If The Beatles are part of your musical vocabulary, then producer/engineer Ken Scott is also a part of your music collection. Scott has been making records since he was 18, and among those records are the White Album, A Hard Day’s Night, Magical Mystery Tour, and countless others.
Lately, Ken Scott has been in the news for his new A Ken Scott Collection: EpiK DrumS, the first in a series of software packages he has created with Sonic Reality. While an expert in miking and recording drum sounds, Scott also knows guitars and the techniques to capturing tone. Best of all, he mastered the craft the old-fashioned way: using and cutting tape in the days when the artist was king and creativity, not market research, ruled the studio.
Ken Scott discusses the art of making records, offers some practical advice for producers and engineers, and shares some in-studio memories.
How much of producing/engineering is technical knowledge and how much is instinct?
I suppose it depends on what one classifies as technical knowledge. My brain knows very little about the technicalities of music. I know sound and feel and what works, not half or quarter notes, crotchets or quavers. It’s much the same way with engineering. At Abbey Road my training was not technical inasmuch as having to know that turning this knob affects that capacitor which affects that tube. As engineers, we learned more about mic placement, different sounds of mics, different EQs, how to use a board. That’s technical to a point. Then I started working with The Beatles, which was a blessing because they never wanted anything to sound the way it would normally sound, so we got to experiment a lot without worrying about budget or pissing the artist off. It was a perfect learning environment for me as a sound engineer.
What are some key things that producers and engineers should know?
How to make decisions, and that mistakes can be good. It’s not just producers and engineers. Every time I go to the supermarket there’s someone on their cell phone asking, “Which type of Heinz baked beans should I buy? Should I buy this one or this one or this one?” Just grab a can and go, and if it’s the wrong can, learn something! Learn from your mistakes! Today, it’s all cut and paste, on the grid, mistakes aren’t allowed. With The Beatles, mistakes would happen and they became a vital part of the recordings. Making decisions — that’s why so many acts have a hit album and it takes them two years until their next album. We did an album every six months, on tape, cutting it with the razor blade. I miss that so much! I used to drive musicians mad because I would cavalierly go ahead and do it. They’d see me cutting and say, “What is he doing?!” Again, that’s part of making mistakes, but you can always put it back together again. There’s a classic passage in one of the “Revolution”s, an extra beat in there that was an editing accident. The engineer cut one beat too early, but John heard it and loved it and it was kept. That would never happen these days. So much now is looking at a screen and doing it by the numbers, probably because the industry is controlled by non-music people, accountants and attorneys. I sat with an A&R guy once who had majored in psychology with a second major in music. He did this deliberately, he said, so he could sit and control a band’s thoughts. It’s no longer about, “I love that song; I love that part in the middle.” When you go to a concert, you see the managers and record companies standing around; there’s no bodily movement.
Where have the guitar heroes gone? Has Guitar Hero replaced them? When referencing “guitar heroes,” we choose mostly from the 1960s and 1970s.
That’s the question I ask myself all the bloody time. They haven’t been replaced by Guitar Hero; they disappeared before Guitar Hero came out. As you say, when we reference guitar heroes, we choose guitarists from the 1960s and 1970s, and I put that down to nothing new coming from guitarists these days. When I give presentations, I start with the way radio was when I grew up. There were three radio stations, only one played pop music, and it was ghastly. There was no finding another station. We were stuck. That’s all there was. All of it, good and bad, sticks inside your brain, and later you take bits and pieces of it and put it together into something unique. These days, if you are into rap, you find a rap station. If you don’t like what’s on, you go through the stations until you find something you do like, and if all you listen to is rap and you have no other sources to pull from, it becomes generic. The same with metal, everything. Even the excitement of the jazz-fusion era died quickly — it’s all elevator music now.
Jimmy Page, in an interview some years back, said this about himself, Clapton and Beck: “I think it’s very interesting that the three of us all came out of a 20-mile radius of each other, which you probably know. I think that’s pretty fascinating.” Coincidence? Musical climate? Your thoughts?
He’s right. Those three, they took from American blues, molded it with English eccentricities, and it all came together and became unique. It’s astounding that so many people came from that era, all born within that five-year time period of 1945-1950, and moved toward music and did such incredible stuff with it. It’s weird that around that period so much came out of England.
He also said, “I didn’t know I was being successful when I was. It’s something you have to look back on in retrospect.” Was this the case in your career? Were any of you able to stand outside of it and grasp what was happening?
My story with that … first and foremost, we made albums for ourselves. When I worked with Bowie, Supertramp, any of the big acts I produced, there was no A&R guy coming in halfway through the recording saying, “Disco is gone; make it punk.” The artist was allowed to make the record he wanted; he was left alone to create. We made records for ourselves, and if others liked them, that was the icing on the cake. We made things to last a year, tops. The nuances in that music come from the soul. To be talking about these recordings 40 years on? I would have bet $5 million I would not be doing it. It never crossed our minds.
You also recorded Jeff Beck. How had his sound and approach changed between Truth and There and Back, and what is your impression of how your own approach had changed?
Jeff’s approach to playing guitar as such had not changed much. The type of music he played was very different on both albums. There and Back had more of a jazz-fusion influence, and Truth was English blues and rock and roll. With Truth, he and his band were virtually unknown. We had a blast. The album came out, they did a U.S. tour, came back to England as gods. Several years later, I’m working with Stanley Clarke and he tells me that Jeff Beck is coming in. I thought, ‘Oh no’, but he was a sweetheart and guested on all of Stanley’s albums that I worked on. He was always as sweet and humble as he was for Truth.
Why has The Beatles’ music had such longevity and retained its relevance over 40 years?
First of all, it’s brilliant. It goes back to the “success” question. When Beatlemania first hit England, a BBC reporter asked Paul and Ringo how long they thought it would last. Ringo said, “Maybe two years, if we’re lucky,” and then he’d like to open a hairdresser salon, while Paul said two years and then he’d like to write songs for other people. They had no idea. It’s nothing you can put a finger on. That interview took place before they came to America. Does anyone know what makes something great? If it comes from the heart, it stands more of a chance of lasting. I can’t see people listening to Britney Spears 40 years from now.