Welcome to Behind the Board! A chance for you to get to know the backbone of Lively; our audio team. Lively’s audio team is a small, focused group of experts who don’t get nearly enough time to tell the world what they do and how they do it. We’re here to remedy that! Look out for frequent posts from the audio team about technical process, thoughts about recording, and so much more. Now, get to know our VP of Audio, Zach Varnell
When I was 12 years old, my dad gave me access to his 1/4” 2 track reel-to-reel tape deck from college, and I set to work building a studio in my parents’ basement. I was fascinated with capturing sound on tape, and after a couple of years learning the basics of bouncing tracks I quickly expanded to a Tascam 4 track. I spent weekends in high school inviting my friends’ bands to the house and recording them using whatever microphones I could borrow from my school’s theater department.
What began to fascinate me as I read interviews and articles by engineers who would soon become my idols was this idea of capturing a moment in time that could never be repeated. The moments of brilliance along with the imperfections were interesting and more human than perfectly sculpted albums (not that I didn’t enjoy those too).
I heard stories about “Sky Dog” Allman playing lead guitar on Wilson Pickett’s cover of Hey Jude. Rick Hall, the engineer and owner of F.A.M.E. Studios in Muscle Shoals, was mixing the band live, just like most of the sessions that were done at that time. When the vamp at the end of the song began, Allman reportedly went over to his amp and cranked it, battling toe to toe with Wilson Pickett for prominence in the mix. It completely drowned out the background vocals singing the famous “nah, nah nah” part, but it didn’t matter. The moment was captured on tape, and was such an exceptional sound that when Eric Clapton was with Derrick and the Dominoes recording the Layla Sessions in Miami, Tom Dowd told him that the Allman Brothers were in town and he demanded to be introduced to the guy who played the legendary solo.
There’s something captivating about a group of people who get on stage and make music together. There is synergy; where the total is greater than the sum of each part. There is also a spontaneity influenced by myriad factors that never repeat themselves.
Neil Young left CSNY officially in 1969 and made a record in three days with Crazy Horse in a house that was chalk full of imperfections and mistakes (even technical issues that left the last verse of Cortez the Killer unrecorded). Because of, not in spite of, this, Zuma emerged as one of the most honest and raw of all of Young’s recordings. The studio albums that captivate me are the ones with imperfections scrawled over them – imperfect and completely alive.
A lot has changed in studio recording, and even though I’ve never been the type of engineer who turns up my nose at the likes of AutoTune and Beat Detective, I could sense the change in the way fans responded to recordings. They weren’t impressed. After college I dove head first into both studio work and live performance, working as a production assistant for House of Blues and in the studio, learning how to coach a passable vocal take out of a lifeless lyric and how to load and unload a fleet of trucks before dawn. I kept one foot in each world trying to decide which path to choose.
When I was introduced to Lively, I realized there was a way to be in both worlds.
Lively started as solution to a problem. Go to any show of any size today and the first thing you notice is a sea of hands in the air bearing cell phones with cameras, desperate to capture the same experience I yearned for as a 12 year old in my basement. We all want to freeze a moment in time; it’s why Instagram and Vine and social media are so heavily entrenched in our culture. We want to share the experience.
As a recording engineer, I feel I do my job best when I get out of the way. I try to do whatever I could to make myself transparent. A recording should never be about the engineer, it should be about the song, the performer, and the listener – in that order. We’ve spent the last 7 months capturing multitrack recordings of big shows at big venues, stereo board matrix mixes of small shows, and even mixing backstage on the fly in real time, and it is always an unrepeatable moment. I read an interview with Daniel Lanois where he talked about the walls of a studio limiting communication, creating a barrier between an organic chemistry that can happen when a group of musicians get together in a room. It’s probably the same reason I’ve always loved albums that were recorded on a stage or in one room, as live as possible. It’s never perfect, but that’s the best part. He also left me with the best advice I think any engineer could have: Always be recording, for the moment that’s needed might otherwise slip by forever.
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