BEAU BURCHELL: Drum Production, Studio Workflow, Work/Life Balance

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Bala ga Guitars. Founded in 2014, Bala ga guitar strives. To bring modern aesthetics and options to vintage inspired designs, go to bala ga guitars.com for more info. This episode of the podcast is also brought to you by Fishman inspired performance technology. Fishman is dedicated to helping musicians of all styles achieve the truest sound possible wherever and whenever they plug in. Go to fishman com

Speaker 2 (00:00:29):

For more info. Welcome. Welcome to the URM podcast. I am Beau Burchell. I'm your guest host for this episode and I'm going to be answering questions submitted by you guys. We did a q and a today for the Live Nail the Mix event for what are we in May right now? It's May 17th. Oh my God, May 17th. And we have the sales and track the silver string. We did a q and a today and there was just too many questions for us to answer. So Eyal and Joey and Joel were nice enough to let me come on here and hijack an episode and answer a few more questions. So that's pretty cool. And if you enjoy this or if you want to hear more questions, if you want to ask more questions to me, you can email aal e yal at M Academy with the subject line Dear Beau, and you can bother him about it and I would love to come back on.

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Okay, well let's just jump right into it. And first question, John Garcia, I noticed you don't have these over the top Cannon blast, Toms with a ton of low end. What's your approach to Toms and what do you want out of them in a mix? I'm hoping that's a compliment. What's funny is usually on my mixes when I get notes back, a lot of the times it's turned down the Toms or the Toms are too huge for whatever reason. I love huge, larger than life Toms, but I do realize that they get distracting. I'm not really looking, I guess in all of my drums, I'm looking for a really a perfect blend of the right amount of, I guess natural versus a little bit of synthetic. If you were to look at it almost like a photo or a magazine photo, I don't want it like the full on alternative press where it looks like, and not that magazine's bad, I'm just saying everyone knows what that magazine's cover photos look like.

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They almost look like cartoony. I'm not looking for that. I'm looking more for just a nicely photoshopped photo where it doesn't look over the top photoshopped, if that makes sense. I just want it to feel like it's just the best drum kit I've ever heard, but I don't want to sound phony. That's what I'm looking for. They have to have impact, and it also depends on the fill. If it's a Tom beat where it's kind of like a fast thing, you also have to pay attention to what the Toms are doing, what their purpose is. If their purpose is to add impact, like a section where it's a big kind of heavy impact part, then you want those to really carry a lot of impact. But if it's a fast roll over, maybe say a vocal and a lead guitar part, you probably don't want those to get in the way of those things.

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Tom's just like any other instrument, I think that you need to address them part by part and on a song by song basis too. Colton Hunter, what headphones are you rocking? If you're talking about the q and a today, I was using the Sennheiser, what is the HD six fifties. I really like these a lot. I track with these even though they're open back, but generally when I have people tracking in here, I have them use the, I believe they're called the Blue Moeys. They're the gray set. I know that they came out with a newer set recently, but these are the gray set and they have a built-in amplifier and kind of some extra base settings on 'em and they get really tight on your head and the isolation is great. A lot of people really like headphones are important. They're kind of something that people don't really think about.

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Headphones are important as well as a headphone mix. You guys probably already know this, but man, I can't tell you how many times I've had a singer come in and when we're tracking vocals, they just instantly and I usually track vocals in the control room, so they'll just stand right next to me and be like, holy shit, this sounds incredible. And a headphone mix is important, and I think that making the vocalists sound great as well as the band, it's really inspiring. I mean, no one wants to sing to just like a crappy sounding rough mix. You got to get it a little bit better than that and make it sound a little more finished. And as well as you can actually hear more what you're looking for out of the vocalist when you have a more finished and a brighter sounding recording, it's easier for me to tell if I'm getting enough top end out of the vocalist or if he's pushing his throat or the top end, the grit that's in a male vocalist voice if I'm getting that out of it or not.

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Whereas if it's a darker just crappy rough mix, it's easy to think that your vocal sounds great when you're comparing it to something that's pretty poorly mixed or not mixed at all. I also have a set of the Sony 75 0 6 s that are kind of like the old ones from years ago. They were kind of like the standard, but now they're just really bright and kind of thin. And then I think I have the buyer, oh man, they're the set that everyone has anyways. They're the buyers except they are the M version, which is instead of the comfy padding, it has more of a leather padding around the ears, the ear pad or whatever that's called Sean Frost. Hey Bo, my question is about the base stems you provided for the silver string are the di and amp stems differently recorded performances? When I've been mixing the base, I swear I'm hearing different rhythms or base fills in each stem.

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I also ask because I can see they don't quite line up. Did you pick one and choose between these two? Did you choose to mix one over the other? Cheers, Sean? Yeah, I kind of mentioned this on the q and a today, this song was The Silver String was the first song that we mixed for the record, and I find that the first song that you mix on a record is usually the toughest one because you have to, it kind of sets the pace for the record or in my case, I normally like to hear the whole record and let the record set the pace for the mix. So when you're doing your first song, you kind of have to figure out what's going to work for that song, but also figure out something that's going to work for the rest of the record. If you have say a metal record or a metal record that's just every song is just blast beats and then breakdown.

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Or if you have a singer songwriter that's just acoustic guitar and maybe he gets loud every once in a while, those are going to be easy records to mix because there's not too much variation. But on this record, I mean I'm in the band so I'm a little partial to it, but I felt like this record had a lot more diversity than usual. So I felt like there's some songs, like our working title for one of the songs was called Further Seems Forever, and it was like, to me it sounds exactly like further seems forever. So what worked on that song was not going to work for a song say like Old Friends, which was much more heavier. I think it's in drop B or even or something like that. So you have to tailor your mixing for each song. But that being said, I was moving very fast and we were flying in different base parts, like amping stuff, trying to make sure the tones were working with each other during all that.

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Since it was in the mix phase, I probably, since I wasn't really using the di, I probably just spaced and totally blew it and didn't put the right di track in there. So yeah, if you're hearing something you're probably not on drugs and having audio hallucinations, that's probably what happened. Did I pick between the two? Yes, I did. Like I said, I just mixed the cab. Next question. I apologize if I blow your name. Robin Leon, is that right? Robin Le what band, no matter what genre would be Z band that you'd really want to work with? Man, I think I have such a broad taste in music that I feel like there's probably too many. I think my number one band that always comes back as far as the band that I would definitely want to produce would be in Flames. Even that their new record is just awesome. The songs are great, but I feel like the mix is just really lacking. I feel like I would've just smashed that mix and just made it awesome. Let's see. There's a band called Night Verses that I really like. Let's see here.

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I also think that I would love to do a Beck record if he was going to do a, I forget what the title was. I think it was like morning, not Morning View, but something. It was kind of like sea change, but it was like sea change part two. But if he were to actually do a sea change part two, I would love to do a record like that. I would love to do a band like Mercury Program or Shiner, and I love doing just actually a Jimmy World record would be awesome. A Bjork record would be insane. A nine Inch Nails record would be insane. I think I just like too many things about too many different types of bands to really nail it down to one, but the one that keeps coming up for me always, that's always there would be in flames, geo hue, Hey, Bo, still remember jamming seven years back when I found out about YouTube when I was 12. Ha. Could you talk a bit about the way your writing process usually is both in the band perspective and with the way you write music on your own? For example, do you usually come up with riffs and work off those riffs or do you sometimes work off the drumbeats, et cetera? I'd love to hear your take on all that.

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I normally have a riff or a rhythm inside of my head. It's almost like I hear if you were to hear a song and then you start kind of humming that song in your head, you have, even though you're only humming, say, I don't know, wherever I may roam or something, it's like even though you're only humming that you know what the drum beat is and you kind of know everything else surrounding it. And that's kind of how it comes to me a little bit. I'll just have a riff pop into my, or a melody or a rhythm pop into my head, and then from there I'm usually just kind of thinking about it and then as soon as I can discern exactly what I'm hearing in my head, I'm able to kind of document it down. I normally do it with a voice note first because sometimes trying to figure out the riff, sometimes trying to learn the riff that's in my head during that time, it takes me to learn the riff.

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I might forget what I was actually listening or what I was hearing, and then that riff might be changed from that point. So I try not to play the riff until I actually have it kind of documented in my voice notes. There's been a lot of times where I might be singing something like say for silver string, it's like, and if I were to pick up a guitar, I may not for whatever chord I might pick up. Now all of a sudden I might be in a different key or I might pick up and play the wrong chord and then that might, and something as simple as hearing a guitar chord might inspire me to have another idea pop in my head. So like I said, I try not to document it until I get that initial voice note down and then I can kind of play that voice note and then learn what I was humming.

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Sometimes we do work off of a programmed thing if we're trying to get away from a certain type of beat, if we feel like we've been using it a bunch, we might just kind of program something else to get us out of that rut. But for the most part, it's kind of both. Chris and I work the same way. We just have these ideas, these fully flushed out ideas and then we pass 'em back and forth and then we all tweak something of his and he'll tweak something of mine and we can make it work from there. Okay, next question, Mike, the rat, are you using a sub? So at the moment I'm not using a sub. I was using these quested monitors. They were the V 31 tens for maybe a year or two years. I really liked them a lot. I have them on consignment right now, but I may decide to bring them back at some point.

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My room is just not big enough to have them in here. They're a midfield monitor and they really need to have some distance between my ears and the speakers and my room is not that big, so now I'm using a company called Barefoot and I use the mm 45 and I've been playing a lot with moving them around in my room and that's something that I would really recommend everyone try, just move 'em around even if it's only an inch this way or that way, a couple inches this way or that way. You'll be surprised at how big of a difference it makes. If you just take a simple sine wave generator in your D and play it, you'll be able to hear either dips or peaks within your room. And again, that's a really archaic way of doing. You can use a fuzz Measure Pro or any of these analyzer programs.

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You'll take a measurement mic, you'll set it up in your listening position and you can, sorry, I'm going way too into acoustics right now. Maybe I'll save that for a different time. If you want to get into it, I can get super dorky about it, but to answer your question, no, I'm not using subs yet. I'm still, I'm about 90% sold on where my monitors are at right now. Once I'm a hundred percent sold, then I will start implementing the subs. I have two subs. I prefer to use my subs in stereo. Some people say they can't hear a difference base isn't localized, but for me, I can definitely hear a difference if I have a floor Tom coming from the right or to the left of me. I can hear that all day long and it sounds weird to me. If I have the sub centered under the desk and I hear the attack of the floor, Tom coming in say my right ear, but the body of the tom is in front of me, that just kind of really throws me off.

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Next question. Hopefully I get this right. Jake La Roach or Jake Laroche? Jake laroche. Thanks. Sorry, is that your whole name? Jake laroche. Thanks. Sorry, question. How did you go about panning the vocals and getting them to fit nicely together? I usually start with my background vocals panned hard left and hard, right? I don't always end up there, but that's where I start. I like to get my background vocals wide and kind of more of a, I like to create a pad with the vocals. I guess I like to have one big layer of vocals unless it's an answer back thing and there are lots of those on this along the shadow record I like to have. It really depends on the part. For me, a big thing of mixing is making all the parts the most effective they can be, but not getting in the way of the song or not letting the production getting in the way of the song.

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So if you've doubled your background vocals and you like those to kind of be wide and make the part sound bigger, that's cool. But if it's on a kind of a stripped down part in the song, to me it's a little distracting, especially if you're listening on headphones and you have these huge wide background vocals just popping in all of a sudden, to me that's distracting. So I may decide to pan those in a little bit more and I'll just kind of play with them until I get it to a point where it feels right. Maybe them being panned in sometimes and then out wider sometimes has to do with it. But a lot of the times, I think AAL said it today on the q and a lot of it is if you have your EQ and compression right on most of your instruments, the width is going to kind of happen naturally as well as I do feel like arrangement plays a big part in getting things wide and getting things big sounding.

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When I'm producing records, I pay a lot of attention to, I guess I don't know what to call it, frequency fullness. I guess. How much of the frequency spectrum is this chorus taking up? Is there a big hole in the mid range? Are you playing a really low drop C power chord and then you're lead guitar part is way up at the 24th fret? That leaves a huge hole in the mid range. Now if your vocal is also way up singing a high vocal, then we need something to fill that mid range. We're going to need another guitar part or maybe some extra rhythm guitars that aren't playing the super low part. I pay a lot of attention to filling up the whole spectrum depending on what part of the song it is. I think that's pretty important and that seems to kind of work for me. Okay. Next question. Dome sev, hopefully. I apologize, man, you guys don't know. I always thought that when they would read these names that they were almost kidding or making up how hard it was, but now when you're on the spot to pronounce something, just like on a cold read, it's like, man, this is actually very difficult.

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So Dover mere question, did you master the album as well? No, I did not. I have, and now here's another name, which is so embarrassing. I have Mike Kelian. You would think that I would know how to say his name by now. He pretty much masters all of my recordings. He's incredible. He's great to work with. On this recent record I just did, I actually sent him a mix that the band was a little bit worried that the overhead sound wasn't the way that they were going to want it to be, so I sent it over to him. He did a test master and then he sent it back and then we all agreed like, oh yeah, we should probably turn those up. So that's great. I would definitely recommend finding a mastering guy that you like and sticking with him because that is a relationship that is only going to help you as a mixer.

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I do master a few projects every once in a while, but it's usually because it's a much smaller budget and the band just doesn't have the extra budget to have it outsourced. I can do it, I can do it well, like a fine job, but I can't do all of the DDP files and what are they, the URC codes and all of that extra stuff. But I can do the actual, I guess I can't do the assembly of the record, but I can do your typical EQ and limiting and making it loud and sound mastered, but I just can't do any of the technical metadata stuff.

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Okay, next question. Tom Farone question. The printed kick drum tracks for the silver string are all in stereo. What was the reasoning behind this? Really? Huh? I don't, are you sure on that? I know the room mic was in stereo. I don't know, man, that's so crazy. I usually never print any samples in stereo unless it's an actual stereo track. Maybe I was doing something weird with it, I'm not sure. Although for my one, okay, I will say this. Sometimes I will put a track, even though it's mono, I will duplicate it, put it onto a stereo track just to give it a little bit more volume out of it. But maybe I did that for those trigger tracks because every once in a while I will open up a trigger plugin and I'll just instantiate it in a stereo mode if it's not getting me what I need out of the mono mode.

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But yeah, that's weird. The room sample should have definitely been stereo, but I mean if you feel like killing those down to mono, go ahead. Next question. Johan Martin, if I remember correctly, you said in the podcast that your drummer doesn't really like to play the kind of intricate stuff required for your music and that he'd prefer to play in more of a straightforward music. If this wasn't a joke, how the hell does that work? Well, I feel like this happens a lot. I've talked to a lot of drummers. They just kind of get tired of showing off all the time. And I don't want to say Alex is the laziest person, but I mean he, I would probably say for being such an amazing drummer, he puts absolutely zero effort into it. If he would just put his shoes on, he would be a fantastic 10 times better than he already is.

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He has that much talent. But yeah, he would just rather, I think one time for when we were doing pre-production or rehearsal or maybe we were booking a concert or something, I think I want to say, I could be wrong, I could be exaggerating, but one of his concerns was like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, dude. Yeah, man, whatever date. Oh man, July 23rd. Ooh, I don't know if I can make that, Alex, why not? You have nothing going on. You play in a band, you just play in a band, you have nothing else you could be doing. He's like, ah, dude. I think Florida, Florida Marlins, they have a game going on that day, can't miss it or he loves What's his other favorite team? Regardless, I mean, I don't really follow sports and I wish I did just for this reason, but it's like if there's a sports team playing, it's like, Ooh, man, I can't make it man off.

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Oh dude, super Bowl. Oh, sorry, not going to be able to make it count me out and the two days prior, we have a lot of Super Bowl stuff going on, can't do anything. But yeah, no, he just loves if he could be in the strokes or the bravery or any sort of those bands, that's just a four on the floor. Simple thing. For instance, on this record, for along the shadow, I had to make him set up an extra crash symbol so that there was, let's see, there was a left crash, a right crash, a ride, a high hat and a China. If he had it his way, he probably would've just had hat crash ride. And I mean, I don't think it's out of laziness, but definitely when it comes time to touring, even though we have a drum tech, he's like, man, just like a lot of the extra stuff, man, I don't need all that stuff.

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So yeah, I mean that's how it works. Somehow he makes it work, and if I was playing drums, I would be one of those guys that had the full on Tommy Lee Cage that flew up over the crowd, and I would mean my kit would make Neil Pertz kit look like a minimalist kit and I would probably have to have five drum texts and it would just be this amazing thing. Yeah, that's how it works. Next question, Terry, how do you manage family time, recording time and going on tour and does it create issues at home with the wife? That's a pretty good one. Fortunately, right now, I don't really have to manage family and touring time, but I think that if you're thinking about having a family, you need to pick the right person to start one with. They need to be completely understanding that you're kind of a crazy person and that you enjoy going on a bus and being gone and exploring the world and playing music and doing all sorts of weird stuff.

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And they need to know that going into it. And I think, sorry if I'm getting too deep, but you need to have those talks with this person before you commit to having a family with them. The last thing you want to do is not disclose any of that information and then now you have kids, but you're never around and you're trying to leave and go be in a band and it's going to be a bad situation for everyone. I think that where I'm at now, I'm extremely lucky because I don't really tour all that much, but when I do tour, the financial side of it is good enough to where my wife is okay with me being gone. It's definitely not at the point where I can be gone for a couple months and she said, it's definitely not full rockstar. I'm playing in a huge band where I can come home and be like, oh, that's fine, honey, here's a brand new Jaguar, cool, great. All is well. It's definitely not like that, not even anywhere near close to that, but at least it's kind of at the point where she's not super pissed off because I'm going out and living on a bus and doing cool stuff and then coming home with no money. So it's depending on where you are.

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If you go on tour for a month and you bring home a hundred dollars, your wife's going to have a little bit different opinion on it rather than if you're gone for a couple months and you bring home 50,000. So it's going to be, each situation is different. And like I said, I think that just having that relationship from the get go is way more important. And I think that goes to no matter what kind of job you're in, if you're a workaholic, which I mean I kind of am, and I think that anyone that's really passionate about something, probably all you guys too, because you're sitting here just soaking in all of these podcasts and trying to soak up every bit of information you can about something that you're passionate about and you want to be involved with. So right now, I don't want to say I'm lucky, but it's kind of nice because I'm doing this at nine 30 at night.

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My kids and wife are already in bed, so I come out here and do this for a little bit longer, and then I'll probably go to bed. I might even do another recall after this and then maybe try to learn something on my own and then experiment with some more things. Then probably go to bed maybe around midnight or so, and then tomorrow I'll have to get up at six and help with the kids. And then right now my wife works one day a week, actually one and a half. So today I had the kids in the morning, I have 'em from nine till noon, and then she gets off work at one, and then we did the podcast at two, and then I did, let's see, what did I do today? I did some vocal editing and recalls for this band called Taken that I'm doing their EP right now.

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I did recalls for three songs for this middle class rut record that I'm working on, and then I worked on the nail the mix session a little bit. I'm really trying to make the nail the mix thing great for everyone so that they can really learn a lot at whatever level they're at. And then came back in, made dinner, ate, hung out with the kids, put them to bed, and then hung with the wife for a hot minute and then came out here and started working. I think I did another, I had to upload some files for mastering for another project that I did, and then I started doing this. So I think just like anything else, if you're truly passionate about something, it all comes down to priorities and again, finding that person that supports you and your goals and is understanding that, hey, you're this person that needs to do these things in order to be the best person you can be.

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So that would be the biggest thing. As far as work studio world, I normally try to keep a tight schedule. I normally work from nine to five or 10 to six. I first started doing that when after our record, we did a record with Howard Benson and it was our self-titled record, and he had a tight eight hour schedule. It was a little bit different. I think it was like 11 to seven or something like that, or maybe it was noon to eight, whatever it was. It was like a strict eight hour schedule. Except the only difference is that there we had an hour long lunch break and an hour long dinner break and then a smoothie break and any other kind of break you can imagine was there, but for the most part we were working and not just horsing around, we were either working or eating, and I kind of implemented that into my workflow to where we get in here at nine or 10, we work as much as we can and then we're done.

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And then I get to go in, hang with the family, and then the band gets to go decompress and be stoked on the work that they did for that day. I think my biggest problem with that is I end up generally recording a band. You're working with one person at a time, so it's almost like me against, it's like this wrestling match and it's me against a tag team. So it's like they keep tagging guys in. It's like, okay, guitar player, you're up, boom, go, go, go, go. And if you've ever been tracking guitars, you're focusing on pitch and timing and attack and playing, and is the note arcing too much? Is it not arcing enough? We need to play it harder. What effects are we using? How is the top end of distortion interacting with the symbols? How is this part going to fit compared to the scratch vocal there?

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Are we keeping the scratch vocal as that main part, or are we going to write a new part because this new guitar part is so great? All these things are going through your head, and if you've ever been in a really high intensity session like that, you're kind of fried at the end of the day, but when you're working straight through that, it makes it even tougher because you've got bass player, he's coming in fresh, and then the guitar player is coming in fresh after that, so everyone's coming in fresh and you have to, I mean, I've somehow managed to make it to where I keep feeling fresh at every point, at every changeover or at every tag in, let's say. And I think that's just because I'm genuinely excited about every instrument that we're tracking. I do a lot of projects like one song a day, and it doesn't work for every band because obviously for the way more technical bands, there's no way that, I mean, unless the band comes in with all of the parts completely already written, and my only job would be to just make sure that the parts are played perfectly.

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Even that if it was one of those Jason Richardson or a really technical thing, I doubt that there's a way that you could really accomplish that doing one song a day. But all that being said, every time we switch instruments, it's like I get this big boost in a recharge and I really feed off of the person that I'm recording their energy. So when they come in and they're now sitting next to me in what I call the hot seat, then all of a sudden I see them starting to get a little nervous and maybe another guy in the band is in here watching 'em, and it's like the intensity level gets hot and everyone's just stoked and ready to just kill it. I really feed off of that, and you have to be on point. That's the whole, I mean, that's another reason why I don't drink and I don't smoke.

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I mean, well, I would say I barely drink. I drink maybe once every couple of months or something, but a lot of the times I'll have bands in here and they're like, Hey man, you want to have a drink or want to do this or that? I'm like, no, man, you guys are paying me to be quality control. The last thing you need is me getting drunk or stoned. And then it's like, yeah, man, that was fucking sick. Yeah, we're done, man, that was so tight. And then we get in here the next day and it's like, yeah, what the hell were we thinking? That sucked. Let's do it again. So yeah, all that being said, I do try to keep a balance of, hey, when we're out here, we're working, we're getting shit done, and then when we're done, we go home and oh, back to my biggest issue with it is that I find myself, since we're tagging in and doing multiple people all throughout the day, then I find myself never really getting a chance to get up out of my chair until I just absolutely have to take a piss.

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Or it's like, oh shit, it's like three o'clock and I forgot to eat. Normally that doesn't happen because I feel like in the studio everyone's talking about food and whenever I hear someone talk about food, my ears just perk right up. I'm a full on foodie. I love food. If I didn't have the metabolism that I do, I would be 500 pounds easily, because if I do get a chance to eat, then I'm just like wolfing down food. Hopefully that answers your question. Alright, that was a long one, Dawn, Kendall, I love the blend of this kick. Is there any way you'd be willing to give, sell the samples for this?

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I don't think it would be right for me to sell the samples, and I don't think it would be right for me to give them away. Well, I guess I could give away or sell the, there's that sample that says, I think it's the MW room. It's the megawatt room. I actually did find the samples that I made for this session, but the BB kick is one that I wouldn't be able to sell, but it's just a one shot. So I mean, if you're savvy enough and you want to make your own out of it, I don't really see a reason why you couldn't. I really like that sample too. It's a great one. Tyler Rodriguez question, are you going to run any of the drums through those badass outboard compressors during the live mix? I think so. I don't know if I, well, I'm sure that I didn't have my kind of triple parallel.

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I guess it's more of a quad parallel because I have the Compex, the IGS and the Lindell and a clean or just a raw or unprocessed. So I guess it's like a quad parallel or would you call that triple parallel? I don't know, three compressed, one uncompressed and then those all go to a drum bus. But yeah, I will be running those through there, even though in the original mix, I'm sure that I did not have that going yet. I probably just had either the IGS, which is kind of like an SSL style VCA compressor or the compact and the compact is just a beast. That thing is awesome.

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Zachary, what are some lesser known artists that I should be listening to? New or old? That's a really good question. Let me see. I mean, I guess it depends on what do you mean by lesser known artists and I wish we had a way to interact. Right now I think that there's a band called ages A-E-G-E-S. I'll just give you a couple different things. Ages A-E-G-E-S. The record that I mixed is called wait Lists. It's pretty rad record, and Bob Marlet actually produced it and I mixed it, which was really cool because actually, I don't know if you heard the podcast that Bob was on, but I think they talk about his kitchen and the drum sounds in there. So on that record, I just love those kind of smashed when I just get to punish. I'm laughing because someone else asked about punishing drums and I call it punishing drums.

(00:40:40):

But anyways, I love that kind of big blown out, just smashed drum room sound. To me it's just like Led Zeppelin on steroids. I love that sound and you can really hear on that record, especially just the full blown out drum sound of, that's the stuff that I love doing. That's just super nasty. The Bronx four is another one of those really raw dog blown out records. I actually produced and mixed that record Middle class rut, no name, no face, I mixed that record. That's another really cool one. And that's an interesting record too, because they didn't don't have a bass player. So it's just two guitars and a drummer. And a lot of it is they actually recorded the drums at their, the drummer has a cabin or his parents have a cabin or something, but they recorded the drums themselves at this cabin and the mono room mic is like 90% of the drum sound.

(00:41:43):

But when you have a record that has that kind of space, you can get away with just a super blown out drum sound that you're not really going for clarity. It's more just all about vibe. I think Moose Blood is a fantastic band. I love those guys a lot. I produced and mixed that record too, but that's just great. Good old emo poppy jams for me, that's my jam right there. Who else is great? There's a record that I really like called the Mercury Program, and they have a record called All the Suits Began to Fall, I think is what it is. That's a really cool kind of instrumental record that has some pretty unique instrumentation on it. I used to love the drum sounds on that just because if you put it on in headphones and you just listen to it at night, if you're getting sleepy, it feels like you're in the room with these guys just jamming around you.

(00:42:42):

And it's just super cool. And I really don't know much more lesser known artists, but I dunno, maybe clarify the question and submit another thing and maybe I could do a whole nother thing about it. Elon Benita, hopefully I pronounced that right. Elon, I feel like I should know this. I feel like we have a lot of interaction on Instagram and Facebook. Do you usually track drums at my place? Yes and no. It depends on the project and it also depends on the budget. If there's a really nice budget, then I would prefer to do drums somewhere else, mainly because I love experimenting with different room mics and just sometimes you get bored of your own room. My room is really small actually, when we do the nail, the mix, maybe we'll do a studio tour or something like that, but I mean it's like an eight by nine ISO booth.

(00:43:47):

And when I say ISO booth, that's exactly what I mean. It is just totally dead with the exception of a few slat diffusers around the room just to give it some air. But for the most part, it's a very dead room. As is my control room. I mean my control room, I love being very dead. I hate hearing any sort of reflection or auxiliary noise in a control room like really bugs me. But my eyes will be this very, very dead i'll stuff, a drum kit in there, open up the door to the ISO booth, stick a stereo set of room mics above the doorway and then up at the top of the hall and then maybe one around the corner of the door. And it sounds cool. I use it on a lot of records, but it definitely takes a lot more work than if you were to just go into a great sounding drum room and pull up the faders and it's like, wow, that sounds great. So yeah, I guess it depends on the budget and what the intent is for say a band like Moose Blood, the goal of that record was not all about the drums and making the drums, making sure that every hit was crystal clear and articulate and powerful, even though it ended up turning out great. And it's some of my favorite drum sounds. I don't necessarily know that that would work if you were to combine those drums with ultra heavy super saturated guitars. Yeah. Next question, Elon Benita again, did you buy the Compex to punish drums?

(00:45:37):

Yes, with a lot of my gear, the settings almost stay the same. I found a spot that I can let them live and then I'll use input pro tools, trim or clip gain to determine how hard I'm hitting things. With the complex, it has this really cool thing that it's got an input. I don't think it's a preamp, but it's got an input circuit that when you drive it hard, it'll actually distort. So when you drive things into the complex nice and hard, it'll actually distort before it compresses. So it's almost like for everyone's that's not really familiar with analog gear, if you have a clipper plugin, so imagine you're just clipping your drums, whether it be your bus or whatever it is. Imagine you have a clipper followed by an SSL compressor, except it's more like a 1176 type of thing. I don't know.

(00:46:46):

It's just definitely got its own sound and it only has a couple different attack times. It's got 2.5 milliseconds, 25 seconds, and sorry, 2.5, 0.25 and 25 millisecond attack time. So it's a really fast compressor as far as attack time. But then your release is variable to a pretty good, even though I just pretty much leave it where I have it set. But yeah, it's just cool because you can lop off the transience before you're hitting the compressor. And like I said, when you blend that underneath or even on a lot of the middle class rut stuff, we just use that as the main drum bus and it just sounds slamming. Same thing with on that ages record that I was talking about, it's just full blown out, just gnarly. So yes, it is specifically to punish drums. Mike the rat. What's up? What are you guys drinking right now?

(00:47:49):

Just joking. Well, I think you're talking about on the q and a today, and I was drinking a cold brewed coffee, but it looked like Al was kind of dipping into the sauce. I can't be sure though, I can't speak on his behalf, but it looked like he was enjoying himself. But now I'm just drinking water. I'm getting ready to kind of wind down for the evening. Next question, Ilan Benita. Oh, you know what? I guess I could go back to Alan's original question. Do you track drums at my place? So on the SN record along the shadow, we track 99% of that at Megawatt, which is the place that we also tracked our self-titled record at. So that whole record was tracked drums at a nice studio. Then for the song Drinking from the Fountain, nobody liked that song. I was kind of the only person that believed in it. And then as we, at the very end, I just had this thing and I flipped the script on it and I was like, man, what if we made this song just kind? We don't really have to follow any of the rules that we've been setting for ourselves. We don't have to fall into the whole typical post hardcore thing.

(00:49:15):

It's just a whole new, let's just do whatever we feel like is cool. That's what we've been doing on the whole record. Why are we trying to imply those kind of guidelines for this song? Let's just throw those out the window and do what we want. So actually another band, and to get back to the other question, what is a band, a lesser known band that you should be listening to? Another band is called B, which is awesome. They have a record called Ringers, and I believe Fred Archibald helped do some engineering on that record too. We were at A URM dinner last time. Those guys were out here and Fred was there, and I brought up that record. I was like, man, the record is insane. He's like, oh dude, I engineered that. I'm pretty sure. Anyways, mu that song. So I turned it into this thing that was really ish, and if you listen to Mu, you'll totally get what I'm talking about.

(00:50:13):

Anyways, the song Drinking from the Fountain, we decided not to track drums for it while we were there because we thought we were cutting the song. But then like I said, I turned it around and turned it into something new. Then I just had Alex go in and I had my kit, which was the same kit that we tracked the record with. I set up the kit and had him go play like a beat that we kind of had in my head. And that song, it's a little more heavily sampled, but that song was tracked in my drum room and the rest of the record was not. So I hope I did a pretty good job of disguising that. But yeah, there's a direct comparison of pretty much same record, but tracked two different spots. Ellan Benita question, when you track overheads and spot symbol mics, how do you mic and how do you mix them together?

(00:51:10):

What sounds is supposed to capture each? So for me, a lot of, I find that there's a fine line between how hard you can push someone to get the performance that you need out of them versus, okay, well let me just set up millions of safety nets just in case. I like to set up a lot of different safety nets just in case, because I do think that I would much rather have my drummer walking away from the experience thinking like, wow, that was a great experience. I totally played all those parts to the best of my ability. I had a great time doing it. I'm excited about this record rather than me really hounding on someone to the point where they're hating me. I mean, I normally hound on people pretty good. I try not to let most things slide, but you do have to kind of read in between the lines on from person to person, whether or not is this guy going to crumble if I tell him he needs to play it 10 more times to get it right?

(00:52:28):

Or do I, for instance, say a ride mic or a high hat mic is a perfect example of what I would call a safety net. If you really think about it, those are spot mics. If you really want to get down to the kind of core, I guess, what would you call it, like a core mentality or a core theory about it, if you're anti spot mics, you're pretty much just going to live with maybe a stereo set of XY overheads. And if the drummer not hitting the ride, Mike, if he's not hitting the ride hard enough in that section of the song, make him play it over because you've just got those stereo XY overheads and he'd better hit it hard if he wants to hear it in the mix. Same thing with the high hat. Hey, you're doing like 32nd notes on the high hat.

(00:53:16):

It's really not articulating all that well. Too bad. You better tighten up your foot and then get those high hats really laying into 'em, but don't lay too hard so it doesn't get too washy. So I guess there's that, and then there's the extreme of I don't give a shit how he plays it. I have a top and bottom and close and side and every mic everywhere. So it doesn't matter how hard he plays it, I'm just going to, if he plays the ride soft, I'm just going to transient design it up, and then it's going to be just this ting and I can make anything sound fine. So I guess those would be the two extremes. And I try to implement maybe equal amounts of both sides, which I feel like is something that I'm kind of, I don't want to say I'm proud of, but I do feel like it's something that I've noticed about myself that I think is a good quality.

(00:54:09):

I think coming from doing more technical and I don't want to say metal bands, but yeah, doing the technical faster, heavier stuff, you get really good at editing and knowing your limitations on what you can fix versus what you can't fix and what needs to be played again. So for me, I set up those safety nets just because I feel like, hey, if Pro Tools has whatever studio at my studio, I have 32 inputs. So if I'm at my studio, I mean, I don't have 32 mic preamps, but say I have all 16 mic Preamps being, if I'm not using all 16 mic preamps, why, or I know that you shouldn't just use things just because you have them, but if you've got, say the drummer has 10 symbols, why not mic up every single one of 'em just in case, say there's a section in the song and it slipped past you because you were working on that part. He's already played that section four times, five times, 10 times maybe, and he just can't get it. And on top of that, he's out of practice and he's got, sorry. We have this joke with our drummer Alex, and he has a really sensitive hands, I guess, and Chris, our bass player came up with this term that he's coined for Alex's hands and he says that he has dick skin hands.

(00:55:50):

So it's like whenever Alex comes to play, he usually never rehearses and he just shows up and he shows up with his dick skin hands, and after the first song, every part of his hand is just like, it looks like Freddie Cougar face. I guess if it would be Freddie Cougar took off his gloves, I'm assuming that they would also be burnt like the rest of his body, but they just look like he just peeled all of his skin off of his hands. So we say he has dick skin hands. But anyways, say you have a drummer that's like that and they show up with their dick skin hands and their hands are just totally shredded from out being out of practice and here you are, the producer like, sorry, man, you got to play that thing again, otherwise it's not going to be heard.

(00:56:35):

It's like, well, yeah, but you got to realize how much you can fix versus how much you're going to destroy this drummer and just make it not a good time for him. So that's kind of how I treat the spot mics or that's why I have the spot mics. It's usually just, I guess for that reason for automation or depending on the track, say if later on in the production you decide that, oh, there has to be some extra guitars, or there's this extra part, and now this crash symbol isn't quite cutting through, it's nice to have that mic that you can kind of automate up for that section. Or if you're looking for a more tight drum sound and you want those symbols to be very fast and not decaying as long as they are, say if you've compressed your overheads or if you've compressed your rooms, you can kind of treat things differently with the different sets of microphones also.

(00:57:33):

So say you wanted to group together or assign all of your spot mics to a stereo bus, you could potentially treat that as your overheads be or your overheads two if you wanted to maybe ditch your original overheads for a section of the song maybe for impact. The other thing that's cool to do is on, I found that sometimes, depending on the kit, how far away where your placement of your overhead mics, they might sound best to capture the whole kit or whatever you're trying to capture, but depending on how far out you had to go with, say your ride side, I call 'em hat overhead ride overhead, just because it's a little easier for me to know in the end, depending on if I had a house engineer set up the mics for me or place them. And sometimes when you go to another studio, they'll have a house engineer, you might send 'em an input list beforehand, so you might show up and all the mics are already ran and placed roundabout in the right way in the room, and if you just put room, left room right, they might do it at audience perspective.

(00:58:58):

So I find it's easier if I just label it overhead hat, overhead, ride room hat, room ride room two hat, room two, ride hat and ride to me is a way more, it is a lot less likely to get screwed up as far as what's your left and what's your right. But another way you can use spot mics is, like I said, depending on how far out your ride mic has to be, depending on where your overhead ride, depending on where your overhead hat mic is to balance the snare in the middle. If that's something you're doing, you may decide that, wow, I wish my high hat was either more off to the side or more in the middle, depending on the section of the song and what's being played. Sometimes I feel like there's a band that I just tracked and there was a really cool drumbeat where they were kind of going back and forth between the hat and the ride doing a lot of type of stuff, and to me it sounded really cool having the hat and the ride panned extremely hard, left and hard, so it was like this back and forth, left and right percussion thing.

(01:00:11):

But then for other sections in the song when it was the chorus, I wanted the hat to be more kind of up the middle so I wasn't hearing just a high hat in my left ear because that, to me, again, back to the kind of frequency spectrum thing, it feels a little bit weird to me when I just have this isolated kind of high hat white noise above the guitars just in one ear on my left side, or just a crash on only the right side. That sounds a little weird to my ears, just a little unnatural. I like to hear my drums a little bit more natural than that, but that's another way that you can use the spot mics is either accentuating or pulling those elements closer or farther apart or bringing them more closer to the front of the mix or just totally eliminating them and letting it be more natural.

(01:01:05):

Hopefully that answers your question. Like I said, any of this stuff you want me to elaborate on, I am more than willing to come back. I really am having an awesome time interacting with everyone. Hopefully there's a lot more stuff I can do in the future. Okay, McKinney bots, last question. Hey Bo, can you talk a little bit about your mastering experience with Mike Kelian? Again, Mike, sorry if I'm saying your name wrong, you'll have to send me a voice note that says how it is. I'm the worst with this stuff. I'm just the absolute worst. Anyways. There's people that I've known for years and years and years, and then sometimes I still am like, oh, hey dude, what's up, man? Yeah, I had a great time at your wedding. And it's just like, man, how am I spacing on their name right now? But anyways, a little about my mastering experience with Mike.

(01:01:59):

I mentioned it before. I mean, he's just awesome. I've dealt with a lot of different mastering guys. Mike, by far, to me is, I don't know if it's just because he used to produce records, and I guess I could relate it to myself a little bit. I find that one of the qualities that I like about myself or that people like about me is the fact that I am in a band and I've been in the position of a band making a record. So I try to treat the band as with the respect that they either have earned or deserve or maybe haven't earned. But I try to treat them and make the experience as best as possible. And obviously the record comes first and the songs and the production has to be my number one priority. But I do try to really make it a point for even if, let's just say little Stevie has this idea that he is like, oh man, I really think that a saxophone would sound great on this part.

(01:03:14):

And in my head, I already know what that's going to sound like because the past four bands have tried to do the same thing. I do feel that it's important for me to let little Stevie bring in his sacks and we mic it up assuming we have time. But still, most of the time I'm working so efficiently that we do have time for those things. So I do think it's important to just not tell Stevie, dude, shut up. Man, that's a terrible idea. Because half the time little Stevie comes in and he plays this riff on the saxophone, and then next thing you know, Jimmy, the guitar player is saying like, yo, the saxophone sucks, but that riff is awesome. Let me play it on guitar, but now let me add this dotted eighth delay on it. And now all of a sudden it's like that's the main riff of the song that we've just created.

(01:04:09):

And without me, I don't want to say humoring, but without me giving little Stevie the chance to voice his idea, that never would've happened. All that being said, I do feel like because Mike used to produce records and he knows what it's like to be a producer, mixer engineer, I think that translates into his mastering and he's able to understand things that are like, Hey man, this is a more blown out mix. Say that the ages record, it's like, Hey, this is a blown out mix. Let's keep it where it's at. It's supposed to be dirty. Everything's supposed to be sounding like everyone's trying to fight for the spotlight. And he gets that. He's like, okay, cool. I know exactly what you're talking about. I've had other mass engineering engineers in the past. I'll send a mix over that's kind of like that. And it's like, yeah, sorry.

(01:05:13):

The master is what it is, but I can't really do much because there's so much kind of just mud and nothing's really that clear in this song or in the mix you gave me. It's like, well, yeah, that's the whole point. That's what the mix is. That's what the band was going for. That's what we intentionally did for this. And the fact that you tried to clean it up just shows that you don't understand what we're doing and you were probably the wrong guy for the gig. But Mike has mastered a ton of records for me. I pretty much use 'em exclusively now unless it's a thing where the band has someone that's like, oh yeah, we want to use our buddy, this guy to master a record. And even then, there's been a couple occasions where I've maybe fought with the band or at least said, alright, cool, well, let's at least have Mike maybe do a test master and then we can kind of compare. Because not saying your dude sucks, but Mike's really good, so I'd like to use him. That's been my experience with him. He's been awesome. And I believe that's the last question. Thanks for sitting and listening to me Yap all night. And like I said, if you want to have me on here doing this type of thing again, just email aal EY AAL at URM Academy and in the subject line, just put Dear Bow and ask me anything. I love talking about this stuff. And see you guys later. The

Speaker 1 (01:06:46):

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