Keenan McRae
Whether or not the name Keenan McRae sounds familiar to you, there’s a good chance you’ve heard his work. He co-owned Artisound Productions on St. Claude for eight years, recorded (there and elsewhere) albums for Donald Harrison, Lilli Lewis, Bobby Rush, Sari Jordan, Isaac Eady, Spencer., The Headhunters, Tonya Boyd-Cannon, and Weedie Braimah (for which he received a Grammy nomination). He also engineered the audio for a Jon Batiste documentary, the theme song for the New Orleans seasons of Queer Eye, Nick Spitzer‘s American Routes, and the entirety (so far) of a YouTube video series with Noé Pierre Cugny called Marigny Tapes. And if you haven’t heard or seen any of those, you might have caught McRae touring with G-Eazy, Tank and the Bangas, and Big Sam’s Funky Nation, or mixing live sound at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, French Quarter Festival, and Master P’s farewell show at Essence Festival. I went over to McRae’s home to catch up, meet his new puppy Violet, and find out why he swears by a rarely used DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). We also discussed his mentors, what life has been like a year after the closure of Artisound—and while I was there, I had the privilege of noodling around on Dr. John’s guitar.
Your studio, Artisound Productions, is where my band WAR BUNNIES tracked and recorded our first EP, and your old business partner Joe Ceponis was the first engineer I interviewed for this column, over 30 editions ago. So we’ve known each other for quite a while, but this meetup was inspired by seeing you at French Quarter Fest, where you ran sound every day at the Esplanade in the Shade stage. How involved are you with festival season here?
Pretty much everything I do these days is freelance. I got a call a couple days beforehand asking if I wanted to do that stage, and it worked out. But I hardly ever do live sound anymore. One, because it’s not a lot of money; and two, because my mission is really to improve the industry around New Orleans, which I mostly do through teaching. I used to run an afterschool program for high schoolers and now I teach live sound at Loyola. That’s the real mission—helping young engineers realize the value of engineering and their own worth.
How do you teach a skill to teenagers that you’ve spent your life learning?
There’s principles. As an engineer, you have to study all kinds of music. You have to know how it should sound in order to replicate it appropriately, as well as giving the artist the ability to convey that message. It’s not different from recording, for me, in that you have to capture that moment and you’re the vector between the artist and the audience. You’re the person that’s going to literally amplify their voice. A lot of clubs will pay anyone who says they can do sound, but it’s important to do it appropriately. And I really don’t condone any excuses in that, no matter how little or great a time you have before the show begins. As soon as you hear the music, you should know what it should sound like.
I remember when I interviewed Joe, he said you guys work with the DAW LUNA, which is a pretty unusual system. People almost universally use Pro Tools, Logic Pro, or Ableton.
I teach the kids with LUNA, mainly because in a lot of other DAWs, mainly Pro Tools (which has been the industry standard since it came out), a lot of the individual tasks are processes. You usually have to do more than one thing to get one thing done, whereas in LUNA, it still gives you the education of traditional engineering, but it does that in just one click of a button for one thing. LUNA was created by Universal Audio and it’s the newest DAW on the market, so they took everything that was not being fixed or addressed by other DAWs, plus a long history of education and knowledge, and they addressed all of the issues. With LUNA, you don’t have to even press save—it saves it for you. Every computer program should be doing that. I was obsessively pressing save before. I taught my kids that every time you do anything, even if it’s just moving a mouse, press “save” and now you don’t have to do that. And furthermore: Why, when I press “save,” are you asking me if I’m sure?! Yes, I’m sure. Just do it. Also, in LUNA, you can simultaneously mix and edit ‘cause there’s no latency, so there’s no need to switch the sample rate or buffer size. Everything I have in plugins, I have in analog form too, but because LUNA has gotten so good at replicating those analog things, I rarely use them. There is slightly more depth to the sound of analog equipment, but the margin is so small it can go unnoticed.
When did you first start mixing?
My father’s a pastor, so I started messing around on the sound system in his church. Once I realized how bad I was messing it up, I was like, “Maybe I should start reading the manuals?” The church my father pastored at when I was really young was an old people’s church that didn’t have a band, so I sang in the kids’ choir and played violin. But as soon as we moved to a church with a band I was immediately like, “I am not playing the violin anymore—I want to play the drums.” The drummer in the church, Damen Robinson—who’s been my best friend ever since—wanted to start a band with me, soon into picking it up, but we realized two drummers wasn’t enough to make a song, so I started learning other instruments, stealing my sister’s piano, who would freak out even though she never played it. Once I got into high school, my teacher, Steve Kaslowitz—he was a huge influence on my life—would let me find old stuff in the band room that had maybe fallen behind a rack or something, and I’d be like, “Could I borrow this and put it back together?” And he’d be like, “If you fix it, you can have it.” One of those instruments was a guitar, so that’s where I started picking it up, just to play a note to record with. I’d also steal my sister’s karaoke machine. And then I’d start messing with the mixer at church, because there were limitations to playing by learning a note at a time, and the way to get more out of it was with a mixer.
Was the music program at Loyola what brought you down here?
It was, and I never finished. I had dropped out because I went on tour with G-Eazy playing drums. He had promised us some money for this two-month tour. And he didn’t have it at the end ‘cause we didn’t do our business right. So I was kinda homeless in New Orleans with my drums, until I got a job with Jimmy Glickman, who ran the New Orleans Music Exchange. He was all about business and he was the only person who would hire a young Black kid. I started doing invoicing for him ‘cause he was like, “You can use a computer?” It was the only music store in New Orleans forever and now we have nothing like it. Jimmy would come to my house and wake me up some days. That’s how amazing of a person he was. And if he couldn’t make it, he’d send his wife.
The irony of being a passionate teacher who dropped out of school! But it also sounds like you’ve had such incredible teachers in non-school environments.
These people were no joke and my mother’s number one among them. I could go on about my mother forever. She really instilled how to learn and how to move forward and take that next step, and she’s still doing it today. In every single one of her emails she puts a Bible verse. Usually it’s [reading from email], “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Matthew 20:26–28)” It’s about being a servant leader and I’ve taken that to heart. I believe that the best people in this world are leading in service for others. It’s the way to keep improving the human condition.
Similarly, I’ve always felt the best way to lead is with a sense of curiosity and humility because everything changes, so you can’t be stagnant in your opinions. You have to be willing to learn new things, to update your beliefs based on new knowledge and new technology.
That hit me hard this Jazz Fest. This was my most rewarding one because you never really know what console is gonna be on which stage. Every time I would call in advance and try to find out, it would end up being a different one when I got there. So I spent nights reading the manuals of every console I could get my hands on. You would think that, by now, I would know how to work every one, but there’s such little minutia in these things that means you have to read the manuals, you have to be open to learning. So I crammed and even downloaded the software to set up scenes beforehand for several different types of equipment. And then I show up and it’s a 30-year-old console, the Midas Heritage 3000. It’s one of the oldest pieces of equipment I’ve seen in a long time, all analog, and I was like, “Does this shit actually work or am I gonna be turning things and it’s just gonna be like, scratch, scratch, hiss?” They must have gone through it, though, because it was in good shape. But my mind was blown ‘cause I was doing sound for Big Sam at the Festival Stage—that’s the main stage.
Luckily, at least, you know Big Sam’s Funky Nation inside and out, don’t you?
I do. I toured with them for years. Sam is such a great guy, another mentor, just a brother to me, one of the nicest people. It’s so rare in this industry, but I think it’s changing and it’s mostly due to the people that are sick of the attitudes that stem from ego and lack of self-education. The old guard is trying to hold onto something that should have been done a long time ago, and the new generation, it’s just not in their DNA to act like that.
That’s a beautiful piano.
Thank you. It’s a Baldwin M1 and it was Dr. John’s. These are actually Dr. John’s finger marks and this is the guitar that he played on tour [an Epiphone Sorrento AS] and it’s the most fun. It actually got me back into sitting around and just playing guitar. You should play it!
Middle guitar: Dr. John’s Epiphone Sorrento AS
This is not at all what I expected. It’s so lightweight.
Yeah, it’s super light and it’s got so many songs inside of it.
What gear would you grab if the house was on fire? Besides this guitar, obviously!
I’d definitely grab the computer because, no matter what, I can always work from there. When I closed down the studio last year, that was a big switch in thinking about gear. It was the last day I had to get out of the studio because I was literally leaving for the Bahamas the next day for a couple of shows at Jon Batiste’s new club down there, with the artist Juice (a.k.a. Julian Gosin). I had filled up three storage units and I had no money left, with all the moving expenses. I was spending more money to get out of there than I ever had to get in. I put up a post like, “Please come buy something from me.” And one person was serious and they bought some things and it hurt, ‘cause you spend so many years with each piece of gear, wanting it and then saving for it, and then educating yourself on how it works and how it sounds. And then you finally get it. And then to have to sell it in a split second—just doesn’t add up. I was crying and then Michael Girardot [Revivalists, Rotary Downs, and former New Orleans Music Exchange employee] called me and was like, “Don’t sell more gear. I’m coming over and I’m gonna help. Do you need lunch?” We went to Loyola together. He was a senior and I was a freshman. There are so many really dope people who have always looked out for me.
Also, didn’t your studio get hit by lightning once?
The transformers blew at that location multiple times because of lightning, and once I was literally on the last note of Weedie Braimah’s album mix for [The] Hands of Time. He was like, “That’s perfect. Print it. We’re done with the album.” Then lightning hit and blew up the computer and I couldn’t get any of the mixes ‘cause I hadn’t put it on an external hard drive. It fried about $10,000 [worth] of gear, too. Wherever audio was playing through, it fried it. I had to remix the whole album, which had originally taken a year, because it was coming out on not one but two record labels in, like, a week.
No wonder you’re not precious about gear anymore. You can’t be.
Yeah, man. I found that I really didn’t need much of it. What I miss most about the studio was the community that got built around it, but I can do so much of the work from anywhere.
Let’s talk about these preamps that you built.
They’re called CAPI preamps. They’re basically API, which are just a classic preamp. I’ve always wanted to get one but the new API products suck, so this version uses the original parts. CAPI was formed by some of the people that used to work at API and got frustrated that they weren’t progressing and innovating, so they branched off and did their own thing, but they’re the only people who have access to the older components. You can order the preamps from their website and have them fully built for a couple hundred extra, or you can build them yourself. The thing about building them yourself is that you have to learn a lot. The instructions that are given aren’t LEGO instructions. You have to solder, you have to ground, you have to know what you’re looking at ‘cause you’ve got multiple different kinds of caps and resistors, so you have to know how to read them and what they are.
CAPI preamps in progress
I love your determination to read about everything and build pieces and record with whatever you have access to.
That’s how hip-hop was born. I always tell that story. Before hip-hop there was funk and jazz. Why did you have funk and jazz? Because a lot of Black Americans were able to get factory jobs and move into the middle class of society, therefore providing their kids with instruments and instrument lessons. And then there was the crack epidemic, gentrification, all these things that disenfranchised the Black community, factories closing, no more jobs. So the kids still made music, but they took their parents’ stereo equipment and tapes and sampled things and were rapping over it. They were still creating jazz, they were putting all these genres together. They were doing it with less resources. I feel like half of hip-hop artists would be the best jazz musicians had they had access. Plus, it’s only the musicians’ need to communicate what’s in their heads that inspires gear innovation. It’s somebody making music who notices that there are limitations, and wants to figure out how to make those limitations go away, that creates the need.
Photos by Sabrina Stone
