Tom Lord-Alge: Roll With It

Tom Lord-Alge has mixed records for U2, The Rolling Stones, P!nk, Peter Gabriel, Dave Matthews Band, Blink-182, Avril Lavigne, Sum 41, Manic Street Preachers, and Marilyn Manson. Headliner catches up with the legendary mixer at his home in Miami, where he reflects on his start in the industry, his Grammy wins, analogue vs. digital, and chicken salad.

“It's really Chris' fault,” opens Tom Lord-Alge, speaking about his five-time Grammy-award winning mix engineer brother Chris Lord-Alge. “A friend of my mom got Chris a job as a kind of gofer at a studio in New Jersey, which ended up becoming The Sugarhill Gang studio. Chris worked there for a couple of years and he worked on some of those early Sugarhill Gang records. I actually think that he got fired from working there, because they caught him using the studio,” he chuckles.

After this, Tom tagged along with his older brother’s band, who were playing a few local gigs.

Despite only being 15, Tom ended up doing the lights for one of the shows, but his real interest lay in audio. He carried on working in lighting even after Chris left to take a job at a studio in New York. One fateful day, the sound technician didn’t show up.

“The band was like, ‘you're gonna do the sound tonight’. I must have done a good job because the next night they were like, ‘you're our new sound man!’”

After doing this for about five years, Tom left to join Chris in the studio, where he assisted him on sessions.

“I'd be assisting him in a session and he'd be in the middle of a vocal take. He walked out of the room, and I'm like, ‘fuck it!’ and I just jumped right in the seat and picked it up. One thing led to another and I assisted Chris for a couple of months, and then I started to take his recording gigs when he started to focus on mixing.”

Fast forward 12 months and Chris was hired to mix Steve Winwood’s Grammy winning album Back in the High Life, while Tom handled production.

“I did eight months on that record and when it was time to mix it, they said ‘we really like what you're doing and we want you to mix it’. Chris was like, ‘go for it, bro’.”

The rest is history. Tom went on to engineer Winwood's follow up, Roll with It in addition to co-producing its number one hit song, Higher Love. He then left Unique Recording to work as a freelance engineer and mixer, and to this date has mixed records for U2, Simple Minds, The Rolling Stones, P!nk, Peter Gabriel, OMD, Sarah McLachlan, Dave Matthews Band, blink-182, Avril Lavigne, Hanson, Sum 41, Live, Manic Street Preachers, Story of the Year and Marilyn Manson, among many, many others.

Tom received two Grammy Awards for his work on Back in the High Life and Roll with It, both winning in the 'Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical' category.

There’s no rivalry between the brothers (including Jeff Lord-Alge, also a successful engineer and mixer), but he admits that it must have hurt a little for Chris to see him walk away with the Grammys.

“I'm all about helping with the Lord-Alge brand, because I benefit from it. So it's never that kind of competition. But I do the Winwood album, and Chris was all thumbs up about it, so I know that it was a tough one for him when I won, because he gave me the gig. Back then, that was the only Grammy a recording engineer could win – ‘Best Engineered Recording’. And then just just to kind of smack him around a little bit, two years later, I won it again! This is for all those times you beat me up!” he laughs.

Tom’s turning point as a mixing engineer was in 1993 after mixing Crash Test Dummies' God Shuffled His Feet, featuring their hit Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm. Shortly thereafter he mixed Live's multi-platinum Throwing Copper, which to date has sold over eight million copies in the US.

“Throwing Copper...I got 20 years of work out of that one,” he says. “That album really resonated amongst the musical community all over the world, and musicians and my peers really embraced that record.”

Tom and Chris are known for crafting their mix with an abundant use of dynamic compression for moulding mixes that play well on small speakers and FM radio, thus somewhat contributing to the loudness war.

“Yeah,” he smiles. “That was during the time that Chris and I had wars over who could make the loudest snare drum. As for compression, I just remember that the more compression I put on, the better things started to sound.

"At first I would just really start to mangle the stereo bus, and it immediately sounded like it was on the radio. I really dug that and my clients really enjoyed that. Then I started mangling the individual instruments, and then just kissing the bus compressor, and again, we came up with a different result, which was still acceptable.

"It was simple and it just makes it sound better. If I was recording something – and remember this is back in the analogue days – that I wanted to sound as close to being finished without having anything on playback…” he trails off.

“If you're doing what you're doing today with analogue, you would have nothing but tape hiss – you had to record things very bright, and you wanted to record them as close to the final sound as you could.”

Tom can’t help but feel nostalgic for the analogue days, when there was a novelty and precision required when you knew that you only had a certain amount of choices.

“There's something about that, that I really miss,” he acknowledges. “But having said that, I don't miss analogue! I jumped right on to digital. I bought two 3348 48-track digital tape machines by Sony when they came out, and then I bought the 24-bit version – the fucking machine was 250 grand! I still have it.

"I love that machine, because it allowed me to take the analogue tapes and transfer them to digital. Then, when you were mixing 48-track analogue, it sucked – it was no picnic. If you wanted to rewind 20 seconds, it was a nightmare because you actually had to rewind 30 seconds because it needed about five or 10 seconds for the tapes to lock up. So it was worth the money!”