John O’Mahony on iconic New York studios, Atmos and AI.

For over two decades, John O’Mahony has been shaping the sound of diverse and exciting artists. A renowned mixing engineer, born and raised in Cork, Ireland, O’Mahony’s early obsession with music led him from recording his band’s demos, to working in local studios and then to the heart of New York’s legendary recording scene, working his way up from tape op to in-demand mixer, engineer and producer. Sitting down with Headliner, he talks about his journey from Ireland to New York, the addition of Atmos to his workflow and his thoughts about the use of AI in music production. We also take a closer look at his recent work with artists like Matt Maeson, BANKS, Anna Graves and MS MR...

Can you tell us a little about your background and what initially sparked your interest in music and mixing?

I grew up in Cork City in the south of Ireland, and as a teenager, I just got super into music. I was quite lucky because there was a big music scene in Cork in the 90s. There must have been like, 50 bands in town, acts like the Sultans of Ping FC or The Frank and Walters, all playing shows so, it was really fun and everybody was obsessed with music. That's how I ended up playing in bands.

I discovered pretty quickly that I actually had more fun playing with the pedals and the gear, than I did playing the guitar. So I bought a four-track and started doing demos for my own band, and ended up doing demos for friends' bands. Fairly soon after that, I started as a tape op in a studio in Cork and spent a little bit of time there, and then I moved on to another studio.

Did you study formally, or did you get your education in studios?

I left school when was 16 because I wasn't interested and I didn't feel engaged in it, I guess. I was excited about other things. Also, back then, it wasn't too uncommon for people to leave school early and go off and chase their careers. Plus, we didn’t have an audio school in Ireland - I would have had to move to the States, or the UK, Amsterdam or somewhere like that to go to audio school, and that wasn't a possibility for me at the time. So I just got a job in the studio, and I remember that on the first day, I had to clean an oven…

I was like, ‘wow, I wonder if this is what I think it's going to be’, but we got past that, and now I know how to run a studio AND clean an oven, which comes in very handy.

It was a great studio though. The owner, Dennis Herlihy - my boss at the time, who got me going as an engineer - also did a lot of touring working front of house and tour managing Donovan Leitch, so he would disappear for months, and would just give me the keys for the studio and say, “Okay, you’ve gotta book it, you gotta run it, you gotta engineer, you gotta clean it, you gotta collect the money…”, so I had to do everything in this small, 24-track studio, and it was a great education. I think a lot of what I learned then still is relevant today.

So how did you end up in New York?

And at some point, I just realised that I was sitting there making demos for bands who would ultimately go off to London, New York or Los Angeles, to actually make a record. So I thought, rather than being the guy here who's shipping bands off, I want to be on the other end, receiving bands who are about to make a record.

The background piece to this is that in the early 90s, there was a show at a then-famous venue in Cork, called Sir Henry's where a New York band called Sonic Youth were playing, and we went to see them. The opening act for the show was a little-known band called Nirvana, about a month before the release of Nevermind.

The show was just one of those legendary local nights that blew everybody away, and I thought, ‘OK, wherever that comes from, is where I want to be.’ So I kind of became obsessed with New York, and read all the books I could find on the New York music scene, watched all the documentaries I could find, and made it my mission to get to New York. So when I was old enough, knowing that I needed to go to a bigger marketplace, and having that love for New York, I just took the dive and got on a plane.

How old would you have been at that point?

It was just a few weeks after my 22nd birthday. I had come here on an exploration mission the year before, when I was 21 and could get into bars there, you know - those things were important at that age. I came for three weeks on my own and just explored the city. I walked everywhere, went to all these places, all the museums, everything, and instantly fell in love, and four months later I was back with my first visa in my hand.

I just walked all around town and hand-delivered resumes to every studio I could find. This was 1998, so things were very different back then. There wasn't a lot of home recording going on, it was pre-ProTools, and so there were lots of studios in town. I must have handed out 20 resumes, and I got 20 interviews and 20 job offers. Which, when I tell that to young people looking for a start in the industry today, sounds crazy, but that's what it was like back then.

So I took a job at Chung King Studios in Tribeca. It seemed a little crazy, but I like the vibe. It was very diverse. There were people from all over the world working there, different countries and different backgrounds - which is what I love the most about New York. It’s so multicultural compared to where I grew up. There were five rooms there with two Neve VRs, a Neve Capricorn, an SSL and a Euphonix, so I thought it would be a cool place to learn all those machines. And I just dived straight in, and it was completely insane, but fun.

By 2001, I’d gone freelance and was floating around the country - New York, LA, sometimes coming back to Europe, and then I worked for five years with a legendary producer and mixer called Andy Wallace. Eventually, in 2009 I went full-time out on my own and I started doing all of my work at Electric Lady Studios as a client booking their rooms. In 2011, they offered to build me my own little room so that I could set up a permanent residence there. So they took some old office spaces and made a really nice studio and I moved all of my gear into there. I was there for about eight years.

What I loved about Electric Lady was that it was kind of the last place standing in New York that had that multi-room thing where you'd walk down the hallway and bump into someone unexpectedly. You might walk past David Bowie on the stairs and say hello, or you'd swap ‘war stories’ with the other engineers as you popped out for a coffee. But there were also other great people in residence there during that time too, like Rich Costey, who I'm still friends with. Michael Brauer, Tom Elmhirst - both also there for a long time, but everybody's now since moved on.

I could have stayed there forever if left to my own devices, but you have to evaluate your business. And with New York studios, it’s just a real estate game. It's so expensive that those places have to be booked 24/7 just to keep going. So after a long time there, I said a sad goodbye and I found a space that was just one block from my apartment in Dumbo, Brooklyn. It was ideal.

I called up my friend Jim Keller, who runs a company called SondHus, which builds very bespoke, one-off studios, depending on the client's needs and the aesthetic. We put our heads together and we figured out a way to make this small room work for me. After three months or so of construction, I moved everything in and the first thing I mixed in here was an album for The Cribs. Just after I got settled in, the pandemic hit, and I felt extremely lucky that I had a studio that was near home, that was private, and that I could lock myself into and not lose a day of work during that time.

Your studio looks like a great space! Can you talk us through the gear that you've got in there?

I’ve got a Neve Genesys, which I got back in 2011, I was one of the earlier adopters of it. And I still love it. I can't imagine ever not having this thing right in front of me. It's the centrepiece of everything I've done. When I left Electric Lady, it was the first time I’d had to move it from one studio to another, so I may as well have been carrying a Faberge egg down Broadway. I was just so worried about it. Jim actually came with me to help move it, and we wrapped it up and put it in the back of this truck and drove very, very slowly over the bridge.

So the Neve is the heart of the room, and I also brought all my outboard with me, but I've been downsizing a lot. I've been on a mission, both in life and in my studio, to minimise as much as possible. I'm always on this quest to see if I can buy one box that replaces three boxes and so forth, so I've been whittling it down and making it a leaner setup.

I’m on ProTools with 48 i/o of Apogee Symphony and the racks are filled with pieces from AMS Neve, Retro Instruments, Rupert Neve Designs, Vertigo, Elysia, API, Thermionic Culture and Crane Song. I was an early adopter of the phenomenal Magic Death Eye Compressors and Ian Sefchick has also custom built me an Equalizer and FET Compressor born out of telephone chats.

A recent addition is the Neve 1073SPX-D. The 1073 EQ has the definitive high-frequency shelf in my opinion, and the new digital interface brings fantastic connectivity options. Now when I travel, I just bring this as my main playback interface.

Inside the box Eventide, New Fangled Audio and Fab Filter do all the heavy lifting and I’ve acquired hundreds of other plug-ins. It seems every time I receive files to mix, I’ll have to buy some new plug-in the producer has in there.

I also have PMC monitors, which I’ve used for years, and some Acoustic Energy nearfields. And then a couple of years after moving in here, the big Dolby Atmos ‘goldrush’ started. So it became evident I was going to have to put an Atmos rig in, to prevent other people from butchering my work by doing Atmos versions of it. So Jim came back, we put some more speakers in and PMC came by and tuned to the room with me, and it sounds amazing.

I'm by no means an Atmos evangelist. But it’s interesting. I always felt, when people would mention Atmos in the past, it was one of those things that people talked about downstairs in the basement at the AES show, you know? But then suddenly, we found that the record companies were starting to have it done to your work and none of us were too thrilled about how that was happening. So, we thought, well, if it's going to happen, let's get ahead of it. I put the system in, and honestly, the first time I ever heard Atmos in my own room, I was like, ‘Oh wow! This is really cool’. If everybody could be in a proper, tuned Atmos room, it would be amazing.

Atmos is one technology that has shaped how you're working. But of course, AI is creeping into various aspects of music production. How do you feel about that?

Yeah, I think ‘creeping in’ is the best phrase we could use for it, right? I’m never totally against any sort of new technology. But I do have major concerns about it because everything I've seen so far is another process that just makes everybody sound the same. I think one of our major challenges in music, is that technology can take the art out of the process if we’re not careful, you know, if everybody's taking a shortcut to produce something that sounds like a record. But taste is the ultimate factor in all of this. For me, I want music to be more diverse, I don't want everybody to sound the same, and this is what happens as a result of everybody using the same plugins or the same software, tuning everything to absolute perfection.

If everybody's using the same tools all the time, and the tools are thinking the same way all the time, then everybody lands in the same spot, right? And that is problematic to me, and not at all exciting. So there's a long way to go, and in the meantime, we're probably going to get a bunch of pretty generic records.

AI tools for file management and all of those mundane tasks can be useful. if something can speed up that workflow so that it frees up your mind to be more creative, rather than being burdened by administrative tasks, then that is how AI can inadvertently, help make you more creative, right?

But it doesn't care about emotion. And I've heard people say, ‘Oh, well, you can just use it to get you going and take a shortcut’ but I remember thinking, imagine Van Gogh being like, ‘I took shortcuts to get me going. And then I just finished Starry Night’... Like, no! It has to be a journey where you wander towards something, and you get lost along the way, and you discover things. And you can't recreate that, ever. If you take art completely out of the hands of humans, there's an argument to be had.

You've worked with a diverse range of artists throughout your career. Can you talk us through some standout projects?

The artist I’ve worked with the most in recent years has been an artist on Atlantic, called Matt Maeson, who's a super-talented guy originally from Virginia. He's based out of Nashville right now, and we've mixed about 100 songs, and we're actually doing some more right now. So, he's one of the more interesting ones, and I like returning and working with the same artists a lot, you can go deeper every time.

Recently, I also worked with a cool band called MS MR. They recorded their last two singles before disbanding. I also did a bunch of mixing for BANKS before the end of last year. She made an acoustic version of one of her records, which was really fun to work on. I'd worked with her once years ago and she's super talented and has a bunch of new music coming out right now.

Noah Floersch is a new, up-and-coming artist that I’ve been working with. I’ve also been doing some tracks for Greyson Chance, Anna Graves and Timmy Skelly. So lots of different stuff.

Do you have a preferred genre? Or do you try and mix things up a little bit?

I don't really have a genre. Even at home, when I'm listening to music in my free time, I like to jump around. But there is a common thread in terms of what it is that I like. I like artists that are really engaging. It could be a solo artist and a piano, like Agnes Obel and I will hang on every word. Or it could be something like a Wet Leg record, something fresh and energetic with just the right amount of production. I’m also a huge Sonic Youth fan, so - noise, guitars, weird synths - but that leads me into electronic music and I’ll put something on by Depeche Mode, for example, because it's gripping.

I feel like I ‘jump into the ring’ with a song and I just fight with it. I do everything I can possibly think of. All rules are going out the window, and I rarely do the same thing twice. Of course, you amass experience and tools in the background that come to the forefront as you're troubleshooting or whatever, but I just keep knocking away at something. It’s like a block of marble, you’ve just got to keep chiselling. And then all of a sudden you're like, ‘Oh, it sounds good to me now’. And I don't how I got there, but it worked.

There've been records that I've been called to do before, and I haven’t really understood why it was they'd asked me to do it. But then it really worked. So I just have to trust other people's vision and understand that they’ve come to me because I won’t do what somebody else would typically do with an artist. I do things a bit differently. So it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what my ‘style’ might be and sometimes that can be hard from a ‘selling myself’ point of view, but it's just how it is.