Sound engineer gets his first Grammy nod
TORONTO He helped build Uptown Funk with Bruno Mars and recorded the teacup-shattering vocals of Adele in an intimate studio session.
Now, Canadian sound engineer Charles Moniz is heading to the Grammys for the first time, with a nomination for record of the year for Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk featuring Mars.
Moniz, who grew up in Burlington, Ont., says he helped come up with the catchy “doh” vocal bass line that kicks off Uptown Funk while Mars was on tour.
The team had been stuck on the chorus for a while, until Mars (née Peter Hernandez) came offstage one night and proclaimed: “I got it.”
“They were tearing down the venue and packing up everything to go and we were still in that room and that’s where that vocal bass line came,” he says. “All that came in the dressing room.”
It was producer-songwriter Philip Lawrence who had suggested they needed an opening bass line, but he couldn’t play the instrument so Moniz told him to sing it instead.
“That became what stayed on the album,” says Moniz, who is based in Toronto and Los Angeles.
“There’s definitely a larger element working with Bruno where you feel like you’re with your buddies, just coming up with music and having fun.”
Moniz also worked on Adele’s song All I Ask from her blockbuster new album 25. He joined the project via Lawrence and Mars, who co-wrote the track.
Moniz worked the recording side of things while Adele, Mars, Lawrence and songwriter-producer Christopher (Brody) Brown gathered around a grand piano. At one point an assistant walked in to give Adele some tea and was startled when she belted out a verse.
“The lights were down ... and he thought she had finished singing but she was actually just about to hit one of the highest notes in the song,” Moniz recalls. “He said it was so loud he actually freaked out and dropped the tea.”
The recording with Adele was fairly quick and simple, Moniz says. By contrast, Uptown Funk took seven months to make, because they were working on it while travelling with Mars on his Moonshine Jungle Tour. Whenever there was a break they’d chip away at it, sometimes using makeshift studios Moniz would set up in dressing rooms. They recorded it in Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Memphis and London, England.
The Grammy Awards take place Feb. 15.