RSR268 - Bill Schnee - Recording Steely Dan Aja, Miles Davis, and Huey Lewis & The News
Recording Studio Rockstars
Lij Shaw
4.8 • 543 Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2020
⏱️ 162 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest today is Bill Schnee an internationally renowned producer, engineer and mix master. In a highly decorated career that spans five decades, Bill has engineered many gold and platinum albums with a wide variety of artists that include Three Dog Night, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Rod Stewart, Chicago, Steely Dan, Natalie Cole, The Jacksons, Marvin Gaye, Dire Straits, Ringo (with all the Beatles), Barry Manilow, Carly Simon, Michael Bolton, George Benson, The Pointer Sisters, Bette Midler, Amy Grant and Whitney Houston, including her mega-single "I Will Always Love You".
Bill also produced multiple projects with Huey Lewis and the News, Boz Scaggs, Pablo Cruise, Joe Sample, as well as internationally renowned direct-to-disc recordings with Thelma Houston and James Newton Howard and Friends.
In addition to working on dozens of Grammy-nominated and Grammy-winning albums, Bill has been personally nominated 11 times for The Best Engineered Album category and has won twice for Aja and Gaucho, both from Steely Dan. Those two multi-platinum releases add to a harvest of hits that includes over 85 gold records, 50 platinum projects and 50 top twenty singles. Schnee also has won an Emmy Award for Best Sound Mixing for a Variety Special and a Dove Award.
In 1981, Bill opened his own recording facility in Los Angeles – Schnee Studio. It boasted a large live recording room with a very unique acoustical sound, a custom made recording console, custom tube mic pre-amps, and an extensive collection of vintage tube microphones. It was widely regarded as one of the finest recording rooms in Los Angeles.
Bill currently resides in Franklin, Tennessee with his wife Sallie. And we are lucky to have him here on the podcast with us today!
Thanks to our sponsors!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode of Recording Studio Rockstars is brought to you by OWC, PreSonus, API Audio, Isotope, Sound Porter, Mastering, JZ microphones, and Spectra-1964, |
| 0:14.0 | on the JZB-B-29 microphone through the Spectra-1964 STX-100 Micpre, C6610 Complementer, and Isotope RX, and Ozone. |
| 0:24.4 | So get ready to rock. |
| 0:26.6 | Their manager called me and said, |
| 0:28.4 | I want you to come up and hear a band and tell me I'm crazy. |
| 0:31.6 | So I went up and I went to Uncle Charlie's up in Marin County |
| 0:35.3 | and saw Huey Lewis on American Express. |
| 0:38.3 | I heard them and went back and talked to him afterwards |
| 0:40.5 | and went back to the hotel and came home. |
| 0:43.9 | Manager called me and said, what do you think? |
| 0:45.5 | I said, the band is good. |
| 0:47.1 | The songs need work, but that kid is a star. |
| 0:50.3 | Music Welcome to Welcome to Recording Studio Rockstars. |
| 1:04.0 | I'm Lid Shaw, and this is the podcast created to help you become a rock star of the recording studio. |
| 1:15.6 | I've got two words for you that will help you make your best record ever and not lose it. |
| 1:21.6 | Storage and backup. You want fast drives for composing and recording |
| 1:25.6 | and reliable drives for backup so you don't lose all |
| 1:28.8 | your hard work when something goes wrong. That's why I chose OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G internal |
| 1:35.4 | SSDs for my studio computer and Mercury Elite Pro external drives for archiving. Discover the best |
| 1:42.0 | OWC drive options for your studio at macsales.com slash rock stars. |
| 1:50.5 | The Spectre 1964 STX-100 mic pre provides unequaled headroom and linear output regardless of transient |
| 1:58.5 | audio peaks, capturing critical details from your microphone. |
... |
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