John Douglass: Mastering Drum Editing, Getting Hired by Producers, and Lightning-Fast Workflows

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Creative Live, the world's best online classroom for creative professionals with classes on songwriting, engineering, mixing and mastering. This mark of the podcast is also brought to you by Slate Digital, making the finest quality software and hardware products specializing in precise analog modeling of classic studio gear. The Unstoppable Recording Stream podcast is also brought to you by Focal Professional, deciding, developing and manufacturing, high fidelity, loud speakers and drivers for over 30 years. And now your hosts, Joey Sturgis, Joel Wanasek, and Eyal Levi.

Speaker 2 (00:00:37):

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. I'm having a lovely cappuccino from my lovely dura that I just got. That's all.

Speaker 3 (00:00:48):

I'm a tea drinker, so I can't relate to coffee.

Speaker 2 (00:00:51):

Fuck your

Speaker 4 (00:00:51):

Tea. Yeah, fuck your,

Speaker 2 (00:00:52):

Fuck

Speaker 3 (00:00:53):

Your shitty coffee.

Speaker 4 (00:00:55):

I wouldn't call that shitty coffee. That is the Ferrari

Speaker 3 (00:00:58):

Coffee machine. Fuck. You're wiping your ass with French silk coffee. Then

Speaker 2 (00:01:04):

I remember, man, I was really into coffee. Well, I still am, obviously, but when I first started out and I first started drinking coffee, I just went ham on it and I was drink coffee all day, every cup, just as soon as it's done, get another cup of coffee and I'd be so amped up. And I think that's probably how I got a lot of shit done early on in my career.

Speaker 3 (00:01:25):

You think?

Speaker 2 (00:01:26):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:01:26):

Either that or the nas. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:01:28):

I moved on, I graduated from coffee to Nas, and then

Speaker 3 (00:01:32):

Six cans a day and 12 packs of cigarettes later.

Speaker 2 (00:01:36):

Well, my hands started going numb. I was like, I need to stop drinking this crap.

Speaker 4 (00:01:41):

I got a Red Bull endorsement once.

Speaker 2 (00:01:43):

Oh shit.

Speaker 4 (00:01:44):

Oh yeah. That was dangerous stuff. Cases delivered and man, I think I was up to six or seven of them a day at one point. Oh my God, dude, it was productive.

Speaker 2 (00:01:54):

It's like you make it a part of your workflow, you're like, alright, so what do we do next, guys? It's like, well, let me pop a Red Bull and then we'll do some guitars or lemme get a Red Bull and then we'll do some vocals or Oh, it's 4:00 AM and I need to do some vocal edits. Lemme get a Red Bull.

Speaker 4 (00:02:09):

Yeah, I really want to know something. And this is probably Joel, this is something you can tell me about because I don't believe it, but I remember one time there was a guitar player from a band at my place, popular band of staying there for a month or so, and he told me that he was done with Adderall and done with caffeine, and this band had written all their records on Adderall and Red Bull, which is something that I had done for a long time as well. And he told me that he was more productive than ever, actually. I was like, how the hell is that possible? He said the first month was hell, lots of headaches, no energy. But then after a while, his body adjusted and started producing its own energy, which is the stuff I read about, but I don't believe that it's true. But Joel, you don't drink coffee, you don't do any of that stuff. You eat kale or you get it infused via iv

Speaker 3 (00:03:12):

Intravenous greens. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:03:14):

Where the fuck does your energy come from? What the hell is going on? Yeah, that's what I want to know too.

Speaker 3 (00:03:19):

Are you saying that I'm always wired and neurotic? Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:03:21):

Yeah, you're always neurotic. How

Speaker 3 (00:03:24):

Real simple. I go to bed early. Well, I have to, because again, I have children and I've said that before, but I go to bed when the sun goes down. So I'm getting full DNA repair every time I wake up. And what's the hormone that is triggered? Is it melatonin or I always forget which one it is.

Speaker 2 (00:03:42):

Melatonin.

Speaker 3 (00:03:43):

When you see blue light, it triggers your brain to shut that off and say, okay, stay awake, go getter. When the sun comes down, what happens with the brain is the lack of light triggers it to say, okay, it's time to go to bed. Let's go into repair mode and rebuild. And that's when your DNA splits and replicates and your cells divide. So what happens then is if you are looking at a blue screen, for example, like a computer, when it's bedtime, you screw all that up. Or if you stay up till three or four or five in the morning, you screw up that circadian rhythm and that cycle and you start aging faster, you have less energy, et cetera. So the moral of the story is, without going on a crazy rant is you fricking need to go to bed on time. And that's kind of like all that comes down to. I know you guys don't subscribe to that philosophy. I used to be a night owl.

Speaker 4 (00:04:31):

I do subscribe to that philosophy. I just have habits dating back to when I was a kid,

Speaker 3 (00:04:38):

Being in a band. I mean, you play a show, you get done at two.

Speaker 4 (00:04:41):

No, I mean, being a kid, I had insomnia back when I was five years old. Even this whole, not being able to sleep thing has been my entire life.

Speaker 3 (00:04:51):

Yeah. Well not only that though too, it is also what you eat. And I grew up on Twinkies. Oreos and Mountain Dew, which is funny. My mom is a nurse and she works for a cardiologist. She should know better,

Speaker 4 (00:05:03):

Maybe she wanted to keep him in business.

Speaker 3 (00:05:04):

I'm like, you want to poison me and kill me, mom, why did you do that? And she was like, what are you talking about? We always ate good food. I'm like, bullshit. You tried to kill me. And I always give her crap and she gets really pissed. It's kind of funny, but I kind of feel like I know more about health than she does. Sorry, mom, if you're listening, but I read a lot, and just because you have an MD or a nurse or whatever after your name doesn't mean that you're relevant in the field and you're keeping up with science and technology and you're actively pursuing it as not only a profession but a hobby. So I'm really into this stuff, and I'll tell you that when I was, I think around 19 years old, I got a road construction job. It was the only way I can make 13 to 20 bucks an hour in the summer and pay for college and all that stuff and start buying studio gear, which was becoming my hobby at the time.

(00:05:50):

So it was a really good way to get some exercise. Finally, I was a very non-athletic kid, and because it required so much energy, I found that if I'm out there and I'm drinking Mountain Dew and I'm eating a Snickers bar or something like that all day, I'm just all day jittery and shaking and exhausted and no energy. So then I got really into bodybuilding and working out, and once I got into that cycle, I started eating a lot better. Okay. I ditched soda, I ditched all forms of caffeine and processed foods and things like that. And then all of a sudden I found I had way more energy. I was way more alive, always excited, I slept better. I was able to concentrate

Speaker 4 (00:06:27):

On, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hang on. There's a producer that I've done a lot of work with who's a total health nut, bodybuilder, go to bed at the same time every night, wake up in the morning, methodical kind of guy, and he's tired all the time.

Speaker 3 (00:06:45):

Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:06:46):

Yeah. Not,

Speaker 3 (00:06:46):

It might just be, I'm not saying one size fits all, but everybody's body is going to respond differently. But I think the argument could be made that on average, across statistics, it's probably something you want to do. I mean, look at it this way. Your body is in two states, okay? Once you hit maybe 25, 26, you're in your prime. And then you begin the slow decline of decay and aging. So there's two states. Your body can enter, you can enter into a state of growth, which slows down aging and keeps your mind sharp and health by exercising and eating right. Or you can enter a stage of decay, which is staying up late, smoke, drink, party. And if you ever go to the bar and you see the girl that's in her mid thirties and she looks like she's 45 or late twenties and they look like they're 35, and you're like, wow, you can tell that chick partied really hard and you can see it on their face and under their eyes. And then when you see somebody who's healthy, their skin is low and they have that spark in their eye and that energy and that life. So I dunno, I'm very passionate about eating and very methodical. I mean, I want to live to 120, I don't know why or as long as I can, but definitely just I guess to see what happens. You're

Speaker 4 (00:07:55):

Fucking crazy, bro. Point, you want to know what breakdowns sound like in the year 2083?

Speaker 3 (00:08:01):

Yeah, I'm going to be so brutal when I'm 90. You don't even know.

Speaker 2 (00:08:05):

Speaking of being brutal, I guess today we're going to talk about some drum edits, which I don't know about you guys, but when I do drum edits, I'm extremely brutal with the timing. And I think at some point in this episode, I want to talk about the difference between being brutal on a quantization level and being brutal on a performance level. Because I know there's some people who give me some shit for saying like, oh man, Joey Sturgis Productions, and they're just fucking quantized all to hell, and they don't deserve to have any kind of credibility because of that. And I really don't subscribe to that because I listen to Mutt Lang, and if you listen to a Mutt Lang recording, there's not a single deviation from the grid anywhere. And he's one of the most successful producers in the world. So same with Max Martin, just I like to do it with heavier music. So

Speaker 3 (00:08:59):

I feel like once DJs kind of took over and killed the live band market, that the live band, and this is just a theory, but the people that were producing live music realized that, and this is right around more, when Pro Tools and the digital stuff started coming in, people realized that people like Perfect. For some reason, the tighter it is, the easier it is to dance, the easier it is to move, and the less you have to think, well, a human has a swing and a feel, which definitely has value that translates in an artistic way and many different parts and art when it comes to just raw movement and dancing and energy. But there's something about Quantizing, at least to me, in my opinion, that is awesome. And really, I don't know, I like the consistency of it.

Speaker 4 (00:09:41):

Well, you know what? Even in music where there is sway, where there is pocket, where there is groove, that's not exactly on the bar line. The best musicians of those styles still play very consistently, even if the snare is supposed to be behind the beat to give it whatever sort of feel, when the best drummers play like an Aaron Spears or something, it's still the same way every time. So that consistency you guys are talking about that you hear on a Mutt Lang record or Max Martin record or whoever, I feel like that's still there in those styles of music that feel more natural. Now, of course, jazz is all over the place, but for popular music, I think consistent timing is almost everything.

Speaker 2 (00:10:29):

And I'd like to listen to different styles of music. So if I'm listening to a Foo Fighter's record of, I don't want to hear 100% gridlocked stuff, and basically it does kind of come down to genre at some point because if I was producing a Foo Fighters song or something, I would treat it the way that it deserves to be treated, which is not 100% gridlocked. And Dave Grohl is just a fucking amazing drummer. So

Speaker 4 (00:10:56):

That's exactly my point.

Speaker 2 (00:10:57):

Yeah, when you move something, you're going to feel a little bit of regret almost.

Speaker 4 (00:11:04):

That's a hundred percent my point. When you're working with musicians who can really pull off the right feel for their style of music, grid editing is not quite as important because all the musical information and feel that needs to be there is already there. So you're changing a living work of art basically by gridlocking it. But in the style of music that we kind of work in a lot, it's very, very hard to get an awesome modern sound without it being gridlocked.

Speaker 2 (00:11:39):

Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:11:40):

I think, well,

Speaker 2 (00:11:41):

Today we have a pretty awesome badass to bring on the air and talk about this with us. His name's John Douglas, he's an up and coming accomplished engineer, mixer producer guy. He's worked with Battle Cross, Firewind Reflections, job for Cowboy Crypto, the Contortionist, some pretty sick ass bands. What did he do for Ka Perry, do you know?

Speaker 4 (00:12:06):

I think that he will be able to answer that better than me, but I know that he other job besides doing stuff for us Metal guys is he works at a big commercial studio in Atlanta that does a lot of pop and r and b acts. And so he's so awesome that I think he rose from intern to actual engineers. So your engineers on sessions? Yeah, Katie Perry, Nelly, TI, Rick Ross, all kinds of stuff. Yeah. He's one of those people that is actually a legitimate engineer that can be thrown into a number of situations and still do a great job. And talking about his credits, there's a bunch of stuff that he's not credited for because he was working as an editor and the band didn't know about it or whatever, but he's worked on almost every audio hammer release from the past two years, three years.

(00:13:09):

So he's been involved with lots and lots of stuff. And the reason I wanted to bring him on is because I get hit up all the time about internships, how do you get hired by you, et cetera, et cetera. And John is one guy who went from non-paid intern to getting paid very well by me to getting paid by other guys I know and developing a career of his own. And I've always said that if people just did what John did, they would also be hired, which is, he was fine to do a bunch of free work at the beginning to prove his worth, editing, cleanup, replacement, all that stuff. And he started getting paid once his contributions were so good that we would've felt bad not paying him. And now it's been years and he just never complains and just delivers. And he has also graduated to co-producing stuff, mixing all kinds of stuff. He's just fantastic. And the reason I wanted to bring him on to talk about editing is because A, that's how he got to where he is today by being awesome at that kind of stuff, but also he's a ninja at it. Oh man. I love people like that. He's one of the fastest, most meticulous badass editors I've ever encountered. So he's got a lot to tell people about this stuff.

Speaker 3 (00:14:40):

Speed editing should be an Olympic sport, like drum quantization.

Speaker 4 (00:14:44):

Yeah. Well, this guy's got it down. So guys, I'd like to introduce you to my buddy John Douglas, who I've done a ton of work with and who's phenomenal at everything he does. Recording and music.

Speaker 2 (00:14:57):

Hey everybody. Hey John. What's up? Hey, how you doing?

Speaker 4 (00:14:59):

So I want to get one thing out of the way before we get into the details, which is what did you go to school for?

Speaker 5 (00:15:08):

I went to Georgia Tech for computer Science. Originally my thought was I was going to go and learn how to make plugins, but then somewhere along the way I decided that I actually just wanted to record bands. And the whole making plugins thing was just kind of an excuse to be like, oh, well, I can go to school for that. So

Speaker 4 (00:15:24):

What made you do that instead of go to recording school, out of curiosity?

Speaker 5 (00:15:27):

Oh, well, I mean the other option was Berkeley and I considered it pretty seriously, but

Speaker 4 (00:15:33):

College of Music, right?

Speaker 5 (00:15:35):

Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:15:35):

Okay.

Speaker 5 (00:15:36):

The summer after high school, I worked in the copy room at a law office and all these dudes making 250 a year, whatever, $400 an hour. And every time they would ask, what are you going to do next? And I'd be like, well, it's either going to go to music school or go get a real job, and without fail, they all said, don't get a music degree.

Speaker 4 (00:16:02):

Lo and behold, you actually work in music though, right?

Speaker 5 (00:16:04):

No, I mean, my whole family was behind the ideas just go get the degree and take a stab at music after that and we'll support you. So pretty good situation there.

Speaker 4 (00:16:15):

I actually think that the fact that you are a computer person is part of why you've got the right brain for being so good at things like editing drums and all of those really, really technical tasks involved with recording that a lot of people just don't seem to get that great at. For instance, I think I'm okay at editing, but there's a certain place my brain won't go to. I just don't think that way that you just do naturally. And Joey, I imagine you're the same way, also one of the most computer-like people I've ever met.

Speaker 2 (00:16:54):

Yeah, I was going to say he's probably on the same wavelength as me, which is if you come from a background with computer science, and even if it isn't a degree, you don't necessarily need a degree, but if you understand what actually happens inside of a computer, you start to think about production in a different way, at least I think. And I mean when I started out, it wasn't entirely musical. I didn't know stuff about chords and melody, and so I was approach almost everything that I was doing. I was approaching it from that background, from an understanding of if or statements or condition statements and things like that. So it's kind of a really weird way to do music, and eventually I grew into the melody and the theory and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, I think drum editing is very much a logic oriented process. Same with, I guess in a way it's kind of the same with guitars and just any kind of audio editing. It is very structured. Would you agree with that, John?

Speaker 5 (00:18:00):

Oh, yeah. No, I think that the point that you really understand what's going on inside of the system, I think that's probably the biggest thing that I noticed with other people when if I'm troubleshooting somebody's session or system or whatever it is, it seems to be the common denominator is that nobody really knows what's going on inside of the computer, inside of the code. It's

Speaker 2 (00:18:22):

Like magic to them, right?

Speaker 5 (00:18:23):

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:18:25):

Yeah. And you don't have, I think you can still be great at this and not even understand that stuff, but it just gives us a different edge. I think we can understand the music part of it, but also know how the computer works and it gives us a little bit of a leg up on stuff. Well,

Speaker 4 (00:18:40):

I feel like one of the best things you can do in music, but in life as well is surround yourself with people who are better than you. Maybe not at everything. Everybody's got something that they excel at hopefully, but surround yourself and involve yourself with people who fill in where you lack. So I know that my brain is just not wired that way. So that's probably one of the reasons that I decided to get somebody like John working with me because it's like no matter how hard I try, there's a certain level that my brain will just not lock into with that stuff. So I agree, you guys definitely have an edge on that, and I'm not advocating that people don't learn how to do things that aren't in their current wheelhouse, but I do think that you should definitely make a point of aligning yourself with people who have skill sets that you don't have and natural abilities that you don't have. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:19:45):

I think there's definitely something to be said for that too, because I mean, one of the big things with me is separating logical tasks from creative one. So if I'm producing something or writing, the last thing I want to do is sit there and concentrate on how tight a vocal take is, for example. Or sitting there and editing something or mixing, for example, routing and things like that. I just want to hit play and start being creative, and when I'm in that mode, that's all I want to do. And being able to compartmentalize that by hiring an editor who's really good I think pays invaluable dividends for creativity when you're doing those more creative type tasks.

Speaker 4 (00:20:22):

Yeah, I agree. I think that being a great editor is the number one way to get yourself hired by a bigger producer, because just what Joel said, there comes a point where if you're thinking about editing, you're not thinking about production anymore and you only have a hundred percent of your energy to devote to a project, and if you're being hired as producer, you probably have other responsibilities rather than editing. But I guess, John, what do you think were the top reasons that you got hired consistently by me and now other people and have been able to build a career?

Speaker 5 (00:21:05):

Well, I guess the first thing was just being able to put out edits that sound good and sessions that work and send to you files with links that work and just be able to get the basics down and have that not be an issue. If you go right off the bat with somebody and you're just constantly running into trouble, then it's probably not going to last very long. But not even just compartmentalizing tasks and trying to be focused on one thing. Even with just editing, I've noticed that lately, especially if I break editing tasks down into smaller, similar tasks and do all those at once, rather than doing a song at a time or however it's sent to me, things end up speeding up a lot and just developing those kind of reliable processes where you know that every time you send a file off, you can be pretty confident that the person who's receiving it's not going to have any problems. And then also just not having to ask too many questions. I mean, that's a simple one. That's not really specific to drum editing, but just any kind of assistant type work is if the guy you're working under it has to constantly be explaining things to you over and over, you're not really assisting them. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:22:16):

Well, let me make a clear differentiation here between asking legitimate questions and just wasting time, for instance, there's a lot of things that you can easily just look up on Google and find out for yourself or stuff that was probably covered in earlier emails or on a couple projects I have with Joey, we have all our info up in a Google Doc, all graphics, everything is up in a Google Doc, so people shouldn't have to ask every time for it. And when someone keeps asking the boss for the same thing over and over and over again, it makes that person seem like their head isn't really in the game, so they become less desirable. But I think that's totally different than asking a legitimate question, I'm stumped on this, can you help me? Or can you clarify what you really want here? Trying to do a good job for you, but I'm not sure I understand the request.

Speaker 5 (00:23:17):

Yeah, sure. If you take twice as long to do something when it could have taken half as long as if you had asked one question to clarify the goal, then you're messing up. But yeah, you want to make it as efficient as possible. And the other thing I was thinking about the other studio I've done workout of here at Atlanta, I know I've gotten gigs there just based off of people who may not even know what I'm doing, but just watching me move my hands fast and make a lot of noise with the keyboard and pro tools.

Speaker 3 (00:23:45):

Hey John, do you have a really loud keyboard that clicks really loud?

Speaker 5 (00:23:49):

It's just the standard Mac one, but it's like the desk is kind of echoy, so if I'm really pounding on it,

Speaker 3 (00:23:54):

I've got a really, the loudest possible keyboard you can get. And back when I used to do my own editing, my bands would always be like, holy crap, dude. You're like, click, click, click.

Speaker 5 (00:24:03):

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (00:24:04):

Because there's a certain tactile or percussive response they get. It sounds like it's really fast and a lot of stuff is being pressed. It's like watching guys play StarCraft professionally. They're just spamming keys to get their a PM faster, and they're not really necessarily doing anything other than trying to get the fastest highlight of a group of characters, but if you're watching it, you're like, oh my god, this guy's ridiculous. And it's the same thing with editing. If you can impress people while you're editing and keep 'em interested, I feel like that totally just reinforces what you just said. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:24:35):

The thing is, John, also, he's not just doing random stuff. He's got a set of totally custom key commands and everything that he's got down.

Speaker 2 (00:24:46):

Now, I kind of recall this, I could be wrong, but didn't you tell me that you got this key thing from him and you ended up switching your whole workflow to match his or something like that? Quick

Speaker 4 (00:24:58):

Keys? Yeah, John can talk more about that, but yeah, he turned me on to Quick Keys. I didn't get the idea of having batch commands from him. That's something that I had tried to do and had seen other people do a while ago, but never really paid too much thought to it, but always wanted to have it done. I think we talked about it a few times and he already knew about Quick Keys or he went and found Quick Keys or something, but point is that he got on Quick Keys and just went nuts. Every single menu command that did not exist in Pro Tools he started coming up with, and now it was basically a whole other set of commands. Basically. Pro Tools is like a whole different DAW Now if you incorporate it with John's quick, does it sound right, John? Yeah,

Speaker 5 (00:25:51):

I mean it's similar to the Slate batch Commander type stuff where it's just, I mean for guys like us who kind of understand code, it's pretty simple. It's loops and click at this pixel at this time and then do these steps and whatever, assign variables. It's all pretty simple like coding type stuff, but you can really get some powerful stuff that Pro Tools is not able to do naturally.

Speaker 3 (00:26:15):

Why don't you give us some examples of some macros that you've invented that have increased the speed of your workflow process for editing? I feel like that would be really useful for some of the listeners.

Speaker 5 (00:26:25):

Sure. So I'll give you two that I use probably every minute when I'm editing. So in Pro Tools, there is no default key command for deleting, fades, cross fades, and that one's a pretty simple ones like if you're on a Mac, you can go into the system preferences and just assign,

Speaker 4 (00:26:43):

That's the first one I asked you for. I remember a few years back, that's actually the one where this conversation even started was do a way to delete fades.

Speaker 5 (00:26:52):

Yeah, I know people who would like, or I'd see edits that you guys would do and there'd be all these tiny little cross fades that'd be like half a millisecond long and just they can't find them and it's screwing up trying to drag regions around and it's screwing up everything. So just simple stuff like that can make your workflow easy, but I mean that's not even requiring quick keys. Lemme find one that's actually got some like, oh, okay. So one of 'em I made is a track naming thing. So if you create eight new tracks, click on the first one and type vocals and then hit eight, it will name vocal 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, stuff like that. What's another good one?

Speaker 4 (00:27:34):

Triplets.

Speaker 5 (00:27:35):

Oh yeah. There's no key command for toggling between triplet grid and straight grid. So it's like click at the top of the screen, hit down four times to get to the triplet thing and then hit enter, and then if your quantized menu is open, change it there too. If not, then don't do anything. Yeah, I mean the more we did stuff with Quick Keys, the deeper I got into it and it actually kind of sucks. Now I realized about a year ago that the guy who wrote Quick Keys died a few years ago, so it hasn't seen an update in three years and we'll probably never see another update and I've mastered it, so Holy

Speaker 2 (00:28:12):

Cow. So

Speaker 4 (00:28:13):

About the triplet thing real quick, not to go back in time too much. So yeah, so when you're going between eighth notes and triplets or whatever, it's literally a key command and everything changes. So it seems like going up to a menu and changing, it doesn't take that long, just a few seconds, but if you're talking about an entire album worth of crazy drums that adds up and that plus naming tracks plus everything else, it all adds up to hours and even days of extra work.

Speaker 5 (00:28:47):

I found Quick Keys at this other studio, and a lot of what they do at this other studio is editing sound for TV and movies, and one of the guys in particular used Quick Keys. He works right now, he's been working on the Squid Billies show. I don't know if you guys have ever seen it, but

Speaker 4 (00:29:03):

Yeah, my ex-girlfriend helped start that show.

Speaker 5 (00:29:05):

No kidding.

Speaker 4 (00:29:06):

Yeah. Wow. Lead Animator. Well,

Speaker 5 (00:29:08):

If anybody hasn't seen it, the lead characters are squids and they move around and every time they move, there's a little tentacle squish sound that he has to fly in and just so he has this library of Quick Keys commands that help him do that kind of repetitive stuff, and that's where I got the idea. That's awesome. Hey,

Speaker 4 (00:29:27):

I just loaded up quick keys right here so I can name off some of the ones that I'm sure you have a bunch more, but create click track, drum cleanup, fade in drum cleanup, fade out, long grid value, edit grid value, edit two, identify sync point, invert, make active, make an active manual slicing, nudge, value, edit, paste, midi, trigger a bunch of those quantize plus grid, bigger in 11 quantize from dialogue, quantize, grid down, reverse sample cutting, fade in step input, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (00:30:07):

I think if you're on Pro Tools, man, you almost have to have either Quick Keys or the Slate thing. Is this Slate thing available as software now?

Speaker 5 (00:30:14):

Yeah, it is, and it was really impressive when I started looking through it. I got so many more ideas for quick key shortcuts based on the kind of macros that they were putting together.

Speaker 2 (00:30:24):

Yeah, well actually I met with Slate when I was in LA and he was telling me that he's actually a Cubase guy. I don't think a lot of people know that. I

Speaker 5 (00:30:33):

Didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (00:30:34):

Yeah, so I think a lot of the stuff that he has in there is kind of based on a Cubase workflow, and the thing that's really cool, I just want to put this out there, cubase has its own Logic editor, so you can actually go in and program little tasks just like you can in Quick Keys, but it's built into cubase.

Speaker 5 (00:30:52):

Wow, that's really cool. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:30:53):

John, you really should check out Cubase. I've been converted.

Speaker 5 (00:30:57):

I'm so tempted. The Pro Tools subscription stuff scares me so much and I want nothing to do with Logic, but Oh

Speaker 2 (00:31:04):

Yeah, logic's bad for editing.

Speaker 5 (00:31:06):

Yeah, the first record I think I did for Al, I edited in Logic and there's just all sorts of little glitchy weird stuff going on with the symbols, and I had to just pull it into Pro Tools afterwards and then go through and fix all the little symbol glitches. It was just from then on that was out the window.

Speaker 2 (00:31:24):

Well, let's talk a little, well, go ahead.

Speaker 4 (00:31:27):

I was going to say let's talk about some technical editing stuff.

Speaker 2 (00:31:30):

That's exactly where I was going. Now when I do the drum edits, I use a unique feature that's in cubase, and I'm curious what you do in Pro Tools. I don't think it has the same thing, but in cubase, you basically, you take all of your whole recorded audio from start to finish, you group that and then every time you make a cut, it just creates a new group for the new ending that comes from it. So every time you cut, you're creating a new group and then you have a key command that you can hold down and while you're holding it down, it changes your mouse to a tool that can shift audio within the event without moving the event

Speaker 3 (00:32:11):

Slip editing. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:32:13):

It's called slip editing. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:32:13):

Don't leave home without it. My favorite thing ever invented,

Speaker 2 (00:32:16):

So you click on your audio, you make a cut, and then you slip the remainder of the audio within the event and you just keep repeating that process until you get all the way to the end of the song. And if you are moving a cut that's late, you will cut in front of the grid point, and if you're moving a cut that's early, you'll cut in front of the transient.

Speaker 4 (00:32:37):

In Pro Tools, I think the language would be moving the audio within a region,

Speaker 2 (00:32:43):

So does it have the ability to move? Last time I heard on Pro Tools you could move audio within the region, but only locked to samples. There was no sample moving. Now in Cubase you have 32 bit float positional data, so you're not gridlocked to samples. You can move within samples if you need to.

Speaker 5 (00:33:10):

So as far as I know, well Pro Tools 11, I think it was the first version to do any sort of slipping audio within regions, and I don't think you could do it with a mouse. I think you just do it with key commands. It's kind of like a modifier on the Nudge command. The only time I really use it is so if there's a kick hit that's flaming with a snare hit that I've already quantized, then I'll just slip the kick mic or the two kick mics or whatever or do some trickery like that, but I don't really use it as the main tool for moving the audio around.

Speaker 2 (00:33:45):

So what is the main method of actually moving it? So

Speaker 5 (00:33:48):

Usually you'll pull up Beat Detective and analyze the transient on whichever close mics you want to look for transient on, and then it will split it up, say 10 milliseconds before the transient cut the region, and then those are all grouped together, however many tracks you've got, and you just move the whole region rather than slipping the audio within the region.

Speaker 2 (00:34:13):

Okay. So yeah, that was the thing that I really liked about Cubase is the fact that you don't have,

Speaker 3 (00:34:19):

It has Beat Detective though now,

Speaker 2 (00:34:21):

And I hate Beat Detective and we can talk about that, but I want to say that I love the fact that in Cubase there's no region cleanup. After you've made your cut and you slipped your audio, those two regions are butted up against each other and they don't deviate in any direction. So once you've finished your entire edit through the whole song, this is something that you probably have a key command for. Then all you have to do is hit X, which will make cross fades across all of your edits, and then you just choose equal power. That's what I do.

Speaker 3 (00:34:54):

You can do it with auto fades too, just one MSN and one ms out. That's what I usually do and get away with it on like 98% of edits. I mean, if you have a symbol that is really long that you have to make a lot of cuts, but usually you can just make a cut, slip it and the auto fade will take care of even needing views across Fade and it's absolutely transparent. 100% and seamless.

Speaker 2 (00:35:14):

Yeah, that's the other thing too is that Cubase has playback auto fades. So if the cursor passes over a cut, that track has its own setting for auto fading, and so it'll just create a cross fade. I think it also applies to bouncing audio too. So you basically can get away with never cross fading anything. They'll just automatically be there, but if you want to adjust the length or the power or anything like that, you have to manually apply your own cross fade.

Speaker 5 (00:35:43):

That seems like a pretty good hybrid solution. I always really hated the way that Logic dealt with cross fades and regions butting up against one another. It was just to be like you'd end up with regions that are behind other regions and you couldn't find them unless you deleted one or the other. With Pro Tools, the cross fade thing is pretty simple to take care of. I mean, I'll quantize a section and then I've got one command to fill in the gaps where there's empty space because regions have been moved around and then there another command to do cross fades. So it's like two keys. And then as far as the other stuff, the other way aside from Beat Detective that I guess you would do drum editing is with Elastic Audio or just by manually cutting and nudging sections around, which is ideally with a good drummer, that's what I want to be doing. I don't want to have to open Beat Detective at all.

Speaker 4 (00:36:36):

I think manual is the most musical way to do it, but unfortunately you really do need good source material to be able to do that.

Speaker 5 (00:36:46):

Yeah, I think one of the things I've noticed recently, I feel like I've got to a point with drum mixing that I can a B with a record I like and feel pretty good about my drum mix in comparison. And I feel like once you get to that point, it's a lot easier to listen to your drum edits and know immediately whether you've over edited something and kind of crush the feel out of it if it is a situation where you want to preserve the feel.

Speaker 4 (00:37:12):

So I want to touch on one thing real quick because we've mentioned it a few times, but people don't totally understand why. Can you elaborate at all on why besides the region thing? Editing and logic is a bad idea because I get people arguing with me about this all the time, I just want to set it straight.

Speaker 5 (00:37:33):

Well, I mean logic. So the region thing is my main beef. It's just like if I can't, it's this whole knowing what's going on under the hood. If I don't know where one region ends and another region ends or if they're overlapping and I have no way to tell which one is playing when, then I don't know what's going under the hood and I get nervous very fast. But aside from that, I've noticed the stretching algorithms that they use for if you were going to try to stretch out a symbol ring out or something like that or just not as good as what I've heard from Tools and cubase,

Speaker 4 (00:38:09):

Do you know anything about it not being sample accurate?

Speaker 5 (00:38:12):

I don't, but I really hate if you zoom in on a waveform in Logic, I can't see what's going on compared to Pro Tools or what I've seen in Cubase. And then yeah, with the measurement of how it deals, I don't even think you can measure samples out in Logic. I've never tried.

Speaker 2 (00:38:28):

Logic is super weird man all around.

Speaker 4 (00:38:31):

I think I'm pretty sure that you can't get down to sample level with stuff, which is why Putney for instance, has his stuff edited in Pro Tools, even though he mixes and does pre-pro in Logic,

Speaker 5 (00:38:46):

It is cool for mixing. I mean being able to load up entire preset chains, that's probably something you could do with Cubase.

Speaker 4 (00:38:54):

Why can you not do that in Pro Tools? Ridiculous.

Speaker 5 (00:38:56):

You can with Batch Commanders sort of, but it's a really janky weird solution and props to them for figuring it out because it's not something I would've thought of. Basically what they do is they have a macro that switches to the Mixer view hides all the channels except the ones that you have selected and there's a hidden feature in Pro Tools that I knew nothing about where you can select your five or six favorite plugins and it will appear in the plugins list in a special place. And then they use that to exploit being able to add your own custom chain. So you have five plugins that are your default chain and it adds them, but that is a kind of ridiculous solution to a problem that Avid should have fixed a long time ago.

Speaker 4 (00:39:40):

Totally. So, alright, so let's talk about a scenario. You are hired to edit drums from somebody else and you've never worked with them before, but they're super particular and they send you the drums and they're kind of fucked up drummer hits like a Ws bad flaming all over the place. They recorded kick but kick and the hands don't line up at all and there's fills that make no sense and weird punch ins here and there like symbols cutting off all that stuff. How do you approach it? How do you make that gig a success? What's your process

Speaker 3 (00:40:29):

Jump out the window

Speaker 4 (00:40:30):

After that drove? Yeah, once you wake up from the drug haze, pick yourself up off the sidewalk, then how do you approach it?

Speaker 5 (00:40:40):

Right. Well, I guess the first thing to establish is do they want it to sound like a human being or not? If not, then just start finding the good parts if there are any, and copy and paste them everywhere. There's all these little tricks as far as things flaming and ways that you can nudge two hits together to make it sound like it's not flaming or copying, pasting things from here and there and trying to make sure that symbol bleeds line up.

Speaker 2 (00:41:10):

I think a lot of people forget about the fact that you can copy and paste. I've done that so many times where the drummer will flub a crash hit before the snare or something. It sounds like kind of messy or just, I dunno, something like a common thing that I'm fixing with copying Paste is when the drummer goes to hit the symbol, but the symbol hasn't landed in the right position yet, so they hit it with the tip of their stick instead of the shaft

Speaker 4 (00:41:41):

And

Speaker 2 (00:41:41):

It has this really crappy click sound. It doesn't sound like a full on good crash hit.

Speaker 3 (00:41:47):

Oh, I hate that.

Speaker 2 (00:41:49):

You can fix those just by finding almost the same beat in the next bar, whatever, depending on the drum beat and just copy and pasting a little slice over top of it and it works perfectly. You can do that throughout the whole song.

Speaker 5 (00:42:04):

Yeah, it really is an underutilized tool. I find myself forgetting about it all the time. If you have a really simple beat going on and it's like there's one snare hit where he just kind of flubs it, it's like, why are you struggling to try to make that hit sound good? Just copy over it.

Speaker 2 (00:42:19):

Yeah, use a better hit.

Speaker 4 (00:42:22):

So you start looking around for parts that will work and copy paste them and all that. So that's like low hanging fruit. Take care of what you can take care of first.

Speaker 5 (00:42:37):

I guess probably as far as setup, I would want to have elastic audio enabled on all the tracks before I start just so I can quickly switch to Elastic and be able to stretch things out if I need to. I don't generally like to use Elastic if I don't have to. It's really there for if

Speaker 2 (00:42:58):

Emergencies.

Speaker 5 (00:42:58):

Yeah, if there's a one var symbol ring out and he comes in on the three and a half or whatever and he never hits that symbol again in the song.

Speaker 2 (00:43:06):

So it's good to have a backup plan.

Speaker 5 (00:43:08):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:43:08):

Always take samples of symbols in your session before you send it off to the editor just in case. That's a really good practice. I just kind of wanted to chime that in.

Speaker 2 (00:43:18):

Yeah. Oh yeah, I like to add it at the end of the song after the song's done, just to have a couple of extra hits just in case. And then also on top of that, a whole session that's just full of the samples that you can drag and drop if you need.

Speaker 4 (00:43:33):

I actually do that as a rule. I'll do the entire sample session at the beginning of the record, but then I will either copy it into the every song and put it at the end or have 'em record a few hits afterwards. But I feel like doing that is an invaluable resource for the editor.

Speaker 5 (00:43:52):

Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of stuff that you can fix that you wouldn't otherwise be able to fix and very easily,

Speaker 4 (00:43:58):

So you've copy pasted to the point where bad hits that you can fix that way are fixed and all that. So what's left now is out of time performance, some flaming that you couldn't fix and maybe some weird symbol rings or something. So what's next?

Speaker 5 (00:44:22):

Well, I mean with the flaming, it's like if I feel like pretty much any project I can get it to the point where it's listenable, if there's one flam every once in a while, I'm not going to sweat over it too much. Simple stuff probably. That sounds like a sampling type thing, but I think as far as out of time fills and stuff, that doesn't make sense. That's kind of where it comes into being able to think a drummer, that sounds kind of like a corny cliche phrase, but it's true though.

Speaker 3 (00:44:52):

What was he trying to do?

Speaker 5 (00:44:54):

Yeah, and it's similar to what we were talking about before with understanding computers and understanding code. It's like how do you understand a drummer if you're not trained in that at all? It's

Speaker 3 (00:45:06):

A math problem. There's only so many different fills that they can do and it's just figuring out which combination they're trying and so many different rhythm meter values.

Speaker 5 (00:45:14):

That's true. And sometimes you can make it sound better than what they were trying to do.

Speaker 3 (00:45:18):

Definitely.

Speaker 2 (00:45:19):

Yeah. So I'm just curious, you've done a combination of editing and engineering and stuff like that. Do you find that there's any good practices during the engineering phase of a drum session that will assist having better edits in the end? I know one of the things that I always found was trying to mic the snare in a way that doesn't have a lot of bleeds so that it doesn't like it's easier to, if you've got a Tom that's ringing out too much and it affects the snare mic, it becomes an issue and it's just little tiny engineering things, maybe any insights that you might have.

Speaker 5 (00:45:56):

Those are all good tricks. I mean obviously you want less bleed and I think really for me, it'ss about the tracking process and I don't like comping after tracking. I want to comp as I go. I want to edit as I go if possible, if the drummer's good enough.

Speaker 2 (00:46:15):

So you're not only choosing the best performances and keeping them and not, are you keeping a backlog of other performances just in case?

Speaker 5 (00:46:23):

Yeah, I'll keep different takes, but I like to comp on the fly because I usually don't remember what was on Take five and it is probably bad practice, but I don't take notes. I don't have a good system for taking notes where I could go back and look at it and understand what I was thinking. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:46:37):

So

Speaker 5 (00:46:38):

I just do it on the fly. I saw Mark do

Speaker 4 (00:46:40):

That. Joshua uses sticky, sticky notes. He told us that he has sticky notes everywhere when he is doing a session.

Speaker 5 (00:46:48):

That would drive me crazy.

Speaker 4 (00:46:49):

Yeah, me too.

Speaker 2 (00:46:51):

Well to each his own. Okay, so then you're potentially editing as you go as well, and then I guess at that point it's what you hear is what you get. So it's kind of a pretty

Speaker 5 (00:47:02):

Yeah, I mean there was one project where we were recording down at Al's place last year and we did probably, I dunno, five or six full takes of the song and then punched parts. So we ended up with I think a total of 13 playlists and pro tools or something like that, and then took 20 minutes off and we were comping as we were recording it and the drummer would come in and listen to a part and then go back in and punch another part after we'd done the full song takes. And then we took a 30 minute break and I went in and edited the song in like 10, 15 minutes and that was it.

Speaker 4 (00:47:43):

I find that that's the best way to do things. For me at least. One thing that I'll make a drummer do is I make them practice the song with the drum mutes on, even if it takes them an hour of playing through it, I make them play until they feel like they're on stage and are just flowing with it. And I find that if I loop the song for that long, by the time we start playing record, all their nerves are gone and they're in a good flow state. And so the takes are just much, much better and you don't need to micromanage them as much. So by the time you have five takes down, you have really, really good stuff. And then yeah, if you've got a good drummer, you just go over the parts that suck, have them fix it and you're done. And ever since I started doing it that way, drum sessions have gotten so much easier.

Speaker 3 (00:48:35):

Man, you guys got to record Nick from vinyl theater because that kid comes in and he just, one takes it. He's like, I'm going to do this in one take. And you're like, yeah, right. And then he does it and then you look at the grid and no hit is more than maybe 10 to 15 milliseconds off. It literally looks like it's almost quantized when he plays back.

Speaker 4 (00:48:51):

Yeah, I've worked with a few guys like that. It's great.

Speaker 3 (00:48:54):

It's incredible. It's so awesome when you get something like that, it's the best thing that can ever happen to you from an editing perspective.

Speaker 4 (00:49:01):

Oh yeah, it makes my day. I want to clear up a misconception though. A lot of people think that you only edit because people suck. And it's true. You obviously have to edit way more if somebody sucks, but even with really, really good drummers, you still have to do a little bit of editing here and there. So this is something that people need to know how to do, whether they're working with the best of the best or not. And the other sad realities that most musicians are not the best of the best. So you really should have your chops together. Getting one taker kind of guys isn't going to be an everyday thing.

Speaker 2 (00:49:43):

It seems like we're shifting into a question phase here and there's some interesting questions from the audience. So I just wanted to ask you a couple things and just see what you think. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (00:49:54):

Now

Speaker 2 (00:49:54):

Do you have a fixed millisecond number for your cross fades?

Speaker 5 (00:49:59):

It's usually five for drums. Five or seven is usually what I pick for drums. And then for guitars it's usually like 10 to 12 to 13 and same for bass and then vocals maybe a little longer, 10 to 20. And

Speaker 2 (00:50:13):

What kind of cross fades are you using on the different instruments?

Speaker 5 (00:50:16):

Usually equal power.

Speaker 2 (00:50:17):

Yeah, I've found that equal power sounds the best on everything. Yeah, agreed. There might be some, if you do some weird vocal cross fading, you'll just have to hear, I actually audition all the different ones and just pick the one that sounds the most natural to me.

Speaker 5 (00:50:31):

Yeah, same

Speaker 2 (00:50:32):

At the end of the day it's like use your ears. It's not a rule system here.

Speaker 5 (00:50:36):

And sometimes the other fades, I find myself going more for the regular straight gain, fades for fade ins and fade outs and that kind of stuff. But yeah, equal power all the way,

Speaker 4 (00:50:48):

Sir. Andreas fluff. Morin said, I wish people understood the problem with phase issues and bleed that I can't move, remove just one drum. Let's say the scenario in editing, his number one rule is play it great the first time. So I don't need to edit, but I guess what's your take on moving instruments on their own? Is it ever okay, is it never okay, what's your take on that?

Speaker 5 (00:51:15):

I'd say it's okay with kick, especially in metal when the room, if the low end of the room is not getting rolled off, as long as you're not doing anything too crazy, you could probably get away with it. And if it's like a flaming situation, you may not have to move just one mic relative to the others. You could move them all together and just move them closer together. And if the flam is short enough, it will not sound like a flam. But yeah, I wouldn't move anything else I don't think. Have you guys slipped to anything else other than kicks?

Speaker 2 (00:51:49):

I'll say that I think it's just a balance between, it's a compromise. You get into a situation where the kick and the snare are supposed to be played together, but they're not together and technically you're not supposed to separate them ruin the phase relationship. So you make a compromise and you move the kick or you move the snare or whatever, and you just have to know what are your goals? Are you really, really, really relying on that relationship between the kick and the room mics And by moving it, are you really going to do much damage? And if so, how much? So I just look at it like that. It's like a lot of times, especially in metal as we're kind of always referring back to that genre, it's like it doesn't really matter a whole lot. You're not going to damage too much by shifting the kick a little bit, but if you're going for a vinyl theater thing, you might completely screw up the kick sound by doing that. So it comes down to the style of mixing and the genre. And the other thing too is if you really want to get picky, you could rebuild and if you took samples, you could rebuild those hits and keep the phase intact.

Speaker 5 (00:52:59):

Yeah, I was going to say you could roll off the low end of your real room and then use the low end of your sampled room or something like that.

Speaker 4 (00:53:08):

Yeah. Is that the approach that you would take if you were working on say, a rock project or an indie project? If the kick was supposed to be right on time with the hands, but it was flaming, but it's in all the rooms, so you can't just slip it over without affecting everything.

Speaker 5 (00:53:26):

If it was cock rock, I would probably just try to copy and paste and have the guy just loop 'em for 10 minutes playing that one, beat the kicks and air fla beat and pick the good hits and then fly in. Because that kind of music is all about the low end of the kick, I guess.

Speaker 4 (00:53:43):

I mean, what about if you're just editing something you didn't record though?

Speaker 5 (00:53:47):

Oh yeah. Well, I guess I try to get as far as I can with copy paste and then yeah, if I got to slip stuff, then I got to slip stuff and if I got to make the low end back up with samples, then I'll do that. Good answer.

Speaker 2 (00:53:58):

Yeah. Okay, so this is a good one. Do you use MIDI at all? Well, I know there's a lot of people who will take an acoustic drum track, for example, have it all quantized and then get the transient converted to MIDI so that they can use the Yeah, you use the MIDI to fire off sample replacements or for sample blending. I personally don't like to do it that way, but I'm curious, do you have any interesting techniques? Probably a key command for getting the MIDI to actually be phase aligned with the audio. I actually trigger off the audio, so I don't use the midi, but there's some people that prefer that convenience, so I'm just curious if there's a trick for that.

Speaker 5 (00:54:42):

Right. Yeah. I use mass EDRT to trigger the MIDI off of the audio. And then I group the MIDI to I'll group the snare midi to the snare close mic. And then in Pro Tools, you can just tab through and every time you hit tab, it goes to the next note. And then you can just see visually whether the mini note lines up with the transient or not. And if it doesn't, then you move it and yeah, I've got a quick Keys command that's just like, so the command pace, the note goes to the next note and then cuts it. So you're just kind of going through and hitting one key. You click where the transient should be, hit the key, and then you just do that over and over until you get through the whole song. But sometimes Massey DRT is good enough to wear on kick tracks, especially most of the time you could just tap through and find the one in 25 that's actually off by more than a sample or two. I didn't get a chance to touch on it before. When you mentioned the inner sample stuff in Cubase, I had no idea about that, and I'm pretty sure that Pro Tools doesn't go deeper than the sample division. Yeah.

(00:55:52):

Have you found that beneficial to be able to work in the inter sample?

Speaker 2 (00:55:55):

I personally like it because again, it goes back to understanding computers inside and out. So if you change tempos and a tempo change isn't exactly on a sample, then you basically are screwed for the rest of every single beat for the whole song. And that's how Pro Tools is.

Speaker 5 (00:56:11):

So

Speaker 2 (00:56:11):

If you want to change your tempo from, let's say you're at 1 53 BPM on bar 1 58 and then, or starting on bar 1 58, you want to go down to, I don't know, one 15, depending on the math of all that Pro Tools will just round it to the next sample because there's no inner sample. So you can't ever have a grid marker, a tempo change, anything can never exist in between two samples. So you kind of get inaccuracies that can build up over the course of a track, and especially if you have a bunch of tempo changes going throughout the whole track, by the time you get to the end of it, you could have been off by an entire 16th note or something, which doesn't seem like a lot, but

Speaker 5 (00:56:53):

No, that sounds significant to me. I never thought about it that way. That's

Speaker 3 (00:56:55):

Crazy. I didn't even, well, I mean, I've used cubase my whole life, so I never even knew that existed as an option. I mean, oh my God.

Speaker 2 (00:57:02):

Yeah. At Cubase, every single object, audio events, markers, tempo, changers, anything can exist anywhere because it's 32 bit float, so you can have it in between samples if it need to. So if the situation that you're working with calls for that type of accuracy, like say you're trying to switch those tempos, like I said, Cubase makes it happen exactly where it should be, whereas Pro Tools rounds to the next beat or the next sample.

Speaker 4 (00:57:30):

Man, I have dealt with this problem before and that's amazing. I cannot tell you how much it bugs me. For instance, when you import a Tempo map from another DAW or from Guitar Pro or wherever, and as the song goes on, it's further and further off, it really bugs the shit out of me. That's really, really cool about Cubase. So here's a question from Justin Bernardo. Would you or do you shift, align the room and overhead tracks before or after you time align your kick and snare?

Speaker 5 (00:58:06):

That is a good question. I've been kind of changing my process on that recently for a while, the last couple years, pretty much every time I would do that kind of stuff after editing or while I was editing, but I would do it in the delay compensation controls that are in Pro Tools. So in the bottom of the Pro Tools mixer, you can, for each track, you can manually set a sample offset by a positive or negative amount. And I would use that to compensate for the, I wouldn't move the rooms, but I would move the overheads to the close mics. And then I thought about it and I was like, well, maybe I should be moving the close mics to the overheads and then back move the whole kit back. So that's what I did on the last record I worked on. But I was curious to hear what you guys do for those kind of situations. I mean, it makes sense to me to have the close mics and the overheads lined up. It sounds better to me usually when the transients punch harder and everything, but you do get into some weird math as far as trying to keep everything phase coherent and on the grid the way you wanted it when you edited it.

Speaker 2 (00:59:19):

Yeah, I think my solution is to just let it be, and then if I find something that needs shifting, I actually kind do a little bit of shifting with the, there's a feature in Cubase on every single track. It's called the, hold on, I'm actually looking at it right now. It doesn't give me the name of it. I think it's, oh, there it is. Track delay. So on every single track you have a track delay and you can actually type in the number of milliseconds or samples that you want this track to play back in relation to all of the other tracks.

Speaker 5 (00:59:53):

Yeah, that's the same thing that I was talking about.

Speaker 2 (00:59:55):

Okay, cool. So yeah, it's like instead of, I think on Pro Tools, it's an insert though, right?

Speaker 5 (01:00:00):

Well, they have that too, but that will only let you delay it later in time, whereas this will let you do either way.

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):

Okay, cool. So it's the same way in cubase. You can go both ways. You can go earlier or later. Yeah, I really use that to calibrate stuff too. This

Speaker 3 (01:00:15):

Is an interesting topic because we spent a lot of time playing around with this. When we were originally mixing Drum Forge, my assistant and I sat down and we tried because we have all these different mic systems. I don't know if you've ever seen the software that we have done, but there's a bunch of mics together that play all at the same time, and they work together as a system as well as individually. And one of the things we spent a long time experimenting with is what happens if we move the overhead mic up to match the direct and get it perfectly phase aligned? And after experimenting a lot, we kind of just left it as it was naturally, but there were a few direct mics or things that we used that were rooms. For example, we used a overhead mic on a Tom and we match it up to the same transient as the close mic because when it blends, it blends differently and it sounds cool, but it brings a sense of air and depth to the drum that you can't get if you're recording a real drummer. Now again, a sample session allows you to do wacky stuff like that and it's okay, but on a real kit, it's definitely dangerous to move one microphone.

Speaker 5 (01:01:17):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):

For sure. So I mean, you just got to use your ears. I personally like to leave things naturally. That's just how it sounds best to me. But I could see what you mean about if you move the overheads forward or the rooms you can get a little bit more punch in the bottom end or in the mid range, for example.

Speaker 5 (01:01:31):

Yeah, I mean it's mainly the transient punchiness for me. So the last year, one of the common things we've been doing for records is we'll take samples of the whole kit and then dump the samples into contact as raw multi-track, kind of like drum forge, a lot like drum forge, actually just like the raw versions. And then I'll use that to figure out what the latency between the close mic and the overheads are. It's so clean and I could just see the snare hit. I guess you could do that with samples that you had taken originally, but it makes it easy. Got my original drum tracks, the real drum tracks, and then I've got a whole duplicate of the whole kit that's the sampled version, and I could set up the latency stuff the same for both and it should translate.

Speaker 3 (01:02:17):

Yeah, you can treat it and find the system that works best for the drum sound that you're getting.

Speaker 5 (01:02:22):

Yeah, if it's a messy edit, you can kind of do all the latency stuff with the samples so you're kind of hearing exactly what's going on and it's not weirdness because of the editing. So

Speaker 4 (01:02:33):

I have a question from Brent Crow. He says, I would be interested to know if you guys reference any other instruments when editing drums as well as our drums, the very first thing you edit in a session. If so, why? And I'll just say that I especially reference the rest of the music when I'm working with a badass drummer who isn't supposed to be entirely on the grid, like Sean Reiner, for instance. Somebody like that who if you gridded him, you would be ruining him. Of course. I feel like you need to be using reference tracks. Now. There is one time where you absolutely shouldn't, which is if you have sloppy scratch tracks, then don't use those as a reference because they'll confuse the hell out of you. Some people like to record drums last. We've done that before, Joey. I think you do that. I think a lot of guys are starting to do that. It makes a lot of sense. And if the music is already exactly what it needs to be, then why not reference the drums to that? But if all you have are scratch tracks, it might cause more harm than good. What do you guys think?

Speaker 3 (01:03:43):

Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 5 (01:03:44):

Agree.

Speaker 3 (01:03:45):

My point of compass is always the grid because I'm mostly, I dunno, I just like things really, really quantized and very rarely do I let a drummer get away with feel. For example, a guy like Nick from vinyl theater, I will because he's just that damn good and if he puts feel in something, it's because he intends it to be there and it's supposed to push or pull a certain way. So generally when I'm doing a harder record, I don't even care what the riff is, I look at the drums, I look at it like a math problem. I understand every possible fill combination, and then I just turn it into what it's supposed to be, and then when I'm done, I'll reference it with the guitars in and stuff quietly and just make it work. So it doesn't really apply just somebody like me. I'm a grid guy. Yeah,

Speaker 5 (01:04:26):

I mean if I was gridding something, that's the way I do it. You want to hear everything and make sure that since you're making that many more edits, gritting it, you want to make sure that all your edits are cool and not causing any weird

Speaker 3 (01:04:38):

Yeah, you can't hear clicks and pops and weird shit in your edits. Like, oh crap, I overstretched this or unders stretch this. It sounds weird and underwater, you can't hear that if there's other stuff going on.

Speaker 5 (01:04:48):

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):

You got to kind of do both

Speaker 5 (01:04:50):

And you could probably leave the click track on if you're gritting it because then you'll hear stuff that's flaming that shouldn't be like it mis detected a transient and moved it slightly off the grid rather than write on it. But if I was editing a good drummer who I wanted to keep the feel, I wouldn't have the click track on because you're going to hear those flam and think that something's wrong when it's really just that's how it feels.

Speaker 4 (01:05:13):

Totally. A perfect example was when we were working on the previous battle cross record with Shannon Lucas playing. I remember talking about this with you that we should just leave a good amount of it be because maybe it's not a hundred percent on the grid, but just listen to the performance. It sounds like classic badass, tight, great metal drumming. Why turn it into a computer when the goal was already accomplished musically?

Speaker 5 (01:05:41):

Yeah, those kind of guys, you got to be really careful not to over edit. I mean, it's tempting. You get in the groove of start moving things and then suddenly it's 16 bars later and you just grided something and it doesn't sound any better than it did before,

Speaker 4 (01:05:55):

But it kind of maybe lost that swagger.

Speaker 5 (01:05:57):

Right, exactly. You definitely don't want to lose the swagger. Personally, that's been my thing lately. It's like I really just don't like the sound of quantized drums anymore for the most part. I mean, there's certain projects where you have to do it because it's got to line up with other loops or whatever, but for the most part, I think I feel confident enough in drum mixing that I don't have to make the timing perfect. I feel like it's just going to sound better.

Speaker 4 (01:06:21):

I got to say though, we are saying that there's leeway and all this stuff, but we are referencing drummers that are fucking amazing. So most drummers that the guys listening to this podcast record are not going to be good enough to let be.

Speaker 5 (01:06:40):

That's true.

Speaker 4 (01:06:41):

Yeah. We are talking about cream of the crop.

Speaker 5 (01:06:44):

Even so though I think people can get away with more than people have been getting away with just the last 10 years of metal production. I think in general, it's okay to be a little sloppy. The thing is you got to get the rest of the mix to sound right, otherwise then it will sound bad.

Speaker 4 (01:07:01):

I guess that brings the next question that I have here from Jeremy's sandstorm. He says, why are metal drums grid edited to where there's barely any human feel left? I'm curious where that comes from. Why are most famous producers in metal not satisfied if the drums aren't exactly on point?

Speaker 3 (01:07:22):

I'll take that one.

Speaker 4 (01:07:23):

Yeah. I want to hear from Joe and Joel on this one first. Actually,

Speaker 3 (01:07:27):

Real simple. If you have a double bass part where the kick drum transient and the snare transient play at the same time, if that is 10 milliseconds off, they flam. And it sounds stupid, and I absolutely hate that sound, and I feel like most people do. It sounds like a mistake instead of good playing. I mean, if you have a really punchy, awesome drum sound, it's all smacking and you got a nice crack to the snare, it just takes the little inconsistencies and it magnifies 'em a hundred times more than you would on an acoustic drum set live. So it really points out it just sounds like a mistake. That's the only way I can, again, for a grid centric person, that's how we view it.

Speaker 4 (01:08:06):

And to take that a step further, what about when you start tracking all the other stuff on top of it?

Speaker 3 (01:08:10):

There you go.

Speaker 4 (01:08:10):

Yeah, absolutely. You'll never get the sound you want. Oh, what do you think, Joey? I want to hear your take on it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:15):

Pretty much. I have the same point of view or perspective, but I find that for my ears, I need, it needs to be absolute perfection because I don't know, I hear the transient and I hear the relationship between the sustain and the attack, and when that gets any slightly bit damaged or decreased or something, I get pissed off because it's not what I want to hear. I want to hear just that perfect marriage of those hits slamming at the exact same time.

Speaker 3 (01:08:56):

It's like synergistic punch from everything working together as a system versus not working and shitting all over each other.

Speaker 2 (01:09:03):

And there are types of music where that would sound very weird if you were listening to blues and it was just absolutely perfect, that would probably sound pretty strange. It would sound like a computer had constructed the song, but this style of music, for whatever reason, is just so rhythmic. And every instrument has to be on the same wavelength in terms of quantization and timing and everything that when it shifts, even 10 milliseconds is enough to throw it off. It's just a very precision based style of music. It's a very surgical style production, and when it's deviating from that, to me, it starts to sound bad. So I'm pretty much just on the same wavelength there.

Speaker 5 (01:09:48):

I'll say it as an aside, the flay type stuff that Joel you were talking about in particular that is on a drummer like Shannon Lucas on that battle cross record, I think 90% of the edits that I did were just fixing flas here and there. But if it's not doing 16th double base and it's not perfectly lined up with the grid, that doesn't really bother me. It's just like I kind of try to just close my eyes and listen through, and if I can nod my head and not be taken out of the moment, then it's fine.

Speaker 4 (01:10:18):

But however, if you were doing that record with me and I was like, we need this a hundred percent to the grid, you would've known exactly how to do that too.

Speaker 5 (01:10:27):

Oh, sure. Yeah. And it would be really easy with good drummers like that.

Speaker 4 (01:10:31):

Yeah. I just want to point out also to people listening that while John has his artistic opinion on stuff, he'll do what the job requires, which is super, super important if you're going to be working for other people,

Speaker 2 (01:10:44):

Never let your opinion get in the way of somebody else's creativity, I guess is kind of what you're saying. Yeah,

Speaker 5 (01:10:50):

And there's plenty of records where I do think that the gritting the drums is an appropriate choice. Devin Townsend is one of my favorite artists, and I know a lot of his stuff is totally gRED just because he uses so many loops that the punch of all his loops and all of the stuff has to line up. Otherwise, like you said, the 10 milliseconds would just throw everything off.

Speaker 2 (01:11:10):

Yeah, I get into that so much. I'm using so many rhythm based sound effects in combination with the artist's performance that if they don't line up perfectly, that it starts to sound real mushy and just kind of too loose and kind of, yeah, you got to put a tambourine section in a chorus and see what it sounds like when it doesn't hit at the exact same time as a snare. It's fucking weird.

Speaker 5 (01:11:35):

Oh yeah, for sure. Well, one of the ways I've been getting around that is a band I'm mixing right now. I just went through and did probably more extra percussion and reverses and swells and all that kind of stuff than I've done on any other band before. And it's not totally grided pretty close, but it's not totally. So I just used, like I was saying before, I'll take MIDI and align the midi exactly to the drum hits, and then if I want to go back and use that midi as a groove template for a tambourine, I can do that. Joey,

Speaker 3 (01:12:05):

Can you imagine dropping in 50 reverse snare and snare bombs on a breakdown and having to tab to each transient and do it?

Speaker 2 (01:12:14):

That would suck so much

Speaker 3 (01:12:15):

Instead of just control D, I would jump out the window. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:12:21):

There's so many additional elements in my productions that it just wouldn't make sense to do. You wouldn't even come up with those ideas if your stuff wasn't gritted.

Speaker 4 (01:12:31):

That's

Speaker 2 (01:12:32):

A big part of it.

Speaker 4 (01:12:32):

That makes sense. Here's another question from Sean Joyce, which is what's the best way to present yourself and communicate with the big shot when trying to get an editing job?

Speaker 5 (01:12:42):

I don't know. I showed up at your door and was like, Hey, you got any drums that need editing?

Speaker 4 (01:12:46):

Yeah. I mean, we knew each other for a long time, so I knew you as my brother's friend who was always

Speaker 3 (01:12:54):

Show up at Ale's Door. That's the last thing.

Speaker 4 (01:12:56):

Well, I mean, no is joking, but that's somewhat true. But he would always be in my old studio where my band would practice off in a corner like recording himself. He was friends with my little brother, so I knew for years that he was into recording, so at one point it made sense to give him a shot. But I mean, okay, so then how about to you, Joey, someone you haven't met or whatever, wants to get an editing gig with you, how do they present themselves to you so that you even pay attention to them?

Speaker 2 (01:13:36):

Yeah, this is a hard question for me to answer because almost every person that I've ended up hiring, I mean, gosh, it would take fate to get you in the door with me because I always end up finding people like, okay, for example, the guy that records vocals and helps me edit vocals and all that stuff with me, he helped me move. He was a friend of a friend that just was helping me move from one house to another. And when we were taking these long van rides back and forth between my old place and my new place, and so he would be carrying something through the door, and then whenever we were done carrying stuff, he would immediately jump in the van and get on his laptop and start working on something. And I just overheard stuff that he was working on. I was like, Hey, what is that?

(01:14:33):

And he's like, oh, yeah, it's just this random thing that I've been working on. And I'm like, it doesn't sound very random to me. It sounds pretty damn awesome. So I basically was like, Hey, if you're interested in doing anything like this long, I would love to have you as an intern. And so he sat in on every session that I had for an entire year before I let him work. So getting into situations like that, I don't really know how someone else would do that because I'm not really actively looking for people and they just sort of show up in my life somehow.

Speaker 4 (01:15:08):

Well, I think your answer is actually really similar to my answer, which is, and also when I've gotten myself hired, it echoes what I went through, which is you have to find a way to be around as a person and not get yourself kicked out of the situation for being an asshole or something.

Speaker 2 (01:15:32):

Yeah. I think what turns me off is when people are saying like, oh, you should hire me because I'm good at this. I'm like, well, since you haven't given me the chance to form that on my own, so I'm not going to hire you. I need the opportunity to see that you could potentially do great work for me on my own.

Speaker 4 (01:15:53):

Yeah, I definitely think that if someone wants to get a job with someone who is in demand or in the industry, you do need to either come highly recommended from a very trusted source, or you just need to be around. And so that, in my opinion, that's your networking game. You have to be on that, and you need to be working at it for years so that you're in the situation to where fate can help you out.

Speaker 3 (01:16:25):

A lot of times guys will ask too, like, Hey, I need a vocal editor who's interested. So they'll post something in a group that they trust or on Facebook or a tweet or something and Hey, I'm looking for an intern. If you're interested and you're within this many miles and you're willing to do this, this and that, contact me. And you'd be surprised. For example, I'll give pretty much anybody a shot, but you can only get one or two shots to really disappoint me, and if you don't learn, that's it. It's just not going to happen. So you've got to give people the benefit of the doubt. But you guys said you got to be around and you got to be visible. I mean, you have a pretty good idea just by, for example, if you're going to look for somebody on the forums, just by the things that people say, you can kind of tell what kind of person they are and what kind of work ethic. So when you see somebody out there running off with their mouth trashing people, or especially people, and it's a small world, what happens then is when you're looking for a job and that person applies, you kind of smile and just immediately discredit them because that's just not the kind of person you want to be around, but the people that are cool and they're helpful and you take a mental note of that and it really, I think helps pre-select some of the people that might get opportunities.

Speaker 4 (01:17:40):

I agree. So I've got two more questions from the crowd. Jordan Milner says that number one thing that drives him crazy is triggering MIDI from audio. He says he can get a decent midi track, but he gets enough extra hits and slightly misaligned hits that drive him insane with editing. Now, I see some problems there that sounds like he's doing things out of order, but sounds to me like he's trying to lay samples before editing or something. So let's take this apart.

Speaker 3 (01:18:15):

This is how I trigger, this is exactly the process that I use, so I guess I can take that. Generally what I do is I go in and I quantize everything. So the snare transient is perfectly on the grid where it's supposed to be. Cubase has an automatic hit point detector that detects off of transient and to midi and converts with one button, and it's really good. So usually I take that and then highlight all of that and then quantize it. Then I go through with hand by hand, and if there's something like a 16th note triplet roll into a room or something like that, you got to go in and kind of put those in by hand. But in general, that takes care of 90% of the lion's share of stuff. And if you edited your stuff correctly, meaning your actual audio, your MIDI will be perfectly aligned.

(01:19:01):

Now on things like fills, those I won't quantize depending on how much feel I put in. So if there's like on the snare, like a buildup or a roll or something like that, sometimes it'll just trigger right off the thing and I'll just slip, edit the midi note to be transient, time aligned if it needs to be, if the auto detect algorithm didn't do it, but it's pretty good if you know how to set it and you have a little bit of experience with it. And then I just trigger off that using something like I like Slights trigger too, I think is awesome. It's really good. And I like triggering off MIDI because it allows me to control dynamics and realism. So if I want to write in a fill, and I don't like the velocity the drummer played naturally, but I see what he was trying to do, and I want it to be maybe a softer snare and then ramp up faster or slower, I can control that when I'm mixing and not be sitting there triggering off of the performance and have to worry about mist triggers and things like that. So it's just a different workflow, but that's kind of in a nutshell how I would approach it

Speaker 5 (01:19:56):

In cubase. Does it use the same hit point detection for editing as pulling MIDI or samples? Is it using the same detection data?

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):

Well, you've got, there's various things you can do. You've got hit points, which are just virtual markers that save little points in time, and you can do all kinds of stuff with those. You can turn those into warp markers, you can turn those into mid notes, you can turn 'em into event cuts, so you can actually cut the audio at the hit points. I think it would be pretty, as far as Pro Tools is concerned, it would be very similar to the little markers that you get for Elastic Audio where it tries to detect transients.

Speaker 5 (01:20:36):

Right. The reason I was asking you is in Pro Tools. So if you had a project where you had to make the drums absolutely a hundred percent gridded, the transients got to be exactly on the grid sample accurate. What I would do is go through and put hit point markers or have it detect the hit point markers and then go back and manually correct and make sure that it got 'em all exactly right before I quantize it's Quantizing, use those markers, but then when I'm laying samples, it forgets all that and I have to do the whole same process over and over. So if Cubase can keep the same hit point detection from the editing to

Speaker 2 (01:21:10):

Once you bounce, you lose 'em. But if you don't bounce, you would keep 'em. Yeah, it'd still be there. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:21:16):

It's really, really good at it. I mean, it's pretty fast. All my assistant does all day is sit there and convert audio to MIDI so I can trigger off it, and he's got it down. It goes very fast. I mean, we can mix eight songs in a day because I can literally open up a session and it's playing back and it's already mixed and it's ready to go, and it's just an issue of writing automation and things like that. So yeah,

Speaker 4 (01:21:38):

John, these guys are fast. Yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 3 (01:21:41):

When you get your workflow refined to that speed, you can knock stuff out. In the last two days, I've mixed something, I think 18 songs. Wow. And it's not like I feel like I've taken any shortcuts. Yeah, there's going to be notes, but if you play it back, I mean, we've been doing some pretty decent albums for some decent clients, and these are records that will definitely be heard by people and the mixes sounds like a record. So

Speaker 2 (01:22:04):

I'd say one trick you could do in terms of keeping those points so that you don't have to redo it for samples is potentially keep a copy of the Cutup version. So you have your consolidated version, but you still have your Cutup version, at least in Cubase. If you did it like that, you could just copycat one of your tracks. So you have one track that has a bunch of Cutup events, and then another track that's completely empty, and then you can, there's a key where you can just go to next event, and then there's another key where you paste the sample. So you just

Speaker 5 (01:22:41):

Alternate

Speaker 2 (01:22:41):

Those keys. Next event paste or go into the macro editor and create a macro, and then just hold down one key and it'll just repeat that action over and over and over.

Speaker 4 (01:22:52):

John, do you have a quick way for fixing the misaligned midi when you pull it out of DRT, lay it onto the track, and then you scan through what in Pro Tools, how do you get through that quickly?

Speaker 5 (01:23:07):

I mentioned a little bit earlier, so I would make the audio track really big, so I could see and zoom weigh in, and then group the MIDI to the audio track, make sure that the regions are the same length, so that when you tab through the mini notes, the cursor stays locked in with the audio track. And then I made a quick keys macro that is literally just hitting X, and then, no, it's hitting V tab and then X. So paste tab cut, and then it goes to the next note. So

Speaker 4 (01:23:37):

Same thing. So just a little note for us, one thing that would be cool for us to put out with this episode, which I have copies of, is when I did my creative Live drum class, John made some videos on editing and sample replacement, and we have a few screenshots from that that show exactly where to line the MIDI note up to, because I think a lot of people don't understand where it actually goes. So just a reminder, we're going to put out those screenshots with this episode. Okay. So one more question, comment from the crowd. This isn't so much of a question, but I want us to comment on this because it stuck out to me, Ian. Ian says, what drives him the craziest about drum editing and recording is the fact that he's expected to it all in his mixes.

Speaker 2 (01:24:34):

Oh, man, this is going to drives me crazy.

Speaker 4 (01:24:36):

Let me, alright, I'm going to read it from his perspective. The fact that I'm expected to do it at all or my mixes won't sound professional, it's my fault the guy can't play. If his performance is going to need that much editing to sound passable, what is he doing in a studio to begin with? Whatever happened to the crap in crap out mantra, why is we'll just edit it any better than we'll fix it in the mix. I don't know, maybe I'm just lazy. Yeah, that's probably it. I don't see it that way at all.

Speaker 3 (01:25:07):

Here's the thing. I mean, at the end of the day, if the mix sucks, guess who gets blamed? The mixer. Not the fact that the band was shit or it was recorded like shit, or anybody else downstream of the mixer did a crappy job. If it sounds like crap, it's always, dude, that mix sucks. Well, maybe the mix doesn't suck. It could be a stroke of genius. You don't know what the raw is that the mixer got and you'll never know because all you'll hear is the final product. So that's the thing about mixes is that sometimes it's really just not fair because people don't know what you're getting. And it's really frustrating because you have to still compete with the A-list guy and you may have a D-list or an F list recording, and you still have to get it up to at least a B or a b plus, no matter how terrible it is because your name is going on it. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:25:49):

I think that that attitude is totally self-destructive. Why should you as a mixer producer, take the heat for a musician who doesn't have their shit together?

Speaker 2 (01:26:01):

Yeah, and I am curious if you ever get, I know you probably do some external editing jobs that you didn't record or engineer or produce yourself. Do you get stuff where you're just like, wow, this is basically impossible?

Speaker 5 (01:26:14):

Yeah, it happens.

Speaker 2 (01:26:16):

And are you expected to fix it? Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:26:18):

And usually I could do it with enough time and effort and misery.

Speaker 2 (01:26:23):

Isn't that crazy though, how everything has changed to be like that?

Speaker 5 (01:26:27):

Yeah. I mean, it'd be nice if we could just do live takes of every band and not edit anything, but that's the job.

Speaker 4 (01:26:34):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like you are lucky enough to get to the point where you can choose all your own clients and you just choose the best of the best musicians then awesome. Good job. But to my understanding, even the dudes I know who do the A-list of the A-list have to deal with unprepared musicians and crappy takes and all that. So you can say, well, it's the musician's fault. I'm just going to, it's their fault. Fuck it. But yeah, you can say that, but you probably won't be working for too long.

Speaker 3 (01:27:13):

I've got a term for this that I like to use. It's called Coffee Shop Bullshit. It's great to be a purist and have all these high ideals and stuff when you're sitting in the coffee shop, unemployed, debating with your friends about how shit should be. But if you want to have a job and you want to do this and do it for a living, and you want to be cut out for this and be competitive because yes, we work in a market where there's competition, you got to suck it up and kind of sometimes put some of your ideals aside. I mean, yeah, you can try to change things, but reality is you got to put food on the table first, and the need to eat is greater than the need to actualize. Maslow figured that out a long time ago.

Speaker 2 (01:27:49):

That's great. I love that coffee

Speaker 3 (01:27:51):

Shop bullshit,

Speaker 4 (01:27:53):

But when have you guys ever been like, oh, we'll just edit it, blah, blah, blah. The only time that I've ever taken that approach of the way he's referring to, we'll just edit it, is if I know that the musician is so bad that

Speaker 3 (01:28:10):

It's faster to edit than to get it right. Yes.

Speaker 4 (01:28:12):

However, my first instinct is to always see if there's somebody else who can play it better. But if that can't happen, like say the band is going to fire me for getting a session musician, they totally suck. Or there are no session musicians they can afford, nobody else can do it. If it is faster and better to just edit it, then awesome. Or program it, then cool. But it's never just lazy, like, oh, this guy kind of sucks. It takes kind of suck. Oh, we'll just edit it, whatever. It's totally not like that at all. It's more just salvaging a bad situation. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:28:47):

I think the more proactive you are on the front end with those kind of situations, the better it's going to turn out. I mean, if you do the first song with a drummer and it's not happening, it's not happening. And you need to call it.

Speaker 4 (01:28:59):

Yeah. If you can though, I have had that backfire on me before, but I still stand by the decision to do whatever you can to improve the quality of the takes. And sometimes the guy is not the guy. Anybody else have anything to say on that topic? Coffee

Speaker 3 (01:29:19):

Shop bullshit.

Speaker 4 (01:29:20):

Coffee shop. Bullshit. That's a great term, man. Actually,

Speaker 3 (01:29:24):

I love it. It gets me by a lot of stupid opinions that I see where I'm like, that's great, but let's talk about reality now.

Speaker 4 (01:29:30):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:29:31):

What do you mean, blah, blah, blah. Well save that shit for the coffee shop. No one cares here. This is the real world.

Speaker 4 (01:29:37):

Alright, well, John, thank you so much for coming on and talking, recording and editing, and career advice with us.

Speaker 5 (01:29:46):

Thank you guys.

Speaker 3 (01:29:47):

I had a blast. Yeah, you've been great. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:29:48):

Yeah. Well just thanks for taking the time to talk to us today and appreciate your insight and your perspective on everything, and we'd love to have you back. We didn't get to talk a lot about some of your involvement in assisting engineering on stuff like Ka Perry and Nelly and Rick Ross, and I think that'd be really dope to come back to. So we'd love to have you back if you'd be on. Awesome.

Speaker 5 (01:30:12):

I would love to come back. Excellent. And I can nerd out about stuff for as long as you want me to. Cool.

Speaker 2 (01:30:16):

Thanks a lot. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (01:30:17):

Alright guys.

Speaker 1 (01:30:18):

Talk to you soon, John. Take it easy. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is brought to you by Creative Live, the world's best online classroom for creative professionals with classes on songwriting, engineering, mixing, and mastering. Go to creative live.com/audio to start learning now. This month of the podcast is also brought to you by Slate Digital, making the finest quality software and hardware products specializing in precise analog modeling of classic studio gear. Go to www.slatedigital.com to revolutionize your mix. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is also brought to you by Focal Professional, designing, developing and manufacturing high fidelity lab speakers and drivers for over 30 years. Go to focal professional.com to find out more. To ask us questions, suggest topics and interact. Visit urm academy.com and subscribe today.