Recording - July 2018 - 14

The Life And Times Of

MIXERMAN
From mix engineer to mysterious author to educator-

THE JOURNEY OF ERIC SARAFIN
Interview by Paul Vnuk Jr.

ERIC SARAFIN is a mix engineer whose work can be heard on records by everyone from the Pharcyde to Ben Harper, having
come from classical trumpet and jazz piano though stints at Boston's Dimension Sound Studios and Capitol Records and Hollywood
Sound in LA to a successful freelance career.
He's also famous in the audio world as the author of several books under his pen name of MIXERMAN,
starting with the infamous Daily Adventures of Mixerman... a blow-by-blow account of a rock album
session bursting with all kinds of music-industry insanity, from backstabbing musicians and hysterical
A&R people to Teflon-slick industry moguls and the world's most clueless doorman, with now-immortal
characters like Willy Show, Fingaz the Wegro, and Penny Pincher. He kept the industry guessing for
years, with writing so deft that many people believed the fictional sessions were actually real, despite
reading about a session drummer playing with headphones duct-taped to his skull or a DAW set up in a
bathroom with the tech sitting on the toilet.
Since then, Mixerman has produced a variety of excellent books on the various aspects of record production: The Zen of Recording,
The Zen of Mixing, and The Zen of Producing. By sheer luck, our Paul Vnuk Jr. recently found himself in Eric's current hometown
of Asheville, NC, where he was able to sit down for a fascinating interview about (as you might guess) all kinds of stuff.-MM
What was it like, producing the Pharcyde record back in the
days before computers could do sample looping and stretching
all in the box? How much of it was live?

Eric Sarafin: I didn't produce Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde,
but I did record it from top to bottom. The thing that made
that record special compared to everything else, particularly
at that time, was that everything was samples. Basically, you
took five, six, seven samples from different records, and created
the entire structure of the song-verse, chorus, everything.
J-Swift used an Akai MPC60 at the time. There were no live
instruments, no nothing.
I got that album because I was assisting at Hollywood Sound
at the time and Michael Ross, who owns Delicious Vinyl, was
complaining to me about working at Paramount Studios, where
these albums were being recorded-the price was right, but
the results weren't. Hollywood
Sound had just put in a new
production room with this thing
called a "DAW", and I said,
"We've got this new room, and
I know what I'm doing-why not
do it here?"
The next day, they were upstairs recording with me, and
I guess they wanted to test
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RECORDING July 2018

me... they wanted to hold a U47. I said, "Guys, you don't
hold a U47!" But it was my first day with them, I was being
viewed with some level of suspicion, so I let them hold the
U47... and it sounded awful. I knew none of it was going to
be kept. The next day, Mike comes up to me and says, "I don't
think this is working out." And I say, "Oh, is it because they
were holding the U47?" He said, "What?"
I said, "Mike, they don't know me, they don't trust me yet-if
they say they want to hold the U47, I let them hold the U47! If
you don't want them holding the U47, you tell them that, and then
they'll be cool with me!" So he calls them up and yells, "Guys! You
don't hold a U47, okay?" [laughs] And from then on, they were
cool with me because I let them do their thing, and Mike was cool
with me because I let them do their thing... and I had the gig.

So, an early lesson in studio psychology?
Yes!

And then you changed to a completely different genre,
working with Ben Harper.

From there it was three years of hip hop, and then I got a
call one day from Andy Factor, who told me that Ben Harper
and J.P. Plunier had fired three top-shelf mixers, all rock guys.
This was 1995, and rock records were still not getting any
kind of low end to speak of, because the big rock mixers were
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - July 2018
