Interview by Paul Vnuk Jr.
Michael Whalen is a two-time Emmy® Award-winning (among a host of other awards and nominations) composer, producer and recording artist known for extensive soundtrack work in film and television.
Michael has also released 46 diverse instrumental albums, including his latest, the beautifully stunning Watercolor Sky (2024), which features contributions from Mark Isham (trumpet and flugelhorn), Michael Manring (bass), Nancy Rumbel (oboe and English horn), Will Ackerman (guitar) and Charlie Bisharat (violin).
Michael is also a respected synth/keyboard guru who works out of his private studio on an island in the middle of Jamaica Bay, in New York City.
How did you get into the music business?
I was banging on my mother’s piano when I was about three and a half, and I started playing drums when I was five. At a certain point in my early teens, there was a crossover. I played a lot of percussion in orchestras and was really into mallets, and I realized I could translate that [note-wise] to a keyboard. So suddenly, I made the jump from percussionist/drummer to keyboards.
How did you get into technology and recording?
When I was 14, I made an audition tape to get into the Interlochen Center for the Arts. It was a multi-track instrumental, where I played all of the parts, which was, as you know, a big deal in 1980.
I did the drum part first, then added the keyboards, and I did the synth bass. I had my first synthesizer, an ARP Omni 2, a Rhodes and a piano. I remember the director of Interlochen calling me and saying, “Have you ever done anything in the studio before?” I was like, “No, I’m 14.”
When I was 15, I got my first job at a recording studio in Bethesda, Maryland, called JRB Sound Studios, which is no longer there, but I got an internship with the guy who owned the studio, John Burr. John walked me through the real basics of a studio—here’s what a tape machine does, what a mixing board does, what a microphone does, how you coil a cable and all that stuff.
It was very old school—essentially, here’s how you record things. He would have me mic things, and we would talk about why this microphone was better than that microphone. The biggest thing I learned from John was a healthy “distance” about EQ.
A “distance” about EQ?
He taught me to be very careful with EQ and that proper microphone placement is the best EQ, and a lot of those lessons have stayed with me for the 40 years of my professional career.
How did you get involved in commercial/soundtrack work?
At the same time, I was working at JRB in the keyboard room at Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center, which is still a great music store.
A guy from the local NBC affiliate, WRC, heard me playing and said the station wanted a synthesizer arrangement of the new theme that John Williams had just written for NBC News. He wanted to know if I could do it. I really had no idea what he wanted, but of course, I said “Yes.”
So, my first professional job was arranging this John Williams theme with my synthesizers and multi-track cassette tape deck. They were thrilled with it, and it went right on the air. They paid me $500, which I thought was all the money in the world—especially in the early 1980s.
Having all this stuff happen within a year of each other when I was still in high school was life changing for me, and I knew I wanted to do it professionally. Eventually, I worked my way into an entry-level commercial music job in New York.
So, in many cases, it sounds like you were at the right place at the right time.
Being in the right place at the right time is important, but you also need to possess the talent, skill or whatever got you there.
I ran a record company for two years, and people are like, “Wow, how did you go through all those demos?” It was easy because the really good stuff was so much better than everything else, while 99.9% of it was terrible.
So when you get an opportunity, you’ve got to have your act together. You’ve got to be ready to go. That’s a preparation thing, a training thing and most of all, a mental attitude thing.
I’ve worked with many interns over the years, and I think what takes a lot of people out of the business is their attitude. They go in with a sense of, “Aren’t you just so grateful that I’m here and you get to work with me?” And I’m like, “No, not really. You don’t really know anything, and you’re not really valuable to me until, you know, some stuff.” You can be confident, but you need to be willing to learn and ready to jump at opportunities when they come up.
When I started working at an entry-level job in New York City, I did not go to sleep for two years. I listened to what people were saying to me and to each other. The good part was that I got to do so much music in those first two years.
So you were composing and scoring as well as engineering?
My boss at the time, Jonathan Elias, was at this very interesting intersection of doing advertising music, film music, TV stuff and being a record producer. He produced a Duran Duran album. He produced a Grace Jones album while I was there. He did three or four feature films, where I got to work on some of the cues. He was doing stuff all the time; and I helped wherever I could. Plus, during the day, I was either doing my own music or working with other composers on stuff they were doing—it was just insane.
What is TV scoring like now, especially in the era of Netflix and Hulu, where a whole series might drop in a day versus weekly episodes?
It’s closer to film now because even though things are cut up into episodes, essentially, you’re looking at one project that you produce over an extended time frame. In the old days of series television, you’d get something on a Wednesday, and you’d have to deliver it on a Sunday, and then it would happen all over again, and again and again.
The editors would get you the picture, then you’d spot it, and then there’d be fixes. Then you’d get a “locked” or final version of the picture, which would get locked again repeatedly over the next two to three days, so you are forced to reconform all of your music on Friday and Saturday night. And then by the time you get to delivery, there’s probably another last minute change. So you’ve probably spotted it, reconformed it two or three times, and delivered it at least once, probably twice. And then you get to do it again. Remember, in the regular network days, a series was 23 episodes. Nowadays, how series are done all at once gives you more time.
In addition to all of your soundtrack work over the years, you also release your own albums, the most recent of which is Watercolor Sky. In the past, you have released classical solo piano albums, ECM-esque modern jazz albums and smooth electronic-style excursions. Your latest is squarely in the New Age category, which is a genre many of your early releases fell into.
My first commercially released recording was in 1993. I had done the soundtrack for a big PBS series called Sea Power: A Global Journey. I convinced the nice people at Narada Records—a New Age label that was a huge genre in the mid ‘90s—to release it, and it worked in that world, sort of.
At the same time, Hans Zimmer and a few others had also released scores on Narada, and we were all trying to figure out the lines between a film score and New Age. Today, the category “New Age” doesn’t exist on all streaming platforms as far as what you can enter for metadata.
We live in a weird world now with so many genres, yet so much music does not necessarily subscribe to any specific genre. Until the past 10 or 15 years, genres were more about how and where to sell music and which audience might listen to it or how to talk about it as a journalist.
Today, people are actually using music, and I’m using that very distinctively—using music. They’re not listening to music. I have music to drive to, music to fall asleep to, and music to hang out with my wife on a weekend.
Now, music becomes about the activities that frame your life.
The GRAMMYs still use the term because you’ve got all these categories, and somehow, all these categories have to make sense to somebody.
Sometimes, especially these days, describing something as a genre can be almost more misleading than simply talking about what sort of visceral emotional thing you get from this or that music and why you like it.
I think that is a more valid way of describing music than, “Here is one of the 93 categories that the GRAMMYs or Spotify are doing this year.”
What about when you are composing or conceiving the music? Do you have a genre or style in mind?
That said, Watercolor Sky was written and conceived using New Age music from the 1980s as my guide. [Both laugh]
In the ‘80s, the Windham Hill Record label was my jam—so was ECM and a few other things—but Windham Hill Records was my favorite. So not only did I do this record with that style in mind, but I got five people from that time period and even that label who were incredibly important to me in terms of my own development to play on it.
So, it is similar to your album Our April Tigers, which I think is your most ECM-influenced and has some actual ECM players on it?
Yes, on that album, Michael Brook played guitar, Michael Manring played bass, Jeff Oster was on flugelhorn and trumpet, and Karsh Kale played percussion and samples.
How do you craft, compose and collaborate on albums like these, especially when most of it is done remotely with people working in their own studios?
You will notice that most of the people I work with, whether it’s Watercolor Sky or Our April Tigers, or whatever, in almost 99% of the cases, the people I’m working with are also composers.
I’m having a conversation with them as a composer. Our April Tigers was written by five people. Sure, it was my album. I had the initial ideas, and I started the tracks; I hired everybody, and I mixed it. However, each player brought a lot to that project, especially regarding the music.
I wanna work with people who are going to carry the water creatively. I am very specific about my expectations on a project, but I don’t tell anyone what to play.
To be more specific, on Watercolor Sky, I had a really good idea of what I wanted, so I am not necessarily co-composing with people, but I really wanted that player to do what that player does. To paraphrase Quincy Jones: a good producer hires great players and lets them do what they do.
I think a lot of producers today hit the wall when they hire somebody but don’t really know who they’re hiring and what that player does. Then, they spend the whole time trying to finesse or shape that player’s performance the way the producer wants it versus letting that player’s organic expression come through. You’ve gotta let the player be the player.
That was certainly the case with Mark Isham. I mean, the guy is working on four TV shows at once and other projects. I can’t even believe that he made time to even play on the record, but I was absolutely sure in my mind that he was the guy that I heard on this project. He heard the tracks and heard himself on it, too. He was like, “Oh yeah, I got this.” It wasn’t simply a session gig because he knew that I wanted him to be him.
How does that idea fit within your own playing?
People always ask me why I don’t play on more of other people’s stuff. The reason is that people will call and say, “Hey, do you wanna play on this?” And I’m like, “What do you want? Do you want Michael Whalen, or do you want someone who plays the piano? If you want a pianist, I can think of 30 other people who play the piano better than I do. But if you want me to be me, I’m the guy.”
I think it’s very important to be in a situation where the people working together have mutual respect for each other and what they bring to the table musically.
You also need to let yourself be willing to be shocked and surprised by whatever this person will bring to your project—something that is over and above whatever you think you are going to get.
I think it’s interesting how you conceptually balance your roles of composer, player and producer, even within a single project.
I’ve worked with many great people in the studio and watched many great producers. The best producers always create an environment for people to do their best performances as an authentic expression of themselves, not as something that reflects on the producer but on the artist.
Then, as an artist and composer, going back to something like Our April Tigers, even though it’s my record, it’s five players with a composer mindset who made the record possible. As the artist, when I hear it, it’s not 100% me with some session players. It’s not five people who each gave 20% to the record. There is one hundred percent of me on this record, along with four other really amazing people, and there is one hundred percent of each of them on this record, too.
While that album was done entirely remotely, I’m seriously considering making another record like that in 2026, but this time with the five of us in a room together
—ECM Style.
I can’t wait to hear that! Let’s talk gear. What DAW do you compose and record in?
I am a Logic guy. For a long time, especially in the pre-DAW era, I was a Synclavier guy, but eventually, after the company folded, there just weren’t enough spare parts to keep them running.
In the early 2000s, I switched to Pro Tools as a sequencer, which was…I did that for a little while, and I could not get out of that fast enough. Then, when I was teaching at the City College of New York, the school was using Logic (pre-Apple). So I played around with it, and one of my colleagues said, “You know, there’s a weekend course in Logic; you should go do it.”
So, I signed up for it and was the only person in the class. It was me and an instructor for three days. It’s the best money I have ever spent in my life. I learned Logic inside and out. I have stuck with it through all the changes and haven’t looked back.
What do you use for your audio interface?
I use an SSL 12 USB audio interface. It works great and is really transparent.
So, obviously, you are a synth freak of the highest order—I’ve seen the pictures. [Both Laugh]
I will totally own that, but right now, I am at the end of a large, shall we say de-escalation. At one point a few months ago, I had 22 Synthesizers, and now I have six.
Woah! Michael, are you ok?
[Laughs] Believe it or not, for most of the stuff that I’m currently working on, I’m using plugins. I am a big Cherry Audio guy. As you know, I have heard and played the originals, and I think that they do fantastic stuff. It sounds great—really well done.
Are you a tweak-a-preset guy, or do you roll your own?
I spend a lot of time in pre-production before I start an album, and 90% of that time is spent making sounds. I make sounds with the idea of, “What is the world, the environment, the universe that I’m creating in this album?”
If you listen to an album like Imaginary Trains or Sacred Spaces—two big electronic records—I started with hundreds and hundreds of new original sounds before I sat down and even wrote a note of music. I’m kind of a lunatic pre-preparation person.
You are like an artist, choosing your colors and laying out your brushes before a drop of paint hits the canvas.
I think a lot of that has to do with my advertising background because, in that world, you can’t work fast and efficiently and not be organized. So when I do my records, I bring a little bit of that sensibility because when it’s time to play and record, I don’t want to be sitting there going, “Well, if I just tweak this a little more…” In that case, I could be tweaking that sound for the next six months.
So, what about your hardware synths? Do you still get excited about new technology?
It would be really hard for another new hardware synthesizer to come into this room right now. It would have to be like the “second coming…” because I’ve already owned and played so many.
I’ve had all of the famous analog synths and samplers, a Schmidt, and a Waldorf Wave, which might be the best digital synthesizer I’ve ever owned.
It’s a plugin now.
I know; they did a nice job with that plugin. I’m a Yamaha artist, a Casio artist, and a Cherry Audio artist. I got a Yamaha Montage M8x, and I have to say that it’s one of Yamaha’s best synthesizers they have ever made. Period. End of story. The analog modeling stuff in it is “redonculous,” and the DX implementation is stellar. I’m saying this as a guy who is a DX-Jedi. I still have my vintage Yamaha DX 1.
I have a reissue Minimoog Model D from 2022. I think it’s the best Minimoog Moog has ever made. I also have a Sequential Prophet-5 reissue and the Waldorf Quantum MK2, which is a phenomenal synthesizer. Then I have the Korg KingKORG NEO, which I like the vocoder on.
The bottom line is that I’ve got plugins that can cover so much ground that if you’re hardware in this room, you’ve earned your spot here.
What do you monitor on?
I have Dynaudio Core 7 monitors. I love these monitors. I’m about to sound like an old guy, so please forgive me, but I don’t listen very loudly. All I want from a monitor is for it to be clean and neutral and not be “barking” at me, and the Core 7 just sounds great.
Do you have any mics or do any acoustic recording at your studio?
I have a Neumann U87 and a Neumann TLM-103 that I will use for an occasional overdub. Since I started as a drummer, I have had a Yamaha Electric kit. Then I have a bunch of acoustic percussion, which all showed up on Watercolor Sky. So that’s about as far as I go with acoustic recording at home.
Do you have any final thoughts?
Over the years, I’ve been a player, a synthesist, a sound designer, an audio engineer and a producer, but at the end of the day, I’m a composer. I am listening as a composer. I’m mixing as a composer. When I go into the studio and work with other people I work with, I’m a composer.
No matter whom I am working with, whether it’s a client or somebody I’m collaborating with, I’m always thinking about how we can improve the thing we’re creating.
Michael, this has been great!
Thank you, Paul, much appreciated.
If you enjoyed this interview with Michael, there is more! Join us starting November 1 at the RECORDING Magazine Forum hosted by the Music Player Network, where Michael will be a guest moderator answering your questions for the month. We hope to see you there.
forums.musicplayer.com/forum/51-recording-magazine-the-forum
For more on Michael Whalen and his music, check out:
Website: michaelwhalen.com
Link to “Watercolor Sky” Album: tr.ee/Uo4Kd3fxpm
Making of “Watercolor Sky” Video: youtu.be/l8-ykwnjmHQ