New Monday #89
Dave Pensado
Dave Pensado has been a name in professional audio since the late 80s, working as an engineer and mixer. He’s worked on huge records for Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, P!nk, Justin Bieber, Lionel Richie, Nelly Furtado, Kenny G—it’s quite a list. He has a Grammy award for Mary J. Blige’s Growing Pains and was awarded a NAMM TEC Hall of Fame Award in 2020.
Perhaps you know him from his wonderful podcast, Pensado’s Place, which features interviews, tech talk, and in-depth tutorials on recording and mixing techniques. His presentation was laid back and warm—mellow, like his southern drawl.
It is a loss to all of us that Mr. Pensado is suffering significantly from Alzheimer’s Disease. His care is expensive, and his family has reached out, asking for support from the professional audio community.
On his website, you can contribute here. There are several options, from monthly to one-time. We’ve contributed, and if you can, please do.
I’ve seen Dave speak live, listened to his podcast, but never met the man. Everyone I know who knows him has expressed that he’s exactly what he seems to be: a humble master of the craft and a lovely person.
Here’s a clip of Dave chatting with producer Ben Grosse. You can get an idea of Dave’s knowledge, his warmth, the details they get into on the podcast, and Dave’s absolute adoration of music of all genres.
Here's the Stone Temple Pilots song they’re discussing:
Black Heart
Check out how relatively loud the bass is, and how tucked in the cymbals are. And is that a gated reverb on the snare?
Tape and Teen Angst
I feel compelled to hit this again, for reasons that will become clearer and clearer.
Most of my recording experience is with analog tape. I started with a Fostex X-15 cassette 4-track—which was an amazing thing but really, it sounded awful, to Fostex 1/4 inch 8-track—which was so much fun and I made some of my favorite things ever with, and then to 2” 16 and 24 and on from there.
Tape does some things really well, and other things not so well.
The technical reasons for this are complex, but mainly it’s clipping, caused by the nature of the little particles of iron (all tiny magnets) on the tape itself.
The nature of little tiny magnetic particles on tape is that they’re lazy, like teenagers after gaming 'til four in the morning: they just want to lie there, and they require a good kick in the ass to get moving, metaphorically speaking. I never kicked my son’s ass.
The boot to the butt is really hitting the tape with a powerful signal, and to do that, tape decks mix in a biasing tone with the actual audio you want to record. The biasing tone is ultra high-pitched, so you can’t hear it when the tape is playing (but you can hear it for a split second as the tape stops or starts—that “beeeoow” sound). Think of bias as a gun to the head of the tape particle that gets the particles to move into a shape resembling the audio signal. For our teenager, it's a threat to throw out the XBox unless he cuts the damn lawn.
In both cases, the tape and the teen eventually acquiesce, but they’re a little slow about doing it, they’re a little slow with the whole process, and when you give them something else to do, they keep doing what they were doing just to throw some shade at you.
For the teen, it means that they’re always a pain in the neck.
For analog tape, it means the peaks and valleys of the waveform are not perfectly accurate, and a little... late. Because the particles have inertia both starting—they don’t want to go—and stopping—they don’t want to stop.
Also, like a teen, there’s only so much you can get a magnetic particle to do before it starts complaining and causing problems. There’s a finite amount of particles on the tape, and they can only be moved so far into the shape of a waveform before they can’t move anymore or you run out of particles to move. The result is that tape acts like a soft-knee compressor with an incredibly fast attack and release time.
Think about that for a second: would you want a soft-knee compressor that had a superfast attack time? Basically, a compressor that is always on, with the threshold set really low, that is always compressing your signal, and compressing it more as you increase the level—do you want that on all of your tracks? Across the whole record? Always?
The answer for me is HELL NO. And there are a ton of engineers who NEVER liked the sound of tape ever. Tchad Blake comes to mind—he does not miss working with tape at all.
But...
Tape has a certain magic quality for low-end
Because that reshaping of the waveform by the lazy tape particles causes harmonic distortion, which adds harmonics to the signal. The harmonics tend to congregate lower on analog tape because of the physics of the tape head, which emphasises the lows and gently rolls off the highs. So, it sounds warmer. Of course, the more you slam things into tape or any analog system, the more harmonic distortion you create, and the more you create, the brighter and buzzier and more like a fuzz box things sound.
There are ways to screw around with the amount of low-end enhancement you can get out of tape. You could record things at slower speed, deliberately change the calibration and frequency response of the tape deck, experiment with how hard you hit the tape when recording—you wouldn’t really know how it sounded until playback, but you could experiment with this if you had the time / budget / client patience available to allow you to squat down in front of a tape deck with a tiny little screwdriver and tweak stuff.
I hated doing this stuff. Especially if the song and band sucked. Tweaking the tape deck doesn’t make drummers tighter, singers more interesting and in tune, add a decent bridge or improve stupid-ass lyrics. Burned steak isn’t made tastier by a cool-looking plate.
And there’s another issue:
Tape sucks the life out of the mids and highs
Let’s go back to our answer to the question, “Would you want a soft-knee compressor that had a superfast attack time across every track and the entire mix?” And the answer is hell no. Why?
Because it’s clipping the transients off. And contained in the transients is most of the high-end energy. You can compress a bass, but the low-end doesn’t sound clickier or punchier: it always sounds like someone making a loud swallowing sound down there. Because the click and the punch are in the higher frequencies, which are getting clipped off. In fact, if you slam into tape enough, you lose the transients and the high-end, and swap in harmonic distortion as a substitute for the high-end that was actually once there. Sounds like what was going on with my Fostex X-15 when I was an angsty teen the Christmas of 1983. It sounded like ass, but oh my GOD it was cool.
I spent the early years of my studio life figuring out how to finesse tape recording levels. I had to cut drums on the low side—lower on the meters of the tape deck—if I wanted to hear life and punch on playback. Cut them too hot, the cymbals would sound awful, the snare would turn into a sort of “SHHHHHSSSHHT” sounding thing, the kick would disappear. Then, you could cut things with slower transients higher, like vocals. Vocals usually sounded good on tape. The slight rolling off of the highs would smooth out harshness. Bass... certain things you could cut high, but the more percussive, the lower you’d have to set your levels. Guitars and keyboards could be deceptive: you could slam them into tape and get all this extra distortion and then when you went to mix, they’d become this blob because you lost the high-end articulation. Horns loved tape. Strings loved tape.
The bottom line
Getting the most out of tape was a learning process, and always a balancing act between getting some bottom-end saturation while not losing the punch and clarity imparted by the transients of the signal.
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone made a plug-in that had that low-end tape saturation warmth but made the mid-range punchy? And maybe had a schweet sounding EQ up on the highs because the developer just couldn’t stop adding features, could ya, Dan?
Wouldn’t that be nice?
We’re always nice to you guys. ; )
Warm regards,
Luke