WARREN HUART: Why Hard Work Beats Talent, Overcoming Self-Doubt, and the Modern Music Industry

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by STA Audio. Sta Audio creates zero Compromise Recording gear. That is light on the wallet only. The best components are used, and each one goes through a rigorous testing process with one thing in mind, getting the best sound possible. Go to stem audio do com for more info. And now your host, Eyal

Speaker 2 (00:24):

Levi. Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. I am Eyal Levi, and with me is a man that needs no introduction, Mr. Warren Huart, but I'm going to intro him anyways. He's a multi-platinum producer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist mixer, as well as an entrepreneur, business owner and educator. He's worked with artists such as Ace, freely, Aerosmith, James Blunt, the Fray, on and on, and for movies and TV shows such as Inglorious Bastards, X Factor, vampire Diaries, Grey's Anatomy. He's the president of the Spitfire Music Group, as well as Spitfire Studios out of Laurel Canyon, California. And is also the president of Produce Like A Pro, which is an online subscription service teaching you how to produce records with the best of them. Also served as an a and r consultant for Epic Records as well as Capital Records. So safe to say he's done a lot of stuff and you should listen to every word he has to say. So thanks for being here.

Speaker 3 (01:30):

Wow, thank you. That's probably the most comprehensive introduction I've ever had in my life. I might just steal that and put it in my bio. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:39):

You're welcome to, well, we do our research. We like to know who we're talking to, and I think that it's important for our audience to know, especially in a case like yours, just how deep your history goes because it's impressive, man. You've done a lot of stuff. And that brings me to the first question I have, which is when you were younger, did you envision yourself having a career that I guess has so many tentacles, if you will, or did you have one goal to be a producer or something?

Speaker 3 (02:14):

That's interesting. I often say this, I think I discovered music maybe too young,

Speaker 2 (02:23):

Was too young.

Speaker 3 (02:23):

Well, I was eight years old and my dad bought my dad's a classical music and jazz music buff. I mean, as a little kid, my memory of my father was every day, it seemed like every day he would bring a new album into the house. And it was always incredible music that I obviously thought was commonplace at the time. As you know, you don't have any comparison until you get older. You don't understand how good or bad your upbringing was. But my father would bring home incredible Beethoven, Maki, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, all of this different stuff. And so I grew up surrounded by music, music, music the whole time. And then he would come home with like, oh, I've got this Joe Pass, Ella Fitzgerald record. And then we would just sit and listen to the most amazing jazz guitar of Ella Fitzgerald, the most amazing singer.

(03:15):

And so this was just seeping into me, but never any pop music. And one, it was Christmas and my dad bought me a night of the Opera by Queen. So I open up a night of the opera and put it on my Sony headphones, my dad's big old fashioned Sony headphones and listen to this music. And I'm staring at all the pictures of all these guys with long hair, which where I grew up in this little village, I don't think there was a person that had long hair that wasn't a girl. So I was just like, wow, what is this? This is crazy music. And so I fell in love with music. And the reason why I say too young is because obviously I didn't understand what any of these jobs were. I didn't know that Roy Thomas Baker as the producer, I was just like, oh, he's a person that's making this music.

(04:03):

I didn't know. The only thing you really know is, oh, that guy sings that guy and plays piano. That guy plays guitar. And I knew immediately that I wanted to be Brian May. I was like, that guy's cool. Firstly, he's got this incredibly cool Afro haircut. And as a little kid, there was no internet, of course, back in the olden days of pre Windows 95. So I was basically scouring magazines, whatever I could get in those days. There was three main music newspapers. There was the melody maker, the New Musical Express or the NME as it was called, and Sounds and Sounds was more of the Rock one slash punk. One Enemy was kind of indie and Melody maker was sort of all encompassing of all genres. So I would buy these newspapers. They were basically newspapers, but music, newspapers and read and scour looking for queen information. They were the first band. So then of course, I started finding out that Brian May built his own guitar, and it took a number of years, but my father understood what I was talking about, and we built my first guitar. I just wanted to be Brian May.

Speaker 2 (05:21):

So if Brian May built a guitar, then you had to do it too. I had to because I had

Speaker 3 (05:26):

To do it.

Speaker 2 (05:26):

That's what Brian May did.

Speaker 3 (05:28):

And I was blessed because my father, I was very blessed. My father is a painter and a sculptor and an amazing one at both, and that's what he did for a living. You can imagine what that brought in typical almost musician's lifestyle of feast or famine. Not that I was aware as a little child, I wasn't aware that we had some money or no money. I didn't know you just don't when you're a child. But it meant that I had a really, really talented father. So when I wanted to build a guitar with him, that was not a big deal. He was already building our furniture and built the extension on the back of our house and done all of that stuff. So he was very gifted and he probably did 99% of the building. I'm not sure. I've never been able to talk to Brian about this.

(06:18):

I'm not sure how it was actually split up between him and his father. He also was young as well. I was 15 and my father built this guitar, and some parts were definitely bought, just like Brian used those burns pickups. We actually got some shallow, sorry, some Diman pickups, which were a couple of decades later. Those were the eighties pickups of choice where when Brian was building his guitar in the sixties, there wasn't as much choice, but other than that of shallow machine heads, because as you try without the proper equipment, it would be pretty tough to build machine heads properly, which I think also is what Brian did as well. They bought machine heads. So that was my baptism. It was like just being a guitar player. But I will say what led into production long-term was the music that I fell in love with.

(07:15):

And it's purely because of my father playing classical and jazz, because I was listening to this very harmonically, melodically rich music because of that kind of music, it meant that I gravitated, initially gravitated towards rock and roll and pop music that also had a rich harmonic and melodic quantity, quality of music bands like of course Queen, as I already said, super Tramp and ELO as a little kid were the first bands that made sense to me, all production masterpieces. So first listening to Out of the Blue as a little kid by ELO was just fantastic orchestral arrangements with huge background vocals, and it's a great baptism of production.

Speaker 2 (08:04):

So what age were you when you started producing? I'm assuming that the music thing was your teens. Teens and preteens.

Speaker 3 (08:16):

Yeah, so I didn't start playing music until I was 15, so I had

Speaker 2 (08:20):

A Oh, so you were just a music fan? I was. And researcher,

Speaker 3 (08:24):

Yeah. My father, I just sort of followed suit with my father. I was obsessive about music and art and everything that comes with it. And I feel blessed. I really do feel blessed through that. And it's a good story to relay because we did grow up very poor. But it doesn't stop you being culturally aware and getting all of this influx of information and being able to assimilate it in a way that makes sense to me.

Speaker 2 (08:56):

And again, you grew up poor and you were still able to get enough information to learn enough about what you were interested in to decide that you had to do something, which is actually kind of incredible. Like build a guitar.

Speaker 3 (09:15):

Yeah, absolutely. Build a guitar and learn to play. I mean, when I first started learning to play, it was literally the stories you hear from everybody, all of those guys. I remember buying Needle and the Damage Done buying Harvest by Neil Young, getting Needle and the Damage done sticking it on my grandfather's Hi-Fi that he had given me. And it was an old fashioned, so it would play at 16 33, 45 and 78. So I put the album on and you played at 16 at Half Speed, and I worked out that part. You played at half speed and you sit there and work out how to play that song on acoustic guitar, and it was painful and slow, but it meant I was able to develop an ear because I wasn't watching a video where somebody's showing me the fingering. I'm having to listen and develop an ear.

(10:13):

And I will say, and I like telling people this, I was not guaranteed, not that kid that just picked up guitar. And it was like badda, boom, badda bing. I had friends, there's a good friend of mine maybe who listened to this called John Hill and John I'd known since I was a little kid who started playing guitar at the same time as me. And he just had an ear and he wasn't even surrounded by music. I was growing up. He was just one of those kids. That was kind of frustrating because you'd put on a song and he'd pick up a guitar and work it out within nanoseconds. And I wasn't naturally gifted. And it's one of those things that I had to work really, really, really hard at to get my thing was art, because I grew up in an arts family and my dad was painting and drawing all the time.

(11:01):

I was like the kid at school that was the best artist in my little school. But I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to play music. So the only thing I knew how to do was take all of those hours that I used to paint and draw and take that passion and that hard work that I'd done and then apply it to music. So even though I started off, I've maybe with the right mindset of wanting to do music, I didn't seem to have, it felt like I didn't have the natural talent that people surrounding me. Everybody else seemed to be getting it so much quicker than I did, and I had to work really, really hard. And now I look at it and I think, wow, I was so lucky. I was so lucky because if I had been some of my friends, for instance, all of my friends that were either a naturally gifted or secondly and more importantly, very wealthy, I grew up in a really nice area.

(11:58):

None of those kids that their first guitar was a Les Pool custom. I had friends at First Guitar, was a Les Po Custom Daddy, I want to play guitar. Oh, okay. Holy shit. Oh yeah. Well, I grew up in a sort of stockbroker belt area, so one of my friends at school's, dad was the chairman of ICI, even though it was what Americans call a public school in England. That's a private school. It's a long explanation to, but anyway, even though, because it was a nice area, there was a lot of wealthier kids around. And yes, their first guitars could be Strats Les Pauls, their acoustic could be a J 45. I had friends that had those guitars or drum kits or whatever. Not every kid, don't get me wrong, but none of those kids became musicians.

Speaker 2 (12:46):

I've got a parallel for you, please. I find it interesting. So I did not grow up poor, but my dad made me work for it. And when I wanted to play guitar, he's a musician, he's a symphony conductor. So I wasn't poor and I was encouraged to do music. However, when I wanted to do guitar, he didn't believe that it was going to be a serious thing. So he bought me a crappy classical, and I had to prove that I was going to stick with it for over six months. So I had to do the classical stuff, and then he didn't buy me a nice guitar. I think it was a really crappy squire. And then if I wanted to upgrade beyond that, it was on me to figure out how to make the money. And from there, I got bought me a Crate Practice Amp, like one of the small ones. And from that point on, he didn't buy me another guitar, another amp, nothing. So if I wanted to play in bands, if I wanted a guitar that was decent, that was all on me. And I had a lot of friends who grew up with similar, pretty good upbringings, and they were given really nice guitars and rigs from the beginning. They would get less Paul Customs and they would get Marshalls and things like that

Speaker 3 (14:16):

At

Speaker 2 (14:16):

The age of 13. And I outlasted every single one of them and actually learned how to play and turned it into a career. Not a single one of those kids who was given a nice guitar at the beginning ended up doing anything with it.

Speaker 3 (14:34):

Yeah, that's exactly my experiences. And again, I think, I don't want to emphasize the poor thing because we, but it sounds like our fathers are almost identical people because my father's a painter, your father's in classical music, and my father's obsessive arts. I mean, my father could talk about William Blake and Leonard de DaVinci till it came out of his ears. And I love that sort of feeling of heritage and that heritage can move forward. I think that a little kid in the seventies and a teenager in the eighties, which is what, I was a little kid in the seventies, and I was a teenager in the eighties, so I got to be immersed in music of those two decades. So when I started playing music and making music professionally in the nineties, which is where my career began in the nineties, I was sort of steeped in that.

(15:26):

So I only really had, the olden music was fifties, sixties. That was the olden times music. And so the Beatles, I discovered, I remember actually just before John Lennon died, I remember in 1980, I just got into The Beatles as a little kid. I was like, oh, Beatles, what's that? And then John Lennon died just a couple of months after my initial discovery, which was another huge thing. You don't realize how powerful that is until you look back on it and it reinforces the discovery. It was like the world news was just all about John Lennon's murder. But to cut a long story short, it really, it does mirror because the money thing is kind of irrelevant because what was driving me was that passion that my father installed. It sounds like your father had the same passion for the arts, for classical music, and it's just, it overs spills now.

Speaker 2 (16:17):

And art, by the way, he was not an artist, but so he made classical music and collected art as opposed to your dad, who sounds like made art and collected classical music.

Speaker 3 (16:31):

Oh, yeah. My dad's classical music collection was insane. I remember my first memory was just looking up and seeing like, wow, what are all these, we didn't call it vinyl in those days, a term that's evolved over the last 10 or 20 years. You bought albums and they became vinyl when CDs came in. But before that, they were just albums and cassettes never really took off. In England, that was a very American thing. Nobody bought cassettes in England, we just buy vinyl albums. But anyway, yeah, so exactly, and I think it's a blessing, but I don't actually think ultimately that was the quotient. The thing that to me was by not having the advantages, and I'm not talking about the money side of it, but not having the advantages of the immediacy of knowing everything. I feel like I was blessed because like I said, it wasn't natural for me, so I had to work harder.

(17:32):

And so I had a choice. And for me, all of this upbringing, all of these experiences are the reason why you gave me that wonderful, incredibly comprehensive intro. And all of those things just come from that upbringing. And also, to be honest, I'll be honest about this, I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder being surrounded by wealthy kids that got whatever they wanted and then gave up within six months to a year. And then sometimes their parents would do the opposite of what yours and my father would do is they bought them a nice guitar. If they didn't take to it, they would buy them an even nicer guitar to see if the nicer guitar would encourage them more. I saw a lot of that. I dunno if you saw that too. It was like, oh, but dad, I like this Strat, but I'm really into this guitar player now and he plays a Les Paul.

(18:22):

That's the reason why I don't play as much. Oh, okay, cool. Here's Les Paul. He's really that sort of mentality, but again, I don't want to make it about rich versus poor. It's this sort of surroundings because like I said, I didn't feel like we didn't have any money because everything we wanted was paid for. We ate, and it's just like my father couldn't click his fingers and buy what I wanted, but I didn't really want for those things. I wanted for information, I wanted for knowledge. That was what inspired me. When my dad bought me that album, I just looked at the pictures, I heard the music. It was guitar based. I wanted to be a guitar player. It seemed to make perfect sense from everything I had been. I'd heard on other forms of music up until that point. It just clicked with me immediately, and it is the reason why I do music. It's purely and simply a night of the opera. Hearing that album for the first time as a little kid, I remember everything about hearing it for the first time.

Speaker 2 (19:24):

So how did it lead to production?

Speaker 3 (19:26):

Well, I think I was earlier. I think it was just because of the classical jazz kind of upbringing, the pop music and the rock music that inspired me the most was a hooky. Big strong melodies, great classical music, has the best classical music, has everything as it's amazing melody, as well as emotional content and stuff like that. It covers all the bases. I mean, to me, behove and fifth or ninth symphonies, you could put me on a desert island. I'd be happy with those two for the rest of my life. They have everything we need. They have

Speaker 2 (19:58):

All time masterpieces,

Speaker 3 (20:00):

All time masterpieces. What you and I do is kind of just pales in comparison to especially the ninth, to a guy had completely lost his hearing at that point. Just being able to write from inside of his mind is just masterful. And the word genius is bandied around quite heavily, but he's one of a handful of true musical geniuses, and it's great. You do really complex metal, and your complex music probably owes a lot to classical. It

Speaker 2 (20:33):

Owes a lot. But I will say that it bothers me when people say that metal and classical are the same thing.

Speaker 3 (20:40):

Oh, I don't, definitely don't think it's the same thing.

Speaker 2 (20:43):

Yeah, it owes a lot to it, but it also owes as much to rhythm and blues as it does to classical. But I mean, the reasons that I got into metal though aren't because of classical. I got into metal. I was pissed off and I was indoctrinated into classical music from a really young age, but at the age that I started to get pissed off at the world, it didn't speak to me. Metal did. And it wasn't the same. I mean, I learned to play classical instruments. I learned violin and piano from a young age, and I have studied classical music very, very seriously, and they're just not the same. There's so many reasons for why they're not the same, but I do think that metal does owe a lot to classical. I agree with you there. Oh

Speaker 3 (21:41):

Yeah, no, that's literally what I think is, yeah, what I like about it is with the best metal is that you can explore all the same space that classical can because you are able to do seven, eight minute nine, 10 minute pieces that take you on journeys and stuff like that. There's not much music that does that. And what I like about The Great Metal is that it can do that, and therefore it can expand people's minds as opposed to this three minute 20 pop world that 99% of the world lives in. And I have nothing. I actually think the best music is when it does everything. I talk about this all the time when I'm producing, and it's a big, big point that I'll make with every artist. This is my firm belief. My firm belief is it's easy to do extremes. It's easy to be a Brooklyn, really super cool indie band that's like got the coolest influences of Joy division and New order obviously, and maybe the Cure mixed in with all of these different genres that that's really, really easy to do.

(22:47):

Just purely art music. It's also really, really easy to do pure pop. It is the 6 4 1 5 radio stuff. Most of my friends, in fact, pretty much all of my friends that write pop music and produce pop music, reference current pop music to write current pop music, which is why, as all of us know, pop music has been stagnant now for at least 10 years. If you play a pop song from 10 years ago and a pop song from today, it sounds like it's the same production. Nothing has changed in over 10 years. It's been one of the worst periods for music for every Adele that comes out and breaks the barriers for every Nulls Barkley crazy, for every Lord Royals, for every one of those songs. That really sounds refreshing. Most of it sounds exactly the same, and I'm not anti-pop get me wrong. But the difficult thing for me, or the most exciting thing I should say for me is when those two things come together.

(23:47):

And it is when you get Lord Royals, when you get just literally a drumbeat with a one sub note and then a beautiful melody and an amazing message and incredible harmonies like royals, when that comes on the radio, that just seemed like a breath of fresh air. Ah, something other than all of this stuff that's happening. It was a wonderful thing. And it seems like to me, when metal's done to its highest extent, it can do all of those things as well. And that to me is a huge, huge deal, is bringing all of those things and making everything hit at once.

Speaker 2 (24:21):

So did you feel like, I guess because I know I did, did you feel like production maybe was your way of expressing all those various emotions and feelings, maybe in a way that just being an instrumentalist?

Speaker 3 (24:39):

Absolutely. That's very well put and a great question and a yes, yes and yes answer. That is the great thing about production, especially coming from a musician, and you probably have this debate as well, because you're a musician producer, and it's difficult because I do honestly wholeheartedly believe that you can be a great producer and not be an instrumentalist. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that being a good instrumentalist is not a massive help as a producer.

Speaker 2 (25:06):

Oh man, I don't know how I would do it without it.

Speaker 3 (25:11):

And it's difficult because there are, in the old way of making records, it was very easy to, you could be one of those, I'm not going to point obvious names, but you could be one of those kind of errant producers that turned up two to three hours a day. And I've made records as an engineer with those kind of producers, and you could do an overview thing and you could be more of a business guy. You could be more of a guy that puts people together like the classic kind of old school fifties and sixties producers that were more about like, oh, picking the right engineer, which is obviously a talent, picking the right musician, picking the right arranger, and then taking the production credit. I mean, you could be that guy when the budget was hundreds of thousands of dollars, which up until mid two thousands was commonplace. I mean, I've recently made records with big budgets, don't get me wrong. When I did the Aerosmith album, it was ridiculous budget, but it's Aerosmith. But when I did the Ace Freely records, they're still bigger than an indie indie budget, but a fraction of what it would've been 10 years ago.

Speaker 2 (26:23):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (26:24):

10 to 15 years ago. I think the turning point for me that I saw was about 2004 five, because we peaked in CD sales in about 2003, 2004, and then the drop off was so quick, it was insane. You can go to Wikipedia, anybody listening should just go to Wikipedia and look up the sales thing, and you'll see this steady incredible growth to about 2003, 2004, and then this amazing rapid drop off that just went through the floor, or the writing was on the wall, and the budgets were just slashed almost immediately because digital didn't, initially wasn't bringing any kind of, it wasn't able to make up for the shortfall. Now with Spotify, as you're probably reading anybody who's listening to this, and I'm sure Al you are aware, Spotify is making the music industry a lot of money now. It's moving into those billions kind of figure.

(27:22):

So as much as everybody complains about it, it is doing its job. It is becoming very popular, and streaming is starting to create a lot of income. So that's a great thing. But I dunno if we'll ever return to those kind of budgets because it's just a different world now, there will still be a room for those kind of old school producers that don't have to have those kind of mindsets, don't have to have that skillset. But today I'm going to go and meet. I'm about to do, I'm going to say who it is because it's not done yet, but I'm about to work with an artist that's being produced by David Foster. Now, the thing about David is he is an incredible musician and an arranger and a piano player and all of those things. So not only is he able to work with these huge legacy artists, he's able to sit in a room and play the songs with them and work on those kind of arrangements. So even though he's, what old school, as people might say, that kind of level of talent means that he's going to continue up until the day he dies, being able to integrate with any artist or any musician, but the older school way of doing things where you could be the guy that sat back literally quite often sitting on the couch at the back, not saying anything, to, not showing up to the studio that there's no room for that anymore. And in some ways, thank God,

Speaker 2 (28:50):

Not just is there no room for it, but I mean, if you want to just approach things practically with the fact that there's less budget to go around, if you want to make a good living at this, you want to have multiple skills so that things don't get hired out to other people on the productions. Why pay a session musician, for instance, if you can play the guitar, why pay an arranger if you can do the arrangements? So I feel like to make the most of a landscape or a climate where there's lower budgets, you should have as many skills under your belt as possible.

Speaker 3 (29:31):

Yeah, no, I agree. I absolutely agree. So obviously my whole message is one of encouragement. So if you're not a musician, it's not the end of the world. You can still be an engineer, you can still be a producer, and a lot of guys making EDM in particular do incredible music but wouldn't know a major from a C major. It doesn't mean that they can't hear something they like. So I still want to encourage people to make music because I admitted I didn't have any natural gift. Everything was hard work, and I'm glad of it because here's a good quote, and I've said this before, but I love this one. Segovia, obviously the most famous, not only most famous classical guitar player of all time, but the godfather of classical guitar, the guy that reintroduced classical guitar back to the world, and probably more importantly, taught every major classical guitar player said, and I quote, all of my best students gave up. So it's two things about that. Obviously it's funny because you're like, well,

Speaker 2 (30:37):

Interesting. I've never heard that quote before, but that's funny.

Speaker 3 (30:41):

Yeah, it's funny on two levels. It's funny for guys like us, ha, that means that all of the guys that are still going weren't as best students. So that's kind of hilarious. But the big takeaway from that is when something comes easy to you, it's amazing how you don't stick at it. My son is a really gifted artist. He is surrounded by me and his grandfather, my father and our whole legacy. All of my family are artists. And so he really was drawing with perspective at four years old, and his teachers were like, what the, he's drawing perspective. And I was like, oh yeah, we draw all the time and it's around it. And now of course he's into computer programming and he's done courses at 10 on computer programming and he hasn't picked up a pencil in over a year. And it's up to, it's his own journey. But I see it as that same kind of metaphor. It's something that came easy to him. He did art, it's in the blood. He's surrounded by art, and now he's like, I want to do my thing, and Dad, you are not as good on computers and I'm already better than you and I'm happy. He's like, that's finding your own path. You with death metal out of classical. You want to rebel and do your own thing and make your own statement. And that's that kind of thing. I think that I love this Segovia

Speaker 2 (32:03):

Question. That's exactly right.

Speaker 3 (32:03):

Yeah. I think, have you ever, and I've used this quote again, so sorry if anybody's heard this before, but the movie, the Third Man,

Speaker 2 (32:14):

Never seen it.

Speaker 3 (32:15):

You should watch it. Before we started the podcast, we had a lot of history conversations. You should definitely watch it because it's filmed in 1949 in Vienna, in a Ruin city, obviously. And it,

Speaker 2 (32:28):

I'm making a note to myself right now. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (32:31):

The Third Man, and it's about 1947 and it's written by Graham Green. If you know Graham Green's history, it's pretty exciting. He was a spy during the Second World War, and it's directed by Carol Reed and it stars awesome wells. So it stars is by the best writer of the period and starring the best actor of the period. And like I said, filmed in the actual environment that it's based on pretty close to the period it's supposed to be. And there's a scene where awesome Wells ad-libs, and he tries to justify why he's doing all these terrible actions. You need to watch the movie to, I won't go into all of the stuff that he does. It's pretty bad. But

Speaker 2 (33:14):

Yeah, no spoilers.

Speaker 3 (33:15):

No spoilers. So he tries to justify it, but he just ad-libs the scene that they keep and the scene is, so in 50 years under the Bourgess in Italy, they had rape and pillage and murder and all of this stuff, burning people, killing people that weren't Catholic, all of his terrible stuff. But in those 50 years, they produced the Renaissance, Michelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci in 500 years of peace and tranquility in Switzerland, what did they produce the cuckoo clock?

Speaker 2 (33:49):

Well, man, there's a lot to be said for being too comfortable and losing your will to create. I feel like every entrepreneur I know, every great musician I know regardless of their background, there's one thing that unites them all, which is this fire that they have inside. And that fire keeps them never satisfied, never comfortable. And whether it's that they have an ideal, they're trying to reach that they're nowhere near or their background was one of where they had to work for everything because they were never handed anything or whatever it might be, that fire has never died inside of them. And I feel like sometimes being too comfortable can extinguish that.

Speaker 3 (34:46):

I do agree.

Speaker 2 (34:47):

I've seen it many times. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (34:48):

I know. I agree. It takes a very special guy to, or girl, sorry, to really have both. We both know obviously people that are very calm and very organized and very on top of everything that are very successful. And that's a wonderful trait and very focused on one thing. But for me, it's like I think maybe this is the poor thing. I don't know what it is, but I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop. So if I'm not doing multiple things and working on multiple projects and moving all my business interests forward to all time, I am concerned that it's all going to go away. And I don't think that way, but I'm just rationalizing what must be going on in my mind. To me, it's like I need to always be moving forward. I always have to be driven. I don't have any time to rest on my laurels.

(35:47):

So getting back to where we're going on this, for me it's like with the teaching side and the mentoring side that's really important to me is it's like I 100% understand where people are forced to be now because where they're forced to be is what I had to do. I didn't grow up with any of the advantages like we're talking about, except the advantage of wanting to learn and having a father that even though he wasn't showing me things specifically because he was passionate about art in general, all arts and architecture and everything, bear in mind we didn't travel. I didn't go to Italy to see this stuff until I made enough money myself to get on a plane. So all this stuff was available at libraries for free local libraries. I would go and get books and magazines or newspapers that I bought with my pocket money.

(36:40):

So it was the desire, the passion, the desire, whatever you want to call it that made this happen. So when I get people commenting on my videos or emailing me, I come from that place and I am never dismissive of anybody, but I try to remind them that everything there is available if it's there available for me, five of us growing up in a two bedroom house, me sharing my bedroom with my brother who's 10 years younger than me and my sister sleeping in the box room as we called it, if I can do that in this little tiny house and have the library down the street and take my pocket money and buy a music magazine or whatever to do my research about the music that I liked. And then building my first guitar with my father who admittedly built it mainly, but being involved if you like, in building, if I can do all of those things, then also in a little town, a little village that's not London, that's not a major metropolis for music.

(37:43):

If I can do all of those things, then you can sure as heck do it in anywhere where you are able to communicate with me online because all of that information now is a hundred thousand times more readily available online. But I think obviously the next point that's probably going through your mind and anybody listening is, well, how do we cut through all of the garbage? And that's a question I'd like to pose for both of us. I don't think it is difficult. We were talking offline before this as we were sort of getting to know each other a little bit. And one of the things is there are a lot of people that benefit from trashing other people and separating and dividing. And my whole philosophy is the opposite. I just want everybody to come together because the democratization of the music industry is here to stay and to the reason why I like what Joey does and why I like what Steven Slate does is because making incredible sounding plugins that are affordable to the whole world is what is changing the music industry.

(38:46):

And don't get me wrong, I use wave plug wave plugins every day, and I love them. And I don't look at them as the Evil empire. I look at them as making high quality stuff. And then I look at Steven and Joey as making affordable quality stuff that is going to allow anybody to start making music. And to me, that's worth, worth this weight gold times a million in platinum because I was a talented kid that created my talent by working really hard. But there's talented kids all over the world and most of them fell through the cracks. I have one story, my famous stories, sorry, I have one story,

Speaker 2 (39:25):

Would love to hear it,

Speaker 3 (39:26):

That I like to tell. And so when I was 16, I left home for one reason or another, I rebelled against my father. I left home. So I left home super young, and my girlfriend and I at the time, she was a few years older than me, she got into an art college in the north of England. So I followed her up. So just to get out. So I followed my girlfriend up to this art college, and we get this little bed, and a bed is a one bedroom, all like a studio apartment, but even less, there was no bathroom in it. The bathroom was down the hall and all of the beds had one bathroom that you shared and you lived in this one room and you didn't have a cooker, you didn't have a refrigerator, you didn't have anything. And it was in Carlisle, and it was the height of winter and freezing cold.

(40:08):

But underneath this bed was this little music store. So anybody from Carlisle will know what I mean. It was called Northern Sounds. It was the north of England, it was called Northern Sounds, which it was a famous little store, little tiny store. And in his store was a kid who seemed so old to me. He was 19 when I was 16, and his name was Nick Rimmer. And Nick Rimmer was this keyboard player. So I remember I would go down every day and ask to try out a guitar. Obviously I had no money, and I'd plug it in and I would just play guitar for a couple of hours and then sheepishly give him back the guitar and say, yeah, I'm not sure if it's what I'm looking for. And then I go back up to my bed and sit alone playing guitar. And every couple of days, and after a while, after a few weeks of course, he's like, you're not going to buy a guitar.

(40:57):

I was like, no, I don't have any money. And he's like, well, you goes, you're pretty good. I play keyboards. So he played keyboards and this guy could sight read, sight sing, and just had the best ear of any keyboard player I've ever heard in my life at that point. And he would get out al Jero sheets and just put them out and then just sight sing and play Alger or anything, just give it to him. It started metronome at the tempo, play it back as though he knew the piece back to front. But I remember at the time thinking very clearly this thing, I remember thinking to myself, yeah, yeah, this guy's incredible. He's in a whole next level. But in Los Angeles on New York, there's like a thousand people like him, and they're all so much better. The fact that he can sight sing, sight read, has perfect pitch, can just do anything that's cool.

(41:52):

But there's this whole next level, well, you know what? It's now 30 years later, and I've never met a keyboard player as good as him, never, ever met. So when I get people writing to me that have talent, and when I do my videos and when I see people like Steven and Joey, I just go, these are our new heroes. Because we didn't think it was possible. Nick didn't think it was possible. If Nick at that point had jumped on a plane and flown to Los Angeles and landed in LA at 19 years old and gone to one of these clubs and sat in and played, he would be, oh yeah, have you heard Nick? Remember this guy's one of the best jazz piano players in the world, but he didn't because of the dogma and the crap that people feed you and still continue to feed you, that we were going, no, no, no, no, we are not good enough.

(42:40):

No, no, no, we're not good enough. So for me, that's the whole point of doing these channels and knocking, pushing back every single time goes, well, I heard this guy. He told me that you have to and you shouldn't do this and you shouldn't do that, and blah, blah, blah. And I posted on this forum and they all told me I was wrong, and I didn't know what I was talking about. And it's like I feel, I really feel, and I relate to those people that are telling me this stuff every day, I don't know, and I wanted to buy this thing, but they told me it was wrong and I didn't know what I was talking about and that this microphone sucked and this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. And I'm just like, oh, it really pains me because I saw a guy 30 years ago not pursue a career because he didn't think it was possible.

(43:27):

But I'm telling you, it's possible. I mean, he plays a church organist now, and he has a normal nine to five job, and he is married with kids and that's fine. And I'm sure he is happy. But now having lived the dream and moved to Los Angeles and been here and worked 15 hour days for the last 20 plus years of living in la, yes, it's possible. But he had a headstart on everybody. So to me, it's a big, big message. It's like if you listen to this, move away from the negativity, move away from people that are experts, because I'm not an expert, I'm sure Al, you don't think you're an expert, I'm sure Joey.

Speaker 2 (44:03):

No,

Speaker 3 (44:03):

We are just guys trying to make great music. And I screw up all the time. I do videos where I show it wrong and I, oops, I forgot to do that. Oh, go. Oh, I didn't bypass that plugging. Oh, oh my God. I did one yesterday and I just realized that I left one of the pieces of gear with a slider pushed down. So even though it's probably not an audible difference, we didn't do it properly. And I made a mistake, and I'm going to go back after this and make a comment and go, you know what? I just checked the video. You are a hundred percent right. I made a mistake. I'm really sorry about that. Oops, I'm not an expert. But that's the reality is I'm not an expert and nobody listening to this is probably an expert either. And you know what? When Jeff Emerick was 19 years old making Revolver with the Beatles, he wasn't an expert either, but last time I checked when they said, what are the greatest albums of all time? They always go Revolver and pet sounds made by people who weren't experts. Crazy that isn't it? It's really weird.

Speaker 2 (45:08):

It, I find that one of the big things that holds a lot of people back is that they feel like things need to be perfect or that they need to be as good. That held me back as the very best in the world. And that that's not true in reality. All you have to do is get started.

Speaker 3 (45:31):

I agree.

Speaker 2 (45:32):

And over time you will improve. Get started and devote yourself to it like crazy. Learn everything you can and obviously do all the work, but really the thing holding people back isn't that things aren't perfect, it's that they don't get started.

Speaker 3 (45:47):

Yeah, I agree. And it's difficult because we have all these illusions. For the longest time up through the mid two thousands, there was this sort of band of elite producers, engineers, and mixers. You grew up in that purity. You know what I'm talking about? Who made every record? Yes,

Speaker 2 (46:02):

Every

Speaker 3 (46:02):

Record.

Speaker 2 (46:03):

And there's still cliques like that in the metal scene for instance, there's the five to 10 guys that make all the big records.

Speaker 3 (46:12):

And I have an academy, I've produced like a pro academy, and I'm telling you, and you guys do the same thing with nail the mix. I'm telling you, there's guys and girls that send me in mixes just as good as any mixes I get from any of those guys. And that's just a reality. And I remind them all of the time, I'm like, this is an amazing mix. I have my friend Phil Allen, who won a Grammy for Adele, he sat in as on one of my mixed critique things and the first mix that we played at Random, he listened to it and he goes, wow, I'm really jealous of this mix. He goes, I dunno who you are, but your mix kind of sounds like what I try to go to. There's a polish to this, which sounds so professional and so radio ready, I don't even know if I can do this.

(47:00):

And he's won a Grammy. And it's just like, and I'll tell you, I'm not going to say who the mixers are, but I've worked with every major mixer on the planet and anybody that follows me knows that I'm a huge fan of Spike Stent. I think he is the best mixer in the world, and Mark Ender is right up there with him. Those two are the most, mark is the most anally. Retentive will take three days and your mix will come back and it will blow your mind. It'll be like more of what you've done. When Spike does a mix, he just screws it up and it comes back like, wow, I never would've thought of that. Oh, you distorted that and you back. Oh my God. So they both do different things. Mark's thing is more of what you've gone and Spike is like, well, I bet you couldn't even imagine what you could have gone look at this.

(47:44):

And that makes them unbelievable. And both of them, I've had first mixes, I don't even know how to comment. This is so far beyond my expectations. I'd be nitpicking now. I'd be looking for a problem. And they've continually done mixes for me as a producer or when I worked at labels and stuff, I've been blown away by their results every time. Now you go down the list now of all the other great guys, I've got guys that I've been minimum seven mixes in and one of the biggest pop mixers, 13 mixes in before we had something where we're like, it should be on the radio. And so it's like, I don't know, but find somebody in your academy or my academy that's one of our best mixers and give them those same files and then give them seven to 13 opportunities to make it amazing. You get where I'm going. It's like

Speaker 2 (48:38):

I know for a fact and I'm already thinking of him. We have a few students, one in particular, but a few who are good enough now. And I don't mean our pro students. We definitely have some pros who subscribe.

Speaker 3 (48:52):

So do I. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:54):

Just because they want to. They love learning. They love mixing but them aside, so we won't count them out of our student level subscribers slash students. We definitely have a few that are good enough right now that if you gave them 13 tries with detailed notes, they would get to the finish line with a totally world-class competent, great mix for sure. And what's interesting about that too is that right there goes back to something that I always tell people, which is that if you really, really want to make it as a mixer producer or really anything in the entertainment industry these days, it's almost like your skills are assumed you better work on those people's skills because you probably are pretty awesome and there's a good chance that you can get pretty awesome at the music part.

Speaker 3 (49:54):

Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of the things that I like also teaching is that part mixed in with the understanding how taste and creativity is a really key component because that's the part that isn't taught. I feel like anybody could launch a YouTube tuition channel tomorrow just based off Boost 60 Hertz on a kick. Ducks anywhere between two 50 to three 50 on the kick boost, two five and seven K depending on what kind of kick you want. Take a snare boost, one 10 or two 20, depending on which low end you want boost to seven K or eight K. And people do, and it's fine if you've got a personality to teach, you can find all the information online. But what they don't teach is taste, understanding and all of the great things.

Speaker 2 (50:42):

Well, Warren, it's been awesome having you on. And I was going to say that we should probably do this again. We definitely do this again. Yeah, I bet you that we could talk for about three hours and still have plenty.

Speaker 3 (50:57):

You and I can

Speaker 2 (50:58):

Talk

Speaker 3 (50:58):

Offline for about six months.

Speaker 2 (51:01):

Yeah, I'm sure.

Speaker 3 (51:03):

Yeah, we got a lot in common and a lot of the same. Well, historical loves I think is a big thing. That is our future, is our past.

Speaker 2 (51:16):

Yeah, for sure. Oh yeah, I study history all the time, so all links to if you want to find more out about Warren, if you want to check out produce like a Pro, which I highly recommend, just go to the show notes. All links will be there. And thanks for listening guys.

Speaker 3 (51:34):

Thank you very much, Al. I really appreciate it. And everybody have a marvelous time recording and mixing. The

Speaker 1 (51:39):

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