[Dave Stewart, New Technology for Recording]

Dave Stewart: There’s pros and cons about everything. It’s amazing all this new technology. You can do all this great stuff. But if you’re listening to the Beatles’ albums or – they sounded great too and they were making in on a four-track and an eight-track. And “Sweet Dreams,” the album, is made on an eight-track of which we can only use seven because the eighth track was always the sync code with this little machine we had. One of the first drum computers, but not like you see them these days.

You had to program everything in and see it as a little white dot. And so we had to make the record on seven tracks. So every note that was played had to mean something. So we used to say we’d take not prisoners. So something that was just filling in space. It was out. Everything was out of the _____. And nowadays, you can get seventy-two tracks worth of stuff and see the poor Mexican guy try to mix it and he’s got forty-three tracks of drums.

And so I’m more of the old school where I don’t you think you need all that many stuff unless you’re mixing a giant movie score with sound effects and everything. To make a record that sounds great, I think you need great sounds on the record to begin with. So I’m more interesting in the mike that’s making the guitar or the amp, the ambient mikes and where they’re placed. Because really, a mixing disk is exactly the same as if you had somebody in the room just moving the mikes around. So when you move the mikes around you’re not taking anything away from the sound. You’re changing it.

When you’re EQ’ing you’re either taking something out or writing something to the natural sound. But you can do the same thing by moving the mike in a different place. If you move the mike nearer the bass strings of a piano, it’s gonna get boomier and bassier. You could leave the mike here with the EQ, turn up the base, and it would get boomier and bassier. But then you’ve already started a downward spiral because then you’re using EQ to alter what’s happening naturally. So it’s best to get the greatest sound you want naturally, then the least EQ you need to use, the better.

And then the overall balance should be – it’s like what you do when you’re recording and orchestra really. You put the mikes in the right place. The orchestra sounds great. You usually don’t have to EQ anything.