Frenchie Smith

Recording Connection Mentor Frenchie Smith on His Journey to Success, Opening Doors for Others, and Helpful Tips for Up N’ Comers

Scorpion Child and Chris “Frenchie” Smith, center.

Recording Connection mentor Frenchie Smith on his Journey to Success & Opening Doors for Others

The story of Grammy-nominated producer/engineer and Recording Connection mentor Chris “Frenchie” Smith is in many ways the ultimate lesson in what can go right in the music industry—from the unique way he got into producing records to the doors he now opens for his best externs. 

Operating out of The Bubble Recording Studio in Austin, TX, Frenchie has been ingrained in the busy Austin music scene for many years, from playing in a popular alt-rock band to recording for other top Austin acts like Ringo Deathstarr and Ume, and eventually working with national acts like Los Lonely Boys, The Dandy Warhols, and Meat Puppets. He also recently co-produced Gregg Rolies’s vocals (along with Gregg’s son Sean Rolie) for the highly-anticipated Santana reunion album-Santana IV, slated for an April release.

Needless to say, there’s a lot students can learn from Frenchie’s story—starting with the way he got into studio life, which he says was initially as a band member with 90s alt-rock act Sixteen Deluxe.

“Being the band-appointed representative to talk to our engineers or producers when we would be making recordings, it was up to me to learn how to speak their jargons,” he says. “Anytime the producer was working on our album, I was there. And, it didn’t mean that I was telling him how to EQ things, but I was certainly hearing him pass in between different types of microphones, what a keyboard’s part sounded like with and without compression, with tube compression versus solid state compression. Being able to hear compression added as a tonal character maker versus just using it as a utility piece, being able to get my hands on the board and be able to write automation fades on the tape machine, on the console where we were mixing it all, that was incredibly eye opening.”

That’s where it started for him. “At the end of this long recording process,” he says, “I came back to Austin, and I just started telling my friends that I liked their bands. I started telling them I was a record producer. And most people laughed…We didn’t have social media, so I just started hitting the streets, telling everybody I was a record producer and I needed a recording studio. And a very sweet guy came and called me up and said, ‘Hey, my boss told me I could use his recording studio while he is on a business trip to England.’ And that was my in. So, I found this studio space for $0. The in-house engineer, he needed more hands-on job training, and I needed a place to work, and the band needed a studio. Absolutely, the stars aligned, and there it was…I was magically in the game.”

For Frenchie, it began as an opportunity to offset the costs of the band and give them opportunities to record cheaply. “What I, in theory, was doing was continuing to record bands, help offset the monthly nut for my band to have this amazing space to record in,” he says. “And when I got ahead financially on recording, keep buying more gear and learn more tricks, then I would fuse that into our records. So, we set this gear up, and the band gave me carte blanche to go spend about nine months just to make as many recordings with other artists in our community as I could, and get my confidence up and get my relationship with the tape machine, keeping it calibrated, and just a feel for it, and learn the acoustics of the environment.”

The Bubble Studio

But it soon became apparent that Frenchie’s priorities were changing regarding the band. “I feel bad for them,” he says. “They had to completely extract me from multiple records [he laughs]. I went in deep, and that whole agreement was just lost on me. I just couldn’t stop, it was amazing. I was going through my community and working with my best friends. It was awesome. And once I had made about one record with every one of my best pals, then that’s when the playing field got a little more even, and it was time for me to just start working with musicians and bands that we didn’t know each other’s life stories. Our commonality was music.”

Frenchie’s obsession with the studio eventually led to working with business partner Alex Lyon at The Bubble, now one of Austin’s go-to studios for local and national acts alike. Frenchie is in-demand as a producer for his ability to craft rich, warm sounds with analog tape while still taking advantage of the digital tools now available in the studio. “I do not miss, on a daily basis, putting up 2500 feet of tape and going through multiple drum takes, and whipping out a razor blade to compile a drum tape,” he admits. “Just the ease in being able to composite joint performances in the digital world is fantastic, and then obviously, being able to edit something really aggressively. And within about two minutes, it’s amazing you can rearrange songs and give the band a day to think about it, it’s great. So, there’s pros and cons of both of them, but I definitely try to use tape as much as I can. I have an analog brain.”

Band Courtesy Tier, Chris “Frenchie” Smith
with dog Agnes and Lindsey Kappa

These days, as a Recording Connection mentor, Frenchie is now imparting his life lessons to those who train with him. He’s particularly impressed these days with one student in particular, Lindsey Kappa.

“Lindsey worked on this record, it’s an album by a band called Scorpion Child, and they are on Nuclear Blast,” he says. “It’s a German and American record label. It’s their second record, and that’s going to be just an amazing time piece, in a Ronnie James Dio rock and roll rainbow vibe. So it’s something that people don’t hear a lot of these days. It sounds amazing.

“One of the projects she assisted was me producing Hunt Sales,” Frenchie continues. Hunt was the drummer on Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life. He was in David Bowie’s Tin Machine. And she’s just hanging out with them and talking to them about drum grooves, moving mics, helping out, just getting along with them…And Jimmy ‘Two Fingers’ was on bass. He had just left Buckcherry. Now he’s playing with the Cults. So she’s hanging out with these antique rock dudes, and just kicking ass, and they thoroughly enjoyed her.”

Because of Lindsey’s performance as an extern, Frenchie is now looking towards her future. “She’s really important,” he says. “She has a real voice on her, she may find her own journey on that duality of being a performer, and then a recording engineer and producer in the studio for other artists. So, I see some commonalities in her that I see in me. Some of my really dear friends have a commercial studio in Austin, and it’s run by a female. And I want to take Lindsey over there and just introduce here to them. They’re a conglomerate, but it’s all under the Willie Nelson umbrella. I want to take Lindsey over there and just [say], ‘If you guys are doing anything to do with the Austin City Limits Television, she could help with that. If you’ve got anything going on with the music venue at the W, the ACL Live– if she could do that she could handle anything you throw at her.’ But she’s got something to offer, and I want her to enter ground level as something on a massive commercial level.”

When asked what the most important aspect of working with an artist in the studio Frenchie says, “I think the most important thing that a recordist can do is be proactive and read the energy of the individual musicians and the collective of the band. When we’re open to their feedback, they’re open to our feedback. You know, also taking the time to discuss what the roles are before going into the session helps. So if the band says, ‘We love our live repertoire right now, all we want to do is record it note for note,’ then they’re revealing that they don’t want any musical feedback; they just want someone to engineer and document their ideas to date. [In that case] the role has been clearly defined. So if the artist is looking for a producer — this is what happens for me — I’m encouraged to bring ideas to the table and look for opportunity to bring more cohesion to their ideas. So I think the gateway to that is to be compassionate and calm and be focused, and just play the role of someone that they trust.”

When it comes to managing the technical and artistic sides of recording bands, Frenchie calls himself a foreman of sorts “the guy with the yellowest hat on site.” Being able to multitask and knowing what to communicate, when to communicate it, and how, is a skillset it pays to master. To illustrate, Frenchie recounts something that happened just weeks ago at The Bubble:

“[Daniel, another one of my students] was watching the one hundred scientific engineering duties I was doing, and he was asking me about those. And he was so focused on that that he missed the finer detail which was a bit of dialogue I had with the band tracking. There was a rhythmic emphasis that some of the band were performing, but for some of them, it was going over their heads. And I brought it to their attention, and they were all able to talk about it and commit to what that performance needed…In talking with Daniel, I pointed out how that one conversation saved me lots of editing time. [I told him] ‘Well, I just saved myself 300 edits by talking to these humans in a graceful manner and just alerting them…bringing it to their attention that there are some oddities going on in the performance.’”

Frenchie is committed to giving his apprentices a holistic understanding of recording, audio engineering and developing the soft skills it takes to remain viable in today’s music industry. Building connections and creating opportunities for oneself are hot topics for the mentor. This means having the right look, right demeanor, and making things happen by working with what you got. Frenchie says:

“Wherever you are, you are a billboard, how you visually look, how you talk to people, the way you carry yourself is your business card…We have to visualize that our demeanor is our business card. Websites fall a little flat when we can’t attract opportunity in real time… if you love recording and you’re interested in others, then go find your tribe. And if you want to get time in a professional recording studio then you can go do that. If you have the ability to track 8 or 16 inputs, and you can roll around with your rig, or you have a tracking room in your house, or you have a rehearsal room, that other like-minded people are helping you with the responsibility of the monthly rent.

The recording studio ultimately is in our minds. And so the technology is so vast that a little studio is anywhere that you can just plug in and get power and not have the cops called on you for making noise. If you can fill in the gaps there, then you’re making a recording. And I think as a pupil, it could be quite intimidating to come out of the Recording Connection and immediately just go to a band and go, ‘I can help you make a recording and I still would like to have some hands-on experience, but were still going to need to pay $20,000 in studio time.’ That’s completely optional. And being able to have the power to remove that part of the dialogue when a new recordist is talking to a band is ultimately powering opportunity.”

On a personal level, even with years of experience under his belt, Frenchie still keeps things in perspective regarding his own career. “Personally, I don’t ever want to get to a place where I’m so entitled that someone sings the vocals once or twice, and I go, ‘Yeah. It’s cool enough,’ and I just Auto-Tune the hell out of it, and it’s done. Infusing amazing editing tools or tracking tools is something that the modern recordist must continuously ask ourselves and police ourselves.”

As a musician himself, Frenchie also has keen insights on how to work as a producer with musicians in the studio—something he tries to impart to his students. “[Artists] don’t really care about how cool the microphones are, what the console is,” he says. “They love having a great headphone mix. They love being encouraged. They like that there’s toilet paper in the bathroom. They like a free donut every once and a while. They like one-on-one interaction and being encouraged to kick the living sh*t out of their performance, and be better than they are today. Be six months better than they are today, now.”