The sad news hit early Tuesday morning, music engineer and producer Al Schmitt had passed away at at 91. I got a chance to sit down with the music legend to chat about his legacy and upcoming book just a few years ago. I was recording interviews for Stereophile‘s Audiostream Podcast at the time, and Al was equal parts gracious and entertaining during the nearly three hours we spent together talking about his expansive, full life. His work in the music industry spans so many years, and he had so many fun and crazy stories to tell from his professional experience with the likes of Sam Cook, Todo, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Paul McCartney and more. 23 Grammys, to be exact. I’ve revisited the entire interview on this week’s Occasional Podcast to help give a small glimpse at the man who spent almost his entire life dedicated to making music sound better. The Occasional Podcast is making its way though Season 5 with this week’s revisit with Al Schmitt, but don’t miss our conversation from last week’s interview with Elac’s Andrew Jones, or even our interview audio legend Mike Moffat from the season opener. Also available for download is last season’s interviews […]
Tag Archives: Al Schmitt
Los Angeles, CA (April 27, 2021) — Al Schmitt, arguably the most successful recording engineer ever, died Monday, April 26, at the age of 91. Over the course of a 70-plus-year career, Schmitt worked with multiple generations of music superstars, capturing some of the best-known songs and albums of his lifetime. The recipient of 20 Grammy Awards, Schmitt also won two Latin Grammys and a Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (the first ever for an engineer), and had more than 160 Gold and Platinum recordings to his credit. Just some of the artists Schmitt worked with included Frank Sinatra, Henry Mancini, Paul McCartney, Barbra Streisand, Dr. Dre, Lady Gaga, Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke, Toto, Diana Krall, Steely Dan, Luis Miguel, Norah Jones, George Benson, Natalie Cole, Quincy Jones, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, Tony Bennett, Bing Crosby, The Andrews Sisters and Jefferson Airplane.
Born in New York City, Schmitt grew up around recording, often visiting his uncle’s facility in Manhattan, Harry Smith Recording, as a child. With that influence, it was unsurprising that after serving in the US Navy, he became apprentice engineer at 19, working under producer Tom Dowd at Apex Recording in NYC. Learning on the job, Schmitt was only entrusted with recording the occasional demo acetate until Duke Ellington and his big band—which included greats like Billy Strayhorn and Johnny Hodges—showed up unexpectedly to record on a quiet weekend in 1949. As the only engineer on hand, Schmitt tried to make the most of the eight inputs available, setting up mics using sketchy placement diagrams he’d hastily drawn while assisting on other sessions. He told Ellington “I’m not qualified” so often that eventually the jazz great had to calmly reassure him that he could do it.
After moving around New York studios for nearly a decade, Schmitt headed west to Los Angeles in 1958, initially working at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, where he first collaborated with Henry Mancini, recording small combo tracks on the composer’s 1959 The Music from Peter Gunn soundtrack. It was the start of a fruitful working relationship, as Schmitt went on to record numerous Mancini soundtracks, including Mr. Lucky, Charade, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (for which he got a Grammy nomination) and Hatari, which landed Schmitt his first Grammy Award.
Schmitt moved to RCA as a staff engineer in 1963 and was soon promoted to staff producer. While there, he produced the likes of Sam Cooke, Eddie Fisher, Ann-Margaret and Jefferson Airplane among others, but the endless 16-hour days and lack of support from upper management led to him quitting in 1966 to go independent. Over the next few years, he continued to produce Jefferson Airplane and added Jackson Browne, Neil Young, Al Jarreau and others to his discography, but found he missed engineering, as union rules of the era forbade producers from touching the console. As the 1970s wore on, he returned to mostly engineering, which he greatly preferred.
It wasn’t a bad career decision—during the 1970s and 80s, Schmitt won a slew of Grammys for his work engineering George Benson’s Breezin’; Steely Dan’s staple Aja and stand-alone single “FM (No Static At All)”; and Toto’s comeback album, Toto IV. In the decades that followed, he would take home Grammys for work on multiple Diana Krall albums; Natalie Cole’s Unforgettable…with Love; albums with Quincy Jones, Luis Miguel, Chick Corea and Dee Dee Bridgewater; a pair of Grammys for Paul McCartney’s Kisses on the Bottom; and a jaw-dropping five trophies for Ray Charles’s 2004 album, Genius Loves Company.
In 2014, Schmitt was honored by the Hollywood Walk of Fame with his own star, located outside the iconic Capitol Records building—home to Capitol Studios, where he spent countless hours recording over the decades. In the mid-2000s, Schmitt was a founding member of METAlliance, a group of top engineers who regularly hold recording workshops around the globe; Schmitt often shared his insights and knowledge with Pro Sound News readers through the METAlliance’s recurring column.
In 2018, he teamed with Maureen Droney, managing director of the Recording Academy’s Producers & Engineers Wing, to write his autobiography, Al Schmitt On the Record: The Magic Behind the Music, which shared not only much of his technical knowledge and wild recording session tales, but also career advice on what’s required on a personal level to stay at the top of one’s game for decades. Earlier this year, he collaborated with software company Leapwing to release a signature Leapwing Al Schmitt Signature plug-in.
At press time, the cause of Schmitt’s death is undisclosed, but a Facebook memorial page has been created in his name. His family released a statement April 27, noting,
“Al Schmitt’s wife Lisa, his five children, eight grandchildren, and five great grandchildren would like his friends and extended recording industry family to know that he passed away Monday afternoon, April 26. The world has lost a much loved and respected extraordinary individual, who led an extraordinary life. The most honored and awarded recording producer/engineer of all time, his parting words at any speaking engagement were, “Please be kind to all living things.”
Loved and admired by his recording colleagues, and by the countless artists he worked with, from Jefferson Airplane, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, Diana Krall, Dr. John, Natalie Cole and Jackson Browne to Bob Dylan—and so many more—Al will be sorely missed. He was a man who loved deeply, and the friendships, love and admiration he received in return enriched his life and truly mattered to him. A light has dimmed in the world, but we all learned so much from him in his time on earth, and are so very grateful to have known him.
How do you capture the essence of a legendary engineer/producer with 23 Grammys, 160 gold and platinum albums and a ‘who’s who’ resume, and put that into a piece of software? Well, that’s just what Leapwig and the iconic Al Schmitt went for with the new Al Schmitt signature plug-in. The team literally encapsulated his gear, mixes’ textures and workflow to come up with something that ambitious.
When first opening the plug-in, you select from a Source dropdown menu that offers up Vocal, Bass, Brass, Mix, Piano or Strings. These are referred to as ‘profiles’ and each of them are tuned differently with their own character and tone. Each profile also features a different ‘tuned’ amount of harmonic distortion. Within each profile, there are a number of options as well—for example, Vocal features Body Level, Air Level, Echo Level, Compression, Air Type and Echo Type.
This approach to plug-in design has led Al and the team at Leapwig to create something that operates in a unique fashion. When audio is played, rings that represent loudness are played around the relevant icon in the center in real time. If there is something like gain reduction happening, the outer rings tighten up accordingly at ½ dB per ring. For instance, if there are four rings happening, you’ve got 2 dBs of reduction. It’s something your eyes have to get used to because it’s simply a new way of operating.
The METAlliance Report – Al Schmitt, Frank Filipetti Talk Miking
Since each source features its own customized parameters to tweak, you quickly adjust to how to get around. For example, Mix features Sub Boost, Low, Mid and High Level, Low, Mid and High Comp, a compressor link and Air Boost. Bass is nothing but Compression, Body Level and Air Level, but it includes additional harmonic distortion within those parameters. Piano, which is one of my favorites, features Compression, Echo Level and A/B/C Echo Type. Note that “echo” is actually a reverb, a name that was chosen since that is what Al calls it. Aside from that, there’s In and Out Meters with up to 12 dBs of gain.
What I like about this plug-in is that you can dial in some taste very quickly. When first listening, it helps to run through each source to understand what the parameters do. To hear the echoes clearly, I would simply put on audio with attack and stop the transport, listening to what sound is created afterwards. The others, such as Sub, Air bands and EQs are easy to hear. Compression is subtle yet clearly audible. I found it useful to also mix and match—for example, using the compression in the bass source on something like a piano. Then, if I wanted more, I put another instance after in the DAW and used the EQ in Echo in the Strings source, or the EQ and Air settings in the Mix source. Once you have a feel for it, your instinct knows where to go. I saved a number of presets for easy recall: I like Echo Type C on the Strings source, so that’s now my “RT Echo 1 Strings’ preset, and I also captured a nice Mix bus preset with Sub Boost, Air Boost a few dBs of Gain and a touch of Highs as “AS Master 1.”
The METAlliance Report: The Recording of Steely Dan’s ‘Aja’
Aside from being easy, this plug is fun to use. You can get to a sound with just a few quick fader slides and most importantly, it works as advertised. It’s not big, bold and aggressive, but subtle and tasty, especially in the reverb/echo fields. Most importantly, all of these sounds are clean, clear and tasty. I would also use the word “refined,” which is a testament to the team making it. Since you probably can’t get him to your session, now you can bring a little of Al Schmitt’s magic sonic touch to your own tracks.
Leapwing • www.leapwingaudio.com
Rich Tozzoli is an award-winning, Grammy-nominated producer, engineer and composer for programming such as FOX NFL, Pawn Stars and Oprah & Deepak Chopra. www.richtozzoli.com
The METAlliance — Al Schmitt, Chuck Ainlay, Elliot Scheiner, Frank Filipetti, George Massenburg and Niko Bolas, along with the late Phil Ramone and Ed Cherney. The METAlliance Mission is to promote the highest quality in the art and science of recording music.
Chuck Ainlay and I were talking about microphones. We thought that it might make a nice column. Then we thought, “Wait a minute—we have the greatest resource in the world right here in the METAlliance. His name is Al Schmitt!” So, I interviewed Al. We not only got a great column, we got a whole series—here’s a portion:
Frank Filipetti: What is the first thing that you look for when you’re deciding on a microphone for purchase, or to go into the studio? Is it frequency response, polar pattern, off axis response, emotional response?
Al Schmitt: I think it’s more emotional than anything. I’ve been doing this for a long time and working on every kind of microphone you can imagine at some point in my career, and yeah, it’s become an emotional thing. I’ll have a favorite mic I love to go to on certain things; sometimes it’s a condenser mic, and sometimes it’s a ribbon mic. It depends on the artist and the circumstances of what we’re doing, and how we’re going to do it. If it’s somebody like Michael Buble, who wants to sing right in the middle of the rhythm section with the band, I’ll use a [Neumann U] 47 on him, in a cardioid position to get some rejection from the other side. He’s got really good microphone technique, so that works for him. Some others, you can’t do that.
Frank: You like to use a U47 in cardioid—part of that is because you’re looking for rejection, but are you also looking for any proximity effect?
Al: Well, a little bit of proximity effect, but it’s more about the setup. If the artist is in an ISO booth, you might use a different mic than if you had them in the room. It also depends on how much time you have—if you’re overdubbing a vocal, guitar, whatever, and you have time, then you can experiment with mics, have a couple of different mics up there, see which ones you like the best, and it’s a great learning process. When you’re doing that, you think, “Oh, I love this 47 a lot” or “This [Neumann U] 67 sounds pretty damn good to me.” And “How about that [Neumann] M50, or even [a Shure] SM7?” It goes on and on.
Fortunately, we’re blessed; we get to use the best microphones in the world. A lot of people who read these magazines have little home studios, and the most expensive mic they have might be a $300 microphone or even a USB. They have to do the best they can with what they have. I’m fortunate that I have a great microphone collection; I know you do, too. And when I work at Capitol, they have unlimited mics.
Frank: Not only do you have unlimited access at a studio like Capitol, but you know they’re all in tip-top condition.
Al: Yeah, absolutely.
The METAlliance Report: Sound Aesthetics – It’s Written in Stone
The METAlliance Report: The Recording of Steely Dan’s ‘Aja’
Frank: Let’s say for example, you have an artist who wants to be in the room with the musicians. Do you encourage or discourage that, especially if the producer wants to punch-in or be able to tune the vocal later?
Al: You don’t punch in, especially if they’re in in the middle of the section and you have all that bleed; you’re gonna hear that unless you’re punching in everybody at the same time, so yeah, you can’t do that. You’ll have to redo the vocal as an overdub and then fix whatever parts you want to fix that way.
Years ago, when you couldn’t punch in, the singer sang with the rhythm section and you needed to keep the vocal on top—and you learned which mic works best. Experience taught you how to use your microphones for separation and isolation. In the end, it’s the years of that experience that teaches you how to do that.
Frank: How about today’s way of making records, where isolation of every track is placed at a premium for fixing and tuning after the fact?
Al: Making vocals perfect always bothered me. Some of those recordings, where every note is right on the mark, it just becomes robotic. It doesn’t sound like a human after a while. Frank Sinatra didn’t sing every note in tune. The great thing is, you can fix a thing here and there, but to go in and tune every note, do we really have to do that? I don’t know; I don’t like to make music like that, and I try to stay away from that.
Frank: I do, too. It’s what I call the stonewall effect—that the old stone walls with their lack of symmetry grabs me more emotionally than the newer walls with their straight lines and perfect symmetry. When it gets too perfect, you lose that emotional response.
Al: Totally agree.
To be continued….
The METAlliance • www.metalliance.com
Steely Dan were famous for their meticulous approach to recording. While they earned armloads of plaudits and Grammys proving they were right in their rigor, it’s the sound of their records that really makes the point. To this day, their albums are held up as pinnacles of recording—and a prime example is their 1977 classic, Aja.
Released in September 1977, Aja found the duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen in top form, once again working with producer Gary Katz. Becoming their fastest seller to date, the album went on to go double Platinum and spawn three Top 40 hits with “Peg,” “Deacon Blues” and “Josie”—not bad for an album of only seven songs! Nominated for Album of the Year and Best Pop Performance at the 1978 Grammys, Aja ultimately brought home the trophy for Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical—a triumph shared by engineers Roger Nichols, Bill Schnee and two members of the METAlliance, Al Schmitt and Elliot Scheiner. With that in mind, we sat down with Al and El to get their insights on recording the landmark collection. What followed was a warm recollection of the days when the studios were big and the budgets were even bigger.
How did you guys get involved with the project?
Elliot: I started on the album before, which was The Royal Scam, and we had a falling out during that project. We had a deal: “Come out to L.A. and we’ll do the record. We’ll be done in two months maximum.” … and I didn’t know enough about how they worked.
I stayed in the Beverly Hills Hotel, Donald got me a Mercedes-Benz sports car and it seemed good, but we only recorded maybe once or twice a week. We started at one studio and moved to Village Recorder. After month or two of that, I got really fed up, and wouldn’t you know it, I got a call on the last day of that week and they said, “We’re not working today.” We hung up, I packed my bags, I left and never said anything. I just got out.
We didn’t talk again until a year or more later. Gary called me and said, “Do you want to mix this record?” I was just in New York at A&R Studios, and it was a great opportunity for me to be back with those guys. We were friends before any of that started—I’d known them since the late ’60s when they were the backup band for Jay and the Americans—so I took it.
Related stories:
• The METAlliance Report: Critical Listening and Critical Evaluation, by George Massenburg, Jan. 30, 2019
• Recording All-Stars Welcome Niko Bolas to METAlliance, May 14, 2020
• The METAlliance Report: Ed Cherney (1950–2019), by Elliot Scheiner, Nov. 25, 2019
Before Al came in, I was mixing the entire record. Bill Schnee had recorded “Aja” and “Black Cow,” and everything else was recorded by Roger Nichols. The only thing that was recorded at A&R was “Peg”—we ended up recording it in one night. I think they actually came up with the song that night and decided to record. It was so much sick s— that happened during that time period. At some point, we finished. I thought.
I had mixed everything on [the title track] “Aja,” but they came back because there was so much leakage in the room on some of the things. Most everything was on one 24-track tape, and in some cases it had three or four things on a single track and they each had to be mixed differently—verse by verse, chorus and bridge all had separate setups. When you got finished with a verse, you now had a guitar on a percussion track. It kept moving around like that, so you had to change panning, EQ, everything—and the whole song was like that, just trying to get the thing together before we even edited. We did that, and about three weeks after, they said there’s no bass in a lot of the mix.
I said, “That’s impossible.” I thought about everything that went into that and the last thing I wanted to do was do it again, but at some point, I thought to myself in the night, is it possible that I didn’t switch it on when it had to be muted? There was no automation—it was all manual, right? They were coming back on a Monday, so I came in early and put the whole mix up, listening to the original. There were notes for EQ and not really as much for level setting. I recalled the whole mix, and put it down with the bass really loud. [laughs]
They came in, and Donald and Walter looked at each other, thinking, “Wow, this is really f—-d up. There was no bass on this.” I started to laugh and they knew instantly what happened. They said, “Okay, so you put it in today. Let’s start the whole mix again.” We did and that was the only thing that got redone by me. Then I didn’t hear until the record came out that Al had mixed two songs.
Classic Tracks: Elliot Scheiner and Steely Dan, by Robyn Flans, Mix, Jan. 31, 2018
All right—so, Al, how did you get into this?
Al: I got a call while at Sound Labs Studio 2 [in Hollywood]. We used to do a lot of work there at that time, and I said yes. They came over to bring their tape and brought five or six 1176 limiters—I don’t know what the hell they wanted me to use them on, but they did. They dropped the tape off and left.
I put the tape up and it’s “Peg.” I get a mix on it and it sounds pretty good. I know there’s going to be a lot of things that have to be done, but I get the mix up—and then I turn the monitor off, and I hit the playback. I’m watching the meters on the Quad 8 board to see how the meters are reacting and everything. Then I turn the monitor back up, so here’s this mix coming out of the speakers. And little did I know, they had come into the room [while the monitor was off]. They were standing behind me and Gary said, “F—–g Al, he can mix without even hearing this s—!” [Laughs]
Elliot: They told that story to anybody who would come in the room, that Al was capable of mixing without speakers. I remember saying to Gary, how is that possible? Gary, in his wisdom, said, “He looks at the meters!” [Laughs]
Al: Anyway, it was such a complicated mix that we were all mixing the record. I was at the board, Donald and Walter were doing something with echo and something else, and Gary was doing something else—and we were there for 12 hours. I had never worked that long on a mix in my life. I’d get it right, but maybe Donald would say, “I missed the echo. I didn’t get in the right spot,” and so we had to keep doing it over and over and over. Every time we ran it down, it was a performance, because we were all performing, right?
I mixed another one, “Deacon Blues,” and then at that same time, they were doing “FM (No Static at All),” [the theme song to] the movie FM, and they asked me to record. Although they had a track done, we got Johnny Mandel in to do the arrangement. We did that at Capitol in Studio A and Johnny said to me, “These guys know what they’re doing?” I said, “Absolutely.” At one point, he was running things down and Donald hit the talkback and said, “Johnny, there’s something wrong in the violas.” And sure enough there was—and that turned Mandel right around. That’s when he really knew that they had ears—they could hear and they knew what they were doing. Then I mixed it back at Sound Labs. The funny thing about that single? I got this Best Engineer [Grammy] award for that, and that was the first and last time that ever happened.
The story you always hear is that they would record a track a number of times with a number of players to get it right.
Elliot: Yeah—I remember on [the follow-up album] Gaucho, they would record songs five, six, seven times, and with completely different bands. With Aja, I only recorded “Peg,” and that was one band. Rick Marotta, Chuck Rainey, Don Grolnick, Paul Griffin and Steve Kahn. I would only do the tracks and then Roger would do all the overdubs. [Legendary session drummer] Steve Gadd played on “Black Cow” and “Aja,” and when we finished mixing “Aja” the first time, they said, “Why don’t you bring Gadd in?” He came in and was really f—-d up. He started listening to the drum solo and was nodding like, “This is incredible!” And at the end of the song, he said, “Who’s playing drums?” [Laughs]
There’s that old adage that when people listen to something they worked on a while back, they hear something they’d want to go back and change. You guys don’t seem to have that affliction.
Elliot: For me personally, when it’s done, it’s done. But if I hear it a year later? Oh. My. Gosh.
Al: I’m exactly the same—I hear it a year later, I say, “Oh, why didn’t I do that? How did I miss that?” That’s the perfectionist in us. Somebody asked me recently, am I happy with anything I’ve ever done? I said, “To be honest with you, no matter what record it was, I can always take something and make it a little better.”
Steely Dan: A Guide to Their Best Albums, by Paul Elliott, Classic Rock, Nov. 12, 2018
Is that something about how you’ve changed since then? Is it that you learn something on a subsequent session, or perhaps you grow as people or grow as engineers—or do you think there was actually something that you probably knew but you just missed it?
Elliot: I think it was a case of missing for me. Here’s an example: The dynamic between Donald, Walker and Gary was such that when we were actually doing the cut “Aja,” Gary wasn’t in the room. He would come in to start the session and then drift out. Nobody knew where the f— he went, but after three days of mixing, Roger was doing the two-track edits when we finished. We played it back and thought it really sounded great.
Gary came in and was on the other side of the console, standing with his ears in between the speakers. After it finished, he looked at Donald and Walter and said, “There’s not enough cymbals.” [Laughs] Walter looked at me and said, “You know, wherever you are, get the f— out of here and go back there.”
METAlliance • www.metalliance.com
This article originally appeared in the August 2020 issue of Pro Sound News. METAlliance Report is a monthly column in which members of the METAlliance discuss topics of interest to audio professionals.
Hollywood, CA (July 14, 2020)—Grammy-nominated recording industry veteran Bill Smith has joined United Recording as chief archiving engineer for the facility’s United Archiving division.
Smith, with 35 years in the industry, is proficient in caring for, reviving, reconditioning and restoring audio assets, as well as computer-based data tape systems. His experience includes archiving individual tape catalogs for such artists as Natalie Cole, preserving and organizing extensive record label libraries.
Taylor Tracks ‘Standard’ Songs at United
Smith began his career as a recording engineer in New York City in 1985, working at The Hit Factory, Quad Recording and Todd Rundgren’s Secret Sound Studios. Moving to Los Angeles in 1990, he secured a staff engineer position at Capitol Studios where he remained for several years before transitioning into freelance work. During these years he worked on both Grammy-winning and Grammy-nominated albums for Barbra Streisand, John Fogerty, Natalie Cole, George Benson, Trevor Horn, The Manhattan Transfer, Diana Krall, Toto, Queen Latifah, Arturo Sandoval, Chris Botti, Al Jarreau and other top-selling artists.
For 11 years Smith worked as the personal recording assistant, co-engineer and Pro Tools operator alongside 23-time Grammy-winning recording engineer, producer and music industry legend Al Schmitt. Their longstanding professional relationship has lasted well beyond that as they have continued to collaborate on many projects throughout the years.
Schmitt commented, “Bill is one of my dearest friends, we have worked together for 28 years and United is truly lucky to have a man of his integrity, competency, technical skill and background heading their archiving department. His attention to detail is incredible and he has such extensive experience with all recording formats that I would trust him completely with every aspect of any archiving project.”
United Recording • www.unitedrecordingstudios.com
My latest Vinyl Anachronist music review is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.
Cambridge, UK (May 5, 2020)—Launched last year at AES, the dCS (Data Conversion Systems, Ltd.) Legends Award campaign has acknowledged the efforts of recording, mixing, and mastering engineers who have strived throughout their careers to deliver a quality music listening experience possible. Since then, the Legends Award has been bestowed upon Bob Ludwig, Al Schmitt, Tony Faulkner and Chuck Ainlay. Now dCS has announced the next round of honorees.
Bob Ludwig Receives dCS Legends Award
In the coming months, the dCS Legends Award campaign will highlight Frank Filipetti, James Guthrie, Leslie Ann Jones, George Massenburg, John Newton, Elliot Scheiner, Mark Wilder and the late Ed Cherney, who dCS also honored with a contribution to the COVID-19 Relief Fund established by the Recording Academy and MusiCares.
While honoring noted engineers, the program is also intended to underscore the growing industry trend toward ‘studio quality’ high-resolution streaming services. “We are overwhelmed by the positive response that our Legends Award campaign has received from both music professionals and enthusiasts alike,” said David J. Steven, managing director. “We have been working closely with the Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing to identify and tell the incredible stories behind a diverse group of legendary engineers, and we plan to continue this effort through the remainder of this year.”
dCS Legends Award • www.dcsltd.co.uk