Geoff Emerick – HuffPost 2.20.12

Mike Ragogna: Geoff, What advice might you have for an artist that’s just starting out?

Geoff Emerick: I always look at this job in visual terms. From a recording engineer’s prospective, it’s like making a film. It starts on the studio floor. You rehearse and rehearse, then you start on your camera shots, which might be the solos, then you go for the take. Now, when you’re recording, you record it all together and try to piece it all together. They don’t go for that “magic take” as we used to call it. I never got into the business of technicalities. We had to make all of those sounds ourselves with bits of tape and God knows what else. (laughs) It’s such a shame. I’m looking at it from an artistic side. It’s as if you have a pallet of paints and a brush, and you’re painting a beautiful picture with sounds, painting it with sounds that are in your head. That’s the way that I perceive it. I’m not interested in how we get back there, but it has to happen. It’s like with the new computer animation compared with hand-drawn animation. There’s no pigment in the computerized drawings, and there is with the hand-drawn. That makes all the difference.

MR: Looking back on your own career, what piece of advice would you choose to give yourself?

GE: I don’t know. I don’t want to stop doing this, but I do want to continue searching for the next thing that’s mind-blowing. We’ve gotten into the lull of content, so I would love to find some incredible content from somewhere and make another album that will be amazing and everyone will want to go and buy it, you know? The album used to be like a stage performance, even down to the fact that the songs that they played were strung together by the keys that they were in. Bands used to spend days, once they finished recording working, on how to segue the album from song to song. It was a piece of art. When you buy an album these days, you can just purchase a bunch of individual tracks and it doesn’t make any sense.

MR: Do you think there will come a time when people will start to demand that artists make those sort of albums again rather than continuing with the single track download mentality?

GE: I think that has to be retaught. That would have to go all the way back to music education in schools again.