24 HEADLINER
(LINKIN PARK)
Q&A
MIXING LINKIN PARK AFTER STARTING OUT IN THE STUDIO AS A RUNNER, KEN ‘POOCH’ VAN DRUTEN WENT ON TO PLENTY OF BIGGER AND BETTER THINGS, AVOIDING A FEW BULLETS ALONG THE WAY (LITERALLY)! HIS ANALOGUE BEGINNINGS LED TO SOME MULTI-PLATINUM CREDITS, AND THEN HE CAME TO AN AUDIO CROSSROADS, EVENTUALLY CHOOSING THE LIVE SOUND PATH, WHICH HAS SEEN HIM FORGE A FANTASTIC RELATIONSHIP AND STATE-OF-THE-ART SETUP WITH US ROCK GIANTS, LINKIN PARK... WORDS PAUL WATSON PHOTOGRAPHS THOMAS RABSCH
You had an interesting start to your musical career... Yeah, I went to Berklee College of Music in Boston, although I’d had some experience in the studio as a musician beforehand. I’d spent a bunch of time watching the recording engineer and producer and realised I wanted to do that. In my first semester, I went to the local studio and asked to work for free; I started as a runner, and by the time I was a senior, I was head engineer at that studio, which was called Blueberry Sound. I ended up doing some projects there that were pretty good, then moved to LA to start a career as a recording engineer; I worked there for four years, and did some good records. I worked for a band called Tony Tony Tony that went multi-platinum, and it was the start of the rap sensation - the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I was a musician, and ended up working with artists... When I say that, I mean gangsters, really! They’d show up and have a couple of lyrics written down, but wanted me to create their entire music. It was a little screwed up, really, a couple of gang members turning up and saying, ‘hey, white boy, make us a beat!’ Sounds pretty intimidating to me... Yeah! I’d spent some time working with an Akai MPC 60, making beats for rap records that then sold huge amounts, but I was only credited as
engineer on it, so I got disheartened. I was working at Paramount in Hollywood, and the booker was having to make sure that they weren’t booking the Crips in one studio and the Bloods in the other... Seriously! They were worried about gun battles passing in the hallway! Then I started to work with a couple of the ‘hair bands’ that were still around - metal bands like Warrant, Slaughter, and Firehouse; and I ended up doing a demo with Warrant. They had a hit called Cherry Pie, and then literally out of the blue one night they said, ‘hey, we fired our FOH guy, and tomorrow we’re playing the LA forum, and wondered if you want to mix us?’ And to that point, I had never mixed a live show, not even in a club; it had always been recording and producing. But I agreed to it, and the next day, there I was in front of 10,000 people mixing a Warrant show... That sounds even more intimidating! [laughs] Yeah, but it went OK; and what I got out of it was that feeling of gratification with that many people screaming! From that point, I never looked back, and that’s what took me into live sound. Your experience in the studio isn’t so easy for youngsters to obtain now, due to the easy-access Mac and DAW setups of today...