Progressive rock fans need not look far to find Paul Northfield’s name among their music collections. Over the past 35 years, he has recorded Gentle Giant, RUSH, Asia, Queensrÿche, Porcupine Tree, and Dream Theater, along with dozens of other artists you know — like Steve Vai, Bryan Adams, Pat Travers, Hole, Ozzy, Judas Priest, Suicidal Tendencies, Marilyn Manson, and on and on and on.
At one time or another I’ve owned a major chunk of his discography. But more significant to me than the impressive breadth of his resume is the handful of standout records he has helped make. In other words, if I were stranded on the proverbial desert island, a couple of Northfield’s albums had better be there with me.
Say, for example, Moving Pictures. I know every note of that record. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve played it, I could buy my own desert island.
Or how about In Absentia? The first time I heard it, I caught myself sitting slackjawed at my desk. And then scrabbling for the liner notes to figure out where this amazing record came from.
It’s too soon to say for sure, but it seems that Dream Theater’s newest, Black Clouds and Silver Linings, would also make the short list. It’s getting a ton of airplay around here lately, to the point that my 4-year-old son can sing along to “The Count of Tuscany” (to my wife’s dismay).
I caught up with Paul earlier this year, after he’d returned home from a couple months in the studio with Dream Theater. We got deep into DT and RUSH, drum tracking, vintage gear, the state of the industry, and of course microphones. Here we go:
You first worked with Rush on Permanent Waves, around 1979. How did that come about?#
I started off at the age of 17 at Advision studios in London, as a tape op. Some of my favorite bands worked there; Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and so that’s what drew me to the studio. I worked in London for about five years. Then I was 22, and I was independent. I’d been working with Gentle Giant, and they brought me to work at Le Studio, which is in the mountains north of Montreal.
At that time, the studio scene wasn’t driven by independent engineers. There were a lot of independent producers, but, quite a lot of the time, you’d use in-house engineers because every studio was different. Every one had a sound and a specialization, so that people tended to go to a studio, and more than 50% of the time they would use the house engineers. As time went on, the engineering became more of a an independent enterprise, especially with standardization of consoles and monitoring, SSLs becoming ubiquitous, along with NS10s and such like.
So that brought me to Morin Heights. And they asked me if I would join the studio, so I ultimately did because being freelance was kind of hair-raising. And then Rush happened to be one of the clients that were interested in recording there, because it was a spectacular residential facility — in the mountains, with its own private lake. The studio overlooked the lake, and it was one of the few studios with large windows looking out. It was a wonderful environment to record in.
So I ended up engineering Permanent Waves. Terry Brown, at that point, had always engineered and produced the band, and this was the first time that he sat back and just did production.
Northfield Interview http://recordinghacks.com/2009/10/28/paul-northfield/
No comments:
Post a Comment