Welcome to Season 3, Episode 1 of Song Chronicles. Our guest is producer, engineer, and educator Mark Rubel. Mark has produced thousands of recordings for artists including Alison Krauss, Rascal Flatts, Fall Out Boy, Ludacris, and many more. Mark sees humans as storytelling machines, with production and mixing as a unified field of sonic storytelling.
Mark placing microphones to record Roy "Futureman" Wooten at The Blackbird Academy in Nashville
Mark has taught audio technology, the music business, and the history of rock to thousands of students. Previously the Audio and Recording Director and Instructor at Eastern Illinois University, he is now the Director of Education at The Blackbird Academy in Nashville, where he and Louise met, when she was one of his students. He shares the parallels between pacing a lesson and pacing a set list and how teachers are, in a sense, performers when they hold their students’ attention.
Mark teaching students at Blackbird Academy
He’s currently working on a book on the great American recording studios of the '60s and '70s many of which had their own unique setups with obscure pieces of equipment before the studio revolution moved recordings from live tracking to mono to 24 tracks synched up. Describing himself as a "inveterate rabbit hole diver", the task of finishing the book has been monumental. We talk about how Mark finds the motivation and energy to get everything done, what kinds of people make art no matter what, and how his parents influenced him. HIs mother was a journalist and his father was a scientist and mathematician.
“You know" he says, "...if you take science, but high level science, where it's not, it's not just equations, it's philosophical leaps of problem solving and finding creative ways to get from one place to another -so that kind of science -and you combine it with what my mother did, which was portraiture in words, and you put them together, you get a record producer, engineer who's making a kind of a technical portrait of someone's essence, and you're trying to portray their personality and, and who they are through sound. So it's, it's a nice combination of those two things.”
Enjoy this conversation about making audio technology accessible to everyone.
Season 3, Episode 5: Carole King - To be Home Again - Forest Ecosystem Preservation
Season 3, Episode 4: Dave Davies (of The Kinks)
Season 3, Episode 3: Billy Valentine and The Universal Truth
Season 3, Episode 2: Michelle Lewis
Season 2, Episode 12: Lady Blackbird and Chris Seefried
Season 2, Episode 11: Thomas Walsh
Season 2, Episode 10: Billy Steinberg
Season 2: Episode 9: Jon Platt
Season 2 Episode 8: Suzie Brown
Season 2 Episode 7: Aaron Lee Tasjan
Season 2: Episode 6: Nicole Atkins
Season 2. Episode 5: Bob Ezrin - Part 2
Season 2: Episode 4: Bob Ezrin
Season 2: Episode 3. Jeff Trott
Season 2: Episode 2. Robin Danar
Season 2: Episode 1. Linda Edell Howard
Episode 12. The McBroom Sisters
Episode 11. Gloria Estefan - Part 2
Episode 10. Gloria Estefan - Part 1
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