Sterling Winfield on Recording With Pantera and Modern Metal

Sterling Winfield is angry. Not from the years of hanging around with Pantera as their engineer, producer and tour tech. Not because Dimebag is gone. It’s the haunting feeling that the way Dime and the band did things is dying.

He has plenty of evidence to back this up. From his days as an engineer at Dallas Sound Lab in the early ‘90s through his work with Pantera on the Grammy-nominated albums Reinventing The Steel and Far Beyond Driven, Sterling had a front row seat to the way metal albums used to be recorded.

Today Winfield works primarily from his own studio, Boot Hill, with a broad spectrum of artists, including hip-hop, R&B, country, blues, choral, jazz and orchestral. Among his recent projects, he produced and engineered metal band Texas Hippie Coalition’s latest release, Dark Side Of Black, produced and mixed Canadian hard rock band A Rebel Few’s new album, As The Crow Flies.

He also collaborated with Erykah Badu on the track “Maiysha,” her contribution to Robert Glasper’s Miles Davis tribute album, Everything’s Beautiful. So his perspective isn’t exactly that of a “metal guy” insulated from the rest of the recording world.

While he was co-producing War Paint, his seventh album with progressive rock band Vangough, I had a chance to dive in with him on the metal world’s dangerous creep into DAW massaging and the way things used to be.

To read the article/interview in it’s entirety, check it out on reverb.com here.