This interview Copyright 1994 by Experience Music and Mike Myers

Mike's most recent release, Sonic Frontiers, is a diverse and very personal collection recorded with painstaking care and exhibiting a subdued confidence that makes the difficult sound effortless and the exotic sound comfortably familiar. Here's how he put it together:

Rumor has it that you teach music for a living?

I'm assistant band director at a public high school in Mesquite where my main job is teaching percussion. I've received bachelor's and master's degrees in music education. I also teach private percussion lessons, adjudicate, conduct clinics, perform professionally and write percussion music. I've been playing for 26 years and have performed with everything from a symphony orchestra to a polka band.

Your compositions are pretty eclectic. The synth tones are very "Wave-friendly", but with more punch than most AC format tunes. Where do you draw your inspiration from?

Anytime I discuss my musical heroes with my teenage students, I get lots of blank stares! My major influences include ELP, Zappa, The Doobie Brothers, Gino Vannelli, Kansas, Triumvirat, Steely Dan, The Dregs, Pat Metheney, Chick Corea, Weather Report, The Brecker Brothers, Yes and Jethro Tull. A Wave-type station in Dallas refused to play my album because "it has a little too much edge to it." I want to distance myself from "Jazz Lite" not to put down any other musicians or styles, but a lot of that music is just too "nice". Everything's in 4/4, all major keys, repetitious chord progressions and no dissonance. Like everyone else, I write what I hear and I also draw heavily on what I listened to growing up. One of the disadvantages I have is I've created a style which is hard to categorize. Some stores here in Dallas have stocked my disc in the rock section, others in the jazz section, and others in the New Age section...I'm not complaining as long as they keep me out the Country bins!

Are the mixed meters a challenge?

I don't intentionally set out to write something in atypical meters. Instead, I just write down the musical ideas that are in my head with whatever the time signature happens to be. One of the freedoms that I have with my original music is it doesn't have to fit into a certain niche. To me there's nothing "odd" about atypical time signatures; on the contrary, it seems odd to me to play everything in 4/4! As a listener, I enjoy music which goes in a different direction that I am expecting. The only rule I go by in my solo work is, there has to be some dissonance somewhere.

Your drums have great presence and separation.

I spend ridiculous hours fine tuning drum and percussion sounds. My sound took a big leap forward when I finally got the right combination of equipment and effects. The type of wood makes a huge difference in sound. I'm presently playing birch Yamaha Recording Custom drums, using Beyerdynamic Percussion Group mics, a Soundcraft Spirit console, DBX compressor/gates, BBE Sonic Maximizer and Alesis Midiverbs. All of the tunes started as MIDI sequences with drum machine parts, which were replaced with live drums on the final versions. The music went from sounding like machines playing notes to a real band: it's sort of my signature touch. I recorded the drums onto 6 tracks of an analog Teac 8-track, with the bass and snare on separate tracks and the cymbals and toms grouped on different tracks in stereo, giving me more processing control. Since I am more a player/composer than an engineer, I owe a lot of credit to Jon Early for the drum sounds and overall recording. Jon is a professional engineer/producer in the Dallas area, and we had many meetings about drum sounds, eq, etc.

Nothing gets lost in the mix, which is a real trick when you're combing MIDI tracks with live instruments. What can you recommend to other musicians for obtaining a high-quality mix?

Taking your time and really doing it right. I work for as long as time will permit, which usually ranges from a few minutes to all day and night! I never make a final judgment on a mix until I've slept on it for at least one night. Get the mix sounding good, then get away from it for 8 to 12 hours and then come back to it. It it still sounds good, then you've probably got your final mix. I am confident that professional recordings can now be made in a home studio. There are a bunch of guys with great home studios who don't know how to use all their stuff. I owe a lot of my success to the time I have spent with a competent engineer in my own studio, and I highly recommend that to any serious home studio musician. The money that it costs you is very much worth it in the end when you have a truly professional sounding musical product. Jon Early also took all my mixes and smoothed everything out in terms of volume and eq. This made the album come together as one fluid piece of work. I will definitely go this same route on my next project, Myriad, which will be out in 1995.