Bob Rice
Great GigsBy Randy Alberts
Audio engineers are a grateful, respecting bunch eager to pay props to those who schooled and influenced them. They remember to the nth degree every move their mentor shared, curled old notebooks full of the memories.
Take Bob Rice, for example, a props kind of a guy with a ridiculous list of influences the past 25 years to be grateful for, a list rich in groundbreaking past and present mentors, peers, and lineage. The sessions he's already checked off his '09 to-do list alone deserves a resume of its own:
Custom synth programming and technical assistance to Michael Bearden, musical director and principal keyboardist for the upcoming Michael Jackson tour; making ready for the New Zealand, Australia and Japan legs of Simon & Garfunkel's first tour in five years; mastering Robby Krieger's Singularity, The Doors guitarist's first solo CD in 10 years; touring as a bass and keyboard tech for Bonnie Raitt; assisting and mixing actor-ethnomusicologist Van Dyke Parks' demos for a new project with experimental guitarist Bill Frisell; synth programming and custom sound design for Chick Corea for the Five Peace Band with John McLaughlin; helping Lyle Mays put his new keyboard rig together for a tour of Japan with the Pat Metheny Group; and yesterday, on the day of his BIAS interview, Rice was finally back home at his own NGP Mastering in Culver City, California, mixing and mastering pianist Armen Guzelimian's new release.
Yesterday, by the way, was just the first day of spring. Home briefly from an unusually busy touring season, Rice is more into giving than receiving credits.
"I come from a place of gratitude," he says, "to those who have helped and influenced me greatly in my career. Chick Corea, Lyle Mays, Roger Waters, Van Dyke Parks, Bonnie Raitt, Issa [formerly Jane Siberry], composer and vocalist Moira Smiley, Boz Scaggs and especially Frank Zappa, among many other maybe not so notable, but equally talented, engineers, teachers and spirit guides."
Jazz From Hell
Zappa? Years before he registered his Peak 1.0, Rice was a sharp rookie studying jazz guitar and electronic music in the Cal State Long Beach music program. His first job, a challenging but dreamy gig for even an experienced engineer, found Bob side-by-side spending days on end with none other than Zappa "sandwiching" — building large, composite Synclavier textures for Frank to use in his beautifully complex compositions.
"You get out of college and you think, 'Hey, maybe I've learned a few things,'" Rice laughs. "Then you get up to Frank Zappa's studio and you find out how very little you truly know."
Bob's own legend as Zappa's main programmer, Synclavier technician, and sole sandwich-maker grew from 1985 to '89, his audio chops heard throughout classics like Broadway The Hard Way, Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, Jazz From Hell and some of Civilization Phase III, the latter two Grammy winners for Zappa. Bob's techniques with the tools of the Synclavier — 100 kHz stereo sampling, FM synthesis and resynthesis — still periodically make cameo appearances on some of the various Zappa Family Trust releases of Frank's work since.
"If you think you know anything about editing or mixing," he laughs, "Just listen to Freak Out!, Absolutely Free, We're Only In It For the Money, Lumpy Gravy, Uncle Meat, One Size Fits All, Sheik Yerbouti, or Joe's Garage. All unique, all brilliant in their own way. Some other great examples of Frank's digital editing techniques are his live CDs released in the '80's, You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore, Vols. 1 - 6. Brilliant stuff! There are not words to describe the value and honor of having worked directly with Frank and his house engineer at the time, Bob Stone. I was incredibly excited and inspired to be there, and I soaked up as much as I could learn from them about synthesis, mixing, and creating records."
Rice relates much, if not all, of what he learned from and created with Zappa to his work today.
"I wish we had had a copy of Peak for the work we did at Zappa's. I still notice things in my own work today, techniques of mine that I consciously or unconsciously learned from Frank. He was a master of so many aspects of creating music and manipulating sound all for the sake of pushing the envelope of what could be done in his music."
Rice devised a handy series of macros that aided and improved the Zappa Synclavier sampling task work, automating utilitarian functions such as file management and the batch renaming of sound files. He also offers this "what if," as well:
"Back in those days, Peak's Batch file processing alone would have saved me so much time. Peak would've offered us a great deal more power in handling repetitive tasks, such as creating the multi-velocity level stereo samples of Frank's Boesendorfer Imperial piano, or for recording, editing and managing his massive collection of pitched and unpitched percussion instruments."
Breathe
Rice has rounded the globe on multiple trips with Roger Waters since 2006 as in-house digital audio editor and surround playback engineer for "The Dark Side of the Moon: Live" tour. Waters, well known for ever tweaking his shows and records on a never-ending quest for perfection, must appreciate just how perfect this particular Peak user's resume is for the job at hand: Zappa, one of his engineer's former bosses, was the ultimate perfectionist.
"I think Roger got pretty close to perfection on this one," says Rice of the recently completed tour. "I had a variety of tasks thrown my way. For upholding the long established standard of quality expected at a show with such classic Pink Floyd material, I would not have survived out there without Peak Pro XT for the majority of my editing and the processing required to hold up that standard."
Most of the transfers and editing of the classic Floyd surround effects were already in place on previous PF and Waters tours long before Bob's arrival, of course, many talented engineers involved with what eventually went into these classic live surround effects heard by millions. Some of these transfers came right from the original analog tapes used for the band's epic live quadraphonic sound systems: The sheep and squeaking pigs of Animals, Dark Side's opening heartbeats from "Speak to Me," and all the lunacy conversations of the band's roadies and handlers and the McCartney's, even, recording in Abbey Road with Wings at the same time as the Floyd.
"I had forgotten just how effectively those sound effects were used on all of the Floyd albums to create an almost cinematic audio experience. It was fascinating to be able to examine the details of these iconic recordings."
Rice, regarding the DSOTM: Live experience, says he needed Peak for its precision in all areas, as well as for its swift and elegant user interface speeding up the process of anything he could throw at it. For example, every once in awhile he'd still find a noisy edit point or some tape hiss in the surround effects material: To remove that he'd export the file to Peak to clean it up, all the while leaving his Digital Performer session, or 'chunk,' intact. When he finishes an edit in Peak the original sound file in DP is automatically updated. This, plus the ability to choose Peak as his external editor in DP, makes these types of utilitarian tasks much easier and faster for Rice; it's more examples, he says, of how attuned BIAS is with how engineers actually work and adapt to their unique workflows.
How does working with Waters inspire Rice and the DSOTM: Live crew?
"Roger is an amazing creative force," he continues. "He always has been, both in his solo work and with Pink Floyd. It is truly an honor to get to work for him, as well, especially since I grew up being very inspired by the Floyd. Who among us hasn't been? Roger is kind of a dream client for me. His vision for what he wants is so developed when he walks in the door that there is very little guesswork involved with delivering it for him. He's very specific about what he wants and is very, very clear about what needs to happen in all areas of the production."
Bob also helped Waters with the pre-production phase of the recent tour, the crew putting in long days and nights together in a musty old film studio in England.
"Whenever I thought I was working long hours," laughs Rice, "I'd remember saying goodnight to him on the way out and then back on the way in the next day! Other than our lighting tech, Ross Colledge, I'm not sure anyone actually worked as many hours as Roger did in the beginning, although I'm certain Colin Lyon, Roger's bass tech and right-hand man ever since the original tour of "The Wall," was also in constant motion. Roger has done so many more gigs than anyone else in his band or crew; he has so much more experience with lighting, sound, filmmaking, sync issues, theatrical effects, and everything else involved. And, not that that isn't enough, but he also happened to write the lion's share of all of those incredible songs, too. It really opened my eyes and helped me to step back and see that every little tweak he made to the show was only to further develop the experience the audience would take away from 'Dark Side of the Moon: Live.' It was one of those moments where I knew if I just shut up and listened, I'd learn something great and I truly did."
Bringing the San Andreas Fault Into the Mix
NGP Mastering is Rice's audio restoration, digital mastering and music production studio in Culver City. Near the legendary old Helms Bakery building and a short bike ride to West L.A.'s best beaches, his neighborhood also features, apropos, a famed natural hot dog stand down the street called Let's Be Frank. He gave Sue, the owner of the cart, an old Zappa backstage pass to put in the window of her cart and filled her iPod with Frank's music. After she'd introduced Bob to her former employer and friend, Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse fame — it was the least a foodie like Rice could do.
The walls of the building that houses NGP have migrated considerably after the dozens, make that hundreds of minor and significant seismic events per year that have left not a parallel surface in the place, perfect for housing a home studio.
"I was told these painted-over cracks in the concrete floors were hip and arty when I moved in," he recalls. "There is a little bow in the center of the ceiling that's perfect for what I'm doing here. I also have a closet full of clothing I leave open to act as a natural bass trap to absorb some of the reflections that would otherwise slap me in the back of the head! It's not the ultimate mix space, but I've had great luck in here."
NGP Mastering's gear list is a nice collection of pre-2K synths and machines and lots of vintage analog processors, including a prized original Prime Time delay Bob bought from the Zappa studio collection, the "death flanger used for the pluker noise on Joe's Garage — it's noisy, grungy and wonderful."
Rice has plenty to say about Peak, too, especially given where his audio roots lie. He does all his MP3 encoding with Peak, saying that to his ear it always seems to produce a better sounding file. His expertise spans many disciplines — including editing, instrument tech work, mastering, archival transfers, musician, composer, sound designer and sampling specialist — and he seems to find a way to ply each tool in that box with Peak.
"Since Peak's inception it has been the central tool in my work involving the precise editing of mono and stereo digital audio. Be it for mastering a CD, declicking transfers from 78 rpm records, doing sound design, sampling and looping for hardware samplers, creative signal processing and analysis, post production work… or simply getting compositional ideas down quickly, Peak is perfectly suited for all of these jobs."
Keeping the red record light on to capture those compositional inspirations is something Rice is keen to do with Peak, too.
"Setting up and using something like Peak to get new ideas recorded quickly and easily is an incredibly important feature every musician should have set up and ready in his or her studio. I remember reading an interview with Pete Townshend years ago where he made that point quite clearly, and I've never forgotten or been without that functionality since."
Speaking of functionality, Rice says he also likes the ergonomic flow of Peak and the options in it he leverages to customize his own creative tool belt.
"It's just unprecedented the offering of options within Peak that adapt to the ergonomics of one's workflow, the degree to which a user can configure Peak to fit the needs of their own specific work," says Rice. "From the color palette for saving your eyesight over long editing sessions to customizing what shows up in the toolbar, it all fits. My favorite features include the Normalize (RMS) for quick rendering of trial premasters, as well as the ability to add an envelope to subtly fade a DSP plug-in effect in and out of a region of a sound file. The latter is especially useful for taming plosives, subtly applying EQ, or even for flanging a precise spot in your master."
Flanging Robby & Looping Bonnie
One of the songs on Singularity, a gem called "Solar Wind" Doors guitarist Robby Krieger has been holding onto for years, is a great performance and 2-track mixdown in which Rice noticed some sub-par edits at mastering. That could've been a problem without the multitrack reels to go back to, but Bob suggested "What any engineer steeped in '60s music would have tried" — flange the entire mix to mask the bad edit.
"Absurd? Yes, of course that is," he laughs. "Robby said, 'Give it a try and we'll see how it works.' It had to be subtle, so I added some reverb with ImpulseVerb then created a slow fade-in and out of my favorite modulation delay to create a nice stereo flange. Not quite 'Itchycoo Park' depth [Small Faces' psychedelic pop song], but it did the trick."
Rice has done audio edits before for Bonnie Raitt, creating loops and samples for Jon Cleary's keyboard rig just prior to the release of Raitt's Souls Alike CD. His role on this year's tour is as bass tech (supporting Hutch Hutchinson) and keyboard tech/programmer for Ricky Peterson, who Bob says "rips it up on B3."
"Great guys, they both are. It's really a slamming band this year and, of course, Bonnie always sings and plays so great. I jumped at the opportunity to work with Bonnie because she's such an amazing inspiration and truly one of the kindest, most conscientious people I've ever met in the music business. She's the real deal, and it's an honor to be part of that organization."
Rice, who also worked on tours with Spinal Tap and Little Feat and has one of the more interesting resume entries ever — that of "keyboard and Theremin roadie" for Brian Wilson at a Carl Wilson Foundation Cancer Fund benefit show — has a great Peak story to share.
Fifteen minutes before the end of a show, Roger Waters asked him to record one of the songs from the show for him to take on a plane to a radio interview the next night. Besides doing everything else his role with the tour requires, Rice then also had a 2-channel board feed to tend, with some additional audience mics going into his laptop via Pro Tools LE to capture the track Waters wanted. The song to be recorded was in the first half of the show, so he spent his only 15-minute personal break of the night between sets mixing the song down to stereo and importing that to Peak to edit, EQ and master Roger's CD for him, all by the end of the encore.
"I burned two copies and handed 'em to Roger as he made his way off the stage and left for the airport. Well, then the following night back home in Los Angeles I heard that same mix on my car radio! I happened to tune into KLOS just as he was being interviewed about the tour. The user interface of Peak sped up my workflow so much that night I could easily get an instant turnaround job like that out in time for Roger."
Rice closes with one more morsel from his days on the desk with Frank Zappa.
"David Ocker, the composer and virtuoso who worked on the Synclavier for Frank before I arrived, gave me a great piece of advice when I was just starting out up there in 1985. He said, simply, 'Don't ever tell Frank something can't be done because, the day you do, he'll reach over your shoulder and do it himself.' One of the greatest gifts I was given in my life was the opportunity to be guided by Frank's imagination, an imagination that's served me in everything I do."