Renaissance recordist Reto Peter is a music producer, audio engineer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, teacher and voting member of the Recording Academy who has worked with indie artists from his native Switzerland to breakthrough hip-hop act Flipsyde in his adopted hometown of Oakland — also home to Green Day, for which Reto earned a TEC Award for his work on their Grammy-winning album American Idiot.
Inside his studio is an impressive “greatest hits” collection of classic studio mics, including his latest investment, four large-diaphragm Audix condensers: a pair of A231 vocal mics and a pair of SCX25As.
Here, he shares his career highlights, recording techniques, and experience of his Audix mics.
How did you first enter the world of music production?
To take it back to the beginning, I played in bands starting at 15 and had played drums since I was eight. At some point I got my hands on an 8-track deck and started recording my friends’ bands in the early 1990s.
Did this lead to studying music production formally?
Yes, it certainly did. At 18 I knew I wanted to get into audio engineering. At that time there weren’t many schools in Europe – I checked out SAE in Berlin and for me, it emphasised the technical over the musical too much. I wound up getting accepted to Berklee in Boston, where my high school big-band instructor had gone.
That’s how I first came to the U.S. At night they opened the studios up to students for our own projects. I just lived there, taking classes during the day and doing sessions all night. I didn’t sleep much! I
was just so excited at all this opportunity to play and record with different people. I was exposed to so many forms of music and cultures that I had been relatively isolated from in Switzerland.
Can you point to an early “big break” moment after graduating school?\
In 1997 I moved to New York. I found an internship at The Magic Shop in SoHo, which was this iconic one-room facility. They had a wrap-around 80-series Neve console and an amazing vibe.
A lot of bigger indie bands came through there with their own producers and engineers, and I got to assist and really learn the people end of how a record was made — the hierarchy in the studio, when it’s your turn to speak up and when it’s not, things you don’t learn in school.
The owner, Steve Rosenthal, also owned a club called The Living Room on the Lower East Side. It was a hub of the singer-songwriter scene, and where artists like Norah Jones came up. I was the sound guy there five nights a week, so I learned the live end of things.