Sound engineer Paul Northfield, known for his work with RUSH, PORCUPINE TREE, STEVE VAI and DREAM THEATER (to name only a few) is featured in a new interview with Matthew McGlynn at RecordingHacks.com. An excerpt from the discussion is available below.

RecordingHacks.com: Can you compare what it was like to work on Permanent Waves versus Vapor Trails, 22 years later? What was the same, and what was different?

Northfield: "People look back on the ’70s and think How did you do that? What special techniques did you use?' Often, pretty much everybody was just making it up as they went along. Recording was evolving at such a rapid rate, and studios were so different, fundamentally, from one to another. Now you can look across the history of recording and be very clear about saying 'These are great microphones, these are great pre-amps…' We’ve now sort of analyzed it to death, to the point where we all have a consensus view of what stuff is great.

When we were working on Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures, the rooms were not as live. The general approach at that time was that you deadened everything down and then added reverb. That gave you more control. And it wasn’t until about five years after that, that we started to come across extraordinary sounding drum rooms.

In the case of Rush, their own experimental eccentricity was that they always wanted to record things differently each time. It drove me nuts. We’d get a drum sound and then, after we’d recorded a song, they’d say, 'Ok, well, that sounded great, so what mic shall we use on this next song?' It took a while to convince them — a couple of albums, actually! — to convince them that a lot more sound change would come from performance and the way something sits in an arrangement, than changing mics for change’s sake."

Go to this location for the complete interview.

(Thanks: RushIsABand.com)