Nashville-based multi-Grammy winning producer Tony Brown is,
for many people, Mr. Country. A musician from his early teens,
Brown played with the Oak Ridge Boys and Emmylou Harris’
legendary Hot Band, and was Elvis Presley’s touring piano
player during the final years of the singer’s life. He went
on to work at RCA and then MCA Nashville, where, as the label’s
president, he helped build country music into the force that it
is today, working with artists such as George Strait, Reba Mcentire,
Vince Gill, Steve Earle, The Mavericks, Lyle Lovette, Wynonna,
Jimmy Buffett, and Brooks and Dunn.
Having been in the music business for over three decades Brown
grew up with analog audio, but switched to digital audio production
five years ago. “I fought it for so long; everyone in Nashville
loved analog. Jimmy Bowen is the one who brought the digital age
into Nashville, and being as I worked for him, he convinced me
about that.”
But now, says Brown, “I could never go back. Pro Tools|HD
sounds so good. All the folks used to say digital was cold—that’s
a bunch of BS; there’s nothing you can’t do on computers
any more. It makes recording so much easier. Things that used
to take forever you can accomplish quickly now.”
Brown, who has won numerous awards and racked up something like
150 gold, platinum and multi-platinum albums plus myriad Top 100
singles, has now established TBE—Tony Brown Enterprises—and
has acquired an Intel-based Apple Macbook Pro 15-inch Duo-Core
2 laptop as a mobile recording solution. “I have so many
songwriters that work at home on Pro Tools,” he reports.
“I’m anxious to loan my laptop out to those folks.”
Brown is working with engineer/producer Jeff Balding, who also
boasts an impressive resume: Faith Hill, Trace Adkins, LeAnn Rimes,
Trisha Yearwood, John Mellencamp, Carrie Underwood and Megadeth
have all benefited from his expertise. “I’m not a
knob turner,” acknowledges Brown, “but I’m so
creative I’ve learned to surround myself with great musicians
and great engineers. I’ve always been attracted to engineers
on the front, as opposed to the back, of the curve. That’s
why I’m hanging out with Jeff Balding; he’s always
been one of the guys in town at the front of the curve.”
Balding was an early adopter of digital audio technology, he
reports. “I started with Pro Tools back in the mid-90s.”
He, too, has adopted Intel multi-core processing power. “Just
as Tony chooses engineers and musicians, you surround yourself
from a technical standpoint with the tools that you know will
do a certain thing.” Balding’s main setup includes
a Mac Pro with two 3.0GHz dual core Intel Xeon Processors hosting
a Magma expansion chassis which houses a five-card Pro Tools HD
system supporting 24 inputs and 48 outputs. For editing and mix
down he uses a Macbook Pro 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and a Digidesign
002: “The processing demands I encountered during the mixing
of some tracks for the new Carrie Underwood Target release, I
found the Macbook Pro was a perfect fit.”
Balding is enjoying the power of the Intel multi-core processing,
he says. “The great thing that I’ve noticed with Intel
chips is they’re amazingly fast, just another step up in
speed and stability, which allows you to get more done. And you
can work in an environment that you feel secure about. You don’t
want things going wrong and the computer going sideways on you,
crashing or whatever.”
Yet nothing benefits an engineer working in a digital environment
more than an appreciation of analog audio, and an awareness of
it’s limitations, he continues. “What makes computer
recording great is it captures and retains exactly what you record
into it. It doesn’t change a week later, three months or
even a year later. Once you get a sound tweaked exactly like you
want it, you can rest assured that it will stay that way. And
with the right computer you can be extremely effective with the
speed that you accomplish your ideas in the studio. Effects and
production ideas that used to take hours in the analog days, can
now be done in minutes. It’s truly one of the biggest technological
advancements we’ve seen in our industry.”
As Balding notes, for all their power, convenience and stability,
digital audio tools are simply there to enable—and capture—creativity,
allowing him to forget about the technical side and focus on the
artistic side. “Recording is a true art, and I hope that
the artistic side of making records—what producers and engineers
and artists bring to the table—doesn’t get lost, especially
in the technical side of things. There is an art to choosing a
mic, choosing a preamp that complements the mic and loads it right,
that goes into an EQ that does what you’re hearing in your
head, then capturing that in a pure environment—as you can
through computer recording with high quality interfaces. Hopefully
that will be passed on and retained in the generations coming
up; that’s what’s so important right now, teaching
and mentoring that.”
As for his favorite plug-ins, he says, he uses them all: “Pick
one, it’s in there.” But when pressed, he admits,
“Some of my favorite plug-ins are the UAD plug-ins. Those
are just the most precise, great sounding plug-ins around.”
Universal Audio’s hardware is also at the top of his list.
“My new favorite toy is their AD/DA converter [2192 Master
Audio Interface]. That thing sounds incredible. I can put that
converter onto the laptop, come out of my five-card mixing rig
into that, and record straight to the laptop through the converter.
It’s amazing sounding,” says Balding.
Based on his considerable experience, Balding says that he is
only too happy to recommend Intel-based systems to anyone thinking
of getting into recording or planning to bring their audio tools
up to the next level. Why? “The speed that it has and the
access that it give you,” says. “As software manufacturers
tap into the power of it, it makes the job easier and lets you
focus on the music.”
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Photo File: Jeff_Balding.JPG