An Interview with Super Producer David Kahne

By day, David Kahne sorted through demos, lunched with would-be rock stars, and performed the myriad duties of his position as head of A&R at Warner Brothers Records. After hours, Kahne produced some of biggest names in the business: Tony Bennett, Stevie Nicks, Sublime, Sugar Ray, Fishbone, K.D. Lang, and The Bangles, not to mention Paul McCartney and his recent album ''Driving Rain.'' The double title meant that Kahne’s producing efforts were continuously infused with new ideas and trends from outside the established industry, keeping his work fresh and original.

Kahne was awarded a Grammy in 1994 for producing the Album of the Year, Tony Bennett's ''MTV Unplugged.'' He has also produced songs for ''Vanilla Sky,'' ''Orange County,'' ''The Beach,'' ''Clockstoppers,'' and a variety of other films and television shows. In this exclusive interview conducted in his personal studio, David Kahne gives M-Audio a glimpse into his unique perspective on the music industry.

M-AUDIO: What did it mean to you to produce Paul McCartney's ''Driving Rain'' album?

KAHNE: Well, aside from the fear, I guess it just was an opportunity to use everything I'd ever learned. That was the best thing about it. You have to really up your game to be with him because he hears so well. There are precedents that he set over the years that come into your mind every four or five seconds. But you have to feel like you. Sometimes I do something and I go, ''I can't do that. They did that on ''Tomorrow Never Knows' or he did that on ''Ram' or something.'' The only thing I was not trying to avoid was his voice - how he plays and sings and gets his voice to be aggressive and powerful. He pretty much took care of that. He's a smart guy.

M-AUDIO: How did you get to where you are today in the industry?

KAHNE: I'm a self-taught musician, but I started playing when I was a junior in high school. I played banjo and then I played guitar and bass. And I started playing keyboards in my 20's. And I had bands and the normal thing. While teaching high school I got signed on Capitol Records with one of my students. We made a demo and got a recording contract, so I quit teaching.

But then I hated being an artist. I noticed that people that are really successful as artists have charisma...and since I didn't feel that I had any, I decided to leave that to other people. I like arranging and playing and stuff, but I didn't really like performing.

So I got a job at Hyde Street Recording in San Francisco as a phone guy after my deal at Capitol fell apart. I was the night guy. I'd wait until everybody left and I'd hook up gear and try to figure out how to run the console. I noticed that if you could engineer, you had a lot more freedom. With the records that I made, even though they were horrible, there were a lot of things I wanted to do that I was told couldn't be done for technical reasons. So I figured ''well if I can figure it out, it doesn't seem like you couldn't do it.'' So, I gradually learned how to run the gear, and then started doing demos.

Some of the demos turned into albums with new wave bands back then, and punk bands like Pearl Harbor and The Explosions and Romeo Void and all those records that I worked on in San Francisco. Then I got a job at Columbia as an A&R guy and was there for a while and then got fired. Thank God. And that's when I did Sugar Ray and Sublime and Soul Coughing and stuff...my `S' period. And then I started working at Warners about five years ago doing A&R and still doing production, obviously.

M-AUDIO: Isn't doing both A&R and production unusual?

KAHNE: Yes. A&R is a very corporate executive job and it requires a different mentality than producing. But I like it because I can help support the records from inside. A lot of times you make a record and then you're done and it just falls into a black hole and you don't even know if it's coming out or anything about it. So I can help get tour support for the bands and follow through.

I work with a lot of different artists that are on the label. So, I'll go and work on over-dubs or do different things. Sometimes I just mix. Sometimes I help them find songs or compose a song and then I won't do the production. So, there are about 10 other things that I'm working on.

M-AUDIO: Does this keep you connected with the current trends?

KAHNE: Yeah, it helps to be able to see it from both sides because it can give you objectivity on the record itself when you're making it. It's very time consuming and requires a lot of work to do the job right, but the payoff is, well, musical. That's really interesting to me. It's not about an expense account. I get to hear all this music.

I hear all the hip-hop demos, for example, and usually demos are about six to nine months ahead of the curve. About a year and a half ago, I started getting a lot more demos of so-called urban music where there were people playing on the records. There were demos where you can tell somebody was going, ''what can I do that's different?''

M-AUDIO: How many demos do you have to sort through each month?

KAHNE: I'm getting over 500 demos a month. A lot of pop stuff, singer, eight by ten, some that sounds like the demo mode of a synthesizer. You know, you just give that loop a couple of changes and somebody singing ''I love you'' over it. It's like a bigger haystack with the same number of needles in it. There's still just as much good stuff as there ever was, but there's a lot more mediocre stuff.

M-AUDIO: What criteria do you use to narrow down the pile?

KAHNE: I have my rules. If they misspell my name, I don't listen to it. If the photo is hideously ugly and inappropriate, I always listen because I try to figure who would put this picture in this package. Who looked at this and said, ''that's cool?''

M-AUDIO: How much do you think technology influences music?

KAHNE: You could do a history of the music business by analyzing the gear. When the first sampler came along, that enabled a group of people to deconstruct entire eras of music and rearrange it and reuse it. Motown went from being an era to being a preset on a computer. You push a button and you get a Motown loop. It's essentially the same as dialing up some string sound on a Korg M1 - it becomes a vintage sound, so to speak. And then, you're combining sound, or drawing on these disparate influences and putting them together.

M-AUDIO: Speaking of gear, can you share how you're using Delta 1010s?

KAHNE: Well, I have a system with about 2,500 orchestral instruments loaded up in real time on all these GigaSamplers. There are six sample cards and then all these PCs here. I was using another company's interface and I was having a lot of trouble with noise when it was just sitting there with nothing playing through it. When I turned the GigaSamplers off, the noise floor would drop to the level that was acceptable. But when they were on, it sounded almost like 60 cycles. It was just a hum all the time.

So I was trying to figure out what to do and seeing if I could gate them or if I had to turn off those tracks and automate. I tried all kinds of different ways to fix the problem, but I was going insane! I started to think it would be easier to hire an orchestra! I didn't know what to do, but then I talked to some people that told me about the Delta 1010 and said it had a really low noise floor. So we got one and listened to it. There was no noise and I went, ''Wow.'' So we got the other one, and hooked everything up. Still no apparent noise when it was input.

And then, when I would play back, I was getting a lot of distortion from the units. I realized that the 1010's have such a great dynamic range that where I had to hype the dynamics on the old gear to get it to feel like it had dynamics, it was too much. So I could scale the dynamics back on the MIDI information and use this broader dynamic range more effectively. I just pulled back my inputs and then my peaks were coming up and it just felt more open and powerful and relaxed. That was very impressive to me, to have that many of them running and to have there be nothing additive. It was really down, so I'm a believer.

M-AUDIO: So the Delta 1010s are essentially the outputs for your virtual orchestra?

KAHNE: I like to have some full orchestral parts, and I use a very classical approach. It's very much like what you would do if you were working with an orchestra - composition, arrangement, and orchestration, following the traditional route. Most of the stuff that's actually on a record is done through GigaSamplers through the Delta 1010s. It's 160-voice polyphony. So that's putting a lot of sound through the 1010s too. They've gotta be really responsive. I did most of the new Sugar Ray singles up here using GigaSamplers and the Delta 1010.

M-AUDIO: Will you share your ''red eye'' story with our readers?

KAHNE: The last time I came back from New York, I was booked on the 8:00 red eye out of JFK on American. Unfortunately, I had a meeting and it went long. I panicked because I had a meeting in L.A. the next morning. I called my assistant and I said, ''I've got to get out of there and we're only supposed to fly American at Warner Brothers. But I have to go, so you have to get me on another flight.'' She called back and said, ''There's only one flight. It's a Delta flight at 10:10.'' And I said, ''Great, I'm going back on the Delta 1010! There should be a lot of head room.''

*Editor's note: David Kahne recently moved on from his stint at Warner and has returned to independent production.