Behind The Sound: Our Interview With Different Fur's Patrick Brown

In between practicing in the garage to playing big gigs is where most bands take some time to record. Now everyone loves a great album but most people don't really know the ins and outs of how an album is actually made. Today we are getting a rare look behind the scenes of a recording studio! We're talking to Patrick Brown, owner and sound engineer of the San Francisco-based studio Different Fur. Over the years Different Fur has worked with artists ranging from Stevie Wonder to will.i.am and Crash Kings, but no matter who the artist is we found the perspective of the person in charge of "getting it done" quite enlightening.

Can you tell me a little of the history of Different Fur Studios?
Different Fur was founded around 1968 by a guy named Patrick Gleeson who was known as kind of a synthesizer pioneer. He was one of the first Moog [synthesizers] authorized people, like in production services outside of Moog, and he was a synth collector as well and a crazy guy. Because of that he had a lot of people fly out to work with him which was sort of how Different Fur was founded. Originally it was founded at a... like hippie commune for him and his wife and another guy and his wife, that it turned into a recording studio because so many people were flying out to work with him on music. So they built the place, they actually built the place by hand, using drawings from somebody else. Yeah, so for a long time they did a lot of records. They did the Apocalypse Now score there, I think he did all himself. A lot of the early Herbie Hancock, I think he did three records, [such as] Headhunters and Sextant. A lot of stuff like that; he did a lot of development solo projects. One project that's really funny, he did a copy of all the songs from Star Wars all in synth form. Pretty hilarious.

But he was one of those guys, kind of one of those early pioneers and sort of a jazz type musician. And he's still around, I think he just had his 81st birthday. Eventually he passed the studio on to Howard Johnston who had it in the years that most people know it from. The years where they did Stevie Wonder, a lot of Joe Satriani, and Earth, Wind and Fire. There were a lot of celesta records at the end of Patrick Gleeson's era and the beginning of Howard's era. Because of where they were in the Mission [district], because of where we are in the Mission, it's sort of a weird location for something that's over 40 years old. At the time it was mainly sort of a residential and warehouse neighborhood. But I actually had a conversation with Patrick Gleeson where I was saying, "Oh, our neighborhood is changing so much. You had such great foresight to put us in this spot," and he actually said that it's come up a few times in the history of the place, so the location has worked out really well. Being kind of a group of non-bigoted people, being close to the Castro during the disco era, we made a lot of disco records because of it.