JF Dagenais: Balancing a band and studio, why your picking hand is king, death metal production secrets

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Golden Age premiere high quality vintage style products at an affordable price point. To find out more, go to golden age premiere.com. This episode is also brought to you by Fuse Audio Labs, uncompromising of classic and rare studio processors in revolutionary plugin form. For more info, go to Fuse Audio Rams de and now your host, Eyal Levi.

Speaker 2 (00:00:32):

Hello everybody. This episode is brought to you by Ultimate Guitar Production, the most detailed in-depth course ever created about guitars. The course is taught by Andrew Wade, who you may know from one of his three appearances on nail the Mix or work with bands like a Day to remember the Ghost Inside Wage War or Neck Deep. And it covers everything and I mean everything. It's over a hundred videos that cover every single step of the guitar production process, setting up the guitar, choosing the right amp cabs, mics the right way to track guitars, editing, amping, mixing, and more. He puts it all together by dialing tones for indie, pop, rock, pop, punk, and metal. And there's actually way, way, way more than what I just told you, but I'm out of time. If you want to see all of it and get a sneak preview of the content, go to ultimate guitar production.com and prepare to have your mind blown.

(00:01:28):

Hello everyone. Eyal Levi here. Before we get into the episode, I just want to tell you that by Popular Demand, we are now on Spotify. So if you use Spotify for podcasts, just go search Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast and follow it and enjoy. Also, even if you use Spotify, we would really, really appreciate it if you went to iTunes and left us a five star rating and a review that really, really helps us out a lot. And lastly, if you want to follow me on Instagram, just go to at a l Levy URM Audio. If you dunno how to spell my name, it's E-Y-A-L-L-E-V-I-U-R-M Audio. I post lots of pictures of dogs, but in addition to that, every single nail, the mix trip where we're in amazing studios all over the world, I try to document that pretty well. So come say hello. Today's episode I've got Mr. JF Dagenais, who is the guitar player from the Death Metal band Cataclysm, as well as a longtime producer. He's actually a Juno Award-winning producer, and he's recorded bands like Despised Icon, malevolent Creation Misery Index or Axis and all the Cataclysm records. And he's been doing this for close to 30 years now.

(00:03:05):

He gets some sick, sick productions. He's just one of those guys that understands the extreme genre so well, and I've wanted to talk to him for years. So what I think is especially relevant about this episode to all of you, even if you're not into death matter, is that you're going to hear from a guy who has managed to carve out a living in a very trying environment, not only in one field or in one profession, being a person in a band, and it's already impressive enough that they have gotten as big as they've gotten in the genre they have, but also as a producer. And the idea of being able to balance two careers I think is especially relevant for people trying to make a living in music. Now, you do need those multiple streams of income, and on top of that, being able to balance that with having a life is just, it's tough stuff, but really it's so important because if all you do is work, you're going to redline yourself into the ground.

(00:04:18):

And what's it all for anyways, if all you do is work, but then on the other hand, you have to work your ass off in order to get just one of those careers off the ground. So to have two is super impressive and I think that you guys will get a lot out of it. In addition, one of the best ways to increase word of mouth about you as a producer is by having a band that people like, and we're going to find more about that in this episode. So without further ado, we're getting started. JF Dagenais, welcome to the URM podcast. How's it going?

Speaker 3 (00:04:59):

Very good, very good. It's nice to be on here. I'm very happy to be here with you guys.

Speaker 2 (00:05:04):

Well, I'm happy to have you on here. I know that I told you an email that I've been a fan of your work for the longest time. I think back when I worked with Misery Index, it scared the shit out of me. I just thought that your guitar tone with them was so fucking evil. It is just so awesome. I didn't feel like I could compare to it and I lost a lot of sleep over it, so back I'm talking like in 2004 or something. Well,

Speaker 3 (00:05:38):

Thanks for the compliment.

Speaker 2 (00:05:39):

Yeah, it's awesome to talk to you and I'm glad we're doing this. I'm glad my car wasn't towed for anyone listening. I'm late right now. My car was getting towed, but we're all good. So you live in Dallas I saw?

Speaker 3 (00:05:58):

Yes, yes. I moved there 10 years ago already. Time flies.

Speaker 2 (00:06:03):

Yeah, it

Speaker 3 (00:06:04):

Does. Yeah, just classic story. I met my wife here and decided to just go for it, but I love it down here. It's great. Always sunny. It's quite cheap to live compared to Canada and I really enjoy being here and doing studio work as well down here.

Speaker 2 (00:06:24):

It's pretty different from Canada. And also, did you come from Montreal?

Speaker 3 (00:06:29):

Yes, I'm from Montreal.

Speaker 2 (00:06:30):

Okay. So Montreal from what I understand from the few times I've been there and just from everyone I know from there, that's kind of like a mecca in North America for metal and that's quite a great scene to walk away from.

Speaker 3 (00:06:46):

Yeah, I know mean, especially if you are into an insider in this business. I think Montreal is really good. There's always bands or musicians doing stuff and there's so many metal fans out there that I was sad for that part of walking away from that. But Dallas is kind of nice too. It has a lot of cool underground bars and there's quite a lot of pretty heavy bands down here as well.

Speaker 2 (00:07:18):

Like Devour meant.

Speaker 3 (00:07:19):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:07:20):

Are they still together?

Speaker 3 (00:07:22):

I mean, I just work actually with Kevin. He plays in another band called Kill Everything, and I mixed a single for those guys not long ago. Awesome. And so I think the environment's still going, but they're also starting a bunch of different side projects.

Speaker 2 (00:07:41):

Makes sense. I can see that happening. So I mean Dallas definitely has, and Texas in general has more metal activity than a lot of other places in the us, but I guess you had to feel pretty strongly in order both. I mean obviously you felt very, very strongly about your wife, but you had to feel pretty strongly that you could just pick up where you left off career wise too, that you weren't fucking yourself over basically.

Speaker 3 (00:08:15):

Yeah, exactly. I mean I think I always liked Texas in the south in general. Whenever we did tours with cataclysm in the past, it was one of the places I was attracted to in the States. I thought the vibe here and it's pretty laid back, but it's also people are very metal and the Rock is very strong here and I really, I like the move I did. 10 years has passed and I can't say I would want to go back to Montreal. I really like living here. People are very welcoming. I made a lot of friends and I'm very happy about how things worked out for me. And you never know when you jump into something like this, it could be an horrible experience, but for me it wasn't a risk. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (00:09:08):

Well, the thing is already you were already quite established when 10 years ago, but still that's quite a big risk, not like you were moving to LA or something.

Speaker 3 (00:09:19):

I mean nowadays, say for me, I got to keep a lot of my clients from the past because I still do a lot of mixing and mastering for those guys. They'll find some other way to record. And the difference also nowadays between compared to back 10 years ago is it's very easy for musicians to record themselves. A lot of bands would actually have their own little studio set up and they get really good quality recording on their own. And so I get to do a lot more mixing and mastering and stuff like that. And I do a lot of Skype and FaceTime to give advice whenever they do stuff or they'll ask me questions. And so I got to keep a lot of the clients I used to work for from Montreal this way 10 years ago, it wasn't that easy to actually have the guy from the band themself record their own stuff. I feel like the technology has just evolved so much and it's so much better nowadays. It's insane. What you can do is just a computer and a good sound card versus 10 years ago.

Speaker 2 (00:10:33):

And 10 years ago it was kind of scary too because I remember that's when bands started only coming in for drums and a mix or something, record guitars on their own, doing everything in Guitar Pro. All that stuff was starting to really pick up about 10 years ago, but

Speaker 3 (00:10:52):

The

Speaker 2 (00:10:53):

Technology was still kind of shitty and it was in its infancy, so you were seeing a lot of bands, I don't know if you experienced this, but I definitely experienced this, that a lot of bands would come in and not be able to play anything because they had just discovered Guitar Pro and would program everything Guitar Pro and then not know how to play a fucking thing that was happening. And then also they were recording themselves for the first time, but on much lower quality stuff than you have now. And so you'd be getting garbage tracks that were played horribly and I was very worried about how things were going to work out for just the genre in general and just music and the future of it. I couldn't see how it could continue like that, but it seems like the technology got better and people learned how to play again and were in a good spot. But were you at all concerned back then?

Speaker 3 (00:11:52):

I mean if you go back 10 years? Yeah, I was really concerned. I always wanted to take projects from the beginning and be there along every step, you know what I mean? I wanted to make sure that everybody did their part and kind of oversee everything. But nowadays I feel way more confident that when I get something recorded from a local band let's say, and they do it on their own and in most cases it's very well done and there's very little to be fixed on those tracks. But yeah, 10, 15 years ago, I would never have done it. I really made it a point to be there and produce everything from A to Z.

Speaker 2 (00:12:38):

So I was just wondering how you adjusted. I mean the thing is that we have had to make this adjustment whether we liked it or not. This is the way that things are evolving and you can't fight evolution, so this is the way things are going and this is the way they were going. I know a lot of people who had lots of problems with it and fought it every step of the way, but at some point people either had to stick to their guns and somehow make it work like someone like Kurt Ballou. But I would say that he's the exception most people had to figure out how they fit in with this new method. How did you come to terms with it?

Speaker 3 (00:13:24):

I mean the positive I'd say is that I prefer mixing and mastering in the grand scheme of things. That's really my passion, but I think it was a step at some point I was like, okay, I got let this go. I'm not going to work anymore if I start wanting to push my ideas. I still try to push my ideas to the band, but I feel like the bigger budgets and time that people would put into a production, they're definitely not the same and this is the way things have gone. I come to terms with it personally and also I get to do a lot more mixing, which is what I really, really like. And the other part I really like is also pre-production because I love the writing and arranging part of things so that I always try to bring in my influence or I always try to help the bands I'm working with do better. I feel like it's something that really gets me off to actually help a younger band that are starting doing music. And if I can help them write stronger songs or better arrangements, that's something that I really like. It makes me feel proud at the end of the result of seeing everything recorded and done and I can help somebody. The evolution of a new musician from the experience I got from all the years of being doing this, it makes me feel really good about myself.

Speaker 2 (00:15:13):

It's interesting you say that I never imagined maybe 10 years ago or more when I was just a musician in my band and when I was, I guess at the earlier point in production, I never imagined that I'd actually, I don't want this to sound bad, but being just a musician is very self-centered. It has to be because creating your own art through your physical body, so your mind has to be in the right place and then your physical technique has to be totally honed, and so you have to be focusing on yourself a lot and it's why a lot of musicians are narcissistic and have personality problems and all that, but it goes with the territory. And I never imagined that I would kind of find my life's passion in something that was designed to help other people like that. I was coming from the musician standpoint of helping myself get better, but now that URM has been going for years and we're seeing all these positive things like helping so many people either at the lower end of it just get better at recording their own home material to the higher end of it, helping people quit their jobs to be able to record full time and to start working under really big producers, I love that.

(00:16:51):

It's far more inspiring to me than even my own music was. So I kind of understand exactly what you're saying about helping a young band become a better version of themselves. It's really cool.

Speaker 3 (00:17:05):

It's things that I wish I had when I grew up. When we first started cataclysm, everything was really the IOY. We recorded everything ourselves and we learned about the business and how to do our own things ourselves. We were basically a bunch of kids in high school that got together and started a band and we didn't know anything about it. We just got lucky to get a record deal very early on and I wish we had people that would've jumped in and say, Hey, you are doing this wrong or you're doing this right, go this way, or some sort of a guide. And it makes me feel good now to give back and be that person for younger bands all these years later. And we've learned a lot through Cataclysm has been around for almost 27 years now.

Speaker 2 (00:17:55):

That's insane.

Speaker 3 (00:17:56):

So it is crazy in my mind it went so fast, but at the same time, so many things has happened and I've learned so much in this business doing this and it feels really good to give back and that's what makes me passionate still about doing this right now. I mean, I really love playing in a band. I really love writing music still. To me, the songwriting, that's my favorite part out of everything, writing music and then putting

(00:18:34):

It out there, all this stuff, the promotion and the touring and all that, I like it, but it's not my favorite part is really writing and arranging and stuff and then helping younger musicians. And also I grew so much. You grow as a musician, you go through all these years of trying to do things better, but then you learn years down the line that sometimes simplicity and just the realness and the natural state of things, that's what really works and that's what really better than trying to impress. I feel like when we started, you want to impress and be really crazy technically and also brutally for us, we were one of these guys that wanted to be the most brutal band in the world and having a million riffs per songs and all these crazy tempo changes and all that. And at the end of the day, I am happy to have learned that just simplicity and real is the answer

Speaker 2 (00:19:46):

Man. I think simplicity is way harder. I mean to pick when you have a million options to pick the one right one I think is way harder than to have a thousand little ones that go together that are okay, but to find that one idea or two ideas that are just incredible and how to phrase them properly and present them properly, I mean that is really hard stuff. I mean, it's funny to me when people talk badly about pop music, they don't understand how much skill is involved, but the ability to take a simple idea that resonates with a lot of people is incredibly difficult. And I see that across the board in all different forms of art, the need to be super complicated and impress other people at first. And then with maturity, the simplicity comes in and now the mix, we watch a lot of people mix. We've done about 50 of them now. And so I've seen a lot of great mixers mix and I can tell you that 95% or more of the time they're doing simple stuff. I mean every once in a while you'll have someone on who has a super complicated intricate chain like Taylor Larson. He's on his own level,

(00:21:20):

But he doesn't always do that. I think that these people are capable of complexity when they need complexity to solve a problem, but they have the maturity to use the simple solution when that's all you need. And I think that it does take maturity, but that's, in my opinion, that's the path in any form of art is to figure out the simplest solution possible somehow.

Speaker 3 (00:21:43):

Yes, definitely. I agree with that 250%.

Speaker 2 (00:21:47):

So I wanted to talk a bit about your move a little more because a lot of people who listen to this live, for instance, in the middle of nowhere and they don't have any clients yet, and they ask about moving to places like LA or Nashville or whatever the standard places, or they just come from a place where there's very few pans. And I've always told people that wherever you are, you need to just become the best wherever you are to begin with. But then at a certain point you kind of do need to be where the work is until you can establish yourself. And then once you're established, you can go anywhere you want because people will come to you. And I kind of feel like you're a perfect example of that. You started in Montreal, which is a capital for metal in North America, and then after being established you could move to a place like Dallas. I mean Dallas is int the middle of nowhere, but it's definitely not Montreal as far as the scene goes, but I feel like you could have gone anywhere, you could have gone to South America, you could have gone to Russia, it doesn't matter where you went.

(00:23:02):

I think you could have taken your career with you. Do you have any thoughts on that for people that are considering moving or not?

Speaker 3 (00:23:11):

I have, one thing that I have for myself is that I have two careers, which first one is being a guitar player in cataclysm. And we got lucky enough that with just the band that could make a living on my own without the studio stuff, studio stuff is my passion.

Speaker 2 (00:23:30):

That's really impressive, by the way, for a death metal band.

Speaker 3 (00:23:33):

Oh, thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:23:34):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:23:35):

If you ask me how we do it, we did it. I absolutely have no idea. We just bulldozed our way through everything and somehow it worked and somehow we have now our own family of fans that are supporting us and it's really awesome. And I'm very thankful also in the same way, in the same time because I see many people's career that it worked for a few years and then it went down, or it's really rock and roll this business. And I'm happy that we're been a steady band throughout these years. It's unbelievable. I remember conversations we had 10 years ago and saying, I don't know if we're still going to be doing this in five years, but here we are still doing it and we're still having fun. So nowadays, I think it's mostly the key thing we're talking about is as long as we have fun doing it, we're going to keep on doing it.

(00:24:40):

But I feel very lucky for that. And then parallel to that, I did my producing career, which I kind of started on my own using four tracks, cassette recorders back in the day at my mom's house because that was the only way I knew I could make my own demos and start recording and presenting my own music and putting the first few cataclysm things together. That's the only way I knew how to do it, and I've learned on my own. All the production side of things worked and since all of us in capitalism had a really DIY approach to things, we went doing things our own way on our own. It helped both side of the fans really helped the band took off, but also I started getting clients because I was the guy in cataclysm and people earned my work and they thought I was doing quality stuff for an affordable price. So I always kept good clients and I never really had to push myself too much, which is also something that I'm lucky for. I was always able to find work and keep working throughout the years on a very word of mouth kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (00:26:15):

Honestly, man, I think word of mouth is the way that producers get work. I think that advertising and marketing doesn't work very well for producers and for people listening who are going to be like, wait, wait a second, CLA does all this marketing or whatever, or URM does all this marketing and what my answer to that is that, well, CLA is selling products. He was a huge mixer long before he had anything to do with any products and that marketing is for his products. He'd be getting great mixes regardless of that stuff. And URM, you see us advertising all the time, but we're not producers. I mean we're producers, but that's a different thing. You rms a business that sells products, but I think that for an actual producer, engineer mixer, word of mouth is the number one best way to do it. And that's why I always tell people that if they have their own music that one of the best ways to get their name out there as a producer engineer is through their own music. Make it sound as good as you can and try to get out there with that because people will hear that and will want to work with you if they like what you do for your own music. And that's one of the easiest things you can do if you don't have great bands to work with. I mean, make your own band great and make it sound as good as you can.

Speaker 3 (00:27:42):

Exactly. And if you do quality work, there's always people that will look for that. And also for me, the way it works most of the times is I'll work an album for a band and this band has other musician friends that will get to hear it and they'll call me, they'll be like, Hey, you did this record for these guys and we want to work with you. And it's kind of like a domino effect and that's how it worked for me.

Speaker 2 (00:28:14):

I got to say though, and I'm curious to your opinion, one of the things that I've always admired about Cataclysm is that you guys, well I'm most familiar with you and Maurizio, but what has struck me is that in addition to just being a Sikh band, you guys are very entrepreneurial. You have your parallel career, one feeds the other, which is really, really smart. And then he is got the management thing going on and he's, as long as I've known about him, I've never met him, but we know all the same people as long as I've known about him, I've always heard about his business ventures and how good he is and how killer of a situation he sets up for cataclysm because he's so smart with business and that extends to his non cataclysm businesses as well. But you guys are a very entrepreneurial band and this is why I think that one of the things that bands need to do in the modern day, maybe in the older music industry wasn't as important, but in the modern music industry, I think bands need to think like entrepreneurs and they need to think about how many different streams of income and networking they can create for themselves because say that you're not bringing in income through certain parts of your network directly, but like you said, a bunch of musicians who are friends of yours who hear your work in the band, and then because of that they know that you're a producer, they hear something you did and either want to work with you or will recommend other people to work with you because they had experience with you on the road and know you're a cool guy and could do the job.

(00:30:10):

All those things work together to where the band alone doesn't need to carry the entire weight. You have a whole, I guess, array of weapons out there that you're using to further the cause as opposed to just the band. When people do that, I think that's when it gets really, really hard.

Speaker 3 (00:30:32):

Yeah, I think if you want to live from the music industry, you got to do multiple things. I think it's something that you learn also what you like as a, because I know a few musicians, I have a few friends are like, man, I'm not good at anything else. I can't play my guitar, but I dunno what else to do, but there's always something you can do as a part of this business and say

Speaker 2 (00:31:03):

Or learn something.

Speaker 3 (00:31:04):

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like say in our bass player in Lym Stefan, a lot of people don't know that, but he's a certified accountant, so that helps a lot as well in different ways.

Speaker 2 (00:31:16):

Okay, there you go.

Speaker 3 (00:31:17):

Yeah, he's balancing all the books and everything for whenever we go on the road.

Speaker 2 (00:31:21):

So you guys have a entrepreneur manager, you have a producer and an accountant in the band. See it all makes sense now.

Speaker 3 (00:31:28):

And then say in Mauricio's case, he kind of same as me, he learned how to do things through doing it for us because nobody else would. And he took everything he learned from the experience in M and started helping other bands going through what we've been through and he knows all the pitfalls and all the where and when to push and when to pull back and things like that. And you can get very valuable advice from somebody like him in the business. And then for me, I think it's a way of life. You're going DIY with everything in your life and you just go for things that makes you happy and go for things that gets your art pumping and just go for it and learn as much as you can and try to live out your passion. Most of us musician thinks nine to five sucks and that's not what we wanted to do in our lives. There is other ways you just have to work out, work hard and learn and just not be afraid to take the steps to go forward and move on.

Speaker 2 (00:32:46):

Absolutely. I mean the thing about the time period we live in is that you can learn anything you want just about on your own. I mean obviously you're not going to become a surgeon through learning on the internet, but there's a lot of things that you can do. And so if you have a basic talent in something in addition to your music, you can take the time to really hone it and learn more about it. For instance, when I knew that I wanted to start my own company in 2013 and 14, I knew I wanted to do this, but I had never started a company before. So you don't just do that. You don't just quit your current career and start another career in something you have zero experience doing whatsoever. So I bought as many marketing courses and business courses as I could and just basically put myself through school on my own and learned how to do it.

(00:33:49):

And I advised that everyone figure out what it is that they can do in addition to just music. Say you're a producer and you want your clients to have a great, great experience with you so that they recommend you to other people and want to come back. Well one of the things that you can do in addition to doing a great job with the music is think about just as a thought exercise, think about everything that you know how to do that could possibly benefit them in some sort of way. Do you know how to edit video? Do you know nutrition? Do you know accounting? There's so many different things that if you actually think about it you could help other people with. And I doubt it when people say that they just know how to do one thing. I never believe them. It's impossible that they just know how to do one thing. And I think that oftentimes they just don't realize how many things they know how to do or how many things they could just spend a month brushing up on that they could do well enough to help other people with.

Speaker 3 (00:35:01):

Oh yeah, totally. I think we all have strengths and we need to discover what they are and just push them. And like you said, it's so easy to just pull up information online and you can teach yourself everything you need to know and just move forward and do the best you can do with all that information. And there are so many helpful things you can do. Like say there's a lot of musicians that I know also would work as crew guys between tours with other bands. That's also another possibility to make extra income between the tours be a good drum tech, a good guitar tech, sound engineer on the road, tour manager, lighting engineer, all these careers there are possibility for musicians because when you're a musician, you know what the band you are working for really needs and what they want from technicians. So it's easy for you to put yourself their shoes and give the services they need. So it's a big plus.

Speaker 2 (00:36:15):

Do you find that the musicians you work with trust you more because they know that you've been through the challenges of being in a band?

Speaker 3 (00:36:26):

Yeah, definitely. I think say if you're a musician that all the ins and outs and you know what you want to accomplish in your career and I think it makes you so much more knowledgeable of what the person you're sitting with in your studio wants. And then it's easier also like the whole, because I feel like if you're a producer or an engineer or when you're working in that field, you got to be a little bit of a psychologist as well. And I think it makes you a lot more knowledgeable about the psychology of everything and I think that's a big plus and it makes people feel more comfortable to work with you and that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (00:37:21):

So let's talk a little bit about your earlier career because interested in some of the finer details of how you used cataclysm to fuel the production and the production to fuel cataclysm. So you said that you were self-taught and that you did it in order to be able to record your own music, but at any point did you get an internship or did you work in a studio? I mean back in the nineties I know that there was barely any information out there for people, especially people who wanted to learn how to record metal. So did you learn everything on your own or did you have any experience in a professional studio that you could then use?

Speaker 3 (00:38:15):

The very first time I went to a studio was a Montreal band that wanted a demo and they asked me for the new, I was doing all the home recording stuff and they wanted something a little more professional, so I said, okay, let's go find and rent a studio and we will record with proper equipment. So I opened up the yellow pages, found a small recording studio, it was affordable and actually went there, rented the place and produced everything. But there was so much I didn't know. I didn't know what kind of mics to use for what

Speaker 2 (00:38:50):

I was going to say. That sounds kind of intimidating.

Speaker 3 (00:38:53):

The first time I put the tape on the actual tape machine, the two inch track, I wasn't sure which direction to go with the tape. I followed the little pattern that was drawn on the machine to put the tape on there and I don't know how, but somehow it's turned out pretty good.

Speaker 2 (00:39:11):

Did you have an engineer helping?

Speaker 3 (00:39:14):

There was a guy from the studio and he was assisting me and he was kind of showing me, don't do this, do that. But at the same time he was just kind of sitting there to make sure that I don't burn the place down. But it was a good experience, a good first step for me to get into the more professional world. But then I kept getting bands to call me and do demo demos for them and eventually I got bigger stuff coming my way. So I rented one of the bigger studio in Montreal, which was Victor's studio, and I brought this band there and recorded on the big iron gear. And when I went there the first time I really, really got along with the owner and he offered me a job as an assistant for his studio. And so I picked that job up, I jumped on it right away.

(00:40:16):

And then I got really lucky to get to learn to the next level all to Caliber, a tape machine, all to plug in everything properly, our real recording studio work. And I worked there for almost five, six years as an assistant. And also I was working my own projects that I would bring in and he would give me a special rate so I could work my bands there. And same with Caac. We did many cataclysm records at that place and eventually got to a point where I learned the ins and outs of the business and I was starting to feel like, wait a minute, I'm bringing all these bands, but I am actually making the studio a lot of money, which I could myself pocket if I had my own place. So then that got me thinking about starting my own business and my own studio. And back in those years it was a little bit more complicated because we obviously didn't have all the technologies from today. So you to,

Speaker 2 (00:41:26):

It was expensive, very

Speaker 3 (00:41:27):

Expensive. You had to buy all this expensive gear, but one thing that led to another and then cataclysm, we were getting really good recording budgets for earlier albums. So what we did is we put all that money into buying our own gear instead of spending it on a studio.

Speaker 2 (00:41:48):

Very smart.

Speaker 3 (00:41:49):

So we started doing that plus with the money I was making from producing, I put all that together and bought extra gear with that as well and borrowed some money at the bank. So I managed to open up my own place and then started doing our own stuff. And the beauty of it was that every time we would do more catechism records, then more money would come in and we'd do it again and just spend it on more equipment and just keep building the thing and making it bigger and more professional.

Speaker 2 (00:42:23):

That's a great situation.

Speaker 3 (00:42:25):

So that's how I did it myself. And I think again, don't be afraid to jump both feet run into these things because I think that's how you get business going.

Speaker 2 (00:42:40):

Absolutely. So this is interesting to me, the dynamics of being a member of the band that's also producing. I always found it very, very difficult to do, but so did the other, back in those days, did the other band members treat you as a producer or as a member with extra powers or how did that work?

Speaker 3 (00:43:00):

Well, it worked really well actually. They really believed I knew what I was doing and they gave me the keys of the castle basically just to do things how I wanted to. And I did that for years and it went well most of the career. And eventually only later we started getting into fights about like, Hey, I want things to sound a certain way, or they didn't like how I was doing things and putting more and more pressure as the band was getting bigger. So eventually I started using other producers to mix because just to avoid all the headaches and the fighting down the line. But that happened only recently, the last few albums we started using big name mixers to do our stuff and for me it's like a way to get rid of that headache and at the same time it's

Speaker 2 (00:44:02):

A big relief.

Speaker 3 (00:44:03):

Yeah, it's a big relief. So now I've become just like a band member again, and also I produce only the songs, the arrangements and the recording and putting, piecing things together. We get it all prepped up super professionally, and then we just send it out. Then I don't have to worry too much about fighting my guys.

Speaker 2 (00:44:28):

Hey everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast and you should know that is brought to you by URM Academy, URM Academy's mission is to create the next generation of audio professionals by giving them the inspiration information to hone their craft and build a career doing what they love. You've probably heard me talk about Nail the Mix before and if you're remember, you already know how amazing it is at the beginning of the month now the mix members get the raw multi-tracks to a new song by artists like Lama, God eth Shuga, bring Me the Horizon Gaira asking Alexandria Machine Head and Papa Roach among many, many others. Then at the end of the month, the producer who mixed it comes on and does a live streaming walkthrough of exactly how they mix the song of the album and takes your questions live on the air. You'll also get access to Mix Lab, our collection of dozens of bite-sized mixing tutorials that cover all the basics and Portfolio Builder, which is a library of pro quality multi-tracks cleared for use of your portfolio.

(00:45:31):

So your career will never again be held back by the quality of your source material. And for those who really, really want to step up their game, we have another membership tier called URM Enhanced, which includes everything I already told you about and access to our massive library of fast tracks, which are deep, super detailed courses on intermediate and advanced topics like gain staging, mastering loan and so forth. It's over 50 hours of content and man, let me tell you, this stuff is just insanely detailed. Enhanced members also get access to one-on-one office hours sessions with us and Mix Rescue, which is where we open up one of your mixes on a live video stream, fix it up and talk you through exactly what we're doing at every step. If any of that sounds interesting to you, if you're ready to level up your mixing skills and your audio career, head over to URM academy slash enhanced to find out more. It's interesting when in my band I also, I mixed one record and then I never wanted to do it again.

Speaker 1 (00:46:35):

It

Speaker 2 (00:46:35):

Was such a painful experience. So then I always tried to get people way better than me and it always worked great and it is very satisfying to hear something you produced mixed by someone incredible. It's very satisfying, but it also made life a lot easier. So

Speaker 3 (00:46:56):

I

Speaker 2 (00:46:56):

Totally understand you worked with great people.

Speaker 3 (00:46:58):

Indeed. The other thing is that for me that I love as an engineer is that working with these big time mixers, you keep learning as well because I learned a little bit from the different guys we got to work with and the people like Andy Snip and Zeus and Jay Rustin on the last one and you kind of get

Speaker 2 (00:47:24):

Jay Rustin did the last one.

Speaker 3 (00:47:26):

Yeah, he mixed the last ly.

Speaker 2 (00:47:29):

That's awesome. He's great.

Speaker 3 (00:47:31):

Yeah, I think he's a great producer and he's Canadian as well, so we have that little kinship. So that's cool that those guys, you learn a little bit of something from everybody and you put that into your own experience bag and then you just apply it to what you do and it just makes you a better engineer down the line.

Speaker 2 (00:47:55):

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the primary things in your reputation or qualities that people talk about is your ability to get such punishing guitar tones. Can you talk a little bit about tone chasing and where you started versus where you are now specifically with guitars?

Speaker 3 (00:48:14):

With guitars, I think I always wanted to have the biggest monster wall of sound I could find, and I started with bus heavy metal pedals back in the day with a very small Randall Amp and I tried to cue that thing and I experimented with so many amps and cabs and tried so many different things to get to what I wanted. And I finally built myself a setup that I really like and I still use it to this day. It's many, many bands in a metal jars use the same setup. It's the 51 50 combo with the M Boogie cab and Max and Overdrive. That's what I got my sound from back in those days. But what I want to say about that is the way you cue and place your things, I really, really, really believe it starts from the way you strum and pick your guitars and it's from the player itself.

Speaker 2 (00:49:21):

Totally agree

Speaker 3 (00:49:22):

Because you can make have the perfect setup or the setup that's perfect. For me as an example, I add other bands coming in the studio that were like, man, dude, I love you, your guitar song. And I was like, here, plug it to my setup. And they would start playing and it sounded like crap. And it was just not that they were not a good musician, it was just don't pick the right way for a certain sound. So you kind of have to cater to the musician the way they play and the way they pick the strings. And I think you got to find the perfect setup for the person. And that's the harder part.

Speaker 2 (00:50:06):

This is also why I tell people that, for instance, I know that a lot of people like to buy Kemper profiles from other producers, and I think the Kemper is great, but I think that the trick is that what you use, the profiles you made then and there with the guitar player, that's when it's really, really great when you start getting other profiles. Maybe they can work, but they generally don't work that well and they certainly don't work even close to as well as one that you made right then and there for that album with that guitar player with that rig. That's when it works fantastically well. And I think that that's just the case with gear and music gear and guitar tone, drum tone too. The person who is playing the instrument, it all starts and ends with them.

Speaker 3 (00:51:01):

Exactly. I do the same thing. I own a camper myself that I use when we play live. My profile that I'm using is a profile that I created from my rig at home. And like you said, it doesn't work for everybody. It's like when I work with a guitar player in the studio, I really work hard to build to find what works for him, then I'll make a profile of that. And then a lot of albums I would use a camper to record, but I would make the guy his own profile. I think if you buy profiles from big producers or even myself, I got lucky because I traded a lot of profiles with a lot of these big guys, so I got a lot of cool stuff in my machine, but I never end up using it not right for the person that records. So I'm a firm believer of building something specifically for the player.

Speaker 2 (00:51:56):

I know for a fact that I would get these profiles and I'd hear it on the record that the person mixed and be like, that is the sickest tone I've ever heard. And then you get the profile and it's like, well, it's okay, but that's not the same thing. Another

Speaker 3 (00:52:14):

Thing is sometimes people expect a profile that's really almost cooked already and mixed and you get a profile that's really raw and that's how a real amplifier sounds like. And then you still have to process the sound to make it good in the mix and to make it solid sit, to make it sit in the mix. So that's another thing also that a lot of players expect when they buy a profile. It's going to sound like the record, but it took a lot of processing to get to that part.

Speaker 2 (00:52:48):

Yeah, it's funny. Five years ago I sold a few, I did for six months, I sold profiles from other people, then I decided to stop. But one of the profiles that we sold was John Brown from monuments. He is one of the best rhythm players around and his tone is just fucking enormous. And those older monuments records all were all done with a pod. He just knew how to make it sound incredible. Nobody believed, no, it was pod farm. Nobody believed it. Or maybe it was a pod hd either way, it was five years ago, it was one of those. But he made it sound incredible. And when we sold the profiles, if you play through them, they sound like garbage. And I know that they're the actual things because he played them in front of me. So I know that those are the actual profiles. But then I would sit down to play and it would just sound like low gain garbage. But I mean he has a massively heavy tone. But the thing is the guy hits the guitar harder than anyone I've ever seen in my life. And I mean, he can barely ever use any boxes because he clips everything. He hits so hard.

(00:54:23):

And so that's the missing key. And so we would sell these and people would be like, that's not the tone from the album. I want my money back. It's like, no, that is the tone from the album, but I can't sell you John Brown's wrist. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:54:35):

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:54:36):

That's the missing piece.

Speaker 3 (00:54:38):

Yeah, I mean it's a quest and I think for everybody that's looking for the ultimate sound, I mean what Kemper and ax effects and all these companies did I think is it made it easier for people to try different profiles and ads from home and download all these things and it could be easier to find what's right for you. That way you get to explore.

Speaker 2 (00:55:04):

I

Speaker 3 (00:55:04):

Agree. Which back in the day, you had to actually find the real physical thing and just try them out and mic it and just spend hours to try to perfect mic position. And

Speaker 2 (00:55:17):

If you bought the wrong amp, you were stuck with it.

Speaker 3 (00:55:20):

Exactly. So now it made things much easier, but it's still the same problem to find what's right for you. And it takes a while. I think you got to just keep searching and trying and I keep trying to perfect my things. And also the one thing that was cool is to, because we used these different mixers on the last few albums, I got to see a different take on what I do from big time guys. So it's helped me try to look for different things or sometimes they would point out like, oh, you have a certain fizzle or something is wrong in the low end or the low mid or things like that that I keep working on and incorporate into how I built my tone. And it's a mix of all these things that makes things better and I feel like I'm closer than ever to the perfect guitar sound for myself, but I'm never a hundred percent satisfied. I just keep searching and try to push it to another level. Always.

Speaker 2 (00:56:24):

I've always described it like you're on a highway at night with the lights on in the desert so there's no lights around you and all you can see is what's right in front of you. And the further you go, all you see is what's right in front of you. And it is just that way forever. I think that the better your tone gets, the more you're going to realize that it could get better. It never ends.

Speaker 3 (00:56:53):

Yeah, it never ends, but it's okay. It's the beauty of doing what we do. If everything was perfect and we had that one up, that would make everything great, then it would be boring to be an engineer, I think.

Speaker 2 (00:57:05):

No, and I also think that mental thing of always wanting it to be better or always thinking it could be better, I mean that's what makes people get better. It's funny, I've had a lot of people over the years say, shouldn't you be satisfied? You should be satisfied. Just be satisfied with what you've got. Or things like, a lot of people would be happy with what you did here. You should be happy too. It's like, no, the reason I was able to do this was because I was, at one point earlier in time, I was unhappy with where I was, whether it was a tone or my situation financially or my career, whatever, my down picking, any of that stuff, there was a point where I was unhappy and then decided to make it better. And that is why now someone else gets to say, just be satisfied. But the thing is that they're not understanding is that that is state of mind of not being satisfied is what keeps things improving. And I think that the moment that you stop thinking that way is when things start to stagnate. It's the same reason that I know that Jeff Loomis in his forties is still taking guitar lessons, and if anyone doesn't really need guitar lessons, it's Jeff Loomis. But that's exactly, exactly. It is a guy like that. Is that good? Because he always sees how it could be better and is always searching for it.

Speaker 3 (00:58:39):

It goes for everything as well as if you put that idea in a band kind of mindframe, there's a lot of bands that we see, we saw along long career that they fell down because I think they got to a point where they were actually satisfied and they stopped trying harder. And then you start making stagnant or bad records and then your career goes down. If you keep having that fire of wanting to make things better, you actually pushing yourself and you make better things and just you keep going. It works as well that way.

Speaker 2 (00:59:13):

Absolutely, man. I remember when my band was unsigned also, this is from 2003, 2004, we had a lineup and I was very unhappy with the lineup and one day I fired just about everybody. And in Atlanta at that time, it was very hard to find musicians very hard. It's not like it is now where every drummer you meet can play double bass and fast and all that. There was a time period where drummers could not play to the click. And finding a metal drummer who could play extreme metal was very rare. It is a very different time period. But I went ahead and I fired these people. I didn't think they were good enough. And lots of people were

(00:59:54):

Like, you don't appreciate what you don't. Lots of other people in town would be more than happy with this. You're just being an asshole. It's like, well, by firing them, that's what allowed me to find Kevin Talley, for instance. And the lineup that we got, which is how we got signed, was in part because the lineup was so sick. And that would've not happened if I had just been happy with what I had. And so, I mean, I'm pretty passionate about this topic mainly because all my life I've been hearing that I should just be content or whatever from people, and I don't agree. I don't agree at all. So about your guitar parts, everything guitar wise in cataclysm and also in what you record, but specifically in cataclysm, it just sounds so tight and together. It doesn't sound crazy layered, but it sounds huge, but it isn't thin, it doesn't disappear, it's just right. And I'm just wondering how you go about approaching riff tracking.

Speaker 3 (01:01:07):

I'm very methodical with it. I like to have an idea of the big picture before I start going into the real tracking of the guitars. So of course, we make a lot of pre-production and figure out the songwriting first once we have the song and know exactly what pieces of the puzzle is going to go where, then I sit down and actually learn. I relearn everything in a sense because whenever I write music, I just go with my own feeling a lot of times sitting in front of brutal in my studio and I just record riffs that I just feel, and that's the first thing I do when I start writing music. And on the last record, we did something special. We actually wear all the four of us in the same room and wrote a lot of songs that way. We haven't done that in years.

(01:02:04):

So that was also a different experience as far as songwriting goes. And I thought it was really nice because we could feed off each other really easily and put the songs together in a very organic way. And I think that made this last album special in a way. But then when I first started tracking and recording those songs, I knew exactly what's going to go where. So now I could concentrate on actual getting a really good performance, and I just start with the riff one and play it until I'm happy and have my left guitar track. Then I go to the right guitar track and do the same thing again on top of the first one. And I really try to get a natural vibe to it, even though I want to play it to the most perfect, in the most perfect way possible. But I think where I'm happy, it's the best of both worlds.

(01:03:03):

You want to keep a little bit of that organic feel of playing and not be too perfect, but you don't want to be off the click and off the grid as well. So it's kind of find a happy middle between everything. And then once I'm happy with that, then I keep that part, move on to the next part. And it's very A, B, c, d, E way of doing things, but I move along the songs this way. But for me, it's like I want to feel good when I hear the track. It's very important, and I think a part of getting that big sound is also, it's a feeling thing for me. When I feel like it's monstrous, then it must sound monstrous.

Speaker 2 (01:03:44):

How do you define tight enough versus, I think that maybe it's just when you hear it, but are there any specifics of what you mean by organic but still tight enough?

Speaker 3 (01:04:00):

An example is like say a lot of things that whenever I record tracks on a few of the R albums, I recorded the guitar actually first, and then we did the drums after. And then my drummer would pinpoint things like, Hey, you're like on these riffs, like the heavier riffs. It's almost like I'm lagging a little bit on the click and I realized I'm doing it naturally to make things sound heavier. So he's following those things and try to have a really heavy breakdown. And it's not perfectly on time. It's kind of delayed almost a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:04:40):

So behind the beat?

Speaker 3 (01:04:41):

Yeah, behind the beat. And it's just my way of making things sound heavier, but it's something I always did naturally without really knowing technically what was going on. I just thought that's my way of playing. But sometimes you just go with your feeling, you follow your feeling, and you can also have sometimes a visual guide where you look at the track and see where you're picking falls versus the grid and see if it's way off, then it's too much as garbage. But if it kind of works within the grid visually, even though it's not perfect, but it feels good, feels right to you and sounds good, that's when I know I have a good take.

Speaker 2 (01:05:22):

And so it sounds to me like the part that is variable is where it falls in time. So certain riff will fall behind the beat to make it sound heavier, however, even if it's off from the click, it's still on with itself.

Speaker 1 (01:05:45):

Right,

Speaker 3 (01:05:46):

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:05:46):

So the two guitars are tight as shit to each other, but they both come in a little bit behind the beat. So it's like a musical decision.

Speaker 3 (01:05:57):

Yeah, because they're tight, because that's how you play them. So it's easy to double that track by playing along with it if that's the way you feel the riff. And I feel it's better to leave it like that and make it sound huge than starting to try to place every single pick on the perfect time on the grid and be like, oh man, I'm way off. Some engineers would start chopping and piecing things. I don't think that's the right way to go. It might sound perfect at the end, but you're missing a little bit of the point of playing things naturally.

Speaker 2 (01:06:41):

So where does base fit in for you? Because base in extreme metal is one of those things where lots of people see it as an afterthought in a way, but it kind of is the hidden weapon in my opinion, of every mix you have to get it right, and it's actually really hard to get right. It's totally not an afterthought, but I'm just wondering where does it fit in for you?

Speaker 3 (01:07:12):

For me, the bass is, it's like the punch in the middle of the whole thing. And I still, I am a guitar player, so I always put my guitar first, so to speak. So when I build my sound, it's like I'll build the wall of guitar first and then fit the bass underneath it somewhere somehow. But the bass is nonetheless, like you said, it's very important and it's very hard to get. I think it's as a mixer is the thing that took me the most time to figure out how to get it right because you need the bass and the mix to play its role, but at the same time in metal, you want that guitar to be as white as you can get it. So I found ways to make it work. And for me, I always try to fit the base to make sure it has that very low sub frequencies.

(01:08:10):

I actually split my base track into, I make duplicates and I'll duplicate it two, three times and then split the frequency range of each track to focus on where I want to fit it. So there's one that's going to be the extreme low sub one is going to be more in the mid range, and then the other track is going to be the real eye stuff. And so I do like the bass to sound a little bit like a piano where you hit the higher frequencies pretty hard, so it cuts through the mix and you can hear it a little bit through the wall of guitar, but then you have that low end that's making all basically the punch of the record. So sometimes I'll mix it and you will hear it, but you're like, man, I wish the bass was a little louder or whatnot. But then if you mute it, the old punch of the record disappear. And I think that's when you know where you got it, right, when it's doing its job in the mix in the puzzle.

Speaker 2 (01:09:13):

Yeah, I think that one of the reasons that people think of it as an afterthought is because it's not immediately obvious what it's doing, but it's like you said, it's immediately obvious when you remove it. So it's more of a utility to the mix, but it's not jumping out like a guitar solo.

Speaker 3 (01:09:34):

Yeah, I mean there's a lot of mixers that would push the bass first because either they're a bass player or they want the instrument to really stand out. And I think really great things have been done as well in that case. Just for me, it's my way of working. I always work the other way around. I always push the guitar first and the bass is the glue somewhat in the middle and that punch in the low end and the balls. But I feel that that's my way of making the puzzle work. But it's something that it's a very important instruments in the mix for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:10:13):

I think that tracking guitars before bass is a very wise thing to do in extreme metal. The only problem I've ever found is that sometimes, I don't know, it's like sometimes when the bass isn't there, you can't totally hear that you're not totally in tune. It's weird. The tuning I feel like is a lot more of an issue. So one thing I started doing to compensate is to program a synth bass for just to have while tracking guitars. So that way there's a perfect pitch reference always. You will always know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you're off or not, and then just replay the bass after. But that helped me tremendously. But I feel like extreme metal is kind of defined by the guitars and they kind of set the tone in a way for the whole thing. So it totally makes sense to me to go first with those.

Speaker 3 (01:11:12):

And also another thing that people ask me is like, how did you get the guitars to sound a certain way? There's no magic to it. You just have to do it and be patient. And I do make a lot of mistakes when I track and I'm very over. I think I'm my own worst critic as well because whenever I track somebody else, I'm very Nazi on them and I try to make sure that they do it. But when it's myself sitting in the booth and I'm recording and I'm so bad on myself, it takes me forever to get just one song done and I have the patience to do it. I think the patience is the key to get perfect guitars because you want to make sure that there's no fret buzz fret noise. The tuning has to be a hundred percent and all these things and the guitars having a good guitar is in tune that's been tuned by a professional. Sometimes it's after the battle as well.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):

Quite the battle too. So do you get your guitars always set up by a pro guitar tech before tracking?

Speaker 3 (01:12:24):

Yeah, I get the chance to have a buddy of mine that's really good with that stuff. So he does it for me. No, I think it helps tremendously the outcome of the guitars tracks because you want that pitch to be perfect and you don't want any weird fret guitar strings kind of noise in there. So they did the pure rest possible way you can make that happen is having a good instrument. And yeah, I'm lucky to have a guy that does it for me, but also with the years you learn how to do it yourself, but I trust him so much more very talented for that stuff. So I think also being a good producer is finding all the right talents for certain parts of the project and not be afraid, not be afraid to delegate certain parts to other people to get it done right. Because I know a lot of people are like, I want it all done by myself. And it's all, like you said earlier, the narcissistic thing where it's like me, me, me. And I think you got to at some point be able to delegate and know when who's good at what and be able to oversee the big picture of the project and make everything come together at the end.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):

It's interesting, the producer by Hollywood standards, the movie producer is not the director, he is not the actor. I mean sometimes maybe if it's a Tom Cruise movie or whatever, but the producer is the guy that sets the budget who finds everybody and keeps the project on track and does all the big picture stuff. And I think that in music, some of the greatest producers of all time like Rick Rubin have that role where they find the best people for everything and they're like the mastermind of the whole project. And I think that even if you're an engineer also and you do a lot of the dirty work and that's okay, I still think that as a producer you need to, a big part of the job is also having that mastermind mentality and you got to get the ego out of the way and get a good team for a record.

(01:14:56):

I think it's also for the sake of the record, you want your attention to be on what's really, really important. Are the songs great? Are these great performances? Are the tones great? The shit that really matters and everything that you do takes away a little bit of your energy and a little bit of your focus. And I don't understand why a producer needs to be worried about setting up the guitars when they can get a professional who is way better than them at it. Who does that for a living? That's their thing. There are some people who they love guitars for some reason, they love the physical thing, it's just what they do. Why not get someone like that to fix the guitars so that you as a producer can worry about producing the record? It just makes so much more sense to me.

Speaker 3 (01:15:50):

Oh yeah, absolutely. It's all these little factors that you can get a very professional job on all these things. It makes the actual work so much more. Your focus is on the right things at the end of the day.

Speaker 2 (01:16:09):

So what stuff do you delegate?

Speaker 3 (01:16:12):

All these things. I mean, it could go also for say, make an executive decision of I know how much I love mixing and I think I do a quality work at it, but sometimes I'm listening to say a song or an album that I produced and I'm like, man, it would sound so much better if that guy did it. Or sometimes I have someone in mind for the album and I'm like, let's just go for it. Let's get it done by that guy. And I think the music would benefit from it. And I think that's something people have a hard time doing as a producer because they want, first they want the job and they want to earn the money or they want to make sure they want to do everything on their own. But I think making decisions like that, it makes a better record at the end of the day. And the artist that works with you will come back and the album has a much better chance of going somewhere as well when it's released.

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):

You got to play the long game with this stuff. And what I mean by that is that you need to make decisions that in the long run are going to bring the most benefit. And a lot of people don't think long-term. They think now. And so now I want that budget for the mix now I want that credit now because they're thinking, well, money's nice and I need that credit so I can get to the next level. But by giving that up when it's more appropriate to have somebody else, like you said, you give the record a much greater chance of succeeding. You leave the musicians with a much better feeling about the whole thing and if it truly is the right decision to get whoever you had in mind, but by helping the record be that much better, if you truly are not the person who should be mixing it by just thinking of the big picture and making decisions in line with the big picture, that will end up getting you more credits and more money in the long run anyways. It really turns bands off when somebody hoards everything and won't let other people work on it when it could be better that way. I know this from experience because my band experience that with somebody we hired once

(01:18:48):

And it was horrible. The person, I'm not going to name names, but the person when I hired him, I hired him to mix and I wanted to have somebody else master it. I had someone in mind. He really wanted to master it too, but I didn't want that. But I gave him the shot of mastering it just to see given him the benefit of the doubt, but from the outset of the project, it wasn't like we hired him to master and then changed our mind or something, which would be okay too. People changed their minds. But from the moment we hired him, it was known that I wanted this other person to master it, and he was not okay with it at all. And so what he did was when he mastered it, he destroyed the unmastered mixes so that we'd be stuck with the mastered mixes and so fucked.

Speaker 3 (01:19:45):

I think that kind of thing, it just leaves a bad taste in the mouth of everybody. You don't,

(01:19:50):

You're not going to go back to that guy. You're not going to tell your friends, Hey, this guy was great to work with. When you do good work, I think that your reputation precedes you and it goes fast. The word out there that you're doing a good job about something and when you do a bad thing like that, then it goes the same way. It's so fast. The music world is very big, but yet very small. Everybody knows each other and world word travel fast, especially these days with the communication system that we have in place and is just, it's bad business.

Speaker 2 (01:20:29):

It spreads and if you give up the mix or the master or whatever and you're totally cool about it and make it easy, nobody's going to think badly of you. And if it comes out great, you're still the producer.

Speaker 3 (01:20:42):

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's what a good producer does is just making sure the album is as best as it can be and ironing the right people for each part of the process.

Speaker 2 (01:20:54):

Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about a couple more elements of this. I really think that this is the hardest style of music to mix well. So I'm wondering where you see the extreme metal kick drum in all this and how you approach it because it's something that people routinely fuck up and it's something that's very, very particular to the style and when it's done just right, it sounds deadly, and when it's done wrong, it sounds like a typewriter floating in space separate

Speaker 3 (01:21:32):

From the mix. Absolutely.

(01:21:34):

I think for me, I go like great lengths to try to make it sound as natural as possible. And whenever we record our albums, like say for cataclysm, that's always a thing where we want it to sound as natural as possible, but yet still be like that thing where it's super present and to make sure you want to ear every it and every, it has to sound big. So we're trying to compromise between both these things and we really actually record, it starts from a real bass drums and we always have the real thing somewhere in the back and then we start layering samples and use a lot of multi-sampling to make sure different sounds come back. The last few albums, we actually used our own kick samples that we recorded ourselves and we made a bank and we used that bank over the real bass drums and we just spent hours to try to get that right.

(01:22:40):

And also the velocity is a big thing where you can't have everything at 10, 110 all the time. You want it whenever it's certain it's, you want it not as loud in the mix, and then when it goes slower, you want it to sound natural and louder. So we spend a lot of great deal of time to just take the pen and go over the tracks and making sure it's the right level for every part. All these things at the end went down. Then you have a big sounding K drum, still a little bit over the top, but yet natural sounding to your ears. It's very ear pleasing in the grand scheme of things and it takes a lot of work in the background to get this done, but that's something important in the metal jar for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:23:35):

How do you dial the high end so that it has just that right amount of click but doesn't sound annoying?

Speaker 3 (01:23:44):

Yeah, I mean depending on how your drum sample sounds originally I try to get the clicky part of the kick coming from the actual real bass drums that were recorded. So that right there sounds already much softer to the ears and more ear pleasing. And then I have a little bit of that tick from the sampler as well in there, but it's usually around the four or 5K for me frequency to get that right click of the beater hitting the skin. And then I'll add a little bit of the I frequency spectrum, like I said on the original real kick to get that more natural vibe. It's easy to put too much when you don't know what you're doing, so you just want to add, it's like little ins here and there of these things.

Speaker 2 (01:24:41):

Alright, so let's move on to another topic. Something I really wanted to ask you about with having two parallel careers, and I would say even a third because the band is one career, but you also have to be good enough at guitar in order to be in the band. So I feel like being in a band and playing your instrument are two different things, like the practice that you do on the instrument just to keep up. But so between being a guitar player, being a guitar player in cataclysm and being a full-time producer and married with a family, how do you stay sane and how do you balance it to where everything is getting what it needs?

Speaker 3 (01:25:31):

You got to make room for all these things, especially the practice thing. There was a point where I was so busy with the studio that I would barely practice my guitar and then I would jump on a flight to go on a tour and start the first day. Then I was like, oh man, I wish I'd practiced before. Sounds horrible. That's like a nightmare. Exactly. So yeah, you have to keep playing and I think I'm a person that likes to keep busy. There are some people that try to live their life a little bit more laid back, and for me it's important I keep busy, otherwise I go nuts. So I fit it in my schedule. I practice my guitar. I still keep on working the tones and these things and for my own personal research pleasure. So I do that on one end and then you're balancing your producer mixing career in there. And then I have a daughter as well. She's four years old, so that takes a lot of my time now. But the cool thing is I'm doing the studio at home. It's my own place. We built it in the garage, so it's really easy for me if I need to tend to my daughter or something's happening in the house, I just stop and do whatever needs to be done and come back and that's a cool thing, being able to make my own schedule. It's very helping things a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:27:01):

Yeah, I can imagine. Do you have bands come to your house at all? I guess to record?

Speaker 3 (01:27:10):

Yes. I still do. Not as much as I used to because lately it seems like I'm getting more mixing job offers and mastering than anything else. But I still do once in a while and I enjoy it and I try to keep the hours limited when I do so just because I don't want to have someone playing drums at the 3:00 AM in the morning and my wife sleeping on the other side of the house with the kid that it's just not happening anymore. I used to back in the day, but now it's like I try to have certain hours and especially for drums and vocals because you don't want to disturb the whole house or even the neighbors at the certain point. My thing is pretty well insulated, but you still hear it from the street. So I try to have good normal working days when I do those recordings.

Speaker 2 (01:28:05):

And I also think that drummers and vocalists do better on normal schedule. I mean, I know that people like to push themselves, but in my experience there's always a point where a drummer could go 14 hours, but generally after six they're just not as good,

Speaker 3 (01:28:28):

That's for sure. Just it's the human body eventually starts getting tired and it's better to rest and take more time to do things and be patient than trying to rush things. And that's also the beauty of owning your own studios. You can make sure everyone has enough time to do what they need to do versus back in the day, renting an expensive place where you had the constraint of budget. And when you do things at home, it's so much easier to balance everything and make sure the performance is getting captured the right way.

Speaker 2 (01:29:03):

How do you balance that then? Which I totally agree with you by the way. That's one of the things I loved about having a home studio is that you can take the time needed, but how do you balance that with not spending too much time? I feel like that becomes the danger also is when you decide that you have your own facility and you're going to take as long as it needs to get right, it can also turn into a huge time suck. And also if they feel like they have unlimited time, that also can be, there's a negative side to that too.

Speaker 3 (01:29:42):

Yeah, true. But the way I work things usually is I'll say if I work on a specific projects and I'll think about enough the amount of time it's going to take and I look at my schedule, see the amount of time that I have available for that particular project, and what I'll do is I'll block, say if I'm doing a record from A to Z, I'll block that month and a half and that's the only thing I'm going to be doing for that timeframe. But then also the band is aware that that's the only time I have for them because after that, either I'm going to get on a tour or I'm going to have something else booked. So I'm trying to make sure that they understand that we have to fit it within a certain timeframe, but at the same time, I leave myself enough room to make mistakes or to take days off or to making it right.

Speaker 2 (01:30:40):

Yeah, absolutely. So it just sounds like balance and choosing your battles is

Speaker 3 (01:30:45):

Exactly. And not pick too much work. Another mistake I've seen people do is I was guilty of it myself, is just you just go day in, day out doing sessions and then you just overbook yourself because you want the work and you want to make the money and it's totally understandable while you can, I tend to notice for me it's always the same thing as I get one big thing going and then there's 10 other things at the same time that everybody wants the same timeframe and you're like, ah. And you just choose your battles and try to make the best of it. But I think your work's going to suffer if you don't plan things right, and you take too much on your shoulders.

Speaker 2 (01:31:31):

I totally, totally agree. So pick the right ones, make them as good as they possibly can be rather than do everything not as well.

Speaker 3 (01:31:42):

Exactly. Exactly. Totally agree with that.

Speaker 2 (01:31:44):

It's hard though, I think especially for people who are first starting to make a living at this, when they first start experiencing some success and they go from not having that many bookings to a lot of bookings, they were just used to not having anything. So immediately their first reaction is say yes to everything possible

Speaker 3 (01:32:10):

Because you think that it's going to stop or you're afraid that it's going to stop and you just want to keep book everything you can now and just do it. But if you do quality work and you take your time, people are not going to stop calling you. You just keep working. It becomes a job and a normal routine. And I think the quality of your work must be the number one priority on your list, not how much work you're getting.

Speaker 2 (01:32:40):

Yeah, actually the way to get people to stop calling and coming back is by taking on too much and pissing people off.

Speaker 3 (01:32:49):

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:32:50):

So actually by taking on too much work, you actually are a lot more likely to make your fears come true. I think.

Speaker 3 (01:32:59):

And also the other thing, like you mentioned age earlier, I'm also in my forties, so for me it's easier to make these decisions where I don't have the energy I used to have when I was 20 to take on many, many, many projects. So now I try to make sure I have the energy and focus to do the things I need to do and do it right. But I think it comes also with maturity having doing it a long time.

Speaker 2 (01:33:25):

Yeah, absolutely. And I don't want to, but there was a time period where 36 hours, 40 hours would do it if I needed to, it would be fine. Fuck that now.

Speaker 3 (01:33:40):

Yeah, totally. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:33:43):

Not going to happen. And I'm okay with that too. I don't miss it at all. I actually wonder if that was a good thing. I know a lot of people who in their earlier years would do crazy hours and then they stop because they don't want to die or something or lose their minds. But I am so much more productive now because it feels to me like there's a certain point where you can keep going, but your brain is just not going to be as in it. And why not just rest?

Speaker 3 (01:34:21):

Yeah, exactly. I think it's incredible what an eight hour sleep can do for you and just go sleep and come back, refresh and the next day. And it's like you see your vision of things. It's so much different when you're resting

Speaker 2 (01:34:37):

And also when you start to get tired, you can take three hours to do something that when you're well rested, you could do in 10 minutes literally.

Speaker 3 (01:34:48):

Yeah, that too, for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:34:50):

Well, anyways, man, I think this is a good place to stop it and just want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's great to finally get to speak to you and just thanks for being here.

Speaker 3 (01:35:02):

Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun and enjoyed it.

Speaker 2 (01:35:06):

My pleasure.

Speaker 3 (01:35:08):

This episode

Speaker 1 (01:35:08):

Of the Unstoppable Recording Machine podcast is brought to you by Golden Age premiere high quality vintage style products at an affordable price point. To find out more, go to golden age premier.com. This episode is also brought to you by Fuse Audio Labs, uncompromising emulation of classic and rare studio processors in revolutionary plugin form. For more info, go to audio to ask us questions, make suggestions and interact. Visit URM Academy podcast and subscribe.