Interviews

Micallef: Regarding Rudy Van Gelder, he did live mixes. Did he generally cut lacquers soon after the recording session?

Farber: That I don't know, but I do know his mastering was very active. I know a mastering engineer who remastered one of Rudy's recordings. Compared to the original record, it was obvious how many moves Rudy made in the mastering process, revealing that mastering was a large part of his final sound. But I'm sure the recordings sounded ridiculous before the mastering, too. Rudy and the Columbia guys had an advantage I don't have: They worked in the same place every day, with the same mikes, the same gear, and they worked with the same old mikes that I use, but they were new at the time. I'm working with stuff that's been rewired, recapped, reribboned. Every mike from that era sounds a little different than the next one. I'm a little bit more subject to anomalies than they were, not that it's any kind of an excuse.

Micallef: But you'd still rather work with those old vintage, classic mikes than new microphones.

Farber: Tubes and ribbons, they have a character and a depth and a pretty sound to my ears. I think it's because they sound more like the records I listen to.

Micallef: Have you been to Englewood Cliffs?

Farber: I could never go there because Rudy didn't want other engineers to come into his space. He was secretive. He was paranoid about somebody trying to copy him. I'll tell anybody anything. Somebody can try and copy me. Good luck. You don't have my ears. It's not going to sound the same. Nobody could have copied Rudy. I don't know why he didn't realize that. In the jazz world and in my world, we pass things down. There's mentorship and apprenticeship. All my assistants have learned all my techniques, and now they have a lot of the work I used to do and I'm very proud of them. They're doing great work. I love seeing that they learned from me. But Rudy didn't have that sense, whereas the jazz musicians who were recording there would pass down what they knew to the younger generations. I don't really understand where Rudy's paranoia came from.

Micallef: So your students—your apprentices—are carrying on your vision?

Farber: I like that they take what I do and add their own thing to it. But there's more than just recording. There's how do you run a session? How do you relate to everybody? How do you go in and be part of the band when you're doing it? So you're not the outsider, you're not the enemy, you're not the guy on the other side of the glass. You want to be part of the process.

Micallef: Can a new reissue record cut from a 60-year-old tape sound as good as when the tape was fresh to cut the lacquer?

Farber: Probably not exactly the same, depending on how the tape was stored and cared for. Often, old tapes need to be baked to get the oxide to re-adhere to the backing. Regarding those original recordings, one of the things that made them so beautiful was the resonance of all the tube equipment, and the idea that the lowest bottom was rolled off. You didn't need all this sub-bass to make music, and you didn't need the highest treble to be in your face. So, the equipment of the time presented you with the most important part of the sound. Strangely, as the digital world evolved, and the spectrum became more extended, people lost sight of what's musical and just said "Well, we can have all this, so it's better," when maybe that's not always the case.

Micallef: I read that you'll only mix on tape at studios where you know the people, like Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound.

Farber: If I'm going to mix to tape, I have to know who's mastering it, because someone can really destroy the sound of tape on a transfer if they don't know what they're doing. You need an experienced mastering engineer like Greg Calbi or Mark Wilder, my two go-to guys. If I don't know who's going to master, I'll mix to tape using one reel and do a live bounce to digital off the repro head as I'm printing, then reuse the tape for each subsequent mix. This way, I'm still getting the tape sound. It's the same thing that would happen in mastering except the tape transfer is being done in the [mixing] studio, not in the mastering studio.

Micallef: I've noticed that contemporary vinyl records of new releases don't always sound good.

Farber: Most contemporary vinyl uses the digital master as the master. No artist is there, no producer is there, no musicians are there, no engineers are there. Just the cutting engineer, who takes the digital master, lowers the level a little bit, and cuts it. Nobody gets a lacquer to approve it. People occasionally get a test pressing, but it's a little too late at that point. There's no quality control on the making of most vinyl these days. If you have the best playback equipment in the world, and your record was done in the best way possible, the vinyl's going to win over the CD. But if you have a $100 CD player versus a $100 record player, it's not always clear that the vinyl will sound better. And considering that much of today's vinyl is an afterthought for marketing purposes, there is no assurance that the vinyl will exceed the quality of the CD.

Having said that, ECM vinyl and the Nonesuch vinyl are often quite good, and some Blue Note vinyl of contemporary recordings is very good. Of course, reissued vinyl cut from original tapes can be spectacular sounding. On many of the records I engineer, I like the sound of the CD better, though I wish that was not the case.

Micallef: Do you still like to pan drums hard right?

Farber: I do that only if everybody's playing in the same room. You need the leakage for that not to sound too separated. I pan the record according to how they're set up in the room. When Rudy recorded, everybody was in the room together, so he would have the drums on the right, as they would be on the stage. Also, there were no pan pots in the early days. Rudy had a choice of left, center, or right. I don't often use pan pots. I'm a big left, center, and right guy. When I have everybody together in the room, the leakage defines the space. Often a stereo room mike helps do that too. This stage panning adds a lot of clarity, because the leakage of the drums is not on top of the drums. The whole thing that evolved in the '70s and '80s was that drums and pianos became stereo instruments. Many of my clients like that sound, and I do too for many contexts. It's a language we accept, but it's really fake.

Micallef: Like some Europe-based jazz recordings where each drum in a set is spread across the soundstage.

Farber: It's like an amusement park. It can be very musical if it's nicely balanced. But with the advent of the Walkman, and much later iPhone earbuds, people are listening less socially at home with speakers. Now, many listeners object to the extreme panning of instruments. I still like old-school hard panning. If it's balanced, it shouldn't matter. If an artist tells me he wants to record a saxophone trio like a Coltrane Impulse! record, with saxophone on the left, drums on the right, and bass in the middle, but the saxophone player says, "I don't want to be on the side. I want to be in the middle," I politely tell him that Coltrane spent his whole life on the left channel, and it was good enough for him! Being on the side of the stage doesn't make you a second-class citizen.

Micallef: Many of The Beatles' early records were hard panned left and right. How do you like the new Beatles remix albums?

Farber: I don't like the remixed Beatles albums. I prefer the originals. Recordings are a statement of their time. I've been asked to remix some of Miles Davis's records. I said "No." Those original mixes couldn't sound more beautiful. The only old record that I remixed was Stan Getz's Captain Marvel (above). The original sounded really bad. It was a beautiful band and beautiful playing, on an eight-track recording. Christian McBride said to me, "That's my favorite thing you've ever done, saving that record." I also remixed alternate takes of Jaco Pastorius's debut Columbia album, to match the sound of the original record. I got to adhere to his sound of that time.

Micallef: Keyboardist Jason Lindner has said there's an honesty and truthfulness to the musicians, to the music, to the acoustic sound of whatever room you're in when you're recording. What's key in achieving that?

Farber: It has to do with my sense of balance in the music, that maybe is consistent from album to album. I have a certain sense of space in reverb where I don't want it to be noticeable. There are elements that are similar on all the records. When you miked a drum set in the old days, it involved maybe a mike or two. Now we're putting a mike on every drum. It's my responsibility to reconstruct the balance of those microphones to reflect the drummer's intention and groove. If I do that, then I'm making the music sound like the drummer played it. I have my methods for recording piano, such as coincident miking, which means I don't have spaced microphones. I'll have either an XY or a Blumlein pair. If I want the piano to be on the left channel in the mix, it's going to sum to mono with no cancellation. And because there's a single-point pickup, even though it's stereo, when a piano player plays a chromatic scale from the bottom to the top of the keyboard, every note is going to appear in order. Over time, I've learned that certain mikes work better with certain players.

Micallef: It's like you've removed yourself and the process and the listener hears only the music, not the production.

Farber: That's what I want. I want people to hear what the band played. And it's never going to sound exactly like that. It's going to sound like a recording of that. I want it to sound natural. I don't want the sound to be a distraction from the music. I just want it to enhance it.