Ben Greenberg: Analog Thinking While Working in Digital

A classically trained guitarist who studied composition at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, Manhattan native Ben Greenberg is a prolific record producer, engineer, songwriter, and performer who coheres conservatory training with a deep history across many different genres of underground music.

Known as a founding member of respected industrial/metal group Uniform and a former member of The Men, Zs, and many more, Greenberg has been described by Ben Ratliff of the New York Times as “a good musician [...] and boss of his own one-man guitar project, Hubble.” Ben’s rich and varied performance history ranges from over two decades touring with bands to performing for legendary composers like Glenn Branca and Terry Riley.

In the year 2000 Greenberg began assisting Grammy-award winning engineer Mike Marciano at Systems Two Recording in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. It was here that he learned the fundamentals of recording on 2” tape alongside early Pro Tools systems. He would go on to build his own recording studio in Brooklyn (Python Patrol) and work out of world-class studios all around the globe (Electrical Audio, The Magic Shop, Strange Weather, The Pool, Sonic Ranch). Greenberg’s studio credits include Danny Elfman, Depeche Mode, Drab Majesty, Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, Junglepussy, Show Me The Body, Drew McDowall, Black Marble, and Christeene, among many others. His process attends to the essence of the artist’s vision and exacts a cultivated philosophy of sound upon them. The result is something between organic and synthetic: A magic that locks in the music’s emotional resonance with the listener.

Since the 2010s, Greenberg has produced and mixed award-winning scores for film and television. He is the principal engineer to the scores of composer Brian McComber (ex-Dirty Projectors), including the A24 productions It Comes At Night and Krisha, as well as Kingdom of Silence (Showtime), 16 Shots (Showtime), Little Woods (Neon), Mickey and The Bear (Utopia), and Fair Play (Netflix), among others. Greenberg was Randall Dunn's mix assistant for the Jóhann Jóhannsson score to Panos Cosmatos’ 2018 film, Mandy (SpectreVision), and Dunn’s co-engineer for the 2022 score to Julio Torres' Problemista (A24). Greenberg has also mixed Ella Van Der Woude’s scores for Something You Said Last Night (Elevation Pictures) and Silver Haze (EMU Films), and in 2024 he won a Cinema Audio Society award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing - Documentary, for his stereo and surround mixes of JD Samson’s score for Sam Green’s 32 Sounds (DofMP).

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:

• Starting music production at a young age
• Finding jobs in the music industry
• Dealing with parents who might not understand your passions
• Working on metal, jazz, and everything in between
• Switching your workflow for different genres
• Understanding what to listen for with compression
• How to approach a new mix
• Why volume and panning are your most important tools
• Determining when plugins are worth purchasing 
• Working with Danny Elfman
• Purposely doing less

To learn more about Ben Greenberg, visit: https://circularruin.com/Ben-Greenberg

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