Since the late 1960s, producer/engineer (and A & R man) Nick Tauber has worked with some of the biggest acts in the world. Twiddling the knobs behind the glass he has produced acts ranging from Thin Lizzy to Venom.
Tauber mains active in his field of work today and recently spoke to Joe Matera about his recording work. As part of Ultimate Guitar's "The Producers And Engineers" series, Tauber discusses his work with Thin Lizzy, how Pro Tools has shaped the recording process and why a good performance will also win the day.
UG: You first started out in your career as an engineer in the late 1960s then moved in A & R?
Nick Tauber: Yes, I first started off as an engineer working at Regent Sound Studios in London where I was working with people like Cat Stevens. This was when he [Cat] was just starting to do his really well known acoustic stuff, and when he had left Decca and was on his way to Island Records. I was working with him on the albums Mona Bone Jakon and Tea For The Tillerman. Around the same time I was also an assistant on the first Black Sabbath album. Later I joined on as A & R at Decca Records where I worked with Thin Lizzy, and I also found the Boomtown Rats, and although I couldn’t sign them at that point, I was the first person to find them. Then I later moved to Bronze Records in A & R and it was while I was there that I found Def Leppard, but the company refused to sign them so I left and made their first record.
How did you find working with Def Leppard on their early tracks?
They were great. We did it Hello America at Olympic Studios and because they had worked a lot on the road, they were really tight and good. They were a very good band before they had ever gone into the studio. And it was very easy to capture that sound of theirs because of that. We did the rhythm guitars, bass and drums all in one go and then we put on the lead guitars and vocals. We did it on 24 track machine and we double tracked a lot of the guitars.
You mentioned having worked with Thin Lizzy, this was in their very early years with the original line-up that included guitarist Eric Bell?
Yes, their first album that they did with Scott English was mixed but the band weren’t happy with the mix, so they asked me remix it for them and they were really happy with what I did, so they got me to do an EP called New Day. Then they asked me to do the Shades of a Blue Orphanage album and then I did one more album with them, the one that has got Whiskey In A Jar on it, Vagabonds of the Western World. That album did really well for them that they left Decca to join Vertigo but I couldn’t go with them as I was contracted to Decca.
How was it working with the band and Phil Lynott?
They were a great band and Phil Lynott in particular was an absolute genius, songwriter, lyricist and great bass player and great performer. He ticked all the right boxes.
Jumping forward quite a number of years to the 1980s and your work with legendary black Venom…
I liked working with Venom. They were a very spontaneous band in the studio, a band that just always went for a good take.
I want to ask you specifically about the two albums you did with the Tony Dolan led lineup of the group.
Those two albums were really great records to make. I think that version of Venom were really never given the credit they were due. They were a terrific band and they were one of those bands that were quite influential but somehow didn’t have the aura.
"If the first record doesn’t do well enough, the record company will drop you. And that is the big problem today, there is no development."
That is right, I mean Metallica has said they were very influenced by Venom and by what they did. But they [Metallica] developed the more accessible side of what Venom were doing and in doing so, they garnered a bigger audience. When Tony joined the band, I think Tony was becoming very well accepted at the time but I really think they should have been much bigger than they were.
You have worked within a lot of different genres in your career, when it comes to rock in particular, as a producer, how do you think it sits in today’s musical climate?
Rock is having a hard time at the moment, but it will come back, like everything else that comes back. So it will come back, and rock is on its way back with a vengeance. We just need a band like Radiohead or a new band like The [Rolling] Stones or a new U2 or a new Sex Pistols to make everyone realize what we have been missing, and then you will find there will be a million bands to look at in their wake. It is always like that. I’m currently working with a new band called Lecarla, comprised of three girls and two boys; a great rock band who are absolutely brilliant. And if they take off, then everyone would go ‘fuck that is amazing! We have to find a band like that’ and you’ll find that suddenly there will be another million sounding bands.
A lot of producers and engineers emphasis the important of capturing good sounding drums in the studio when crafting a record.
Yes I agree too. At the moment I am working in partnership as a producer with a guy called Jack Ruston who is the best engineer I’ve ever worked with, and he’s a co-producer too, and gets the best drum sounds ever. Our method is, we will tune the drums for every track, and we will tune the snare drum to the major chord of a track so you can place it within the track, without it clashing with anything we may reject later. And we’re very fastidious about skins etc. In my early days as producer, that wasn’t really an important thing, as in those days it was about getting a great live drum sound and a great performance. Yet most people these days lay down drums to a click track so that later in the editing stage, it is easier to do.
When it comes to recording guitars in the studio, how has the process evolved for you?
There is not a lot of difference. First off you have to make sure you have got a great sound, and a lead guitar sound needs to sound completely different to a rhythm guitar sound. But it is all about construction. It is very unusual for most guitarists to go into the studio with not the slightest idea of what they want to do. If you don’t, you’ll get it in the end but it will take forever. With a large percentage of great solos, guitarists will go in, and they will have a slight idea of what they want to do, like they will have a melody or something and it then becomes just a matter of getting a great take or most of it being great, so that the bits that don’t work, you just comp them together, taking bits from here and there. It is not like back in the days of Elvis Presley or Otis Redding, where they’d do take after take until they got the right take. Nowadays, you don’t do that many takes, you do just a few takes, get what you want and whatever doesn’t work, you get rid of and then add the bits that do work.
Obviously with the technology available today, there are so many options available to perfecting the perfect take.
Yeah, like if there is a great take but with a slightly out of time bass, then you can just move it slowly on the grid until it feels tight. Then you have a good take. That is where Pro Tools is absolutely wonderful today. Anything and whatever you can do with it on the grid, moving things around, it is absolutely brilliant for that. I would spend hours and hours and hours in the old days on editing. But you don’t have to do that today.
"We just need a band like Radiohead or a new band like U2 or a new Sex Pistols to make everyone realize what we have been missing."
Not with any specific genre, but when it comes to getting a good performance with a rock band or a good performance with a solo act, the solo act you will have a harder time in getting those types of acts to fire up. In getting a good performance it is really down to the act and how comfortable they are and sometimes they don’t get themselves into gear until the second or third album. That is the problem with have with the record business today as in the old days an artist didn’t really hit their stride until a few albums into their career.
I agree as I think record companies have lost all realization that to give bands staying power, you need to nurture them and develop their careers over time, rather than focusing on giving them five minutes of fame.
In this day and age you don’t get a third shot, sometimes you don’t even get a second shot. If the first record doesn’t do well enough, the record company will drop you. And that is the big problem today, there is no development.
With advances made in recording technology over the years, what is your view on the current state of recording technology?
Strangely enough, the whole recording industry spends its life trying to imitate things that are analog. They are trying to copy things we all use like Urei compressors or Fairchild compressors or reverb units or spring reverbs. They spend their entire time trying to copy these things to make them sound like they were the old way. I like a lot of the software and the plug-ins but it is much better if people make it with the real thing and then use them in conjunction with the Pro Tools set up. But the problem with that is one; these things are expensive to do it that way now and two; when you go to redo a mix where you’ve got to re-set up, you to have round up the right analog gear and need to track down everything used and the settings. Where as if everything is in a computer, everything, all the software, all the outboard plug-ins you want, then you don’t have to do anything like that, you just press a button and there you go. I think with a lot of engineers nowadays, and the big danger nowadays is that there are not enough engineers who know how to record drums or bands live, there are very few. Most of them haven’t a bloody clue to be honest. Their idea of recording drums is to get somebody into a studio get them to hit something on a kit, and sample the fuck out of it. And to me that is just like madness. What that method doesn’t take into account is the performance side of things. Every drummer hits a kick a different way, and every drummer will build a chorus differently, some move it slowly down, some move it slowly up, and some hit it harder in the chorus. It is that personality and performance that makes it integral to the session.
Interview by Joe Matera
Ultimate-Guitar.Com © 2012
I dont give a damn about your spelling just noticed the humor in it. You're right and I agree, rock will never die and it will come back huge! 
