MARK NEEDHAM STUDIO <
Needham has remained side-by-side with Chris Isaak throughout his career, engineering on nearly every album he has released
“Oh man, that MTV Unplugged one was a nightmare. I was at Sony studios in New York and I’m doing the recording and also running a live mix for the TV broadcast. I had an engineer in the other room and I asked him never stop the tape recorder. We had two tape recorders for the multitrack and I asked him to always have them running. Anyway, what did he do? He stopped the multitrack. And the worst thing was that he didn’t tell anybody, so it wasn’t until I got back to the studio to do the mix that I found out the multitracks were blank. At least four of the tunes for the album had to come from the live mix that I did for the broadcast. I went into it with the thought that I would have the chance to go back and fix some things. I would really have liked to have had another shot at that mix.” At first I was a little disappointed that what I considered to be a really well mixed track was perhaps not quite as good as I thought. But then Needham acknowledged that, happily, the live mix had actually turned out to be a lot better than expected and I realised that, just because it was done live, in one take and recorded straight to a stereo track, didn’t necessarily mean that the end result couldn’t stand up to
Needham’s mix of Mr Brightsidetook 40 minutes to mix
something that had been poured over in a mix room for days on end, far from it. And then I thought of all the times I’d heard rough mixes turn out to be the best of the lot.
Recalling his work with The Killers, Needham adds some credence to this idea: “Mr Brightside was recorded in just a few hours. I did some re-arrangement stuff and mixed it on a little 12-channel Neve in about 40 minutes and that’s what ended up on the album. It was done incredibly quickly, yet it was probably the biggest-selling song off [the band’s multi-platinum-selling album] Hot Fuss.”
Despite this, Needham is quick to point out that there is no hard and fast rule when it comes to how much time should be invested in a mix in order for it to blossom – that one track might require lengthy periods of concentration that could possibly spoil another. “Usually, if you work something to death – over work it or over think it – it doesn’t come together. But there’s really nothing written in stone, it’s not always the case. I’ve had some songs that I’ve worked on for months and re-invented in a bunch of different ways and, in the end, they came out awesome. The studio version of Wicked Game was a perfect example of this. I spent a lot of time on that song and it was only something that started to come to fruition about month or two into it.”
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audioPRO December/January 2010/11 35
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