JACOB HANSEN: Pro DIY Metal Albums, Recording in Bad Rooms, Performance vs. Gear

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by tele Funken Electroacoustic Tele Funken. Electroacoustic has been following the tradition of excellence and innovation set forth by the original tele Funken GM BH of Germany that began over 100 years ago with one foot rooted in the rich history of the brand and the other in new microphone innovations for both stage and studio applications. Tele Funkin Electroacoustic is recognized as one of the industry leaders in top quality microphones. For more info, go to t-funk.com and now your host, Eyal

Speaker 2 (00:39):

Levi. 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.

(01:37):

Welcome to the podcast. This episode's cool because I am in Denmark and just have a unique opportunity because normally on these nail the mix sessions, we don't have any guests, but this time we not only have the mixer, Mr. Jacob Hanson, but the band showed up. We've never had a full band show up. We've had the odd musician, but both the band Dyscarnate showed up and their manager, Mr. Chris Adler, who you probably know as now, legendary Metal drummer, we had them here for the whole session. And they all have very, very unique insight. And the reason I wanted to bring them on was because if you've heard the Dyscarnate mix, you know that it's pummeling, crushing all those words that we use for awesome metal mixes. But the recording itself, not to talk any shit, it's just DIY style, bare bones, very basic, and it does not sound at all like what the final product ended up being.

(02:54):

And this is very relevant to most of you because don't have million dollar studios or even a hundred thousand dollars studios or even 50,000 or $10,000 studios, a lot of you have minimal means. And this is a testament to the fact that with modern recording technology, if you make the right choices, you can end up with a great mix. But how to do that, like I said, involves making the right choices. And that's what we're going to talk about. I'm going to shut up. Here's the episode. Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. My guests today are Jacob Hanson, Chris Adler, and Tom, Matt and Al from Dyscarnate. Welcome everybody. Thank you for being here.

Speaker 3 (03:39):

Hey, thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (03:42):

Yeah. Let's get right to it. I wanted to talk about something that for me as a mixer and Jacob as a mixer is a very real thing, which is having to mix stuff that was not recorded in the most ideal fashion. And I'm sure you'll agree that there's times when you can work with it and times when you can't. And there's times when you can make it sound just as sick as, or close to a sick as something that was recorded in high production. Everything great. There's times where it's better to just tell the band to throw it away, start over, come to you next time. I'm just curious of, just in a broad sense, what are some of the dead giveaways when you get something from a band that went DIY? What are some of the dead giveaways that you will be able to work with it?

Speaker 4 (04:42):

I mean, if the drums are done in a way that is not, I mean, they haven't destroyed it with something they thought was cool, some weird mic placement or just went pretty standard with everything, then I'm normally going to work with it. But there are so many things that can happen with DI's from guitars and bass vocals can be destroyed by something choosing a weird mic that doesn't fit the singer or in a

Speaker 2 (05:14):

Weird room.

Speaker 4 (05:15):

Oh, yes. Oh yeah. People standing far away from mics because they don't know how to record, really. And who can blame them if they're just musicians? They don't know how to record, and that's the thing.

Speaker 2 (05:32):

So Jacob, what was it about the way that the Discarnate tracks were delivered that made you realize that you could work with it? You could put your name on it. What was it?

Speaker 4 (05:45):

Yeah, I think some thought went into the recordings before they even started. I think they even had some help from somebody who knew what to do and what not to do. So everything was working really well. They did some great choices, and they didn't try to be producing at that spot, trying out crazy things. They just went with pretty natural sounding things, which is good. So I had clean great tracks to work with.

Speaker 2 (06:22):

Yeah, it's interesting. One of the things that I've always told people, I guess just some good wisdom is if you don't have a good drum room or a small room, then the best thing you can do is to try to take the room out of the equation. For instance, when you're recording drums, make everything as clean as possible and don't let your scenario influenced you. Like you said, you deliver the good DI's, don't go crazy. Don't try to experiment in a shitty space with shitty gear. Just get the basics and get those right.

Speaker 4 (07:04):

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (07:06):

So for people who didn't watch Nail the Mix, it was a bare bones recording, but if you hear the final, there's nothing bare bones about it. It sounds massive, but I mean, it was just a kick trigger snare top and bottom, Tom Mike's, Tom top Mike's two overheads, I think hat Ride China. Right. And then,

Speaker 4 (07:33):

Yeah, no, you not even know. Not well Overheads and I believe I had and a ride mic as far as I remember,

Speaker 2 (07:42):

And no rooms, no. Which I mean goes back to the whole thing about if it's a crappy room,

Speaker 4 (07:51):

Just

Speaker 2 (07:51):

Find another way to do it.

Speaker 4 (07:52):

Totally. That made perfect sense. Otherwise, I would just have thrown that room out the window anyways, not using it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:01):

Yeah. And there's plenty of techniques you can use to create a fake room.

Speaker 4 (08:06):

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (08:07):

They delivered DI's. Were there amped tracks with it?

Speaker 4 (08:11):

Maybe? No, maybe not. Oh,

Speaker 3 (08:12):

We sent over a reference tracks. There were some reference demo guitars, but no actual prerecorded guitar tones.

Speaker 2 (08:18):

Yeah, you guys had the intention of having Jacob reamp it, right?

Speaker 5 (08:22):

Correct. Yeah, that

Speaker 2 (08:23):

Was discussed. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (08:24):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:25):

Great. So you weren't precious about your tones, it was just you're sending it to Jacob and let him do his thing?

Speaker 3 (08:33):

Pretty much, yeah. We'd heard Jacob's mixes before we knew what amps he had in the studio, so we were pretty confident that he was going to deliver a tone that was on the same wavelength that we were thinking already. So

Speaker 2 (08:44):

When you guys went into record, you just said that you knew what amps he had in the studio. How much research did you do or talking back and forth did you do with Jacob about how to make this the best possible scenario?

Speaker 3 (09:00):

Surprisingly, not actually too much communication with Jacob. We've worked with him before on a previous album, but for this album, we pretty much sent all the stems to him. We had a few notes with the tracks, just had some ideas, but it was pretty basic stuff. And I think a lot of the stuff, we just let him fly with it and put his own touch on it, and we went wait to see what came back.

Speaker 6 (09:20):

I think like he said earlier on as well, because we didn't really do any production work on it at all. We literally just went, here is every tool that hopefully you could possibly need to achieve. Kind of what we've got in mind. You take it and see what you can do with it. And then, yeah, we delivered exactly that.

Speaker 2 (09:36):

Sure. You've been in the exact opposite scenario where you get handed something that is recorded in a less than ideal way, but where there's a bunch of production done and you don't get di and the drums aren't very easily replaced, where it just makes it really, really tough to work with.

Speaker 4 (09:57):

Yeah, I mean, you can't always tell that it's going to be hard to work with. I mean, even though I'm in contact with many of the bands that are working or producing their own things, recording their own stuff, when they ask me, of course I'm telling you or telling the bands, this is what you can do and please don't do this and make sure this is working and such. But sometimes because there's no professional involved most of the time, so no, how do you say, quality guarantee or anybody who's looking over the tracks to check if is it actually working or is there crazy noise going into the gis or, because these people, they don't know most of them, so they just trust what they see on the screen. And yeah, there's signal going into it, but there might be 10 things wrong with that signal and you need to know things and it takes experience.

Speaker 2 (11:02):

So I mean, do any of you guys have any recording background or you brought someone in to work with you

Speaker 6 (11:09):

A little bit, but yeah, we recorded all of the music with Stu McKay at Studio Six in Swindon in the uk. So he is a professional and he's done that kind of thing before. And he helped with, well, he kind of oversaw everything and made sure it was all good for delivery because I know he does mixes as well for other people. So I guess he has the same experiences. He gets things delivered, which he can't work with sometimes or whatever, but he kind of knows what needs to be there for Jacob to do his job properly and made sure it was all there. And

Speaker 5 (11:38):

We obviously went to him to book in and say, we've got a mix booked in with Jacob Pants and we want some clean tones. So it was all about getting the real high quality clean DI signal from it, because we had a couple of apps that we were referencing just to hear whether you got the right sort of tone that the Clean Signal is giving out. But

Speaker 2 (11:58):

So that you had some DI to reference from another recording or something?

Speaker 5 (12:04):

No, no. Obviously we had our demos, but then we just went to him and sort said, we just want to get some cleans.

Speaker 6 (12:11):

I think he just ran an AMP

Speaker 5 (12:12):

Sim didn't he? At the same time so that we could gauge what was similar so we could hear, and then obviously just knowing that we were sending it off. So he was pretty helpful really.

Speaker 2 (12:20):

So if I was to hire you and to mix Jacob and I said, I don't really have much of a studio, what do you need right off the bat? What do you need in order to be able to work with this? I have a thousand dollars and not much. How do you need these files delivered?

Speaker 4 (12:43):

Yeah, I actually have this, normally I have this list of things how to do or how to deliver the files to me. But the thing is that if you are inexperienced with recording, there are so many things that can go terribly wrong. So I would always ask people, please make sure you bring in somebody who can help you with this. I mean, it's not enough just to go out and buy the gear. I've worked with so many people that they end up sending me four or five six DI tests where everything is noisy and crazy, and sometimes it ends up I need to Skype with people to see what are they actually doing. And I see the craziest setup sometimes, which is actually fine. It's not like everything is always wrong. It's not. A lot of times it works, but it's just so stressful for everyone if they deliver everything and the guitars can't be used. I mean, for a whole album that's just terrible and terrible to tell a client that, sorry, but everything you recorded is you got to start all over. It's not a good scenario.

Speaker 2 (14:04):

So do you make them send you tests in advance?

Speaker 4 (14:07):

They do that. I ask people to, if it's people that I haven't worked with before, I normally ask them to send me a DI test if they're just the slightest bit in doubt of how to record a good DI signal. So yeah,

Speaker 2 (14:24):

I do that too. I've gone to the point of mailing a band a DI to work with because I didn't trust the one that they owned.

Speaker 4 (14:32):

No, yeah, exactly. I sent my whole vocal chain to a band at one time. Please use this.

Speaker 2 (14:40):

The hardware.

Speaker 4 (14:40):

Yes, it's not, I mean, and it's fine. And if it's people that can stop by, I'm totally fine with borrowing them. My Avalon di whatever, we just got to make this work and I'm here to help because it's frustrating for me as well as for them. But I mean, if it's people far away from here, it can be a little bit harder to help them. But I'm,

Speaker 2 (15:10):

I've definitely gone to the point of sending a band a pair of Kick pads, the Roland

Speaker 4 (15:18):

Kick

Speaker 2 (15:18):

Pads. Yeah, because the guy they had was not capable of recording them very well, and their drummer was going to need some heavy, heavy editing, and so we wanted them to record with kick pads. So we sent them the kick pads and the funniest thing happened. They hit me up and said, these kick pads aren't working. I think they're broken. They sound really crazy. And it turns out that we're them up miking them up. I can't anything.

Speaker 4 (15:55):

Okay, all right. Well, yeah,

Speaker 2 (15:56):

But that kind of illustrates the point that if they dunno what they're doing, you can try to help. And sometimes

Speaker 4 (16:02):

It's

Speaker 2 (16:02):

Still not going to do much. So they should try to bring at least someone in who knows the basics.

Speaker 5 (16:09):

And the truth is, as a band, you don't know what you're doing until you have a go at it. And obviously this was our first time amping because previously your last album was in the studio, wasn't it?

Speaker 3 (16:21):

Yeah,

Speaker 5 (16:22):

We

Speaker 3 (16:22):

Just recorded

Speaker 5 (16:22):

Guitar tone straight to tape before. Yeah, and I've done a little bit in the past with previous projects, but it's stuff that you don't realize until you make the mistake. I remember the first time I recorded something, it was asked of me that the bass strings were changed, every song even. And at the time I was like, I'm sure it's going to be all right.

Speaker 2 (16:45):

No, it's not.

Speaker 5 (16:46):

Yeah, I'll leave it. It's not going to be alright. The producer goes, ands, come back to me. And he was just like, man, did you change these strings? And I was like, yeah. And he was just like, how many songs? I was like maybe two years. Like, oh man, I'm going to be chasing bass tone all day. And it was just like at the end of it, it cost me more because I didn't because thought, oh, it'll be fine. But obviously that just listen to your producer because they know what they're on about and you don't.

Speaker 2 (17:10):

Best way to know is if you get to the end of a song when you're tracking bass and the bass sounds completely different by the end at the beginning, you probably should have changed your strings

Speaker 5 (17:23):

Once a year, isn't it?

Speaker 2 (17:25):

Once a year. That's fine. At least maybe every two years. Do you make bass players change strings? Every song

Speaker 4 (17:32):

If I can, but it's often something that if I say that, people will look at me really strange and be like, that's so strange. Or I think this is sometimes something that's going to start a weird argument, which is strange because I'm just here to get the best out of that. So if I can, yes, I would change at least the lowest strings between each song, but bass players are often like, but that's very expensive. But you have a budget and you went into the studio to make an album that's going to haunt you the rest of your life. If it's not going to sound great, it's the big picture again.

Speaker 2 (18:20):

Hey everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast and you should know that it's 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, nail the mix members, get the raw multitracks to a new song by artists like Lama God, Opeth, 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.

(19:22):

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. Those are some of the simple things that people can do when they don't have a huge budget. There's a bunch of simple things they can do to ensure that it's going to be a lot better, get their guitars set up, have enough strings to be able to change them once per song

Speaker 4 (20:36):

Or

Speaker 2 (20:36):

At least as much as possible, a few different pairs of drum heads at least, and sets not pairs. And I realize that it adds up, but like you said, it'll haunt you. It'll haunt you forever. And it's not like that stuff's going to add thousands and thousands more dollars. I mean, it adds up, but it's a very simple thing you can do.

Speaker 4 (21:03):

Oh yes.

Speaker 2 (21:04):

You don't need much knowledge to change strengths.

Speaker 4 (21:07):

No.

Speaker 2 (21:09):

Capturing a DI is another super obvious one. I wanted to talk about vocals too, because on the discarnate, like you guys said, it was an SM seven B into a focus right

Speaker 3 (21:25):

Interface

Speaker 2 (21:27):

Bare bones, and you got it sounding great. And I've been in situations where that is workable and I've watched plenty of people work with tracks like that and make 'em great. And the opposite as well, where it comes in with just an SM seven B and a focus and it sounds like garbage. So there's something else, which there's another factor at play. What kind of room did you guys record and what steps did you take to treat it or not?

Speaker 5 (22:05):

Yeah, it was just an old sort of farmhouse with big stone walls and it was quite like a small closet area that we just completely put mattresses in and phoned and signed in, and we had a vocal, a shield around the mic as well to try and make it as dead as possible. We just wanted to get the cleanest tones vocally for Jacob. It was quite hard to record like that. It was just very, you could just hear every little bit of your voice whilst recording, but again, we just wanted to send it, get the cleanest stuff we could.

Speaker 2 (22:40):

How much money did you invest in deadening the room?

Speaker 3 (22:45):

I think it was everything we had already. Al just had some boards and stuff that he had from some previous work he'd done and a couple of mattresses just borrow, take your own.

Speaker 2 (22:54):

Yeah, I just wanted to dispel the myth that you need to spend a whole lot of money to dead in a room.

Speaker 5 (23:01):

Oh, no, no. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (23:04):

I mean plenty of records have been done in a room where mattresses went up, but it sounds like, so you deaden the hell out of it and put all your focus into the performance.

Speaker 5 (23:16):

Yeah, yeah. We were all, like I say, we run up a home studio. We were running pro tools and we were just running the vocal booth through into another room and we had a PA set up so we could just talk back to each other. And when it was my turn to record, the lads would be there. We we'd be talking, producing it like what we wanted, the sound to be with the words and whatever. But yeah, it was all just down to performance and just making sure that we were happy with it because once we sent it, we weren't trying to rely on knowing that it was going to be altered, it was just trying to make it the best it could possibly be before we sent it.

Speaker 6 (23:51):

I think we've all sat through enough vocal sort of tracking sessions now as well to know what you've got to look for when you're tracking vocals and make sure all the nces and pronunciations and stuff are correct. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (24:01):

We were talking yesterday about, or listening to yesterday about how you don't want the whole band there when often when a vocalist is recording because it's intimidating. But that's something that we have actually always done whenever we've done vocals, we've always had the other two members in there being part of the process to get the best possible performance. So we could do that on our own without someone else there. And we knew what to look for if there was mistakes in the vocal line, if there were too many explosives and that kind of thing, we knew, okay, we're going to need to do that again because of this, that and the other.

Speaker 6 (24:32):

And also, we'd only just finished writing the lyrics and putting them to the music as well. So throughout the whole thing, regularly one of us had pipe up and say, maybe we could try this slightly different rhythm in that section. You just laid that down and now I'm hearing something else, which could be worth a go.

Speaker 5 (24:49):

And when we record vocals or write lyrics or whatever, s me and Tom have different style voices. We never go, well, I'll always do the verse or whatever. We just sort of listen to the riff and see what lyrics we've got for that point and try it out and see what voice sounds better on that piece of music and work it out like that. So we do all need each other really, because Matt writes a lot of the lyrics as well, so he'll have a way that he wants it phrased or So yeah, we kind of do need all of us there really, don't we? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:20):

Sounds like a lot of thought went into it. Oh

Speaker 5 (25:22):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:23):

I think that Jacob, one of the things that you mentioned too was not just that the performance was great and that it was super clean, but that it was edited well, so it was crossfitted, right? Because one of the things that you've noticed when you get some of these bare bones productions is that there's bad cross fades and bad edits, which then make it hard for you to do what you need to do in order to make it sound like an expensive production.

Speaker 4 (25:50):

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you could tell that things were actually done. It wasn't like I didn't even, when I stopped thinking about all these technical things and just mix that, the ideal situation, of course, and this was one of those situations where everything that I got just worked right off, right off the bat. Everything was sounding great and I could be creative with it. So I think, again, the experience that the band had already, plus they brought in some guy that could help them with editing and whatnot. I believe you had some help with that. You didn't do that yourself, right? With

Speaker 3 (26:32):

The vocals we did all ourselves. Alright.

Speaker 4 (26:34):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (26:35):

We recorded all the vocals together and then pretty much every day before we started, I'd wake up at 6:00 AM and just sit there and just edit vocals. I actually find it quite therapeutic.

Speaker 4 (26:44):

Well, cool, but you know what to do and how to make that work.

Speaker 3 (26:49):

Yeah, we got some basic knowledge of how to cut and edit things on pro tools. So yeah, just aligning things and top chopping and

Speaker 5 (26:55):

You're getting right into it. Toward the end, there was even certain guitar bits that we'd had done with Tom was looking back over and go, oh, tweak that very slightly. Three

Speaker 6 (27:03):

O'clock in the morning on deadline day, just going, I'm just going to spend another three hours on this.

Speaker 2 (27:08):

Well, that's actually something that I do think bands should invest in if they don't know how, if they know how cool. But if they have a small budget and are wondering what to spend it on spending on someone that knows how to edit stuff properly, that's a good use of money. Very good. Because that right there determines a lot about what you can do in the mix or not.

Speaker 4 (27:38):

Totally. It's such an important thing.

Speaker 2 (27:41):

Yeah. You're not afraid to compress.

Speaker 4 (27:46):

No, and that'll bring up all kinds of weird things.

Speaker 2 (27:52):

And then also if it's recorded in one of the things you get in lower budget recordings too, who's talking about the room, people will record in a room that's got weird flutters or just weird shit going on. And then when you compress the hell out of that weird room stuff obviously gets louder

Speaker 4 (28:12):

And

Speaker 2 (28:12):

You end up with a vocal that just can't really fix too well.

Speaker 4 (28:18):

No, you're right. There are some tools that can take away some of that,

Speaker 2 (28:21):

Some,

Speaker 4 (28:22):

But it's not ideal and it will change the sound of the vocals and it's going to be basically a nightmare.

Speaker 2 (28:34):

So another thing about the way it was delivered that I thought was rare was the quality of the base track, both in the playing and the way it sounded. That's something where people screw up a lot. You were talking about simplifying the baselines.

Speaker 4 (28:53):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:54):

Jacob, did you tune their bass at all?

Speaker 4 (28:57):

I think so. I probably did that because that's something that I mostly always do because a bass is hard to keep in tune, very hard. It's always like that. It's on the attack, it's going to be a little sharp, and then on the sustained notes it's maybe going to be a little flat. So it's always a little bit of a, yeah, you have to figure out how to make that work, and that's just normal. It's not a huge problem really. It's just part of the base and it's easy to fix really. So

Speaker 2 (29:30):

The thing though that isn't easy to fix is if the bass player doesn't play hard or if the part doesn't actually support the low end. So I think that something in that base arrangement made your life a lot easier in the mix. And that's something that's down at the production level and the arrangement level and the writing level. But in metal, sometimes you'll have these base players that when the guitar is playing a tremble, they'll try to tremble or something. I mean, sometimes it works, but they don't think as the bass player being a functional instrument that

Speaker 5 (30:12):

We were having this chap with Jacob when we were watching the mix. And I'm as guilty as that when we wrote the songs, all the little relo bits on iron and everything. I was replicating when we were because I played with my fingers normally and just to, because I felt that that's what I should play. But it wasn't until we got to the studio that when we sat down with the guitars and everything that it just kind of felt better to play with a pick, play hard and just play, simplify it, just to keep the base feeling at a constant level. As soon as you start trying to chuck in, especially on our music, you're trying to chuck in some of the fastest stuff and not having the consistency of the pick because your fingers aren't as hitting as hard. We just really felt to really simplify it. And since then, since the album's come back, I've changed the way I play certain songs because I want to have that album sound and not try and overcomplicate it. And it makes my life easier as well for vocals. So win-win really,

Speaker 6 (31:09):

Plus that bass is always just there, almost backing up the guitars and providing the back end of the guitar tone. So we always allow the guitars, for example, in the groups of 16th guitar riffs, like those bleed esque kind of riffs, allowing the guitar to really provide the picking definition of the, and having the bass just kind of hitting more of a, so that you really get the tone of the base note and not just kind of the pick attack of it.

Speaker 2 (31:37):

Well, when you play rhythms like that on base, it just

Speaker 5 (31:41):

Muddies

Speaker 2 (31:42):

Starts to blend together.

(31:43):

You can't even really hear all those notes. So it sounds to me like the moral of the story is that from the ground up, meaning from the writing to the arranging to the decisions of how to record certain parts, everything was done basically to optimize it. So the base was recorded in a way that supported everything else. Vocals were recorded in a way where you're not going to get a shitty room destroying the mix. The di was clean enough so that Jacob could reamp and get a great tone. Drums were recorded in a way to where you don't have a horrible room getting all over everything ruining life, making Jacob want to drink himself under a table. Is there anything else you want to add to that for bands who are wanting to hire people such as yourself or other mixers and are recording it themselves? And besides also get someone to help you who knows what they're doing?

Speaker 4 (32:56):

No, I think that's the, how do you say that's the headline for this in some way that you need to use your, or find people who knows or who know about you should find some people that knows what they're doing because you can't know everything as a band, obviously it makes sense that your songs and you know how to play them, but that you need a pro that knows about microphone choice. How far are you going to stand from the mic miking up a drum kit? That's what's going to happen. There's so many things, and I think that's where the Discarnate boys did. They did very well there in choosing. They chose wisely there really. And also the fact that they were actually, they were really thinking about, that's totally sweet music to my ears when Al is saying that he went from playing with his fingers normally to playing this with a pic and simplifying what he was supposed to play just because he was thinking about the big picture. How do we want the bass to sound in this? And I even remember us talking about, I think maybe the first test mix that I did was with less insane bass in some way. And you went, we really worked on the bass on this album. So we want that to be smashing your face in.

Speaker 5 (34:32):

That's been one of the biggest things that we, we've had lots of people get in touch with us and how we got our bass sound for the style of music. And there's a lot of people wanting to replicate that, which is amazing because considering that something that we recorded or whatever, but obviously testament to you because it's a really good base town. I've had a nightmare trying to replicate it live,

Speaker 2 (34:55):

But it's a combo of things. I mean, your chain is obviously a huge part of it, but you needed to have a track that you could

Speaker 4 (35:04):

Turn

Speaker 2 (35:05):

Into that.

Speaker 4 (35:05):

I mean, it sounds like a cliche, but it starts with the bass tone and the player of course. And the choices that you made because I mean, I do the same thing over and over again for bass sound. Of course there are differences how a bass should sound in metal, but still most of the times choose the same plugins for the bass sound. But this sounded just so good because you put some thought into it and that's important.

Speaker 2 (35:43):

Same for those guitar riffs. I'm sure we've all experienced this where you have a guitar rig and one person hooks up to it and it sounds godly, and then someone else plays the same guitar through the same rig and it sounds like garbage because it all begins with that right hand and how the player approaches it. And so focusing on those rifts and how they were played you to addition into the clean di allowed you to actually be able to get that monster tone amping.

Speaker 4 (36:24):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (36:25):

I mean, I'm sure you would've got in a good tone either way, but that one's especially awesome.

Speaker 4 (36:31):

Yes, and thank you.

Speaker 2 (36:33):

You're welcome. So just as far as the guitar tracks go, what are your thoughts about when you're recording rhythms, what are your thoughts about right hand pick choice, how hard you're playing, all those types of things. What were you thinking about?

Speaker 3 (36:53):

Definitely Pick Attack was a huge thing down to the pick choice. I think I was using Tex 0.73 Dunlop Picks, and that was actually a suggestion from the studio. He said he's always used these picks and found that the attack was great. And so I started using those and yeah, he was totally right that we would a B in different picks, and that definitely came out with more attack. And especially on the tremolo notes, pick definition really came through.

Speaker 2 (37:19):

Lemme interrupt you for a second, because a lot of guitar players I know are very, very precious about their picks. I only use Totex, sir. I only use this or that, which I think is really stupid. I mean, we all have our preferences, I get it. But I feel like any guitar player who wants a sick tone in the studio should be open to drawing different bicks because it's such a cheap way to massively change the tone.

Speaker 3 (37:46):

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I was using other picks before we went into the studio, but only just because that was what I'd ended up using. I wasn't like, oh, this is the pick. For me, it was just what I happened to be using, which is something much thicker. I think I was using two mil or three mil, big stubbies, that kind of stuff. So yeah, when he suggested these, started using 'em, I was like, yeah, you're totally right. We can totally hear the difference in the pick attack. And just other little things like not having the action too low on the guitar, obviously for speed and things like that, having low action is usually comes hand in hand so you can move up and down the neck so quickly. But pretty much all of our music is rhythm based riffs. So you raise the action up a little bit, you're going to get much less string buzz, you're going to get a lot more resonance. And that really helped bring out some of the bigger chords and that kind of thing. And just really digging into the strings on the right hand. Play as hard as you can because with stuff like Palm Mute, you're going to get much more cab swell on the low chugs and all that kind of thing. So just those sort of things, really trying to think about how can you make the riff as heavy as possible by really digging in.

Speaker 6 (38:50):

Plus he'll spend an extra three hours trying to down pick something, which is impossible if he knows. It'll make it sound 0.02% better.

Speaker 2 (38:59):

Good, good.

Speaker 5 (39:02):

It's only recording like Tom Live. He hammers the guitar. It's quite cool to see. It's just proper digging right into get that huge sound. There's only one guitarist, so it's kind of like got to make it count, really. It's like death metal hetfield.

Speaker 2 (39:18):

Well, the thing is that it's not a coincidence that the sound is that huge and you guys focus that hard on playing, playing really hard and really precise and making the parts exactly what they need to be to sound big. There's what we call, or at least I call them tone riffs. There's just certain riffs that lend themselves to sounding great. And it's kind of like yesterday when you were dialing on the amaranth mix, there was a certain riff that you kept looping during the guitar tone part, and that's totally a tone riff because there's just something about it that makes a guitar cab sing and focusing on that kind of stuff. You don't need a budget to focus on that kind of stuff. I think that makes all the difference in the world. So I think we're pretty much out of time. Is there anything anyone wants to add? I think that

Speaker 3 (40:12):

Covers most stuff from our side of things. Yeah, thanks for having us on. Thanks for nailing

Speaker 5 (40:16):

The mix, Jacob.

Speaker 3 (40:17):

Awesome.

Speaker 1 (40:19):

Thank you. Thank you. This episode of the Unstoppable Recording Machine podcast has been brought to you by tele Funken Electroacoustic Tele Funken. Electroacoustic has been following the tradition of excellence and innovation set forth by the original tele Funken GM BH of Germany that began over 100 years ago with one foot rooted in the rich history of the brand and the other in new microphone innovations for both stage and studio applications. Tele Funkin Electroacoustic is recognized as one of the industry leaders in top quality microphones. For more info, go to t funk.com. If you like the Unstoppable Recording Machine podcast, make sure you leave us a review, subscribe and send us a message if you want to get in touch.