JOEL WANASEK: Mixing 500+ songs a year, pricing your services, and the Righteous Vendetta drum sound

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by two notes. Audio Engineering two notes is a leader in the market for load box cabinet, and mic simulators garner the days of having ISO rooms or having to record an amp at ear bleeding volumes to capture that magic tone. The torpedo live reload and studio allow you to crank your amp up as loud as you want, but record silently. Check out www do two-node.com for more info. And now your host, Joel

Speaker 2 (00:34):

Wanasek. Hey, hey, hey, how's everybody doing? This is your host, Joel Wanasek, and we are back with another episode of Dear Joel here on the Unstoppable Recording Machine podcast. And wow, is it great to be back. I've been on a mini hiatus here on the podcast. I've been so busy doing some really exciting and awesome projects that I'm going to tell you guys about here in a little bit that I quite haven't had time to do things like Get on the mic and have fun and hang out with Al and Joey as much as I'd like to. So that being said, if you got questions, you can always submit 'em to Joel at urm Academy. As this is a Dear Joel episode, I will be answering your questions and throwing in a little bit of my own nonsense rants, sense of humor and having a little bit of fun hanging out with you guys and just talking the talk and chatting stuff.

(01:21):

So if you want to submit questions, it's Joel at URM Academy. One more time with the subject line Dear Joel, and you ask it and I will answer your question. So in the meantime, I've got a couple of things here that I want to lead off. So excuse my need to do some preamble, but I always like doing this stuff and just ranting about certain topics and things like that, and you guys seem to be giving good feedback. So if you hate it, let me know. If you love it, let me know and we'll keep doing it. So anyways, I've got three things I want to cover and I want to talk about. The first thing is I think it's really important to have a good sense of humor when you're doing this for a living. So if you're a producer or a tracking engineer or if you are working with physical clients in a recording studio session and setting, you need to be a really, really entertaining and dynamic person and being audio guys, like a lot of us that does not come natural for.

(02:13):

I'll tell you guys, if I can do it, you can do it because I used to be the most socially awkward person, still am to some degree, but the most introverted, socially awkward, weird, doesn't like to talk to people, just kind of sat maybe said 10 total words out loud in high school kind of person, just really a hermit. So for me, talking to people, being entertaining, having lots of energy and charisma and things like that was not something that came naturally to me. It was something that I really, really struggled with a lot. And I'll tell you, anything in life, you need to sit down and make a conscious effort to get good at it and break out of your shell and your mold and push your limits of what you think is possible. Because most of the time the only thing really holding us back is fear.

(02:56):

We're afraid of whatever. Maybe we'll be judged or we'll say something stupid or we'll embarrass ourselves or we'll make a fool out of ourselves. Well, I got to tell you, it doesn't matter. Seriously, it doesn't matter in a way, in this day and age, you got to be able to say some things that are going to piss some people off and be controversial as well as do some things that you aren't going to embarrass yourself. You're going to say dumb things, you're going to regret it and I'll tell you it's okay because this is how we learn. This is how we grow. So don't be afraid of that stuff is what I'm saying. If you're really socially awkward or you have a lot of social anxiety around people and you kind of just like hermiting out in the studio and sitting there by yourself and working on music and not interacting with people, it's alright, I've been there.

(03:39):

I understand, I empathize. I'm with you. I understand your plight. I've been there and gotten over it myself. For me, it was really just an issue of one day sitting there at Rock Bottom after some situations that happened in my life and I was sitting there thinking kind of internally blaming myself, and then I realized I'm like, Hey, you know what? Instead of blaming everything else in the world, I'm done blaming. I'm just going to take accountability and accept who I am and I'm going to do something about it because I can't change me or the cards I was given or the personality or any of that stuff. But what I can change is the way I feel about it. I can change the way I think about it and more importantly, other than my attitude, I can change what I do about it. So boom, went out, broke out of my shell, and one thing I really tried to do was develop somewhat of a sense of humor so I could have a good time with people, learn some jokes, things like that.

(04:34):

It's really important if you're a producer sitting in a session to get a good repertoire of jokes and just some on-call stuff that you know is going to make people laugh that you can gauge. You're going to be sitting there with a group of people probably for a long time, let's say 12, 16, et cetera, hours every single day for at least a couple of days. And if you're doing an album, it could be months. If you're going to spend that much time with a group of people, you better learn how to entertain and be funny and lead a conversation and ask good questions and find out what gets people fired up and excited and things like that. It's so important and I think having a sense of humor is also really important in terms of client acquisition. Meaning keeping your clients not only gaining them because you're fun to hang out with, but then keeping them and retaining them for future sessions and making them want to come back because they enjoy working with you.

(05:25):

So if you have a really good sense of humor and you're a lot of fun to work with and you have some really good jokes and you spend a little bit of time researching and just memorizing a few things and putting a couple in your back pocket and you know when to pull out and you can develop a good witty sense of humor where people can say stuff and you can talk a little smack and throw some retorts in there and you can have a good banter and a lot of fun and people respond well to that for the most part in the studio, especially when you're sitting there and it's really intense and everybody's super focused, I feel like a good amount of humor always takes the edge off. So nothing ever diffuses and always remember this never diffuses a really intense, strong argumented spirited part.

(06:07):

Like, dude, that guitar riff sucks. No way, man. I've been working on this riff for two years. This is like my favorite riff I've ever written. Nah man, it can't be in this song. And you come in as the producer and you're like, all right, you're both idiots. Cut this part out, move this here, blah, blah, blah. And the whole band's like, well, I don't know. I'm like, shut up and just try it. So you go through and everybody's all fired up and you're fighting over some stupid guitar part or whatever and some song and everybody's like all intent and all mad and flustered, and then you just crack some total ridiculous joke completely out of left field and everybody just goes, whoa. And then they lose it and the mood is lightened and everybody's having a great time and a lot of fun and they're laughing about it.

(06:43):

And then you've totally changed the intensity and the dynamic and the spirit of the debate in the room. So I'm just saying it's worth it to learn how to be funny, to practice it, to learn some good jokes, to develop a sense of humor, a sense of wittiness, and just learn how to talk to people and practice it so it doesn't come natural to all of us. For me, it's something I've always had to work on and I'm constantly trying to improve at and I still feel like I suck at it, but hey, like I said, you can do it. If I can do it, you can do it. So for you guys out there who are socially awkward and you really struggle with getting out there and you got to learn to step outside of your personality and your natural inclinations and to challenge yourself and to push yourself to that new level of performance and just do what makes you uncomfortable after you make yourself uncomfortable enough, you get very comfortable with it.

(07:35):

If you're pushing yourself outside of your levels of comfort that my friends is when you are succeeding. That being said, have a sense of humor. I want to move on to two things. I've had a really busy two and a half months, I've been working 16 hour days, get in at seven in the morning, give or take work till midnight with a couple hours in between on and off to go do family stuff and help out. And it's just been brutal. Getting up at five 30 in the morning. I'm working till 12 one in the morning and it's just, you do that for a couple of days. You kind of take a day where you come home and you go to bed earlier like nine or 10 and then boom, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. After a month or two months of doing that and maintaining that kind of work schedule and you guys that grind it out, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

(08:21):

You get tired and that point, it's just sheer willpower. So that's kind of how I feel right now because I'm going on a nice long six week vacation coming up here. I'm going to go to the Black Sea in Russia and spend some time not doing this or anything else involving work, turning off my phone and I'm just going to chill out and relax and enjoy life a little bit and hang out and then come back and go super hardcore again. So every time I do this, and this is probably the fifth or sixth time I've taken a really long extended vacation like this, what ends up happening is the amount of work that needs to get done somehow magically all lines up at the same time. No matter how hard you try to plan, I mean I tell everybody, I'm like, Hey guys, six months from now I'm going on vacation.

(09:05):

Nine months from now I'm going on vacation, I'm going to be gone from this to this date. Everybody's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it gets down to the last month and everybody's freaking out because all kinds of crazy stuff happens at the same time. For example, this month I have arguably the two biggest product launches ever that I've ever done all at the same time, which is absolutely crazy and I don't even know how it worked out that way, but somehow it did. We are doing a course here at Unstoppable Recording Machine, our first real full length, complete total package course, not just like a fast track or anything like that for Enhance, but the next level, like an entire system here, which I'll talk about in a second, what it is and why you should care. And we just released a sampler over at Drum Forge.

(09:48):

So before you had to use contact tubes or Drum Forge one library and we turned it into its own standalone plugin and we have the fastest, coolest, most streamlined sampler out there right now. It's crazy. I can click one button and in a second on my computer, it literally loads up the whole bloody thing and that's it. It's like the whole drum kit comes up and it's really sick. So I'm really, really proud of that. It took us two and a half years and an untold amount of resources and money to build this thing, but it's exceeding our expectations and people are really excited about it and I think we've got something really cool. More importantly though is that it's your sampler and I feel like the first company that's doing it this way, meaning we're taking your guys' feedback, your improvements, and we're adding in features and things like that.

(10:34):

So we're going to be putting out an update here in the next week or two with a bunch of user added features and we've got all these ones slotted out and planned. So it's really exciting. We're taking feedback from our community and you guys, the users and we are taking it, we are implementing it, we are improving it, and it's going to be like a living growing thing. So people that have it are going to get free updates and they're just going to be continually supported. So if you're looking for a drum sampler or you want to get rid of your old stale stock sounds that you've been using for years and upgrade to something modern and fresh that's faster, that's got a more intuitive UI that's just all around next generation, check out the news sampler [email protected] would be greatly appreciated. We put a ton of blood, sweat and tears on a level that I feel like most people will never truly understand because they weren't there.

(11:20):

So check it out, appreciate it. Thank you. So something very interesting I want to tell you guys about, I want to tell you kind of like a story here. So something's happening in the music industry right now, and this is the cutting edge here at Unstoppable Recording Machine. And that may sound like a bold statement, but what I'm about to tell you is something you probably have never heard or you may not even know about, but when I tell you it, you're going to kind of have the light bulb go on in your head because a lot of you guys are experiencing it, and if you're not experiencing it, you're going to be experiencing this in the next year or two because this is what's about to happen and be a very, very big thing. So for many years, a lot of people on the top levels and even going down would spend quite a long time mixing a record.

(12:06):

So two months, or sorry, not two months, like a month, three weeks, et cetera. I mean, for example, Al was telling me at Audio Hammer when they would get in a record and they didn't get a month or at least three weeks to mix, they'd be really stressed out and frustrated, what's going on? Why does the band want to mix a whole record in two weeks? Now, on the other side of that equation, there are guys like me out there and there aren't many of us, but this is changing. I'll go in and I can mix a whole record in a couple hours. I think like three and a half hours is my whole world record self world record for mixing an entire album, 10 songs, 50 minutes of music in a single sitting, and then I mix four more singles that day. So think about that for a second.

(12:50):

A lot of big records that we did, for example, I feel like Joey and I did Attila in about two days flat, including revisions and everything like that. So think about that for a second. A lot of records that I've been doing and have been involved with get mixed in one to three days, and I usually don't spend more than 45 minutes at maximum on a song mixing unless it's something really custom and I'm really overthinking it. So my entire life, I've built this system of being able to mix over 500 songs a year and just absolutely take my time and scale it to a level that I feel like is absolutely insane. I've optimized every single second and possible thing that can be optimized down to a science. And this has been my modus operandi for quite a few times. I've had many, many years where I've mixed over 500 songs and it's been really, really exciting for us because we've really been able to just shotgun out so many bands and put out so many releases.

(13:53):

And it's crazy to me when I talk to my friends and they're like, yeah, I spent about two or three days mixing a song. I'm like two or three days mixing a song. I'm like, dude, I mix a whole record in that time and I don't feel like I'm sacrificing quality or not doing some of the best work in my life. And they look at me like I'm crazy up until recently. Now this is what's changing and this is why this is the cutting edge. And like I said, a lot of people don't even know that this is happening, but this is just an observation. So we've got this thing called Nail the Mix and we've got all these really awesome producers and now I'm friends with all these cool producers and people and we know all this stuff and we talk to each other and we nerd out and just chat amongst ourselves.

(14:31):

And we've noticed a trend that's starting to emerge here in the last couple of months from talking to a lot of different things, or sorry, different producers and mixers and et cetera. And that trend is that people are forced to mix at the top levels much faster than ever before. So the amount of time you get to turn in a record is gone way down. They want the same quality results and you're getting paid less money. So you're sitting there as a mixer and you're like, okay, well I'm going to make it up on volume so if I can get a little bit less per track, but I can mix five more songs in a day, I mean holy cows, you know what I mean? That adds up to huge, huge, huge dollars at the end of the day. So this is kind of becoming the norm now.

(15:11):

Now what's cool is I feel like we just had that nailed the mix with Billy Ducker who is amazing and one of our good friends, and Billy was cool. I feel like he blew a lot of people's minds because he showed him his template system and how he just knocked out a bunch of songs and nailed the mix and it really blew a lot of people's minds. They were like, holy crap templates, I just want to say are a small part of what makes you able to mix the insane amount of songs. A guy like me or Billy or Crystal Lord Alger, guys that do really high volume mixing do, like I said, there's not many of us, but this is changing very fast. Like I said, this is the cutting edge. Literally, I probably am the first person that has ever told you this, and right here at Unstoppable Recording Machine, you are getting that information and you're not getting it from anywhere else because no one says this even crossed anybody's mind yet.

(15:57):

But this is what is happening right now and the writing is on the wall, and if you're paying attention and you're listening like we are and you're observing astutely, you're seeing this happen mean, and it's not just mixing, it's all the way down to things like editing. I mean, I remember when a lot of people online would talk about spending two or three hours to trigger up drums and now it's like people get pissed if it takes more than 20 to 30 minutes to trigger up a song. So think about that for a second. A lot of trends are changing here and we are working faster than ever, and now the question is for you, how are you going to not get left behind? How are you going to adapt? How are you going to keep up? How are you going to take a system regardless of the amount of work you had?

(16:38):

It doesn't matter if you have five clients or 500 clients, that's irrelevant. How are you going to take and build a system of optimization that's going to allow you to take any crazy amount of workload, any crazy amount of stress or clients problems and mixed notes and crazy situations, the craziest things you can ever think of last minute deadlines and changes? How are you going to create a system that allows you to plow through anything that's thrown at you and spit it out? It's not even a problem, and just absolutely crush day after day after day after day, like an efficient machine and kill the game. That's the real question and that my friends is what we've been working on here at Unstoppable Recording Machine for so long and so hard is we have this course called Speed Mixing, which is how to mix over 500 songs a year and it's so much, it's an entire freaking system.

(17:32):

It's like for those of you who have ever played a Dungeons and Dragons board game allowed me to be a total nerd here. You open it up or any board game, you get the instruction manual and you get all the supplements and the cards that come with it. It's like an entire system. You got the little plastic miniatures and the dye and the rules and the rule cards and the hero cards and the gold pieces and the damaged tokens. This is kind of like that. So we've sat down and we've built a totally full and comprehensive course that's an entire system that's going to make you guys and absolute monsters in the studio. It's going to give you such an advantage. And like I said, you are going to be on the cutting edge while everybody else is following behind wondering what the hell is happening and why they're getting left behind.

(18:17):

You are not because you are here, you are on the edge and you are going to have access to this information and this information is an entire culmination of my life's work, meaning I have spent my entire freaking adult life, I've given up my twenties and half of my damn thirties building this system and refining it to the point where we could just dominate on such a high level and do it consistently every day, all day, no matter what anybody threw at us. And it's been refined and refined and refined. And now that we're sitting here on the education side a little bit, I'm just like, well, I know how to do this. Maybe we should share it with the world because it's kind of like it helps me right now and it helps my assistant Joe, and it's great for us, but why not share it with people?

(19:03):

Why not give people the same tools? Because like I said, it doesn't matter if you have five clients or a hundred million clients, right? That's a lot of clients. Can anybody mix a hundred million songs? That'll be the next challenge. It doesn't matter. What matters is that are you able to build a system that allows you to succeed and do things faster and more effective and efficiently than you've ever done before? And as a result, you'll be able to make more money or if you were trying to get better at if that point in your career, it'll allow you to train harder and get better much faster so you'll be able to make more money, you'll be able to train harder and get better much faster than a lot of people, and you'll have a lot more free time to actually go and have a life.

(19:47):

So not everybody wants to work crazy hours. Some people are not crazy mentally messed up people that are just overly ambitious and they just want to go in, work an eight hour day, come home, relax, sit down, drink their beer and watch the game, and that's awesome. So if you're one of those people, this is going to give you a lot more control over your life. This is going to give you less time in the studio working and stressing out with whatever clients and band you're working with or artists and more time to do what you want to do. And if this is what you want to do, then you can study more, you can learn more, you can read more, you can practice more. You can go out and spend more time getting new clients into your studio and growing your business. You can do a lot of things with all this extra time.

(20:30):

So I'm going to show you guys how to do all that, keep a look out for it. It's going to be opening up here, and I think the next, well, it depends on what day this episode comes out, but towards the end of the month, like the last week. So save up your pennies. You're going to need 'em. Guys, this is going to be a full standalone, comprehensive course. It's available for everybody. This is not something that just enhance people get or nail the mix subscribers. Anybody can get this, but please take the time to check this out because even if you follow, let's just say 15% of the advice in this course and do nothing, even though there's a huge part of this course that is extremely actionable and we have all these challenges and all this awesome stuff that's going to be implemented, that's going to make you get better, but let's just say you ignore all that crap and you just watch the damn videos and throw everything else out and don't pay attention to anything else, it's going to make you much better.

(21:18):

And the amount of money that you'll return on your investment, if you go in and even apply a couple of the small tweaks that are made in this course, it's going to pay massive dividends in your lifestyle, your career, your finances, your free time, and how you feel even at the bottom level, just like your confidence about how you can get in and you can just crush a mix and not be afraid. So you guys keep on the lookout for that. So I've talked about that enough. Sorry, I get amped up and super excited. I'm really passionate about this and I can't wait to share it with you guys. Oh wait, I'm sorry. I totally forgot. One more important thing. I need to satisfy the FTC requirements. So I just want to say that the results I'm telling you are not typical, nor are they guaranteed.

(22:02):

I don't know you. I don't know your work ethic, where you're starting from, how talented you are or if you're even going to try. The results I described are my own, and I know that with a hardcore application of the principles I teach, results like mine are possible. Now I'm going to get to answering your questions. All right, our first question is from Maxim. Dear Joel, your production and hustle are always no small time, but your arms are still pretty small time. When are you going to go pump some weights with your new Belgian buddy Maxi in regards from Belgium? Well, Maxim, I really only have one question for you. Do you even lift? Our next question comes from Ben. Hey Joel. I'm still in my infancy as far as learning to mix and I obsess over it every single day. My problem is that my day job is a traveling gig while I'm in hotels every week and rarely have time to be home at a decent setup, I use my MacBook Pro and a pair of headphones on the road, but I fear that I'm not going to be progressing properly because of this.

(23:05):

Any advice for a road rig that's decent and portable or is this one of those things that I just need to find a way to get back home? Ben, while Ben, that's a really, really good question, obviously, because if you're traveling a lot and it's paying the bills right now, it's really important to keep your job probably. So I would say that mixing on headphones while not the optimal ideal situation, I'm guessing you're in a lot of hotel rooms. So what you could do, and I think you should do is you should go out and try to find a small pair of portable speakers that are not necessarily loud. You don't need to rock music super loud, but I mean, I've been in hotel rooms with Joey, for example, when we were in Nashville and we were rocking dubstep super loud and working on a plug and launch and 1130 at night, no one seemed to care.

(23:54):

So you can get a little bit of volume going as long as you don't have a subwoofer, but try to find a nice portable pair of monitors that you can take with you. And I know there's some out there, there's a particular brand type that comes to mind, and I can't remember the name, but I'm sure there's something out there like some mini monitors or something. But just get something you can throw in a suitcase that you're not going to damage, that you can take a little bit of heat, and I feel like that combined with some headphones and just referencing back and forth is going to be the best you're able to do in that situation. So what's most important is not necessarily what you're listening on, but as long as you're doing it every day and you're training it because you're going to get better, you're going to learn to hear better and different.

(24:31):

You're going to acquire skills. And if you have a nice portable rig and maybe even a second pair of headphones that you can listen to, like I said, like a small set of speakers or even a boombox that you could bring out, you can hear your mix on a couple of different systems. So when you actually go home and you work on the big boy toys, you're going to be getting better and you're going to be getting better because you're out there every day doing it. So I think for you right now, the solution is definitely to find a pair of speakers that are going to allow you to do what you need to do without pumping out volumes that are so insane that are absolutely going to murder all the rooms next to you. As for low end, which is going to be the hardest thing to reference, again, you're probably better on headphones, but if you're EQing guitars and vocals and things like that, or any type of mid-range instrument, in my opinion, you're going to get much better and more realistic clarity on even a boombox or anything where you can actually hear something coming out of some speakers.

(25:29):

So I would do that, Ben. Good luck. Hopefully it works out, man. Alright, next question. Hey Joel, could you talk about the drums on righteous vendettas, the fire inside and defiance albums where they reel or programmed? They sound really good, John. Alright, John, this is going to be interesting because this is a good proof that you can record something in a 10 by 11 room with carpet and have crappy dimensions and hardly any trapping and still get a sound if you know how to place your mics and optimize your room for the best possible performance and acoustics you can get out of it. So that particular record I use my own samples that I've taken from a lot of different sessions. For example, the Toms on that record were sampled directly off the kit in that room and we employed a couple of different techniques and tactics to get them to sound that way.

(26:21):

The first thing is we kind of, me and Joe kind of came up with this cool thing, which we've implemented many times since in drum forge, but on the Toms, I like to put a 4 21 on the direct. And given that the room is small, you're losing some of the depth in the space because the 4 21 has a lot of click and a lot of bottom and a lot of punch to it. So we came in with a stellar audio CM five, or maybe it was a CM six, CM five, and that's kind of like a nice high end. I think it's kind of like a C 12 or something like that where the CM six is more like a U 47, but it's basically a nice recreation of one of those really high-end vintage mics and it's a really great sounding microphone under a thousand dollars.

(27:00):

It's really, really nice sounding. And we take that microphone and we placed it three feet above the Tom. So we would then move the transient of it when we were taking the samples to be perfectly phase accurate and aligned with the 4 21 Tom. So we did something that you couldn't do in an actual recording because it would mess up all your symbols and all your bleed. So we did the samples and we took that microphone, which was three feet up and knocked it in. It was a direct mic, and then we were able to blend it and that was able to add a ton of depth and air to those Toms and not just give you that 4 21 punch and click. So that was where we pioneered that process, which we've been using on drum forges, which for us is one of our secret weapons in ways that we get really cool and interesting Tom sounds because it just makes it sound more like a drum and thus like a 4 21 clicking, snapping thunderous thing.

(27:49):

So we did that, but we also set up some room mics, two feet back from the kit room mics in a room that the size the kit barely even fits in, but as far back as we could. And we took those and crushed those through some stressors and got them to sound pretty big and we were able to take that bottom end and EQ them intelligently and build those toms up and get a pretty damn thunderous drum sound in there that we were able to use the positive attributes of the room and place the mics in certain parts of corners where there's base buildup and things like that to get all of that low end clarity and punch and get something that sounded pretty thunderous. So when defiance kicks in, it has those really big Toms, and we did that in a little Mickey Mouse, small sandbox, small time pizza shuttle level room.

(28:38):

It wasn't a nice, awesome killer drum room. So I think the kick drum and the snare drum were blends of samples that we took off his kit with maybe some other stuff that I'd done. But then the symbols are straight off the room in a space pair maybe. I think we used, I want to say some reverb on them to simulate some space. Probably something like lexicon or one of the impulse response, like IR one from waves is pretty good and try to get more of a bigger room and basically lie to people sonically and when they hear it, it sounds like it's cut and done in a bigger room than it actually was. So the drums are done in a really small little box and they don't sound like it too much. I mean they're tight, but at the same time they've got some characters.

(29:23):

So it's a really interesting sound and it's kind of a unique one. So yeah, very interesting. I haven't even thought about that album in years, so glad somebody thinks it sounds cool. So alright, we'll move on to the next question. Hey Joel, first off, love what you guys are doing. My question is, what techniques do you like to use to differentiate parts in a song? I've heard about changing the tempo a few beats per minute and instruments having different volumes, but are there other production techniques or songwriting tips that you may have that may not seem so obvious but can really drive a song? Thanks Tom. Well, Tom, this is a great question and there's a ton to talk about, and I'm a pop rock kind of dude, so I'm always going to come from the premise and the prism and the direction and mindset of I'm here to sell records and I'm here.

(30:14):

Well, does anybody sell records anymore? Fine, I'm here to get people to click on streams or click on that YouTube video and get that radio thing. So I'm always going to be coming from that sort of view. So first and foremost, in my opinion, in my experience, a great song is like a story. So when you're coming in with a song, and I will say this is a disclaimer, like metal songwriting, it's a little bit different because it's not quite as dynamic. It's very flat. You always have heavy guitars and drums and bass and screaming and all that crap, and not every genre of metal is super dynamic and has a lot of song movement and things like that. So again, let's talk about more rock and pop and songs and stuff you'd hear on the radio and things like that. So it's important to say that a song to me, a great song is like a story.

(31:06):

So if you come in and you and talk blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the whole song is just monotone. For example, if I did the podcast in a monotone tone of voice and I did not change my pitch or tell an interesting story, you would tune out because it would be very boring to listen to. You know what I mean? You got to have a little bit of theatrics when you talk or when you play a song for somebody or anything like that. So you have to really think about that as a producer or a songwriter. So when you're going in, if it starts out huge and then stays huge, you can't get any huger, you can't get any bigger. So just like a good movie, maybe it starts out with a great action scene or maybe it starts out really slow and does character development, but at some point in the movie there's going to be a climax that's going to be super exciting and maybe the whole movie leads up to a certain climax or maybe there are several climaxes in the song or the movie where certain things happen and then it calms down.

(32:07):

I'll give you an example. If you're a Game of Thrones fans, usually the first episode of a new season is really exciting, and so it was the second one, then the second, third, fourth kind of calmed down a little bit. Then they give you something really juicy and exciting to give. Everybody all worked up and then they build and build and build, and then those final two episodes are super clima back and super exciting. So writing a song is like that. You got to really think about that. So what techniques and what things can you do to make your songs better? And again, some people like to speed up their choruses a little bit or this or that. I generally like to keep my temples about the same, but I try to build with production and think about the octave spectrum. So if I'm coming into a course, I want to add in a new element, and every time I hear that course I want to add in yet another new element, or I want to change one of the existing elements slightly.

(32:57):

It's kind of like doing what you would expect, but there's the twist, you know what I mean? Doing things like that, you know what I mean? And I think that's kind of a cool way to look at it. So you hit your first chorus and great, you've heard it before and now you're in your second verse. Okay, well what can you add in your second verse that's going to make it more interesting? Aside from new lyrics and maybe some slightly different melodies and harmonies or whatever, a little bit more interesting than the first verse. They've already heard the first verse, so we got to give 'em the second verse and the second verse needs to be just a little bit more interesting and a little bit more dynamic and lead up a little bit more. So you can put stops in it or drops out dropouts or different instruments in different production, or you could change up a riff or you can maybe change the vocal flow or the vocal melody or throw in a little bit of a play around with the hook or something like that, you know what I mean?

(33:46):

So then that chorus comes, well maybe we're going to transition this different, maybe we'll do a double tail or something so it's more climatic when it hits, or maybe it will stop and drop out this time instead of just going into it with a big drum fill, we'll just cut it out for two beats and then all of a sudden boom. So there's lots of different little production type tips that you can do. There's tons of different ways you can approach it, but come up with something to kind of make that second course like more exciting and pop more. So we've already heard the first chorus. Now how can we make the second chorus a little bit bigger and a little bit more interesting, or at least at the same intensity level? And then, alright, so now let's say we've got a bridge in the song.

(34:22):

The bridge is your chance of come in and do something fresh, something interesting, change the chord progression a little bit, change the feel and the vibe of the song to take that story and to go somewhere. Is it going to slow down and get epic and somber? Is it going to get more exciting and climactic and build towards that last chorus? Is it going to go up and bring you up and then bring you down into a really slow dropout part and then come in massive? Or is it going to just keep the same level of intensity and then all a sudden the chorus sits? But before maybe we drop out on the downbeat of the chorus and do some drum hits or some drum stops or something and then play around with that. Then maybe that second chorus as it's building, we're adding ad libs and overdubs and guitar parts and synths and strings or whatever, and then suddenly we decide to modulate the song up a third or a fourth and pivot off the chord progression and use the same thing higher.

(35:08):

For example, Bon Jovi living on a prayer. He does that in the second or the last chorus of the song they modulate and they go up and it's the same chorus, just higher and more exciting and the second time they go through. So there's a lot of different songwriting techniques that you can use if you approach this little techniques aside. If you approach this with the mindset that you are telling a story, you are not writing a song, you're telling a story to the listener and trying to convey a certain emotion and that you have to keep their attention interested and play with it and bring it down and you have to tease them. And it's kind of like if I come in and say, Hey guys, I got this really interesting story. So the other day I was at the post office and the craziest thing happened to me.

(35:49):

So I'm standing in line and this dude comes up and he taps on my shoulder and I turn around and I'm like, now if I just stop the story right there, you want to know what's going to happen? I mean it's kind of unfair. So it's the same thing when you're doing a song. Even I, having just told that story, I feel like unfinished because I just let myself hang even though I had no idea what I was talking about. It's the same kind of principle when you're writing a song. It's like you got to take the listener on an emotional journey and then kind of tease it and then take it away and then give them the resolve that they need, but then maybe throw in the twist or something like that. So just approach everything like you are telling a story. If you are telling a story, Tom, you can't go wrong and just think, how can I make this story more interesting?

(36:32):

They've heard this part before, how can I make it a little bit different? Where's the twist? Where's something that's going to be like, oh, that was cool. Oh wow, that's really awesome. Oh wow, I love that little variation on the melody they threw in. Or oh geez, that chorus Adlib is so awesome. So those are a lot of the techniques that I feel like great songwriters know how to do. They know how to just play with you just a little bit, add a little bit of that ear candy, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Just take the song and just evolve it and keep moving and convey whatever emotion they're trying to convey with that song most effectively. Alright, our next question here is from Franklin. He's asking, I'm well on my way to building my own studio and have even started to offer some lyric video services as well as I'm having to find a balance between promoting and marketing for local clients as well as my online presence as I only realistically have the funds to do one of those.

(37:26):

What would your advice be? Focus on the online promotion and let the local acts do the promotion for me, a word of mouth and make a website for mixing and mastering and a separate page for my work. As an artist, I've been putting in all the hours I can work, but there are times I feel like I'm losing my vision, if that makes any sense at all. So thanks for your time and have a nice day. All right, Franklin, it sounds to me like you've got a lot of stuff on your plate and this is a complicated situation to be in because if you're overwhelmed with a lot of different things, there's something called opportunity cost. And I've talked about this many times on the podcast and opportunity cost. If you're not familiar with it and you should be because I've recommended books to read many times.

(38:10):

But go read Basic Economics by Sowell, it's a fantastic book. Go study some economics, but opportunity cost is basically the cost of the alternative usages of your time. So every single minute you spend, for example, pursuing your own artist career versus pursuing, doing lyric videos and video type stuff versus audio stuff comes at the expense of everything else you could be doing. Every minute you're sitting here drinking a glass of wine at your kitchen table. You could be marketing or hustling or stuff like that. So because it sounds to me like you've got a lot of different irons in the fire and a lot of different things going on, it's important to I believe, to treat it like fishing. So throw out a couple of lines in the water and see what's hitting, and if something starts hitting and is doing really well, then focus on that a little bit harder, right? So do that.

(39:04):

It's hard for me to tell you because I don't know your situation exactly what you should do in terms of should I pursue this, should I spend more time and money on this? I will say this, the best advertising you can ever do is word of mouth. Okay? You can go out, you can spend lots of money marketing and promoting, but at the end of the day when somebody's friend tells 'em that something's sick and they have rapport with that person and they trust that person and they know that that person is going to give them something good, they're going to listen to that person a hundred million times more. Well, I don't know what the exact number, but you do get what I'm saying a lot more than if you were to just see some ad or some advertisement or something like that. So that's important to understand.

(39:43):

So it's very important to do a great job with your clients. They will be your best mouthpiece and your best spokesperson for you and your business. So I would say try to balance it, you know what I mean? It's like don't guess test, put some money over here, test it, put some money over there, test it, put some money over there, test it. And if B is working really well double down on that. So without you really going into more detail, it's hard for me to give you great advice and really in-depth advice on this stuff. But like I said, at the heart of the issue is the fact that you have a lot of things going on. You have to test each thing and see what's working the best and find a way to balance your resources. Now, going back to what I was talking about speed mixing earlier and why it's going to be so cool, that course is not so, I mean it's about mixing and stuff like that, but the skills you're going to learn in that course are going to apply to your life.

(40:40):

And this is a direct problem and thing that you're struggling with right now is you only have so many hours in the day and you're not sure what to focus on and you have to allocate your different time and things like that. So how can you be more efficient and more effective? And this is a very important point to understand because being very efficient at something that's not effective is a total waste of time. For example, you could be the most efficient email organizer on the planet, but at the end of the day, it does not matter how good you are at organizing your email. If it's not helping your career directly and bringing money, then what's the damn point? Now that being said, if you're the most efficient mixer in the world and you have a ton of mixing clients, that is extremely effective, that my friend is how you kill it and destroy and crush the game.

(41:25):

So it's very important for you to find inefficiencies in your process and things that you are not being as effective as you could be. For example, if you're going to do marketing and run an ad or something like that to promote your services, you test several of them at a very low price point and then maybe one of them outperforms everyone and the one that's outperforming you, try to make a couple more like that and then test that. And then after two or three rounds of ads and not having spent a lot of money, you will find an ad that performs well. And then once you find that ad, that is the one you throw a lot of money into. Does that make sense? So it's kind of like the same thing. If you've got a couple of bands that are going out and getting you a lot of business and that are generating good mouth pieces, identify the core characteristics of those artists and try to replicate that amongst your clients.

(42:13):

So look at different markets. So let's just say there's a city that's a big city that's a two hour drive and you maybe pull in one or two bands from there. Find the key players in that city that are going to have the same kind of performance like the bands in your market that if you work with them and can convince them to come in, what's going to happen is then they're going to go out and they're going to convince 10 other bands in your city to come and work with you. So that's just a lot of philosophical stuff that is general advice because like I said, I'd really have to go in detail with you and see exactly where you're struggling, exactly what you're doing and ask you some questions to dig deeper. But hopefully that helps you somewhat to some degree. Alright, our next question comes from Nick.

(42:55):

Dear dark Lord of no small time. I've been at an hourly rate here for a while, but I've also been trying to get, trying out giving clients a per song flat amount for mixes to try and give them a better idea of what it's going to cost for tracking. I'm still doing hourly. I know the end goal is to switch over to a day rate. When you moved to a day rate, how did you go approach telling clients exactly what a full day would give them as far as how much they could expect to be done? For example, if someone booked you to mix their whole album at your day rate, would you just tell them how many days you estimate it would take to finish the song or album for mixing? Or is it still the best to give them the price per song?

(43:50):

Is it easier to charge a day rate just for tracking? And how do you know when it's a good time to think about subcontracting someone else to do editing and tuning vocals for you? Thanks Nick. Alright, Nick, sorry for my absolute butchering of the reading of your question. Reading was never my strong class. I need to improve at that. So alright, there's a couple different things to talk about here when it comes to pricing. First and foremost, if you're working with a lot of wrappers and people like that, that want to come into your studio and work like two to three hours a day, obviously you can't do a day rate. Now, I think if you're working with a band, a reasonable amount of time to do a song, and this is based off many, many years of experience doing this is one to two days for a local band.

(44:37):

And if you're doing something signed, then I feel like it's two to three or four days depending on the budget, the label's going to give you, if not five. So it really just depends on how much money you're getting and what level the client's at. But let's just assume and say we're working on local regional bands that don't have a ton of money, but they need that tender love and care that you're going to give them as a producer and et cetera. So first and foremost, I feel like I would say to a band, Hey, I require a minimum of one day and right day. I mean an eight hour day, we start at eight in the morning and I am done at five o'clock. And in that period of time I take a one hour lunch, which usually ended up being more like a half an hour.

(45:18):

So anything less than that is a credit, a benefit to your time and me being generous. And you tell them that and they're like, okay dude, that's cool. We get it. So if you do that, what's going to happen is you tell the bands, Hey, we get one day per song minimum, but if you really want to be awesome, let's do two. So the bands know how long it's going to take to succeed and as long as you can fulfill it on your end, meaning, and again, I've done so many bands in my life where I've, they've come in on Monday, done five songs and left by Friday at 5:00 PM and I'll kid you not. It's amazing how no matter how crappy the band is or whatever, you just find a way to make it work. Sometimes you got to cut corners here or move things around or prioritize things here or play the instruments here.

(46:03):

But at the end of the day, you get the band out by a certain amount of time. If you charge per song, the band will walk all over you. And I always was just like, give me five days to do five songs and I will give you all the way through mastered if you guys come in prepared. And then maybe book one or two extra days at the end of that just so we have more time if we really get inspired or come up with some cool ideas or something like that. So I think it's a great idea to give somebody a day rate. So I mean, I just started establishing the rules. I didn't have to tell my clients, I said, Hey, listen Nick, I know your band is blah, blah, blah and you want to do three songs, but I'm going to recommend we go and we do like three 10 hour days and it's going to cost this amount of money and I want to do one song a day and focus because we're going to do our best and just sell it to 'em.

(46:45):

Explain to them why it's important for them. And I mean, I would just do it like this if I'm going to pitch it to band and be like, listen dude, do you guys want to be small time and put a shitty EP out that no one cares about that's going to bomb and you're going to waste six months of life playing at some stupid bar wondering why the hell your band hasn't made it yet and you're going to call me and we're going to do this again? Or do you want to come in and do you want to do it right? And do you want to get fricking serious? Do you want me to show you how to be successful and do something that's really awesome? Again, you got to know who you're talking to and what they want to do before you can come into them and lay into them.

(47:15):

Be like that. But you can aggressively sell the band and come in and just be like, listen guys, if you want to get serious two days a song, don't waste my fucking time. I got stuff to do. I'm not going to sit here and do a half-ass job because you guys want to be cheap. Go work for one more month, then come back to my studio because you got five dudes in the band. So if you cut it out per day, per dude, divide everything by five. It's really not that expensive. You're telling me you can't come up with another a hundred or 150 bucks per person and save that over the next month. Don't go to the bar 16 times a month, you know what I mean? And spend $80 a night. Just save a little bit of money, wait an extra month to record, and we can do this for real.

(47:54):

We can put out something that is really going to be awesome, that's going to be your best work ever that people are going to listen to and they're going to get excited about your band because we spent some actual time on it. We didn't sit there and half as it and do a crappy job and screw around and just ram rot it in because you guys wanted to be cheap. We put out something that is the best that you've ever put out and you guys are going to be damn proud of, and you guys are going to be stoked on and it's going to be great. So you can sell the band like that. You get 'em all jacked. I mean, that's really hard to disagree with other than a bunch of bands who just don't give a shit, which is not most people, but you got to play to their egos a little bit and let them understand you're doing this for them.

(48:31):

I mean, you obviously want a little bit more money, but at the same time, you want to do the best damn job you've ever done with the band and you don't want to be stressed out because the drummer sucks. You want the drummer to come in and suck and be like, that's fine. I got an extra two or three days to play with, so I don't care. I'll just get through it and then we'll move on and I'll have extra time to catch up and allocate it to writing a better song with the band or working up better hooks or adding more vocal production or stuff that's really going to make a better song and really make a better album. So it's very important to do that, and I feel like structuring it by day rate and just setting up the rules so the next time somebody comes in, you say, okay, how many songs do you want to do?

(49:05):

Boom, here's how we're going to do it. This is what I think and this is why. So I would just change immediately and stop screwing around with hourly because hourly is a waste of fricking time. Now, when it comes to mixing, I mean if I was working at day rate, I would just mix it for whatever, but if I was hired to just mix, I would charge per song. And again, this is what I'm going to teach you guys with the speed mixing course is it doesn't matter. Okay, I'll give you the artist in the park thing, right? So you go get one of those caricature designers in the park. Then they sit down and they draw a really funny cool picture of you and you're like, oh, that's really awesome. And then they're like, all right, give me a hundred bucks. And you're like, you spent five minutes doing that.

(49:41):

And they're like, yeah, five minutes in, 25 years. So it's kind of like the same thing. It does not matter how fast you mix a song. All that matters is when that client hits play, does it blow them back in their chair and do they go, holy crap, this sounds sick. If it does that and you do that, it doesn't matter how long you spent doing it. So if you can take your clients and get 'em in a position where you can surprise them with your mix and blow 'em back, you don't have to spend a lot of time mixing and you can sit back and optimize everything with this system. I'm going to teach you guys how to do all the way from client's interaction to preparation and optimizing that and every single little part of your stuff to philosophical things, to optimizing your execution, and just like the whole nine yards, it's fully encompassed.

(50:30):

So being able to take that sort of information and that sort of knowledge, you can get your mixing time down where you're rocking out a song in like 40 minutes and doing a kick ass job and absolutely working at your peak, the best that you've ever put out. And when you can get to that level and you can refine your stuff, I mean, dude, you can just be deadly. So you can charge whatever you want per song. And if you're getting even on the low end, let's say you're getting $250 a mix, but you can mix four to 10 songs in a day, dude, you're going to be killing it. You do that every day for a couple of months that turns into a serious fricking paycheck. You know what I mean? And then as you get more expensive and go up and you're getting 500, 7 50, a thousand bucks a song.

(51:13):

Now imagine what you can do if you can mix 10 songs in two days at a thousand bucks a track. It's like, cool, you just made 10 grand in two days. Think about that for a second. It's totally easy to do, and if you've developed the system and the infrastructure to do that, you're going to be super savage and you're just going to kill it. So Nick, man, you got to really adjust your pricing here. I feel like it's really important. Now in terms of getting somebody to outsource to subcontract, like edit and tuning, the answer is once you switch your price guidelines to how I just recommended, and you've got that flow going, the question is then how much demand do I have? So if you have enough demand and you can say, look, I can take two or three more projects this month, or I could mix 10 more songs this month if I had somebody helping me, then you could sub out all those things.

(52:03):

You can look at the cost of it. It's a simple equation. You just say, okay, how much time am I wasting? Meaning, what's the opportunity cost of the time? If I hired an assistant, here's what the assistant costs, here's the amount of more money that I can make minus the cost of assistant, boom, there's a difference. So having an assistant makes me an extra couple thousand bucks a month. Well, dude, get an assistant or even a couple hundred bucks a month. So you got to weigh those decisions. You've got to think about that stuff. It's super important. And again, I have a whole section on this in speed mixing, of course coming up and some cost calculator tools and some spreadsheets and stuff where you can literally sit down and plug in your data and be like, okay, it makes sense to get an assistant.

(52:45):

No, it doesn't. So long story short adjuster pricing, look at the math, look at the demand and say, Hey, I'm getting pretty busy and I like to take these three projects, but I don't have time. So let me bring in somebody to assist me so they can speed up my workflow by two days a project and now I have an extra six days a month. Now I can take one of those projects and make an extra, let's just say three or $4,000, and then boom, I had to pay the assistant like a total of 500 for the month. And then, all right, we've made an extra 25 to 3,500 bucks. It's win-win. Everybody wins and you're happy and it's great. So I would set it up like that if I you, and that's what I did and where I started going down this whole rabbit hole towards super speed mixing and all that stuff.

(53:33):

Those are some of the strategies at the core in the very beginning that led me to how I operate my business and run it today. Hopefully that helps you, my man. Alright, we've got one last question I'm going to do here today from Yvonne and Yvonne is asking, dear dark Lord of no small time, how should I go about finding a commercial space to build a studio on? Thank you very much. Okay, Yvonne, this is an interesting question. I'm going to throw in a little bit of a different answer in here that's going to make this more comprehensive and in depth. So first thing is to rent or to buy. So here's the question. If you're going to, well, before that, I'll start with this. I think it's important now to keep your overhead down low, and if you want a really great drive room or something, you can source it only if you have a ton of extra money to play with and you just want it because it's cool when I build a drum room and you have the demand because then you can sub out your drum room and rent it and it's really convenient.

(54:30):

But if you see yourself doing a lot of mixing and producing and songwriting and stuff like that, you don't need to own a drum room. But if you're going to be a tracking studio and have a lot of producers come in and flying and work out of it and local guys are going to come in and record out of it and rent it from you, then yeah, maybe it makes sense to build. So if you're not going to be in a position or a place or a certain location for too long or you don't know with a degree of certainty what you're going to be doing in several years from now, then I think in my opinion, it's worth it to rent. For example, I'm renting my office. I have no idea if I'm going to be there in two or three years from now, but I'm happy.

(55:04):

I've got a cool setup, I like it, and everything in there is portable, all my traps, and I can just pick it up and walk out and go, or I can dig in and stay for a while. But either way, it's at a price that's affordable and I'm happy and I like the location and the proximity to my house, and I'm happy that I don't own it because I don't have to clean the damn toilets and screw around with all the bullshit, all the siding fell off the windstorm, now you got to replace it. Or, oh, no, we don't have wifi today. Call up the cable company, don't have to deal with any of that landlord shit. So I like having that freedom. So that's the upside to renting. If you want to buy a place and build, then you better prepare to go long and you're going to need a lot of money to do it.

(55:45):

So in terms of answering your question, how do you go about finding a place? Well, you first answer the question, am I going to rent or am I going to buy? If you're going to rent, it's as simple as looking at commercial spaces, figuring out how much space you need to do what you need to do, and finding a price. So for example, do I need a live room to cut drums or do I just need a vocal booth? Do I just need a single room or maybe a small lounge and a bathroom? A bathroom, definitely as a must do I need a kitchen area? You have to figure out these sorts of things and weigh how much it's going to cost. Okay? So I'm going to get a thousand square feet and I'm going to divide it up like this, and I'm going to have a tracking booth and a small drum booth.

(56:21):

And then how much is it going to cost? Cost to build out? What are the neighbors, how loud are they going to be? Am I going to have to deal with if I play drums at two in the afternoon, is the printing press next door? The machine's going to end up in my drum bikes, whereas the florist next door going to call the police and get pissed. I'm constantly jamming really loud guitars. So you got to come find a place usually out in an industrial park or something like that, is a great place to find a spot and build out a little studio because you can make a lot of noise and it's a little bit off the heavy major freeways and things like that. So you don't have massive trucks coming through and planes flying over and well, maybe, I guess planes aren't dependent on that, but you know what I mean, find a place that's a little bit quieter is what I'm saying.

(57:06):

Some people like to build in houses and things like that. That can be cool too, except I'm very against working out of the same place that you live because it will consume your damn life. So there's a lot of different places that you can do in a lot of things that you need to take into consideration. If you want to buy, obviously you have to figure out if you're going to buy something existing and modify it or you're going to find property and then you're going to build from scratch. So you're going to build a steel building or a concrete building. How much is electric going to cost? How long is the timetable going to be? How much money am I going to have to pay in property taxes and all that fun stuff. So I just want to say those are all questions that I cannot answer for you, that you need to answer for yourself.

(57:43):

So Yvonne, hopefully that helps and hopefully you make the right decision. Alright, with that guys, I'm going to wrap it up here tonight at Unstoppable Recording Machine. Thank you so much for listening and hanging out. It's always a pleasure, love doing this. If you've got questions, shoot me an email. It's Joel at URM Academy and as always, stay tuned. We have this really amazing course coming up here in about a week, week and a half on speed mixing. It's going to really change a lot of your workflows and your lives. I'm so excited to share this with you guys. I can't talk about it enough. There'll be plenty more opportunities to do that. So I just want to say keep an eye out. It might be worth checking out for you. In the meantime, if you want to go check out our brand new drum sampler that is super savage and awesome, head over to drum forge.com. So thank you again everybody for listening and hanging out, and I will see you next time. But the most important thing now here on this podcast is podcast theme go. The

Speaker 1 (58:48):

Unstoppable Recording Machine podcast is brought to you by two notes. Audio Engineering two notes is a leader in the market for load box cabinet and mic simulators. Gone are the days of having iso rooms or having to record an amp at ear bleeding volumes To capture that magic tone, the torpedo Live reload and studio allow you to crank your amp up as loud as you want, but record silently. Check out www.two-notes.com for more info. To ask us questions, make suggestions and interact. Visit nail the mix.com/podcast and subscribe today.