Trust Me I'm A Scientist: A Point of Departure with Producer Scott Solter
In this month’s issue of Trust Me I’m A Scientist, Brooklyn musician Daniel Shuman talks to Scott Solter, the producer and engineer behind distinctive sounding records by John Vanderslice, Mountain Goats, Spoon and more. Read an excerpt below or click through to the full article.
“I wasn’t interested in recording music because I particularly enjoyed putting up microphones,” says producer and engineer Scott Solter. “I wasn’t somebody who understood anything technical about audio – or anything technical at all.”
Scott Solter
This might come as something of a surprise to anyone who has worked with Solter, or heard his productions. He’s an exceptionally creative engineer and a bona fide sound wizard known for more than a decade’s worth of work with artists like John Vanderslice, Spoon, Mountain Goats, Pattern is Movement, and Superchunk.
Though years of constant recording have allowed him to establish his formidable technical skill, Scott insists it was a vision for sound that drove him from the beginning. “I went into engineering with a purely aesthetic appetite,” he recalls.
Solter, a California native who worked for years in San Francisco studios like Tiny Telephone, now calls a bucolic stretch of North Carolina’s ‘Triangle’ area home. His masterful catalog of work and dauntless approach to shaping sound continues to keep him very busy.
This year marked the third time I worked on a record that Solter had helmed, and we came to record with him at a personal studio, built out of a converted barn on a sprawling residential property. When he agreed to share some of his insights about recording with me, I found him a fiery intellectual with a penchant for language and aesthetics. He was so natural in this role that I was surprised to hear he generally eschews interviews.
Scott entered the world of audio engineering around 1999, thanks to a creative fire sparked while listening to David Sylvian’s “Gone to Earth”. He began recording bands for free, under the sole condition that he be given “an influence over the aesthetic nature of the record.” This, he quickly adds, was not to control the music, but to have a voice within it, and to apply his own creative instincts.
“I was never interested or patient enough to be a practicing musician,” Solter says, “but [I was] always wanting to be involved in music…Eventually I would realize that the studio was the instrument that I [had always] needed.”