EQ: I would imagine those classic Talking Head’s albums weren’t exactly “5.1-friendly” . . .

Jerry Harrison: We went back to the original master tapes. A lot of them had to be baked in ovens. The glue that holds the metal oxide on the tape gets brittle, so if you took one of these reels to a tape player the metal would shred off. We put the tapes in special ovens at around 120 degrees Fahrenheit for ten hours or so, to warm up the glue and make it stick again, but not enough to cause damage.

We then transferred everything to Pro Tools at 192kHz/24-bit. A lot of our favorite plug-ins for Pro Tools HD, like all the Waves stuff, are not available at 192. So we did a test of the difference between doing it at 96kHz versus 192kHz, and it was very little. You could make it out most in the stereo mix on something like a solo piano or certain vocals where you could really hear the higher harmonics, the air. But rock mixing is not usually about air: It’s about solidity. With air, we’re not talking about silence, but rather about the air around the sound of something like a cymbal or a cello. But anyway, it just wasn’t apparent enough that it made sense to use 192.

Our system over here has 72 outputs and 48 inputs. Because we have all of these analog compressors, we go out of the Pro tools 192 I/O interfaces and then come back in to use them. We also have an old TDM system, so we go analog to the old system (there’s a Lexicon reverb plug-in that we really like), and then come back in digital — we’re not working only with plug-ins. We find it luxurious to do that.

Eric Thorngren: We used a tape simulator from a McDSP [Analog Channel]. When we’re doing stereo, we’ll bring in a two-track ATR. We’ll set it up where we’re going straight out of the repro head, then into two tracks on [the second] Pro Tools [system] using an analog tape simulator plug-in, which is eminently adjustable. And then we’ll go out through the 1/2" and come out of that off the repro head, then into two tracks on Pro Tools. When we’ve A/B’ed them, the emulator that we’ve used going into our mixdown system seems to be better than our analog.

JH: One thing about high-quality analog is that even with changing digital formats, you can always go back to that analog.

EQ: But of course, it all ends up being in digital format, anyway.

JH: That’s another very real issue. Instead of mixing it down to either two channels or five channels on the computer, we go out through 48 channels of analog summing on our Dangerous 2-BUS LT equipment.

[Editor’s note from Jerry Harrison: "Though it ends up digital we feel it's best to go through an analog stage. We use the Dangerous Music-2-Bus summing amplifiers; we have three of them so each of the six channels is going through the same stage. There has been a question raised in digital audio that suggests truncation can happen when a mix is too large or complicated because each plug in or summation requires additional headroom in the bit depth. By combining multiple tracks in 2-Bus we avoid this problem, and finally we are big fans of the way the 2-Bus sounds, to us it is similar to the summing amp of the SSL 9000, very clean yet powerful."]

EQ: What challenges did you encounter during the conversion?

JH: One of the things we didn’t have, that we had during the original mix on the big console, was the ability to have all the mutes available. The original console automations on most of these records didn’t exist anymore. I mean, I haven’t heard of any studios that have the Allison Research equipment. That was a weirdo product with a piece of plastic that was like a loop that you would move, and LEDs would show you your position on the volume or fader. The idea was that it was a VCA automation that didn’t have a moving fader, so that it could show you the actual space of it. But the problem was that if you didn’t wet your finger, sometimes it wouldn’t move. It was bizarre.

Anyway, a lot of this was sort of forensic mixing — you’d have to put it up and listen very carefully, particularly on “Remain in Light,” where we played continuously on every track. We made that album by creating complex muting.

ET: The whole track was six minutes, and they’d turn it on for one point — that was the style when automation came in. People said, “Hey, I don’t have to stop playing. I’ll just play right through the whole track, and you just turn me on when you need me.” So everyone would play all the time, and you’d have to come up with a mute structure for the mix.

So when we came back, we were listening to two tracks, and on there are 24 tracks of these parts, you have to figure out who comes on where. A lot of them are really close, and the tracks would be labeled “pop it 1,” “2,” and “3.”

JH: For a lot of these things too, we couldn’t find the track sheets.

ET: That was good, too (laughs)! I don’t know if you’re familiar with the olden days of recording, but when you had only 24 tracks, the guitar player took his solo, before that there might have been a tambourine part, and in the vamp, you might have something else to build it up.

JH: That was very common; that’s why mixing boards got so big, because you would end up patching that same channel into three or four other ones. So a lot of the work on remixing the first two records was figuring out what was on where.

We didn’t want to start over; we wanted to maintain the feel that the originals had, but create it in the space of 5.1. There were times when we extended the mix a little longer. These were originally on vinyl, so things had to be faded out to fit the LP. Obviously, we didn’t have that constraint. We wanted it to sound like the way you’d remember the original album . . . but more. We didn’t want it to sound like a dance mix.

ET: You had to go back into the mind of the record then, because we didn’t want to mess with somebody’s hopes and dreams and memories. I would think about what kind of equipment we had back then. On the records that I worked on with Talking Heads originally, I could remember. Otherwise, I relied on Jerry’s input. All of that helped us zone in how figuring out how they got this flange, that delay . . .

JH: On the first couple of records, Tina Weymouth was using a Hofner bass, and playing high notes. So we put that an octave lower. And we thought, “Wow, man! It’s got some balls now! It’s totally great!” So we sent it off to Chris Frantz and Tina, and we got this note: “ET, Jerry – I thought of the bass more as a low guitar than a bass. Please maintain that sound.” And we thought it sounded really good . . .

Talking Heads: 77 was recorded on a 16-track, and some of the songs were only eight tracks. We still found a way to have it sound great in surround.

ET: That was very hard. For example, we’re sitting here, talking to each other, but my voice isn’t coming out of the middle of your head. All the sound in this room is a result of delays, a result of how the room is constructed. Surround is more of a psycho-acoustic feeling rather than, “that sound is over there.”

JH: As we got into percussion and doubled vocals, we were able to play with the stereo field. I think we built on that in surround – to make it dance around. But we never wanted to stick, like, the kick over here, and the bass guitar way over there. We wanted to keep that stereo energy.

We did a study on a lot of the surround sound re-mixes that had been done. The ones we liked had the qualities we’ve been talking about. The ones we didn’t had elements like trying to make you feel like you were playing in the band. We generally found that distracting. Although, conceptually, it sounds cool having the feeling of actually being there, and hearing the horn player behind you and to your right, on a riser. But having been in the band, a lot of times it’s too loud, of course, but also it doesn’t necessarily sound as good as it does out front, where everything congeals together. And then there were other remixes where too much of the stuff was in the rear, and the front seemed too empty. You put it on stereo, and there it is; you put it on surround, and, where’s “there”?

EQ: What were 5.1 remixes that you liked?

JH: I liked Dark Side of the Moon a lot. It maintained respect for the original record, and had a sense of a lot happening in front of you, with judicious and cool things happening behind you.

One of the reactions to The Brick is, “Wow, I’m hearing stuff I never heard before.” It was always there in stereo, but now there’s more clarity. Sometimes that’s a problem when something was recorded or played poorly. Sometimes putting music in surround can make elements sound naked.

ET: Back in the day, little noises like guitar scrapes and the drummer dropping his lighter... you would never hear any of that. But when you spread it out, you start hearing all these things that got covered up in the stereo. We had to pay close attention to that.

When you actually come to “a mix,” it’s all about feeling. And when a mix is right, it could be one guitar 5/10ths of a dB louder and wham! It locks. When we sat down to mix in 5.1, at first it sounds “Wow!” – it sounds better than stereo because everything is bigger. But it’s not necessarily the mix. It was about getting it working like it did. After everything is placed where it should be, and not interfering with the feeling, the whole thing has to gel as a mix. And that’s where we went the extra step.

JH: It’s an evolving format. People still don’t get it. I was working with a band on making 5.1 mixes. The members all wanted to have their own speaker — “I want that one!”

Now I know why the early Beatles mixes sound the way they do, where the bass and drums are on one side, and the vocals and guitars are on the other. Try turning off each side. It’s a different record! So it was important for us to get a really easy system, one that was easy to solo or turn off speakers. The biggest issues in surround are “What’s in the rear?,” “What’s in the center?,” and “How do I not cloud up the sound effects?” It might sound good in the room you mix it in, but people at home will probably be listening to it with smaller satellites, where more is being put in the sub. You have to be careful that there’s no cancellation between something you put there, and what someone’s AV amplifier puts there.

EQ: So what speakers did you use for this project?

JH: We have two sets of surround speakers: A Blue Sky SAT 6.5 system, and a system with a Meyer subwoofer and NS-10Ms with vintage Hafler 220 amps. My philosophy was “Now that we’ve been mixing our albums for 20 years with NS-10s, why change now?”

For one thing, powered speakers are really convenient when you have to have six speakers. A lot of studios use Genelec systems, but Genelecs have a very different sound. We find that if you put something on Genelecs, it already sounds great. So you can accidentally leave it alone. You have to be careful with monitors that good.

ET: And then you go someplace else, and your mix sounds completely different.

JH: Part of what was good about mixing with two sets of speakers was how ET was working with the Blue Skys, and how when we shifted to the NS-10s it sounded so different. The job was to make the mix sound the same on both sets.