The Artist and The Engineer

Somewhere after 2 AM the night before the session, while I’m grinding through all these charts, I accidentally started hitting the keystroke for the clarinet transposition on some of the guitar charts. So some of George’s charts were now in the wrong octave and the wrong key.

Now, with a normal session player, a normal human being, here’s how this goes down. We press record on the first cue with the wrong chart. He plays insanely wrong notes in the wrong key and the wrong octave. We quickly figure out my error. Then one of two things happens: either we take a break and I reprint all the charts properly, or the musician says “don’t worry, I can transpose it in my head,” at which point David would have said “No, let’s reprint the charts, I don’t want your mental energy going to that, I want your mental energy going to playing well.” At least I assume that’s what David would’ve said since that’s what any great producer would say, and David is a great producer.

But that’s not how it played out at all.

What happened was the session ended. Everything was perfect. Not a single bad note played.

Afterward, George pulled me aside and whispered in my ear (because he didn’t want to embarrass me.) He said he knew we’d had Bob in that morning. When we pressed record on the first chart that was printed wrong, between the time the first note of the track played and the time he had to play his first guitar note, he heard it coming in a different key than what was on his page. Knowing that Bob had been there earlier he instantly assumed he had gotten charts written for clarinet and transposed it in his head before he ever played a wrong note.

It was the first time I ever met a musician who was a superhuman.

Almost thirty years later I am sitting in front of a much more advanced computer looking at my session for “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” this tongue-twisting patter song written by Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Benj Pasek, and Justin Paul for Season 3 of “Only Murders in the Building.” Steve Martin’s character had been struggling to master it all season, and the payoff was his big performance in Episode 8, “Sitzprobe.”

Now in a normal musical, when the music starts and everyone starts singing as the produced music track appears, the background sounds in the film disappear. The singing and dancing transport the audience to magical “music land”, and no one in the audience for one second thinks we’re watching something real. In music land, everything is magical and different.

But this was not actually a musical. This was a TV show about people putting on a musical. So when they were on stage singing, you had to fully believe that they were on stage singing it live. It had to look and feel real.

This got really complicated when the producers decided that for the patter song, we were going to do a montage with multiple images on the screen at the same time. The audience was going to see one take of Steve Martin’s face on camera for every single word of the song.

A normal part of music production is something we call “comping” (I think it’s short for compositing) where a music editor goes through all of the different takes that were made during the recording session and chooses the best word or line or even best part of each word to assemble a final master take that has the best performance for every moment in the song.

We had lots of takes of Steve singing the song, takes from beforehand in the recording studio, and takes from the set when he re-recorded it live every take while they were shooting.

So in addition to doing the normal comping where every single word is chosen from the best take, meticulously tuned to be perfect, and sonically matched to sound like one seamless take, each syllable also had to be time-stretched, edited, or manipulated to land perfectly in Steve’s mouth so that the audience believes they are watching that one take happen in real time. Every word. Every syllable taken from all various takes synced to his lips to create a single perfect take visible for the entire montage.

This took me almost a month.

I guess I was so effective at it that nobody knew. And when I say nobody knew, I mean Marc Shaiman, the co-composer of that song told me he had been telling everyone that it actually was one take. Because he believed it was. He didn’t find out the truth until I accidentally bumped into him at the Emmys and told him.

When artistry rescues engineering, we don’t hesitate. George Doering is a genius. Superhuman. We all know we should celebrate that instinctively.

But when engineering rescues artistry, something shifts. Think about how it feels when you find out an artist is using Auto-Tune. Our gut reaction is to feel cheated, the technology is a crutch, compensating for a deficit. Nobody admires that.

George’s superhuman artistry absorbed my technical mistake so completely that no one knew anything had gone wrong. Three decades later, my engineering made Steve Martin’s performance look so effortless that even the composer of the song believed he was watching a single live take.

But the Pickwick Triplets story isn’t about fixing something broken. Steve Martin is a gifted musician. Every single take he did had something great in it. It’s about a monumental engineering effort that created the illusion of a perfect live moment. To the contrary, George was compensating for something. My charts were wrong.

When artistry rescues engineering, we call it genius. When engineering rescues artistry, we call it cheating. Why?

George used his musical abilities to engineer the solution to a problem. I used my engineering abilities to create something beautiful that didn’t exist before.

I’ve spent my life working at the intersection of these two things, sitting in a chair that is equal parts musician and audio engineer. For so long, I thought my job was special because it blurred the line between what is a technical achievement and what is an artistic one until one day I realized the line between artist and engineer was never real.

The first thing I noticed when I took my first blacksmithing class (a story for a future Substack) was that blacksmithing was a trade and now it’s an art. Nothing changed about swinging the hammer or heating the metal. What changed was the way we think about it. What changed was the story we tell ourselves about it. And that story, like many of our internal narratives, is not only untrue, it holds us back.

Half of us have been convinced that we’re not creative, and half of us have been convinced that we’re not technical thinkers. It’s a false dichotomy. It’s a story we’ve been told that we just don’t question. But the line was never real. You are both an artist and an engineer. We all are.

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