Bill Hare

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.[1][2]

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.[3][4][1] Their 1990 follow-up album together earned the attention of Deke Sharon in Boston, who had heard the album and who wrote Hare a letter describing his new a cappella society (what would become the Contemporary A Cappella Society, also known as CASA).[3][2] Hare soon began working with other Stanford a cappella groups, developing new techniques along the way. In a 2019 interview, Hare described the circumstances under which he developed his new recording techniques with collegiate a cappella groups:

"An a cappella group came to the studio... At first I thought it was really weird—why would you do this to pop music? [But] the people were really cool, and over the years, it gave me a lot more creative control. The groups were willing to be experimented on... I developed a lot of the techniques that people still use now just by the seat of my pants, and we had fun creating new things."[5]

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.[2][6]

It was his engineering for the Stanford Fleet Street Singers' 1992 album 50-Minute Fun Break that landed him on the map for good.[3] A critic from the Recorded A Cappella Review Board wrote of the album: "Of all of the collegiate albums I have heard, this is the one that I would recommend most readily. If I could have only one collegiate album, this would be it." The album's engineering polarized critics: One said, "[Fleet Street's] studio engineering work is incredible", and a second said, "This is technically one of the best albums I've heard from the collegiate scene", but other critics panned the studio work, calling it "unnatural", "intrusive", and "strange".[7] 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.[8] Sharon wrote in a statement for CASA that the album had "the best engineering we've ever heard on any collegiate album. Ever."[3] In a 2019 podcast, Sharon recalled, "It was so exemplary, it was so ahead of its time, that [Hare] just walked away with a special award in best engineering."[2]

Hare's influence in the recorded a cappella world expanded (even as he continued recording orchestral and concert band albums on the side).[2] With his trendsetting work, Hare began earning a cappella-related awards at a steady clip. In 1999, Stanford University a cappella groups were nominated for a record 14 Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards for their new albums. Hare had produced nearly all of them.[4]

At the end of the '90s, Hare was friends with the creators of ProTools. He became one of their beta testers, trying the earliest four-track music editing programs, among others. With digital processing, Hare was among the first to include in a cappella music distortion, phasers and flangers.[2] Hare pioneered the practice of "octavizing" the lowest vocal bass part (lower its pitch by an octave), first included on Stanford Counterpoint's 1996 album "Nomansland".[2]

In 2001, The House Jacks brought to Hare raw recordings from live performances across their entire European tour. "By that time, I had worked with some collegiate stuff that was pretty cool," Hare recalled as a guest on a 2019 podcast, "with [Stanford's] Mixed Company and the Harmonics—Fleet Street—newer groups, and by that time I'd experimented enough to know I could do anything I could hear in my head, as long as I could get the performance [from the group]."[2]

For The House Jacks' next album (Unbroken (2003), modeled after Queen's A Night at the Opera), Hare struck a deal for revenue sharing, instead of accepting a fixed fee; this created an opportunity for them to work together until the album was the best it could be. "This was the time to make a breakthrough," Hare later recalled, "That this might be something that would sell outside of [the a cappella community]."[2]

In 2011, Hare won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Crossover Album for his work on Calling All Dawns, an album by Christopher Tin (himself an alumnus of the Stanford a cappella group Talisman).[9][10][11] 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.[12][13]

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.[2]