The Problem
You see I used to make albums on Rounder, Warner Brothers and others in the old fashioned way. Out of a typical recording budget, the studio and engineers would end up with the lion’s share. The musicians would be rushed, end up over budget, and with a finished product that we were not always proud of. The record would sell a reasonable amount, but never enough to receive any significant royalties by the time you started the next one. Due to something evil called crosscollateralization, any artist profit would be applied to the previous unrecouped records, and as soon as you started the new one, all costs would be applied to any previous records that were recouped. Pretty amazing, huh? So you could have a very successful career, sell up to and well over 100,000 units consistently and still end up in the hole.

A Solution
I ran into an old friend named Leo Eilts one day. I had known Leo from my bluegrass days back in the New Grass Revival. Leo had been a bluegrass musician but now was also the Pro Tools dealer in the Kansas City area. Leo told me all about the gear and it sounded like just the right thing for this live album that the Flecktones were about to make. So we dove in headfirst, got the system, spent the studio budget on gear and did all the edits and mixes on the computer.
The money previously spent in the studio could now go into equipment that we could keep.(an asset)
Future albums would be cheaper to make, allowing me to either bill for studio time or just have a lower budget. Albums would recoup sooner with the same amount of albums sold. I could actually show a profit on my own records!
What a concept.

Hard Disk Recording
I had been a Neve/Flying faders freak ever since producer friend Garth Fundis showed me what VCA’s did to the sound. I could hear them on the mixes of that time.
Fidelity freak that I am, I was very suspicious of the sound of hard disk recording. As I hard as I tried however, I couldn’t find anything missing except perhaps the missing sound of tape, which I had given up on early in the digital age. The mixing capabilities were powerful although they took a little getting used to.
Previously our studio albums had received very high marks for fidelity. We often heard about speaker manufacturers using our music to demo and sell product and we were proud of that.
We got excellent comments regarding Live Art, recorded live to Adats, edited and mixed on Pro Tools. This double album also won the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental.

The Plan
When it was time to make the next studio album "Left of Cool", with the Flecktones, I decided to go all the way. The Live Art experiment had gone well. Roger Nichols had consulted on that project, checking on the EQ of my office/studio for accuracy, critiquing mixes and just reassuring us that it was gonna be ok. He also mastered the project. So I thought it would be really cool to have him engineer the tracking dates, which he agreed to. Roger was so helpful in so many ways, basically setting up a studio from scratch in my new home. He helped hook us up with Alesis, getting prototypes of their 20 bit machines; Pro Tools, getting prototypes of 24 bit Pro Tools; an early Apogee AD8000 and a Yamaha 02R for playback.

An extremely important part of the equation was Richard Battaglia, the Flecktones live sound engineer. I have been working with Richard for 16 years now since New Grass Revival days.
Along with a great ability to get the most out of live performance situations, Richard works individually with band members to systematically improve their electric sounds. He built a pre-amp for acoustic instruments (AcH 104) that I, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and many fine musicians use. At any rate, Richard has become a Macintosh computor freak over the years and this proved to be extremely important as we got the studio working.
Richard, the biggest Steely Dan fan on earth, was also excited about working and learning from Roger.
Rich put in an incredible amount of time. His handling of all the set up, back-ups and computer in and outs freed large portions of my brain up so I could be a ‘creative type’.
Rounding out the team was Tracey Hackney who kept precise notes (with numbers) of the takes, kept a DAT reference in record, and generally helped out.

The Musicians
Bela Fleck and the Flecktones includes Victor Lemonte Wooten all over the electric bass. On this album he also played cello and upright.
His brother Future Man plays drums on an instrument he invented, basically triggering sounds from samplers and drum machines with his fingertips in real time. It is quite bizarre and it really works. He also played acoustic percusion including the Cajon, a Spanish percussion instrument that he sat on.
For about a year now Jeff Coffin has been playing all the winds. He added flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, baritone sax and finger cymbals.
I played banjo, electric synth banjo and occasionally guitar or mandolin.

Set-up
One of the first things Roger did when he got there was to set up a pair of Meyers HD-1’s. He told us that when he tracked using these speakers, he rarely had to do anything in mastering. We had a pair of Genelec’s 1030A’s and some NS10M’s along with a Velodyne sub that we used sporadically to check for surprises in the low end. So we had to get used to the sound of these speakers. We inserted an Oxmoor DEQ1 digital EQ to compensate for the room, an ‘extra room’ over the garage. I live in very quiet neighborhood, off the road so noise wasn’t going to be a problem.(this was a prerequisite for buying this house)
Also we ordered some monoliths of gray foam and some ASC tube traps.

We rented a bunch of mikes and mic-pres from Dreamhire and Underground Sound and began shootouts.
Roger had some BSS DI boxes that were great for Future Man’s digital drum kit, which required about a dozen channels. These were routed through mic pre’s, something we hadn’t tried before. The signals with kick or other low information seemed cut off on some pre’s, so we used the NightPro PreQ for these. This preamp ended up being our favorite in general so we bought one. The Massenbergs were solid, but the Neves didn’t float our boat, surprisingly. The Avalon was really nice for Victor’s bass although he liked the BSS DI almost as much. The Avalon two channel version was excellent and we used it for banjo.
On sax we used PreQ or Massenberg.

So all we were miking was banjo and sax. Banjo went in the kitchen with a couple of shotgun mikes and a Sony C-800G in closer.
Sax was in the dining room with a AT 4030 and an old Neuman U-67.The walls of foam kept the sax out of the banjo mikes in the next room.

Tracking
Our approach was to simply play the tune for a couple hours till we were tired of it or confident we had it. Then we would move on. We rarely listened to playbacks, and we never played to a click. After a while we did start using a click for countoffs so the tempos would match up later for edits. Sometimes we would cycle solo sections around so we could have 10 or so banjo, sax or bass solos to choose from later on , and so we could really concentrate on soloing, which is a different mind set. This way we would also end up with solos that interacted naturally with the rythm section, which usually dosen’t happen when overdubbing solos.
After playing a tune for a couple of hours, we would take some time getting the sounds and headphone mix right for the next one. For headphones we used our Crest monitor console and bought a 4 stereo channel headphone amp from Music Row Technologies right here in Nashville.
We set up for 2 days, and recorded for 5 on the first session.
A few weeks later we had a similar time allotted of which we only used 3 days.
We completed tracking with 21 tunes in the can.

Pro Tools 24 wasn’t here in time for the first session so we started out on the new Alesis 20 bit dudes (M-20s to be exact) and 16bit Pro Tools as our back-up.
Then we would store everything from our hard drives (from Glyph Technologies) to DLT tapes using Grey Matter’s Mezzo.
On the second session we were able to use Pro Tools 24 as our master and the ADATS as our back-ups. Every thing therefore was at least 20 bit and much of it 24. After processing with plug-ins it was all 24 bit info.

Alesis was kind enough to send Don Hanna with four of their babies so we had some real good help for the first several days. These were prototypes so there were several inevitable stressy moments while things didn’t quite work. These machines had a couple of flaws, that they obviously fixed immediately but we were in session with 2 of the Alesis 20’s going down. Suddenly Roger realized that the drums were only 16 bit anyway, so we synched up one of our 16 bit ADATs just for the drums, did a quick test, heard no difference and continued onward.
Roger is amazing at figuring stuff out and getting it working fast, often with brand new gear with glitches in it. Very impressive.

Whenever we had a couple hours break we would get in the habit of backing up the DLT’s with Mezzo. These would run all night as well.

Editing
After tracking, the band went on hiatus and Richard and I started figuring out a procedure for editing. Often this is what takes the most time - figuring out the best way to do something. Once the procedure is in place, you can really cover some ground.
I started listening to the 2-tracks of takes on airplanes and road trips. There were anywhere from 7 to 21 takes on each tune. I would put together a comp chart and grade all the takes, underlining my favorite parts. As I studied the takes it became rather obvious what the best stuff was, but I really had to get to know the material.
Then we dumped in or restored (depending on whether the masters were ADATS or DLT’s) to ProTools and went to town. It took a day or two per edit, so I decided not to edit everything, just the stuff that seemed strongest.
After the tunes were edited down we compacted the files( a ProTools term for throwing away excess audio files that are no longer used in the session document), getting rid of everything we weren’t likely to use. When in doubt, we made sure the additional audio could be recovered.

Sweetening
Because Future Man was going to Spain for a couple of months, I edited the tunes that he would be adding vocals to first. He did his vocals in the dining room on a C-24.
We experimented a lot, I kept everything and he left town.
Then we got into other overdubs, such as synths, basses, horns and flutes, guitar, mandolin or extra banjos. We were always adding layers, as opposed to fixing. All the basic tracks and solos came from the tracking session with no exceptions. Now we were sweetening, and getting creative with what we had. Rather than bring outside people in, we did it all ourselves, which was a lot of fun.
In the past we had always taken a live approach in the studio, so this actually made the process fresh. Anybody could try anything. The only guests we did have were vocalists Dave Mathews and Amy Grant. I traded services with Dave, playing on several cuts of his DMB album, and he came and sang some for us. I think I got the better end of that deal! We had toured opening shows for Dave and so there is a neat friendship between our groups.
Amy lives just down the road from here, and Richard suggested we ask her. Well I ran into her a few days later and she agreed to pop by. She likes the sound of stacking her voice 4 times so we tried that and liked it.

At every stage of the project, the members of the band would drop by and ok each tune or solo, etc. If someone didn’t like something we would change it right then and there and hit save. This was a great benefit of the system. Anyone could contribute at any time.

Mixing
Now it was soup and mixing time had arrived.
As we went along, we found reverbs, eqs and panning we liked. We saved the plug-in stuff and kept notes on which external verbs were used on the sends themselves. Then we merely dialed up the right programs when we opened each tune. For the digital verbs PCM 80 and 90 we used with digital I/O so the levels were always the same, even when we took them out on the road for shows and replaced them. We had to keep an eye on the input and output levels of the (analog) PCM 70 and keep them the same for every song.
We used the volume and pan graphs to set all the levels, automate sends, etc. I actually prefer this to faders, because you can see it, make minute changes, etc.
Now it was time for Roger to come back to town and critique our mixes, and solve problems. I found him to be great at clarifying things and we generally agreed on stuff. When I left the room and came back, it usually sounded better than when I left.
On this project I found him to be more of an "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" type of engineer, rather than a "lets try everything and anything", which was an appropriate approach since I was doing a lot of the later.

Plug-ins are really cool. We used Waves and occasionally Focusrite eq’s, Drawmer and Focusrite compressors, Maxxbass and TrueVerb, L1 Ultramaximizer from Waves, LexiVerb, Multi-Dynamic’s Tool, Antarres Master Tune, Duy’s DAD Valve, and the Aphex Aural Exicter.
The ability to live with something for a while, then change it once you know what’s needed is so great. Developing the mix over a period of time is a pleasure.

Now I was taking the tapes to various places to listen and see how accurate the mixes were. In each listening setting I took notes as different things popped out. Then I went home and made minor adjustments.
Garth Fundis and Justin Niebank made some good comments, and Justin came over a couple of times and tried some of his ideas in terms of vocal compression and tweaks and introduced me to the Sans Amp which we sprinkled onto a vocal and sax.

Mastering
Then we went into the mastering facility (Georgetown Masters with Denny Purcell) and spent a morning listening to the mixes critically. Things sounded really good but maybe could use some more way high up stuff. Denny found the frequencies on his board, then we went home and opened up those areas on certain reverbs and particular instruments.

We assembled a sequence one night with the whole band collaborating and turned in the record. At mastering we were looking for stuff to do. We kept adding tiny bits of EQ and in most cases deciding against them. There was no leveling to do. We did like the HDCD process so we did that.

Emergency!!!
At this point we were over the length that the Warner Brothers plant would cut onto a CD (76.30) so we needed to find some edits or delete a tune. Plus the label didn’t like the sequence. We were going to lose our June release date, which coincided with some Stadium gigs I was playing with the Dave Mathews Band, plus the Flecktones’ Colorado tour including the Telluride Festival. It would be a real drag if the record wasn’t out by then, and I was already out of town on tour!
So, I had Pro Tools 4.0 on my power book. I worked out the proposed edits, and resequenced the album on a dawn flight to Nashville with Chris Palmer from Warners. I met Carlos from Georgetown Masters at my house, did all the edits to the multi tracks, resequenced and got back on a plane to Philly by 2 pm the same day. Carlos ran the finished master off to Sony optical, locked up behind him and we made our release date.

Single edits and remixes
With the album put to bed and Roger safely out of town, it was time to cut some of our vocal tunes down and try some creative remix ideas. We called another Nashville resident Richard Dodd to assist us with this project. He had considerable experience with radio as Tom Petty’s engineer and a very different approach to Pro Tools. As far as I was concerned the singles could be quite different from the album versions and Warner Brothers was ok with that. So we dirtied stuff up, shortened, rearranged, compressed and got loose with the stuff, eventually using the Finalizer (tc electronics) and sent off our singles to Warner Brothers.
Now we’ll see what happens. Wish us luck.


Left of cool entered the Jazz Charts at # 3 and has remained top 5 for its first 5 weeks, it also entered the Billboard top 200, the first time for Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.
The single Communication was 3rd most added on AAA radio in its first week and continues to do well. The next single, Trouble and Strife will be released in September '98.