Connecting With An Artist :: Russ Long
Does an engineer have to love the music they work on? Russ gives his take on the engineer/artist relationship.
Well I feel like I have to connect with the artists. I mean the preferred thing is that I connect with them musically... like there's something that makes me feel passionate about their music. Now, I can as an engineer… I don't even have to like... I mean I prefer to work on music that I like, but I don't have to love it. It doesn't have to be something I would even listen to. I feel like I can make something… I can do a great job mixing a record, and pretty much most records I feel like I can do a great job... I mean hip-hop's probably not my forte, but outside of that, I feel like I can do a great job mixing a record and I don't necessarily have to be a fan of it or connect with it emotionally.
But to be involved from the production standpoint, which probably means i'm going to be helping pick songs and be involved far deeper than just the mixed standpoint, I need to feel connected on an emotional level... that I feel like I need to feel passionate about the music. I need to feel like it's something I enjoy. I need to feel like I can offer something to it.
I mean, like, and I tend to be drawn, I think, production wise to a lot of, um, I don't know, younger rock bands just because I feel a lot of times they complicate things too much. And I can, they've got these, sometimes, it's too many ideas in a song and I can identify you know what these are all three great ideas but these two aren't as good as this one and this is too many ideas for one song. You don't need three bridges. You don't need the thing to go six minutes. We can chop this this and this and make it a three and a half minutes song and it's going to be punchy and and hit the point and connect with the audience. I mean those are the kind of projects I think I connect with best, but I don't go in to it necessarily with a checklist of what I'm looking for. It's more of listening to some of the music and feeling like, “oh yeah, I know what needs to happen to fix this” or not.
And if i don't feel like I could offer anything or to make it better then I don't necessarily feel like it's the right thing for me. But i don't want to change it either. That's another thing I think a lot of band producers try to take something and make it into their own thing, and that's why I think a lot of and there's a lot of technically great producers but their stuff all sounds the same, which i don't think is a good thing. Because i think bands who've spent a lot of time playing together in a garage or wherever they rehearse have come up with something that's their own, and I don't think you, I mean you can, you can edit songs and make them a little shorter and maybe move some parts around, but still keep the integrity of what they came up with... which I think is also important.