JOEL WANASEK: Massive Guitar Tones, Studio Business & Taxes, Landing a Studio Gig

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Ivanez Guitars and Basses Ivans strives to make high quality, cutting edge musical instruments that any musician can afford and enjoy. Visit ivans.com for more info. And now your host, Joey Sturgis, Joel Wanasek, and Eyal Levi.

Speaker 2 (00:22):

Good morning everybody. It's time for another episode of Dear Joel. This is where you guys ask me your questions and I answer them with the most anger, hatred and No, I'm kidding, just having a little bit of fun. But yeah, if you got questions you guys want to submit, send them to [email protected] and put in the subject, dear Joel and I will be happy to go through your questions and answer them on these episodes. So today we're going to have a little bit of fun. Marty riled up and ready to rant. So let's begin. Dear Dark Lord of no small time, I'm at a crucial point in my life where I'm about to leave my job. I've got money saved up to go pursue working in a studio. I don't want to sell myself short, but I'm not the best at editing using MIDI or even using outboard gear because my current setup is all in the box.

(01:10):

Later this week, I am taking a tour of the studio and meeting the owner. My question is, how should I go about presenting myself knowing that I have some flaws that might make me unsuitable for the gig? PS I almost wrote a novel, but I did my best to shorten it up for you. Thanks, William. Alright, William, here's what's up. So first and foremost, if you don't know something, you need to fucking learn it. Okay? So if I walked into a studio for the first time and I wanted to be an intern, I want to leave that studio with the impression that the owner of the studio is going to know that no matter what, I don't know that I'm going to be the hardest working, best intern or assistant or whatever he's trying to hire you for that he's ever had. If I don't know something, I'm going to go home.

(01:51):

I'm going to study it relentlessly and I'm going to learn it. If I'm struggling with something, I'm going to become the best I can at it. So you have to really make the impression that you're there to learn and that, yeah, admit your fault. Hey, I am not the best at this and that, but I'm really learning and I'm really working and putting a lot of time and every day I go home after session and after work and I spend a couple hours working on my editing skills, for example, or working on my MIDI skills. So you got to present confidence. You got to walk in there and feel like you know what you're doing because if you don't have any confidence, you're not going to do a good job and it's just not going to come off. So anytime you're approaching anybody who owns a studio, they wouldn know that somebody that is coming in is there to learn and they want to be great and they want to add value to the studio and they're going to really work hard and they're going to try to excel and be the absolute best they can be.

(02:35):

If you can do that, you're going to stand out. If you can't do that, you're not going to stand out. So it's very important to just walk in there with confidence and be like, I don't know really how to do this yet, but I really want to learn. Maybe you can teach me. I want to be great at it. And when you say things like that and use verbiage like that and say, Hey, I don't really know a lot about that yet, but I want to become great at it. I can't wait. I'm so excited, enthusiastic to learn this craft. I want to make this my life. This is the center of my world. This is what I'm the most passionate about. I want to be absolutely mind blowingly fantastic at doing this. So if you walk in there with an attitude like that, William, you can't lose.

(03:09):

So that's what I would do. Alright, next question. Dear Darkest, Lord of the abyss of no small time, I'm having a really hard time with guitars. I can't get them sounding wide like on the IC Stars record or any other album for a matter. I've tried and tried and I know there's a good way to get that sound, but I literally can't figure it out. Thanks for any help, Shay. Alright, Shay, let's talk about recording guitars, recording heavy distorted guitars that sound a-list are a fucking pain in the ass. And I mean that with the most sincerity. If there's one thing I've always struggled with in my career and I've always gotten pissed off over it's distorted guitars, which is ironic because yes, I am a guitar player and I've been playing guitar for probably over 20 years now. I don't even know. So if I struggle with them and every other dude I know that's great at this stuff, struggles with them don't feel so bad.

(04:01):

Getting great at guitars is an art, and I mean an art, and it takes time. And if you want to really master them, you have to put in the time to get great at them. So for example, let's just start out with Micing a guitar cab. So if I was going to mic up a guitar cab and I had a bunch of gear, well first off, before I tell you the process, I'll talk about how to train it. So first things first, getting the right miking position very difficult. This is something that I struggled with in my career for a very, very long time. Where do you put the mic? How does it translate? Where do I get that special sound that just sounds aless? How much EQ should I be adding afterwards? And yes, it's really difficult to reverse engineer because when you listen to a finished guitar tone, you don't know how many tracks of guitars it took to get that necessarily what gear they were using.

(04:48):

It can be how much EQ, for example, was used on it, how much compression limiting if there was saturation. You have no idea what kind of craziness happened into the mix and you have no idea what the raw tone came in as. So it's really a struggle to figure out why does this finish guitar not sound anything like my raw guitar? And I struggled that with that for a long time. So what you're going to do is you're going to grab a guitar cab, maybe like a vintage 30, whatever you have, and a good head and a good guitar, and you're going to record a riff, double track it, throw it in a mix with your best drums and bass that you can possibly come up with. Then you're going to take that microphone, put it right in the center of the speaker, pick any speaker, and then you're going to record reamp it.

(05:27):

Then you're going to re reamp it and move it over to the left an inch and then another inch and then another inch. And then you're going to go back to the center off to the right an inch, and you're going to go through systematically and record every inch of that guitar cabinet. And you're going to take detailed brutal notes and you're going to listen and you're going to compare and you're going to see if you notice some trends, for example, maybe you like it right in the center, maybe you like it right in the center, but slightly off axis, maybe you like it where the cone meets the dust cap, where that circle thing is. There's lots of different ways and places that you can mic a guitar cab. So you got to really sit down and just listen very, very, very carefully and see how things translate.

(06:08):

So then you pick a couple of favorites, like I like one, two and three, maybe three different positions, and then you're going to throw them in your mix and then you're going to see how much EQ you need. Maybe one is too hissy and bright, the other one's too dark, but the other one mixes really well. I don't know. You got to experiment, you got to put some time in. So if you do that and you spend a whole day or two doing that and you do that maybe once a month, give it six months, your guitar game will get way better. You'll start knowing where to put the mic, how it's going to translate better, et cetera. So that being said, aside from training it, what you really need to do now is then you need to go through a process when getting guitar tones.

(06:43):

And like I said, we'll talk about sims later. So first and foremost, what you want to do is you're going to sit down with the cabinet. You pick the cabinet first. So if you have several cabinets, they're all going to have different speakers in them. So listen to the different cabinets, just like I said, get some drums in, get a bass, get it mixed as close as you can and reamp the part. And then just sit there and be like, alright, does a vintage 30 sound better than a G 12 H 30 or a greenback or a 75 or an Eminence legend or et cetera. And then you're going to pick a speaker and then you're going to sit down with that cabinet, whether it's a two by 12 or a four by 12 or a one by 12. Well, if it's a one by 12, I guess it's a moot point, but like a two by 12 or a four by 12, you're going to then go and take the microphone.

(07:20):

You're going to find this direct center of the speaker, maybe like an inch back, and you're going to do that for every single speaker. And you're going to find the best speaker where you turn up the volume to the excursion point where the speaker just starts moving and vibrating physically a little bit because right around there is where it starts radically changing the tone of the Guitar Amp, what it sounds like and how it moves air and et cetera. And you want to find that volume kind of in there where speakers kind of starting to excursion and just see how the different speakers handle the excursion of the speaker and the excursion is the movement again, and some of them are going to kind of fart out and get tubby. Some of 'em are going to be really awesome and super brutal sounding. Some of them are going to sound very unfocused, et cetera.

(08:01):

So different speakers are going to sound different even though they're the exact same thing depending on how much use and wear and tear they have, just depending on manufacturing variants and all kinds of things like that. So it's really important to just really get down with the excursion of the speaker and figure out which speaker is the best sounding one on the guitar cab. Once you know which speaker is the best sounding one on the guitar cab, you can then go and play around with a mic positioning. And again, since you've spent so much time playing with mic positioning, you're going to have a general good idea of where you should be placing the microphone in relation to the speaker. So maybe you like it in the center of the cone or a little bit of the edge of the cone or et cetera. So go play around with that reamp a bunch of different places and try to get the best tone out of that.

(08:42):

So once you've got the speaker and you've got the mic position, what you can then do maybe is try different microphones at that same position. I mean I would go in and maybe tape it off so you can get it duplicable, but try it for microphones and see which one you like. So after you shoot out a bunch of different microphones and you find a microphone that you like, maybe it's a 57 or an I five or a high L PR 30 or an Sennheiser E 6 0 9 or there's so many different microphones you can use, but the point is you're going to find one that is going to get you stoked. And then once you've got the speaker, you've got the microphone and the microphone position, you're going to pick the head and you're going to play with all your different heads and you're going to sit there and you're going to try to dial in each one the best you can.

(09:24):

You're going to compare all the different heads. And then once you've got that dial in, you're going to go and you're going to grab all the guitars you have in the building and you're going to reamp the same rift through it with all that great guitar chain that you've spent so much time getting and you're going to pick the best sounding guitar for that. Once you have the best sounding guitar, you're going to then play with the different pick gauges and see which different pick gauges work the best and sound the best in the mix. So once you have all those variables, you hit record and then meticulously and ruthlessly record your guitar parts. Now if you're using Amp Sims, it's going to be the same process. What I would do is generally maybe find a bunch of presets that I really like and I would go through a bunch of them and just see which one gels into the mix with the DI's the best and sounds the most powerful and the most excellent.

(10:08):

And eventually you're going to narrow it down to two or three different tones. And then once you find that tone, you want to tweak it. The cool thing about an amim is you can always load or save like, Hey, I like this tone, but maybe I can get it better. So you hit save on it and then you go and you tweak for 20 minutes, you come back, you listen, you compare, and then you're like, I totally screwed it up. Then you can revert back with a single mouse click and without killing yourself. So that is the process for getting your guitars to sound awesome on the way in, and when they sound awesome on the way in, it's going to be a lot easier to mix it. Now once you get your guitars rocking on the way in, now we need to talk about mixing guitars.

(10:45):

So this could be a 14 hour rant I feel like, and I feel like it's also best shown, but I would definitely start by watching maybe how we handle some of the stuff on Nail the Mix. For example, if you want to get an IC Stars mix, you could watch Joey Mix something like Chunk or Vesta Collide and see how he processes his guitars and he gets the kind of tones that he gets. If you like, the more natural guitars and stuff like that, maybe watch somebody like Al or Andrew Wade or et cetera or Naly or whatever. So we've had so many different guys here nail the mix, some of those back issues if you haven't been subscribed from the whole time, there's some really great stuff in there and some real gold for how to mix guitars. But either way, there's a lot of different things that you can try.

(11:26):

For example, getting the right eq, getting the right amount of limiting or compression or not compression, maybe using saturation, et cetera. Either way, you got to try all of them and you got to get a workflow. I mean, talking about how to mix guitars super massive and wide is, it's hard because it's a lot of philosophy and it's so much easier to show it. I think width is an issue of one panning them very far left to right. So a hundred percent, but I mean let's discard that as an obvious thing that most people would do right away. So you got to get the bottom end right if you want width, width is usually a function of frequency. So basically if you get your frequencies right and you don't have any weird, crazy low end swinging around, it's nice and tight on the bottom end, your mid range is nice and tight and it's not super honky and your top end is smooth and bright but not harsh.

(12:17):

You're going to get really, really wide sounding guitars that sound crushing in a mix. But you also have to realize that massive guitar sound in a mix is not necessarily just a function of the guitars, it's also a function of how the bass and the drum sound. So if you have a really crushing bass and a really crushing drum sound, you'll find that you can get it to lock very tightly with your guitars and you can get a super massive, super wide crushing guitar sound and it'll sound much larger than life because it is the synergy of a lot of different parts coming together to make something that is greater as a whole than it is by itself in solo. So that's really the rub of getting your guitars to sound amazing, is figuring out where you need to mic the cab or what kind of preset you need to get on the raw side to get it to translate where it sounds amazing in a mix so then you can massage it.

(13:04):

And that is an art and it takes years to master and to get the ear, I can't just give you a formula for it. You actually have to sit down and do the work and it's hard work and there's probably less than 50 guys on the planet that are masters of the A-List guitar game. And I'll tell you, not a single one of those guys got to that level by being lazy about it. They all got there by working their asses off and really, really pushing themselves and struggling every single day and trying to get fantastic at it. So alright, let's move on to the next question. Dear dark Lord of no small time, can you tell me how an average tracking session goes from when the band comes in the door straight to when everything is recorded and ready to be edited? Let's assume that the band members are good guys, not geniuses, but who know their shit.

(13:46):

Let's assume we're doing a 12 song album. Thanks in advance, Roy. Alright Roy, so here's how I record a band. Everybody's going to do it differently and I definitely recommend you find a workflow that works for you and again, experience will dictate to you how you should do it. Over time. You try a bunch of different things, you try to optimize stuff and eventually you're going to figure it out and get it down to a science and you're going to find something that works for you every time. So when I have a band come in, first thing I do is, I mean I've already talked to them and gotten paid some money and explained how everything's going to go down, but basically the band comes into my studio and we start recording click tracks. I don't really like doing pre-pro, I'm not much of a pre-pro guy.

(14:27):

If I hear something bullshit on the click track, I'll adjust it, but I like kind of doing that stuff more after drums are recorded and I usually leave the drums set up and whatever. So generally I'm going to come in, I'm going to record all the click tracks with the band, get the stuff down, maybe make any arrangement edits or whatever. If the band is writing with me, I will sit down and I will just write with them, but that's a whole different experience. So let's just assume that their songs are written and I don't need to do any major surgery or rewrite the entire album for the band because they suck. So that being said, and that being set aside, what happens is then the drummer will come in and track all of the drums. So I'll set 'em up, I'll try to get all the drums done in a day to two or three days, and then I'll edit them right then and there so they're perfect.

(15:08):

Once the drums are edited, then I will go and I will track guitar. So we'll go in and we will get all of the guitars set up and get all the tones and et cetera. Part of me editing the drums usually is triggering them up if needed and getting the drums pretty much mixed. So it sounds like you've got the kick and the snare pretty much ready to go and slamming so you can get closer tones to the album without having to go crazy from the get go. That way. If you've been working on a drum sound for over a week or two weeks or maybe three weeks with a band, you can always go back and change your snare and you can say, you know what? I've been listening to the snare for three weeks and it just doesn't bring enough heat. I want to lower deeper snare or something like that.

(15:43):

So I track guitars, edit them, get perfect guitar tracks, that's done. Then I do bass, get perfect bass tracks, boom, that's done. Then I get my vocalist in and we spend time getting the vocals perfect, edited, tuned, et cetera. So once the vocals are perfect, then I will sit down and do any post-production with the band orchestration, strings, synt, whatever they need me to do, whatever creative stuff they want. And by the way, I should mention the entire time that I'm sitting there with the band, if I hear something that I think sucks or needs work or I have an idea, I'm going to just say it and we're going to work on working on the song as we do it and cutting things and moving things and stuff like that. I usually also take drum samples, I should say after I cut the drums just in case I need to fabricate some sort of drum track.

(16:28):

But again, if you leave your drum set up, then the drummer can just go walk in and punch 'em in the other room and it's not a problem. So you need a lot of inputs obviously to do that and inputs cost money, but it's really nice for workflow. If you want to be flexible, you can always program the drums first with the band or have them bring in program drums and then you can work off that to get everything tracked and then go back and track drums later at the end. But either way, at the end of the day I like to have everything recorded, edited as I'm doing it tuned, et cetera, everything is perfect, then add any post or whatever. And then after that's all done, I'll go in and I'll mix the, so I'll throw the band out, I don't want 'em sitting over my shoulder when I'm mixing it.

(17:04):

I'll get my first mix done, bring the band in, get their opinions on it, tweak, do whatever, get that first mix and then I'll mix the entire rest of the record with them removed from the studio. I also master what I'm mixing. So then they hand the band a CD and they go home and we sing kumbaya and dance around the fires. So that's pretty much how an average tracking session goes for me. That would be more of, I would say our local, regional, smaller national band. And if I'm doing something a larger and bigger than generally it's going to involve a lot of writing and we're going to sit down and submit demos to the label for approval. Once the label gives us approval on the songs, then we will actually go and execute and track the songs. Alright, next question. Dear Dark Lord of the abyss of small time, can you describe your monitoring setup?

(17:52):

I've subscribed to the Bobcat's advice from your podcast and I'm curious what you're listening through given that you have a similar respect for analog. Thanks, Nelson Nelson. I'm using a pair of focal twins and I have a KRK sub. Not the most expensive or brutal monitoring setup, but it's definitely good enough and I know it intimately and I trust the speakers and I've had enough stuff on a radio that I know how it translates and I know what it's going to sound like and I'm very confident in it. And I think that's the most important part is you get a great set of speakers that you can afford, that you feel comfortable mixing on, that you really learn intimately and get them really set up and dialed with your room and your room treated right. And once you have it all set up and you know it, you've done a bunch of mixes and you've seen how it's translated across different mediums, you should be good to go.

(18:39):

Dear. Great Annihilator, destroyer and destruct of all that is small time. What other mics do you use on guitar cabs other than the SM 57? Thanks John. John, first off, there are no other mics for a guitar cab that you can possibly use other than a 57. All of the mics are a lie and are false and are banished to the abyss of small time. No, I'm just kidding. Actually, there are a lot of fantastic mics for mic and guitars and I recommend having a lot of them because each one has a very different frequency signature and sometimes you may find a 57 isn't as cool as a high L, PR 30 in a certain tuning in a certain type of song. I can get really cool guitar tone. So some mics I like other than a 57, I like the Audix I five, it's like a slightly more high 5 57, you can try the E 6 0 9.

(19:26):

I don't get much good results out of it, meaning I've never really gotten into that mic, but I own one and I try it a 4 21. I kind of have a love hate with the 4 21 very few times in my career is it ever worked for me? And when it's worked for me, I've usually gotten a really sick and awesome tone with it, but most of the time I just can't get the damn four 20 ones to work. I don't like multi micing, it's just not my thing. High OPR 30 is a really cool microphone that's really got a lot of depth and it's kind of scoop sounding and very modern. I do like the PR 30, that's kind of cool. It gets used with a lot of low tunings for me. I definitely like that. Aside from that, I think that I've used the ribbon mics and things like that and I'm not really a huge fan of the ribbon mics because they're just not badass enough or heavy music in my opinion.

(20:16):

So I kind of stay away from the ribbons. There you go. Like an I five a high LPR 30 a 57 and a 4 21. I think those are like my staples. Dear small time abolish her. I'm curious how you went about setting up and determining your listening position in your new space. While I know it is very similar to your last studio, I've also renovated my control room recently and changed my listening position. Curious on your process and maybe what you've done to pick the best location as well as the treatment decisions that you made. I'm trying to get a better listening environment while mine is better than before. I know there's room for improvement. I've delved into the EQ wizard and done some pink noise tests, but that's a little bit overwhelming. Maybe we can add a section for members posting pics for the listening positions of the rooms or pointers and how to improve them.

(21:03):

Thanks Eric. Alright, Eric, I've got some thoughts on this. So I think you're going to be kind of disappointed with my answer, but my answer is a little bit more practical. I've never sat and done pink noise sweeps with a measurement microphone and all that fancy shit. I've never done that before. I should bring down the fire and brimstone on me for not doing it because I feel like part of me knows better, but at the same time, I'm all about practical. So I determined my listening position by first building my room to a correct ratio and I went online and found some ratios. For example, the giant L Sayers forum. I can't remember, I'm going to butcher the shit out of this guy's name. It's like S DeMeyer or Sep Meyer or something like that. There's some good ratios. So I built my room as close to the ratios as I possibly could.

(21:54):

And then you want to be in the length position. So if your room is longer, you want to be on one end of that because there's more room for the base to develop. So first things first, I try to get my listening position like 32, 33, 34, somewhere in there, percent of the room like you're supposed to. And then I just treat, so I treat my corners and then I treat my back wall a little bit, my first reflection points, and then I go and I listen to the room and if the room feels too reverberate, then I'll add some additional treatment to get things from bouncing around. Or if the room feels too dead, then I'll remove treatment and I just add treatment and I really just sit down and listen. But more importantly, I grab a CD of tracks that I know very intimately well mixed by other people that I really love their work that I've been listening to for years.

(22:42):

And I play it. And then I sit there and I dial in my sub and I dial in my speakers and I spend the time to make sure that I've measured my speakers off the wall and at least everything is symmetrical, left to right, front to back, et cetera. And then I listen to those tracks and I just sit there and I learn the room because I know what that low end sounds like in 50 different systems. So when I hear it in my room, if it sounds like, oh man, it's really muddy, maybe I need to add some traps or put a trap behind my sub buffer, maybe my suber is too loud and I just experiment with things until I sit down in my listening position, I'm like, man, this sounds great. And then when I sit down and I mix, I'm like, alright, does this feel right?

(23:20):

And then I go through and I take the mix and then I go and I reference it in a bunch of places and I'm like, alright, how is this translating? Another thing I'll do is I'll also listen to a bunch of my old mixes, the few of them that I actually like that I don't hate and don't want to completely redo, but I don't actually, I dunno if I have any of those, but I'll try to listen to some records that I've done, that I've done well and other people like the mix on. So then I'll take those records and I'll listen to it and I'll listen to the bottom end and all that stuff and see if it feels about what I'm used to hearing. And once I get my room and I play around with the treatment a little bit and to get it to the spot where it's like that, then I just say, screw it man.

(23:56):

Let's mix songs. I don't want to spend a whole week moving around my stuff. I got work to do. So I'm very running gun and very practical on my room treatment, but I feel like you just need to experiment and spend some time playing with different treatment and stuff like that. But most important thing is get your corners trapped, get your first reflection points, then maybe get a cloud and stuff like that. But that's pretty much the lay of the land and anything after that is negotiable. Dear Vanquisher of small time, sir Joel of the Kingdom of Small Time Vanquishing, you help inspire me to invest in quality gear, but while I research and budget, I'm worrying about worst case scenarios. Call me paranoid, but do you think I need insurance? And that would be smart for our home studio Nelson? Fuck yes, get insurance immediately.

(24:43):

Listen. All right, here's the deal. You can go out and spend a bunch of money buying equipment, which you're going to need some gear to do your job, but if something happens to your equipment, and I'm going to tell you a story about this here in a minute, something happens to your equipment, you're going to be like, oh man, I'm so happy I have insurance because the whole building or the house burned down, knock on wood. Hopefully that doesn't happen, but you know what I mean, any kind of crazy catastrophe can happen. You can get an electrical surge that can fry out your computer and your hard drives. Who knows? There's all kinds of things. Spend the money to get insurance. It's super cheap. I've got six figures worth of insurance and all the gear I have here, and it's literally a couple hundred bucks a month, a year plus millions of dollars of liability on the building.

(25:22):

So if anybody comes in and they decide to smash themselves through my wall drunk and then try to sue me for it, at least I don't lose my Shadow Hills mastering compressor. So get insurance. Literally no one has ever sat down and said insurance costs a lot of money that's ever needed to use it in an emergency. Now I'm going to tell you a story. I saw this a few weeks ago. There was a guy in one of the forums and he had a great tragedy where basically he had all of his backup hard drives, his laptop and his sprinter and it got jacked. Somebody broke in and took all of his shit and he lost all of his sessions and all of his work. He was working on four albums. He didn't even have rent money. He literally lost everything and he didn't have insurance and he didn't have it backed up via crash plan.

(26:02):

So he didn't spend five bucks a month on insurance, I mean on crash plan to back up his data to the cloud. And he didn't spend literally 200 bucks a year or a hundred dollars a year to ensure his gear for a replacement value. So he could have had brand new gear within the week and been back on his feet, plus gotten all of his files back on his new computer with minimal loss and been compensated for his time, but he did not have insurance. So dude, for love of God, for everybody listening to this, please go out and get insurance on your equipment and get crash plan to back up your data and do not let that same mistake happen to you. Please do not be silly and do not be a fool. Always be prepared because you never think it's going to be you.

(26:41):

And then when it happens to you, you're like, shit, I wish I would've spent the money and not screwed myself over. So be responsible, be an adult. Get insurance. Thank you dear one who takes the sledgehammer to all that is small time and annihilates it. I've got a question for you in your machine head, nail the mix while you were talking about balancing kicking base, you mentioned children of BOM's 2003 album, hit Crew, death row. Damn, I love that album. Just random sidetrack. In my experience and from a year of watching Nail the Mix, it seems like most people are in favor of running the kick around 60 hertz in the base around 80 Hertz after hearing you mention the Bodom album is an example of doing it the other way around. I can't unhear it. That album and their follow-up have a particular and very distinctive, loud, heavy bass sound and it's just such a huge part of their overall sound and I've never really appreciated it until you pointed it out.

(27:32):

So my question is this, under what circumstances would you as a mixer decide to lay the kick above the bass and what kind of thing would you be looking for musically to make this preferable to running it using the more conventional method of bass on top of the kick? And how would you avoid ending up with a crazy thin kick drum as a result? Thanks for answering these questions. Looking forward to it, Charlie. Alright, Charlie, generally there's no right and wrong. I can't say that the kick below the base is some kind of standard. It's more of it's got more energy and the mix sounds more powerful, whereas the kick above the base is going to sound a little bit more beefier and bigger. Now, for example, a lot of nineties rock mixes were done with a kick above the base where you didn't have a super brutal heavy kick drum, but you just had a super deep, awesome crushing base and it was really fat and round.

(28:24):

So generally there's going to be a lot of different considerations. For example, the tempo. If the tempo of the song is fast, it's really hard to get a super just smashing 50, 60 hertz sub in your kick because it's going to muddy everything up. But you can get a lot of bass going on down there and you can have a kick that's a little bit thinner and things like that. So a fast tempo is a good indicator, really, really aggressive music and things like that. Now you can do the kick below the bass there and it will sound really powerful, but again, it can get really muddy and you're going to have to do a ton of automation. But to be honest, it's really a preference thing. I mean, some guys like the kick above the bass, some people like the bass above the kick, and it also is tuning.

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If your guitars are tuned down like an octave, it's going to be really hard to get a super subbing kick because you've effectively taken the octave of the guitars and moved it down. And frequency pitch is so much lower on the guitars and the bass and et cetera that it's just going to be completely crushing everything from 30 hertz to 60 hertz. So you need to really think about those considerations when you're mixing and experiment. I always like to play around when I'm mixing and I have time and just see if I like the kick above the base or vice versa. Now getting the kick to sound not too thin is really, I feel like about just spending some time EQing it. You can still a lot of energy in your kick at 70 hertz, 80 hertz, even at a hundred hertz. Go listen to some of the pop mixes like Britney Spears, toxic, Katie Perry, teenage Dream, things like that.

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Kesha Die Young is a good example. The kick there has got most of its power at like 120 hertz and there's a lot of the bass synths are going right below that kick so you can get a really punchy sound that way. But again, in heavy rock and metal and stuff like that, definitely the more modern trend is to be doing it where the kick is below, but there's no right or wrong, it just depends. Maybe a really bass heavy mix that drives it or maybe a really drum heavy mix. Each one of those is going to give the song a different emotional impact and create a different feel and you just got to experiment. Each song is its own song and you should treat each one when you're mixing like that. Alright, next question dear Dark Lord of no small time and french fries.

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Two part question number one, what are the keys to getting fast at mixing when you do multiple songs in a day? And how do you go about trusting your gut for EQing and compression and et cetera? And number two, how fast, sorry, when mixing fast, how do you allow for creativity and experimentation? Or does being able to mix really fast? Wait, sorry, let me read that again. Or does being able to mix fast allow you to do the extra creative stuff? Okay, Patrick, I'll answer the second question first. When I'm mixing really fast, I don't really care about creativity and experimentation. I care about getting the song done so I can get the 40 other songs that need to mix finished and getting it to sound awesome and super consistent. So I'm going to use a lot of different templates. So I experiment with templates and things like that, trying to find the right drum sound or so I can just load it.

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Nope, load it. Nope, load it. Yes, that sounds good. All right. Load a couple different guitar sounds. Yep. Nope, nope, nope. Yes. Love that load, a couple different bass sounds. Yes. Boom, boom, boom, there it sounds great. Load some different vocal chains, et cetera. So you got to have your shit set up to the point where you can just go in and go out really fast like that. So what are some of the keys to getting really fast mixing wise? Well, first off, I'm going to just mention here that I have an entire course coming out on this and how to mix it over 500 songs a year and it's going to be really awesome and super in depth and I'm super stoked to tell you guys about it and show you guys that you guys are going to really dig it. It's so savage and so ruthless and there's just so many cool tricks.

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But just to give you a very small taste of some of the immensity of that course, for example, you need to have a great system of organization and templates. So like I said, you can fly different things in. You never want to mix and prep at the same time. So you want to batch all of your tasks. So do all your prepping in one day, then do all your mixing in another day and things like that. Another thing that's really important is the prioritization of the elements of the mix. So what are you focusing on that matters the most? For example, getting the triangle sample to sound the best in the hip hop mix isn't as important as getting the kick base and your vocal sounding super awesome. So if you only have two hours to mix, if you're going to spend an hour on those three things, then who cares about the rest of the stuff?

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That's 80% of the mix. So if the triangle isn't the best triangle sound, then just let it go. So it's about prioritizing, it's about organizing and just so many different things, but I don't want to go on forever about that because there's just too many things to go over and it's completely overwhelming to do on a single podcast. So how do you go about trusting your gut for compressing and EQing, et cetera? I think you need to train it. And I'm a big fan of setting up limitations. So for example, maybe grab a mix, don't do any eq, load up all your compression chains and stuff and whip out a fader balance. And then just go through and in 30 seconds try to each queue each instrument and then go onto the next one. So set up rules for yourself, like never EQ more than 15 seconds and just you want to really emphasize trusting your gut so you're not sitting there and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking if you only allow yourself to EQ at once.

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This is more for practice than actually mixing for real life. But if you only allow yourself to EQ a sound once and you give yourself 20 seconds, it's going to be your initial impulse. You're not going to sit there screwing with a snare for four hours. You're just going to be like, boom, boom, boom, sounds good. Well, maybe it's not perfect, but that's not what's important. It's not about being perfect, it's about mixing the song and getting faster and being able to train your gut in terms of getting your compressor settings correct. I think it's important with your compression to just have it set up in templates and have everything automatically gain structured so you can just drop it in and know that if you're hitting it at a certain input level that the output level is already going to be calibrated into your master chain.

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So really sitting down and taking the time to get your templates to do that. So hopefully that helps you out. Alright, last question of the day. And this one has several parts. Hey, dark Lord of no small time. I've been doing the home studio producer thing for a couple of years, but in the last few months I've been getting a lot more consistent paid work. Good for you, man. That's awesome. Congratulations. Not enough to live off of yet, but it's picking up a lot. I've always done it kind of freelance though, not as a business or whatever, but I've started getting a lot of work with bigger clients, at least for me who signed to Universal Music Group. And now there's even more than ever I'm having these business worries and questions that are creeping up in me. So first question, at what point financially should I start worrying about taxes or claiming these freelance home studio jobs and my taxes?

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Holy shit, dude, immediately you cannot not pay your taxes because if the IRS audits your ass, and I'm assuming you're an American, but if you're not, whatever your taxing authority is, if they audit you and you're not paying taxes, you are fucked. They will hit you with penalties and back taxes and they will screw you. So immediately start claiming your taxes, get a separate bank account and get a corporation or an LLC in America to protect your assets so that if something happens to your studio, you're not fucked as we kind of talked about earlier. Next question. Where should I begin with my tax records for my home studio work? Okay, first things first, grab some money and go meet with an accountant. Spend an hour and have an accountant help you set up your business and teach you how to do your taxes. You don't need to do anything crazy like for example, at bare minimum, you can have a bank account open for your business.

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You only put business money in there. You only draw funds when you're a paying yourself a salary, when you're doing an equity draw depending on how your business structure is set up. Or number two, whether you're buying equipment. So you are writing things off so you have a checkbook and a debit card so you can keep track of your expenses and then you're going to go and reconcile all of your stuff and you're going to make a profit and loss sheet, which basically says, how much revenue did you have minus expenses, and here's your net income from that. Your accountant can go and reconcile your checkbook and track all your stuff. So you need to sit down with an accountant, don't put this off, do this immediately. You got to do it. Don't fuck this up. It's super important because the accountant will give you tax strategies on how to save money and will put you at a massive advantage if you're not writing things off.

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For example, you could be saving 30% depending on which tax bracket you are, or 40% or almost even half your money if you live in a state like California where they have exceptionally exorbitant ridiculous taxes. So it's important to get ahead of the game now because man, it is your duty as a citizen of whatever country you live to pay the least amount of taxes legally possible. You are only required by law to pay what taxes you are required. So don't be stupid. Take the advice and go out and learn everything you can about tax law because you have to be educated. If you're educated, you will pay much less in taxes than other people and you get to actually keep more of your money. And believe me, if you have a family and you want kids and a house and all that crap and a wife, you're going to be really happy that you did that because man, they absolutely destroy you with taxes and it's really hard to have several kids, at least in America and make a decent living because they take all your fucking money and they give it away.

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So be smart about it and learn how to maximize all your deductions. So that's where I would begin. Go meet with an accountant, do it tomorrow. Don't wait. Whenever you hear this podcast, immediately go and do it. Do not fucking procrastinate. Okay, next question is, should I be setting aside a portion of each job for taxes? Yes, 30% is a pretty good default of that. So I have two bank accounts, one for tax revenue and one for your actual revenue. Now, this is something I never do. I always wait till the end of the year, so I'm a total hypocrite when I do this, but then I always get hammered and I have to pay out a shit load of money at the end of the year, and I totally get fucked on taxes. So be responsible about it. It's easy when you're by yourself and you're single, but when you've got a family, it's like sometimes you need money for this or this or that or something breaks in your house or you're car and you got to spend the money.

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You can't put it aside for taxes. So you're going to have to pay estimates. If you live in America and you have a business every quarter, you have to put aside a certain amount of money. But it's hard as a freelancer running a studio to necessarily predict how much money you're going to make. So sometimes your estimates will come in a little bit short and you'll owe a ton of money, and so you just got to prepare for a rainy day. I mean, for example, I've literally had times where I've owed like $20,000 and I didn't even expect it or realize it where I'm like, whoa, shit, I made a lot more money this year than I thought I did, and fuck, now I got to pay the government $20,000 and I got to come up with it in two weeks. Yeah, it sucks. So don't be that guy.

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Be smarter than that and be responsible. So put some money aside for your taxes if you can. I understand life is hard sometimes. You've got credit cards and debts and kids and all daycare and all kinds of shit to pay for. It's difficult. So just do the best you can and make sure you pay your taxes. Do not score around, because like I said, if you get audited, they're going to nail you and take you for everything that you have. They're absolutely savage, ruthless, horrible people. And the IRS, it is what it is, man, just a very terrifying organization. So pay your taxes, don't fuck around. Next question, should I be sending out invoices for everything I work on? Yeah, you can. I mean, what's more important is every dollar that goes into your bank account you declare as revenue. So you can basically say, yeah, I've collected, here's all my revenues.

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Boom. No one's going to get upset if there's not an exact invoice for something or whatever. As long as you're paying, here's all the money that I made. And if the money reconciles with your lifestyle, the IRS is not going to come and say, oh, it says you make $5,000 here on paper and you don't have a job, but I see four Mercedes brand new in your driveway. Are you ducking taxes, buddy? Then you're going to get slammed. So you got to be smart. So yeah, invoices are a good habit, but not 100% necessary. But yes, you should do them. Am I an idiot for waiting this long to seek tax advice? You're not an idiot. You're just, I would say uninformed and lazy about it, which there's nothing wrong because again, I'm no saint with taxes, neither is anybody else. I mean, I pay all my taxes legally.

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I take all the deductions that I'm legally entitled to, but no matter how much you know about any subject, life is busy and you can always learn more. So just be responsible about it. That's all I'm saying, man. You got to get right on that shit, and you got to get on your taxes. Like I said, you don't want to screw around. The IRS is something to be feared. Be responsible. Pay your taxes, don't play games. Okay, next part of this, he says, okay, so all this stuff is over my head and everyone asks, gives conflicting advice to the extent of my knowledge regarding taxes involves turbotax.com and what's on a W2 from whatever fast food job I've worked in the past. I really have no idea what to do or if I should even be worried about this right now.

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The way things I've done it are clients usually reach out to me and then send me work and I would do the work, send it back. Then they pay me cash or PayPal, me. Sometimes it's a flat rate, like a hundred bucks a mix and master. Then they come and do like 20 bucks an hour. I've dabbled with invoices in the past when a client asked for one after that, I tried to make it a habit of doing invoices for everything until one time called me. I didn't need to send invoices unless I'm claiming it on my taxes. That's what the whole conundrum started for me. It got me wondering, how do I start to handle this side of growing my business? I come up from a very small town and nobody around here can give me a straight answer in the matter. Any advice would help me immensely.

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And I figured you find gents would probably have some good advice on this stuff. Thanks, Steve. Okay, so Steve, I've pretty much answered everything in there, but let me just reiterate a few things because I feel like no matter how much I say this, this stuff is super important and you really need to get good advice. So if you're from a small town, get in your car, go find a big town and find an accountant. There's got to be somebody who knows what they're doing. That's smart. And you got to get with an accountant and you need to get a separate bank account and a business. So then you put all of your money that you make. So if somebody gives you cash, you go and then you take it to the bank and you deposit it and you log it as income, you track it.

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The account will show you how to set it up with a tax tracking software like TurboTax or whatever you want to use, or you can do it on a spreadsheet, et cetera. I always do all mine by hand because I like to count every single penny and make sure that my balance sheet matches. But you got to meet with an accountant. The accountant will show you exactly how to set it up exactly how to maximize all your deductions and save money because dude, I'm telling you, every dollar counts when you're trying to make a living doing this stuff. And you want to keep as much of your money as you're legally entitled to do it because they like to take it and steal it from you. So what else can I say? Pay your taxes, be responsible, and it's a lot of work and it's a pain in the ass.

(43:06):

They make it really complicated needlessly. But it is what it is. It's reality, and unfortunately you have to deal with it. I don't know a single person that likes paying taxes, but they're inevitable. So that is what it is. Thank you guys so much. Hopefully this has been helpful to you guys again. I've had fun. Hopefully you guys have, and if you've got questions, it's m Sorry, LM al at URM Academy. Email. Dear Joel, the subject line, give me some detailed questions. I will do my best to help you guys out with whatever I can. And again, it's been fun. So I'll see you guys next time and cheers. The

Speaker 1 (43:43):

Unstoppable Recording Machine podcast is brought to you by Ivans Guitars and Basses. Ivans strives to make high quality cutting edge musical instruments that any musician can afford and enjoy. Visit ivans.com for more info to ask us questions, make suggestions and interact. Visit URM Academy podcast and.