Anthony J. Resta has been in the music producing, engineering business for about 17 years. In that time he has helped local and national recording artists find that sound that was just so right for their songs. Aside from working with Collective Soul, Duran Duran, and Sir Elton John, Resta has become a hero to many local recording acts.
Business is crazy busy at Resta’s Bopnique Studio in north Chelmsford, Massachusetts, with Resta working six days a week while he also works on developing a studio that will open in Hollywood in June 2013.
When asked exactly what his job is, Resta couldn’t give a simple answer, as his tasks are many and they often overlap with his engineer Karyadi Sutedjas. “I arrange, co-write, perform multi instruments on peoples’ songs,” he said. “I wear lots of different hats for different projects, a lot of composing, a lot of nurturing, a lot of enabling, trying to help people bring up the best of what they have to offer.”
Resta has many modern high tech state of the art tools at his disposal, and he combines his modern technical devices with older equipment. “I use a lot of vintage gear and a lot of modern gear,” he said. “It’s a quite a mixture. I’ve got 4,000 square feet of stuff, so I don’t even know where to being. We do mostly hard disc recording and Pro Tools, but we use a lot of vintage mic prees and outboard gear to warm up the sound. We’re known for having a very analog sound.”
Resta studied music synthesis and percussion at Berklee College Of Music before heading out into the professional world. Resta began his journey into sound back in the late 1980s at studios like Courtland in Hanson, Massachusetts and Sound Techniques. He got his first big break in 1994 when British superstar band Duran Duran recruited him for a partnership that eventually spread over 30 songs in five years.
“I started up interning and working at studios, just slowly learned a craft working around great engineers like Bob St. John, and Fred Danner, and Chris Lannon, and Tom Soares, and Paul David Hager,” Resta said. “I kind of flowed and by osmosis picked up my own techniques and things, while borrowing from my favorite producers Jon Brion, Brian Enos, Daneil Lanois, and Mutt Lang.”
Working with big name stars like Collective Soul, Duran Duran, and Sir Elton John was pretty much like working with local recording artists yet to be discovered. “For the most part, most of them are pretty down to earth and gracious,” Resta said. “I really haven’t had any bad experiences with people who were really difficult to work with. I’ve been really lucky. I don’t really think it’s all that much different. They look for the same kind of honesty that I give people as far as my opinion about songs and lyrics. That’s one of the reasons why they keep having you back or having you around. A lot of times they’re used to everybody just saying ‘that’s great, that’s great’ but they really respect somebody who can be honest. They may not agree with you all the time, but at least they know exactly what you’re hearing, and that slowly nurtures itself into a situation where there’s more trust and more longevity.”
Resta said music is subjective with no right or wrong opinions and is instinctual. “I found out my best work comes from just going by my first impression, that instinct on things and making quick decisions,” he said. “As soon as you start going ‘Hmmm, well, let me hear it again. Hmmm, maybe this, maybe that.’ Then you go into an area where you’re thinking too much. Thinking doesn’t really yield the best results for me.”
Resta grew up listening to progressive rock band like Yes, Genesis,King Crimson, UK, Brand X and Gentle Giant before slowly making his way into pop and R&B until he became more about the song than the genre. “I think when you listen to a lot of music and feel emotion about how things sound, it hits you on a visceral level, on an emotional level,” he said. “My job is to try make that happen as much as possible without over thinking it.”
Resta still works with nationally recognized acts,Will Daily, Need To Breathe, Green River Ordinace, and actor Michael Chiklis’s band to name a few and man ten plus years repeat clients and he continues his 17 year work with Collective Soul. He still writes with Nuno Bettencourt and he toured with Rhianna. Film and television, however, are his latest aims. He belongs to a group of LA composers who call themselves Electron. Electron, which includes Eric Alexandrakis, Steve Ferrone, Roger O’Donnel, and Warren Cucurrullo, recently scored some music for the TV show Burn Notice. They also did some work with movie director David Lynch.
“I’m doing all kinds of different things,” Resta said. “I’m really enjoying developing up and coming artists. I’ve got a 16 year old kid I just did a record on from New Jersey. The band Prospect Hill is an unsigned band that’s got several record companies looking at them.”
Yet, Resta, like other producers-engineers, has been focusing locally as major label work diminishes as label budgets decline. Indie artists must do most of the work themselves before they can be signed. “They look for artists that are ready to go,” Resta said. “If “they’ve done 40-50 thousand in sales. They’ve got a whole following already. It’s becoming more self-contained. It’s totally different.”
Resta works with artists from all over the United States, Brazil, and England. “I’ve had one client from Australia twice. That would be the furthest anybody has come to Chelmsford to record with us,” he said.
Resta recently wrapped up a record called Womanity with an artist named Minky Starshine. “We did a record together which is going to be released any day now,” Resta said. “He’s from Rhode Island. He’s a fantastic artist, really great. He did a record with Ken Stringfellow from The Posies over in France. He’s been around. He’s like power pop. On this new record he really stretched out. He’s got a little Brian Wilson influence, Jellyfish, really cool retro, very layered.”
Resta has been working with Boston singer-songwriter Michelle Lewis for a while now. “When I first started working with her, I helped her find what part of her voice was most pleasing to listen to. She’s got a lot of different timbres and I think I helped her find this kind of sexy Susan area where she’s just really intimate with the microphone and very present and very in your face, not a lot of reverb or effects, just very organic.” Resta received a positive response from the vice president of Virgin Records about Lewis’s song “Paris” that got people paying attention to Lewis. There is a YouTube video of Resta working with Lewis on the song in his studio.
Resta works with a lot of greater-Boston area musicians. Casey Desmond, for example. Desmond presents technical challenges because she doesn’t use a lot of natural sounds and plays an Omnichord. “The reason she plays an Omnichord is because I gave it to her,” Resta revealed. “I’ve been using Omnichords since the early 90s, and I gave her one, and she kind of made that her own. She’s a phenomenal talent.”
Resta will be on Desmond’s upcoming CD as co-producer, drummer, and multi-instrumentalist. Desmond works with her friend Taylor Barefoot in their own studio then they send material to Resta and his engineer Karyadi Sutedja who add to it, tighten it up, and do their own thing to it.
“On this next record,” Resta said, “her sound evolved so much from the time we finished on it, that they kind of reopened the songs and went back in and revised them, and they’re going to be completely different from the way I left them because she’s evolving and going more into a dance direction. She’s a fun artist to work with. We have a good time.”
Resta also works with the Worcester-Boston power rock trio Starr Faithfull which is fronted by the highly rated guitarist-vocalist Jodee Frawlee. “I love Jodee. She’s phenomenal,” Resta exclaimed. “She’s fun to work with. I think I approach them a little differently. I try to capture more of that raw, bluesy kind of rock sound that they have as a trio. But they really enjoy me adding my sort of Jon Brian sort of icing. It’s a nice mixture of what they do and what I do. There’s some tracks that are just straight up live. I think the track ‘Bleed’ was them live, and I didn’t add anything to it. Some songs we keep more raw than others. ‘Do What You Want’ was one that I co-wrote with them. That’s a fun song.”
Resta worked on the latest release from Boston’s My Silent Bravery, Can’t Quit, an album that exudes from stereo speakers with a large sense of cool. The disc certainly has a personality to it. My Silent Bravery is the name local artist Matthew Wade records under.
“He’s a guy that came to me and sang songs on an acoustic guitar, and that’s what I heard in my head,” Resta said. “Basically, the band is just Robert Holmes and myself on all those tracks. I played bass, drums, guitar, keyboards. I had some extra help. I had Richard Gates play bass on a couple of tracks and Steve Sadler did some nice dobro.” Wade had told Resta that he had been listening to One Republic and others who were combining organic sounds with more futuristic sounds. “That’s fun for me. It’s a collaboration like that,” Resta said. “We didn’t set out to make it hip and cool. Ultimately, you want music that’s marketable, commercial, but also not generic. That’s my main goal: to make something that’s marketable but not generic.”
Resta doesn’t fly solo in the studio. His assistant of 15 years, Karyadi Sutedja, is like Resta’s wingman, co-pilot, and navigator all in one. Their jobs overlap and Sutedja too has a lot of input in the music they record. “He’s a phenomenal recording mix engineer,” Resta exclaimed. The two work in the 18 year old Studio Bopnique Musique , a facility that has everything a full band would need to record a full length album.
“It’s constantly evolving,” Resta said. “I started it off at 1,200 square feet, now I’m almost at 4,000 and now I’m ready to downsize more because of the way that the industry’s changed. Things ate getting smaller and there’s less demand for Hammond B3s and all this big stuff.”
The producer could probably talk for hours about his work. Resta’s new studio in LA will be streamlined with more software based projects. The producer’s other fairly new hobby is collecting old guitars, ironic, since he started off focused on keyboards and drums. Resta owns 40 vintage guitars from the 1950s and 1960s.
“That’s my true addiction, vintage guitar stuff,” Resta said. “Most of the stuff that people think are keyboards on a lot of my productions are actually guitars through crazy signal paths and multiple tape delays.” One gets the sense that Resta could talk for hours about guitars, recordings, and artists.
There are likely as many accomplishments ahead of Resta as there are behind him. He will likely be as busy in the coming decades as he is today.
