If you're a Cars fan or dig Ric Ocasek's production of bands like Weezer, it's really cool that he finally talk about producing in the new edition of Future Music (the US edition).

Ocasek is like a hero of mine, from a songwriting point of view, and putting together the sound of the Cars. I think this is the first interview I read where he gets more technical than usual.

Here are a few of the things I picked up:

1) He syncs together four digital 8-track machines because legendary producer Roy Thomas Baker was a stickler for Tascam tape machines. Ocasek does no hard disk or Pro Tools recording, which is a rarity!

2) For the first Cars album, Baker would have three people singing a part in unison, making them do it over and over again. The band thought it was because they didn't get it right on the first take, but Baker was just layering the vocals.

3) From Baker, he learned "if you want to hear something, you push it all the way up. There weren't any subtle moves with Roy. If you couldn't har the toms, he'd just jack'em to the top. I think you have to exaggerate whatever you want to pop out in the mix."

4) "Recording and mixing guitars is much more about cutting frequencies away rather than adding EQ boosts. I like to get rid of anything that hurts your ears, but I still like the guitars to be powerful. I do try to cut 3 kHz away a lot because I want the vocal to be able to fit in. Whatever I cut away from the guitars, I just put on the vocal to get it to stick out more."


Drew