Welcome to the Sound On Sound people and music industry podcast channel.  The career of LA producer and engineer Mark Linnet spans everything from live mixing for Frank Zappa to engineering for Randy Newman and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We talked to Mark about his studio, the gear of past and present, and his extensive work remixing and remastering classic Beach Boys records. 

Mark Linett
The studio has been here for, I think, about 15, 20 years. When we bought this house, it was with having a studio for me in mind. For a long time, it was just one band after another and one mix after another.  I'm trying to remember what year we first started using Pro Tools.  I do know that initially it was still just using it like a tape recorder.

With some plugins, but still mixing everything through the analog console and mixing to tape. Then, you know, slowly it became not tape at all. It never went back to tape recording. Uh, the tape machines I still have are really just for transfer projects. Especially the Beach Boys. We have over the years transferred pretty much the entire Beach Boy catalog.

Uh, so we have easy access to it.  So now the old control room, uh, actually has a D command console in it, which I use for mixing and, um, I have another small system at my home. Uh, just a desktop, laptop, you know, UAD box, um, these little iLoud monitors that I've become incredibly fond of. It's scary how hi fi they are for, you know, 300 bucks.

And like it or hate it, you can do amazing work. Very inexpensively and with a very small amount of equipment.  And it's a shame in a way. I mean, you know, this console served me well for a long, long time. And, uh, but it, you know, was an incredible amount of money. I had these input modules made because the original ones weren't sufficient in terms of echo sends.

So we built these and they have 12 echo sends, which is a little bit overkill. But, uh, you know, kind of what you, you know, you need, you need a data, you know, for all the various outboard gears. There's three stereo buses and, you know, insert points and all.  I mean, you know, the kind of thing you can, you can do, uh, with a piece of software instantly.

And then, of course, all the myriad of outboard gear that we used to have. To run and patch, you know. Yeah, we still have, I still have a lot of, um, older equipment. Uh, not as much as I used to have because frankly, I've always been a collector. So, having the studio was great in that regard that I could do half and half recording studio and museum.

Um, although I wanted it all to work. So, because of the Beach Boys connection, one of, you know, one of my faves is always the, uh, Universal Audio stuff. So, uh, you know, we have, we have some of their original 610 console modules. Uh, I used to have a couple of their actual consoles that I would use. And, and their outboard gear, 175, 176 compressors.

You know, a lot of the standard stuff, I mean, Pultex and Urea 1176's, RCA's, and uh, you know, limiters, and uh, Neve limiters, and of course all the, all the reverbs. I, I, for quite a while I was sort of collecting uh, spring reverbs, and uh, we've got a, we've got a stereo EMT plate in the back that came out of Studio 55, which was the old Deca Studios here in Los Angeles.

I was in when, when old gear became good again. Probably most everybody knows that all this old gear was considered worthless, and um, Less than desirable  for a very long time. I mean, uh, you know, tales of, of, uh, you know, Pultex being sold at junk stores for 15, you know. Um, so I got in a little, you know, pretty early.

So I was able to buy pristine 47s for 500 and things like that. Before this, everything went completely crazy.  In terms of what, uh, what you had to pay.  It's interesting about the old gear that we all, myself included, revere so much. Lee Hirshberg was, uh, he was a staff engineer at, at Western, and, um, most significantly did all of Frank Sinatra's recordings, uh, starting, uh, with the Strangers of the Night album. 

And, um, he was here one time, and at that point I, I had one of the original consoles from Western Studios, and I thought, you know, he would find it nostalgic to see the thing. And I showed it to him and he was actually almost horrified, you know, that anybody would want to use the darn thing. Um, we talked about it and it was because the unreliability was just paramount.

I mean, you can imagine because, you know, especially the tube stuff is just so finicky and I, I could just imagine.  I mean, doing a Frank Sinatra session with 40 guys and the chairman, you know, in the studio and the console starts to fry and you've got to be the one to say.  We need to take a break. So I finally, because I've always wondered, I mean, the tube stuff always seems to sound better in the old recordings.

Um, I'm not sure if the solid state consoles, when they went to them, weren't so good at the beginning. Um, it was also the period when multitrack recording changed from capturing a performance in a room.  to, well, let's slice and dice everything and, you know, cut a basic track and everything be isolated.

And, you know, so that's certainly part of it, but clearly the, from the engineering point of view, the reliability outweighed everything else. And, uh, this is why, I mean, when I started in the seventies, if you went to the crummiest studio in town, that's where you'd find the 47. I remember I worked at a really crummy studio in the seventies and they had a Telefunken 251.

I don't think we used it that much because the 87 was more modern, but That's where that stuff wound up because nobody else wanted it, you know, and, uh, we've all probably heard, you know, stories of 670s getting thrown in the trash. I mean, I heard stories about that when, you know, Western had mastering rooms for years.

Everybody had some kind of mastering room because that's how you took something home, even if it wasn't You know, for actually cutting, uh, a master disc, you'd have something to cut reps with. Uh, but Western, of course, had real mastering rooms, and when they decommissioned those, I'm told that the 670s, which were used for cutting, went in the shop, and at some point were used for doorstops, literally, and when people got tired of tripping over them,  out to the dumpster they went. 

You know, now you pay 70, 000 for one, you know, I mean, it's, yeah, crazy.  I wound up working with Brian and the Beach Boys just from one phone call.  I just happened to call Oceanway, uh, recording out here one day. My recollection is I must have been looking to book time for one of my projects. And the lady that ran the studio said that they had a, you know, last minute session for Brian Wilson.

They didn't have an, you know, he doesn't have his own engineer. Do you, you know, they want us to get him an engineer. I said, sure. I had worked with Carl a little bit. Ironically, I had engineered David Lee Roth when he did California Girls. I did the background session, which Carl sang on along with Christopher Cross, and maybe Tom Kelly?

I can't really remember. I did a couple of sessions that Carl was on, some for America, who I'd done a lot of albums for. But I never worked with Brian. Um, so I showed up for the session and wound up spending a year working on his album. That album went on for a long time. And, um, this was right when CD reissues were starting to happen.

So when the decision was made to, uh, put Pet Sounds out, I was given that job. And, um, you know, then we did the two fers, and then we did the Good Vibrations box, and  on and on and on.  I didn't do much work for Brian after the first album, until about 2000. Uh, when we did Live at the Roxy, then we did Pat Sounds Live, and then I did, you know, a bunch of, a bunch of studio albums for him.

I mean, most notably Smile, and, uh, Getting Over My Head,  Gershwin, Disney, his Christmas album,  Lucky Old Son. My goodness, it's quite a  Start, start reeling it off, it reminds one how long it's been.  Because of my involvement with Brian and the Beach Boys, I wound up doing their first box set, uh, Good Vibrations, in  1993, maybe, somewhere there.

And, um, the Beach Boys are kind of unique, uh, I think, among bands, in that they have an awful lot of unreleased material that's of very high quality, which kind of makes sense, because even in their early albums, The album cuts were generally just as good as the hits, which was unusual for an act in the sixties.

I mean, you know, you made your hits and you did an album and you had your three or four hits and then a bunch of filler and off it went. But, uh, they, they were never really like that. So it's an awful lot of material unfinished, unreleased in their archives. And the other great thing about the Beach Boys is that unlike most acts, they always controlled their tapes. 

And while they didn't really care about that any more than anybody else did in the day, because this was all considered to be disposable, you know, once it's gone, it's gone. They didn't turn the tapes into the record label. And the, you know, record labels, for obvious reasons, aren't going to keep every tape, every outtake, they're going to keep.

What was necessary to do the final mix and the ma then the, of course the, the final masters and that's, that's it. All the rest of it's gonna go in the dumpster in a lot, in most cases, you won't have the sessions and you won't have all the, the runup. And with the beach boys especially, you know, the way Brian produced when they all produced, it's so instructive and that's why we could do projects like the, you know, the first big one we did was the pet sounds box where we dissected the entire album Going through the tapes.

I, I think we were missing one tracking session. But we had the subsequent, uh, overdub session. Because the way, I should explain, the way you were recording in those days, uh, because you only had a limited number of tracks, I mean, in 1966, 65, excuse me, there was only one studio, CBS here in town, that had a custom 8 track that they had built, uh, I believe out of Ampex 354 electronics, meaning you could not record on two adjacent tracks, you had to record on odd or even tracks.

But that was the max you could get. And most people were still just using 4 track. So your typical way of doing a pop record, a rock record, was you'd, you know, record on 3 track or starting around 66, you could do 4 track. Maybe in mono, maybe spread it out. Uh, but then you need more track. So you're gonna mix that down to another 4 track and then do your overdubs and in some cases You'd go on and on and on.

I, at one point was able to, uh, listen to an awful lot of Phil Spector masters, three track masters. And some of those sessions, they would go four or five generations down before the one that you would do your final mix from,  because the other thing you would do in those days was if you had one more overdub to do, you wouldn't transfer to another tape.

You would just do the overdub. While Chuck Brits is doing the mix, like Help Me Rhonda, for example, has a bunch of overdubs that only exist on the mixdown. Typical process for the Beach Boys in 64 would have been cut the track in mono. Generally weren't any overdubs, or if they were, they were very slight.

And then, um, well, let's talk about Don't Worry Baby. So Don't Worry Baby is a mono backing track. It's a band playing. The remaining two tracks, they did the background vocals first. And then they bounced that to another three track. Combined the backing vocals. Just bounce the track over and then did the lead vocal. 

And at the same time, Carl did his little guitar solo on the third track. That's what they mixed to mono, you know, Brian's mode was always mono.  And while they did issue some of the early albums in stereo, they were, you know, very quick and just, you know, whatever was left on the final three track stereo and pop music.

I mean, not pop music and rock music. Stereo was, you know, a marketing thing. I mean, and I agree. I mean, those records, they were made to be heard on AM radio. And they were made to be heard in mono, both because of the medium, and also because in mono, a producer could make sure that what you were doing was what the listener was going to hear.

Stereo, especially in those days, could be so, so odd. I mean, speakers behind the couch, speakers out of phase, you know. Rock music had always been, been mono. So one advantage we had when we went back to do things like the Petzhauns in stereo is that we could manually sync the first reel and all the subsequent overdubs onto at the time what we used was a Sony digital dash machine to come up with something more like a traditional multitrack master that we could then do a mix from if you didn't do that.

I mean, if you went to the final tape that was used for the original mix, which was in mono, what you had was The entire backing track on one track and then the vocals on a few other tracks. So you really couldn't do much of a stereo mix from those tapes.  When you're trying to take a record specifically made to be in mono and make stereo out of it with what's left.

I mean, you wind up with the band on one side and the vocals on the other side, maybe the lead vocal in the middle. I mean, it's, it's not terribly satisfying. When we were doing the Pet Sounds box, doing the stereo mix and the song Caroline No, there's no backgrounds, but it's a double lead vocal by Brian.

And he sang the double as it was being mixed. But amazingly, there was a tape in the vault, maybe it was an echo delay tape, it's a quarter inch, and what's on it is Brian's double. So I was able to take that and manually sync it to the other one. And voila, we have the double vocal. This sort of leads to a discussion about the pen sound stereo mix.

Because while it is 90%, let's say, the same, uh, has the same content as the mono mix, there are a few instances like that where either a double lead isn't on the multitracks, or, in a couple of cases, most notably, wouldn't it be nice, and God only knows, where on part of the song, The lead vocal that's in the final mix isn't there.

And wouldn't it be nice, I don't know whether Mike originally sang the whole song, or only sang the bridge, which is what he's on in the finished version, but the A track master has Brian singing the lead all the way through. We eventually used digital extraction technology to try to pull Mike out of the mono mix, and add that to the new stereo mix, and then there are a couple more like that, where um, After something was recorded, Brian apparently decided to go back to an earlier version and use part of it or use all of it so the multitrack doesn't duplicate that.

Then of course there are things on the multitrack that didn't get used in the vinyl mix as well. So the biggest project was we did a, it's a five CD plus LP version of the, uh, the Beach Boys Smile recordings. Which was very instructive because it was, you know, a project that Brian labored over for a long time and ultimately had to abandon and one of the reasons I think he had to abandon it is that the technology was not  Wasn't going to catch up to him for another 20, you know, 20, 30 years.

He was trying to make a record, uh, the way you make a film, uh, by editing, which he had done with incredible success with Good Vibrations. But the way he was trying to do the, the Smile album was taking that to the next level. The only reason we were able to do it was by the time we got to it, we had everything transferred to digital.

We had random access editing, and we had a database that we could instantly access. And find where any particular piece of anything was and get to it very quickly and try and edit and redo and edit. I mean, you know, in the old days. Uh, well even when I was doing the Pat Sounds box, I mean it was still editing the sessions with quarter inch tape and a razor blade. 

So something that at that point in time would have taken several hours to edit a tracking session down to something you could listen to in, you know, three to five minutes. Uh, you know, you can do that now in just about the same amount of time, in about an hour, an hour and a half. And it's great because the method doesn't get in the way of the creativity the way it used to.

So we've been doing these kind of compilations for the band for a long time, but a few years ago, back in 2010 or 11, somewhere in there, in the UK they came out with a new copyright law which said that anything that had been recorded had to be released within 50 years of its creation, or it became Public domain and the Beach Boys had a kind of unique problem in that somewhere in the late 70s or very early 80s somebody got into the head house and copied and made mixes of Practically the whole catalog up until about 1970  and released a huge series of bootlegs  So the problem became that these things were already out there  And if we didn't do legitimate legal releases, they were going to fall into public domain.

So starting in 2013, I think it was, we started doing releases, mostly as online only. Covering, you know, covering every year. The exception being last year, we did a physical release of the Wild Honey Smiley Smile period, 1967.  Uh, as a two CD set, a vinyl set, which also featured the first true stereo mix of the Wild Honey album.

An album that had only ever been released in mono up to that point. And then subsequent, uh, we did another volume, uh, online only of, um, that sort of material. And then all the live recordings from 1967.  Which brings us to 2018, uh, where we did the same thing for the Friends 2020 and Live in London albums.

And what would have been a, the equivalent of a two CD set on the studio albums. And an additional, uh, eight concerts, all of which, uh, are available on, uh, online, either as streaming or, uh, as downloads. And, uh, yeah, having done this in 2018, we are confident that we'll, well, we pretty much have to keep doing these things because there's an awful lot of material, uh, going forward.

As I said, this band, I've always said this band left more good stuff behind than most people were, you know, released at all, which makes them kind of unique. And the nice thing about it is that while we, we do have a lot of stuff, you know, that, uh, has to be released to just maintain the copyright. At the same time, uh, my partner, Alan, Alan Boyd and I have always wanted to do the kind of alternate.

dissection of, of the records that we've been doing since the Pet Sound Sessions, because it's so instructive. And the Beast Boys, I think the Beast Boys are kind of unique in, in that. Because the making of the records was always so interesting. I guess because they were a vocal harmony group, the way the tracks and the harmonies, you know, fit together, unless you take them apart, it's, uh, it's tough to see exactly how, uh, how amazing it is, how that stuff all fits together.

Because  we've done all this archive work. We are, we are aware of what we, all the tapes we have and all the tapes. Um, well, the few tapes that we don't have, uh, one of the big holes in the, in the tape library was from the shutdown volume two album. And I can't remember now when it was, it's, it's gotta be a, a good number of years ago, somebody got in contact with us.

And told us that he had three half inch, three track tapes of the Beach Boys, and they turned out to be outtakes from the Shut Down Vol. 2 album, including the full tracking session for Why Do Fools Fall in Love, and the story he told was that somewhere around 1966 67, his brother, um, who I think has since passed away, came home one day with these three tapes,  Uh, it was never really clear where, you know, where they had come from.

And, uh, the guy we bought them from had tried over the years to contact management or, you know, but he didn't, he didn't really know, didn't know where to go, so it had never succeeded. What ultimately happened was, now we're in the online age, of course, and, uh, somebody had written a book about Dennis. And this guy with the tapes got in touch with him and he got in touch with us.

And, uh, we had a project we were doing for Capitol at the time that fit perfectly with having these. So Capitol agreed to buy the tapes and we were able to use them as part of the project. It was great. Cause that, that's a, you know, that's a really important album. I mean, fun, fun, fun. And I get around and My Defaults Fall in Love and a bunch of other, you know, lesser known tracks.

The Holy Grail that we're missing. Well, two things. Some of the Smile tapes are missing. That we, I mean, that we know existed. There may be more that we just don't know about. Uh, and unfortunately, the 8 track master for good vibrations was apparently destroyed when the CBS tape library, uh, or the studio, they just cleaned it all out around 1979, I've been told, and destroyed everybody's masters of their own, you know, I mean, you know.

Sadly, as I said, all this stuff was considered  A waste of space for a long, long, long time. And there are many, many stories about tape, you know, tape libraries just getting tossed because nobody thought anybody would want it. In fact, the most recent example I can tell you is about ten years ago. Somebody came to me and said that they had a studio called Valentine Recording out in North Hollywood, where the Beach Boys did a fair amount of recording in 1968.

It had been designed by Bill Putnam, so it was kind of a good alternative to Western and so forth. And they recorded some of the stuff on 20 20, the song Breakaway, the original backing track for Do It Again. Somebody had been in there. When the owner died, the studio was just mothballed.  Uh, I eventually got to go in there and it was literally like, you know, they just kind of turned the lights off and locked the door and this, the guy who had been in there first went to the tape library and there was a beat.

There was a one inch tape said Beach Boys. So I got to go in there and see what it was. And it turned out to be three different versions of a song called All I Want to Do from the 2020 album from 1968. So that's one of the things we featured on the new set.  These things are out there. Oh, yeah. And there's another example about 15 years ago, somebody came to us with a.

Like 25 tapes and looking at them, we realized that they filled in a gap of tapes that we some of which we knew and some which we didn't, but that had been stolen around 1980, 81. So, uh, I wound up having to buy those back and it was the sessions for fun, fun, fun. And I get around and, um. Some stuff from the first album, multitracks, and some of the Live in London tapes, some of the Christmas album tapes, it was really kind of random.

Some things we didn't know existed, like the first generation mix reel for the Smiley Smile album, which they then copied again because they needed to add fades and do some edits, and sonically, it's a million miles above what we've had to use as a master for nearly 60 years.  Discovering these tapes is great because, well, first of all, some of these are versions and songs that we didn't know existed.

And then as far as getting the masters back, you know, we're able to do true stereo mixes the way we did in perpet sounds. And, but again, also, it's being able to hear the process. Because what we wound up with was, you know, we wound up with outtakes. And the other advantage in the early days is that when you're doing vocals that way, you're now running two machines.

So. The second machine where you're doing the vocals, you're going to do multiple takes and you're going to have talking. And, you know, so again, you get to hear the process. When you get to a track, you're not doing that anymore. You're doing your vocal. And if you don't like it, you're erasing it and doing it again.

One thing we do know is that early on, for good vibrations, because we have some footage that we recovered filming in the sessions is that Dennis Wilson was singing the lead with a completely different set of lyrics. There were early lyrics to the song and we can see that in the film, but we've never found even a rough mix. 

Going back to Good Vibrations, certainly one of the biggest, if not the biggest, recording by the group. It's unfortunate that we don't have the final A track with all the vocals. We have all the tracking sessions,  that are three track,  and we have an A  track that, among other things, contains a copy of the edited four track master before it was transferred to A track at CBS.

So many years ago, I, I, it was quite a project because the number of Good Vibrations, uh, uh, session tapes, uh, backing tracks is about, uh, maybe three or four feet tall, three track. So figuring out where each section came from was a bit of a challenge. a job, but we did that, put it all together. And now we had a stereo backing track and there are a few little pieces of vocals on that four track, along with the overdubbed cellos and the overdubbed theremin.

So we've got a pretty good start. And in the last 10 years or so, as digital extraction technology has gotten better, we have experimented with that song and with a few others using extraction techniques to, uh, try to get the vocals that we can add to our stereo backing track. We have been using a company out of Ireland called Audio Source RE.

I've tried a few of these different programs and they've got the best one I've heard so far under the right conditions. You really can, can isolate. Uh, I've only really tried to isolate vocals, but you can, you can certainly do that. And one of the things on my to do list is to, uh, go through the vocal process again and, um, you know, update the mix and hopefully release it.

I mean, I've, you know, I've realized for years at some point, you know, I'm sure we'll be able to take any recording and extract anything. It'll be good for us.  Thank you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.

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