PANTERA, HELLYEAH Producer Interviewed

August 3, 2011

Alan Ayo of the Dallas Observer recently conducted an interview with Dallas, Texas-based producer/engineer Sterling Winfield, who is best known for his work with PANTERA, DAMAGEPLAN and HELLYEAH. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Dallas Observer: Was there something in particular that sparked a friendship between you and the guys in PANTERA?

Sterling: They came into Dallas Sound Lab, which is now gone by the way, because of a flood due to a broken water main about a year ago. It was in October of 1993. They showed up to finish what would become "Far Beyond Driven". I got paired up with one of my best friends and engineers there, Tim Kimsey. He was the senior engineer and I was to be the assistant. The guys in the band and Terry Date were awesome. I learned a lot from the project and all of those guys. I had been a huge fan since I was in junior high, when those guys were still releasing their independent albums. Dime [PANTERA guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abott] and I really gravitated toward each other, but he was that way. He was always very personable to everybody. Then when we hit the common ground of being huge KING'S X fans, that was it. Friends for life!

Dallas Observer: After DAMAGEPLAN, and leading up to the period when HELLYEAH started to culminate, things were quiet in that camp. What did you do as an engineer during this time?

Sterling: We were all in a pretty long mourning period then. I didn't work a whole lot through that period, but when I did, I made sure that it was someone or something that I really enjoyed, or it would have been pure hell, for sure.

Dallas Observer: Were you the first-choice, right out of the gate, to move up the ladder to producer when it came to the HELLYEAH records? Or were you one in a pool of candidates?

Sterling: It was pretty much Vinnie Paul [Abbott, former PANTERA and current HELLYEAH drummer] calling me on the phone about 10 months after Dime was killed and saying, "Well, two of the MUDVAYNE guys are coming down with Tom from NOTHINGFACE [who we had toured with before], so let's go down to Chasin' Jason [the PANTERA studio] and see if something musical happens." That was pretty much it. The rest is history.

Read the entire interview from the Dallas Observer.

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