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Christopher Cross with his Fender Stratocaster at Amigo Studios guitar on one of their records, and he was so intimidated, afraid to do it, and he never did.” The producer says Cross was much more confident about his vocals, and justly so. “I always like to get the vocal on pretty quickly after the basic track so you’re not loading stuff up that competes too much with the vocal,” Omartian says, adding that they used an AKG 414 on his leads: “We got the lead right away. We probably went to four or five tracks and then comped the vocal parts. Chris’s pitch was ridiculous and he was very stylized, so when you went from one thing to another, he was exactly the same. If there was an impulse to do something like a scat or some kind of a riff, he had thought about it so every single track possessed that same riff. He wrote his vocals as they were to be, period. You could depend on all five tracks to be the same. You just took the best.” The basic tracks had gone on first, which was the basic chord line played by four instruments playing the Identical part. Cross wanted Omartian to play on the record, so Omartian played acoustic piano and Rhodes on top; Cross played guitar, and another acoustic guitar. On the original demo, Cross sang the answer vocal, but Omartian said it really should be a different voice and suggested Michael McDonald. Omartian says that when McDonald came into the studio soon after that, Cross was like a little kid in a candy store. They recorded the answers and then harmonies in the release section. Victor Feldman came in to do some percussion, Lenny Castro played the signature conga part, and then strings and horns were the last piece of the track. Chet Himes, engineer, left, and Michael Omartian at the Harrison console. The horns played by Lew McCreary (trombone), Jackie Kelso (saxophone), Don Roberts (saxophone) and Chuck Findley (trumpet) were voiced exactly the same as the vocals on the release section so they blended together, Omartian says. Violinist Assa Drori was called in to head up what Omartian recalls as a 28-piece string section, and the horns and strings completed what Omartian describes as a track with everything “but the kitchen sink.” Omartian reminds us that it was 1979 and his memory is hazy, but he recalls the console was a Harrison 48-channel board, and there were two Ampex 1200 24-track machines. “When you had those tracks available, you tended to use them,” Omartian says. “It was ’79, so the automation would have been pretty rudimentary.” At the end, Himes and Cross had what Omartian calls a “Clint Eastwood moment” and thought of adding the wind sound near the opening of the track. “It could have ended up being dopey, but we didn’t push the volume up on the sound effect to make it take over what was going on,” he says. “It seemed to add to the cinematic flavor of the song.” It came from a sample, but in those days they weren’t digital. “You went to a library of sound effects and you pulled out a record or a piece of tape, and all you did was put it up where you wanted it onto the 24-track. There was no slick way of doing it. It was just trial and error.” And at the end, what had started off as shaky in his office, resulted in a wonderful ongoing partnership between Omartian and Cross. Omartian says he learned to be patient with Cross’s analytical ways. “Just to give you an idea, whenever you presented an idea that was new to Chris, he really needed time to think about it,” Omartian says. “When we were doing ‘Sailing,’ there was no piano solo on the demo, just some chords. It took him about four hours to warm up to the idea of the solo. I did it in one take and his band said, ‘That’s it, that’s it,’ and he said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ The night guy who cleans the studio walked in while we were in there and Chris said, ‘Would you listen to something for me?’ He listened to the solo and Chris said, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘I think it’s really good.’ And Chris said, ‘Okay.’” Ultimately, the album was stalled. “It was an era where Debbie Harry and the Cars and punk music was huge and we were in the studio making something anything but,” Omartian says. “But when you’re lost in that world, you’re not thinking about what’s going on outside until you’re ready to present it. When we were finished, the head of promotion, Russ Thyret, came down to my office and said, ‘I know you did a great job, but nobody’s playing these kind of records.’ He said, ‘I like the record, but I don’t think radio would want it, so we’re going to delay the release for six months.’” Omartian and Cross felt disheartened, but when the record took off, Omartian got a very different call. Thyret said, “Lest you think we had anything to do with this, forget it. We just put it out and it went nuts.” n 22 MIX | OCTOBER 2015 | mixonline.com
Rewriting the rule book The Specification 96kHz as standard 24 mic line inputs 12 analogue outs 2 AES I/O (mono) Word Clock I/O 1 GPI and 1 GPO DVI out (for an external monitor) 2 DMI Card slots (up to 64 I/O per slot) 2 Ethernet connections for Networking 2 x 24 segment master/solo meters Touch sensitive rotaries with integrated switch & HTL 2 x multi-touch screens 21 x touch sensitive moving faders 4 x layers of banks of 10 faders Customisable bank and channel layout Snapshots Integrated USB2 Audio I/O interface for recording and playback of up to 48 channels 40 x Input flex-channels Mono/Stereo (equivalent of 80 DSP channels) 46 busses: 16 x flexi-busses Mono/Stereo (equivalent of 32 DSP busses), Stereo Master (2), Solo busses (2 stereo, 4 total), and 10 x 8 Matrix (8) 10 x Control Groups 1 x Compressor per channel and buss 1 x Gate per channel and buss (switchable to ducker, or compressor with side chain access) 16 x assignable 32 band Graphic EQs 8 x FX engines (reverbs, delays, w/modulation and enhancer) 4 x assignable DiGiTuBes 4 x assignable Multiband Comps User definable Macros An extremely high power headphone amplifier with 1/4 inch and mini jack socket S21 Surface $6995 DMI Card Options DMI-DANTE DMI-HYDRA 2 DMI-MADI-B DMI-ADC DMI-MADI-C DMI-AES DMI-DAC DMI-SOUNDGRID DMI-OPTO DMI-AVIOM Exclusive US distribution: Group One Ltd Toll Free 877 292 1623 www.g1limited.com www.digico.biz
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