Originally published in Joe Bonamassa YT channel · October 2021
Kevin Shirley (excerpt)
Article1 min read
Joe Bonamassa: What is the most impressive thing you’ve ever seen in the studio as a producer?
Kevin Shirley: The most impressive thing?
JB: Yeah. Like from a musician or whatever.
KS: I was making a Dream Theater record – Falling Into Infinity – and I remember the vocals being very difficult with James. Not the least of all because he needed to have an hour’s warm up, and had to have the right reverb for the warm up environment. We’d go into the studio and get his headphones on, and the delay would be wrong, and the reverb would be wrong. I remember being frustrated at it, and Doug Pinnick walked in from King’s X. He was going to sing a vocal on there. He came in, he took one look at the lyric, smoked a big blunt [laughs] and went in and sang in one take, and man, it exploded out of the speakers! That was like “Wow!” – like that’s how you do it!