Neil Young News

Friday, January 04, 2013

Producer John Hanlon On Recording Neil Young's two latest albums, Americana and Psychedelic Pill

Producer John Hanlon
Here's an article that we missed getting posted last year which really deserves highlighting.

A very essential read if you're into all of the technical details of making a Neil Young album. Here's a Mix magazine interview with producer John Hanlon about the recording process for Neil Young's two latest albums, Americana and Psychedelic Pill. From Mix magazine's October 2012 issue, Producer John Hanlon talks about recording Neil Young's two latest albums by Barbara Schultz:

In August 2011, Hanlon got the call to head up from his home in Malibu to Young’s ranch in Northern California. “They told me we’d be working with Crazy Horse and Mark Humphreys,” Hanlon explains. “Mark is Neil’s monitor engineer onstage; he runs the P.A. in the studio. We record everything live, with no headphones. There’s some overdubbing later, but he always goes for the live performance feel. It’s always about the performance with him.”

“I was to build a studio in one of the houses on the ranch where David Briggs and Tim Mulligan had done American Stars ’n Bars with Neil back in the ’80s,” Hanlon says. “And he wanted to do it 8-track analog, which meant we’d also snapshot to Pro Tools, but he wanted an 8-track setup, in the building they call the ‘white house.’

“First I went up for some preliminary meetings with my assistant engineer, John Hausmann, to lay out the space and check out the acoustics. I purposely didn’t ask how they had set up the room for American Stars ’n Bars. I wanted to feel the vibe in the room without any preconceived notions of copying what they did. That was the 1980s; sounds and amplifiers, and where people’s heads were, would have affected the sound coming off of the instruments and from their souls at that time, anyway.

Everything changes.

More of interview on Mix magazine.