then to television and presenting, before going on to become Governor of California and ultimately President of the United States. Like him or not, he was certainly adaptable, and that's a quality that many American entrepreneurial engineers and producers are now displaying, as the music‑production business continues to undergo upheaval.
Like most young record makers, Mark Hornsby thought he was going to make his mark as a hotshot mixer early on. But his business chops needed to be honed, alongside his mixing talents — and they were, at several studios in Nashville, as a staffer or freelancer, then as co-owner of Ridenhour Studios in Fort Lauderdale, adding side gigs like repping BASF tape and consulting new artists and start-up ventures. Eighteen years later, at 33, he's just finished building the studio infrastructure and establishing the A&R and music‑production divisions for a North Carolina-based Christian record label, Projecto 151, in Costa Rica. But he doesn't just build studios: he continues to work in them, too. Most recently, Hornsby returned to Abbey Road to polish tracks for a forthcoming Kevin Gilbert retrospective.
"Diversify,” is Hornsby's succinct advice. "I see a lot of people, especially students, come into the business expecting to work only on rock or hip‑hop. You have to figure out: do you want to be able to cover rock one week and hip-hop the next, or do you want to be the artist? Music is fickle — make your decisions before they are made for you.”
Joe Smith was chief engineer at Transcontinental Studios, part of impresario Lou Pearlman's empire in Orlando that once included artists like Christina Aguilera, Backstreet Boys, N'Sync and Mandy Moore, all of whom Smith recorded and mixed there. He left in 2000, a few years before Pearlman's Ponzi scheme imploded, leaving him with a 20-year prison sentence in 2008 for financial fraud. (At least he was ahead of that curve, too.) Smith managed to keep his production and mixing work going, but he also realised an affinity for wine, which led him, in 2007, to becoming the winemaster for Yonah Mountain Wineries, in North Georgia. In a business model that serendipitously parallels custom labels for producers at major labels, Yonah Mountain liked Smith's handiwork with meritage varietals so much, they gave him his own imprint: Serenity Cellars.
At upwards of $36 for a bottle of red, it's a better return than on a CD — but that hasn't interfered with Smith's career as a mixer and producer. He says his revenue from work with Disney (a collateral relationship from the Orlando days) is now better than the best days of the Transcontinental era, and more importantly, one career seems to help improve the other. "The way I see it, either way, it's all about mixing, music or grapes,” he explains. "I mix music using my ears and emotions, and mix wine using my taste buds and emotions. I think both are working off the same side of the brain.”
Mix engineer Elliot Scheiner, though, might have found the most unique applications of his skills. The surround‑sound music mixing specialist (he has mixed music by Steely Dan and the Eagles, among others) was looking for a way to give surround music a higher consumer profile. Instead of dealing with record labels, however, he went to car makers Acura. Today, the most recent editions of several of their models feature surround playback systems, good enough for artists like Joe Walsh of the Eagles and the Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl (Scheiner mixed the Foo Fighters' 2005 album In Your Honor) to buy, to accurately monitor Scheiner's surround mixes in the car.
Even though surround music has not gained as much market traction as Scheiner once hoped (held back by a lack of content, he says), it's all about keeping his perspective fresh and his mind focused on something other than yet one more music mix. And when surround music isn't enough, come spring and summer, Scheiner has his other diversion: he lathes his own custom wooden baseball bats for Division II collegiate teams. "It's a great distraction,” he says. "You don't get rich off baseball bats, but you come back into the studio with a new perspective, and that makes sense in the long run.”