Bill Hare

Bill Hare is an American Grammy Award-winning audio engineer known for pioneering contemporary recording techniques in a cappella. He was the first to record voices individually, and the first to mic singers exactly as one would mic instruments. Over the course of his career, Hare has become well known for his outsize role in shaping the sound of recorded a cappella. Industry observers have called him the "patriarch" and "the Dr. Dre" of a cappella recording. Deke Sharon, founder and longtime president of the Contemporary A Cappella Society, wrote of Hare's influence in 2018: "The sound of contemporary recorded a cappella owes more to his technique, style, and pioneering than any other person."

Career

Early years (1980s–1992)

Hare began his career playing bass, which he had studied while in college at San Jose State University. At the beginning of the 1980s, Hare began working with a professional recording studio in the San Francisco Bay Area as a session musician. In 1984, Hare purchased part ownership in the studio, and began his first work as a recording, mixing and mastering engineer. In these first few years, he recorded some a cappella music, but generally choral, barbershop, and jazz rather than "a cappella" in its contemporary sense.

His career took a turn toward a cappella in 1988, when the Stanford Mendicants were referred to Hare to record their 1988–89 album Aquapella.

Chief among Hare's innovations was recording each voice with its own microphones. Recording in those days on analog tape, modern techniques such as recording individual parts to a click track and editing them together did not yet exist.

It was his engineering for the Stanford Fleet Street Singers' 1992 album 50-Minute Fun Break that landed him on the map for good. At the Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards (CARAs) the next year, the album won awards in five categories, including Best Mixing and Engineering for Hare. Sharon wrote in a statement for CASA that the album had "the best engineering we've ever heard on any collegiate album. Ever." By the mid-2010s, Hare was working with nearly every top a cappella group, including Sing-Off winners Nota, Home Free, and Pentatonix, with whom he received 2x multi-platinum certification for their album That's Christmas to Me.

As of 2020, Hare has shifted his focus away from United States a cappella toward European and international a cappella groups. For the shift, Hare cites an increasing degree of same-ness in the industry, in part due to the widespread adoption of his techniques. In his memoir Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory (which was later adapted into the blockbuster film Pitch Perfect), Mickey Rapkin said of Hare's influence: "In many ways, the history of collegiate a cappella recording is the Bill Hare story. Bill Hare is sort of like the Dr. Dre of a cappella recording."

Awards and recognition

Hare has won one Grammy Award: for his work recording and engineering Christopher Tin's 2009 album, Calling All Dawns. Unbroken (2003), an album by The House Jacks Fleet Street (2004), an album by the Stanford Fleet Street Singers Pandaemonium (2007), an album by the Tufts Beelzebubs Play the Game (2009), an album by the Tufts Beelzebubs Ferris Wheels (2009), an album by the Swingle Singers Nota (2010), the debut album of Nota Great American Songbook (2013), an album by the King's Singers Southern Autumn Nostalgia (2013), an album by Street Corner Symphony PTX Vol. II (2013), an EP by Pentatonix That's Christmas to Me (2014), an album by Pentatonix