When he was nine years old, Joel Hamilton received a small reel-to-reel recorder as a gift from his mother. Little did he know, this gift would send him down a career path that he would follow the rest of his life.
Since that day, Hamilton has been obsessed with the intersection of technology and art. And it’s that obsession that has been the driving force behind his work with such artists at Tom Waits, Matisyahu, and Pretty Lights. It is also the reason he’s enjoyed a large handful of Grammy Award nominations. Obsession, that is, and his unwavering compassion for the artist’s original vision.
With the 60th annual Grammy Awards recently come and gone, Hamilton was kind enough to chat with Sweetwater. Here, we discuss his latest Grammy nomination for his engineering work on Bonobo’s Migration album, the importance of knowing how to make a great record, and why the great-quality gear you’ll find in his Brooklyn, New York, Studio G is simply a means to an end.
Congratulations on your Grammy nomination for your engineering work with Bonobo. What was it like working on his album Migration?
It was the same as any of the artists that I’ve worked with in the last five years. Bonobo has a definite way of working. So [for me] it’s like working as a method actor within someone else’s aesthetic. It was more as an engineer to his production. It was figuring out the pieces of the puzzle that are missing and bringing an analog texture to it. I needed to see what he’s seeing and understand it. We didn’t talk about it, and there was no direction to me. So if I impart a particular texture on the sounds and they sit correctly with the other elements, then I was done. I mean, it’s still me twisting the knobs, so I can’t help but impart a particular sound on things.
Do you try to imprint your signature on the projects you work on?
You always imprint something inadvertently. But to me it’s like being a director. You’re not in front of the cameras. The story’s not about you. You’re not in it. But you’re definitely guiding a narrative arc, so it makes sense to the viewer when they sit down in the movie theater. So in that sense, yeah. The decisions you make in production impart something on the end product. If it’s with compassion and without ego, you can really make a big difference in a record.
A big part of a producer or engineer’s sonic fingerprint is the gear they use. What are some of your favorite pieces of gear?
I have some Neve 1076s, which are 1073s that were spec’d by the BBC to have detented boost and cut. I have a bunch of 1073s and 1075s. But I also use things like a Maxson Department of Commerce that’s an old tube compressor that’s freaky. And I use things in the box as well, like UA plug-ins.
You have a great relationship with Universal Audio. How did that come about, and how do you utilize their products in the studio?
Even though I mix analog, it’s a hybrid situation. If I have six guitar tracks coming out of two channels of the console, chances are there’s the UAD 1073 on that bus, before it comes out of the box and into the SSL. Even just the line amp and the highpass give me a bit of that Neve color. You can hear that there are transformers in that model, because they do component-level modeling. So things like that 1073 get a lot of use from me.
Michael Brauer suggested I check them out years ago, and he’s been a good friend and mentor. And since then I’ve literally used UA’s stuff on every single one of the Grammy-nominated things that I’ve done, and more.
Earlier this year, you had the opportunity to live stream a real session using their gear. What was that like?
It was great! They put together this thing where we did a live session in my studio. So I put the band together, and we backed Lyrics Born, who is classic hip hop mc. We had 27 inputs going, everybody playing live. So we had all 27 inputs literally running on a laptop. Then we used some Apollo 16s and brought things in using unison 1073 models with a combination of analog gear. And I still kept a running mix on my SSL console.
We basically swapped [my HDX rig that we normally run in every room] out for a laptop and 32 I/O of Apollo. It kind of took the place of the tape machine and about ten 1073s. And it performed flawlessly. I couldn’t be happier with the way that stuff always works.
With the availability of all these products, there are more engineers and producers coming up than ever before. What advice would you give them?
I would listen to music like you’re responsible for it and think about whether you’d make the same moves. Like, listen to “Billie Jean,” and think about whether you would have left this, that, or the other thing. And then understand that it did really, really well. And compare your response to it with what actually came out and how well it did. You’ll be like, “This sold 50 trillion copies, and I would have turned the vocal up. Thankfully I didn’t!”
Studio G and your career are booming today. What’s your secret to staying relevant in an industry that’s always changing?
What we’ve experienced is an increase in the number of days booked, every single day, in all three of our rooms. It’s based on having a space where you can come in and work with somebody that understands how to make the process work for the particular band or artist. Having a fundamental understanding of how a record gets made isn’t specific to the capture device used to make it. Meaning, bringing it in relatively on budget, aesthetically pleasing to the artist and yourself as producer, and feeling like it enters the world at the right time makes more of a difference than what kind of tape machine or computer [we] used to record it. To me, that’s what it is. It’s bringing the fundamentals of how to make a record, and dragging that through whatever technology-of-the-month is being used to capture it.
