Piper Payne is a mastering engineer and the owner of Physical Music Products, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Do you remember when you first became interested in music engineering?
I’ve been playing drums since I was in second grade. In ninth grade, we had a person come in and record our Christmas concert. I was playing the drum kit. My little Tom ran from my left to my right; my high hats were on the left, and my bride cymbals were on the right. When we got the CD back from the recording engineer who had recorded the concert, I listened to it and I realized that now my rack toms were on the right side, my floor time was on the left, my high hats were on the right, and my symbols on the left. I was so confused. I tried to ask everybody that I knew how this could be, because I remembered playing it in the opposite perspective. It sounded wrong to me. But then I realized that that’s how the audience was hearing it. It was something that made me go, ‘Oh my gosh, you can manipulate sound in recordings.’
What was it about that moment that felt so magical?
Every time we make a recording, it’s a snapshot of something that happened in the past that we can now recall for future enjoyment. We have a huge amount of manipulation available, even though this [engineer] literally just put up a stereo pair of mics. It was a very important moment for me to realize that there was this way of manipulating what was a live event into something that can be listened to and enjoyed later on. It was the moment that I realized that music and a career in music was what I wanted to pursue.
How did you think that career would manifest?
I wanted to be a music teacher, because I had taught drum lessons all through high school and I really enjoyed that. But I really also wanted to pursue an engineering career because I had a grandpa who was a carpenter and a mechanical engineer. He taught me how to do a lot of really amazing fabrication things. I was really fascinated by that kind of stuff, like making things.
A career in music performance was not really for me, a career in music teaching was potentially for me, but it was a different type of future than I thought I wanted to be doing. I wanted to make stuff. Then, I realized that there was a program at U of M that I could marry up engineering and music [that specialized in] acoustic recording.
And you had an important early mentor, right?
[Yeah!] My very first mentor was Dave Greenspan. He taught me how to solder cables, how to run a tape machine, and how to splice tape. That was one of the early moments in my career where I was like, ‘Okay, cool! Even if recording engineering doesn’t work out, if I can’t get enough clients, if I can’t find the right gigs– I can still make a good living with these basic skills that not a lot of my young colleagues, my cohort in school, even took the time to learn or had a mentor who cared about them enough to teach them.
What was it like beginning your professional career in the industry?
When I walked into my first job in a recording studio, Dave, my mentor at the time, gestured to all of the equipment and people, [and I realized, ‘these’ are all] resources for me to be creative.’ [I said to myself,] ‘There is not one thing in here that’s going to hold you back other than your own creativity and your own imagination.’ That really stuck with me, because it was like anybody can tell me ‘no,’ anybody can tell me that this ‘so and so’ isn’t a good idea. Anybody can tell me that it’s maybe ‘not the path’ that I should take. But I’ve always been strong headed. And if someone closes a door on me, I’m gonna find a window to go through.
Do you remember a specific moment where you first thought, ‘Damn, I’ve made it?”
I kind of realized that I had reached some modicum of success when I got this email from somebody that I didn’t think was real. It was a very well known artist, in fact, someone that I held in really high regard to the point. When I was reached out to by this person, they just sent in an email inquiry over my website, and I literally thought it was just someone else named Janis Ian. I called the number immediately. I realized the moment that she answered, that I was speaking to the real Janice. She wanted me to master her album. I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ We worked on that project for almost two years through the pandemic. She went on to get a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album for it. I think that was kind of the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I’m doing something right.’
What would you say was the proudest moment in your career, so far?
When I got elected to the Board of Governors of the Recording Academy in San Francisco! I was like, ‘Wow, my peers voted for me to represent them for the Grammys.’ I thought that was really really neat. It was a really important step for me personally and in my career. That was a moment where I was like, ‘Whoa, I’m one of the 40 or 50 people that get to represent the many thousands of members of the Recording Academy at the national table and help advocate for them. It was awesome to be voted in by people that respect me and love me.
Do you have any advice for someone building their career?
There are some basic principles that I have always had and will continue to have that have helped me retain clients and make sure that my client base continues to grow.
Number one, I never ever, ever send something out unless I’m actually done with it. Anything that has ever had my name on it or my credit is what I would consider to be the very best that I could have done with the resources, time, and budget that we had at the time. Anything less, and I can’t sleep at night. I can’t send out anything less, because I wouldn’t sleep.
Another thing is, if someone is paying me for something, or if someone is not paying me for something, they still get the same level of attention, work, and love. No matter what. Someone could come in waving a million dollars around and someone could say, ‘I’ve got $5, Will you help me?’ If I agree to do it, it will be done to the highest degree quality possible no matter what.
[And finally,] this is a service business, the customer is always right. At the end of the day, it’s not my picture on the front of the album, it’s maybe my name and tiny little letters on the back, if at all. It’s not my show, it’s their creativity, their vision, and it’s up to me to facilitate that for them.
What are some lessons you’ve learned the hard way?
I’m happy to say that it’s been extremely rare that I’ve had to learn a really hard lesson. A cool lesson that I’ve learned is that at the end of the day, the artist just wants it to be done. They want to be able to put it out and share it. Until I’m done with it on the mastering side, they can’t really share it. They’ve already been working on this for probably years at this point and put most of their life savings into this album.
I’ve learned a lot of patience. I’ve learned to just sit and listen to what the artist is looking for. That way I can be a conduit for them and help them accomplish their end goals. I fully believe that mastering is really just about the same three things I say all the time, it’s format conversion, quality control, and helping to find problems and fixing them before they become issues out in the real world. You’re at the end of the creative process and in the beginning of the manufacturing and release process. As long as I just keep those three things in mind, I don’t ever have a problem with the artist or with the deadlines or with the money or with the creativity or the sound or any of that stuff.
Do you have any advice for younger you?
I would say to younger me, ‘[Develop a routine and a schedule a little earlier and take a little bit more time]. If you do have a minute, take the dog for a walk around the block, go grab a drink with a friend that you haven’t seen in a long time, make sure to call them back.’ Those kinds of things. It’s really stuff like that I sort of regret not having done when I was coming up. But I wouldn’t really change much other than that.