If Steven Wilson did nothing with his career besides form Porcupine Tree, he’d still go down in music history as the leader of arguably the greatest prog rock band of the 1990s and 2000s. And the innovative solo work that followed only solidified his reputation, earning him a substantial cult following that allows him to tour all across the planet.
But Wilson’s life took a very unexpected detour a little over 15 years ago, when he began remixing classic albums by heavyweight rock acts like the Who, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, and King Crimson. It didn’t take him long to become one of the most acclaimed remixers in the industry, creating new stereo, 5:15 surround, and Atmos mixes for some of the most beloved albums in rock history.
He’s become so popular in the audiophile community that Yes even advertised the new editions of their classic Seventies albums as “The Steven Wilson Remixes” and placed his name prominently on all the packaging.
There’s never a moment where he’s not working on multiple remix projects at once, and he manages to do this while making new records on his own and with a reunited Porcupine Tree. “I’ve always liked to have lots of balls up in the air simultaneously,” Wilson tells Rolling Stone via Zoom from a hotel room in São Paulo, Brazil. “I get bored quickly. And it really doesn’t feel like a job sometimes when you’re being asked to do these remix projects. It’s been such a privilege and such a joy, and I’ve learned so much from doing it.”
The seeds of Wilson’s interest in remix work were planted back in 2002, when his label commissioned veteran music producer Elliot Scheiner to create a 5:1 remix of a new Porcupine Tree record. “I didn’t really like it,” Wilson says. “And it wasn’t because Elliot hadn’t done a good job, it’s just because I’m a control freak, and he hadn’t done it the way I would have done it. I called up my manager, and I said, ‘Look, is there any way I can fly over to New York and sit with Elliot and just make a few changes?'”
Sitting alongside Scheiner in the studio and observing the process, Wilson knew he’d found his calling. “I thought to myself, ‘This is amazing,'” he says. “I fell in love with the whole notion at that point of immersive spatial audio. I flew home, set myself up, started doing it for my own projects. And within a couple of years, I started to get Grammy nominations.”
To music fans not immersed in the technicalities of music production, there might seem to be little distinction beyond a remaster and a remix. But they’re actually quite different. Remastering started in the Nineties, when record labels attempted to improve the sound of older albums on CD.
“That’s taking the original stereo mix, presumably from an analog tape, and basically just trying to make it sound a bit more impressive,” says Wilson, “maybe adding a little bit more treble to it, a little more bottom into it, using the best possible analog to digital converters. But essentially it’s the original mix. You’re not changing anything in the sonic signature of the original stereo mix. It might just sound a bit more clear. There might be a bit more bottom end, a bit more air around the instruments if it’s been done well.”
A remix is something very different. “That means going back to the original multi-track tape,” says Wilson. “So essentially what you have there is each instrument discretely recorded. As the remixer, you are able to isolate everything from the bass drum, to each backing vocal part, to each acoustic guitar part, to each guitar part, to each bass. You’re able to essentially start to rebuild the mix from scratch.”
This involves making all sorts of very delicate decisions. “The advantage there is being able to use a lot of modern tools to deal with things like tape hiss, hum, audio anomalies, and to try to get more clarity around the instruments,” Wilson says. “The downside of that is that the fans of those albums have been listening to them for sometimes decades. And they will hear at a moment’s notice if something feels slightly off, if the reverb tail is a little bit too short, or you’ve used the wrong take of the backing vocal on the third verse. So this is a very, very delicate tightrope to walk.”
After all these years, Wilson has become an expert when it comes to walking that tightrope. We spoke with him about eight of his most memorable remixes to learn more about his process.
King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King
That was an interesting one because it was recorded on eight-track, but they had the original session reels, too. The work process of that album was guitar, bass, and drums would go down onto an eight-track tape. That means bass drum, snare drum, stereo drum mix, bass guitar, mono, and a couple of guitar parts. So it would fill up seven tracks on an eight-track tape. They would then mix that onto a single mono track or a stereo channel on a second eight-track tape. So now we have a situation where we have an eight-track tape where the drums, bass, and the guitar are on just two tracks on an eight-track tape. So we’ve got six channels we can still fill. And then they would go on to fill those channels with the Mellotron parts, the wind parts, and the lead vocal parts.
The fact that they still had those original drum, bass, guitar session reels meant that I was able to resynchronize those with the reduction reels and create for myself something like a 13- or 14-channel session. It also meant that for the first time ever, the drums, bass, and guitar were being heard as first generation in a mix.
It’s very unusual to actually have access to the original pre-bounced rhythm-track session reels to be able to resynchronize them. It was quite a painful process because no two analog tapes ever run at the same speed. So basically you are having to constantly adjust the speed of the second reel. But over a very long painstaking process, I was able to create a 13-, 14-channel session mix, which meant I had a lot more separation, a lot more control over where I could place the bass, the guitar, and the drums apart from each other. Because every mix you’ve ever heard before [of this album], they’ve been basically just a mono bounce. So they were always in the same place. Working in Atmos now, I was able to start to move those things out. And we got back a generation of audio bounce having not had to use the reduction version of those instruments on the second reel. So that was a really interesting experiment.
Yes, Fragile
That was a 16-track recording. It’s interesting, you can almost guess from the year what the multi-track’s going to be. So if you say to me, okay, Fragile, recorded in 1971, I can be pretty sure it’s going to be a 16-track recording. And it was. But you know what? It’s still essentially the sound of a band playing live in the studio when you listen to a record like that. And there are overdubs, of course there are overdubs, and there is a complexity to the way the album is produced.
But essentially any record still made throughout the 1970s, that one included, you’re still listening to bands recording a live performance in the studio. And they’ll record it, in the case of Yes, 50 or 60 times before they say that’s the one, that’s the take. And then once they’ve got that take, they’ll start to add the other elements, the backing vocals, the acoustic guitars, the sound design elements. But essentially, it’s still a fairly economically recorded album.
It’s also a very dry album. The drum sound is very dry, very upfront. That’s the Bill Bruford sound. So there’s not a lot of additional reverb added. This is the big change going from the Seventies into the Eighties, I would say. The amount of processing and reverberation in the Seventies is still relatively minimal. You have a lot of dry drum sounds, a lot of dry guitar tones. And then in the Eighties, suddenly you have massive stadium reverbs added to everything.
So here’s an album just on the cusp of the new decade into the early Seventies. Sixteen-track is a relatively new thing, and this is a band that are really making use of it. They’re saying to themselves, “You know what, we’ve got these extra channels on the tape. What can we do? What complex multi-part harmonies can we add?”
The progressive movement is very interesting because it’s not only about the music, it’s also about the availability of overdubbing that suddenly comes along in a way that it wasn’t really there. I mean, obviously the Beatles were making use of overdubbing, but it’s suddenly available to all bands, the option to record it like you would when you were playing live. You can go and add a cellist part, or you can go and add a harpsichord part, or you can rent a theremin and add a theremin part. Or you could add five layers of backing vocals if you want. And I think that’s something that the progressive movement was very good in taking advantage of.
Chicago, Chicago II
What a great record. That was also a 16-track record. But it was not a particularly well-recorded record. And famously people had always said it sounded very muffled. That was really initially a commission to create a new stereo mix. In fact, the stereo mix came out way back in 2019, and the Atmos was only done relatively recently, almost as an afterthought.
But the initial commission there was to try to deal with some of the issues that had always been there on the original stereo mix, which was very… I mean, who knows why? Could have been the desk they were using. Could have been they were all stoned. Could have been they were in a rush to get back out on the road. Who knows? But certainly compared to the first album, which sounds beautiful, the second album always had a very kind of middly, quite harsh tone. Tonally, it was quite harsh. Everyone used to say that the horns sound like kazoos on that record, which is a slight overstatement. But what they were kind of getting at was that there was something that was a little bit thin, tinny, and harsh about the original stereo mix.
That was an interesting opportunity to go in and try and find a little bit more. I mean, obviously some of that is baked into the way it was recorded, but there was a lot I felt I could do, there was a lot I felt I managed to do with that record to make it shine and to bring out some of the instruments. Put some more tone into them, put some more clarity into them, put more air around the instruments. And I always loved that record. So that was a real labor of love to try and bring something new out of it.
I mean there’s the complete opposite example. It’s an incredibly beautiful record. Stephen Barncard was the engineer. He’s an amazing engineer. He also did that amazing first David Crosby solo record. These are just beautifully recorded albums.
The idea with American Beauty was to try and find a way to put the Dead into space, quite literally into space. And it’s a difficult one. I’ve just done Blues for Allah as well, which is a slightly different kettle of fish because it’s a much more impressionistic record, much more sound design, much more experimental. American Beauty isn’t really. It’s a very traditional-sounding record.
So what do you do with that? What do you do with a record like that when you’re mixing it into Dolby Atmos when you’re positioning things around the listener? The answer is that don’t do anything gimmicky. You don’t have things moving around the room. What you do is you position the listener inside the studio, inside the band as they’re performing those songs.
You may have Jerry’s guitar over there, and you may have the piano player over there. But you kind of leave those things there in that space for the duration of that piece of music. So as you sit there in the room listening to the Atmos mix, you’re in the studio while they cut that track. And it’s so beautiful, so beautiful.
The Who, Who’s Next
When I’m approaching Who’s Next, I’m trying to be as faithful as I can to the original sonic signature, the original mix, as I can. This album is an eight-track recording. We haven’t yet arrived at 16-track. So Keith Moon’s drums are mostly recorded as a mono signal. There’s not a lot I can do there. The drums are just going to have to sit where they sit. I can’t spread them out around the listener the way I might like to. So again, there are limitations kind of inherent in the fact you’re working on an eight-track recording.
But there are things added to the mix. The reverb is so fundamental on that record, the reverb on Roger’s voice, trying to get the signature of that. And what’s interesting sometimes is that nowadays there are digital emulations of almost every piece of equipment that’s ever been. And fantastic ones.
I speak to a lot of the original producers. I’ve just done the Phil Collins catalog. And I’m able to speak to Hugh Padgham, the original producer, and say, “What reverb were you using?” And he’ll say, “Oh, we were using the EMT 140, or we were using Lexicon 244,” and that information is gold to me, absolutely gold to me.
So in the case of Who’s Next, I was able to find out that they were using. They were using actual chambers. There were recording studios where they had these big rooms that were the echo chambers. But they were also using the EMT 140, a very famous vintage reverb. So a lot of my work, particularly with an album like that which is so iconic, is trying to match the reverb, the echo, the sound on the voice that makes it sound like it’s in a space. Getting that wrong is such a giveaway.
The one thing that drives me crazy is when I hear Sixties, Seventies recordings with Eighties, Nineties, or even more modern digital reverbs. It drives me nuts. It just sounds wrong. And I appreciate there’s a kind of paradox there that says, well, I’m remixing albums in the computer in 2025 that were recorded decades ago. But I think there is a way to get close. So there’s a great example. Trying to match the reverb on Who’s Next was a big part of getting that to sound right.
Van Morrison, Moondance
I said how earlier the Grateful Dead album was a band in the studio live, but some of it was still overdubbed. They still redid their vocals. Van did nothing after the session. Literally what you hear is the live take of the band, including his lead vocal. I know this because I can hear his lead vocal leaking onto every other channel in the studio. So you can hear his lead vocal take on the drum mics, you can hear it on the guitar mics, you can hear it on the piano mics, you can hear it on the bass mics. But the point is, you can hear everything on every mic. So you can hear the drums on the vocal mic, you can hear the bass on the guitar mic.
It’s very much capturing a live performance in the studio. So again, I took a similar kind of approach that I did with the Dead there, which is this is a live band in the studio. Let’s put the listener right in the middle of the studio with Van and his band as they cut “Caravan,” as they cut “Into the Mystic.” And I think there is something beautiful about that. When you hear the Atmos mix, you can see the piano player over there. You can see the double bass player over there. You can hear the sax player over there. And it’s amazing. If you love that record, I think it’s an amazing, amazing way to re-experience it.
Black Sabbath, Vol. 4
For this one, we had session reels. We didn’t have the master takes. Now, this has happened to me a couple of times actually, where I’ve been sent what are supposedly the multi-track tapes for an album. And I load them all up and I start listening to them. And I’m like, “OK, well that’s the band running through multiple takes of ‘Wheels of Confusion.’ But where’s the master take? Where’s the master take they added all the overdubs to? It’s not there.”
What happens sometimes is that they would fill reels and reels and reels with takes of the band just running through the song live. The band runs through the song live, usually with Ozzy doing what’s called a scratch vocal, a live vocal that would be replaced later on. But they’re looking to get a good performance of particularly the drums, the rhythm guitar, and the bass guitar.
So they’re running through all these takes with Ozzy doing a scratch vocal. And then they would get the take they liked. It would be cut out of the tape that it was on, and spliced into a new reel, which was called the master takes reel. Those disappeared. So the master takes reels for Black Sabbath Vol. 4 disappeared. But what we did have is we had the band running through multiple takes of the songs. It’s not great, but it meant the record label could put together a nice deluxe edition.
But what we couldn’t do is we couldn’t do any remixing or Atmos mixing of the actual masters themselves. What we were able to put together was a really nice sort of CD or two of the band working in the studio with breakdowns. And I mean, for the people that like that kind of thing… I appreciate it’s very much a niche thing, but some people like that stuff. Again, those people for whom that’s their favorite album of all time, they probably find it fascinating to hear the takes and the breakdowns.
The Rolling Stones, Black and Blue
That was amazing to do. It’s a 24-track recording. Some people say they think it’s sonically the best sounding Stones record of the Seventies, and I might go along with that. It does sound fantastic. But there’s a little bit more in terms of overdubbing on those records. There are guests, since they were basically auditioning different guitar players as they’re cutting that record. So you have all these different guitar parts. You have the backing singers. You have Billy Preston on keyboards.
Some of the ballads, particularly “Memory Motel” and “Fool to Cry,” are quite textured. Some beautiful guitar, Fender Rhodes, and keyboard overdubs. That sounds absolutely beautiful in Atmos. But again, it is very much trying to put you in the studio with the band. They’re not what I call sound-design-orientated records. When you get into artists like Tears for Fears, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which are also things I’ve done recently, these are very much sound-design-orientated records. They’re almost producers’ records where they’re looking for little sonic events to kind of pepper the tracks with. That’s not the case with a live rock & roll band like the Stones. But I think they sound beautiful in immersive spatial audio.
