“Ellis Wyatt”
Sunni: Oh my. We are never going to get through everything I’d like to touch on! And I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself here already, Ellis. The objectivism is a minor point of interest to me, compared to your [pauses] is it an avocation? a hobby?—your interest in music. How did that come about?
Ellis: We could call it an unrequited love affair. [laughs] And ya know, I’m not really sure. Chronologically, it probably starts with my folks—dad was a musician in college when he knocked up my mother who was a painter. So art runs in the family. Next might be cerebral meningitis at age two, causing deafness in my right ear. Thus my audio processing is/was done by my right brain from very early on. Add in the folks’ record collection, and by about four years old I was finding the harmonies in Beatles songs, and surprising the hell out of my folks by coming up with new ones. Nothing relevant happened until sophomore year of high school, when I actually started playing the acoustic guitar my dad bought me. So I cut my eye teeth learning classic rock, and that same year got to play an upper-classman’s drums. End of that year and thoroughly smitten, I bought his kit and brought it home, from boarding school [pauses] and that was pretty much the end of any other plans I had. [laughs] To this day I’d rather sit and play drums than do just about anything else. Ironic considering I sold my kit to move to Cali back in ’02, and haven’t played since. You can be certain that I’ll be buying another drum set at some point—and roundly ignoring the less visceral realities around me. There’s just something about taking a stick and beating the stuffing out of a noise maker that does it for me.
Sunni: Interesting. My unrequited fascination so far has been with stringed instruments. Did you harbor dreams of making it big some day?
Ellis: Ah, but of course! We used to argue about who would have the bigger pool and stuff. We didn’t actually write music that had any commercial potential, so it was largely an exercise in self-delusion, but the dreams were rather detailed and colorful indeed. To any musicians reading, if it’s money/fame/babes you’re gunning for, do not expect them to enjoy your nine-minute atonal opus. There’s a reason it’s called “pop”.
Sunni: [laughs] I played the flute in high school, and still have one that I tootle on rarely, so I don’t really consider myself a musician any more [pauses] and I’ve never kept up with “the scene”, whatever that may be. But, based on the reading I’ve done and things others closer to the biz have told me, it’s an increasingly rare thing for a musician to understand and appreciate what goes on in the booth, after the tracks are done. And yet that knob-twiddling, as you called it, can arguably be more important than the tracks themselves as far as the final product’s sound. How did your interest in mixing and arranging develop?
Ellis: It goes back to doing demos on a Tascam four-track recorder. Ya know, I’d listen to all these great albums and say, “Why the hell doesn’t my stuff sound like that?”. As before, I was an audiophile from early on, so I could hear the differences, and I simply taught myself which knobs to twist to produce the desired result. [pauses] I’ll mention that it was many years before I was actually any good at it.
