Paul Northfield interview (excerpts)

Let’s switch gears to talk about Dream Theater. You joined Dream Theater to engineer Systematic Chaos. They were coming off of a long run of working with Doug Oberkircher. What sort of change were they looking to make?

They’d had Doug, who’d had always recorded their stuff, and then they’d used somebody else to mix everything. When they came to me, they were looking for somebody that they could have do everything. Aside from the stimulus of working with somebody new, they wanted somebody that they felt could mix the record as well.

They said “We’re going to write in the studio, so how do you feel about coming into the studio and you’ll be busy for, like, a week, setting everything up and then you’ll be sitting around a lot. Are you OK with that?”

I was quite comfortable with the whole idea. I liked the idea of working with them because of the experimental nature of their music and, as much as I like to move quickly and efficiently when I’m recording, their reasons for being indulgent about writing and recording in the studio, as opposed to demoing and walking in and then being super efficient and cutting the drum tracks in a week or ten days and then moving on... I understood exactly where they were coming from, and I admired them for that choice. They don’t want to go through the process of spending a month or two writing and making a demo whilst they’re inspired with a song, and then going into the studio and then redoing it all. They just wanted to be inspired, get some ideas, record them, that’s it. Do a song, finish it.

We’d do the drums, guitar, bass and sometimes some keyboard, and then move on to the next song. So we usually had finished the guitar work on a song – not the solo perhaps, but all the rhythm guitars – before we started on another song. That was their mode of working and that’s what brought us together to work on Systematic Chaos.

Did your role change at all for Black Clouds and Silver Linings?

From the start, they said “Look, we’re producing the record ourselves, because we always know what we want to do. We wouldn’t mind some help with producing the vocals because it’s good for us to be able to sit back and have somebody else deal with that, and then us give some general direction about where we want to go.” So, on both records, I was involved in producing the vocals.

This time around – even though I’m not a credited producer apart from the vocals on the record – this time around there was more dialogue about what work they were more interested in. Mike and John are still the producers on the record, but, producing being what it is, everybody’s opinion is taken into consideration in some way. I think, perhaps, there was less tip-toeing around because they knew me and I knew them... if you had a criticism or a suggestion, you could more openly voice your opinion because everybody knew where everybody stood.

The Black Clouds album has the 5th and final song of Mike Portnoy’s epic “Twelve-Step Suite” of songs about recovery from alcoholism. How did that go down?

They used elements of all of the previous sections that they’d written. Mike comes in with lyrical content in mind, and that gives it structure. He doesn’t come in with a completely written piece; it’s more like film directing. He comes in with a vision or an image, or a sentiment that this is going to be about. This one was more defined, in the sense that he wanted to borrow elements, take elements from the earlier parts and use those in different ways in this song. Aside from writing new parts for it, he wanted to be able to use some of the theme, and I think that really worked quite effectively, without it sounding like just a medley of other ideas. Some of the melodic themes and stuff like that are reused in different ways. So, in that sense, that was a sort of defining characteristic of this final piece, just so it ties them together. At some point they’re talking about performing it as a whole on stage.

Let’s talk about tracking drums. You’ve worked with three of my favorite drummers – Mike Portnoy being one, Gavin Harrison is another, and of course Neil Peart. They all have a ton of experience recording. Do these three – and maybe there are different answers – but do these drummers come in with specific ideas about engineering? Such as microphone choice, placement, technique?

As for Mike, he is so involved in the production and the vision and the ideas of Dream Theater that he’s not particularly interested in what’s involved in recording them, even to the extent that he would prefer that somebody else gets the sound. He says, “You guys take care of all that – I want to be able to sit down and play.”

Mike has a great drum tech, who can tune the drums, and who knows Mike, knows what he wants, can set the kit up the way he wants, and then can play it well enough for me to be able to dial it in.

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Mike Portnoy’s drum-cam videos show that each song is comprised of many different drum takes and overdubs. How do you manage that process? And more generally, how did the band approach the tracking for the two latest records?

The fundamental way that we approached both Systematic Chaos and the new one is that guide tracks were laid down – after they’d written the song, they would map out the optimum tempo for each section, and we would make a click track. In the case of Systematic Chaos they would just play all together against a click track that had programmed tempo and meter changes. They’d play a take to something like that and, as long as it was a pretty good take, Mike would use that as his reference, and listen mostly to the click, and keep the other instruments just sort of loud enough so he knows where he is. So when you see his live studio cams, he’s playing to a click with guide tracks.

It used to drive them insane how long it would take to program a click that felt comfortable to play to. They’d have recorded the demo just playing freeform, and then sit and discuss it. And they’d play it again together and say “Ok, no, let’s go two or three beats per minute faster...” They’d spent a day just trying to get a click track that felt comfortable for a 10-15 minute song, and it was extremely tedious and they hated doing it, but they knew this was the only way they could comfortably end up with something that moved from section to section in the way that they wanted.

This time around, we used technology to our advantage. They played the pieces as they liked. I recorded the songs into Pro Tools, then I created a click track absolutely precisely locked to the live performances, and then used the Elastic Time function in Pro Tools to remove any tempo changes that were not liked. If the band said, “We want the bridge two beats per minute faster,” I could just adjust that, and all of the tracks, the guide drums, everything, would just be time-stretched, using Elastic Time.

What that meant was that, first of all, they didn’t have to spend hours tediously doing it themselves. They could just listen to it and say “Oh, we like it two beats per minute faster,” instead of having to discuss it, experiment, play it together, record it again. They could just all sit in the control room – well, Mike or John for the most part – and listen, and I can just adjust it on the fly. Once it was all settled, what we ended up with was a track that was sometimes untouched because they played the song very steadily, other places where it’s within one beat per minute, because we’d removed all the little changes that might have happened, and still other places where there are some natural tempo changes in this recording that are actual live drum performances.

With a drummer like Mike, some of his spontaneous performances are extraordinary, so there were a couple of occasions where we used the original demo drum performance for a certain section of the song. Usually I’d re-record him three times through a song. And then we would sit down together and decide which are the best takes, and edit them together. If there’s something missing, like a drum fill here or there, or he’s decided that he wants to play a different feel – usually it will be something like “I want to play that on the ride, not on the hi-hat” – then he’ll go back in and punch them in.

So what is the process, actually, when you have maybe three takes plus the demo? How do you aggregate those into a final track? Is Mike Portnoy sitting next to you at the console?

Well, yeah. Basically, Mike will come in and listen and take notes. He basically decides what he was wanting to do, and I have some input because he likes to ask me what I think, so, for the most part, we sit and discuss. I’ll tell him which I thought was the best performance, and he knows what he’s looking for – sometimes we have different things that are of concern, so, between the two of us, we arrive at a point where he’ll say “Ok, the good drum take will be this one up to the first chorus, and then this take is really good on the chorus.” You might end up with almost one take for the entire song. But that’s basically it, we’ll just sit together and decide together which ones we’re going to use and then they’re just edited [with] playlist editing in Pro Tools.