Lij Shaw in the Toy Box Studio in East Nashville, Tennessee with the 26-track MCI console that Jeep Harned customized for Criteria Recording Studios in Miami. (Courtesy of the Toy Box Studio)
Being too cool for the Los Angeles rock band the Eagles was enshrined in the Coen Brothers’ classic film The Big Lebowski (1998). The Dude (Jeff Bridges) has been doped by a pornographer and brained in the forehead with a coffee mug by the Malibu Police chief, yet he still retains the presence of mind and sense of entitlement to ask the cabbie ferrying him out of Malibu to change the radio station so he does not have to listen to the Eagles.
Of course, the cabbie (Ajgie Kirkland) and the Eagles have the last laugh, since the cabbie shoulders his vehicle and ejects the Dude without collecting a fare rather than change his music. It is funny that these micro-aggressions play out over a song titled “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” It is even funnier that the Dude is a leisurely White person like the Eagles’ core audience whereas the soft rock band’s passionate defender is a Black man in a black kaftan one might have expected to be driving the freeways to Parliament Funkadelic or Public Enemy.
“Peaceful Easy Feeling”—sung by Glenn Frey but written by his buddy Jack Tempchin—was recorded by the Eagles for their eponymous debut album (1972) produced by Glyn Johns (who had recorded the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and most recently the Who) at Olympic Studios in London. Imagine these transplanted Angelenos singing about wanting to sleep with a woman in the desert tonight then walking out of a studio onto Church Road surrounded on three sides by the River Thames.
The Eagles returned to Glyn Johns and London to record their follow-up, Desperado (1973). In the interim, Johns had recorded what many consider the greatest rock record ever, the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. For all the ferocious rock music that Johns had committed to tape, the Eagles were not satisfied with the results they were getting with him—the Dude surely would have agreed with the band’s contention that they needed to rock harder. So, the Eagles interrupted the London session for what would have been their third record with Johns and moved back to the states to record with a guy named Bill Szymczyk.
Szymczyk had produced B.B. King (“The Thrill is Gone,” Live in Cook County Jail) and a string of sizzling records for the James Gang and their front man, Joe Walsh (not yet a member of the Eagles). Szymczyk may not have produced every band from the British Invasion of the 1960s like Glyn Johns did, but he was getting some amazing sounds and had his own story to tell.
Szymczyk got into recording music not by playing music, like most rock producers, but by studying sound—Sound Navigation And Ranging, or sonar—with the US Navy. After recording songwriting demos (including for the hitmaking duo of Carole King and Gerry Goffin) and then bands at the Hit Factory in New York, Szymczyk joined ABC Records as a producer. ABC sent him to Los Angeles, until an earthquake in 1971 rolled him out of bed and into the mountains of Colorado and Caribou Ranch Recording Studios. When Szymczyk could no longer book a room at Caribou because owner Jim Guercio was busy producing a string of eleven records for the band Chicago (whose horn players needed oxygen tanks to blow at nearly 9,000 feet above sea level), Szymczyk moved to Miami.
Criteria Recording Studios in North Miami was busy in June of 1974—Crosby, Stills and Nash were in Studio A, the Bee Gees were in Studio B, but Studio C, with its orange shag carpet and four airplane seats in lieu of a couch, was open. Szymczyk booked it, on the condition that they upgrade the room from 16 to 24 tracks.
Multi-track recording, still captured on the finite physical medium of tape, was in its adolescence. In fact, Tom Dowd, the Manhattan Project physicist turned producer who enticed Szymczyk to Miami, is credited with mainstreaming 8-track recording in the industry. Grover Cleveland “Jeep” Harned’s nascent MCI company happened to be located nearby, and MCI customized the multi-track consoles and other electronics at Criteria.
On short notice, Szymczyk produced that third Eagles record they had started with Glyn Johns, On the Border (1974), at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. After that, he booked them into Studio C at Criteria in Miami, with its custom Jeep Harned board. There, they recorded One of These Nights, which made the shortlist for Album of the Year Grammy in 1975, and then, in the bicentennial year of 1976, the record that would become most closely associated with Szymczyk and the custom MCI console in Studio C at Criteria, Hotel California.
Hotel California was the record that came to Rick Carson’s mind at a party in Los Angeles some forty years after it was recorded when he ran into Szymczyk’s son—Carson immediately recognized the unusual last name. Carson, a record producer who owns Make Believe Studios in Omaha, Nebraska, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the gear and traditions of recording music. “Did your dad make Hotel California?” Carson asked the guy at the party named Szymczyk.
Carson later started to design software for recording studios. Digital media had almost completely replaced the analog tape that Bill Szymczyk had laboriously spliced when editing Hotel California—the iconic title track had 33 splices on its 2-inch tape. Computer programs, especially Pro Tools, with their infinite number of tracks had almost completely replaced desktop consoles like the 24-track custom MCI board of yore in Studio C at Criteria. This seismic change has created a growing market in something called plug-ins—computer software that shapes recorded sounds in specific ways, often reminiscent of old analog gear.
Carson thought to ask Szymczyk’s son, now his friend Michael, if there was anything from his dad’s career that his dad would like to hear again in the digital audio workstation of today. When Michael sent Carson a photograph of the custom MCI board on which his dad recorded Hotel California, the idea for a new plug-in was born.
Bill Szymczyk had not used that board since he left Criteria to open his Bayshore Studios in Miami soon after producing Hotel California. The board was no longer installed at Criteria. Carson traced the custom MCI board to a small, independent studio in East Nashville, Tennessee called the Toy Box Studio, owned by a podcaster and gadfly—he fought city hall over the right to operate home studios in Nashville and won—named Elijah Anderson Shaw.
Lij Shaw (left) and Bill Szymczyk at Szymczyk’s studio in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. (Courtesy of the Toy Box Studio)
Despite bearing the beautiful name Elijah with its cool diminutive of Eli, he is known by a different diminutive, the family nickname of Lij (rhymes with fridge). By producing his popular podcast Recording Studio Rockstars—Bill Szymczyk would be his 400th episode—Lij has become a rock recording encyclopedist equal in depth and range to Rick Carson. Lij threw himself into the enterprise of recreating a one-off analog soundboard as a plug-in.
How do you do that? “To capture the console for the plug-in we relied on a nifty bit of tech developed in-house by B.J. Buchalter at Metric Halo,” Carson said of his partner in software development. “It is known as the state space extraction process, and it involves running many tones through the console at almost every setting imaginable. This allows us to really hone in where the differences are between each piece we come across. On this console, we made sure to do multiple channels and outputs so we could get a clear idea of what was part of the design and not just a quirk from age.”
The distinct features of Jeep Harned’s design of the board was described by Juried Engineering, which included the custom console in its online History of Recording. “The warmth of its legendary sound comes from its design,” they wrote: “discrete transistors, monster transformers, hard-wired sub frame.” Juried Engineering also noted a break-through in its design that anticipated the ubiquitous touch screens of the twenty-first century: “It was the first console to use touch-sensitive controls where the continuity from your skin completed the circuit.”
Szymczyk described working with these touch-sensitive controls at length in the interview Lij conducted for Recording Studio Rockstars. Szymczyk found these controls especially helpful in the many deft cuts one makes when compiling multiple vocal takes into one master vocal track (called “comping vocals,” it is a notorious hell of the recording studio). Szymczyk said that his ease comping vocals on the MCI custom console was liberating to Don Henley and Glenn Frey when arranging vocals for the Eagles: “when Don and Glenn saw what I could do, that unleashed the monster.” With the kind of detailed memory that can accompany suffering, Szymczyk recalled that Frey’s master vocal track on the first line of “Lyin’ Eyes”—“city girls just seem to find out early”—was comped from six different takes recorded on four different days, facilitated by those ground-breaking touch-sensitive controls.
In the digital audio workstations of today, not to mention on every gadget of every kind anymore, touch sensitivity dominates. No one needs touch sensitivity, or expects anything else, from a new plug-in. The trait of the board Szymczyk treasured most will not really translate into the new medium. In fact, Szymczyk, the person who recommended this precise board for a new plug-in, is not the plug-in’s best pitch man. He told Lij that the Criteria board “sounded pretty flat”—that is, it faithfully recorded whatever was being sent through it—“which is good,” Szymczyk added, perhaps realizing that “pretty flat” sounded like less than an endorsement.
Chad Brown, who won a 2015 Grammy Award for Roots Gospel Album mixing Mike Farris’s Shine for All the People on the old custom MCI board at the Toy Box Studio, gives better copy. A former tenant of Lij’s in the house that fronts the Toy Box, Brown said the board “adds the right kind of harmonics and richness to your mix.” Juried Engineering marveled at the board’s sound in terms often invoked when enthusiasts try to sum up the intangibles of vintage analog gear: “What a sound, big, fat and warm.”
These warm comments about the actual board are consistent with early reviews of the plug-in, which was released on July 19 under the product name MBSI (derived from Carson’s brand Make Believe Studios rather than the board’s unique history). Jon Fintel of Relay Recording in Columbus, Ohio used the MBSI on the first record he mastered after the plug-in became available. “Needed some retro something, and I really like what it did,” Fintel noted. “It has that spongy low mid thing that old analog does.”
Big, warm, fat, spongy, low-producers’ positive associations with vintage analog sound may be of psychiatric interest.
Ironically, Lij was in the process of selling the custom MCI board when he heard from Carson about the plug-in idea, so now, just like anyone else, Lij needs the plug-in if he wants to import the sonic qualities of his old board into his new sounds.
Full disclosure: Lij is my best friend and longtime band member, songwriting partner, and co-producer. We made more records together using that custom MCI board than we can remember. I do remember his original excitement when in 2005 he acquired the board used to record Hotel California, and he always raved about the console in those terms when someone new visited his studio. In the spectrum between the Dude too cool for the Eagles and the cabbie riding to Bill Szymczyk’s final mixes from Studio C, Lij was riding shotgun and saying: Turn it up! Lij also can rattle off many other historic records—Saturday Night Fever, Grease, We’re An American Band by Grand Funk Railroad, Eric Clapton’s 461 Ocean Boulevard—made on that board.
The 26-track MCI console that Jeep Harned, founder of MCI, customized for Studio C at Criteria Recording Studios in Miami when it was the house board at the Toy Box Studio in East Nashville, Tennessee. (Courtesy of the Toy Box Studio)
In the years Lij owned and used the custom MCI board from Criteria, he and everyone else in the business became more and more reliant on Pro Tools, on computer-assisted recording and mixing, and made less and less use of things like big, clunky 24-track consoles. At some point I stopped seeing Lij always twiddling multiple knobs on the Hotel California board. The board started looking less like a recording console and more like a huge desk for a laptop computer. Lij would send certain signals through the old board—he particularly liked the way it made electric guitars sound—but the magic happened on a computer now. In the control room, we watched digital waves on a large computer screen, not faders on a recording console. So, rather than replacing the old board, the plug-in actually brings it back into the Pro Tools signal chain.
The MBSI plug-in was launched while Lij was vacationing with family on Little Cranberry Island in Maine. When he got back to East Nashville and the Toy Box Studio, he picked up a project we had tracked in Columbus, Ohio. He could now plug the old custom MCI console back into our music, even music we tracked elsewhere.
“Instantly, the guitars,” Lij said when he plugged in. “It just sounds like classic rock. It sounds like the guitars on Hotel California. It’s the sound of the old console. It sounds like home.”
The actual console awaits its next home. Lij sold the machine to a broker in Nashville, the Retro Gear Shop, which in late July had it listed optimistically at $1.5 million. Perhaps a wishful plug-in fever was driving up the asking price just days after the MBSI initial product offering.
It was a major studio redesign that forced Lij to move out the cumbersome console to make room, not any disenchantment with the gear, but he sees its loss as fitting. “It was never mine to begin with,” Lij said. “It was history.”
