Mixing It Up on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: Advice from Harvey Goldberg

CDs are gone. Terrestrial radio is barely holding on. Of all the legacy media still beaming out signals, late-night television has become one of the last bastions of music performance.

All three major-network late-prime time shows — The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, The Tonight Show Featuring Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel Live (there’s Conan outside of the networks) — are keeping more Americans up later than ever, partially because they’ve become bigger vehicles for music-discovery than ever before.

Critics look to the shows as gatekeepers, finding the pearls in the muddy waters of an age when records are made on laptops. Getting a slot on a late-night talk show has become more sought after than ever. How that gig goes can mean an enormous amount for both new and familiar artists.

There’s a very small group of people through which all that music passes: the select clan of music mixers on those shows. Of them, the dean is inarguably Harvey Goldberg.

The Grammy Award-winner’s career began at Mediasound, a legendary NYC studio where he worked as a recording and mix engineer in the 1970s for artists including Duke Ellington, Richie Havens and Joe Cocker, and on records like Stevie Wonder's Music of My Mind LP and Kool and the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie.”

Harvey Goldberg

Through the 1980s, Goldberg kept the hits coming for artists like the Ramones, Bronski Beat, Modern English. He also worked with jazz artists like McCoy Tyner, Roy Haynes and Pharaoh Sanders. But it was on Late Night With David Letterman, where he became the full-time music mixer in 1998, that Goldberg made an even deeper mark.

Ensconced in his subterranean mix studio under the stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater, where Stephen Colbert’s name now tops the marquee, Goldberg sits before a massive SSL C200 console, facing a week’s worth of new music from every part of the genre spectrum each week.

Some of them are so natural, he’ll barely need to move a fader. Others, he guides through a whirlwind three-hour set-up and a 30-minute soundcheck before their four-minute segment that closes the show and, hopefully, positively impacts their careers.

Reverb recently caught up with Harvey on what makes music on television work these days and what bands should know about playing on television.

How has the music changed from when you were doing live music on the early Letterman shows to now with Colbert?

The approach to the Letterman show was to always kick it up a notch. They wanted bands to come on and feel that they were coming off better on that show than they were on any other show. The show pulling in [engineer/producer] Michael Delugg (Barry Manilow, Dionne Warwick) and then later myself was a conscious effort to bring somebody from the music record business into the production of the music.

Who had been doing this work before? Was it more like live mix guys?

It was either somebody who came up with a broadcast sound background but not necessarily a whole lot of music, or it would be somebody coming from the live world. Front-of-house mixing is very different.

How do you approach a music mix on television?

I try to think as if I'm trying to do a radio mix more than I'm trying to do a television mix. I'm very aware that it's going to be heard on all different kinds of speakers and all different kinds of scenarios. When I just mixed records, every radio station had a different type of compression. I learned which things to pay attention to, knowing it would be heard later, and which things not to pay attention to because it would never be heard.

RELATED ARTICLE



What do bands need to know about performing on television? What are the biggest mistakes you see them making?

Several things. There are a lot of bands that are married to particular microphones that they use on the road, and they become their favorite mics. But the television environment is very different than what they're dealing with onstage.

First, the footprint of which the band is going to perform in is usually much, much smaller than anything that they would be doing on the stage.

Second, they're surrounded by metal in a television studio, which is not the friendliest environment for sound because of all the very reflective surfaces surrounding the performer.

Third, because everything's [more compact], the front of house PA tends to be directly over the band instead of in front of the band.

Those three elements combined mean that some of the mics they prefer to use live may not work in a television scenario. Stage mics tend to pick up so much ambient sound. Sometimes I wind up with more cymbals in the vocal mic than the actual vocals.

Are you choosing mics that have hypercardioid characteristics instead?

It could be hypercardioid. Where some people would prefer to use a condenser live, I always go with dynamics as much as possible. It's the only way I can get control over what's going on.

Also, I find a lot of bands sometimes will bring in a piece of gear that they've never actually used before and decide to break it out on a television show. That's the kind of thing that always made me roll my eyes. It’d be a struggle to get it to work. On television, there are a whole lot of other things going on to prepare for broadcast. Time is precious.

How much time to do bands have to sound check before a show?

Between load in, setting it up and getting basic sounds, we usually allow three hours. Then we budget roughly half an hour of actual rehearsal with the band, which is really about getting the mix together.

Will you usually have their front-of-house engineer and/or producer with you in the control room?

I would say half the time the front of house mixer comes down here, half the time nobody is here.

It helps to have the front-of-house guys, as far as cues, because I have a limited amount of time. A half an hour means roughly running through the song maybe four times. It helps if somebody tells me that the backing vocals don't come in until the last chorus rather than me constantly going to solo and seeing if they're singing it or not singing it.

The front-of-house mixers are aware that this is a different kind of [environment]. They trust the fact that I'm more familiar with what's going to work in broadcast television than they are.

The Head and the Heart perform 'All We Ever Knew' on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

When the show airs, are we hearing a live mix or a remix?

A good 60 percent of the time, it's the mix that I did at the time of the show. I think there's something special that happens in the moment. I don't want to lose that magic.

It's like the old days where people used to complain that the rough mixes sounded better than the final mixes. I think there's an excitement that happens live and you don’t want to overthink it. I may make a mental note to myself at the time of the show that there should have been a little more reverb on the lead vocals. I’ll go up to the edit room and just add that little bit of reverb without rethinking the whole mix.

Do you let bands fix mistakes later?

It depends on whether it's the kind of mistake we can fix. We tell the bands that if they know they’re not happy with what they did, they should immediately tell the segment producer or the stage manager literally as soon as they are done performing.

We could finish off the show, hold the audience, and then do another performance with the band and that gets edited in. That's one way to do it.

If you're talking about various different fixes within the band, it depends on what it is. You can't really re-do a lead vocal. You can maybe pick up a word or two, but keep in mind, this also has to match video. The idea of them singing an entire verse over is not going to fly, as it's not going to match the video.

You could re-do a guitar solo providing the rest of band didn't freak out when it went wrong. For instance, if the bass player screws up and it doesn't throw the rest of the band off, I can bring the bass player downstairs into my control room, plug him in direct and just punch him in for that.

I would just let the director know that at the right moment make sure the camera isn't showing the bass player, just in case it's slightly different. Again, it has to be the kind of mistake that didn't throw the band off. Which happens sometimes.

What are you recording to and editing on down there?

I record to both RADAR and Pro Tools simultaneously. [RADAR is a purpose-built digital multitrack recorder that operates linearly, like an analog tape machine.]

Why RADAR?

iZ Technology RADAR 24

Going back about eight or nine years ago, I was using an analog console. The RADAR sounded better to me than Pro Tools did as far as digital conversion. Plus, I was finding RADAR was more stable than Pro Tools had been, though Pro Tools has advanced greatly as far as stability since then.

I'm now using a digital console, so both the RADAR and Pro Tools sound identical because I’m using the console’s converters, which are superb.

That said, there is some editing you can do on Pro Tools that's clumsy to do on RADAR. If there's something I want to drop out or delete, sometimes it's faster to do that in Pro Tools.

Are you finding more artists using pre-recorded tracks on television?

There's been a trend over the last two years to move away from that. There was a period where tracks were almost always part of the performance. I would say there was a time where it was reaching the point where about 80 percent of the bands had some sort of track going on.

Now, it's flipping back to more to like 50 percent. One of the things I will say about the Letterman show is that [Dave] was very anti-track. Bands were, for better or worse, forced into playing live on the show.

He didn't like the concept of people using tracks. He didn't really care how famous they were. He didn't want that kind of thing on the show.

David Letterman actually got that deeply involved at that level on the music?

Yeah. He would complain if it felt like it was all tracks.

And Stephen Colbert?

It's clear that Stephen is a very big music fan. He has a serious love of music. He’s a really good singer in his own right.

RELATED ARTICLE



Who are some of your favorites that you've mixed on this show over the years and why?

It goes in two categories for me. The first is it's always fun to work with a legend. Somebody like Paul McCartney or Jerry Lee Lewis or Aretha Franklin. It adds a certain element of excitement, working with somebody that just brings such a sense of history and somebody that influenced me long before I even got involved in any of this.

The other thing that's exciting is when somebody comes on that I'm not aware of, gets out on that stage, and blows me away.

Is there one in particular that sticks out?

On Letterman we would do a 45- to 60-minute concert after the show with whatever act was booked on the show. We'd release the audience and bring in a fan-based audience.

I remember us debuting the new Adele album [19]. The one with “Rolling in the Deep” that just broke all records. I was kind of familiar with Adele but not hugely so. The second we started doing the concert, I remember thinking, wow, this is really something special that I'm witnessing.

As we were doing it, it just became so apparent that this was going to be huge after tonight. Another one was Chris Stapleton. That was somebody who I was not aware of that came out and made a big statement. Those moments are priceless.

What are the differences you've found between the house bands from Letterman and Colbert?

They are dramatically different. Paul Shaffer's band was made of the top studio musicians from a certain time period - the ‘70s, ‘80s - and they really excelled at being a cover band.

Jon Batiste's band is a much, much younger band. The next generation of jazz players. They're more clued into playing improvisationally. They do more original music on the show. Even if they do some cover material, it quickly goes to a level of improvisation that makes it original. Both bands have superb musicianship but dramatically different styles.

The O'Jays perform "Love Train" with Jon Batiste and Stay Human on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Also, on Letterman you knew who was going to be in the band every night.

Yeah, we're still changing members in Jon’s bands. There's a core membership: the drummer, Joe Saylor, the sax player, Eddie Barbash, and Jon Batiste himself on piano. Some of the other players are here more than others, and some have been in different positions at different times.

You won't know this until the night of the show?

Well, I get a list of who's coming over the course of the week.It can even be two different bass players in the same week. It changes the dynamics and the feel of the band, which, I think, is one of the things that Jon actually likes.

I think part of it is his love of improvisation. I think he actually enjoys shaking it up because it makes him react differently as a musician on a nightly basis. Obviously, it makes it a little bit harder on the mixing end because the field of [musicians] keeps changing.

Keeps you on your toes, though.

Oh yeah. I enjoy it, because they're all so good at it. As long as somebody is really good, I'm always up for the challenge.

comments powered by Disqus

Reverb Gives

Your purchases help youth music programs get the gear they need to make music.

Carbon-Offset Shipping

Your purchases also help protect forests, including trees traditionally used to make instruments.

Oops, looks like you forgot something. Please check the fields highlighted in red.