Artist Interview: Todd Mark Rubenstein

It's rare to find an artist whose work can be found in virtually every category at your local record store. Nashville based composer, musician and producer Todd Rubenstein can be found on albums spanning Classical, Pop, Rock, Country, Country/Rap (yes, you heard right), Bluegrass, and more. His diverse talents have won him a Grammy nod for Exit Stage Right: The String Quartet Tribute to Rush, and recent Billboard chart success with new Country artist Michael Lee Austin. Todd is also a co-writer, co-engineer and co-producer on the upcoming album from country/rap star Chance.

Cakewalk: Todd, looking at your discography, you show up with credits as Producer, Engineer, Mastering Engineer, Arranger, not to mention you've played everything from drums to classical strings to pedal steel. Exactly how do you describe yourself when people ask you what you do for a living?

Todd Mark Rubenstein: I'm a Record Producer. The rest is what led me to the field of production which gave me the knowledge and experience to help others with the development of their music. I feel that it is absolutely crucial for someone who produces a recording for an artist or a label to have the ability to provide a deep understanding to every single step in the process.

Music is an obsession for me. I had no choice but to somehow associate my life to music and have done so in a multitude of aspects. From business to development, to performance, enjoyment and additional participation; it is really everything I do and everything I'm about.

CW: Tell us a little bit about your background.

TMR: I grew up the baby of 4 boys who are all multi-instrumentalists with parents that are also musicians. When I was barely old enough to sit up (and even before), my father would sit me onto his lap while playing the piano. He would hold my fingers and play children's tunes like "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and "Chopsticks." When I was one, he began to let go of my fingers and accompany me.

Dad's into swing and jazz, and as a youngster, he worked at the Mercury Theater as a lighting technician in New York. Mom's from Russia and brought an element of European folk and cultural music into my life. My three older brothers were all into Rock & Pop: from Vic who loved Simon & Garfunkel, to Keith who loved Santana, to Ken who was in to Deep Purple & BTO. I became inundated with a very wide range of musical influences.

When I was about four, Keith would lovingly tell me when he left the house, "Todd, if you touch my guitar, I'll break your fingers!" Well, as soon as Keith was out of the driveway, I was standing on a chair plugging his Strat into his Marshall stack and touching everything on it.

By the time I was in first grade, I could play piano, drums, guitar and bass. I began crafting songs when I was eight, joined orchestra at ten, and became a member in my first rock band when I was twelve. I recorded four of my own originals when I was fourteen, started as an intern in radio when I was sixteen, studied Broadcast Engineering and became a licensed Broadcast Engineer by eighteen, at which time my band Tokyo Rose got a major recording contract from recordings that I had written, engineered and produced.

I guess I was either blessed with a lot of opportunity or condemned into a musician's lifestyle!

CW: Can you tell us a little bit about your studio, TMR Productions, and how SONAR and Cakewalk software factors into your work?

TMR: I have a 1500 square foot facility in my home in Nashville, TN. It is a fully functional studio with a primary Control Room, tracking booths and an additional "B-Room" which is a tuned 5.1 Mix, Master & Authoring Suite.

Check out some pictures on my MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/thestringtributer.

SONAR plays such an important part in my production routines that I could not (and would not) work without it. I use it on all of my sequenced pre-production in conjunction with GigaStudio. These tracks are then either used to draft developmental concepts, or combined with the final production performance by live players. I also export my MIDI files into Finalé to score and chart from these performance guides.

I do all of my basic tracking sessions (commonly 5 players depending on the session type) using outboard mic pres, two Tascam MX2424s with 1 to 1 routing into a Yamaha O2R. I export all of my tracks rendered to length as Broadcast Waves.

I then mix all of my work in the box with SONAR's 64 bit mix engine on our Quad Core AMD Italy System in the 5.1 mix and mastering room.

CW: You handle a lot of different types of music creation, production and engineering work. What in particular about SONAR made you choose to rely on it for your studio?

TMR: I couldn't name just one thing. It is an amazing music creation, recording and processing tool. I'll give you a list of reasons:

• Stability
• Customer Support
• Functionality
• Breathtaking audio quality

CW: You recently recorded an album with new artist Michael Lee Austin which basically exploded onto the Billboard Country charts topping out well established acts like Keith Urban, Tim McGraw and others. Tell us a little bit about working on this album and what is making it such a success.

TMR: Michael is a great guy and has loads of talent. I mixed and mastered his album which was produced by Michael Edging.

In today's demanding atmosphere, great sound is everything. This is the first album I mixed using the 64-bit mix bus audio engine in SONAR 5. When you turn it on, it crushes and bangs everything out there with amazing sonic purity—the sound is like no other album out there and people are eating it up. Imaging is amazingly true and transparent. Volume and density is achieved through full resolution factors without any fake dynamics created by massive mastering compression techniques to falsify volume.

That's a big, big reason the album has become successful. Plus, the guys at Alive Records are the world's best Internet marketing people in the world, by far.

CW: You're also working on a Country/Rap album. We had a chance to listen to a mix from the record and it sounds great! There is a lot going on from very classy sounding country vocals and acoustic guitar to rapping and even scratching. Working on an album like this must be very different than an average country or rock album. Are there any unique challenges you're facing when working across different genres in the same project?

TMR: Absolutely not. To me it's all Rock & Roll, baby! As engineers and producers, we have to get it recorded and provide an environment where the players understand and are comfortable. The true greatness in music comes from the believability between The Artist, The Song and The Listener. When you combine this with sonic purity, it clarifies these messages.

CW: You've gained a lot of notoriety for your String Quartet Tribute albums, honoring the music of everyone from R.E.M. to No Doubt and Rush. At last count you've done dozens of these, that's an impressive body of work in itself! How did the String Quartet Tribute idea develop and did you ever think you'd have done so many of these albums?

TMR: Funny Story. The great Jerry Reed was at my studio working on one of his albums. We were transferring some files over and in the meantime, I threw on "Rock & Roll Ain't Noise Pollution" from my album entitled; Back In Baroque: The String Quartet Tribute to AC/DC and it was like an epiphany. I pondered in amazement, "if anyone would have ever told me in the 80's that one day I'd have Jerry Reed in my Nashville Studio listening to my String Quartet version of an AC/DC song I would have told them they were insane!"

David Haerle from Vitamin Records commissioned me to do 4 songs from the first String Quartet Tribute Album (Led Zeppelin) in 1999. It did well enough that they continued doing them and there are around 200 out there now (I've done 35), and we're still doing them! I'm currently working on Breaking Benjamin.

CW: Is there one artists' work that stands out above the rest in your mind as lending itself best to being arranged in this way? What was your favorite tribute album to do?

TMR: Great songs are great songs no matter how they are produced. I really like all of them. No Doubt's interesting arrangements, Dashboard Confessional's haunting melodies, Limp Bizkit and Pantera's challenging musical development and the rawness of Rap. The Beatles' fantastic music. So, basically, I really enjoy all of them.

CW: In closing, do you have any advice for musicians and producers who want to make a career out of music? What is the secret to your success?

TMR: You are where you are at. Put yourself in the place you want to be. Maintain the highest level of honesty and perseverance and you will eventually succeed at whatever you do.

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