Musician, author, educator and acclaimed studio engineer Mark Rubel has passed away, according to a post from his sister.
Sasha Rubel wrote that Mark Rubel passed away peacefully at home on March 8, 2024. Records indicate he was born on May Day 1958, which would have made him 65 years old. Friends indicated that Rubel had been diagnosed with cancer.
Rubel was the founder of Pogo Studios, a recording studio which for 33 years drew celebrity artists as well as up-and-coming singers, musicians and producers to downstate Champaign, Illinois. According to the Pogo website, Rubel made “about 1,000 recordings” including records from Hum, Alison Krauss (“You put a microphone anywhere near her, and it sounds great,” Rubel would later say. “You want to be self-congratulatory, but it’s all her.”), Rascal Flatts, Adrian Belew, Melanie, percussionist Oscar Sully and many more.
Aside from drawing celebrity artists to his studio in Champaign, Rubel taught thousands of students the art of recording.
Rubel was also a well-known music educator. The son of a professor at the University of Illinois, Rubel taught the art of audio recording to thousands of students over the years, including lessons at the console at Pogo itself through Parkland College. In a forthcoming interview for the next issue of 5 Mag conducted prior to Rubel’s passing, house producer Black Sjuan cites Rubel as being “the main engineer in town. I took his engineering class and learned how to record on two inch reel and how to record real instruments.”
After a stint as audio director and head of recording at Eastern Illinois University, Rubel relocated to Nashville where he served as co-director of education at Blackbird Academy, closing Pogo Studios. He was also an avid reader and contributor to Tape Op magazine, writing reviews and sat for an interview himself in 2005, where he opens by describing how studio engineers and producers compete to look the most “emaciated and etiolated” from spending the most time in the studio:
Rubel’s bio at Blackbird Academy notes he was writing “a history of recording studios of the 1960s–70s,” the relics of which survive but often as high-end playgrounds for millionaire musicians or museums for the public rather than workspaces. Places like Pogo were created in an era when studios were often presided over by independent producers, sometimes seen as gatekeepers but also mentors. The spaces themselves were centers of collaboration and, in a sense, community. Legendary disco producer John Morales wrote a column for 5 Mag back in 2011 lamenting the passing of the great studios into “vacant, hollow rooms that echo with the sounds and memories of the great music they once created”:
It’s a strange turn of events: networking technology has enabled people who have never met in person to record together, but physically they’re all alone. Nearly all music recorded for popular or even niche consumption was once made in studios like Pogo. One would have to figure that the vast majority of music being made today is created by a single person alone in a room. It’s a triumph of technology and an unnervingly lonely experience.
Among the writing Rubel published for Tape Op was a segment on producers and engineers who had passed away. Rubel’s words in memory of recording giant Les Paul could also be applied to their author: “The world,” he wrote, “that of musicians and recordists in particular, is better and brighter thanks to your untiring efforts.”
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