Randy Staub: Recording Evanenscence's 'What You Want'

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Published in SOS January 2012

People + Opinion : Artists / Engineers / Producers / Programmers


The multitracks for Evanescence’s third album were so big that they required two maxed-out Pro Tools rigs to play back!
Paul Tingen
The way the music business works,” says Randy Staub, “is that you get pigeonholed as an artist, a writer, a producer, an engineer and as a mixer. If you’ve had some success with heavy rock, like I had, people will naturally think that that’s all you do. I do like rock music, but I don’t like music because of its genre. I like it because it’s good. It can be extremely heavy, or it can be Hank Williams, or 50 Cent. I love all kinds of music, but sometimes, when I’m 13 tracks into mixing a heavy rock album, I find myself wishing that I was mixing a girl singer with an acoustic guitar!”
While Randy Staub’s sentiment is understandable, it’s also understandable that he’s regarded as a living legend in the world of rock, having worked with Mötley Crüe, Nickelback, Metallica, Bon Jovi, Iggy Pop, Alice In Chains, Bryan Adams, Hinder, Lostprophets, Evanescence and many more.
Hailing from the town of Prince George in British Columbia, Staub always wanted to be an engineer. He recalls, “I always liked the sound of records and the technical aspect appealed to me, so to become an engineer was the obvious thing.” After leaving high school in the late ’70s, the Canadian attended a summer recording course in Rochester, New York, and spent a while doing live sound before being employed as an engineer at Phase One Studios in Toronto. It was there that he met fellow Canadian Bob Ezrin, who recommended him for a job at A&M Studios in Los Angeles. Staub spent three years at A&M, but was eventually persuaded by another top Canadian producer, Bob Rock, to return to Canada, to work in the latter’s Vancouver studio.
The first record Rock and Staub did together was Mötley Crüe’s Dr Feelgood (1989). Two years later they worked on Metallica’s eponymously titled album, also known as the Black Album, which went 15 times platinum in the US. Unsurprisingly, Staub has, as he says, “worked non-stop since”. Since Rock moved to Hawaii in the mid-’90s, Staub has mostly worked out of Bryan Adams’ The Warehouse studio in Vancouver. Until 2001, his credits were fairly evenly divided between engineering and mixing, but for the last decade, 95 percent of Staub’s work has been mixing. “It was a conscious decision to focus on mixing,” Staub explains. “It has always been the thing that I enjoy the most.”
Evans Above
Randy Staub mixed the Evanescence album on the SSL 4072 in Warehouse Studio 1.
Randy Staub mixed the Evanescence album on the SSL 4072 in Warehouse Studio 1.
One of Staub’s recent high-profile projects was his mix of the entire third album by the American goth metal group Evanescence, including lead single ‘What You Want’. The disc, simply titled Evanescence, ticks all the boxes that characterise much of Staub’s work, with heavily distorted rhythm guitars, monolithic bass and drums, and an in-your-face sound image that is very, very loud. Singer Amy Lee’s dramatic voice and crystal-clear acoustic piano (she’s classically trained) are an essential part of the band’s identity, and extensive string arrangements form the icing on the cake. Though it has yet to match sales of the band’s debut album, Fallen (2003, 17 million worldwide sales) or its follow-up The Open Door (2006, five million), it reached the top spot in the US, and has so far peaked at number four in the UK.
The band began work on the album early in 2009 with producer Steve Lillywhite (U2, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads), but eventually shelved these recordings, and a year later switched to producer Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Alice In Chains, Rush). Raskulinecz and Staub had earlier both worked on Stone Sour’s Audio Secrecy (2010) and Alice In Chains’ Black Gives Way To Blue (2009), amongst other things, experiences that set the tone for a fruitful working relationship on Evanescence.
“Nick and I have done a few records together, which have generally been big rock records, and that was definitely the approach here,” says Staub. “I always tell people that you have to create the sound of the record that you want right from the beginning, so that when the mixer first pushes up the fader, the record is there. Everything sounds the way it should, the arrangements are good, the emotion is there, the balance is there, and as a mixer your job is to take it to another level. You pump it up and make it sound larger than life. This rather than trying to create something that wasn’t there to begin with. Luckily Nick works like that. His stuff has its character recorded into it, so I don’t need to mix it into it. The arrangements are great, and Amy’s vocals are powerful and recognisable and tell the whole story of each song right from the start. So it was a matter of making her vocals sound even more powerful and making the drums sound bigger and making sure that the strings could be heard. There’s lots of everything, and it all had to sound big!

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Published in SOS January 2012

 

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In this article:
Evans Above
‘What You Want’
Warehouse Party
Total Recall
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