EP186 | Marc McClusky

Marc McClusky (Weezer, Motion City Soundtrack, Bad Religion) is here to go deep on the science of music, strategies for successful collaboration, and bringing your unique humanity to productions.

Marc brought a number of inspirational moments to this discussion. The amount of thought that he’s put into how to approach music, production, and life in general comes through loud and clear. If you ever find yourself feeling like you’re just going through the motions with your projects this is definitely an episode you’re going to want to keep handy.

“Nobody succeeds by themselves. Everybody succeeds together. The best records I’ve ever made aren’t because of me, it’s because of all of us. We’re in a room together. We all sat down and nobody had an ego, and everybody’s opinion was valuable.” – Marc McClusky

ON THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

2:00 Marc’s childhood as a music lover, his first instruments, and his punk background
5:00 Music and Songs as math and science
15:00 Learning from music you don’t like, understanding the intention, recognize the feeling behind the math
20:00 The art of listening, visualizing an arrangement on the piano roll, the power of simplicity, and John Williams
35:00 Symphonic movie scores, relationship to classical music, and imitation/quoting as fundamental musical building blocks
40:00 Pre-production and songwriting with the mix in mind
45:00 Recording local band demos while working at Starbucks, word of mouth leading to engineering/production work
1:02:00 Being comfortable with ditching/changing parts you wrote, fighting for the ideas that you feel the most passionate about
1:05:00 Working on Weezer – ‘Hurley’, multiple mixers on the same album, mix being guided by decisions made in tracking rather than fighting them
1:13:00 How you can still add to the ‘texture’ of songs you’re mixing or don’t have creative input on.
1:19:00 Knowing your weaknesses and actively work at improving them, finding people who can complement your style
1:27:00 Dealing with entrenched competition or a saturated market
And much, much more

Links:

Marc’s website
Smack Drum Samples
Screensound Alliance and the Coca-Cola ad campaign discussed on the show

Thanks for listening!
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