Rick Perez and Steve Russell

“You want me to play it like this?” says the voice in the speakers. And then comes a line of melody.

“Yeah,” a man in a rumpled pink button-down shirt and jeans and flip-flops answers via intercom.

“So I play that, and then you take me out?” It’s the voice again. “And then do you want me to hold that third line?”

“Yeah,” pink shirt repeats. He’s Rick Perez, owner of Republic of Music and a record producer. When he speaks, it is barely above a hoarse whisper. “It’s been like that for 20 years,” he says, “my voice. No, it doesn’t hurt.” He turns to Steve ‘the Chef’ Russell, a recording engineer and sometime producer whose hands are moving at an impossibly fast pace while adjusting virtual knobs and faders on a computer screen. The rig sits on a work table in front of a large plate glass window that separates the recording studio control room from an inner sanctum of padded walls and microphones, where trumpet player Derek Cannon (the voice) stands alongside a saxophone player named Bob Campbell.

“You want me to double that?” Russell asks Perez after they’ve recorded a few bars of music.

“Yeah,” Perez says to Russell with the intercom switched off. “Make it a little thicker.”

Next, Campbell plays a ripping line of honks and squeals and sonorous riffs on his tenor sax. With the intercom off so Campbell can’t hear him, Perez says to Russell, “I think he’s starting to feel it.” Perez intercoms into the studio: “We’re gonna save that one, okay? But we’re gonna give you one more pass.”

Perez to Russell: “Let him hear it with less horns in the mix.”

Perez on the com to Campbell: “But I’m gonna maybe fade that sooner. So start in the upper register.”

Another aside to Russell: “He’s melting into the other horn parts.”

Perez intercoms Campbell: “Give it more energy earlier in the solo.” It goes like this for two hours.

At 11 on a weekday morning, traffic drones east and west on University Avenue in La Mesa only a few paces from Stealth Recording Studio’s unmarked front door. Nearly everything about the unglamorous strip mall that surrounds the studio is stealthy, including Perez’ headquarters next door and the marijuana dispensary next door to that. But inside Stealth, the lighting is dim and the vibe has the feel of a bedroom late at night. Perez calls all the shots and oversees every detail of making today’s record, from the musical arrangements to the final sound that Russell manages to liberate from the horns with his array of microphones.

The job of record producer tends to be a male-dominated career path with no set hours, no clear way to get in or to advance up the ladder to better gigs. Record producers are usually musicians themselves, have been known to write songs, and more than a few of them can also engineer, meaning set up microphones and run the recording studio equipment. It’s a vague job with boundaries that are subject to change, and perhaps worst of all there is no set pay scale.

“There are ‘A’ level producers, ‘B’ level producers, and ‘C’ level producers,” Steve Russell says. “A big-name producer at the top of the game might get $300,000 from a label to produce a record, or maybe $50,000 to produce an up-and-coming band.” But locally, here in the non-music-industry town of San Diego, Perez bills at whatever rate the market will bear. “We work with a band’s budget.”

“That’s the thing about record production in San Diego,” Russell, 48, says. “You’re the guy. Producer, engineer, tech. You’re everything. You become a producer by happenstance. It’s not a clear boundary.” Born in Odessa, Texas, the Navy delivered Russell to San Diego. “One of the first guys I produced was Eek-a-Mouse. We’d work from 10 p.m. to 10 a.m. the next day, and then I’d run across town and work on Studio West’s gear with no sleep.”

It was during that time that Russell recorded the EP that got POD signed to Atlantic Records. “I was called in to work as a tech and second engineer when they recorded their second album. Marcos [Curiel] wanted me there.” That was Russell’s connection to more and better gigs in Los Angeles — his talent for setting up guitars and amps. He demonstrates how to get a ’60s rock guitar sound: “I put a big-ass tube mic about a foot away from this speaker cabinet that has speakers from an old Vox amp in it.”

I get artists to work harder

“The process of recording just one second of music involves a million different possibilities that all have to be worked out. For example, where the snare drum is [in the mix], how it sounds, and so on.” A veteran of a local band that rose to some prominence ages ago called the Price of Dope, Ben Moore was destined for his gig as a record producer. “My dad was in the business. He was a backup singer with Joe Cocker on the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour. He wrote ‘Space Captain,’ and he lived off residuals for years.”

Moore’s not sure, otherwise, how one becomes a professional producer of records. “You have to know how music works,” he says. “And that’s a long and complex subject.” I ask him to boil it down to ten words or less. He gives me seven: “It’s whatever makes you feel good.”

In his office, which is in truth a smallish song-writing suite at Singing Serpent Recording Studios in Kensington, Moore, his hair graying, sits before an old yellow oak desk, the flat top of which has been conquered by a computer screen, keypad, and an electronic keyboard. “This is my 20th year of doing this full time,” he says. The walls are padded beige with cloth soundproofing. “There were a couple of times I thought about uprooting and moving to L.A.,” Moore says, “but I was busy here at home.”

There are large speakers on either side of the desk, a bookshelf, a framed gold record from a Switchfoot album Moore worked on, and a grouping of what might have at one time been bordello furniture — a crimson velvet antique sofa and a matching lamp shade. Within arm’s reach of Moore’s desk is a very old Hammond B3 organ. Moore, who played keys in the Styletones until that band dissolved, will turn 42 in June.

“The record producer job description changes a lot across different genres.” The gig affords the Vista-born Moore and his wife and child a home in East San Diego. “It’s not as simple as you’d think.” A hip-hop producer, for example. “He actually makes all the beats and the backing tracks.” Otherwise, Moore says, producers vary from the type that “shows up on the first day of rehearsal, gives everybody homework, and then you don’t see until after the record is finished, to the guy that stays on top of quality control. He’s there in the studio all the time, tweaks the recordings, and he may even write some of the material.”

Which type describes Ben Moore? “The latter. I show up at rehearsals, I work out the kinks in the songs, and I get the artists to work harder than they ever thought they could.” The producers whose work he enjoys most? “The ones who find a way to exaggerate what’s good about an artist.”

Ego booster

“I wanted to hear some energy coming out of them. I had a goal.” Drive Like Jehu drummer Mark Trombino, 48, produced records in San Diego for more than 20 years. In the process, he made a raft of albums by artists such as Jimmy Eat World, No Knife, Finch, and more. Now the owner of a Los Angeles designer donut shop, Trombino recalls producing Dude Ranch, Blink 182’s second release. “I wanted to get intensity out of the vocals. I got Mark [Hoppus] to a place where he was almost screaming. Later, in interviews, he would say things like his voice was hoarse because he’d been smoking too much, or something, but it was from me pushing him. They didn’t like it. I loved it.” Mission accomplished, Trombino says.

“One thing that’s huge is being able to talk to musicians. To get in their heads, you know? The producer is an ego booster, a cheer leader, and a critic. It’s all about getting them to do their best work. But I’m not a people person by nature. It was hard for me in the beginning to talk to people. That was probably my Achilles heel as a producer.” He says it’s a male-dominated industry, but that he’s known of women who produced records. He doesn’t remember their names.

Trombino’s long career run in a town without a music industry was the product of luck, timing, and the right studio. “Big Fish recording studios — I don’t remember how we found this jewel in North County. I was lucky because of Big Fish and Cargo Records (now Cargo Music). There was a wealth of bands to record in San Diego, and Cargo was willing to finance them. I was really lucky to be in the right place at the right time.”

“I’ve never told a band they sucked”

Christopher Hoffee

Before Christopher Hoffee joined the Truckee Brothers, he was a member of Blacksmith Union during the ’90s. “We got signed to Capitol Records, and then we immediately broke up. Why? Because we were about to get money.” He laughs. “And you know bands can’t have money.” He’s been recording bands since the ’80s, says he now works out of the 105-year-old Escondido farmhouse in which he and his wife and their dog reside.

“Art is an opinion. And it’s very dangerous to have an opinion about an artist. If it’s really good art, you shouldn’t like it right away. Instant happiness means it’s commercial. As an artist, we’re supposed to illuminate and inspire, which may not start out as an incredible love affair.”

That said, Hoffee’s been known to send a band home to rehearse more before recording. “I want to believe what I hear. It doesn’t have to be the greatest performance, but at least I want to believe there’s honesty and some kind of connection with an audience. I spend a lot of time with young artists, for example, reminding them of what a singer’s job is. No, it’s not to hold a note or look a certain way. The job is to tell a story.” The vaunted jazz singer Billie Holliday, for example. “Not the best tone, but you believed every word she sang.” He pauses, as if considering how to proceed, then says, “If I don’t believe you, then what are we doing here?”

Hoffee is his own recording engineer as well as being the session producer. “This is all I do. Mostly hometown artists. It’s all word of mouth.” The needs vary. “Some artists need help with the song writing, or singing backup, or just recording. I like to be whatever they need me to be. But when you talk to people, they need labels. Producing is such a vague term. In film, a producer is not the same as in music. And even in music, it’s not what it used to be. Digital has given a lot more people the power to engineer their own thing. Now, engineers make artistic choices no engineer should make. His job is to make the band sound good, not comping your vocal, for example.” Comping? “Taking several parts from different performances and editing it into a single performance. That’s a best-of, and it doesn’t make sense. If I hear more than two or three problems in a recording, then I say we do another take.”

The biggest sociological change that the advent of digital technology has brought to mainstream pop music? “What is considered talent now would have not made it to the audition in years past. A filter is a good thing. Think about it — if there was an art gallery where they displayed anything for a fee of $20, I don’t think I’d like that gallery.”

He talks about the importance of the editor, or the art critic, or in this case, the record producer. “Just because you can make it doesn’t mean it should be there.”