DAVE OTERO & DEAN LAMB: Recording hyper-technical metal, studio compromises, speed-rap influences

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by IK multimedia. Ik. Multimedia gives musicians access to the most famous and sought after guitar gear and studio effects of all time. With our Amplitude and T-Rex analog modeling software, now IK has created the ultimate all-in-one bundle for bands and engineers. The Total Studio two max, combining all of I K's award-winning amps effects sounds and more. It's everything you need to track, mix and master your music. Ik, multimedia musicians first. For more info, go to www.ikmultimedia.com. This episode is also brought to you by Fascination Street. Mastering Studios have your songs mastered by Jens Boren and Tony Lindgren. The engineers that mastered bands like Ope, Dimmu Bo, gear Arch, enemy Creator, se Torah, Amman, Marth, and many more. By using the coupon code URM 18 in the online Mastering Configurator, you'll receive a 15% discount on your order. The code is valid for the rest of the year. Visit www.fascinationstreet.se to learn more and book your mastering session today. And now your host,

Speaker 2 (00:01:21):

Eyal Levi. This episode of the URM Podcast is brought to you by URM enhanced our tier of premium content. That's everything you need to know to deliver world-class mixes. The core of URM Enhanced is our library of fast tracks. Each one of the fast tracks is a video course that dives deep into a specific area of recording, mixing, or mastering, and a level of insane detail that you're just not going to find anywhere else. A few of my personal favorites are guitar editing, which Joey Sturges creating ambience with Forrester Seve, and recording metal guitars with John Brown. You get instant access to over two dozen fast tracks, and that's over 50 hours of content when you join URM Enhanced. And we are always adding new ones. URM enhanced members also get access to our mixed rescue series where we open up one of your mixes, perform a little surgery, and explain what we're doing every step of the way.

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And last, but definitely not least, URM enhanced members have the ability to book one-on-one Skype sessions with us and some of our friends. It's your chance to get to detailed mix, cri, some career advice or really whatever else you want. It's your time to find out more or join URM enhance. Just go to URM Academy and click the get enhanced link. So let me talk about today's episode a little bit. I've got producer mixer, Dave Otero, and Dean from the band, archspire, Dean's the guitar player, or one of the guitar players, and really, really excited about this episode because as someone who has been a fan and creator of Metal for a good quarter century at this point, I can remember when there's been turning points in the various genres. And by contrast, when there haven't been, and in the world of technical extreme metal, I personally feel like there hasn't been anything to come around and revolutionize since 2003 with neph phages epitaph.

(00:03:36):

And it's not to say that there haven't been good bands, but when Microphage Epitaph came about, it raised the bar, it raised the bar, both with the songwriting and technical proficiency displayed in a way that just wouldn't be matched for over 15 years. But now we've got Spire and I do believe that they are that next evolution for technical death metal. And that's saying a lot. I mean, it's been 15 years, so I was very, very curious to talk to a member of the band and pick their brain. And as it turns out, the musical talent is strong with that one. These guys are some serious musicians. And I don't just mean technical chops. I mean musician with a capital M real strong music background, real strong understanding of it. And it all makes sense when you hear their music. It all makes sense. And of course, Dave Ros a great extreme metal mixer and producer.

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I think that that's one of the hardest, if not the hardest genre on earth to mix. And he's found a way to make his mixes sound raw and nasty like there's blood dripping down your face, but also punchy, clear and modern. I mean, he's just great at it and it's not all he does, but that's what he's, I'd say, best known for. So this episode is great. We hear a lot about how two brilliant minds collaborated and collaborated to create something greater than themselves. And if you liked the previous episode like this I did, which was with Machine the producer and Chris Adler from Lamb of God, I'd like to know if these producer plus musician episodes, if this is something you want more of, let me know in the comments on YouTube or on our Facebook Private Producers Club, just wherever you can find me. Let me know if you want more of these, because I actually really enjoy recording these. They're some of my favorite episodes to make, but if you guys love them, then that makes me even more inspired to make more. So with that said, I'll stop talking and we'll let you get into this episode of the URM podcast with Dave Otero and Dean from Archspire. Enjoy Dave Otero. Dean Lamb, thank you for coming on the URM podcast. Welcome and let's talk some shit.

Speaker 3 (00:06:17):

Wait, I thought you said we weren't going to talk shit.

Speaker 2 (00:06:19):

No. No, we're not. We're not. Now everyone knows we were talking shit before the show.

Speaker 3 (00:06:24):

Good job, guys. That's true. They do.

Speaker 2 (00:06:26):

Yeah. You guys missed it. It was pretty good though. It was pretty good. I came up with a good one, so everybody listening, you can just wonder about it and you're not going to find out. So that said, how did you guys meet?

Speaker 3 (00:06:43):

Well, what was it? Paris, 1976. That smokey. That was a

Speaker 2 (00:06:47):

Good year. That was a good year.

Speaker 3 (00:06:48):

A smokey club. No, I mean we sought him out because Bar, we sought him out because we loved the work that he did. So I don't even know how we got really hooked up or maybe Spencer messaged

Speaker 4 (00:07:00):

Dave initially was just a random Facebook message from Spencer. He was like, Hey, you want to record my band? I was like, what band is that? And then the rest is history.

Speaker 2 (00:07:11):

Were you guys known at all yet when you guys got hooked up?

Speaker 3 (00:07:16):

I mean, I guess so we had done, let's say we had done maybe six US tours, five or six US tours by then, and then maybe a couple of Canadian tours and a European tour and tour through Mexico. So we had done some sort of international stuff from Vancouver, Canada. So I guess we sort of were, but things really got a little bit more the band, the profile of the band got a lot bigger after we worked with Dave.

Speaker 4 (00:07:48):

They were definitely, when I looked him up, I knew the name, but I wasn't too familiar with the material when Spencer first hit me up. And people, I mean, you guys definitely had a big buzz going on, but a lot of it was kind of like the cliche centered around the speed and kind of thinking it was a gimmicky kind of deal,

Speaker 3 (00:08:10):

Which it is.

Speaker 4 (00:08:13):

I feel like a lot of that has sort of been put to bed, or at least that's not the focal point of the band. When you kind of bring it up these days, it doesn't seem, everyone's like, oh yeah, that guy that talked real fast and that drummer of the plays real fast. It's kind of more like these are just super sick.

Speaker 2 (00:08:31):

So if I'm understanding correctly, I only heard about the band when you told me about them about now the mix and was like, damn, this is really great. So if I understand what you're saying correctly, and I'm not going to name any names here, there was the kind of bullshit going around, oh, these guys program their guitars and blah, blah, blah. It's not real.

Speaker 3 (00:08:57):

I think it was more just like this band is just relying on being fast and showing off basically.

Speaker 4 (00:09:03):

Yeah, I didn't really see so much of the Accusational. These guys are fake and bullshit kind of thing. It's just that, oh yeah, bar is cool. They just play real fast and their only thing is it's just really fast. Rather than having actual musical content, which clearly it does, as everyone kind of knows now at the time, it seemed like they were mostly just kind of thought of as only that, or at least that's what a lot of people, what the impression was. For a lot of people,

Speaker 2 (00:09:35):

That's a really easy thing for people to say when they get intimidated musically.

(00:09:42):

I'm serious. I mean that's the kind of thing that people would say about when guitarists first started to really get good in heavier styles of music in the eighties and stuff, people would say, oh yeah, that dude's fast, but he plays with no feel or that was just the cliche thing to say. And it just seems like the easiest thing for someone that feels intimidated to say, because there's no correlation between speed and feel or speed and musicality. It's not because you have one doesn't mean you can't have the other. I mean, yeah, there's people who suck, who play really fast, but there's also plenty of people who can't play fast who suck. Let's talk about them.

Speaker 3 (00:10:36):

Let's talk about all the people who can't play fast and they suck.

Speaker 2 (00:10:40):

Alright, so why did you guys seek Dave out?

Speaker 3 (00:10:43):

Honestly, the majority of the reason was because we really like what he did with cattle decapitation. So we saw our band going on a bit of an upwards trajectory, big word. So when we saw what happened, cattle decapitation, which is basically they were a band that everybody kind of knew, but they weren't on anybody's, at least as far as I saw, album top 10 of the year for the albums that they put out until they did that first album with Dave, I found they made a much more mainstream, I mean as much mainstream as you can get in this genre because their name is cattle. Do you have decapitation? You know what I mean?

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But that album, that monolith of inhumanity really did a lot for them and we really liked the album itself and the musicianship on the album and just everything about it and also the production. And we knew that Dave wasn't just an engineer, he was also going to take our songs and be like, okay, well this part is kind of weak. This part's pretty strong. Let's do this again. Let's harmonize this part. So that was a big reason of that album specifically. And I mean all the other bands he's worked with as well, were big fans of Cephalic, carnage and Allegion and stuff, and a lot of other bands, but specifically ke decapitation.

Speaker 2 (00:12:09):

So you actually wanted to be produced?

Speaker 3 (00:12:12):

Yeah, I mean we didn't really even know what that was going to be like because we had done two albums before Relentless Mutation with the same engineer, producer, engineer, but he's amazing. But he didn't really take as much of a hands-on approach, I think is because it was a little bit further outside of what he is used to doing. He doesn't necessarily listen to the genre of music that we're playing.

Speaker 2 (00:12:38):

You kind of got to know the genre to pull this off.

Speaker 3 (00:12:40):

I mean, this is the thing a lot of bands on the West Coast go to specifically these producers. And we found Dave was that kind of person that was just slightly outside of what people would normally use for this genre, and that's what would set us apart sonically. So that's the whole idea. Let's go a little bit outside of maybe what people would normally go to for this exact genre. So that will sound a little bit different. And I think that worked.

Speaker 2 (00:13:05):

Okay. So you said that it was kind of scary though, going into a situation where you're going to be more produced rather than just engineered. When it came down to it, was it as scary as you thought it would be?

Speaker 3 (00:13:18):

Well, I mean, I think that we all went in going, okay, well let's put much as much faith as we can to this person that we know that they can do it. So we know that this guy can do a lot of stuff for us musically. Let's just give him as much as we possibly can. So we pre-pro the entire album, we demoed all of the songs, we tracked everything beforehand, every instrument was totally done. And I was even getting a little bit into just mixing the demos that we had so that we could really get a feel for it. And as well, we played a lot of the songs on a mini tour on the way to the studio so that we could see what the crowd reactions were like. So that being said, we had most of it ironed out, but there was a lot of the small things.

(00:14:06):

So some of the solos, some of the just parts that we didn't feel were quite as strong. That's the stuff where, okay, let's hopefully get some cool ideas and get those beefed up. And Dave is the kind of guy where you're in the studio with him and you're tracking guitar and he's like, lemme see your guitar, and he'll try some harmonies. And some of them really, really work really well. Some of 'em stink. No, just kidding. Allies. No, and I mean it's the same thing with drums, the same thing with vocal ideas. I mean, he's getting in there and not being afraid to maybe, okay, well, a lot of people might be like, oh, I'm not going to play guitar around you guys because whatever, we're playing all fast and for some reason that's impressive. But it's like Dave's like, no, I don't care here. I'll just play this harmony. And then you track it if you like the idea. And that's the kind of stuff that we really like, not somebody who's there to show you what kind of musician, what kind of instrumentalist he is. He's just there to help make the album better and that we really benefited from that, I think.

Speaker 2 (00:15:06):

Dave, how rare is it for a band to come in that prepared in your experience?

Speaker 4 (00:15:11):

It's pretty rare. I mean, honestly, these days most bands are pretty good about it, but Spire definitely took it further than most I they were here, they had a full recording set up in the band apartment and were just completely crushing it every single day. During tracking Dean, or I think it was mostly Dean, I don't know if anyone else ever really ran the setup back there, but if Dean wasn't tracking, he's back there recording someone. They're either doing vocal, which was kind of the last step that hadn't really been fully fleshed out before they arrived. So constantly during drums, during drum edits, during guitar tracking, after Dean is in here playing guitar for seven or eight hours, he's back in the apartment tracking vocal demos to try and stay ahead of the curve for the album. So I had a lot to work with and I think I had to stem stuff out for me too. So vocals, we had just the demo tracks that I dropped in the project ride in Tempo and lyrics were there. I mean everything. They did everything they could to most efficiently use our time in the studio, which is awesome. And you can hear that in the finished product.

Speaker 3 (00:16:30):

And we still ran out of time a little

Speaker 4 (00:16:31):

Bit, and we still did run out of time, which was a bummer.

Speaker 2 (00:16:34):

You'll always run out of time. There's a law, I forget what it's called, but it's kind of a joke law, but it actually seems to apply to every project I've ever been in, which is that the length of time it takes to complete a project will automatically adjust itself to however much time you'll allot for it. So if you say it's going to take three months, you'll find a way to run out of time at three months. If you say it's going to take two weeks, you'll find out, you'll find a way to pretty much get it done in two weeks, but still need one or two days.

Speaker 4 (00:17:19):

The planning phase for our project is actually really important because of what you're saying. You are sort of determining how the workflow and how the session is going to go, and you totally can plan too much time for something if it's a project that needs to have a bit of emotion to it, there needs to be a bit of a time crunch there. I think probably a lot of people listening to this podcast that have gotten into production trying to record their own bands have fallen into that where they're like, they go in with this mindset We have all the time in the world, I'm going to record it myself. This is my band. I don't care if this takes six months, six months later, you're probably sitting on a pile of shit that you've just overworked and had too much time on and had no deadlines to create any kind of intensity. So that's very, very much true. And I kind of tell when I'm booking projects, I can be like, well, if we finish up early, then I won't charge you for these last few days. But that is never ever going to happen.

Speaker 3 (00:18:18):

Well, I'll tell you that when we recorded with Dave, it was like, here's, here are the days that we are going to be in the studio, and it was Monday to Friday, these hours, there's a lunchtime, you don't go past this certain time. And it was very scheduled. It was like, you're going to work, which is exactly what it is, even though it's an artistic endeavor, the working hours, and sometimes we would do a Saturday, but we would be back in like David said, in the back in the apartment or tracking solos or whatever. But that sort of structure really made it easy to see, okay, well here's how the rest of the projects are going to take shape, because we understand that between these hours, between these hours we're open to record in the studio, but past that he's hanging out with his family, which is there's, I dunno, that's just a really legit way to run it. You know what I mean? So that was something that we felt very comfortable with because we understood that, well, if these hours are the working hours and Dave's not sitting there stressed out, he seems pretty relaxed. So it's like, okay, well I think we're probably going to get most of it done in time. And that kind of helped because the last thing you want to do is panic while you're recording an album

(00:19:32):

And totally suffers, makes the entire project suffer.

Speaker 2 (00:19:35):

I think that some producers who are first coming up are get a little intimidated about imposing that kind of a schedule on a band, but in my experience, bands appreciate it. They need to be reigned in. If you don't do that, if you don't impose some kind of a schedule like that, shit's going to go off the rails and you don't want the band to be in charge of the schedule. It'll always default to whoever is the craziest, whoever is the most unstable and insane with schedules, it'll default to that. So a producer has to do it. Dave, were

Speaker 4 (00:20:15):

You always like that for a long time? I have a daughter, I have a family and other parts of my life that I've tried to keep in balance, and the longer I've done this, the better I've gotten about making sure to maintain that balance. Super important. And I'm doing this a band. They come in, they'll have maybe anywhere from three weeks to six weeks to 10 weeks of a project where man, they get done and they're like, holy crap. That was intense. Like, oh, I just need to shut down and just take a rest for a while. Well, I maybe have a few days off and I'm onto the next project. So a lot of it's about self preservation. I just need to be able to maintain this amount of work through an entire year because I've got that many albums to do, and you can very easily burn yourself out.

(00:21:08):

And that's not to say that sometimes you get near the end of an album and okay, the deadline's there, there's more work than you have days scheduled. That just means that you're working 14 hour days for a couple of days. I mean, you do what you have to do when the time comes to it, but if at all possible, I really just try and keep a pretty consistent schedule. And honestly, the way Dean put it as far, it's just being able to set expectations and it's kind of easy when you're working eight hour days and you kind of know how much work gets done in eight hour day, it's pretty easy to extrapolate that and kind of see what the next week looks like and be able to have an idea of where you are in the project and then make adjustments to that if necessary.

Speaker 3 (00:21:52):

Yeah, I mean, it's like you're all going on a road trip or you're doing a tour or whatever and you're like, it's going to take us this long to get to the show. It's like, well, I mean factor in everything. And so if you can actually factor in everything, then your schedule looks more legit and it's going to be closer to reality. But when you're sort of just, oh, today we're going to work really hard or really long or what, it's like you never really know how much work you're going to get done in those last three hours where you're tired as shit

Speaker 4 (00:22:18):

Or how much you're going to have to redo the next day.

Speaker 2 (00:22:20):

I find that if I push past a certain point, like you said, those last three hours get real questionable and I can usually redo everything in 15 minutes the next day. Those three hours aren't worth it. And to your point, about 14 hour days and maintaining your stamina so you can just keep going for a year. Another reason to maintain an organized, and I don't want to say moderate, but moderate schedule to where you're not redlining all the time is so that you do have the energy for the 14 hour days when you need to pull them.

Speaker 4 (00:22:58):

For sure. And honestly, those are kind of fun when those come up. If they're not happening every day or every week, they're kind of fun and it sort of ends up, if it's a tracking thing and it kind of ends up being a bonding moment almost between producer and the band, just because you feel like the trooper's in there getting it done and things get silly past 12 hours, no matter what you're working on, people fucking start losing their mind a little bit. And weird things happen. Some really cool creative stuff can happen, weird ideas come up and they become stories that you talk about later and sometimes are cemented for eternity and some weird idea that you put on an album. So it's definitely, there's value in those too. It's just like if you're doing that every week or every other day, you're just not going to last. You won't have anything left.

Speaker 2 (00:23:51):

Well, you're going to have a lot of fun. Then when the URM crew shows up to your studio, we have a lot to do in four days. So when you guys actually got there, and it seems like both parties were bringing a game to the table, band showing up with all the pre-pro and ready to do what needs to be done to actually play it. And Dave actually doing his job as a producer and being the boss and making the record better and all that. How long did it take to make the record together?

Speaker 3 (00:24:33):

What was it like five weeks or something? I think we were in there five weeks. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'd say that it was five weeks of being in the studio and then we were tracking in the apartment in the back, and we were playing a lot of drunken monopoly because Dave's wifi network is maybe not super fast at the time, and we called it music prison. So we were there playing drunk Monopoly trying to watch Netflix, but it just wouldn't really load very fast. We were just like, yeah, music prison. And at one point our van's insurance ran out, so we had to mail in so we couldn't go anywhere. So it was like, well, there's a liquor store pretty close. So I mean they Let's just do that. Yeah, they're

Speaker 4 (00:25:15):

Waiting for their deckels.

Speaker 3 (00:25:16):

Okay. All right. Let's just now is the portion of the show where we talk about the differences between Canadians and Americans and the way they

Speaker 4 (00:25:24):

Say things. They say decals, deckels. I still can't get

Speaker 3 (00:25:27):

Over. Yeah, yeah. Deckels a

Speaker 2 (00:25:29):

Problem. Wait, wait, wait, wait for a set. Are we talking about decal on a car?

Speaker 4 (00:25:36):

They're stickers. So I didn't even know this, but insurance is a state thing. Insurance is like a state or a country's a government thing and Canada, is that correct?

Speaker 3 (00:25:45):

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, it sort of

Speaker 4 (00:25:48):

So they have to get their insurance deel, right? Right.

Speaker 3 (00:25:55):

Yeah. We had to go get some pasta with our decos.

Speaker 5 (00:25:58):

Yeah, they say they're from Canada and they call pasta, pasta, pasta. What? That sounds like the most hillbilly going to have some pasta. What?

Speaker 2 (00:26:11):

See, I'm used to the normal Canadian stuff that everybody says, but I've never heard of decals. Yeah, decal

Speaker 3 (00:26:23):

Pasta. That's great. Okay. Yeah, right. I feel like you guys are ganging up on me here right now. All right. This is not fair.

Speaker 2 (00:26:31):

Was that good though, to not be able to drive and not have much internet? Did it actually help the record?

Speaker 3 (00:26:36):

I think it sort of, did it make you go a little bit crazy? We were all feeling it pretty hard, going a little bonkers, but it's like we're in the back and there was a couple of days where I was like, I have this empty part in this song and I could put a guitar solo in there or a guitar lead or lay or something. I'm going to track something and see if it fits. And some cool stuff came out of it, so I guess it was good, but at the time it didn't feel good.

Speaker 2 (00:27:05):

So let's talk about the cabin fever a little bit. I actually think that that's really an interesting topic because I've experienced it. I know bands who have recorded with me have experienced it. I used to experience it with my own band on tour. That weird cabin fever does set in. And I actually think that one of the determinants of if someone's going to last at this beyond album one or the first year of touring or whatever, is how well they deal with cabin fever because it's very, very real. So how did you guys deal with it?

Speaker 3 (00:27:49):

I mean, we have definitely all lived together, worked together, hung out together, jammed together every day of the week for years. So it's not like we weren't used to hanging out together, so that was fine. So we can all sit in a room totally silently and just whatever it's gotten to that point with. Although we had a new bass player or bass player, Jared Smith, he was new in the band only for about, I'd say maybe a year and a bit at that point. So he was new and that was kind of cool having a new person there to sort of reenergize a little bit of the dynamic.

Speaker 2 (00:28:23):

He wasn't old and jaded yet,

Speaker 3 (00:28:24):

Right? Yeah. So that was cool. But we've all toured a bunch, so it wasn't too much different. It was like the fact that you weren't going anywhere and it was the exact same place every day because live in our van, we have bunks built into our van, so we're pretty used to that on tour, but staying in the same building every day and not going anywhere was really a little bit different. But yeah, I mean, we've done it. That's the basis of this industry, at least at our level in our genre, is you have to live in a small confined space with three or four other dudes and you have to just like it. You have to appreciate it. And like Dave said, the shared kind of suffering of doing those really long days in the studio in the last few hours, you're both in there together. It sort of bonds you a little bit. So we have a lot of that. So yeah, I dunno. It's a pretty good dynamic between the group. We all just say stupid shit nonstop, so that was helpful. Just dumb shit

Speaker 2 (00:29:33):

Saying stupid shit is helpful. One thing that I've noticed is with bands that are more veteran, one of the things that I'd suggest, and I actually suggested this with a lot of bands who wanted to be at my place for longer than a week or two, is that not everyone has to come down at the same time. For instance, the drummer, if all he does is play the drums, I mean, that's not the case in every situation. There are some bands where the best guitar player in the band is the drummer. So as a producer, I'd make him stay. But in situations where it's more like the drummer's, the drummer, well, is there any reason for him to stay past his 10 days really? Or if the vocals sometimes vocalists, we'd get started on vocals way early, but then other times, if the vocals are going to be last, is there a reason for him to be here the whole time? Sometimes the answer is yes, there's a reason, but sometimes all it does is invite cabin fever. However, the flip side I've noticed is that when I do have people coming in and out, there's a less of that shared going in a battlefield on the record.

Speaker 3 (00:30:54):

It's definitely something that we all write in a room together. So for the most part,

Speaker 2 (00:30:59):

Wow, like a real band.

Speaker 3 (00:31:05):

The writing process is really, yeah, it's us all together. Wait,

Speaker 2 (00:31:10):

That kind of blows my mind actually. Can we talk about that for a second?

Speaker 3 (00:31:14):

Yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 (00:31:15):

Because really, really rare, at least in my experience, writing in a room together is something that bands used to do then they stopped doing. And the only time that I've ever, I've worked with some really technical bands and those are the bands that would never write together. The only bands I ever worked with that wrote in the same room together were more rock bands and stuff where it's a lot easier to just throw riffs across the room, not stuff like you guys do where it takes, I mean, I have never been around you guys, but I know with technical death metal that you can't just jam that shit

Speaker 3 (00:32:01):

If you want to be around us or specifically Jared, that's an hourly rate. So Ollie takes the money,

Speaker 2 (00:32:09):

Just send me the invoice.

Speaker 3 (00:32:10):

You pay Ollie the money, our vocalist, you pay Ollie the money and he'll give. Yeah, it's extra if you're a guy. Sorry. No, it's actually now it's extra. If you're a girl, it's changed. He's sort of like one of those, anyway, the fluid kind of guys, the whole thing about writing in a room together, it's been a really just basically the cornerstone of our band since we've been together for almost 10 years. We just always have done that.

Speaker 4 (00:32:38):

I'm sure you guys bring in riffs and stuff though. I mean

Speaker 3 (00:32:42):

We do, but here's the problem with that is that when I write a riff at home, all I have in my brain is the voices of the other guys in the band going, nah, that part's, whatever. So it is hard to write at home because I feel like, well, if I write this and make this big thing, which happens sometimes, but not always, but happens sometimes I feel like it's going to change anyway, so I might as well bring the initial idea to the guys and see what everybody thinks. And in that way, the guitar players have a say in what the drums sound like or what the drum fill is like, or the drummer has an idea of what the vocal patterns should be, and so everybody gets together on that. That being said, you get a lot of that too many cooks kind of thing sometimes. So we've learned to be like when we're in the studio with you, Dave, it was not everybody was in the tracking room at one time, obviously because of space issues, but also because of, I mean, that just adds too much. And sometimes it's very easy to put out an idea and be like, oh, you should do this. But it's like, well, does that idea really do I really need to pick this specific battle and be like, let's do this.

(00:34:00):

Why don't I just see how things kind of come out and it'll probably turn out really great. And so knowing when to do that is good. Yeah, I mean it would definitely diminish some of the cabin fever if everybody wasn't there, but I also feel like if you're playing a song every single night on tour, you better every single moment of that song. And so that's one thing that we do. We enforce a unanimous writing style, so everybody has to like a thing. So if everybody likes this thing, we'll put it in. If everybody except for one person doesn't like this thing, then we're not going to use it or we're going to change it.

Speaker 2 (00:34:37):

And so when you have that situation come up where it's like four people like it and one person, are you guys at the point now where it's just quickly, you'll just be like, alright, the part's dead. We'll find another part.

Speaker 3 (00:34:52):

Best feeling in the world to scrap a part that's not working for one person because you note that that person wasn't into it. It's

Speaker 2 (00:34:58):

Freeing.

Speaker 3 (00:34:59):

It's freeing. So amazing. Even if you like it and a part of it sort of stings to let it go, it's still like, well, that person didn't like it, so if that person didn't like it and they're going to be playing it every single night for the next however many years the band is going to be together, then we might as well scrap it because that's going to make everybody happier and it creates a better group dynamics. So that's a big part of our band.

Speaker 2 (00:35:21):

There's no riff that's worth losing the band over, and that's the kind of shit that makes a band break up. I mean, it's not like one time where someone gets unhappy, but it's like those little incidents over and over and over again over the course of X amount of time is what destroys a band. I think I'm just impressed by the fact that you guys do it with the style that you do.

Speaker 3 (00:35:48):

Well, we all play within your monitors as well, so we have that in to our benefits. So we're in the jam space and our amps aren't on, there's no vocals going through the pa. We are all listening to each other very clearly. So that helps us. And also we've sort of gotten really good at, here's an idea, I'm going to come up with it right now and you have to learn it. But yeah, it's an interesting group dynamic, I think. But I feel like more bands would do it if they all lived in the same city, but it's harder and harder to find bands that are all living in the same city we are,

Speaker 4 (00:36:22):

Even if they start that way.

Speaker 2 (00:36:24):

There's that whole Guitar pro thing that I think really decimated that style of working together.

Speaker 3 (00:36:31):

We don't do that either. We don't write with Guitar Pro.

Speaker 2 (00:36:33):

Well, there you go. When Guitar Pro came on the scene, so my band never wrote really with Guitar Pro. We taught each other parts, but in my productions, I remember when Guitar Pro came about that less and less bands would play together even if they were in the same city or in the same dorm room or whatever. It just stopped being part of how they did things. But so hearing that you work this way, I think that you guys are a super musical band. That's actually why I wanted to have you guys on and why I've kind of been an advocate for the band is because normally this genre doesn't get too musical. It's actually one of the reasons, specifically what you guys do was one of the reasons that I kind of stopped listening to too many bands. I feel like now there's a resurgence in it, but before that, honestly, in the technical space, the last time that I was really excited about a band was when Epitaph came out.

Speaker 3 (00:37:51):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:37:52):

Totally. We're going back 15 years, and I honestly think that for the audience too, there's been a few to kind of stoke the audience, but not in the same way. But anyways, not to kiss your ass or anything, but I'm not surprised. I'm surprised that you guys write that way just because it's rare, but now that I hear that you guys write this way, it's not surprising because that's what bands do. That's what real bands

Speaker 6 (00:38:24):

Do,

Speaker 2 (00:38:24):

And that's the way you make better music. It proves this argument I've been making for over 10 years now about how Guitar Pro writing in guitar Pro ruins music and bands should write together and actually play their songs.

Speaker 3 (00:38:42):

That's it. Writing together. There's definitely a specific style to writing with Guitar Pro, and I'm not going to say that that's, I personally don't, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I mean, I think it's probably something that I'll say. I think that if Bach or Mozart had Guitar Pro and they could do different mid, I mean, hey, they would use that. Sure. I mean, why not? It's an easier thing, but

Speaker 2 (00:39:09):

That's different though. That's really, really different. They're not writing on an instrument that they're writing on an instrument that was then being arranged out for, I mean, I'm sure they wrote piano music too, but they're writing, they didn't have the ability to, that's all they have. So I feel like with guitar, it's a very, very different thing because the person writing it is generally the person playing, and the way that it's played has a huge, huge part to do with how it even comes off in the first place. It's not like a Mozart piece that can be reinterpreted a hundred to a thousand different ways played by a jazz band or an orchestra.

(00:40:00):

And it's not the same thing with this kind of music. It's like the way that it's played I think is part of the song itself, and that's why covers get so weird between metal bands. It's so specific to how the band that wrote it played it, in my opinion. It's like why when you hear a band do reigning Blood or something, which I'm just picking a song that everybody covers. Lots of bands can play the notes, but it's just not the same because they don't play like that, which I don't think is the same deal with orchestral music. So I kind of feel like Guitar Pro takes that out of the equation.

Speaker 3 (00:40:49):

I think that if you're in a band, you should write together. I mean in whatever context or in whatever dynamic, in whatever capacity you should be writing together so that everybody has at least somewhat of a say in the composition. That's just the basis of my idea. But anyway, Dave, you were going to say something.

Speaker 4 (00:41:08):

I mean, it makes the whole thing a little more interesting too. You're getting genuine interaction between musicians and otherwise. You have a guitar player writing this song and inevitably programming drums, and we've all heard drums, that guitar players program, and then a drummer's like listening to that and playing it, that's going to stifle his creativity because he kind of feels like he has to fit into a mold of something that's already written,

Speaker 2 (00:41:33):

But

Speaker 4 (00:41:34):

Not,

Speaker 2 (00:41:34):

And he doesn't have eight arms. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 (00:41:38):

It opens up a whole can of worms, and like he said, I really am kind of on Dean's side as far as, I'm not going to say that that's better or worse. It's just different. And I will say that when I think of rock music, a lot of what separates it from classical, from other forms of music, rock metal is those small nuances of an interacting band of individual performers and what that all sounds like together as one thing. There's a unique thing there that could happen, writing the way that you guys write all in the same room, everybody putting in their own flavors, writing their own parts, making up a new unique thing rather than one person writing a song, everyone else essentially covering that person's parts, and then that's what you get.

Speaker 2 (00:42:28):

Orchestral music is meant to be reinterpreted. That's a big part of it. It's written for other people to play, and so using something like Guitar Pro or Sheet music, whatever technology allows in my opinion, makes a lot more sense because the interpretation of the music is not in the map, is not the territory. What these guys are doing when they're composing on paper or whatever, they're just writing the map. Then the musicians take it and they show you the territory. But in the case of a band, the band is the map and the territory, and I feel like when they only make the map and don't learn how to play this shit properly, or they don't do those tours on the way to the studio like you guys do, and they don't play the shit together, it leads to records that that's why these records start to sound very chopped together and fake and not real music because these guys have never even played these songs in the first place. They don't have the proficiency to show you the territory musically.

Speaker 3 (00:43:50):

Yeah, well, I think that the composition aspect of it should be done together, but the live performance, in my opinion, should, at least with our band and our genre, should be as close to reproducing the album quality as possible. So

Speaker 2 (00:44:08):

Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (00:44:08):

One of the things that we do is we don't even listen to each other on stage. So we have a big in ear monitor set up, and we listen to just the album stems, so we have a mix. We can control each other's mixes on our phones or whatever, and we can listen to just edited perfect album tracks and then ourself and a click track and whatever else we need. So we don't listen to each other's live feeds. What we want to do is just reproduce what you love on the album. So when you come see us live, it's like, wow, this really is, is the reason why I came here is because of the music, and I really like this song and I love listening to it on the album. I'll come watch somebody play it live, and it's like, wow, that's impressive. And then those crowd parts are harder hitting, they're louder and they're through a pa and there's really loud sub drops and you can feel it. It's like we just want the album amplified short of just putting on a CD player and pumping it through the speakers of the pa.

Speaker 2 (00:45:14):

I backed that method. I think it's a really smart way to go. My drummer used to do that. He would do in ears and have the album guitars cool. I mean, we could play our parts,

Speaker 6 (00:45:26):

But

Speaker 2 (00:45:27):

What if one of us can't hear the hi hat or the snare that well that night Totally, and just starts to get slightly off. Then it starts throwing him off as opposed to, yeah, like you said, here's the guitars the way they're meant to be. So play to that. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:45:40):

I see that too. And I mean, from the audience standpoint, that it's probably preferable you're giving them a more consistent experience every time, but you are missing out on some possible special performances and some moments that might be more memorable. Otherwise, I'm not saying you should change anything, but I have done, I've done a similar thing. I filled in on drums for a band a couple of years ago, and I didn't really have time or the energy or the want to learn all of the drum parts perfectly, and it's a band I had mixed, so I made myself a cheat sheet that I listened to, and it was essentially the album, and then I just overdubbed myself telling myself what to do next. So cool. I would tell myself the next beat and then I would count myself in, and then I was producing myself playing these drums and I was like, man, this is so slick.

(00:46:33):

It worked so well. I just play perfect every night. And then I did a couple shows, and then I realized in the middle I was getting bored. I was like, man, I wish I could check Facebook right now. I'm playing on stage in front of hundreds of people. And it just wasn't, I personally was missing that actual musical interaction between the other people in the band. I felt too disconnected. I was wearing in ears. I couldn't really even hear the crowd or hear any of the energy in the room. And personally, I felt disconnected. Now I've seen you guys live and I've never gotten that impression from the crowd, so you clearly,

Speaker 3 (00:47:09):

We feel very disconnected while we're on stage. I'm oftentimes checking my phone in between songs. That's amazing. Yeah, it's very disconnected.

Speaker 2 (00:47:18):

What about during songs?

Speaker 3 (00:47:20):

Well, what we do actually sometimes is we will have a laptop on stage on basically our tower with all of our in your stuff on it. And I'll put on a season of Seinfeld with the subtitles on. And so during breaks and during say a set interlude or 20 seconds between songs, I can look back and watch part of a Seinfeld show episodes,

Speaker 2 (00:47:46):

And it's those little things that get you through the hard time.

Speaker 3 (00:47:49):

Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:47:49):

Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:47:49):

Totally. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:47:51):

So I don't even know if it would be possible. You guys are so used to doing this way, but I would personally love to see the band just play a show once with amps and no click track. That

Speaker 2 (00:48:07):

Sounded

Speaker 4 (00:48:08):

Very exciting. I've seen Nile back when Nile was a big thing and they were touring constantly, and I just could do nothing but listen to death metal all day long. I, I've probably seen Nile like 10 times in my life, and I'd seen him a handful of times before.

Speaker 2 (00:48:25):

It's a lot of Carl Sanders.

Speaker 4 (00:48:27):

It was a lot of Carl Sanders. I mean, I was watching him when they pretty much had the same setup. He had his midi rig on his guitar, and he used to bring an entire rack with, not laptops, I'm talking about rack mount computers. He had a giant old school CRT monitor that would sit on top. I think this was before LCD monitors were a thing.

Speaker 2 (00:48:48):

It was pretty extreme. I toured with them once, man. It was like the other bands would get six inches of stage at these small death metal size clubs. The other bands would get six inches of stage because his rig is just, it is like Mark Dani's rig or something.

Speaker 4 (00:49:06):

It was monstrous then. It was a lot of setup time and it probably caused a lot of headaches for other people in the production. But I'd seen him a few times with that and it was always good. I mean, they were tight. Everything sounded kick ass. Everyone was right on their marks. I was like, man, yeah, Nile's awesome live. Then fast forward a few years to a Milwaukee metal fest where they're performing and his whole rig shut down. They literally, they had a packed room, I mean, packed to the gills room waiting for them to try and get this thing booted up for a half hour tensions were running high. The band was clearly super frustrated. The audience was super frustrated. Finally, they were just like, fuck it. We're done with this. We are not going to have intro and outro or segue music today.

(00:49:52):

No mini guitar shit. We're just going to play. And it was so sick. Everything was 15 BPM faster. There was so much more fury. The combination of the frustration from trying to get that shit working for a while, and then it was like you cut the leash on a pack of rabid wolves or something like that, and they were just free to completely annihilate and hands down the best Nile show I've ever seen and one of the better death metal performances I've ever seen because of that feeling. So you should play show for me, play show for me one time. Yeah, I'm going to steal your laptop power supply next time you guys come through town or something like that.

Speaker 3 (00:50:36):

I think that one of the big things for us is if we did end up playing a show without all of our gear, it would be pretty close to what you would see with it. However, the tempo ranges because they would slightly, they would be humanized, so it would be slight, maybe something would be faster. You feel like it should be faster or slower or whatever. I think it would just gas us out. We've gotten so used to just setting our endurance level to a specific tempo that if you play one part YBPM faster, I'm going to fucking kind of probably blow it a little bit,

Speaker 4 (00:51:12):

But who cares? But

Speaker 3 (00:51:13):

Maybe that's part of it.

Speaker 4 (00:51:14):

Yeah, it'll be furious and then you'll push past your comfort zone and then maybe a bit of desperation will set in and you'll, a whole new level could be realized that now you really can't get to because you're kind of being held back. So I'm just saying there are two sides of that coin. It could be cool, and you guys are such a technical thing that a lot of this stuff needs to be how it is just put on a good performance. But there's that flip side where if you guys want to do that for one show, just see what happens.

Speaker 3 (00:51:46):

I'll make sure it's in Denver.

Speaker 4 (00:51:48):

Or if you're on tour and a show just sucks and no one's showing up, just fucking try it and see what it feels like. Maybe

Speaker 3 (00:51:55):

It's too bad. All of our shows are packed all the time. I'm just totally joking. I'm totally joking about that one. Not to say that we don't play packed shows. Next question.

Speaker 2 (00:52:07):

Hey, you know what though? I will say that coming from a situation where I was in a band that did that in terms of playing to the same click and the totally programmed show every single night, the times where the gear didn't work sometime in Europe or some shit, man, sometimes those shows were the best ones

Speaker 6 (00:52:36):

Because

Speaker 2 (00:52:37):

They were fucking explosive, but we didn't reach the levels of technicality that you guys do. I actually do have a question about that. I'm sure you guys get asked about this a lot, and so I don't want to talk about it too much, but in terms of the speed, I feel like speed and music is kind of like the same thing as in athletics or whatever. There's a speed that people thought was normal for the mile, and then someone beat that mile and then it got beat again. Or the home run record at one point in time, 40 home runs in a season was a thing. Then Mark McGuire and Barry Bonds and stuff started destroying home run records and the bar keeps going up. And I remember sometime around 2005 or six that drummers in extreme metal suddenly started getting way better, and I figured out why it was because they were listening, like this new generation was coming up that was listening to bands that had edited drums, but they didn't know they were edited.

Speaker 6 (00:54:03):

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:54:04):

They just thought that was normal. And so that became the new normal. And so obviously there's yet another generation that comes with people like Alex Inger where they learned from the people who learned from those edited drummers. So then you have that next stage of evolution where people like Alex Rudger on drums, that level of drumming was unheard of even in 2007 or something. So in terms of your level of precision and speed, it is pretty crazy. But to you guys, how much of it is pushing your abilities and how much of this is just how you guys play at this point?

Speaker 3 (00:54:48):

Well, I mean, it's interesting because the instrument of the electric guitar has been around for a lot longer than the style death metal drums. So death metal drums is pretty new in comparison to playing a loud electric guitar on stage. Eddie Van Halen,

Speaker 2 (00:55:04):

Yes,

Speaker 3 (00:55:04):

Eddie Van Halen was doing crazy shit long before, however, whatever the first crazy death metal blasting drummer was trying to figure out how to do the fastest, it just feels like the instruments are evolving in a different way. So guitar has gone through this period of time where we had Van Halen, and then we had Sean Lane, and we had

Speaker 2 (00:55:29):

Jason Beck, Bing,

Speaker 3 (00:55:31):

All these crazy guitar players that were pushing and pushing and pushing the speed. And I feel like there's almost a kickback to that now where it's like, okay, of course you can play fast. We want it to sound really interesting, like Rusty Cooley, holy shit so fast. It's like, I'm not playing faster than Rusty Cooley and I'm not going to be able to, I just don't feel like that's in my musculature or whatever. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm going to try to get really fast, but I also want to create really memorable melodies and harmonies and compositions that work well with the other instruments. So while being fast is a really big part of that, it's also not necessarily the only goal. However, with the drums, drums in that regard, it's a little bit newer and fresher. And so if you're doing, let's say a three 58th notes and you're doing a bomb blast or something, it's like, holy shit, I've never heard that before.

(00:56:30):

That's amazing. Nobody in the eighties was doing that. So it's cool because we have this sort of different dynamic with the instruments where they're evolving at different rates, and the same thing with bass, and now the same thing with death metal vocals. We're doing something or I'm not doing anything. I can't do that shit. But Ali is doing something where he's using influences from speed rap. And so death metal vocalists have been doing, like Corpse Grindr was doing some fast dust spawn possession. There's psychotic, there's been some bands that have done really fast interesting passages, but what he's doing is taking direct, here's a Tech nine influence and putting it into a death metal style, and now he's even taking some Juicy J and some sort of mumble wrap flows and putting that in there. And now we've got this kind of interesting still really, really fast and pushing it in that way, but it's also memorable. So the dynamics of the instruments and how they're evolving altogether at different rates is I think what makes the genre interesting. And if you can get that at just at the right moment, then it's going to sound really cool. But I mean, Spencer has definitely put a list of the fastest drummers in Canada anyway. I was like, I don't really know many people that are playing faster and crazier stuff than him, but he's such a specialized drummer that all he does when he practices is practice that style. And so

Speaker 2 (00:57:59):

Like an Olympic athlete,

Speaker 3 (00:58:01):

And I love that. I think that's so cool. That's like, okay, so we're not going to go up and play a jazz section. We're not going to go up and play a rock beat. No one in this band wants to do that. What we want to do is go up and play super fast, memorable, extremely technical speed, kind of breaking music, but it's going to stick around with you. So it's a very specialized thing, and members of our band have really specialized in different ways, but specifically Spencer has specialized in, here's this very, very narrow field of study, and he's pretty much at the forefront of it as much as anybody could be at the forefront of that, he is. So I think that part of Ben is really cool.

Speaker 2 (00:58:45):

Well, what I like the most about what you said is how much you guys know exactly who you are. And I think that that's so huge because especially in heavier genres and there's so much pressure from elitist or the audience or from the business side of things to be a certain way or to appear a certain way or to be legit or this or that. There's all these different pressures

(00:59:17):

On metal bands and so you get there at one point in time. It was not cool for a metal band to say that they were just like a metal band, even though they sounded like slayer. There was a time period where they couldn't admit what they were. And then there's another time period where playing solos just isn't cool at all. You couldn't be a good guitar player. There's different rules in different genres, but I've always thought that the best artists are the ones that know exactly who they are unapologetically. And the thing you said about how the musicality is just as much of a priority. Yeah, I can totally hear that. But I do think you're being humble about the guitar because I don't remember people playing three 58th notes back in 2007.

Speaker 3 (01:00:11):

I mean, I feel like my favorite guitar players, guys like Paul Gilbert and guys like Marty Friedman and stuff, they were doing insanely fast stuff. And the cool thing about being a guitar player now playing this genre is I can go back and be just as inspired by those dudes as I can be by most of the people today. And there are some exceptions. So a big one for me is Jason Richardson. So Jason Richardson is doing,

(01:00:39):

No one has done that, in my opinion, that dude is doing stuff no one has done because of how precise, and I've seen him play live before. He's unreal. But he is as specialized in that style. I feel like his best stuff is when he's going a million miles an hour. And it's really interesting and it's cool, especially that last track that they put out tendonitis, that song is like, wow, holy, I don't want to plug a bunch of other, but that song, if you haven't checked out that song, holy shit, there's the forefront of guitar in metal like that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):

I remember. So I mixed that EP he did with Chelsea Grin, and I remember when things fell apart with Borner Osirus, I had heard the tracks for the record for that record and heard the leads. I didn't work on it, but I heard the tracks and was like, man, this kid's really good. And so when he joined Chelsea Grin, I remember though people kind of talked down about that band, but I kept on saying before I even heard them, it was just like, this guy's in the band just wait and hear what happens if they let him do his part. And then we worked on the EP and he basically totally took the band over and it's basically a Jason Richardson ep.

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):

Yeah, I didn't listen to that one.

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):

You should check it out. It doesn't sound like any of their other stuff. It sounds like a Jason Richardson thing. I mean, he wrote the whole thing and played everything just about crazy. It's the Evolve EP and it's got his orchestral shit on it and it's like it's Jason Richardson before the solo stuff, but it's not really Chelsea grin, it's Jason Richardson basically taking over another band. People who would be like, well, guitar players now suck. It's like, no, they don't.

Speaker 3 (01:02:35):

They don't.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):

You need to hear, you're just not looking for the next evolution. And this guy, Jason Richardson is the next evolution. If he was around in the eighties, he would've been hanging out with the Jason Becker's and the Marty Friedmans and the Paul Gilberts, like he is that guy for our time period. So you should respect him. And now people do feel that way, but I totally agree with you. I do think that he is one of the people that's pushing that envelope, and it is because he writes music

Speaker 6 (01:03:10):

Like

Speaker 2 (01:03:11):

Actual music. He's not just playing fast shit. And also the fact that he can actually play the stuff. Oh

Speaker 3 (01:03:19):

My God,

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):

It's

Speaker 3 (01:03:20):

Unreal.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):

So the fact that he can actually play it and it's super musical is unbelievable.

Speaker 3 (01:03:27):

While we're on the topic of just new guitar players real quick, if we just did a tour with Obscura, so supporting Obscura in the States and their new guitar player, Raphael Trujillo is unreal. That dude writes some of the coolest things I've ever heard, and his technical abilities are unreal. So if you just haven't checked that guy out, he's pretty new. I think he's pretty new in the scene just because he's now playing with Obscura and doing a lot more touring with them. But man, that

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):

Raphael Quila,

Speaker 3 (01:03:56):

Oh my God, dude, he's unreal. So cool.

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):

Do you spell it kind of like the guy from Metallica?

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):

Okay. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:04:03):

He's amazing. Yeah, so anybody listening that hasn't checked that guy out, like holy shit, that guy's super inspiring.

Speaker 2 (01:04:09):

Another one is Brandon from Black Dahlia murder.

Speaker 3 (01:04:12):

Yeah, yeah, Brandon Ellis. Yeah, he's great. His vibrato is amazing.

Speaker 4 (01:04:16):

Everyone just talks about that dude's vibrato. Every band that I have in here, vibrato, it's great. I mean, it is really good. It is really good.

Speaker 2 (01:04:23):

Guitar Pro ruined vibrato in my opinion. So I really do think that Guitar Pro writing on Guitar Pro and not actually playing stuff is part of why Vibrato started to get really, really bad.

Speaker 3 (01:04:37):

You're totally right. You're totally right. The vibrato is the thing that suffered from Guitar Pro.

Speaker 2 (01:04:41):

And so when you hear someone like Brandon Ellis come around with that classy real wide and just Marty Friedman esque vibrato is just like, yes, a real guitar player. So a few questions here from our audience that I wanted to ask you. Joe Manne was wondering if there were any slower than real-time tracking on instruments or vocal tracks? I'm going to guess the answer's. No.

Speaker 4 (01:05:09):

No. Yeah, I don't think so. No, we didn't do it. I mean, we did standard edits for sections, but I don't like that vibe when you slow stuff down. I mean, I have done it out of necessity, but it never sounds right.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):

The only time that I've ever been able to make it sound right is if it's a five BPM thing where the riff or something is just a little bit above the guy's ability to play it with a good feel. But that halftime stuff,

Speaker 4 (01:05:44):

Yeah, I would say the exact same thing when I've gotten okay results. It's like that, like five or 10 BPM, and then if you're doing guitars, then you just time compress the di and then they reamp and they sound fine. But it seems like the more common method is the halftime and you just make cuts at every attack and that literally will just sound exactly like you amped out of Guitar Pro and what's the point?

Speaker 2 (01:06:10):

There is no point. So when you say that the goal is so super technical, super musical, super memorable, do you foresee that changing or do you just foresee you guys doubling down?

Speaker 3 (01:06:26):

Well, okay, so we have a bit of a brand. Our brand is stay tech, so we have, it's like a secondary logo basically, and what that encapsulates is basically this what we're doing and whoever else wants to join us, the goal here is to just keep writing and keep improving in this very kind of narrow field where you have musical but really technical and interesting. But we're not playing, like I said before, in sort of a jazzy kind of thing. I'm probably not going to do a polyrhythmic thing into a seven eight part into a jazz section. Or what we want to do is just write really extreme, fast technical death metal and we're not going to add any melodic singing. No offense to anybody that wants that. I feel like that's totally a cool thing. It's all art, so whatever you like, but for us, we want to keep doing exactly what we're doing and just get better at it. So hopefully everybody is along for the ride basically in that regard.

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):

Yeah, I mean that just goes back to what I said before about how the best artists know exactly who they are. But Dave, as for you as a producer, you're really well known for the extreme stuff you do, but I know as well as other people that know you that you can do lots of different things. Your more commercial stuff sounds great too. You've got a wide range as a producer, and I know that sometimes producers who do have a wide range of abilities will try to bring other genres or elements to bands, whether or not it's appropriate. I guess when you approach a band like this, what's the line for you in terms of bringing an idea to the table? I mean, Dean just said they're very, very clear on what the goals are.

Speaker 4 (01:08:26):

Yeah, I mean it's really just what's best for the band because I do work with such a wide variety, which honestly keeps me sane and I wouldn't want it any other way, but I'm pretty good at shifting into a mode with a band and especially when you have dudes here and that's going back to having everyone at the studio, even if they're not tracking all that stuff kind of serves to put everyone on the same page, on the same road in a way of speaking. So a few days in, I wouldn't ever, I'm not thinking about like, Hey, there's this cool thing I used on this radio track. You guys want to try this in here mean Unless for some reason it's absolutely fitting which, and an var song is just never going to be. So it really is just what's best for the project.

(01:09:20):

And I try not to, I use my experience from obviously every project I work on and everything I've done over the past 20 years, but I look at it through the lens of the project I'm working on at that time and what they want and what their fans are going to want and what is best going to represent them. I don't think I ever suggested anything too weird. Occasionally I might, I'll even find myself be like, man, I hear this really melodic thing. Say I'm working with a band that maybe not even Arch Byre, but an other band that's just really atonal, caustic extreme. And I was like, well, if I hear a melody, I might be like, guys, I'm just going to show this to you. I can't get out of my head, but I completely don't know if it's appropriate and you need to tell me. So I'll sometimes kind of refer to bands themselves to make sure I'm not stepping too far out of the lane, but in most cases I'm kind of just right there with them and I'll know you can just tell you just know something's appropriate or something's not. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:10:20):

Well I thought it was interesting that Dean said that, for instance, with the vocals, there's speed wrap and I actually think that there's a lot in common between brutal metal and rap, but That'ss not exactly two genres that on the surface go hand in hand. There's a time period where even admitting that you were influenced by rap would get you would not go over well.

Speaker 3 (01:11:00):

And there's many cities that we played where when we put on rap between, so we have changeover music and we usually put on Juicy J race app Rocky or something. There's been a couple venues where the promoter will be turn that shit off and it'd be like, whoa, okay. I mean you like the band, so it's like why do you, I mean there's definitely some similarities to draw between us and them.

Speaker 4 (01:11:22):

There was a point when I was just first talking to Spencer and we kind of laid out some stuff for the album. I think we may have even been confirmed at that point, but I hadn't really talked to everyone else. I think I maybe talked to Dean for just a split second, and then with Gordon, kind of their label, dude a whole bunch,

Speaker 3 (01:11:38):

Shout out to Gordon Conrad. Amazing.

Speaker 4 (01:11:40):

Yeah, Gordon is the best of the best dudes best. But Spencer sent me a random Facebook message like, Hey, are you into technical rap at all? And honestly, I didn't even know what that was. Technical speed wrap, I had no idea. I had never heard it. I had never heard Tech Nine.

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):

It's insane. Isn't it

Speaker 4 (01:11:59):

Mean now I have, but even then, that's not something I'm going to listen to. It's not on my alley. I can listen to it and get some cool things out of it, but I don't personally listen to it ever. It's just not what I do. And I was like, no, no, Spencer, I've never heard that stuff. And I could feel his hesitation through the computer and I would not be surprised if Dean got a message shortly after the be like, dude, Dave doesn't listen, tech speed rap. I don't know, maybe we should go somewhere else. But then I got in here and I figured it out, especially when you got to vocals. I was like, oh, they're just talking about catchy flows. I know that I could do that.

Speaker 3 (01:12:42):

So

Speaker 4 (01:12:43):

It wasn't like, even though I don't really like the rap side of it, I can appreciate what they took from that and put into this. And I was like, oh man, this is really fun. Writing these vocal flows is super fun. Actually trying to write catchy rhythms on top of this insane death metal. It was one of the more surprisingly enjoyable parts of the album. And then we'll track a section that would just be crazy insane, and we come back and listen to it and everyone is just throwing their hands up in the air because it sounds so ridiculous. And it was one of the more fulfilling sections that I kind of didn't anticipate, honestly.

Speaker 3 (01:13:17):

Yeah, you should listen to all he do impressions of rappers that he really likes. I think he does a really good ice cube. He knows a bunch of verses and he'll just bust out Ice Cube, be like, holy shit. Totally sounds like Ice Cube. Or there's a video of him covering a Tech nine section from Midwest Choppers on YouTube and he just nails it. The dude is very heavily influenced by that, and I think he brought a little bit more of that. He's always bringing more and more of that, and as much as we still listen to a lot of the same music that we did when he started the band, there's also new influences in that regard. So new rap and stuff like that, that's a big one.

Speaker 2 (01:14:04):

So switching topics a little bit, want to ask you another question from the audience, but I want to preface this with this has been a real issue for me in my productions and also from both sides, both when working with bands or going into the studio and being produced. This has always been an issue because some instruments sound better than others, but at the same time, nothing sounds better than a musician that's comfortable on an instrument. So the question is from Max, and I can't pronounce his last name, sorry, max, with music this technical, do you ever find musician preferences for instrument set up to be an obstacle from a tone standpoint? And if so, how do you approach it? Dave

Speaker 4 (01:14:50):

Talking mostly about, well, okay, so and that comes down to everything from strings that people are used to playing with to their picks, to their instruments, to drummers, drumsticks, and it's always a compromise. And the only time where I am pretty much like, okay, this is your time to shine, unless it sounds like complete garbage you play with whatever you're comfortable with are guitar solos. So on guitar solos, I typically let guys use whatever guitar they want to play, guys or girls, whatever guitar they want to play with, whatever pick they want to play, standing up, sitting down, whatever kind of monitoring environment, ampt tone, amount of delay. At that point I was like, you need to be as comfortable. This is your point to put your complete musical self into this part of the performance. All eyes are on you, so kind of give you free reign unless it's just something really terrible. Someone's trying to use a felt pick or something like that, which never had happen. But if someone did, I'd kick him right out.

Speaker 2 (01:15:47):

Man, I have had some guy insist on a felt pick and I've had another guy insist on trying to play rhythms for a super heavy band finger style. Oh my god,

Speaker 4 (01:16:00):

Some dudes can do it. I've seen incredibly consistent bass players.

Speaker 2 (01:16:05):

This was not good. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (01:16:08):

No, I fully understand that. Then you just hand them a 1.2 millimeter and be like, figure it out, or someone else is doing this.

(01:16:17):

But for the rest of it, it really is. It kind of has to be a compromise because rhythm guitar tone is a huge part of an album, and if we bump your string gauge up a tiny bit, that is actually going to make a substantial difference. And we're tracking rhythm guitars for seven days, so you'll get used to it kind of thing. Or honestly, the main one these days is picks. Most guitar players like to use these as a little tiny jazz, three tapered edge picks or the nylon ones a lot. And while those picks have cool tone for certain sections for aggressive rhythm guitar, a torque sex is just going to sound better a hundred percent of the time and make a large, very substantial difference in the attack and the punchiness of the tone. So I'm going to probably hand you a green cortex, and unless you completely say you cannot play with it at all, we're probably going to use that or something else. That sounds good. And we'll try a few different ones. So I mean, I think that kind of answers the question. Same thing with sticks, that's a more difficult one, but might make you,

Speaker 2 (01:17:20):

It makes such a difference though.

Speaker 4 (01:17:21):

Yeah, yeah. I might make you try use heavier sticks or at very, at the least, if you do a lot of intricate bell stuff, I might want you to use nylon tips. They're like, I know those are more expensive. They break cause problems, but they will make your ride sound a lot cooler if you're that kind of a band. Or hey, if we're going to try to use natural kick sound on this album, I'm probably going to loosen your kick drum. I know you have it really tight, it makes your triggers work better and it gives you a bit of bounce, but doesn't sound that great for some styles that way. There's always going to be some adjustment. I try, and this is the kind of stuff I typically go over with people before they start, at least drummers because they're the first to show up, so they kind of need to have an idea. There's not a chance to converse about that stuff ahead of time, but I will. And then if it's never really happened, but if a guitar player was to be like, I cannot play with this pick, I absolutely can't. And then maybe we figure something out there, you have to be able to perform well. I mean, that's what people are listening to, so it's just a compromise.

Speaker 2 (01:18:18):

Dean, what's your take on it from the musician side of the fence?

Speaker 3 (01:18:22):

I found myself going into the studio with Dave relatively open-minded, or at least I feel like I was pretty, I didn't want to go in there and shut down ideas and have the album sound not as good. So I'm like, okay, well if he asked me to play with a different pick, I'll try it out. And I found it's totally changed the way that I think about playing guitar and recording guitars. Now I have picks that I use only for recording and then only for live. I didn't quite realize the difference that it would make even from basically the first rift that we played. Yeah, the first riff, pretty

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):

Dramatic, isn't it?

Speaker 3 (01:18:54):

Yeah, the first rift that we tracked, I was like, oh, this is crazy. This is way more pick tone and just it doesn't pull the string because I'm used to using 1.5 jazz threes, like the Intune 1.5 jazz threes, and they feel great. And I am so used to playing with those and I love the way that they play, but if I'm in the studio, I'm going to go with a thin big pick. I mean even for a lot of the really low risks we used, I think we used a 0.88 totex for something on the low. If we're tuned down to a drop E on an eight string, it's like that just sounds way better.

Speaker 4 (01:19:27):

Yeah, that's not thin to me. That's kind of where I think picks are usually best balances, like 0.8 to one millimeter typically. But I do, I mean I'm sure we did in the ry, I do typically on almost all my albums, we'll have a few picks around and we switch between them sometimes for clean stuff, if you use one of those tapered nylons, they really bring out the lushness. That softer nylon material brings out little more of the body of a string and it can really give you some nice warm clean tones. But actually it has this sparkly element too. But for standard distorted rhythm guitars, I personally think the green, I dunno if they're 0.8 or 0.8 eights totex, the green totex is just almost always win. But then if there's a trim section, then we'll use a thinner one. We will go to a 0.6 because you're able to gloss over three strings at a time picking really fast and get more note and less pick out of it and it's going to pull it out of tune less.

Speaker 3 (01:20:25):

Yeah, I feel like the biggest piece of advice I can ever give to a band that's maybe new or they've been playing for a few years and they want to get a bigger profile is defer to the expertise of somebody that you're working with. And so I mean for this example it was, okay, well what type of picks, whatever, it's be open to it. And it's the same thing with anything else in the industry as well. If you genuinely trust somebody's opinion and you feel like they're probably more experienced, more well-versed in the subject that you're talking about, let them give you sort of the path you should take. And that's really helped us. So for this example, it's gear in the studio or there's always exceptions to that, but if you feel like this person really does have your best interest at heart, then yeah, defer to their expertise.

(01:21:13):

And in this case it made our rhythm guitar sound way better. I mean the big thing for us was we were tracking, I think with Pod farm and Dave's studio, and if you can make that sound good with the di before you re-amp, if you can make pod farm sound good like this dry kind of, it's not cutting edge technology, it's not the newest plugin. It's like here's this thing that sounds okay. And if you can make that sound good before you re-amp, then the guitar tracks are going to sound really, really good. And they did end up sound really good.

Speaker 2 (01:21:42):

There's some great sounding records that have used Pod farm amazingly enough. I'm glad we got to talk about this because I feel like for newer bands it's like a big obstacle to overcome the veterans. This is never an issue. Veterans veteran bands, they know the score if they go to the studio ready to make a record, but the less experienced bands will get precious about gear and things that you shouldn't get precious about and it's not talking shit about them. They just don't have the experience yet to know. And so I think that what you said about if you actually trust the person that you're working with and I mean why would you go to him

Speaker 3 (01:22:21):

Other than you want to go there and subconsciously show off how much you know about this certain topic, oh, I'm going to go there and show him up when it comes. Some people have that in the back of their mind too. They're just like, oh, I know how to do this. We're going to go track it, but I'll take over a little bit. It's like, no man, just be vulnerable in that kind of space and be like, here's our music. What do you think?

Speaker 2 (01:22:40):

I've definitely experienced bands coming to where I was because they liked the records that were coming out of that studio, but then questioning every single thing that was going on. But it was generally the newer bands. It is never the vets, it was always the ones that still had a chip on their shoulder, something to prove that something to prove vibe was they had something to prove to us. They had something to prove to the audience, audience add something to prove to everybody. Still,

Speaker 4 (01:23:07):

This honestly could apply to some of the listeners listening to this and because this kind of platform that you guys has created, you get a lot of cool tips and you get a lot of these things and I can imagine it would be easy for people to only hear those tips and then not hear what we're saying right now because it's not as fun. It's not a tip. It's not like a concrete like, oh hey, here's this quick trick to get this amazing thing. What we're saying right now. It's probably more important than any of those tips together unless you are at the point where you're in the position of power producing bands. And if you're going to a producer, let them give them the power, first of all, take your time, make the right decision, and then once you make that decision, commit to that and really let that person guide you because if you've made the right call, they will have your best interests and have more experience in you in all these regards. So it hasn't happened to me much lately, but it has a few times and if it did now I would be so incredibly annoyed by someone being adamantly backseat producing and if it came from something from a podcast or something like that, I would probably lose my cool pretty quick and I almost never lose my cool. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:24:16):

That's a big part of why we enjoyed working with you. You never seemed stressed, even though you may or may not have been, I mean I'm not inside your head, but the day to day it was like I feel like he's got it under control. The timeline as much as at the end we were sort of just like we're a little bit tight for time, but like, but we knew that was going to happen. It's not like we went and being like, we knew that we were going to have to bust our ass in the studio to get the album done in time. Yeah, that was a big thing. It's like we're going to put the trust in you that you're going to be able to do all the things that we asked you to do and do it in the way that we wanted you to do it and you blew it. No, I was just kidding. No,

Speaker 2 (01:24:53):

Dave, I actually, I was wondering what you meant by something you just said that if it came from a podcast it would annoy you more. What did you mean?

Speaker 4 (01:25:03):

I just know there's a lot more transparency between people doing this day-to-day in the industry, producers now and people coming up. So this podcast would be one of those newer things that's happened in the last five years, and this is across almost any industry, especially creative industries, that separation of knowledge is not as wide as it used to be, which is really cool.

Speaker 2 (01:25:30):

No more monopolies on information, right?

Speaker 4 (01:25:32):

And which is really cool, but it's easy. I can imagine as a less experienced person, it would be easy to cherry pick that information and not take all of it. So that's what I'm saying is don't go into a studio and then maybe you heard me say one time that a green torque text 0.8 pick gives the best rhythm tone and pick a fight with your producer that wants you to use a one millimeter pick. At least try it out. I mean, give everything a fair shot. And it's easy to just pick those little quick tips and think they're going to make all the difference. I mean really you got to put those together with all the rest of the knowledge and trust in the process and that sort of stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:26:09):

The tips themselves aren't what makes the difference. It's the thought process that gets you there.

Speaker 3 (01:26:14):

There's a big thing, I really like the magicians pen and teller and they talk about how when you tell somebody the secrets to a trick, they find themselves really bored and they don't actually care. So it's like, here's how this trick is done and it looks amazing. And so it's like, okay, well here's actually how it is up. We have somebody backstage doing this and then this person's doing this, and then when we do this, we have this thing and it's really complex and there's a lot of stuff to do. It's not just a, oh, we did this one thing and somebody's like, oh, it's never a satisfying answer. It's always just hard work and practice and timing. It's the same thing with this. In order to know the secret, the secret is experience and knowing a lot about it and doing it a million fucking times so that you can actually feel comfortable with how good you are. And then even then being open to learning things.

Speaker 2 (01:26:57):

It is interesting though because Dave, what you said, I am sure it happens. Back when I went to Berkeley, I remember going around Boston looking for a studio for my band to record in. And when I told people I went to Berkeley, I learned real fast, I should stop saying I went to Berkeley because people would immediately hate me. And I was like, why do you guys have a problem with Berkeley kids? I'm not going to give you a problem. And they're like, well, you might not. But typically when the Berkeley kids go around town, they act like they know everything because

(01:27:32):

They learned three things and their studio class. So they go to a studio and they tell the guy that makes a living who's been doing this for 20 years, how to do their job. And so I'm sure that people watch nail the mix or do the podcast and cherry pick information like you said, and then misuse it. But I hope that listening to this, they'll stop doing that. And actually I know that it's kind of unavoidable when you put out this much info to this many people, but my only hope is that people do listen to the deeper message behind all that, that it really is not about the individual tricks. I mean, they're cool, they're cool and all, it's good for your vocabulary, you should have as wide of a vocabulary as possible, but if you don't understand how to form those sentences based on those words, it doesn't matter how many words,

Speaker 4 (01:28:26):

Right? Yeah. And honestly, this whole platform and nail the mixes actually gives you access to all of that. So it's not like you're just getting the tips and that's all you have to work with. You see the entire process. So take all that in and gain the knowledge from that stuff rather than just getting a little, the quick pulling the sound soundbite kind of type deals. I have so many hobbies and I constantly am trying new stuff and I fully admit I'll do that if I'm not going to do something a lot and I just want to get video editing. Recently I just wanted to put together a quick video. I was playing around with something. So I watch a bunch of YouTube videos and I'm just fast forwarding all over the place. I just want to know how to do the thing. Enough of this talking, just show me the three buttons that I click to do this and that's fine. But if you're trying to take it a step further than that, then just a casual thing, then you really got to dig in and go beyond that. It's not about a bunch of three second sound bites. It's about putting yourself in the experience. And with the capabilities with nail the mix, it's about actually digging into all those tracks, different tracks, trying different things, listening to critique.

Speaker 2 (01:29:35):

What I always tell people that the best way to go about it with anything that they learned from us, but we'll just use now. The mix for example, is when you first get to tracks, you do your own mix fast

(01:29:52):

In a couple of days, normal speed for if you were getting hired, turn it around fast and then put it down and wait until the q and A happens. Ask your questions, figure out, have your list of questions about what was challenging for you and talk to the mixer or post in the group and tag the mixer, ask him questions. Then after the q and a start from scratch all over again and mix it, but with those answers in mind, but only spend a day or two on it and be done with it. And then when you see nail the mix live stream, ask your questions, take notes, pay attention to how it was done in real life, and then put those notes away and mix it a third time from scratch. But every time I think they should do it from scratch without looking at settings or anything like that, they should be asking questions about concepts and then try to incorporate those concepts into their own mix, but without settings or anything like that so that they don't lull themselves into a false sense of competency. And besides it doesn't work to copy people's settings, really

(01:31:08):

Kind of the same way that Jean you were saying about magic tricks. They could tell you how to do one of their magic tricks same way that Gordon Ramsey can explain how to cook a pasta. A pasta on his show. Yeah, pasta. But you're probably not going to be able to pull it off like him, even if you have all the same ingredients.

Speaker 3 (01:31:34):

I just want to say, I think it's funny how you guys were talking about this very in depth, very cerebral sort of thing about the processes of mixing and you're like, yeah, like Dean said about magic tricks. Oh my God. Well, yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:31:50):

I like to tie conversations together, but those high level, let's say illusionists actually very comparable to recording in that their world used to be kind of like a secret society where still

Speaker 4 (01:32:06):

Kind

Speaker 2 (01:32:06):

Of is more so than recording. Recording definitely used to be a secret society and this information, these platforms for information, we got a lot of hate for doing this at the beginning and it's because it was kind of breaking that code of silence that was a thing in the studio world. And it's a very similar thing too, that when you actually see how technical it is behind the scenes, it it's not nearly as sexy as you think it is. There's actually a lot of parallels I think

(01:32:40):

Between the two worlds, except in recording, you're not going to get eaten by a tiger. So that's pretty cool. Okay, so speaking of actually doing stuff, actually getting better, like you said, you can learn some tips and tricks if you want to dabble in something, and it's probably easier than ever to get mediocre at something because all the basic information on getting mediocre is easily accessible for just about anything. But for you specifically, Dean, this is a question from Perkins, how the actual fuck do you play so fast? So what goes into it actually on a technical daily basis, discipline level, what goes into that?

Speaker 3 (01:33:23):

I'd say that because I teach guitar, I used to teach a little bit more guitar than I teach now, but I still do teach. And one of the things I've noticed that is sort of the ultimate thing to getting the most control over the fastest technique is splitting the workload over multiple muscle groups. So when it comes to my right hand, I'm not just using my wrist or my fingers or my elbow or my shoulder, I'm using all of it at the same time. So that's a big thing when it comes to speed is having it so that your control level goes up so the speed ceiling of your controlled techniques goes up, and that's a daily practice thing of playing very slowly, analyzing how you play fast and then taking that exact sane movement and just slowing it down. Because a lot of the times when we practice something slow, we use entirely different muscle groups than we do when we play it fast. So we have to analyze how we're doing something in this sort of what our ultra fast mode is, and then taking all those muscle groups and slowing them down and realizing that, well, I need to minimize the amount of lost energy going into this technique as much as I can. So that's a big part of it. Daily regimen practice, I don't really practice as much lately. I'm sort of going through a period where I'm also doing a lot of video editing. But

Speaker 2 (01:34:41):

What about when you did? How about when you were building it up and getting there in the first place?

Speaker 3 (01:34:47):

I would play, let's say the baselines of my technique came from when I was in high school and during the summers I would play 6, 7, 8 hours a day, something like that. And that's a lot of just playing the very basics and understanding how your body works. And also for me, really inviting new movements that you don't really realize you're doing. So let's say something recently that I've done that's boosted my speed was I've incorporated index and thumb movement into my fast picking. So everything else will stay still and I'll just practice index and thumb movement and just to move the pick. So it's a different way to move the pick. And when I get that motion somewhat mastered or at least I have some sort of competency edit, then it'll start to add its way into all my other things, all my other techniques, all my other ways of playing, and then my playing will be 10% faster or whatever, splitting up the workload between multiple muscle groups. And that's what I find is really important. Number one, don't fool yourself. Because when people go and they say, thank

Speaker 2 (01:35:52):

You for saying that,

Speaker 3 (01:35:52):

Here's this riff, I'm playing it, it's like, no, you are not. If you don't know what stroke each individual node is being played by and why it's doing that, then you aren't really playing it. Because oftentimes people will just go, like I said, to this ultra fast mode and this ultra fast mode is essentially useless because we play an instrument that has more than one string. If we didn't, then it would be fine. You could play in one string all day. Ultra fast mode doesn't really matter because trend picking is just, okay, tense up, get as much motion in there, hit the string as many times as possible. But for us, we play an instrument that has more than one string, so we need to sort of adapt. There's all these different styles of picking different things, and it really just comes down to really simple math downs, strokes, and upstrokes and where they all fall on each string and being, like I said, honest with yourself. If you know that, if you know what you're doing and not just essentially faking it, everybody knows the transients on a waveform will tell you if you're faking it. And if you don't know what you're doing, then you're going to see it and it's not going to translate well, especially in a recording setting.

Speaker 2 (01:36:59):

Sounds to me you approach it very much the way that an athlete or a dancer would approach their discipline.

Speaker 3 (01:37:07):

Yeah, I mean you definitely, you play enough, you start to learn some small things about how to do it.

Speaker 4 (01:37:13):

Dean should plug his YouTube channel. Dean is clearly a very good teacher, and I honestly kind of figured this out more after he left, really. But you have a video series, what is it called? Dean Learns to Play Blank or something like that?

Speaker 3 (01:37:27):

Yeah, it's called Dean Attempts to Learn.

Speaker 4 (01:37:29):

Dean attempts to Learn, and honestly, everyone should watch,

Speaker 2 (01:37:34):

Put a link to this in the show notes.

Speaker 4 (01:37:36):

Okay, cool. You definitely should. He's got a few of 'em up there, and I don't even play guitar and I have watched full episodes. You missed me. Literally. Yeah, it's just mostly I just Ms. Dean and it kind of feels like we're hanging out when I'm just replying to emails. I'll put Dean up in the corner on the screen, but he goes through the entire process and you can hear him talk about this and you understand how methodical he is and how much he thinks about things before he does them. He doesn't just jump in head first and you get to watch his entire process. And that is from picking up the guitar all the way through learning a section, and that includes warmups and that includes the thought processes of like, okay, well how am I going to break this down? What are the technical tools that I'm going to use as far as bringing this into a DAW and slowing it down to try and learn this? And it's super instructional. And if I did play guitar, I would fly to Vancouver to take lessons from because he's a really good teacher. He explains things very well and everything is real thought out and makes sense. And I was like, man, yeah, I don't even, I'm familiar enough with the instrument obviously doing what I do, that I can look at that and be like, that is the exact right way to approach this.

Speaker 2 (01:38:51):

I imagine that it also probably saves you from injury to really break down the mechanics that much.

Speaker 3 (01:38:58):

Yeah, I mean it probably has. I have had some injuries with my left arm, specifically some ulnar nerve inflammation, which is a kind of a bummer, but that's also part of it. So I mean learning how to adapt, learning how to put the least amount of effort in for the most amount of results. So not doing wild movements, so understanding how to keep your hands as tight to the guitar as possible and all that kind of stuff. So the real bottom line is that people, when they learn how to, they learn how to do something, they are looking for the quick tips and the things to make them really amazing at it. And those things are cool, but the real baseline is just how much time do you put into it.

Speaker 2 (01:39:40):

I know

Speaker 3 (01:39:41):

Something that I listened to Lauren, Lauren Michaels, SNL, he was saying that he one time got a job offer two job offers at the same time. So he's from Toronto I think, or Ontario at least, and he got a job offer from the CBC, so the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to do a project.

Speaker 2 (01:39:58):

So not the Center for Disease Control?

Speaker 3 (01:40:00):

I don't think so, no. Yeah, he got two job offers. One was to do a government funded sort of project every two or three months or to go to LA and do a project every one or two weeks. So it was with two different companies. And even though the quality of the project might suffer because of how much condensed work you'll be doing, your ability to do projects will greatly increase. Your quality of the projects will eventually start to go up quite a bit because you get used to knowing how to do projects and the repetition. It's like the same reason Bach was such an amazing composer is because he worked, he had to write a new mass every week. He had to write hours of music that you also had to have the ability to improvise over top of that music in the same style.

(01:40:52):

And now he had a lot of music. Was every song that he wrote or every piece that he wrote of Total Bangers, like no, but he wrote some of the most amazing music you can listen to and so much of it because of his experience in doing that. And so I really feel like the more you do it, the better you're going to get at it. And it's really just time. So how much do you practice a day? So that's the end goal. And so if you don't do enough, then you're probably not, the quick tips are not really going to get you there.

Speaker 2 (01:41:23):

It's interesting because some very, very intimately familiar now with online education, both taking it myself and running this company. When I decided I was going to start this, I dropped a lot of money to learn how to run a business and how to market it online. I'm talking, I spent 20 grand on courses, basically a small college education on how to do this. And one thing that I did was put the shit into practice immediately and did a lot of work. This is over a period of 18 months, and I met a lot of other people who were also dropping money on courses and not getting any results. And they'd get mad, they'd be like, this is a scam or whatnot. And I'd be like, this is not a scam. I'm getting fucking great results with the same information. So I'd start to analyze, what is it?

(01:42:21):

I don't think I'm that special. These people, it would be easy to say they're all idiots, that's why it's not working. But that's too easy. That's not always the case. What was always the case was that they just wouldn't go the distance. And so that's all it was. I mean, sometimes they'd be dumb and sometimes they'd have a stupid idea, but more often than not, they just wouldn't go the distance and that's the end of it. They'd buy the course, learn the superficial shit from it, maybe get a slight boost to what they were doing, and then that's it. Then they'd move on to the next shiny object before really mastering one thing. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:43:05):

Well, the reason why generally people don't do that is because they don't believe in themselves. So they can do it deep down. So they see some sort of obstacle and they go, well, who am I to do this thing? All these other people have done it, but they're better than me.

Speaker 2 (01:43:17):

I feel that way too, but I just ignore it. So

Speaker 3 (01:43:19):

Do I. Absolutely. And you just push through it. And then when people start saying, Hey, you're just as good as this person that you think that you personally think really highly of, you're like, no, I'm not. And the truth is that you are, because if they say that you are, then you are, who are you to say that they're wrong? So it really is just allowing yourself to fail, but putting in the time and pushing through all the negative thoughts, because the negative thoughts are the things everybody has those in their head, oh, you can't do it. You can't do this thing. You're not good enough, you're not smart enough. All this stuff, so-and-so did it. And they did it in less time because younger than you or whatever. Constantly comparing yourself, it's like if you just push through that and be like, Hey, I enjoy doing this, I'm going to keep doing it, I'm going to get pretty good at it maybe, and eventually you will if you're going to put the time into it. But it's also about priorities. If you have a family or whatever and you have other obligations you need to put in. And the balance of that is really tough too. So that's why I'm probably going to get a vasectomy. Everybody,

Speaker 2 (01:44:20):

I was watching a director's round table the other day, like a bunch of Hollywood directors, great ones sitting around talking shop. I feel like Darren Aronofsky said something like, bad reviews suck. Great reviews are worse.

Speaker 3 (01:44:37):

Yes, totally. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:44:39):

Totally. But I agree that if someone thinks you're good, you are good because it's perception. But at the same time, I don't listen to what they say. But that doubt, that self-doubt thing, I think that anyone who has done anything great just about, unless there are a complete psychopath, and I'm being serious about that, unless there are a psychopath, psychopaths actually have a lot of tendencies towards success because of the way they're wired. But if you're not like that, you probably will have a lot of self-doubt. And the big difference I think between the people who get somewhere and don't are the ones who just ignore that doubt. You get it, you acknowledge it and then you say, fuck it, and keep going anyways. If you don't do it, someone else is going to do it, so fuck it. Why not just do it? So Dave, here's a question for you from Cameron Simpson, and he says, it's not a question, it's more an appreciation to that symbol hit at three minutes and nine seconds that hit felt isolated, but at the same time it was the perfect transition back into the song. My question would be, was that a decision that was made by Arks Byer or was that your decision? And this is me asking, do you even know what he's talking about? No,

Speaker 4 (01:46:01):

I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:46:02):

Is it right after my solo? I think,

Speaker 4 (01:46:04):

I mean, is he talking about the fact that there's just a measure rest with just a bell?

Speaker 2 (01:46:10):

I think he just means that there's so many different things you could put in that pause. You could have put nothing. There could have been a drum fill, there could have been a reverse swell. There's so many different things. And I think he was just saying that that just felt like the perfect thing of all the 10 million things you could do or not do, that felt perfect. But he also is saying that it felt like an isolated hit, recorded separately inserted there as the transitional idea, I guess separate from the song.

Speaker 4 (01:46:46):

I honestly can't totally remember. I do love those little bell huts. That's kind of like a cephalic carnage kind of thing too. They were a real belly band back before that was real too popular. On another project I did, way early in my career, I actually used to, in the studio, I had an extremely old microwave that had a physical dial that counted down, and when your food was ready, it had a ding sound that was an actual physical bell ding sound. And I totally did on some goofy project I did a long time ago. We totally recorded it and used it in a spot like that, in exactly the same kind of fashion, it as kind of a bing, then the song kicks in kind of deal. Dean, do you remember if that was written? Was that something you guys had on the pre-pro or is that something we did in the studio? I have no idea.

Speaker 3 (01:47:33):

I'm pretty sure it was something that we had written, but I think the comment is cool because yeah, it, it's on the four or the bar I guess if you, depending however you count the bar. So it is kind of cool. And then on the one you really dig back in, so it's like, I dunno, it's a cool placement. Yeah, I mean that was just something that I'm sure Spencer could have put a bell anywhere, but I guess that was the kind of thing that drove you back into the riff enough and it was enough of a juxtaposition between the crazy solo before it, and here's just one simple hit. And so that might be something cool too, where it's like crazy section building up, building up, building up. And actually, I don't know if anybody listening to this is super interested, but the section before is based on the conflict autos malus section of Mozart's Requiem. It's transposed down to B, so down I knew it.

(01:48:23):

Yeah. Yeah. So I listened to that. I mean, I love that piece, all the movements of that piece. But that section specifically, I heard it, I was like, man, that would be amazing as a heavy riff. And I was like, what's the lowest note that Toby has? Because Toby plays seven strings so that we could both play it. And that worked pretty well. I think actually Jared is playing one of the vocal melodies as well. So one of the, I dunno if it's a soprano or whatever, but that kind of thing. So at one point he goes into that, and then while I was writing the solo over top of that section, I was like, my life is so cool that I get to write a crazy solo over a Mozart, a thing that Mozart, I have a bust, or at least my wife, Claire has a bust of a Bach next to us. And I think we have a Mozart somewhere in our apartment. And I just felt really as kind of weird as it kind of felt really close to him. It was really weird. I was like, this is amazing. So I took the bust into our bedroom.

Speaker 4 (01:49:29):

You

Speaker 5 (01:49:29):

Slept with it?

Speaker 3 (01:49:30):

Yeah. Yeah, I knew it. I knew it. You really

Speaker 4 (01:49:36):

Close. You put lipstick on the Boston.

Speaker 3 (01:49:39):

Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:49:41):

It's interesting. I was actually wondering about that. If you were using quotations from a certain orchestral pieces, I could hear it, but what it sounded authentically done when Neoclassical shred was a thing and people would be like, it's based on classical. It'd be like, no, it's not. It's only on the most surface levels in patterns. A guitar player would use the same pattern that Vivaldi would use in a fucking warmup exercise.

Speaker 3 (01:50:14):

Yeah, basically a riff. Here's a Bach riff, right? Yeah. So I understand it's like that's neoclassical, I guess,

Speaker 2 (01:50:22):

But you're doing it in a very authentic way that actually captures that flow that orchestral music has, which is really tough In riff based music.

Speaker 3 (01:50:34):

It is very tough. Not to say that I'm doing it as well as maybe I could or as other people have, but for me, I really like, I love the instrument of guitar. It's so expressive. You can bend notes, you can play notes harder or soft or whatever. But when you put a lot of distortion on it, and as much as we have to with this genre and when you gate the shit out of it, and when you edit it on the album, it, it's not like the violin or the cello or the voice. It's not quite like that. There's expression in it. But sometimes I find the instrument itself is lacking in the way of dynamic

Speaker 2 (01:51:10):

And melodic potential, in my opinion.

Speaker 3 (01:51:13):

Yeah,

Speaker 4 (01:51:13):

Timber, I mean, there's a lot of more variables, honestly, with a more acoustic instrument.

Speaker 3 (01:51:19):

So for me, when I listen to orchestral music or when I listen to even a string quartet or something and I'm like, wow, there's so much flow up and down with the volume, all this stuff. There's so much stuff that I wish that we could accomplish with that. And there is some highlights of that on the album a little bit. There's a song, the Last Song, dark Horizontal, has a part that I wanted to sound like a PCO violin. So I think we put something to mute the strings on both sides really heavily. And I picked it as if you were sort of plucking the string of a violin. And I dunno, I just love stuff like that. And I think everybody in the band also loves that stuff. Although I feel like I probably listen to the most amount of concert music. So Bach is my favorite. He's stream of notes. Everything that he writes is, here's a chord progression, and it's in these stream of notes and it's just so virtuosic and so amazing. And that's the kind of stuff that I like. But I also want to take in some romantic area influences like Mozart and all that kind of stuff. It's just tough with the instrument that we have. So I turned it into a dumb guy, death metal, real. So there you go. Well,

Speaker 2 (01:52:33):

You're the first person I've ever spoken to who understands that they're not the same thing. It's one of my biggest pet peeves when people say that orchestral and metal are the same thing, not but, okay. So on this topic of your influences, so I actually a question. So human admiration, that slow Arpeggiated intro, are you and Muse inspired by the same people or, because I know that Muse is a very orchestrally inspired band, or is that song inspired by Muse?

Speaker 3 (01:53:13):

I actually had never heard anything by Muse that sounded like that. So until I saw some people commenting about it. So I mean, I had listened to Muse a little bit just because of teaching. And some of my friends, nobody in the band really, but some of my friends outside of the band.

Speaker 2 (01:53:27):

Have you heard the song Take a Bow?

Speaker 3 (01:53:28):

No, I have. No, I haven't.

Speaker 2 (01:53:30):

You need to listen to Take a Bow because

Speaker 3 (01:53:32):

Is it exactly the same?

Speaker 2 (01:53:35):

Go check it out right now.

Speaker 3 (01:53:36):

Oh man, they do it really cool too. That's sweet. No, I never heard that. That is super cool sounding. It's really similar. So you have augmented and major triads put together sort of in the same spot, so it turns into one of my favorite modes of melodic minor mixolydian flat six, or at least it sort of insinuates that, which is a really cool mode. It's so spacey and it has that minor six, but when you take the five out of it, it just makes it sound like you're in close and canvas with a third kind or something like that, which is, that's where I got that idea from would be movies like that, movie scores like that, or I think that Han Zimmer might've done something kind of similar. It was sort of like, here's a spacey intro and if you listen back to our second album, the Lucid Collective, there's some stuff in there that has that same sort of insinuating, the same kind of mode that Lyon flat six with a major triad. Then you bump up the five to a flat six and it becomes sort of like this augmented style thing, but then it kind of releases and goes back and forth. There's lots of stuff like that, but I had never heard that song, so it's just sort of coincidence

Speaker 2 (01:54:41):

You should listen to that song later

Speaker 3 (01:54:43):

Just

Speaker 2 (01:54:43):

From start to finish. It's pretty fantastic. Great. Yeah, that it's arpeggios like that the whole way through, but it just builds and builds and builds until it explodes. But it's, it's arpeggios. It's those arpeggios, but they just keep on ramping up the intensity on them. It's fucking awesome, but sweet. I was just curious because

Speaker 3 (01:55:11):

It's very similar.

Speaker 2 (01:55:12):

It's very similar, but also the thing I know about them, like I said before, it's a big pet peeve of mine, the fake orchestral shit and metal. And so whenever I hear an authentic orchestral influence, I'm like, that person gets it. So I actually am not surprised by anything you're telling me. I was curious if you and Matt Bellamy, the dude who writes all this shit for or probably influenced by the same exact music.

Speaker 3 (01:55:42):

I guess so. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:55:44):

More than likely.

Speaker 3 (01:55:45):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:55:46):

So cool. Well that settles that. I was going to say also Host the Planets has a lot of stuff like that in it too. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:55:54):

Totally.

Speaker 2 (01:55:55):

Do you like any of the late romantic stuff like Gustav Mahler?

Speaker 3 (01:56:01):

I haven't really gotten into Mueller. I've just more into some of my favorite pieces are the loot suites, like box loot suites.

(01:56:08):

So you just listen to just stream of notes and that's pretty evident in a lot of the stuff that I play as well. I love that stream of notes style thing, but the sort of romantic up and down tempo wise, we can't really do that. So for me, we like to keep everything different tempos for each song, but we like to keep things very robotic and so it's a bummer that we don't really do a lot of the ups and downs flowing, free flowing, sort of the tempo up and down like that. But I haven't really gone into Mahler. I also didn't really go to music school, so if you have any other composers in that era that maybe I do,

Speaker 2 (01:56:54):

I didn't, didn't get this info from

Speaker 3 (01:56:56):

Music school. I just like knowing everybody from whatever era. Actually who I really love is Revelle, Maurice, ve. Oh, he was great.

Speaker 2 (01:57:07):

Great Orchestrator

Speaker 3 (01:57:08):

And wc. Yeah, both of those composers are some of my favorites. And actually there's a really, really awesome Harvard lecture series called The Unanswered Question by Robert Bernstein. It's like an eight hour long lecture series. I have it on audiobook and I've listened to it a bunch of times and it goes through one of the chapters is called The Delights and was it Delights of Ambiguity? And so it's like a lot of the stuff he goes through, it's like, here's how these composers created this ambiguous sort of tonality and there's this free flowing chord section that insinuates something and then it takes it away. S Sheinberg is the composer that he uses for an example of that. And while I'm not super into Berg, he's a little kind of crazy. It's that style and that era that I really, really like. And it was just modern enough where I can get into, they use a lot of really big extensions, cord extensions and stuff like that, but it's not directly influenced by sort of major key jaunty, epic standard concert music. So yeah, I dunno, it's

Speaker 2 (01:58:19):

Have you heard of Vic Clarkton knocked by? It's before he went nuts with the atonal stuff, but it was when he was right on the edge of going there, so it's still somewhat melodic and stuff, but you can tell he was about to go nuts. To me it's like his best shit. The eternal stuff is not I thing

Speaker 3 (01:58:46):

It's a little crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:58:47):

Yeah, it's a bit much. But it's interesting you brought up WC and Revelle. They're both real great innovators in orchestration and the thing that I think that WC has in common with the style, you said you like Bach, which is the stream of notes, WC is impressionistic, so it's not exactly like the constant stream of sixteenths just coming at you, but there's a lot of tremble stuff happening and there is still a steady stream of notes. It's from a different time period and it comes across in a different way, but there's still that steady flow, which is really, really cool. And he definitely took orchestration to new place. Two more questions that I want to get out before we end. This one is from Mike Nolan because I'm curious about this too. The gun samples and Calamus will animate are awesome. What did the recording and mixing of those look like?

Speaker 3 (01:59:50):

Oh, the recording of them. Well Dave,

Speaker 4 (01:59:54):

That's a pretty fun story actually. So those are all actual gunshots that we recorded. All of us shooting guns. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (02:00:02):

Canadians shooting guns in America.

Speaker 4 (02:00:04):

Yeah, I have a few firearms of my own and I've got a good buddy Nick. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (02:00:11):

Shout out to Nick.

Speaker 4 (02:00:13):

Shout out to Nick Sutton. He currently does not have any firearms, but he did and he took us all out and I think it was mostly because I had Canadians here that I was like, okay, we have to go shoot guns. We have one thing in this country that's cooler than your country and that's see Billy to go shoot guns. And that's the only thing.

Speaker 3 (02:00:33):

That's

Speaker 4 (02:00:34):

Our one claim to fame. Also, sometimes we fall to those same bullets, but

Speaker 3 (02:00:40):

Regardless you have that cool opioid epidemic. That one's cool in America. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (02:00:44):

That's pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (02:00:47):

Anyway, sorry.

Speaker 4 (02:00:47):

So anyway, we went up, I had up a little portable zoom recorder and we just turned it on and kind had fun. It was like a Sunday or a Saturday off kind of thing, and I chopped a bunch up. I mean that was in a plane from the beginning. That's like an homage to a tech nine part. That's correct. Right

Speaker 3 (02:01:08):

Dean, yeah, from stamina. That

Speaker 4 (02:01:11):

Part's so

Speaker 3 (02:01:11):

Cool, by the way. Yeah. Cool.

Speaker 4 (02:01:13):

And then the pattern was already set. I think we mapped it out using a snare drum or you guys had a program snare or something.

Speaker 6 (02:01:20):

We

Speaker 4 (02:01:20):

Did tweak it a tiny bit during the recording just to make it fit, but the pattern was established and then I just took those 45 minutes of shooting guns and picked out some cool and some of 'em were the guns we were shooting. There was a couple other people at a spot that we were, so there's actually some variety in there. It's kind of hard to tell underneath the vocals and I just made a cool little pattern out of some gunshots and layered it right in. But yeah, it does sound really cool. And honestly the isolated gunshots sound really cool. That little zoom recorder did a pretty kick ass job. Yeah. Alright,

Speaker 2 (02:01:54):

Last question. This one is from Isaiah Prather and hey Dave, love your mixes and was always curious how you found such an amazing balance between natural sounding drums and the insanely polished recording sound like heard on the last two Cattle Dcap records as well as the record you did for Arch Buyer. Those drums sound super great but still feel heavy as hell. Any info on the tracking and mixing side would be awesome. So how do you make them sound awesome and real and polished, but real all of it right now in five minutes? Tell me.

Speaker 4 (02:02:28):

It's really, it's just the mindset. I mean, it's takes a lot more time than doing a pop rock mix where you can just toss on the latest drum samples of the week. It's just like a four on the floor beat at 145 BPM or something like that. If you would put those same drum samples on an R Spire song, it would sound just so stupidly ridiculous. I mean, it just is. These drums are more expressive and a lot of it, so the two albums that you mentioned, you're talking about Spencer and Dave McGraw, who are both incredible drummers and they give me such an amazing platform to work with. So I'm not creating anything with these guys. I'm just accentuating and presenting their performances in a polished format. It's not like Spencer records his parts and then I'm like, okay, what should this snare drum sound like?

(02:03:26):

What should these Tom sound like? How should I, I'm not taking his performance and putting it in my own box. It's already all there. You just have to, and honestly nail a mix. Subscribers know that already because you hear the raw tracks. That's pretty much what they sound like. There's not a huge, there's augmentation there, but nothing is majorly shifting. A lot of it comes down with using samples from the session. With this style of drumming, you really got to dial in those snare sounds and try and retain as much of that natural performance because blast parts and right-handed versus left-handed blast parts, gravitys, switch blasts, all those things sound different and they have to keep that feel through the recording. So you figure out how to use as much of those mics as you can. And then when you augment, use a good amount of sample set from that drum set so that it blends properly, that gives you a little more control over dynamics that allows you to pull things towards the center a bit and give some cohesiveness across all the tracks because sounds are going to change a little bit over recording, even if you're tuning after every song or in between every 10 takes or whatever.

(02:04:39):

And then a lot of it just comes from understanding dynamics and how drummers play different parts. Drums was my first instrument, so I do think, honestly, that set me up pretty well for my position as a producer, because a lot of guys come from the guitar world or they play piano or they're a vocalist or a composer or something like that. But with heavy, super fast technical drums, there's a lot of just physical knowledge that you have knowledge about the physical aspects of playing drums. You kind of have to know to use samples and augment crazy blast beats and make 'em sound natural. So it's like how hard is he going to be hitting here? Where is it going to be? And that also goes back to the editing. Okay, well, I know from playing drums similar to this, that after you finish this blast and you hit this crash, it's going to take a certain amount of time to get back. So I maybe am not going to edit certain sections quiet as hard as I would because it's going to make it sound unhuman. You end up with a record that just sounds like computers rather than retaining just to write that human element, but also tightening things up. So it's kind of like I'm cheating there, just from my knowledge of being behind the kit rather than just recording it.

Speaker 2 (02:05:50):

So knowing more is cheating.

Speaker 4 (02:05:55):

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But it's experience that you can't, no one could just gather real fast. It's parts of my musical history that kind of benefit me specifically in these scenarios,

Speaker 2 (02:06:06):

Man, I've always thought producers should learn how to play a few different instruments, even if they're not going to become world's best, they should take drum lessons for a year and

Speaker 4 (02:06:19):

Things

Speaker 2 (02:06:19):

Like that.

Speaker 4 (02:06:20):

You have to be able to kind of put yourself, flip the tables and you don't necessarily have to actually get behind the kid and show a drummer something, which I can do sometimes. I'm never as good as the drummers I'm tracking, but I have enough ability to get my point across. But you do have to understand what it is back there, and not only the physical limitations of only having two legs and two arms, but what makes sense, what drummers would do. And then after the fact and you go back and you listen to these parts, you can be like, okay, well, something is a bit off here, but what was the intent? So where do I have to move this to make it the intention of the parts? Even if every take isn't always the best when you're tracking and maybe you're looking at four different, four or five different factors of a take and of, well man, we nailed three of 'em here.

(02:07:09):

The dynamics are good, the energy's good. Your tempo is up, your consistency was great. There's this one little flub here, but everything else is so cool that we're going to go with it and move on. Well, I have to understand how to compensate for maybe the one or two parts that we just didn't get super perfect on that take and pull 'em into focus. And it's just knowing where it's supposed to go, where it is and where it's supposed to go on the editing side, and then understanding dynamics and the physical aspects of playing drums to know what sample velocities are supposed to go where and that sort of stuff, and how to edit to the point where it sounds like the dude is just crushing it, but that it's still a person.

Speaker 2 (02:07:52):

Sounds to me like we've got a topic for fast track here.

Speaker 4 (02:07:56):

Yeah, I've been watching the comments and a lot of people are talking about that, but I mean, I just already said it all, so

Speaker 3 (02:08:07):

Please send your money to [email protected].

Speaker 2 (02:08:14):

There you have it. Well, Dean and Dave, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been great talking to both of you. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.

Speaker 3 (02:08:27):

No worries.

Speaker 2 (02:08:28):

No, no, for real though. Thank you. It's been awesome having both of you on.

Speaker 3 (02:08:32):

Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah, been a good time.

Speaker 1 (02:08:35):

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