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Ben Kane is a Brooklyn-based producer, mixer, and engineer who holds three Grammy Awards and a Latin Grammy for his work with D’Angelo, Cultura Profetica, PJ Morton, and CeCe Winans. In 2018, Ben and co-founder Drew Vogelman opened Electric Garden: a colorful, inspiring studio with an eclectic vibe that seems to mirror Kane’s adventurous production style.
Kane’s "Five Sounds With" interview offers a blend of creative production, masterful songwriting and musicianship, soulful vocal performances, and occasional psychedelic flourishes. From breathing new life into Bilal’s demo tracks to stacking harmonies with D’Angelo and recording jazz ensembles direct to analog tape, Kane brings unique and thoughtful contributions to everything he’s a part of.
Bilal’s album Adjust Brightness was initially brought to me as an EP to mix, but when I dug in and saw that there were more great songs, I suggested making it an album. This tune was one of many that had been started years ago, and had sat on a hard drive. There were some instruments on it, but not too many. It was just a vocal, drums, and some bass and piano that I think Bilal had played. The drums were recorded in a large commercial parking garage or something like that, and it was part of the vibe.
I really loved the song Bilal had written, and the bones they had recorded, but it was more than just a mix away from reaching its potential. I suggested bringing in Pino Palladino to play the bass. He's collaborated with Bilal before and we’ve had the pleasure to work together with D'Angelo, Chris Dave, and the Drumhedz, and on Pino’s music. It's kind of a cheat code when you can call up someone like that. Like, I'm imagining the greatest bass performance and I have a friend who can deliver that in ways that will exceed the best thing I could imagine.
Pino’s bass really cemented the song and laid the groundwork for pulling in some other colors like Isaiah Sharkey on guitar and Jake Sherman on piano. This song is about the groove, but finding the right colors to complement the songwriting took it somewhere else. Once all the instrumentation was more lush, Bilal sang new vocals on parts of it to kind of flesh it out.
It was cool to have been in the position where the song had been started so long ago that there weren't a lot of restrictions. It had lived in this kind of purgatory for a while, so Bilal afforded me the freedom to make it into a new thing while keeping some of the original parts. The whole album was kind of a similar process, where there were songs that had been cooked for a while and no one had demo-itis anymore. I was able to interpret the songs freely with Bilal. It was a really enjoyable collaboration.
This song is named after Paul McCartney. Krystle is like the biggest McCartney fan in the world, and she had this idea to write a song honoring him without it being a cover. I think Krystle would say it's a love letter to Paul McCartney. We wanted it to be an original feeling but also kind of a tip of the hat to Paul, so she teamed up with Jim Boggia, who's also one of the biggest McCartney fans out there. He played the acoustic guitar, and they wrote it together.
I've been working with Krystle since 2003 or 2004, when we were both kids who were new to New York City. Most of Krystle’s band, The Faculty, are characters who have been playing with us from that time. One of those recurring characters is Brad Cox, who arranged those amazing strings. We had these demos that were just guitar and vocals, and then Brad sent us some MIDI string ideas. We had the opportunity to really hone in on what we were going to do with the song before getting the musicians in the room, so we spent a day in my backyard listening to the demos and saying, “What if the strings did a pizzicato thing here? What if we built up the bridge there?”
It was a workflow that I’m rarely afforded, and it gave us confidence going into the production with the band, where we at least had a clarity of our initial vision and what direction we wanted to point them. These musicians are so sensitive to the song and their own sound, and we've all been working together long enough that there's no learning curve. There's just such a naturalness to it; you can be free and creative, you don't have to second-guess anything, and it can be wrong the first time around without judgment. It’s really a pleasure to have that kind of creative experience.
Having a roadmap of the song gave us the ability to work back and forth with Brad on what the strings and horns would be doing, and allowed those arrangements to be a co-voice next to the vocals. The strings were a quartet that we recorded twice, and then the horns did one pass. For strings, I generally lean on a great mono or stereo mic instead of a lot of spot mics. Listening to classic records, what makes the string section sound great is the sound of them all playing together in a room, so I try to take the approach of capturing the ensemble as a whole, whether it’s in mono or stereo.
Cultura Profética is a great reggae band from Puerto Rico, and they're always fusing those worlds together. With this one, there was definitely an opportunity to lean into the dub world a little bit. It’s fun to use a bunch of reverbs and echoes, but it's only good when it serves the song and makes it more interesting to listen to. Figuring out how to keep it musical and in service of the song is always at the forefront of my mind. I wanted to embrace the dubness of it all, but even effects have to be soulful to be right.
The band was there with me for the mix, and sometimes it's cool to work like that. They were saying, “Oh yeah, do that. Go further,” but to go further required some arrangement decisions to make space for some of those delays and make it work in this dub kind of fashion. We spent a while together tweaking the arrangement of the tune to allow for some of those moments to happen.
It's like a puzzle where it becomes clearer as you do each piece. “We need to leave a couple bars here before getting back into the verse. We need space for the delay tail. It feels like the verse is stepping on the chorus too much.” I would double a chorus if it felt right, or leave a couple bars to do that kind of delay-flange thing at one point. “Maybe let's take out the guitar here so we can do a snare reverb hit,” or little things like that. I used all analog delays, a lot of spring reverbs, and the Electric Garden echo chamber. I have a Fulltone tube tape echo that Ricki Begin (AKA “Tech to the Stars”) modified for us to add additional speed controls. Most of the delays would have been from that unit, and then we have BX 20 spring reverb, an Orban, and these great Demeter reverbs that I like a lot. It's dub style, so you can't have enough flavors of spring reverb.
I only worked on the vocals for this song, but it’s an interesting story. It’s from this great film, The Book of Clarence. Jeymes Samuel is an amazing director and musician who makes the music for his films, and he's also Seal's brother. There’s a version of this song that Jeymes sang himself, and it's great just like that in the film, but for the soundtrack album, they wanted D'Angelo to sing on it. It has this core melody that’s kind of a mantra-type thing that repeats many times. Someone had communicated to me that we could just record the vocals a couple times around, and then loop it, but the approach D’angelo took far exceeded that assignment.
People sometimes wonder what takes so long when you give a song like this to someone like D'Angelo, who can't help but think creatively and expansively. On one level, it’s a simple, repetitive thing, but on our version, there are various iterations of the melody, all these intertwining parts, and no two times through are the same. There's different harmonies coming in, there's countermelodies, there's responses; so it becomes a question of, “How can we take the simplest thing and make it complex in a beautiful and evolving way?” I think that was D'Angelo's approach with this one.
It was D'Angelo and also Kendra Foster on the vocals, so we recorded it all and then spent time tweaking how these intertwining vocals would sound and be balanced. We tracked to an instrumental and delivered a stereo vocal mix back to them because there were so many of these details that had to be just right to evoke what D'Angelo was going for. For instance, with great vocalists and producers on the level of D'Angelo, you might have a four-part harmony where the level of the bass vocal harmony, to give a random example, completely informs one’s perception of the melody. If you send it off to another producer or mixer and they're thinking the low note is kind of just quietly supporting, but really the intention is for that to be matching the power of the melody, it's a whole different feeling.
Leaving some of those choices to chance can be dangerous when there's so much intention to how the harmonies are being balanced. There have been a number of features where people ask for every single track and everyone thinks their mix or choice of vocal effects is what's important. Is that more important than the harmonic structure and balance being right? I don't think so, personally. When you're working with a real genius like D'Angelo, who has a singular vision for how his harmonies work, giving it to a stranger can be difficult.
JMI Recordings is a really cool label that does pretty much exclusively jazz and all-analog productions. Not only are we recording it to tape, but everything that ends up on these recordings is analog, and that goes all the way down to the guitar effects and outboard gear. So if you buy a record from JMI recordings, nothing digital is part of the vinyl in the end. It's a really cool label to have been able to do a bunch of mixing and recording for.
Usually, we record to two-inch 24-track tape and mix it to half-inch two-track. Then, I'll splice the songs together so that side A is on one reel, and the mastering engineer who's cutting the lacquer (Scott Hull, in this case) will take my side A reel and it's one continuous playback for that side. I've already spaced it out, so it goes right to vinyl and it never touches digital.
One of the projects that was a first for me in some ways was the Myron Walden Flutes and Strings album. That one was recorded here at Electric Garden in my live room. It was a five-piece string ensemble with two violins, viola, cello, and bass, and then Myron on a variety of flutes, which is not a typical ensemble for me. We have a cool setup here in the live room: the back corner has curtains, so we had Myron in that corner and kind of partially curtained him off back there to just give a little bit of isolation.
For this album, the label asked me to record it direct to half-inch two-track in real time, so it was a live mixdown situation. We recorded the whole album in one day, so we had a lot of songs to get through and I was mixing it live as they were playing. Being able to do direct-to-half-inch recording was really special. It's a little bit about the sound, but it's also about it happening in real time and having to get the performance and mix moves just right; doing it all together in the moment. Those are some of the aspects of analog recording that go beyond the sound and make it special, maybe more so than the sound of the tape.
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