KURT BALLOU: Capturing Real Performances, Committing to Sounds, The Problem with Re-amping

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. The Unstoppable Recording Machine podcast is also brought to you by Ernie Ball, the world's premier manufacturer of guitar strings, bass strings, and accessories. And now your host Joey Sturgis, Joel Wanasek and Eyal Levi.

Speaker 2 (00:00:25):

Hey, how's going everybody? Good. You remember that time that we were about to podcast and I hid the last Red Bull for myself so that I would have it for the podcast and then I couldn't find it.

Speaker 3 (00:00:38):

Was that today?

Speaker 2 (00:00:40):

Yeah. Wait,

Speaker 3 (00:00:42):

I'm new to this story.

Speaker 2 (00:00:44):

No, I found it, but we were just talking about how you were tired. Dude, you got to step into the liquid meth game.

Speaker 4 (00:00:51):

Oh my God, man. Okay. This weekend I was staying, I mean, I normally go to bed at nine o'clock and I was staying up till like two 30 in the morning mixing, and I was drinking like five or six cups of coffee. Usually one is enough for me to be wired because I don't drink coffee, so I'm running rough. It sucks.

Speaker 3 (00:01:11):

I'm on the espresso game, man. I got a machine. It's called a Dura, and you just put beans into it and water and then it does the rest. Yeah, it does the rest. So it's

Speaker 4 (00:01:23):

Really great. Comes out like Starbucks and mixes whipped cream and shit in it.

Speaker 2 (00:01:27):

Yeah. That's not coffee. That's cake. Yeah, that's cake. Alright,

Speaker 4 (00:01:32):

Well whatever. I drink tea, so fuck you guys.

Speaker 2 (00:01:35):

Well, does your tea have caffeine?

Speaker 4 (00:01:38):

Yeah, but there's a way to dip the bag for 15 seconds and discard the water if you don't want the caffeine. So you can do it both ways.

Speaker 2 (00:01:46):

What's the point if you're not going to get the caffeine though?

Speaker 4 (00:01:49):

Antioxidants taste, flavor, aroma warm and tingling sensation on your face. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (00:01:57):

I still don't hear what the point is besides the warm tingling sensation on my face. I

Speaker 3 (00:02:03):

Was very much a consumer. He takes stuff and wants the reaction from it.

Speaker 2 (00:02:09):

Yeah, well there's a few things. I don't like the taste of alcohol and I don't drink very often, but I always preferred liquor over beer back when I was touring and

Speaker 4 (00:02:23):

Hey, we can't be friends anymore. I can't drink hard liquor. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (00:02:26):

Well, I just figure what's the point of getting full and tired when you're trying to get drunk? So may as well drink some liquor.

Speaker 4 (00:02:34):

Here's

Speaker 2 (00:02:35):

The deal. It works.

Speaker 4 (00:02:36):

I'll explain it to you like this. I hated beer too until I went to college, but in Wisconsin, we drink beer different than the rest of the world. Drinks beer, see the rest of the world, everybody sips it and they enjoy it Over a half an hour, Wisconsin, we're like, fuck that. We shotgun. So we get the beer and then you look over at us a minute later and it's already gone and they're like, what happened to the beer? And you're already on your third one, so we just get it done. So we treat beer like it's liquor here, but that's just the culture of drinking that we have.

Speaker 2 (00:03:05):

But I feel like having to take eight of those bottles or cans worth where you could just have four or five shots and be good and not be weighed down, I dunno. Makes you feel I agree with that. It makes it feel bloy

Speaker 4 (00:03:18):

More of a tradition. I just grew up that way doing it, meaning once I hit that age, and I don't know, okay, here's the deal. My first time drinking hard liquor when I was like 16, I had nine double shots of brandy and I picked 87 times. I came home, my old man was like, oh yeah, boy, you'll learn. I'm like, damnit, this sucks. And he's like, oh, you got rotten gut. And I hung over the toilet all day, so I can't drink liquor after that. That ruined liquor for me for my entire life. So now I have to substitute and I've turned into a whio. So I

Speaker 3 (00:03:48):

Hung my wine. I had a similar experience as well, man, when I was 15 or whatever and I got drunk off beer for the first time, it made me really nauseous. And I remember I was at this dude's house and it was a party and I was kind of laying in his bed and someone in another room kept yelling the word cheesecake for some reason.

Speaker 5 (00:04:14):

Cheesecake?

Speaker 3 (00:04:15):

Yeah. I dunno why. And every time I heard them say cheesecake, it made me want to throw up

Speaker 2 (00:04:20):

And

Speaker 3 (00:04:20):

They just kept doing it over and over. And then that was enough to scar me for about 10 years. So I pretty much, I wouldn't drink from 15 to like 26 or 27 I think it was. And then finally it cracked.

Speaker 2 (00:04:33):

That's how I feel about Robitussin and cough syrup.

Speaker 4 (00:04:36):

Robitussin, if you're getting drunk off Robitussin, man. Man, that

Speaker 2 (00:04:40):

Stuff used to make you trip.

Speaker 4 (00:04:42):

That's like 12-year-old shit.

Speaker 2 (00:04:44):

Well, it was a long time ago when I drank it.

Speaker 3 (00:04:50):

Well, that's the scissor or whatever. Now

Speaker 2 (00:04:54):

Maybe that's

Speaker 3 (00:04:55):

What they do. They take, I don't know if it's Robitussin, but it's some kind of cough syrup mixed with some kind of alcohol. And that's like the scissor that everybody drinks gets fucked up on.

Speaker 2 (00:05:05):

Oh, that's like, from what I understand, that's liquid painkillers that they mix with Sprite,

(00:05:11):

But Robitussin used to have this property to it that if you drank enough it would make you trip. But I mean you had to drink two bottles of that shit. Oh god. Bottles of pot. I mean you would really trip though It wasn't a joke. It was definitely legit as far as that goes. However, so disgusting. And so it's been years and years and years and years since I ever considered doing something like that. But I will never drink cough syrup again. I just can't. It fucking grosses me out. Don't do drugs, kids. Yeah, if you want to be able to treat your sore throat with cough syrup, don't do drugs. So speaking of which, somebody that I don't think does drugs but whose records sound really amazing, how's that for a, that's

Speaker 4 (00:06:08):

A great transition.

Speaker 2 (00:06:08):

Great transition. Yeah, I

Speaker 4 (00:06:10):

Thought it was drug month.

Speaker 2 (00:06:12):

It's set as guitar month, the same thing. Well, we've got Kurt Ballou with us today who is one of my production and guitar heroes and I say guitar because lots of dudes are into the shredder guys. But I always loved what he did just in terms of bringing intensity and noise, artful cool noise to the tables, the guitarists.

Speaker 3 (00:06:39):

Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:06:40):

Yeah. When I first heard converge back in the day, I was like, how is this possibly so brutally just pissed.

Speaker 3 (00:06:52):

It's funny too because I think once we bring him on the air here and the listeners get a chance to hear him speak, he's definitely not an abrasive or aggressive person at all. No, not at all. Which is crazy considering the kind of music that he's really into. And so I think it'll be interesting

Speaker 2 (00:07:10):

Also considering his production ideals. It's funny, I met him last year at Nam and I was expecting to meet a real elitist, abrasive kind of dude and he turned out to be one of the nicest, most thoughtful guys I've met in music. It's interesting how that works. Maybe he gets it out in the music and then he's just chill the rest of the time

Speaker 3 (00:07:37):

Or it is an art at the end of the day. I mean, I think some people kind of want to put punk music or even aggressive music in his category of people who are really angry and mad and have all these emotions they need to get out. But at the end of the day too, there's still an art form to it.

Speaker 2 (00:07:54):

I feel like that a lot of the time. While it may be Sorry, I heard you cut out. I guess we lost somebody. I think we're good. We're good.

Speaker 3 (00:08:06):

Okay. There we go.

Speaker 2 (00:08:08):

Okay, cool. Yeah, I missed whatever you said, but I'm sure it was brilliant. You still there?

Speaker 4 (00:08:13):

Yeah, yeah, I didn't say anything.

Speaker 2 (00:08:15):

Oh, okay, cool. Alright, let's just bring Kurt on and we will kiss his ass to his face instead. Instead of behind his back. Awesome.

Speaker 3 (00:08:24):

Hey, how are you doing, Kurt? Great. How are you guys? Not bad.

Speaker 6 (00:08:28):

Fantastic. Awesome. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 3 (00:08:31):

Yeah, absolutely. We were just actually kissing your ass a little bit before we brought you on.

Speaker 6 (00:08:37):

Nice. I like it.

Speaker 3 (00:08:39):

I guess we decided to kiss your ass to your face now. Sweet. Oh, I talk behind your

Speaker 4 (00:08:45):

Back. We had to sack up a little bit first.

Speaker 6 (00:08:48):

That's fine.

Speaker 3 (00:08:49):

So let's start with your story a little bit and tell us how you got into this, because from what I understand, you're actually a biomedical engineer and I don't even know what that is.

Speaker 6 (00:09:02):

Well, I mean I've played in, actually my band converged. We've been going since I was in high school and I'm 41 now. So I've been playing this kind of music for a long time and the kind of music that we play, there's a bit of a market for it now, but when we started, I mean aside from being a much worse band, there was just really no market for our kind of music at all. So anything that we wanted to do, we had to do ourselves. So I kind of took an interest in four tracking pretty early on and we put out all our own records early on and booked our own shows and did everything DIY not out of the desire to be DIY, but because we had to be because there was just nobody interested in helping us. And eventually we got a little bit of money together to go into some recording studios and start making records, but I always felt really frustrated in the recording studio environment because it wasn't turning out the way that I wanted it to.

(00:10:00):

But I also didn't have the vocabulary to articulate to the engineer. I mean the vision that I had for what things should sound like. So I eventually bought myself a little bit of recording equipment. I started with a half inch eight track and a few mics and a small mixing console and started just making demos just to learn about the recording process so that I could just be more educated when I went into studios to record my own band stuff. And then that just sort of snowballed and friends started asking me to record their band's demos and then later seven inches. And then eventually people I didn't know started calling based on what they had heard friends of mine do in my studio, which I say studio, but it was actually my parents' garage. I started my parents' basement. I mean I think everybody does. And then I'm on my fourth studio now and I've been here for about 12 years. But yeah, it was just like a snowballing natural kind of thing. And it was like I started doing it when I was in college and I was studying aerospace engineering in college and when I graduated I ended up getting a job, basically doing mechanical engineering at a biomedical company and stuff that we worked on. So

Speaker 2 (00:11:12):

You're an actual smart person.

Speaker 6 (00:11:14):

I mean that's debatable, but I worked in a, I mean, okay, so I have a degree in aerospace engineering, which one could argue that I'm a rocket scientist, but wow. Well, here's the deal.

Speaker 4 (00:11:29):

We need a private jet

Speaker 6 (00:11:30):

Made for us. Actually, one of my senior projects was to build an RC plane, not from a kit, but from scratch design a ear foils and all that stuff. It didn't fly so good. So you probably don't want me doing that for you. I think I'm better at making records, but, but anyway, so I got a job doing mechanical engineering for this biomed company and it was the first time in my life that I had any money in my pocket. So that stuff just all went into my studio that I was moonlighting at, and then eventually I was laid off from that company and got a really nice severance package and that was the kick in the ass. I needed to start doing music full time. But yeah, I never set out to do this stuff full time. It was just a love of mine that fortunately snowballed into a career. I wish I had had some formal training, I had never interned with anybody or assisted anybody else. And so I think I learned pretty slowly and that's a blessing and a curse. I think I developed my own style because of it, but I also learned slowly

Speaker 3 (00:12:38):

You have an interesting approach to how you work or how you decide to work with bands. Is that right? From what I understand, you believe if the artist isn't going to play it properly, you shouldn't be recording it.

Speaker 6 (00:12:51):

Yes and no. I mean, I'm sort of malleable. I believe that there's a lot of different aesthetics and ethics involved in music and at the end of the day I want to go to work and be excited about what I'm doing and have fun doing what I do all day as I'm sure everybody does. And that means different things for different people. I'm not really philosophically opposed to any production technique, but for me I enjoy making, I guess what I consider real music, real players, real instruments, things I like recording live if possible. Unfortunately my studio is not really set up for a lot of live tracking. I've done albums where I followed the band on tours, sat on stage next to them while they played, and then their live performances became the album. Things like that are really fun for me and exciting, the immediacy of that type of thing.

Speaker 2 (00:13:50):

You can only pull that off if the band is good, right? I mean you can't just do that with anybody

Speaker 6 (00:13:58):

For sure. Well, lemme just take a step. I'll address that in a second. Lemme just take one step back and just say, I think I'm a few years older than you guys, so I come from the last generation of people who were raised recording on tape. So for me, a lot of the modern things that are done in order to make pristine records just weren't possible back then. So I was raised with a certain kind of aesthetic that didn't use to be a choice, but now is a choice. So that's part of my difference. And also I got my start recording on four tracks. So when you only have four tracks, you really have to commit to things, you have to record things simultaneously. You have to either mic the drums with one mic or you have to mic the drums with a bunch of mics and then mix them together down to one or two tracks.

(00:14:49):

You're not going to multi mic a guitar amp on a four track and then keep the various mics on separate tracks so you can make decisions later. So my whole education in recording was about making decisions in the moment and then sticking with those decisions sort of like life, you come to a crossroads in life, where am I going to have dinner? And then you decide you're going to go to this place and then you meet a girl there and you end up getting married. But if you could, whatever, you could have just easily decided to go eat dinner someplace else and then you could have met somebody else and then ended up dead or who knows?

Speaker 3 (00:15:31):

Well, one of the things we always preach is right now we have so many tools available which give us so many options to do different things to our music and our audio. And one of the things that I got into was analysis paralysis is too many things to be working on and too many things to be tweaking. And so one thing that really sped up my workflow was to start committing, just make something sound cool and then print it to an audio file and delete the original and then just move on.

Speaker 6 (00:16:05):

Yeah, I agree because sometimes it's hard to decide what your guitar overdub sound is going to be if you haven't decided on your guitar rhythm sound. And it is tough to determine what your bass sound is going to be if you haven't determined the tempo of the song yet or so forth. And so each decision is based on what came before it, and if you leave yourself infinite variables at the end, you'll never make a decision about anything.

Speaker 2 (00:16:32):

Absolutely. So do you find that in a way your records are close to mixed before you're done or do they mix themselves as you go along?

Speaker 6 (00:16:41):

I'm pretty heavy handed in mixing, but yeah, I mean the vibe is there. There hasn't been too many times where other people have mixed my recording, so it's tough for me to say what somebody else's take on mixing my recording would be. But yeah, I mean I think that the vibe is pretty much there. Before mixing, let

Speaker 3 (00:17:02):

Me ask you this, because I think the idea of mixing now for our generation is kind of a new idea. I can remember when it was a little bit foreign to reamp in the mixing process and now it's almost assumed, it's almost like, oh yeah, we'll give you the DI's and the

Speaker 4 (00:17:19):

Well all the way to tuning vocals and editing drums and consolidating edits and things like that. Now people think it's all mixing, doing post-production, making stems.

Speaker 6 (00:17:29):

When I mix a record that I didn't record, I very much discouraged that kind of stuff and for several reasons. Number one I feel is though remote mixing is more of a technical craft than a creative craft, sort of like a mastering. When you send your record off to be mastered and the mastery engineer drastically changes it, it's typically off-putting to the band and the engineer, the mix engineer, it's more just optimize this. And I feel like that's because that mastery engineer, and in this case the mix engineer just hasn't spent nearly as much time with the songs as the tracking engineer, producer band, et cetera. So they don't necessarily have quite the same vision of the artistic intent of the song without having been through that whole process. Personally, I'm just kind of not into amps in general just because I feel like there's, as a guitar player, there's a big interaction that happens between me and the sound that I hear coming back from the speakers as I'm recording. So I don't like to, I mean certainly track di once in a while and do reamp things from time to time, but I think of that as more of a safety type of thing and not as something I would do, as a matter of course, I want the players to interact with their tone as they're performing just so they can get the ultimate performance.

Speaker 3 (00:18:58):

And that's how it was designed. I think originally it was designed to be sort of a safety measure or a backup plan, whereas now it kind of became just status quo recorded. Yeah,

Speaker 6 (00:19:12):

Cool. If you're doing it with sims and then the mix tone is just a slight tweak on the sim that you were tracking with, I mean I'm into that, but I guess what I don't like is when people ask me to mix their record and they're not just asking me to mix it, but they're asking me to build the entire production, I feel like that's a little bit out of the range that I would want to do as a mix engineer.

Speaker 3 (00:19:39):

I wish we could live in your world, Kurt, because

Speaker 6 (00:19:41):

So opposite. No, you can. I mean, I try to pick and choose projects that I think will be enjoyable to work on and for me that would make me feel paralyzed to trying to determine for a band without them present what is their sound. I guess that's what I'm always trying to get at with the band, whether I'm recording 'em or mixing 'em is not so much getting them to conform to my idea of what good sound is, but for me to find what it is about them that makes them unique and then help them capture it and to not be present for the guitar sound as a guitar player, I would have a tough time with that. Personally.

Speaker 2 (00:20:24):

A technical question about amping, well, not that technical, but do you feel like there's always something lost in the tone? Yes. Yeah, because I've been playing guitar forever as well, and I always have felt like there's this, I don't know, a little bit of signal loss or something that subtle, but it's definitely,

Speaker 6 (00:20:48):

Have you guys ever just tried playing guitar out of different length cables?

Speaker 2 (00:20:54):

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 6 (00:20:57):

There's been a couple of times I've plugged into guitar amps just to test them with a one or two foot cable and I'm like, whoa, this sounds awesome. So there's a difference just in that, but there's a, okay. Okay, so you guys all play guitar, right? Yes. Well I do. Joey, do you play guitar?

Speaker 3 (00:21:16):

Yeah, I do.

Speaker 6 (00:21:17):

I've seen pictures of you playing guitar.

Speaker 3 (00:21:19):

That absolutely doesn't mean you're doing, yeah, this is something that Al probably just doesn't know about me, but yeah, I do.

Speaker 2 (00:21:27):

Well, I knew that you played guitar in the studio and stuff. I've

Speaker 4 (00:21:30):

Seen him do it in person,

Speaker 2 (00:21:31):

But I didn't know if you consider yourself a guitarist or not.

Speaker 3 (00:21:35):

Yeah, absolutely. My dad actually plays guitar and has basically for his whole life and he teaches guitar as well, so I learned holy

Speaker 2 (00:21:45):

Shit, learn things every day. Yeah, I thought that you were just one of those dudes who is just good at music, so you could pick up the guitar and play some of you wanted to, but I didn't realize that you're a guitarist. That's cool.

Speaker 6 (00:22:01):

You guys are lucky to come from musical families. There was very little music in my family when I was a kid. I wish that I had had more music around when I was a kid.

Speaker 2 (00:22:11):

It's one of the biggest advantages I've had in my life is in my opinion, coming from a musical family. Absolutely.

Speaker 6 (00:22:19):

Anyway, the reason why I asked you guys for your guitar players is I wanted to ask if you feel like you can judge a guitar tone better when you are playing it or when you're listening to somebody else. Play it

Speaker 3 (00:22:30):

For me, I like to take the more objective approach, which is to do it after the fact because I do always feel like if you are sitting down or well, you don't have to be sitting down if you're playing the instrument and you're in the moment, everything feels like it's right, everything feels like it's going good and then you listen back to it and you're like, oh, that wasn't so good. I kind of messed up this part. And I didn't necessarily

Speaker 6 (00:22:57):

Mean about performance, I mean about a tone.

Speaker 3 (00:23:00):

Well, even the tone, I can imagine the other thing that you hear depending on how loud you're listening to the tone is the sound of the pick hitting the strings and that actually adds to the transient of the tone. And then when you hear the tone back, that's not there anymore because that was happening in the room and not through the guitar, cable and just various things. So I think there's definitely two feelings. You have the one feeling, which is what it sounds like while you're playing and the other feeling, which is what it sounds like when it's played back. And I like to judge from the one that's being played back because ultimately that's what other people are going to hear.

Speaker 2 (00:23:36):

I feel the exact same way. I've noticed that there's been lots of times that I fake myself out because I got into the sound in the room while I was playing. And like he said, the pick attack, especially when tracking bass, I've faked myself out the most because the pick attack is so loud that I think that that's part of the tone and it's cutting and awesome and I hear it back and it's not nearly as cool as I thought. So that's definitely happened to me quite a bit. Are you the opposite?

Speaker 6 (00:24:07):

I mean, I think it's important to have both, but I feel as though I can track down a problem faster when I'm playing something where sometimes you're getting a guitar tone with somebody, they're playing guitar and you can tell they're not totally feeling it. Sometimes for me, I can just grab the guitar and play for a second and be like, oh yeah, obviously it's because there's not enough mids or there's something screwy and there's some latency or something you wouldn't notice as an engineer that all of a sudden as soon as you're playing the guitar you're like, oh, okay, there's not enough gain or there's too much woof coming off this guitar. We need to throw an EQ pedal in the chain just to tighten it up or something like that. I feel like I can sort through the problems a lot more quickly when I play it.

Speaker 4 (00:24:49):

Absolutely. From that perspective. That makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 6 (00:24:51):

Yeah, absolutely. So that's sort of going back to your earlier question about can I hear a difference with amps? And usually my very first step when a band says, Hey, here's our DI's and make some amps for us, I'll go out into my live room and I'll get a guitar and I'll try to pick a middle of the road guitar and then line up a bunch of amps and maybe track three or four different amps simultaneously so I have some options and I'll get 'em sounding good, playing them in the room, and then I run the di into 'em and then I'm like, oh, this doesn't sound good. And then sometimes it's just because it didn't sound good to begin with and I couldn't tell because I was playing it, but also a lot of times it's because there's something lost in that sound. Maybe it's just all the cabling, maybe it's the additional circuitry. Maybe they used a terrible, maybe it wasn't a very good sounding guitar to begin with, but yeah, it never sounds the same to me. Although it is nice, especially with bass to have the option to put a multi-band compressor on it or something like that before it gets to the amp. So you actually use bass amps. It's so weird that just recording real instruments is weird for you guys. Well, no, no, that's not me. It's

Speaker 3 (00:26:15):

Not weird for us. It's weird for the common, the state of the game has just been changed for our generation.

Speaker 6 (00:26:24):

I think I have something to say about that that's kind of interesting. So there's a lot of people that are my age that's sort of grew up recording on tape that are really raise their noses to the idea of tracking with amp sims and drum replacement, drum programming and all that kind of stuff. But there was a parallel that happened a few years ago. I'm sure you guys probably read Tape Op, right? Yeah, for years. So back in the early days of tape op, it is primarily been like an indie focused or underground music focused magazine. And the people that read it and created the magazine, you could tell were very diehard analog. They loved Steve Albini and also all the classic seventies recording engineers, the Glenn Johns and stuff like that. And they loved, they worshiped all that kind of stuff. But then there's also, there's an indie aesthetic for analog, but there's also an indie ethic for DIY.

(00:27:28):

And then so at a certain point they started to really embrace and then later prefer digital recording because of how DIY it enabled you to be and how mobile enabled you to be. And I think that the same thing is happening now that virtual instruments have gotten so much better. And I can really get behind that because the whole reason I started recording in the very beginning was to be more DIY. It was like the more you can take control of the creation of your own music, the more invested in it you'll be and how can you possibly be more invested than by having a setup that's portable or sort of self-contained that you can do everything yourself. You're not dependent on a recording studio or booking time with somebody else or anything like that. You can do everything yourself now because all those tools are contained within an environment that you can control. And that's like the ultimate in DIY. So from that perspective, I'm super in favor of all this virtual instrument stuff, but I still totally hate using them for me. But I have great admiration for people that are able to use those tools really well. And I think it is the future and I'm learning more and more about that stuff all the time.

Speaker 2 (00:28:55):

I would always rather prefer to record a real instrument. I just found myself recording in a genre where the playing has to be so technically on that almost nobody can actually do it.

Speaker 6 (00:29:12):

I think that that sort of genre is also extremely competitive, whereas in Indie worlds or hardcore or noise rock, whatever, the kind of shit that I usually do, people I think are a little bit more concerned about their records being unique. And I think that in the sort of slicker metal world, people are, they seem to be very competitive with each other with, you're correct, my record's the loudest, my drummer can do double bass at three 20 bpm, or my drummer can do it at 3 25 or whatever. It's like,

Speaker 4 (00:29:48):

I wish more bands wanted an original sound because I mix a lot of records, Kurt, and I'll tell you that it's my primary focus. And so many times bands come back and they're like, they'll reference the same four or five records that I had mixed and be like, we want it to sound just like this. And you're like, why? You guys are a different band? And they're like, well dude, that's the sound. That's what we want. And I'm like, okay, well, I mean, I don't have a problem doing it. It's money and I'm having fun, but at the same time, I, part of me always really wants to sit down and just make that sound with that band and do something unique and fresh.

Speaker 6 (00:30:21):

Have you guys ever tried to actually duplicate the sound of a record that you've done?

Speaker 2 (00:30:26):

Yeah, it never

Speaker 6 (00:30:27):

Works.

Speaker 2 (00:30:29):

It's so bad. Yeah, it never ever really worked. At least for me, it's never worked out. No.

Speaker 4 (00:30:35):

What do you think, Joey? I think,

Speaker 3 (00:30:36):

Well, I got to go to NRG once when Jay Baumgartner was working with a band, and I love to tell this story. It's really cool. So I was in room A doing vocals or something, and then he was in rooms C or BI think, and he was recording a full band, but I didn't know this. So we were on break, we were on a food break, and I'm just walking around the studio, tons of awesome stuff in there, just looking around and I hear some music coming out of this room. And so I kind of just wandered over there to see what was going on. And there was basically about three or four people in a control room who were all sitting in different chairs just kind of looking at the ground and listening to the music and it sounded great. And I walk in there and I listen to the song and I wait until the song is, well, this song is going along, and all of a sudden I hear sort of a mistake and I was like, oh, I wonder if anyone knows that that mistake is in there.

(00:31:36):

And then all of a sudden the music kind of starts to crumble and just stops. And I look over and I look through the glass and there was a band in there playing, and I thought that everyone was listening to a cd. I had no clue that there was a full live band playing this song in the live room because the way the windows were, it was kind of dark, you couldn't see. But as soon as I looked over there, I was like, oh wow. And that experience for me, I'll never forget that because I had never heard something like that in real life.

Speaker 6 (00:32:13):

The monitor mix was just that good.

Speaker 3 (00:32:15):

The monitor mix was like literally you could put that on a CD and ship. It sounded great, at least in that room. I mean, I don't know what they got going on over there, but it was awesome. I think we all, there's a lot of people that are getting into this that don't know that they don't know about that.

Speaker 6 (00:32:35):

It's really a joy when you're in a studio and you have players who can just kill it because you have such a great perspective on all of the tones of every individual instrument. When you hear it all in context with each other,

Speaker 2 (00:32:55):

It's almost like you can actually do your job when they can actually play and sound great on your instruments. It's like your mind is free to actually produce an engineer.

Speaker 4 (00:33:05):

What a concept.

Speaker 6 (00:33:06):

Granted, you can't be as meticulous about any of the performances or about the tone, but you almost don't care because you're so excited to be hearing the performance that you're not really focused on the sounds. I actually, earlier this year I was recording high on fire and they're the kind of band that aren't quite done writing songs when they enter a studio, so there's always a bit of pre-production. And I had them all set up tracking live, and I was really pushing for them to track this record live. It was sounding great, just the three of them playing together in the live room. And my studio doesn't really have much in the way of ISO booth, so it was just like, I mean, I had a couple of gobos set up, but I mean the amps were six feet from the drums and everything's just blasted in the live room and it sounded awesome,

Speaker 2 (00:33:56):

But that's the kind of band you would expect that on the kinds of bands. And I mean, I don't work on the same kind of stuff that Joey and Joel work on, but I feel like the kind of bands, the thing that's in common between what we all do, me, Joey and Joel's, that those bands playing live in the studio probably wouldn't work out, but I've toured with High On Fire and I can totally see how that would make sense.

Speaker 6 (00:34:21):

Yeah, it's almost hard to get that band to track one person at a time, although they're accustomed to doing it now. But yeah, Matt hates headphones. He just wants to have an amp blaring in his face and that makes him happy.

Speaker 2 (00:34:34):

If you're recording high on fire, the thing is to capture whatever brings the best out of him. There really is only one mat out there.

Speaker 6 (00:34:43):

Yeah, it's like I almost don't want to double track his guitars. He literally cannot touch the guitar without doing at least a quarter tone vibrato on every single note he hits, including chords. So just like doubling rhythm tracks is sounds like super chorus and wobbly, so you almost don't even want to double track them. There's a lot of times on the record where there's leads or we just have no rhythm guitars under it, and they're either doubled leads or they're peu pseudo doubled leads.

Speaker 2 (00:35:14):

Yeah. Technical question. How would you get around doubling him and still get a huge sound that's modern, I guess? I mean relatively modern sounding.

Speaker 6 (00:35:29):

Yeah, I mean they're definitely not super modern sounding records, but I mean there's all kinds of tricks. Rim mics panned. Sometimes you delay and slightly detune the sound and pan one to the other side. Sometimes it's just like mono guitar. I try to do different tricks. Sometimes he doubles himself and it'll be like the IO thing where it's like its kind of doubled, but kind of not where he hits the important things, but then there's some in-between things that diverge and that just sort of adds to the swirliness of a doubled lead. Gotcha.

Speaker 3 (00:36:07):

Well, there's an interesting thing that happens. For example, Jack White. I think the fans of that music kind of expect it to sound a certain way with the fact that it's just two people and just one guitar and drums. And of course they get kind of fancy on their productions from time to time, but there is an expectation of what it should be. And it's interesting to be working in the genre we work in because I almost wonder where did that expectation of perfection come from? Why is it that this song isn't going to sound very good

Speaker 2 (00:36:46):

Unless I have a theory? My theory is that we, Andy Sleep got the first kill switch and gauge record to mix. It was so messed up tracking wise, and I do believe that Adam d is really good now, but I think that probably back then he was very young. Andy sne got this record, he had to totally fix up and it got mega popular and started Metal Cord basically as we know it not, I mean, even though melodic Swedish death metal existed for a long time as we know it, kwit, in my opinion, kind of brought metal cord to the front and I think Andy, what Andy had to do to kind of recover the record just became the sound. And I feel like from that record on to this day, that's where it comes from.

Speaker 3 (00:37:36):

Yeah, I could tell you my approach towards if I was asked to produce a converge record, I absolutely would not do it the way that I do records on the norm. I would do it in the way that the listener sort of expects trying not to make it too stale, but to keep it within the realm of what the listener or the fan expects the band to sound like. You don't want to come in and just

Speaker 6 (00:38:02):

When you guys are mixing records, do you feel like you are mixing them for the band's, tastes for the labels, tastes for their fans', tastes for your own taste? That depends

Speaker 4 (00:38:12):

On the format. I would say if I'm mixing for radio, it's for the program director and the manager and the a and r guy. If it's like a local band, it's for the band or if it's a local band that's trying to get signed, it's for the standard. It just depends on the context, but unfortunately, it's never usually just selfishly for the band. I mean, I just went through that with a band. We made a record the band loves and the label wanted them to be a different genre, but didn't communicate that until after the thing and turned on the record. And the band is just like, you're dumb. This is not what we want to be or play. This is not what we want to sound like. And the label's like, too bad we have your money.

Speaker 6 (00:38:49):

Yeah. I feel like a lot of times I'm hired because a band wants, Hey, you do that Kurt Ballou thing really good. So do the Kurt Ballou thing on our record or you know what I mean? If,

Speaker 3 (00:39:03):

Do you find yourself struggling to even know what that is, or are you in touch with it to the point where you're like, okay, I get what you're going for?

Speaker 6 (00:39:10):

Yeah, generally speaking, I mean, I try to pick projects that I think that I will do well on. And if I don't think that I'll do well on a project, then I'll try to steer someone elsewhere

Speaker 3 (00:39:23):

Because I do get people coming in saying, can we get the Joy Sturgis thing? And for the most part, I kind of get what they mean, but then we'll get halfway into the record and we'll be sending songs around and then it's like, well, this isn't really what we wanted. And I'm like, well, this is my interpretation of your idea of what I do.

Speaker 6 (00:39:48):

I mean, I guess what I want is to try to help a band identify what they are, and even if they're not able to articulate it, I think that I still try to treat everyone. They have valid opinions and that their voice should be heard and that they know what they want, even if they're not able to articulate it. And I try to help them. Obviously, it's impossible to not put your own imprint on it. It's still filtering through your ears. I mean, I've made records with bands of lots of different genres and sub genres, and there may be some common sonic threads in them just because it's filtering through my ears, but I really do try to be malleable to the project.

Speaker 2 (00:40:30):

So let me ask you something. On the topic of being malleable and re guitar tone, which is say you get a band and they have their own preconceived notion of what the tone should be, and you don't think that their preconceived notion matches the reality of what they're actually looking for. Do you have any go-to pieces of guitar gear that you'll impose or would you try to hear them out first? How do you approach that?

Speaker 6 (00:41:06):

Anything I do in my studio, I try to keep the man's budget in mind, so I will scale how much I intervene based on how much time they have. I mean, I do records in two days sometimes, and I do records in a month sometimes. So based on how long they're there, I'll interject more or less.

Speaker 2 (00:41:28):

But yeah, I mean I always do try to. So do you interject less if they have more time or the other way around because

Speaker 6 (00:41:37):

Oh yeah, I get what you're saying.

Speaker 2 (00:41:38):

If you have more time, you could experiment with their gear more versus if you have less time, you can go with your go-to. But I can see how you could see the complete opposite way, which is if you have less time and they come in, you want to get what they've got and be done, you don't have time to go into it further.

Speaker 6 (00:41:59):

Yeah, I think in the more time scenario, if I'm not feeling what they're doing but they're feeling it, I'll try to do both, whether that's tracking multiple S simultaneously, one that they like and one that I like, or whether that's track everything with one rig and then track it all again with another rig or something like that. Sometimes I will do that in situations with more time. The Band Beast Milk that I recorded a couple of years ago, they were feeling a certain guitar sound when we were tracking, but I had some other ideas, and in the end, I think the rhythm guitars are maybe comprised of six or seven different amps, and we're toggling between them based on the riff. So with more time, I will do that. But yeah, I think it's just kind of trying to establish what a band is into, and it's also trying to be aware or try to be self-aware that I don't get what they're trying to do. And sometimes that means that what they're trying to do sucks. Other times it means that I just don't get it.

(00:43:12):

There's been bands where I've recorded where it took me a little while to recalibrate my years to understand what they were doing. A band like Torch, they're like, people call them stoner pop, right? Sort of the aesthetic is kind of the stoner doom aesthetic a little bit. I mean, they have their own thing, but there's a little bit of that sort of stoner doom aesthetic. But everything's in major keys, so it's weird because you'd expect everything to be in minor keys, but they just flip it over and make it all major and happy, even though it's these punishing fuzzy doomy guitar tones. So it's like,

Speaker 4 (00:43:51):

I got to hear this.

Speaker 6 (00:43:52):

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. If you haven't heard Torch, they're awesome. I've worked on their last few records. I recorded and mixed, and then Jonathan, the bass player who's a really good recordist, he had done their previous record as well as the EP that followed that. And then the last two albums he tracked and I mixed, and they're a great band. But yeah, it's all just major keys, or actually one of my most recent projects, four Year Strong, their stuff is mostly major keys too, but that's kind of the only thing that's different about them for me versus the kind of stuff that I'm more known for. So it just requires a little bit of ear calibration. I think guitar sounds are no exception to that. Sometimes you're just not feeling a guitar sound, you haven't figured out how it fits in context yet. Other times you're not feeling a guitar sound because it sucks, and there's just a stubborn, opinionated guitar player who needs to be put in their place.

(00:44:53):

So in situations like that, sometimes I'll indulge them or sometimes I'll start polling other people in the room, like their band mates, try to figure out who their band mate is that they respect and see how that person feels about the tone. And I mean, I try to make it so it's not like Kurt, the dictator telling you that your sound sucks, that you have to change. I try to generate consensus amongst everybody in the room. Is this or what is it about this that we, is there anything about we don't like? And maybe I could suggest some other options that'll work. In the average project for me, which is usually 10 days to two weeks, there's usually enough time for me to educate myself about the band, listen to their previous recorded output, and talk to them a little bit about it, about what they liked about it and what they didn't like about it, and then listen to the rig that they're used to playing out of.

(00:45:55):

And then also then being able to say like, yeah, I'm not sure about this or I like it, but let's try a few other options. And then I'll got probably 30 guitar amps in my studio, so I'll pull out a whole maybe five or six that I think might be likely replacements or supplements for the live tone and as well as different cabinets and pedals and stuff. And then we'll kind of mess around for three or four hours and just see if there's anything I have in the studio that gets them closer to where they think they want to be. What I really don't like is when people come in thinking that because they like some records that I've made and that I've been making records longer than they have, that I know better than them. I feel like everybody's opinion is valid regardless of their ability to articulate it. Unfortunately, the people that can articulate opinions the best usually get their way, and they might not actually be the best person to be deciding the direction for things.

Speaker 3 (00:46:59):

They're just really good at articulating.

Speaker 6 (00:47:01):

So I really do try to listen to everybody and try to pull opinions out of people who aren't voicing them.

Speaker 3 (00:47:09):

That's great. Yeah, that's like a really good point to kind of accent for upcoming people who want to be better at producing and be a better producer is the psychology behind it. Sometimes there are people who know exactly what's right for the song, but they're shy or they don't speak up or they can't articulate their ideas, and so you do have to kind of go in and pull that out of them. So that's a good point.

Speaker 2 (00:47:33):

Yeah. Yeah, lots of the most talented people on earth aren't known for their social skills or communication skills. Very true. So that sounds to me like very, very sound advice.

Speaker 4 (00:47:46):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:47:46):

Yeah, for sure. Definitely.

Speaker 4 (00:47:47):

It's like the guy you got to catch on the bathroom break, and so what do you think? And then they'll tell you when the band isn't around, then you got to go and bat for 'em when you get down with the band.

Speaker 6 (00:47:56):

Yeah, there's definitely some bands too where I've had to just be a shoulder to cry on for each individual member, independent of each other in order building trust with a band that you're working with is very important, and if you have to be their bartender for a little while, then that's what you got to do in order to make them, because if they trust you, they're more likely to articulate what they want and they're also more likely to be excited about the record and then they'll perform better. And just everything will be not only a better product, but a more enjoyable experience.

Speaker 2 (00:48:33):

I feel like trust is one of the biggest obstacles that upcoming producers have to overcome with their clients. I hear from people all the time who tell me that they get clients, but their clients don't want to try their ideas. They don't want to check out their gear choices. They don't want to do anything that the engineer says, and my opinion is it, they don't trust you yet because you A, don't have the body of work, but B, you may not have taken the steps to win the band over.

Speaker 6 (00:49:09):

That's true. And another thing that I think works against people in those situations often is that the band has spent six months, a year, two years, whatever, writing these songs, and then the producer gets to come in at the 11th hour with the benefit of never having heard them before and hear them with objectivity and without having put two years worth of time and effort into those songs. And they can just immediately tear 'em down and say, oh, the verse is way too long on that. Or You don't need three bridges in that song or whatever. And the band are just going to be kind of butt hurt because they've been working, they've been slaving away on these songs for two years, and they've developed a lot of ownership over these songs. And then also in a lot of cases, the types of bands I record, the singer is not particularly involved in arranging the songs.

(00:50:09):

So they write all of their lyrics based on whatever arrangement the band has come up with. So if the producer comes in in the midst of the 10 day or 14 day session says, Hey, your song doesn't need three bridges, and the singer's just going to go, but what about all the lyrics I wrote? Now the song doesn't make any sense. So you kind of can't make changes. So I think that if you can find a producer and get them involved with your songwriting early on so that you don't develop too much ownership over what you've written before, it feels really set in stone, then you'll be better able to optimize the songs before entering the studio. If you can find a producer who's willing to work with you in the songwriting phase long before you're in the studio phase,

Speaker 2 (00:51:00):

I try to do that with bands when they are into it for the exact same reasons that you just said. All those reasons, and especially the vocals. I want a vocalist to come in as prepared as they're comfortable to be, but at the same time, I don't like what happens when you change everything on them and they are unhappy. I don't like the vibe. You got to keep vocalists happy.

Speaker 3 (00:51:27):

How can they even get behind their own song? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 6 (00:51:31):

Riffs are compartmentalized. You do riff A for four reps and then riff B for four reps or whatever, but vocals, that should be a cohesive narrative that goes throughout the entire song. And if you rearrange the song, then now all of a sudden if the verse is now the chorus and whatever, now the song doesn't read properly, so the singer needs to completely redo the entire song. So you really want to have a pretty good arrangement before you set the singer loose writing lyrics. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (00:52:05):

Joey, do you get in early, early on songwriting stuff?

Speaker 3 (00:52:10):

It depends. Never. It seems like no project is ever the same thing twice, but there are some bands that have definitely said like, Hey, we wrote these songs. We have 12 or 15 songs that we wrote, but we really want to just come in and either write new songs with you or take these songs and get your spin on them. And in those scenarios, I'm like, if that's what I'm being hired to do, then absolutely I'm going to come in and do that. So I actually love to do that more than anything else. I would rather be the person who is just creative and coming up with cool ideas and cool parts and helping arrange the song and structure everything rather than making guitars quantized or recording vocal takes or any of that stuff. I prefer to just be more creative. That makes sense.

Speaker 2 (00:53:09):

So Kurt, do you mind if we ask you some questions about guitar from the audience? We have quite a few questions submitted. This is all through your filter, however you use this stuff is what we want to hear because we have a few different people coming on to talk about guitars this month, and we kind of just want to get everyone's unique take. So if there's a technique that you just don't use at all, then feel free to just say you don't use it or whatever. But so Kevin George is asking with surgical eq, what's its usage or abuse and what are some of the finer points of using it on guitars with you?

Speaker 6 (00:53:59):

Well, for me, I know you guys have talked about in previous podcasts about low passing guitars and things like that. I don't typically do that, but I will often, especially on an amp that is recorded with the master not cranked, I'll find that a lot of guitar tones are a bit too sizzly for my taste. So I'll go in with a notch filter and scroll around somewhere in the 10 K to 11 K range and find the real kind of stuff and get rid of that. And that's the main, unless there's a problem I'm hearing somewhere, that's the main surgical thing that I'll do. I do, I generally use two or three EQs on a guitar for different things, and I'm mixing out of the box for most of things. But in the box I'll usually have the fab filter ProQ two on guitar, and there's the sort of built in specter graph on that thing, which is nice because you can see if there's certain frequencies that are really pokey or there's some holes somewhere. So sometimes I'll try to do a couple little boosts and cuts on that thing to level things out if I'm hearing something weird. But yeah, generally it's just like the 10 or 11 K notch filter.

Speaker 2 (00:55:16):

So I'm going to paraphrase a question because I know that this was asked later, but we've got about 30 questions that we're not going to be able to get to. So I'll just go, I'll just ask. So if you are removing nasty, painful, high-end frequencies, how do you counter so that the tone doesn't become dull? So basically how do you keep the guitars out in front and bright and present and awesome, yet still notch things out without killing the tone, just make 'em louder.

Speaker 6 (00:55:55):

No, I guess that's why probably using notch filters instead of lowpass filters. When it comes to removing annoying sizzly stuff or harsh upper mid range, I feel like leaving in some of that ultrasonic stuff adds a sense of three dimensionality to it. And I also will room mic guitars for a lot of things, like a stereo room mic on guitars. So there's a bit of just sort of natural air about the guitar that makes it feel real. And then it just really kind of depends too on what's going on with everything else in the mix. Obviously I listen, but I'll look at where I boosting and cutting drums, where am I boosting and cutting bass, and then I'll try to do whatever boosting and cutting on guitar that I'm doing in different places than I do with the bass and the drums. And I try not to have things build up in too many different frequencies. So I'll use different mics and different mic pres and all that stuff for different instruments so that there's not that kind of natural buildup that happens when you use the same gear on everything.

Speaker 2 (00:57:07):

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Matthew Burrell was asking how you like to EQ the guitars to make room for vocals, but I feel like you just kind of answered that that starts at the source of making the right gear choices so that you already start to avoid some of the overlapping frequencies. But is there more to it than that?

Speaker 6 (00:57:29):

Yeah, I mean it's always different. It depends on the singer's voice, but the guitar player's sound and what kind of presence they have in the mix, of course. But yeah, I don't have a default go-to like always use this type of EQ or this mic or this, whatever. But when I'm thinking about carving out space for things, I'm not just thinking about them in terms of frequencies, but I'm thinking about them in terms of panning space. So one of the main things to get vocals and guitars away from each other is panning. And even if there's a guitar overdub that's happening at the same time as a vocal, maybe I'll pan out the overdub 50% or something like that just to get it away from the vocal. Or maybe the vocals panned away from it, or always thinking there's this frequency space, there's panning space, and then there's also sort of effect space. How deep are the reverbs are you're using in order to place things within your stereo field. And I think the low mid content of each instrument has a lot to do with sort of how in front or behind the speakers it feels. So I'll use all those techniques to kind of find not only how they interact, well, not just carve out space for each element of the mix, but also carve out where I want to place them in the sound field.

Speaker 2 (00:58:55):

And here's another question that I remember, but I'm going to have to paraphrase. Speaking of the low mids, do you have any techniques that you use to bring them out on the guitars without going too flubby or muddy?

Speaker 6 (00:59:12):

Yeah, I mean there's lots of different saturation plugins out there that can do that kind of stuff. I mean, sometimes it is just eq, sometimes it's compression. When I'm getting a guitar sound out in the room, I spend a lot of time on the master volume knob and trying to dial in the right position for the master and how it interacts with the cabinet so that there's the right balance of clarity and body and sizzle reduction based. So I generally record guitars pretty loud but not fully cranked.

Speaker 2 (00:59:53):

So you kind of already have it kind of sounding right, coming in or Hopefully,

Speaker 6 (01:00:01):

Yeah, I mean I do my best. I do have a tendency to make stuff a little bit too dark and honky on the way in, and so I find myself cutting low mids and brightening them when I mix a lot of the time, but I guess I'd rather have a little bit more of that stuff there than to have to try to create it out of nothing.

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):

Here's a question, touching on getting stuff right from the beginning, which is do you have any sort of guitar checklist or mental checklist or just anything that you make sure that you're going to do to the guitars or to the amps or whatever before you start recording? Do you have set rules?

Speaker 6 (01:00:48):

Yeah, for sure. I mean, again, this is sort of scaled based on how long the band is in the studio. I mean, there's times where I very much employ a fuck it attitude, but what I like to do as I mentioned earlier, is spend time with the guitarist and listening to their previous output and their current rig and stuff and see how that sounds and then make suggestions and maybe swap out some pedals or a cabinet or a head or a guitar or whatever, just to try to dial in what's the right sound for the songs. But then once that's kind of determined as to what gear we're going to be using, then there's a bit of optimization that needs to happen. I got to make sure all the cables are good, make sure there's not any noisy power supplies. Sometimes we'll just run on just batteries instead of power supplies for the pedals, I'll almost always pick up the guitar. The person's going to play and make sure that that's the guitar is feeling good and set up well and has the appropriate gauge strings on it and so forth and so on. Everybody always takes their guitar into the shop to be set up before they come record with me and probably 75% of the people who do guitar setups don't really do guitar setups.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):

They

Speaker 6 (01:02:06):

Just kind of polish 'em and change the strings. So I think it's pretty important to learn how to intonate a guitar, learn how to identify, warn frets, learn how to identify a nut that's too high or too low, and try to find for yourself a good local guitar tech whose work you trust or learn how to do that stuff for yourself so that you can make sure that the guitar that you're going to be recording with is capable of being played in tune. I did this record, I mean, I'm sure you guys know how, especially with drop tune stuff, sometimes you have to intentionally detune the low strings in order to get it to sound in tune just because the wobble and all that. So I was recording this band recently and the base was like, we had the open, I think it was tuned to sea.

(01:02:58):

We had the open sea sounding great. We had the 12th fret sea sounding totally fine, but everything in the middle of the neck was sounding terrible, especially from the first to the fifth fret. We just couldn't get any of those notes sound right and come to find out, this guy just had a super tall nut on his base, so there was just a lot of deflection on the string just going from open to first fret. Ideally the nut shouldn't really be much taller than the difference. The difference between open and first fret really shouldn't be much difference than the difference between fretting the first fret and then hammering onto the second fret for ideal intonation. So being able to identify those kind of problems on guitar and either fix them yourself or get a guitar tech to fix them is good. I did a record recently where I had to change everybody's pickups before we even started tracking. I mean, I've had to level frets intonation, Tru rod adjustments are very common. Replacing jacks is very common.

Speaker 2 (01:04:05):

I just want to add that this is the kind of stuff that if you just take it to Guitar Center, drop it off and pick it up, the guy probably will not know that this is a problem. I try to work with the same guy every time and he comes to the studio and then after he sets up the guitars, we'll play through it with him right there and make sure that yeah, all the frets are working, everything is good to go. And I have noticed that about 70% of the time when they come back from a shop, they're not done right or not done all the way.

Speaker 6 (01:04:37):

Yeah, the high on fire record that I just did, it just came out. There were days where the guitar tech, his name's Gabe Ani, he's really good. He came to the studio sometimes four times a day. There is so much stuff for him to do. Matt just caves in. He plays Les Pauls and he's got two nomatic bridges and just caves in the bridges constantly, so the center strings will just be buzzing like crazy because the bridge doesn't have it's arced in the wrong direction opposite the direction that the Fretboards arced.

Speaker 2 (01:05:13):

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all because with my guy, I've had him come to the studio four times a day before as well, and I know that that's kind of a regular thing for him when there's a band around that warrants that sort of thing. That's totally normal for me,

Speaker 6 (01:05:35):

But I'm sure a lot of people listening here probably are not recording in situations where they can afford to pay a guitar tech to come by the studio four times a day. Of course not. That's why they should

Speaker 2 (01:05:47):

Learn how to do it.

Speaker 6 (01:05:48):

Spend a bunch of time on YouTube like learning about guitar setups and just buy yourself a crappy guitar at Walmart or something or from a flea market and rip out the frets, replace the frets or level the frets. Just have a practice guitar that you can beat up and learn how to do this stuff because it's a super important skill.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):

I find that lots of people's guitar tone is messed up before it even gets to the amp. I try to tell people this all the time, but I feel like these early steps in the guitar tone process are crucial. If that stuff is messed up, good luck with the rest of it.

Speaker 6 (01:06:25):

Yeah, I mean every step is crucial. Do you guys find that you have a tough time work when you're mixing records that people recorded at home, that there's a lot of times that stuff gets overlooked and there's a whole period of forensic audio that you have to go through just to build up the mix to the point where you're ready to start mixing?

Speaker 2 (01:06:47):

Absolutely. That's why I hammer, that's why I hammer this stuff home because I feel like you're right, every step is crucial, but I feel like people are more inclined to spend more time on the later steps and just kind of gloss over the early ones because the later steps are sexier, actually dialing tones

Speaker 6 (01:07:10):

Or they're just excited to get started and then later in the process they have to fix it earlier in the process. They can just dive in and ignore it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):

Yeah, that forensic audio thing on di I sometimes have to spend a long time. Have you ever had to send a, we will tell a band that hired you to mix that the DI is just not workable? Yeah,

Speaker 6 (01:07:36):

There's only been a couple times where I've had only a DI to work with. Usually they have at least some sort of reference amp tone along with it, so sometimes I'll just go to that. There's been very few times where I've just completely rejected something or told somebody to rerecord something, but there have been a few times where I've asked not to be credited. How does that conversation go?

(01:07:58):

Well, that's interesting too. Maybe you guys have experienced this too, but I feel like every once in a while somebody hires me to get my name on their record. More than that, they like what my work sounds like. I remember there was one record that I worked on years ago where the band name was this kind of scratchy logo down at the bottom of the cover, and then there was a big sticker on the top of the cover that said mixed by Kurt Ballou, but I think the record was 13 songs long and I only mixed four out of those 13, and yet my name was bigger and more legible than the name of the band on the front cover.

Speaker 4 (01:08:36):

That's crazy.

Speaker 6 (01:08:36):

Wow. Yeah, so that kind of stuff is a bit off putting to me. I like to think people are hiring me, they like my work and not just because it's a marketing tool.

Speaker 2 (01:08:47):

Yeah. I find that people sometimes do go to studios for the wrong reasons. Have you ever been hired to get somebody else's sound? No, I've never really been asked to mimic anything other than something that I did see. That's pretty cool. I've definitely been hired to mimic other people's sounds and that's always weird. It's like, why don't you just go to them? Oh

Speaker 4 (01:09:10):

My god, I hate that so much.

Speaker 6 (01:09:11):

Well, I got a buddy who he does audio for American Idol and I know other people, I'm sure you guys know people that have done karaoke stuff where your job is to mimic other people's sounds and I think that it's super educational. I think I'd actually probably really enjoy that to try to sit down and figure out how somebody recorded something and try to make something sound the same. I think that would be really interesting. I mean, it's not flattering, but it's interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:09:42):

It is interesting, but it's very, very hard to get somebody else's signature sound.

Speaker 6 (01:09:50):

That fab filter has EQ match, right.

Speaker 4 (01:09:55):

Just EQ match everything. Your tracks your master. That's it.

Speaker 6 (01:09:58):

You know what? Okay, can I tell you an EQ match story? Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I was recording this band and we did their album in two different basic tracking sessions separated by about four or five months, and in the end it was decided that we didn't love the original bass sound and we liked the new bass sound and we wanted to re-amp the original bass tracks through the new bass rig. I did have a DI for the original bass tracks, but it was a sand amp with some of the EQ engaged. So what I had the bass player do was just play along with one of the old songs with a clean di, and then I used the Clean DI just as a temporary guide track to EQ match the Samp DI from the original session, and it was like dead nuts.

Speaker 2 (01:10:52):

I've done that as well.

Speaker 6 (01:10:54):

So if it's the exact same perform or not the exact same performance, but the same notes in the same rhythm sort of side by side with the new version, it actually works really well. It's when you have a song that's in a different key and totally different tracking tones that it's really weird that it doesn't work.

Speaker 2 (01:11:15):

If it's the same player and the same instrument and all that stuff's the same, then EQ matching is a total godsend. EQ

Speaker 6 (01:11:24):

Match is actually just as an educational tool kind of interesting. It's not that often that I would use it in a mix, but to throw something on and just see, oh, what would I have to do in order to make my guitar sound like that guitar or whatever, and to see what fab filter will tell you to do is always kind of an interesting exercise.

Speaker 2 (01:11:47):

Yeah, I completely agree with you there. I feel like actually using some, if you use too much EQ matching, I feel like your mix will start to get weird, but I feel like if you use it to get information, that's the ideal way, at least for me. You

Speaker 4 (01:12:08):

Do have to learn how to hear that stuff. It's pretty important if you want to actually be good at this because part of being good is being quick and being able to get results and commit, and if you just rely on an EQ match, you're never going to learn the ear skills necessary to be a good mixer, for example. I

Speaker 6 (01:12:23):

Think it can help you quantify what it is that you're hearing so that next time, oh yeah, my guitars always have too much, 3.2 K or whatever. So it will help you in the future.

Speaker 4 (01:12:37):

Well, every guitar has too much. 3.2 K, how do you feel about

Speaker 6 (01:12:42):

2.7?

Speaker 4 (01:12:44):

No problem, but I've been on a fuck 2K recently. I don't know why. Every three months I have a different frequency area that I'm really sensitive to that for whatever reason, it's irritating me and all my guitar and symbol tones and the last two or three months it's been like the two to low three Ks. It's really weird.

Speaker 6 (01:13:04):

Just

Speaker 4 (01:13:04):

Keeps changing.

Speaker 6 (01:13:06):

No, I used to be really diehard 2.7 boosting on massive passive on guitar, and now I'm down to 1.8 or sometimes up to 3.3 or 3.9. It just depends. But yeah, those are nice.

Speaker 4 (01:13:27):

Yeah, I love the massive passive on guitar. I think it's a great eq.

Speaker 6 (01:13:31):

Yeah, I mean you got to learn it. It's not like other EQs where you can just grab it and start tweaking the massive, I think you got to spend some time with it learning what it does.

Speaker 4 (01:13:40):

Yeah. Anyway, analog piece, it's got a tone and a certain curve and you can't just pick it up and turn a knob. You have to kind learn it and try it out on a bunch of different stuff and figure out

Speaker 6 (01:13:50):

What it does. Yeah, especially shelving, the shelving sort of bandwidth controls.

Speaker 2 (01:13:55):

Yeah,

Speaker 4 (01:13:55):

I totally, totally

Speaker 6 (01:13:56):

Agree.

Speaker 2 (01:13:57):

Here's a question from Jeremy Dove of,

Speaker 6 (01:13:59):

Okay,

Speaker 2 (01:14:01):

Do you have a cab micing do and don't list in your head basically? I doubt you have one written down.

Speaker 6 (01:14:12):

I've done some weird stuff. I remember there's been times where people have come in with cabs with ports and have asked me to mic inside the port.

Speaker 2 (01:14:22):

How did that

Speaker 6 (01:14:22):

Sound? Like a wind tunnel? But it was interesting. I mean, the guy was playing out of a solid state crate amp too, so it was distinctive. I guess it depends on if you're going for distinctive or if you're going for classic. I very rarely mic the back of a cab or a back of an open back cab, but some people love doing it. It all comes down to time. If it's going to be quick, then I'm just going to go right for the usual suspects like the 57, the 1 21, the 4 21, that kind of stuff, and edge of the dust cone and into probably a transformer based mic preamp, either a knees clone or a day king or a Chandler or something, API, something like that. And then if I have a little bit more time to experiment, then I'll start going a little bit deeper into the mic locker or maybe start recording two or three amps simultaneously, maybe even some something like some affected like distortion pedals right into the board, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:15:26):

Do you sum the multiple mics on the way in or do you sort that stuff out later?

Speaker 6 (01:15:31):

I do both. Typically, I will sum an amp on the way in, so if I'm recording out of three amps and I have multiple mics per amp, I'll sum the mics on each amp and then I'll keep each amp on its own track. That makes sense. On base, I'll tend to keep the mics separate, but on guitar, not usually room mics, I'll keep separate as well.

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):

And so another question I remember is how do you decide when you're going to blend an amp and do you have any tricks for getting them to work well together? Because I guess blending amps can sometimes be a terrible sounding thing or a great sounding thing.

Speaker 6 (01:16:17):

Yeah. Well, one of the ways tricks in order to get amps to blend together better is, well, I guess let's back up a step. Why are you blending amps? So what are the reasons to blend amps? In an ideal world, the reason to blend amps is because you're not getting something from one amp that you like in another and vice versa. So together they theoretically make a great tone. I think what happens a lot of times unfortunately, is bands come into my studio and they see a bunch of cool amps and they're like, dude, I want to use the orange, but I want to use the Marshall and I want to use the EG too. Let's use 'em all.

(01:16:56):

In that case, sometimes I'll indulge and just not use everything in the mix. Or sometimes I'll try to find a way to use everything in the mix, and I'm super guilty of doing this for my own band as well. But yeah, so ideally it's like, oh yeah, I got this amp, but it's a bit lacking in saturation or it's a bit lacking in depth or something, so I'll pull out this other amp and then together they're awesome. So you get 'em sounding awesome in the room. And then the trick, then it's really all about the phase relationship between the amps and getting that totally dialed in. And for that I'll use a mix of adjusting mic position as well as allhouse filtering with an IBP, like the little labs IBP, and then finally just micro sample-based delays to really get things lined up properly. But one of the ways that you can make the phase relationship stuff less important is if, let's say you have two amps and one's the bright amp one's the dark amp, rather than putting a dark mic on the bright amp and a bright mic on the dark amp to bring them closer together, you choose a bright mic for the bright amp and a dark mic for the dark amp to actually even to make the differences between the two amps even greater.

(01:18:16):

And then you'll have less of a phase relationship between them, and it's almost like you're in a amp type territory where this is kind of like a crossover between the bright amp and the dark amp, and you're able to kind of balance them independently of each other without there being a super destructive phase relationship.

Speaker 2 (01:18:36):

So basically the closer the tones are together, the more the phase relationship is a major factor. Correct. Makes sense. So actually Finn from Creative Live was asking Finn McKenty. Hi, Finn Finn. So he wants to know more about tracking, so you need to do minimal editing. I'll just read his question. Tracking. So you need to do minimal editing, which is maybe just how to play guitar in quotation marks, but the idea of how to get sick tones without recording one note at a time, I guess you would be the person to ask about this. Well, I guess hopefully you have a sick guitar player.

Speaker 4 (01:19:26):

Where do we find one of those?

Speaker 6 (01:19:30):

Well, I think it's not going to directly answer his question, but one of the ways that you can make people think that you're better at recording is to record really good players, because really good players just tend to sound good and really bad players tend to sound bad even out of the same gear. So if you can try to avoid recording bands that suck, people will think you're really good. So that's one technique. You just have to be willing to that one a lot, not work a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:20:06):

Let me just chime in. I think there's a misconception about Ross Robinson. I don't want to say anything bad about him. I mean, the guy's a freaking genius and look what he's done to music, but I know some people who have worked with him and said, yeah, he's a complete idiot. He has no clue what's going on in terms of engineering. He's just such a creative mind and so fired up about music and the meaning behind it and getting performances to where they need to be that it doesn't matter that he doesn't understand engineering, he's getting it right before it even enters the air. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 6 (01:20:47):

Wait, who is this? Sorry, I missed who you were talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:20:51):

Ross Robinson. Ross

Speaker 6 (01:20:53):

Robinson. Oh yeah. Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:20:54):

So he gets it right before it even gets into the air, and so as a result of that, it ends up sounding great, even if he has no clue what's going on engineering wise, and that's not to say that he's a complete engineering idiot. I'm sure he understands the basics, but I know some people that worked with him and said that they actually understood more about the recording process than he did, but it didn't matter because he just gets good results with his mind.

Speaker 6 (01:21:22):

That totally makes sense, but I mean in terms of what can you do just given your situation where you are not choosing the player? I think it's just a matter of making the players comfortable, making sure they're well rehearsed, and also making sure they've got a comfortable chair and that their instrument feels good to play and that they like the sound that they're monitoring and that they're excited to play and that they can hear everything well and the song was tracked at the right tempo and all that kind of stuff that just lets people play their best and if they need do, did they get to go to the juice bar that morning and do they have the right amount of coffee and have they pooped yet? And all the different little psychological factors, just making sure someone's ready to perform. You don't want to, especially singers, but guitar players too, you don't want to just throw them to the wolves.

(01:22:16):

You want to make sure that they're ready to do their job and so that you get the best performance out of them. Sometimes there are people who are the driving creative force of a band, but they're also the worst player in the band. That's me. And that's always interesting. Yeah, because then you have to, there's a band I've worked with a few times that I won't name where the band, the leader and primary songwriter is arguably the worst guitar player in the band, and he knows it though, so he doesn't have an ego about it. So he delegates the recording to the other players and then if it's something that he really has a certain feel for, he'll play it. But I actually even played a lot of guitar on their records. I was able to play it with the precision that he wanted. And I think letting, as a guitar player or any musician, if you can let go of your ego, if the end product is the most important thing in your recording process and you can let go of your ego and let somebody else play it or let AL'S assistant program it or whatever it happens to be, then that'll make for the best end product.

(01:23:42):

And if that's not what's the most important to you, if what is most important to you that you play on your own record and that you make something that you are proud of, then just make sure you show up prepared.

Speaker 2 (01:23:54):

Yeah. I feel like 80% of these types of problems would be solved by people showing up prepared because honestly, the last thing I want to do is start playing guitar on their record and have to learn their riffs and then reprogram the drums and do all that stuff. I would rather that they just come in prepared and we can do it for real, but Well,

Speaker 6 (01:24:19):

A lot of people don't know they're not prepared. That's the problem. Very.

Speaker 4 (01:24:23):

Isn't that the truth? Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:24:24):

That's so awesome about home recording now that so many bands have the capability of doing a bit of recording on their own, they can start to become aware of what their own shortcomings as players are. I mean, I'm sure you guys have all been in a situation where you want to record a drummer on a click, but they've never played to a click before and everything just kind of falls apart. But if they had done some of their own recordings and kind of practice, not just practice how to play the songs, but practice how to record the songs, then everything will turn out better.

Speaker 2 (01:24:55):

Absolutely. Well, there is a skill as well to knowing how to be recorded as a musician, and I think that it's totally separate from knowing how to perform or knowing how to play.

Speaker 6 (01:25:09):

Yeah, there's, when you see a band live, there's a visual excitement that will lead your ear to hear certain things that you can just never reproduce on a record. When you see the drummer, their arms are flying all over the place and it looks awesome, and it's super exciting live. But in a recorded sense, if the snare drum is being played eight times as loud in the slow part as it is during the blast beat, it's just like it's a nightmare for the engineer.

Speaker 4 (01:25:37):

Hey, that stick twirl though, that adds tone to the air of the room, excites the air.

Speaker 6 (01:25:43):

There's a band I know that insisted on micing up a middle finger and just putting that on the track. Oh, I love that. That's

Speaker 4 (01:25:54):

Awesome. Mike, did you use in what pre, that's the real question.

Speaker 3 (01:25:57):

I didn't record them. It's just did you compress it? I mean, you've got to put a distress on that middle finger.

Speaker 4 (01:26:04):

L one for sure. L one on the middle

Speaker 2 (01:26:05):

Finger. So here's a question that I actually made somebody rephrase because I thought I understood the question, but I realized I didn't, and it turned out to be a pretty good question. So I'm going to read you the rephrased version. Let's see if it makes any sense. So

(01:26:24):

It's from Jake. I hope I pronounced that right. There are a lot of things that have to happen to make a guitar tone fit in the mix out of all the things that need to be done, like EQ or multi-band or compression, just to name some possibilities, some things are easier to learn than others and some techniques are more important. My question is, what technique or process took you guys the most time to get good at? For example, maybe it took Joel years of experience and practice to realize that doing X improved his mixing abilities, X being whatever he answers. I hope that clarifies. So yeah, so does that question make sense?

Speaker 6 (01:27:02):

Yeah. But yeah, it's a tough one to answer. I don't know if I have an answer. I just kind of take a holistic approach to all this stuff where I feel like I'm just always learning about everything. Lately. For me, I think I've been making great strides with learning about pedals and expanding my pedal collection and understanding how a pedal is not just a sound in and of itself, but a pedal is sort of a way to optimize the interface between a guitar and an amp. Prior to that, I think I was learning a lot about guitar pickups. I bought a guitar that had an EMG in it when I was 17, and I basically played nothing but EMG 80 fives for 20 years, and then I started saying, Hey, maybe there's some other pickups out there, maybe I should learn about them. And I build guitars too, and some of them for customers, some of them for myself.

(01:28:03):

So especially as I've been building guitars, people ask me for different pickups. So it's been a great opportunity for me to learn, oh, okay, here's what the different bare knuckle models sound like, and here's what a JB sounds like, and here's a PAF, and here's a TV Jones. And kind of like learning, not just how do these pickups differ between each other within the same rig, but how will this pickup cause you to set your amp differently or how will this pickup cause you to reach for a certain fuzz pedal as opposed to a distortion pedal or an overdrive and that kind of stuff. And just realizing how sort of interdependent every choice is all along the way with the whole guitar single chain, and I think it is very much incremental learning. You learn a little bit about setting up an amp and then that changes what you've learned about miking, so then you have to learn a little bit more about micing and then now that you've changed this, yeah, now your mix EQ needs are a little bit different, so you learn a little more about that, and then now you start mixing records that you didn't record, and now you got to learn how to handle all these different types of recorded guitars that are coming into your mix environment.

(01:29:23):

Yeah, so it's just a lot of incremental learning. I wish I could give an easy answer, but I don't really have one,

Speaker 2 (01:29:28):

But that's an honest answer. Keeping

Speaker 6 (01:29:32):

Yeah, but people don't, I never wanted that when I was first starting a recording, I wanted to ask a question and then people tell me like, oh yeah, just do this. That's this. I mean, there are things like that. If you want a Swedish death metal sound, you get a boss. Hm. Two, it's not totally that simple, but that's like you need to do that one step. There's some things that are just that cut and dry, but most things are not. Unfortunately,

Speaker 2 (01:30:01):

I feel like, and I know what you mean, that people do want the silver bullet answer, but the people who have helped me the most musically over the years have given me basically the answer that you just gave, which is a, you have to be really interested in it and never stop learning and just go for it, and every time you got to take on something new, go for it. Just like you went for the previous thing you had to learn. And that's really the answer is be willing to take a few years of your life or more to really figure this stuff out and take an active, proactive interest in learning as much as possible about it.

Speaker 6 (01:30:44):

Hey, Joel and Joey, do you guys want to

Speaker 3 (01:30:45):

Chime

Speaker 6 (01:30:46):

In on this?

Speaker 3 (01:30:47):

Well, I was just going to say, when you're in this profession and when you mess around with recording stuff, you are always a student, and I feel like there's new things to be learned every day, even when you know how everything works. Somebody comes in with a goofy ass riff or something and you're like, wow, that's interesting, and I need to learn how to make that sound good.

Speaker 6 (01:31:10):

Every time there's something happening in my studio that I don't love, maybe I don't love the band, or I'm not getting along with the people or the tones suck or whatever, always I try to think of that as an opportunity to learn how can I make this better or how can I relinquish control to these people and see how they think about things and what can I learn from them or whatever. I try to treat everything as a learning opportunity.

Speaker 4 (01:31:39):

I'll take onto that last question that the listener had asked about. What do you think is the most important thing that helped in guitar mixing? And from my own perspective, I think it was really learning how to EQ and hear different frequencies for what they are and how they interact. And that sounds like a really simple statement, but what I'm describing is a process that takes years where you sit there and all of a sudden you're really sensitive to a certain part of the mid range, and you start hearing it and everything, and then you can see it with razor focus in your mind and manipulate it, and then all of a sudden that opens up another one and then another one and you. So really learning how to EQ definitely helped me take my guitar game up a lot because there are certain ranges and frequencies and things that I learned to listen for that I know automatically are usually going to get discarded in most situations, and other ones where situations you have to learn how to balance certain things against each other and different strategies. So that was a big one for me.

Speaker 3 (01:32:39):

It might sound weird, but it's like you need to get better at listening to music, which I know it sounds

Speaker 4 (01:32:45):

Really essentially the same point. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:32:47):

Absolutely. It's like understanding what 400 hertz actually sounds like and

Speaker 4 (01:32:54):

How much of it you do or don't need and why,

Speaker 3 (01:32:57):

And getting that connection with your gear or your plugins or your tools or your interface or whatever you're using so that like, okay, I'm hearing this one thing and it's got too much base. How do I react to that to change it so that it has the right amount of base that I want to hear that kind of stuff.

Speaker 6 (01:33:15):

Yeah. Hey, Joel, when you have a frequency that's bugging you, do you find that, you hear that in all listening environments, other rooms, other speakers? Do you hear that in other people's recordings as well, or is it just in your own production environment that it's bugging you?

Speaker 4 (01:33:32):

Usually it's per instrument. For example, I'll equate it to this. This is the best way when I listen to a sound, maybe I played in a band for 15 years, but I always wore earplugs, so hopefully my ears aren't too damaged. But when I'm sitting there and I listen to a sound, the first thing that goes into my head, it either sounds fucking awesome or something's wrong with it, and I have to get to the bottom of why it doesn't sound right or something's harsh or irritating. And then I try to get rid of the irritation and reveal the beauty of the tone. It sounds too tubby or too boxy, for example. So I usually go in and try to find something where something sounds wrong with the sound. If I'm not immediately like, wow, that sounds great to me, and I try to do it, so it's not like I go out and hear for example, 4K and everything, and now I know we joke a lot and we talk a lot about that, but generally I would say those are more a summation of tendencies that have been built up over years of mixing.

(01:34:29):

If there's a couple of frequencies that I hear over and over and over and the guitars that I get to mix that drive me nuts, it's usually in that range. Now, like I said, sometimes that changes, but I try to take everything on a case by case basis and just listen to the sound, listen to the song, figure out the big picture, then micro it down to a small finite level and get in there and notch out whatever needs to be notched out to make it clearer and more pristine and just better sounding.

Speaker 6 (01:34:56):

Okay, so you really do believe it's within the track and not just within your listening environment?

Speaker 4 (01:35:01):

Yeah. No, I mean, I'm very comfortable with my listening environment. I never go into my car and then hear 4K in a certain way versus on my speakers or versus on my assistant speakers. It's really just when we talk about a lot on the podcast, like I said, it's tendencies and it's like an 80 20 thing most of the time. It's usually within X for me and the way I hear, but it's always on a case by case basis. I'll give you an example. I mixed a couple of different songs for a couple of different bands this morning, and one particular song had a really nasty buildup in the two range. It was just pissing me off and I got it off. Then I go to a different band and a different guitar, and it's a similar tone. I was using the same Amps sim plugin, but it was a completely different thing that was irritating me, so you just got to take it one thing at a time, listen to the sound and figure out what you want to do with it and why.

Speaker 2 (01:35:49):

I think it's important to not pass judgment on the tone and gear choices before you've heard what's actually coming through the speakers

Speaker 6 (01:36:02):

And in context of the

Speaker 2 (01:36:03):

Song. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 6 (01:36:04):

Because I know that there was, you guys are probably a bit young for this, but there was this, I started playing guitar right at the end of the Pink Charl rack mount gear craze, and I guess that's kind of back, but I was playing guitar before grunge hit, and back then everybody had a BBE Sonic maximizer in their rack because they sold the Royal Their Amp couldn't put out enough high-end sizzle or enough bottom-end rumble. It's like they wanted to sound like a full band all by themselves, just blame their guitar, and then when those guitar players joined bands, there was no space left for the cymbals and no space left for the bass guitar, and

Speaker 4 (01:36:51):

Guitar is the only instrument that matters,

Speaker 6 (01:36:53):

Obviously. Well, I mean obviously as a guitar player, that's what I think, but unfortunately vocals are the only thing that matters. Mean ask like your mom or something. She probably couldn't even tell you what instruments are on her favorite song. It's true. Everything is in support of the vocal, unfortunately, as a guitar player, I have to admit that. But anyway,

Speaker 4 (01:37:12):

Blast me.

Speaker 6 (01:37:12):

But anyways, go ahead. One of the most important things in my early studio recording experiences was walking in and seeing these studios with big collections of combo amps and smaller amps, and I remember talking to an engineer, a friend of mine, saying, yeah, sometimes just to sound huge, you need something that's really small because that's the only theme that's going to cut through this dense mix. You've got a lead guitar thing with a ton of character or something like that. You don't want to record it out of like you a 51 50 and a six by 12. You want to record it out of a fender champ with a fuzz pedal in front of it, because that's the only thing that's going to cut through the wall of guitars that you've already established.

Speaker 2 (01:37:55):

Yeah, I've noticed that as well. Absolutely. Well, Kurt, just want to thank you so much for coming on here with us and taking the time to talk shop, and then answer all those questions.

Speaker 6 (01:38:07):

Yeah, no sweat. I think what you guys are doing is awesome, and I've already learned a lot from listening to your other podcasts, so I hope it's pretty cool. I hope that this helps other people as well.

Speaker 4 (01:38:17):

Absolutely. Well, you've been extremely requested and our listening base loves your work. Sweet. It's really cool to have you come on and just pick your brain a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:38:25):

Well take it easy, and thanks again, dude. Anytime.

Speaker 1 (01:38:28):

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