Legendary Engineer Allen Sides – My Magic Bullet

I recently had a chance to sit down with legendary engineer Allen Sides at Sweetwater Studios while he was here demonstrating his new, impressive Ocean Way Audio 7.1.4 immersive audio studio monitor system. If you don’t know Allen’s name as a producer and engineer, then you most definitely know his work. He’s a five-time Grammy Award winner who has made records with Ray Charles, Mary J. Blige, Aretha Franklin, Green Day, Joni Mitchell, Aerosmith, Eric Clapton, Vince Gill, Alanis Morissette, Ry Cooder, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, John Williams, and Jerry Goldsmith.

Allen shared lots of stories from his long career, many of which will be inspiring to aspiring engineers.

Meet Allen Sides

Fuston: Allen Sides, what a treat to chat with you. What I want to discuss today is certain tools, “magic bullets” as I call them, or certain moments ­— light bulb moments — when you discovered something that would change your workflow forever, whether it was a technique, a mic, or maybe outboard gear. I remember when I was first starting out, I had been using a spring reverb and finally bought a full-size reverb plate, one of those beasts that’s 8 feet long by 4 feet high by 1 foot. I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh.” Just swapping that made everything I was working on sound like a real record instead of a nice demo. The difference was huge, and it was just that easy.

Sides: Well, you take each thing that you have, and you manipulate it to get the most out of it. I remember having a pair of Fairchild spring reverbs, but I had a pair — one for the left, one for the right — and then I got a nice pre-delay going on it, and all of a sudden it sounded a whole lot better than just a mono spring reverb.

Like so many things, it’s never perfect, but if you finesse it, you can get more out of it. Of course, with an EMT 140 plate reverb, even those can sound different from each other. I bought out so many studios over the years, I’ve probably owned 60 or 70 EMT 140s. I think when I bought RCA Studios in Hollywood, I got like 11 EMTs in that one deal.

Tube or solid-state?

Some of each. I generally prefer the tube version. What I would do is I set them all up in the studio, and I pick the ones I like the best because the piece of metal defines how it’s going to sound. There’s lots of variables in how you tune it, but it’s all about the metal. If the metal’s got the sizzle — the highs — that’s what you want. My dear friend Phil Ramone, he had two tweaked EMTs that were his pride and joy, that he used on all those Dionne Warwick records and all that stuff he did for years. I think Rhymin’ Simon — he did all that. He made the mistake of getting rid of those, and he never forgave himself because they were just a part of his sound. I can say that myself. So many things I wish I would’ve kept.

I agree. I had a preamp (a Groove Tubes VIPRE) that I always used on kick drum. I sold it thinking I could find something else that was close enough. Guess what? I was wrong. Nothing else would ever do what it did.

Neve 1073

Speaking of kick drum, I was always fond of the original Neve 1073 on my kick because I love the 35Hz boost. And I also loved the 12.5k shelf because I could add clarity without tick. And if I pushed the mid band a little, I could get exactly what I wanted. I would typically use two 1073s. I would use one with a FET 47 on the outside with a windscreen, and inside I’d use an AKG D112 aimed at the beater, just slightly off axis, about six inches away from the head. The two of them together would give me what I wanted. The 1073 was really particularly good for that. I mean, there’s lots of other preamps that do work quite well, but the 1073, I love the EQ specifically for that.

Your Early Years

Let’s go back to your formative years, the early years when you were still trying to figure out what you wanted to hear. Was there a moment when you ran across a piece of gear, and it was like the clouds parted and you heard an angel choir?

Well, here’s the thing: I started really young. Even when I was 14, I had a crazy sound system in my bedroom. It was tri-amplified theater speakers.

Wait. 14 years old? How does a 14-year-old do that?

Well, when I was 13 and even 12, I was kind of wheeling and dealing. I used to read the LA Times classified section on Saturdays, and I’d look for old Marantz and McIntosh tube gear that was for sale. People didn’t think it was valuable, but of course it was valuable. So, I started buying Marantz Model 9s, McIntosh 275s, and old JBL stuff for nothing because people didn’t know the value of what they were selling. And so, I’d buy it on Friday before anybody saw it. A friend of my father’s funded me, and I’d tell him, “I got a deal for you.” I said, “You fund this, I’ll find this stuff. I’ll sell it, we’ll split it.” And he would drive me. We’d go pick up this stuff, and we’d split the profits 50/50. So, I spent his money, and then I kept acquiring all this cool stuff because I didn’t want the money. I just wanted the stuff.

Spoken like a true engineer.

That monitor system in my bedroom was RCA theater speakers, which I was very fond of. This particular design was one that Harry Olson designed in the late ’50s. And each speaker was seven feet high, three feet wide, four feet deep with twin 15s. It had a radial horn with twin drivers. And then I came up with my own custom tweeters to go with it. So, it was tri-amped. I had Marantz Model 9s on the highs and mids. And then I had a friend of mine who worked for Tektronix that built me a transistor amp for the bass out of a Tektronix curve tracer power supply that had quite a bit of juice. And that was my bass amp.

Wow.

I had a Pioneer electronic crossover, and then I had SAE equalizers, and it sounded really, really good. But the problem was finding great-sounding material to play on my speakers. Let’s face it, there’s really only a handful of great recordings — ones you can play and say, “That’s got some punch, and that sounds great.” And so there was Phil Ramone, we became great friends later on, but I was a fan of his Quincy Jones Smackwater Jack and all those records that he did, his early stuff. This was in A&R Studios in New York.

Phil was doing Burt Bacharach. He did Casino Royale and “The Look of Love” with Dusty Springfield. Sounded fantastic. And that was Phil. One time, Phil was staying with me at my house in Georgia. We just went over all his old stuff. He did those records with Pat Williams. They were big band records live to two-track at A&R. And I remember the first time I heard them. I thought, “It’s so polished. The ’verbs are so great. And it’s all live to two-track.” And Phil said he’d have three different pre-delays going with the ’verbs sometimes. He had it all hooked up, and it just sounded so polished. Sure, you can edit a live to two-track, you can do different bits and pieces, but it’s still a live mix.

So, when I really started working early on in my first studio, which was underneath Pacific Ocean Park in Los Angeles, it was all live to two-track. A friend of mine had a place called the Beach House, which was a beer-bar nightclub, and they had bands playing upstairs. And the basement was an old speakeasy nightclub from the ’20s, so that was my recording studio. I did a PA system for the club, and he gave me that 3,000 square feet in the basement for free. So, I had that from 10th grade on, and that was my first studio.

Let’s Talk About Mics

So, that’s how you started acquiring gear. Let’s talk about other gear that was influential for you.

The other thing was microphones because all this wheeling and dealing led to some interesting microphone deals.

I bet.

As a kid, I used to hang out at Capitol Studios. I used to hang out at Todd-AO and various places.

Wait a second! How did you make a connection with Todd-AO when you were a kid?

When I started looking for all this gear, I just started making calls, and I talked to this guy, his name was Jack Woltz. He was the Chief Tech for Todd-AO. (I later hired him to be the manager of Ocean Way Studios.)

I went down there, and he was a really great guy. We met, and we were hanging out — it was the dub stage where they were dubbing major movies, but we’re hanging in the shop. And he opened this cabinet, and I saw all these mics in there, these Church mics, which were modified U47s, some U67s, and a bunch of RCA 10001s. I said, well, what’s that? “Well, when Michael Todd was making motion pictures, we scored all the pictures at the Charlie Chaplain lot, which became A&M. These are the mics we’d use. They haven’t been used since.”

They’re just sitting in this locker, and I said, “Oh, okay. Well, how about I trade you stuff for these?” I could buy these SAE graphic equalizers, which are really good, from a friend of mine, Morris Kessler, who owned SAE. So, I ended up trading a bunch of those for all those mics. I got eight Church mics. And then I got five 67s, and I got some Schoeps CM 61s, some AKG C 60s for just nothing. I mean, I figured I was averaging a hundred dollars a mic.

As a young guy, that hurts my feelings.

The Church mics blew me away. I already had a Neumann U 47, and I thought it sounded great, and it really did. But when I heard the Church mic, I said, “This is crazy how good they are.”

Let’s back up a little. I’ve heard of Church mics, but I bet most people haven’t.

Well, Stan Church worked for MGM, and they decided they were going to build their own mics because the U 47 was a great mic, but it did have a few deficiencies. You could overload it occasionally. So, MGM built their version with a 6072, which is the same tube that the 251 and the C12 has. But what’s interesting about it, it has much higher polarizing voltage. They ran 275 volts to the capsule compared to 175 volts for a U 47. And then there’s a Triad transformer. It just swings more current than a U 47.

It’s impervious to overload. And if I compared the two, it’s just got more punch. When I first started recording drums, it was at a friend’s house. I got a great drummer and a bass player. I put them in the bedroom, and we completely draped it up for acoustics.

I remember he had three toms, kick, and snare. So, what I did was I had one Church mic between the first tom and the snare and another Church mic between the other two toms. I think I had an AKG D24E on the kick. And then I had a DI on the bass, and I recorded them live to two-track. And I used these JBL graphic controller preamps called SG-520s. I used those together for mixers. So, I think I had three of those tied together with 10k resistors. And I went directly to my Ampex 354 tape recorder.

It sounded ridiculous, but for me, it was all the joy of getting great-sounding, punchy stuff. I knew what I liked when I heard really superb recordings. I said, that’s what I want. I’m a musician, so I play guitar, I play bass, I know what it takes to make instruments sound good. So, I just started recording. I never really learned from anyone. I just basically did it because I knew exactly what I wanted.

So, you started experimenting, thinking, “That doesn’t sound how I want it to sound; let’s change something until it gets closer.”

Well, sure. In that same respect, the speaker system that I had in my bedroom, I had the two graphic controller preamps. So, I had electronic crossovers, had the gains on the highs, mids, and lows that I could adjust. Then I had the SAE Mark VII octave equalizer, which had 11 bands. But one of the problems was that my bedroom was very small, and my speakers were gargantuan. So, I was missing the low-frequency wavelengths I wanted. I could get really killer down to about 40 Hertz (Hz), but I couldn’t get the 30Hz, the 20Hz stuff.

Just not enough cubic volume in the room.

Not enough depth to really reproduce that, so I built a cabinet, and I put two JBL D140s in it, and I put it between my two speakers, face down, and I’m on the second floor. So, I made the entire floor of the room a resonant vibrator. And then I crossed that over around 45Hz.

So, you just turned the whole floor into a speaker diaphragm?

Exactly. And I got the cleanest 20Hz you ever heard!

What did the people downstairs think?

Well, when the cracks began to appear on the ceiling in the dining room, my mother said, “I don’t know what’s going on here.” I told her, “I can’t imagine why that’s happening. It’s like all this dust keeps landing on the dining room table.”

What I would do then was I’d find the best-sounding records, and for every album I had a preset. Okay, where was the sublevel set? Where was the SAE equalizer set? Where was the SG-520 shelving? And I created complete presets, like mastering each record, to make it sound as impressive as I could. So, I understood what all the EQs did and what frequencies I wanted and didn’t want. So, I had a lot of experience even before I started recording. I had a great sense of tonality and frequency response and where I needed to boost or cut to get it to be juicy and fun.

How About New Mics?

Wow. Okay. Then fast-forward, what mics are there now that give you that same kind of experience that you got with the Church mics. Is there anything current?

Well, I’m very fond of the Sony C-800G. I think it’s a great mic. A lot of people dig it on vocals, but it’s great on everything. And Sony did an outstanding job on it. I worked with [George] Massenburg, and I worked with Sony on the various versions of that. And I think that’s a killer mic.

I didn’t know you guys were involved with it. George never mentioned that to me.

Oh, yeah. I still have the original prototype that Sony gave me from our original work. And George had some, as well.

So, other new mics? I mean, I am very fond of the Schoeps CMC5, the cardioid Schoeps. That’s a great mic. A lot of times when I was doing all those American Idol singles with Rickey Minor, he had a beautiful studio that I built for him behind Ocean Way. And he had a beautiful SSL 9000 J console, and we did a lot of tracking. I would just use a pair of those Schoeps as the overheads with a couple of API 550A with +4dB boost at 12k shelf.

And I was using Sennheiser 421s on the toms. But when you add the Schoeps in, they’re not just cymbal mics. I call them overall drum mics. They make the toms sound great because they pick up what the 421 doesn’t have. And then also the off-axis stuff from the 421s isn’t the prettiest thing in the world, so you really want the Schoeps to fill in that hole. And we got some pretty great drum sounds out of Ricky’s Studio just using that plus the usual AKG D112 and FET 47 on the kick.

I think, because — when I’m doing recording at the studios, if I’ve got four toms, I use an AKG C 12A, one per two toms — because it’s got such low-end presence, it just sounds beefier. Straight cardioid, and the mics sit between the two pairs of toms. The only thing wrong with a condenser mic is that it gets a lot more leakage, of course. So, what I would do is, as soon as I finish recording the track, I’d turn down the level, say 6dB, between all the hits so that I don’t have that. I get less noise. I mean, I want the noise. I just don’t want it near that loud.

Then you get this big, powerful low end. It doesn’t sound like a 421. It sounds more serious. You figure out ways to make it work.

When you’re recording through the SSL J in that studio, were you using the preamps in the console?

Yeah, I’m very, very fond of the J mic pre. I think it’s stunning, but I never come off the channel. I always take the Insert Out. So, my gain control is the mic trim pot. I’m also very fond of the latest version of the Neve 88R mic pre. That is really, really good, if you bypass the console.

I was going to say, there’s a lot of electronics after the preamp.

Don’t even think of going through the channels! When I mix on the 88R, I usually patch Insert In to every channel, and I bypass about five amp stages. And then sometimes, if I don’t need the master, I’ll come off the insert, and I’ll bypass the extra amps and bus and take the Insert Out and go straight to Pro Tools, and I’ll do my rides and overall gain where I bring it down in Pro Tools, bring it all down 2dB if I need it, whatever, to get the gain set. I’m looking for max resolution.

On the Focusrite ISA 110 & Console

When we customized our Focusrite console, it had a similar situation when Rupert [Neve] designed it, the original ISA 110 module...

My pair of ISA 110s are sitting right in the next room.

The way the 110 was originally designed, the buttons don’t take any amplifiers out of the circuit, just the pots. So, you go through all the amps all the time and all the channel.

I said, “Why would you do that?” And they were worried about noise from the switches causing a click. Luckily, the relays in the 110 had extra contacts, so we modified the buttons to switch the entire section out. That way, if I want just highs and I push the high frequency in, the signal comes in, and I’m only going through two amp stages. I bypass the entire chain. And then we changed the amps out from 5534s, which quadrupled the slew rate of the amps. There’s also an additional buffer amp in the module that doesn’t need to be there. We took that out, too, so we modified the original ISA 110, and it sounds way better.

Well, I liked the way mine sounded when they came from the factory.

Oh, well, wait ’til you hear these.

I’d love to.

I mean, the curves and everything were good. When [Phil] Dudderidge made the Focusrite console, I told him, “You know what I need? I need an 18k because the problem with the 15k shelf, it’s very broad. It’s pulling up a lot of 12k and 10k with 15k.” So, I told him, “Give me an 18 because then it’s pulling up 16k, but it’s not pulling up 12k and 10k.” And so, when the console was delivered, it was the first one where they had the extra band.

Nice. I bought my ISA 110s in ’87, and Rupert signed them in ’93.

Well, listen, Rupert made some amazing stuff. I’m a huge fan of Mr. Neve, but on this one, there were a few things that could have been better. You can look at it this way. It’s like when he built the Air Montserrat consoles, they’re all 5534s. So, he took out all the discrete amps and went 5534s because, obviously, it cost a tenth of the price.

Understood.

But the open-loop high-frequency gain in the original discrete amps was significantly better than 5534s. It didn’t make that much difference in the mid and low bands, but it made a big difference in the high-frequency band. It also made a big difference in the mic pre. So, the Air consoles didn’t sound near as good as the stock 8078.

Using a Concrete Hallway for Reverb

Interesting. I could listen to these stories all day long. Give me one more.

When I had my studio under Pacific Ocean Park, I didn’t have a reverb unit. But there was an 80-foot-long concrete hallway that went under the amusement park that was attached to my building. So, I put two Altec Voice of the Theatre speakers in it — one on one end, one on the other. And then I put a pair of AKG C 60 mics in the middle, aimed that direction so I could change the decay time by moving the mics closer or further away from the speaker. Then I had a Nagra III (tape recorder) with a matching VSO (varispeed oscillator) that I’d gotten from Jack Woltz, my friend at Todd-AO. That was my pre-delay. And so that sounded really nice.

Whoa, I bet. Allen, thanks for your time and all these stories. I love hearing about how you got started.

What’s Your Magic Bullet? Let Sweetwater Help You Find It

Every engineer, musician, singer, or producer is searching for their own unique sound. Sweetwater has thousands of instruments, pedals, and tools that can help you realize your own voice. If you’re looking for your own magic bullet, then call your Sweetwater Sales Engineer at (800) 222-4700 and let them help you find the gear that will fulfill your dreams.

Check out all the Ocean Way Audio products that Sweetwater carries here.
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