ANDY MARSH: Productivity Hacks, A Career-Ending Injury, and Nailing Your Guitar Tone

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by IK multimedia. Ik. Multimedia gives musicians access to the most famous and sought after guitar gear and studio effects of all time. With our Amplitude and T-Rex analog modeling software, now IK has created the ultimate all-in-one bundle for bands and engineers. The Total Studio two max. Combining all of I K's award-winning amp effects sounds and more. It's everything you need to track, mix and master your music. Ik, multimedia musicians first. For more info, go to www.rkmultimedia.com. And now your host, Eyal Levi.

Speaker 2 (00:00:47):

This show is brought to you by URM Academy, the world's best education for rock and metal producers. Every month on Nail the Mix, we bring one of the world's best producers to mix a song from scratch, from artists like Ms. Sugar, periphery a data, remember and bring me the horizon, and we give you the raw multi-track so you can mix along. You'll also get access to Mix Lab, our collection of bite-sized mixing tutorials and portfolio Builder Pro quality multi-tracks cleared for use in your portfolio. You can find out [email protected]. Hell yeah. Andy Marsh. Yes. Hi. Hello. Hi, how

Speaker 3 (00:01:22):

Are you?

Speaker 2 (00:01:23):

Well, I'm good. It's good to, thanks for being here.

Speaker 3 (00:01:26):

No worries. Good to be back. It's been a few years since we last got together. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:01:29):

You last time I saw you was at my old studio in Florida

Speaker 3 (00:01:34):

Back

Speaker 2 (00:01:34):

When you came to visit the

Speaker 3 (00:01:36):

Man in the wheelchair.

Speaker 2 (00:01:37):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:01:38):

And also we did a podcast thing one time on

Speaker 2 (00:01:43):

Creative Live

Speaker 3 (00:01:43):

Via Skype,

Speaker 2 (00:01:44):

But that was before that.

Speaker 3 (00:01:45):

That was before that.

Speaker 2 (00:01:46):

Okay. Yeah, it all gets blurry because

Speaker 3 (00:01:48):

It's

Speaker 2 (00:01:48):

Been so long.

Speaker 3 (00:01:49):

Oh yeah. You've

Speaker 2 (00:01:50):

Stayed pretty active since then.

Speaker 3 (00:01:52):

Yeah, I've done a few things since then.

Speaker 2 (00:01:54):

So that was, just so everyone knows, that was 2014, right?

Speaker 3 (00:01:58):

Yes, it was in when you came to My house

Speaker 2 (00:02:00):

Fall? Yes. September,

Speaker 3 (00:02:01):

Late summer

Speaker 2 (00:02:02):

September 21st. Oh's. Good memory. No shit. Fuck. I don't know. No.

Speaker 3 (00:02:10):

Trying to piece it together. It would've been August or September.

Speaker 2 (00:02:14):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:02:15):

For sure.

Speaker 2 (00:02:15):

Yeah. You, I think your bassist Ney came with you.

Speaker 3 (00:02:19):

Yes, the three of us.

Speaker 2 (00:02:21):

And

Speaker 3 (00:02:21):

We had this running joke that Sean, the other guitar player in my event, he was playing bass at the time, was hand Zimmer's engineer. So he was walking around your live room clapping and Will and I were telling other people that he didn't speak any English and he was just calling it like woodwind over here. Good spot for woodwind. People thought he was crazy.

Speaker 2 (00:02:43):

Is that how bad my memory is? I don't know. Yes, the answer is yes.

Speaker 3 (00:02:47):

Yeah, you don't remember that? No. Yeah, six and a half foot tall redheaded guy Studio.

Speaker 2 (00:02:51):

No, no, I remember that. In

Speaker 3 (00:02:52):

The studio.

Speaker 2 (00:02:53):

That's your basis, right?

Speaker 3 (00:02:54):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:02:54):

Oh, okay. I thought you said guitarist.

Speaker 3 (00:02:56):

Now he plays guitar. He's flip flopped. He started playing bass as a child. His father bought him like a Warrick or whatever. Does his

Speaker 2 (00:03:04):

Dad hate him or something?

Speaker 3 (00:03:06):

His dad's a bass player also. Oh, okay. So he's grown up playing bass. He's fantastic at bass and then he would play guitar whenever the band could find a bass player but not a guitar player

Speaker 2 (00:03:18):

And

Speaker 3 (00:03:18):

We would just flip flop him. He's very versatile.

Speaker 2 (00:03:20):

So

Speaker 3 (00:03:20):

Your

Speaker 2 (00:03:21):

Current guitar player?

Speaker 3 (00:03:22):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:03:23):

Then bassist?

Speaker 3 (00:03:24):

Well, yeah, he's done each one for various stints four or five times now.

Speaker 2 (00:03:30):

So just guy in the band that he's just a guy in

Speaker 3 (00:03:32):

A band.

Speaker 2 (00:03:33):

I remember him walking around saying weird shit.

Speaker 3 (00:03:39):

Yeah, he says a lot of weird

Speaker 2 (00:03:40):

Shit. So that doesn't surprise me, but I guess in the past four years, I guess one of the reasons that I brought you on Creative Live before that, maybe a few months before that, was because Putney told me about you. I didn't know about you, I had heard of your band, but I was like, do you know of any smart people that can bring on a creative live? I have to do Creative live. I'm looking for intelligent people who can talk about music and who are going to be articulate and not, I need someone from a band, I

Speaker 3 (00:04:16):

Dunno about

Speaker 2 (00:04:17):

Articulate, but just go with me on this. I told 'em I need somebody from a band, but this is going to be an educational thing. So they need to be able to speak and hopefully have some sort of a story. I can't just have, because sometimes when you get band guys in interviews, it's like watching a sports interview where it's like, yeah, the team played well and we had a great game. It's

Speaker 3 (00:04:41):

A bit Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights. What do I do with my hands?

Speaker 2 (00:04:44):

Yeah, exactly. So Will was like, this dude has an amazing story and you should have him on. It's very articulate. So I trusted him.

Speaker 3 (00:04:55):

Well, thanks Will.

Speaker 2 (00:04:56):

Yeah, thanks Will. So that's why I had you on and you told me about your story, which we're going to get into, and I was super impressed by it and super impressed by basically how you overcame adversity, but not just overcame adversity, but put basically your foot on the gas career wise and didn't lift off. And it seems like you haven't lifted it off really since

Speaker 4 (00:05:22):

In

Speaker 2 (00:05:23):

The past four years since then. What I remember, you were actively trying to add mixing skills, but the Iris murder was already a well-known band, but you guys have kept on crushing it, but since then what? You've added a label, the studio business.

Speaker 3 (00:05:39):

Yeah, I was recording a lot of bands and producing records in Australia. Thankfully I got to do one cool one for nuclear last, which was the biggest thing that I did. But as the band got busier and busier and the touring schedule got more and more intense, I mean in 2014 when I last saw you, I was on tour for 10 months, which is

Speaker 2 (00:05:58):

Straight,

Speaker 3 (00:05:58):

Straight. I left my house in January and I got back in Christmas.

Speaker 2 (00:06:02):

How are you married?

Speaker 3 (00:06:04):

I'm not married.

Speaker 2 (00:06:05):

Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:06:05):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:06:06):

Okay, well,

Speaker 3 (00:06:06):

There you go. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:06:09):

I thought you were, I guess you right.

Speaker 3 (00:06:10):

Not married, probably never will be.

Speaker 2 (00:06:12):

Hey, lesson to Word to the Wise. Don't tour for 10 months,

Speaker 3 (00:06:16):

Don't tour for 10 months and maybe you can get married and have a house and normal things go in your own bathroom when you want to. But no, that was when things really started taking off. We were making a record around the time that I came and saw you down in Florida, and since then I've taken over the management of the band, which keeps me busy a lot. A lot of work started my own label. So between the touring and both of those things, there's not really a lot of opportunity for me to work in a production capacity anymore.

Speaker 2 (00:06:50):

I mean production a full-time producer, I had to quit too. Joey had to quit too. When we started, I mean when I left Florida, the idea was to start this company. I had been looking at starting this for years, but what was not totally certain in my mind was whether or not I would occasionally record bands or keep it going. And in the first year it still seemed possible, but man, as soon as this became a thing, like a real thing, there's absolutely no way. Oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:07:27):

It's

Speaker 2 (00:07:28):

Just not possible.

Speaker 3 (00:07:29):

Producing a band or engineering a record is like a 24 hour a day job. You've got to eat, sleep, breathe the record, and when you've got to do that for five other entities, it gets a little bit tricky. So thankfully this year I'll have the opportunity to work on some, do a lot of writing and pre-production for some other bands, but in terms of taking a record from beginning to end, I just don't have that kind of time.

Speaker 2 (00:07:54):

So you're involved in the business of the studio?

Speaker 3 (00:07:56):

No, no. Not in Will's studio, but in terms of bands that I'm working with on the side and working with them, writing songs or working on pre-production and so forth.

Speaker 2 (00:08:09):

How do you make that work as far as finding the time? Do you do it on

Speaker 3 (00:08:14):

Yeah, it's very hard. Thankfully I've acquired or developed some sort of other worldly time management skill in the last five years.

Speaker 2 (00:08:23):

Let's talk about that.

Speaker 3 (00:08:25):

Yeah, it's a tricky thing. It's kind of like cashflow, like money coming in, money going out, when to hold it, when to push it. Same with time. It's just another thing to have,

Speaker 2 (00:08:37):

But time doesn't come in.

Speaker 3 (00:08:39):

No, it time just goes out. It just keeps going.

Speaker 2 (00:08:42):

It's not like you're getting a replenishing supply of that

Speaker 3 (00:08:45):

Shit. Yeah, fortunately I've just developed the world's first time machine, so I'm able to do a lot of these things. That explains a lot actually. Yeah. But no, it is just about, okay, I have to do this or I would like to do this at this particular time. Make sure that everyone, you have to have a really strong line of communication. We need to be ready to go because my time's very important and I only have X amount set aside.

Speaker 2 (00:09:09):

So you're talking about when you're talking to potential client

Speaker 3 (00:09:13):

For

Speaker 2 (00:09:13):

Your songwriting

Speaker 3 (00:09:14):

Services, some bands that I might be writing with or handling some pre-production and arrangement stuff. So I'll say, oh, well look, here's the times that I've got where I'm not physically tied to a location because that's another issue. Certain times I might have time available. I'm here today,

Speaker 2 (00:09:30):

But

Speaker 3 (00:09:30):

I can't be working on a band in Australia for a couple of hours.

Speaker 2 (00:09:34):

You're here today in the middle of a tour.

Speaker 3 (00:09:36):

Yes,

Speaker 2 (00:09:37):

But I did hit you up how long ago ago? It's been a minute.

Speaker 3 (00:09:41):

Yeah, 30, 45 days ago. So that's a good minimum amount of time to advance things for

Speaker 2 (00:09:46):

Just to get you for a morning to do a podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:09:49):

Yes. Gets tricky. So I'll just make sure that they know how important it's to be organized and then it's just a matter of what work would I have had to do otherwise in that time and crushing it ahead of time, getting it done so that when you go to work with an artist, you're not sitting doing some paperwork or doing your accounting.

Speaker 2 (00:10:12):

Oh, you mean stuff that's not even related to that artist?

Speaker 3 (00:10:15):

Yeah, absolutely. So that you can just kind of be doing it with them for at least eight hours a day.

Speaker 2 (00:10:22):

Okay. So because you have the management of the band, which is basically the management of a business, I know that there's a lot involved with that and that it is also a 24 7 thing. The music industry doesn't just stop. So speaking of that paperwork and all that stuff you have to do, do you have any concrete methods for time management when it comes to getting rid of all those tasks so that you can then focus on your projects?

Speaker 3 (00:10:53):

Yeah, there's been a few tools that I've kind of started using over the last four or five years. There's a great built-in an Apple guy, so I've got an iPhone, a MacBook and iPad, and I Mac everything and I use the cloud a lot. So having the reminder app, you can put in reminders, it's like a to-do list. You can also put alerts on those to queue when something has to be done

Speaker 4 (00:11:17):

And

Speaker 3 (00:11:17):

You can do it no matter where you are. I can say it into my wristwatch and it'll put it on my laptop. Oh,

Speaker 2 (00:11:23):

You got the Apple phone.

Speaker 3 (00:11:25):

Yeah, the Apple watch. So if I'm,

Speaker 2 (00:11:26):

You mean an Apple watch? That's right. You don't wear a phone on

Speaker 3 (00:11:29):

Your wrist? No. Well, it's kind of like a phone. You can take a phone call on it, but if generally you think about these things that you have to do at random times and it's just about making a note. And sometimes, I mean all the time actually for me, someone this busy, it's very difficult to just make a mental note like, oh, I've got to do the grocery shopping on the way home from it's

Speaker 2 (00:11:53):

Did you used to do it that way?

Speaker 3 (00:11:55):

I did. I did. I did for a long time and it became very unburdening because all of a sudden you're just chasing, it's like, what was that thing? What was that thing? It's the solutions right there on your phone, make a list.

Speaker 2 (00:12:06):

But I'm sure that there was a point, or there was a point probably where you started fucking up, but I'm sure that up until that point you could handle your whole life in your head. I know that for me it

Speaker 4 (00:12:19):

Was like

Speaker 2 (00:12:19):

That my entire schedule for a year and everything I could just do from memory. And there came a point in the past two years where it was like I need to accept that I've been defeated and get a digital aid.

Speaker 3 (00:12:34):

Absolutely. One of the big tipping points for me was, so I was in the band and everything in the band personally affects me. And generally you want to know what your personal schedule is. I'm going to go on a vacation, I'm going to go and do this. And those things are inside your head all the time because you are personally affected. You are the passenger in the vehicle that you are driving. What happened for me was I started managing other artists and I'm not in that car. I'm driving it remotely. So that day to day reminder, oh, we're going to here tomorrow, we're going to here tomorrow. I needed to know that's much. But when you're talking about five different artists and a label and the this and a that, it becomes completely ridiculous to expect the human brain to be able to store all of that and cure it. And the other thing is, I'm traveling every day, so I'm working with three major different time zones, Europe, Australia and the United States, and then there's multiple time zones within those regions. So to know, oh, it's this time in Melbourne and I have to launch this thing, it's not going to happen.

Speaker 2 (00:13:42):

And even if you could handle it 80% of the way, what I noticed was when it got like that for me, I could still handle 80 to 90% most of the time it would be fine, but then it would just be one stupid thing where I booked a flight for the wrong month or something like that, which is just an easy mistake to make, but that has lots of repercussions.

Speaker 3 (00:14:11):

Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:14:12):

That's when I made the decision. I can still pretty much, I could tell you our itineraries for the most part for the next year from memory and airports and everything, who's coming on, who their managers are, where the contracts, all that. But if I don't write it down, at some point I will fuck up somebody's plane ticket. It just will happen.

Speaker 3 (00:14:36):

And this happens with any kind of management that's dealing with a lot of different clients or providing a lot of different services. And whilst it might be a small error on their part and they go, oh, it's fine, just book another flight or whatever, that person's directly affected. They missed the flight, they missed the first show of a tour, they miss a rehearsal, they miss a this. They miss delivering a product on time. So the risks aren't just what you did. There's a massive trickle on effect. And someone like me, I'm booking. I mean just the other month I probably booked about a hundred flights in one month. So you think each one of those is someone different with a different story on that day trying to do something else. And if I make an error there, it's just more of a mess to cleanup. So it's important to do things right from the very beginning. Luckily, most airlines

Speaker 2 (00:15:33):

Have a 24 hour grace period

Speaker 3 (00:15:35):

In the United States. In the United States, not in the rest of the world.

Speaker 2 (00:15:38):

Oh really? Yes, Virgin Australia does.

Speaker 3 (00:15:40):

Well, no one wants Virgin

Speaker 2 (00:15:42):

Australia. I flew them to Australia and it was great.

Speaker 3 (00:15:45):

Yeah, well I'm a Qantas guy, American Airlines, British Airways. I should try

Speaker 2 (00:15:50):

Qantas. I've heard they're great.

Speaker 3 (00:15:51):

You should do. They're fantastic. Highest

Speaker 2 (00:15:52):

Rated

Speaker 3 (00:15:52):

In the world. They are. And I have the highest status attainable, so thankfully

Speaker 2 (00:15:56):

You get to look a human.

Speaker 3 (00:15:57):

Well, yeah. And I'm given certain luxuries there and grace periods that maybe someone else might not do.

Speaker 2 (00:16:04):

It makes a huge difference, doesn't

Speaker 3 (00:16:05):

It? Massive difference.

Speaker 2 (00:16:07):

It's about, it's funny, it's really not about looking cool or anything. It's about getting treated like a human and being able to possibly rest.

Speaker 3 (00:16:18):

Yes, reliability, speed of processing. I mean, some people go in the airport three hours early. I go to the airport 30 minutes before the flight, walk straight through, get on the plane first. And it sounds like such a stupid thing to gripe

Speaker 2 (00:16:31):

About. It's not.

Speaker 3 (00:16:32):

But when you're talking about saving minutes in your day, that's a lot. And for someone like me that flies upwards of 200 times a year. I mean one extra hour times 200, that's a whole week.

Speaker 2 (00:16:43):

Yeah. That's really funny. That's very similar to when we teach people workflow tips for the studio and we're like,

Speaker 5 (00:16:52):

Certain

Speaker 2 (00:16:52):

Things are like, I'll just, one real basic one is we talk a lot about session maintenance, like getting rid of all the garbage files, all that stuff. So your session loads quickly because if your session invariably by the time you're towards the end of a recording, every session is huge.

Speaker 3 (00:17:14):

It

Speaker 2 (00:17:14):

Starts to take longer and longer for a session to load. It

Speaker 3 (00:17:16):

Takes longer and longer. It's going to crash more often. More than likely,

Speaker 2 (00:17:19):

Dude, if it takes 10 minutes, I remember one point in time where sessions would start taking 10 to 15 minutes at the end of a record times how many songs you work that day, times how many days you're working, times how many bands you get to that point with. And it ends up being, I calculated it actual entire weeks out of your year. And it's the same thing. Sir, are you a member of pre-check and Clear?

Speaker 3 (00:17:48):

No, I'm a clear member.

Speaker 2 (00:17:49):

Dude, you should get pre-checked too

Speaker 3 (00:17:50):

If you can. Yeah, it's just finding the time to go and do the interview process.

Speaker 2 (00:17:54):

Trust me, you want to.

Speaker 3 (00:17:55):

Yeah, I know you do. I mean, it only benefits me in the United States, so that's another reason why I'm kind of being lazy on it, but I do really want to do it.

Speaker 2 (00:18:03):

You do because, and

Speaker 3 (00:18:04):

The global entry as well.

Speaker 2 (00:18:05):

Yes. Look, because Clear is great as you know, because you get to the front of the line, but then you get to walk right through. So I've clocked it sometimes 39 seconds from

Speaker 5 (00:18:17):

Getting

Speaker 2 (00:18:18):

To clear and putting down my fingers to getting through security 39 seconds. And I've posted about that and a lot of my friends that travel have made fun of it or gotten bitter and been like, yeah, well some of us don't think that that's a necessary expense. But when you're traveling a lot, like we said, just like a 10 minute load time on a session over the period of a year, those two hours at the airport over times 200

Speaker 3 (00:18:43):

Makes a big difference. And my baggage gets handled with respect.

Speaker 2 (00:18:49):

You get it

Speaker 3 (00:18:49):

First. Yeah, they'll tag it as first class baggage. And then I've got for the band, a particular special top secret baggage policy with American Airlines. So everything just gets funneled through. The only time we ever lose a bag is when we're flying with KLM, unfortunately. And it's always one of my guitars, so don't fly with them very, very bad.

Speaker 2 (00:19:13):

Alright, cool. Well thanks for, I'm just kidding. So the thing that I'm getting from this and that I think is interesting about the time management is that, and I know this from Joey too, he's a big time management person, runs multiple companies, and there's a lot that he has to keep up with all the time is he's just an Apple person. He does it all through Apple stuff. So I, I think the key is to find a system that's simple and that will work on all your stuff. There are expensive, complicated systems that seem really cool.

Speaker 5 (00:19:55):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:19:56):

But the problem with those is, A, you have to learn how to use them and that right there is an investment in time B, it's sometimes hard to get them to talk to other people's

Speaker 3 (00:20:07):

Time

Speaker 2 (00:20:08):

Management systems. If you're

Speaker 3 (00:20:09):

Interfacing when use a crowd potty,

Speaker 2 (00:20:10):

Yeah, it can be a bitch. And three, if it's on something like Apple, it's going to work and it's going to keep being updated in a way that works. And it's simple, it's integrated in your life. You don't need to do something else just to be able to do this one thing

Speaker 3 (00:20:27):

100%. And a lot of people say, well, I can get this laptop with better specs for cheaper and this Samsung phone's better than this Apple phone. I'm like, well, maybe it is. All of my stuff is integrated. And that is where the power lies, not in the individual device, but in the compatibility

Speaker 4 (00:20:49):

And

Speaker 3 (00:20:49):

The interface. And most people that I work with have Apple devices also. So synchronizing the Notes app, I mean, for instance, I generated a shopping list for my tour party.

Speaker 2 (00:21:04):

Wait, wait, tell me about this. I didn't know about synchronizing. The Notes app.

Speaker 3 (00:21:07):

The notes app. I use it on my laptop and on my cell phone you can cloud share that. Also, just individual notes. So this last week everyone's like, oh, we need to make a shopping list. So I just made one in the notes, shared it to everyone on the tour party and said, put what you want to buy in there and it'll get bought for you. What the hell's wrong with it gets wiped every day, the Apple calendar. So I have maybe 10 calendars, a personal one, one with my partner, one for management, one for recording stuff, one for the label, and then one for each band that I work with.

Speaker 4 (00:21:41):

And

Speaker 3 (00:21:42):

Then you just share it to all of them as soon as you went to a new event in they get notified.

Speaker 2 (00:21:47):

You share every calendar with every one of them,

Speaker 3 (00:21:49):

Every calendar with everyone involved with it.

Speaker 2 (00:21:51):

Oh, okay. I was going to say that seems like a big burden for lots of people. Oh

Speaker 3 (00:21:56):

No, no, no, no, no. So for the band, everyone in the band and then there's just a crew one, then there's one with the band and the crew. And then, I dunno if you guys use Slack, I've got a Slack as well with various different work groups. We use the shit out of

Speaker 2 (00:22:11):

Slack.

Speaker 3 (00:22:12):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:22:13):

It's great for certain things.

Speaker 3 (00:22:14):

Yeah, I don't really realize the true value of it because I don't need to, most of the tasks that have to be performed have to be performed by me. Unfortunately.

Speaker 2 (00:22:26):

Here's the value in it in my opinion, is when you're dealing with product creation in real time and you're not in the same place, which is reality for us because we're an internet company

Speaker 4 (00:22:40):

And

Speaker 2 (00:22:40):

For my other company, the Beard Oil company is also an internet company, and then Joey's companies are internet companies and Joel's other company, even though he's in the same place with one of his partners, everybody else is through the internet. So we need a way to be able to talk in real time when we're creating a graphic or just doing something in real time. It's good to have this method where it's so easy to share files and it's just so easy to get work done together and communicate. However, it has its limitations where if the conversations get too crazy, you end up with a thousand messages. So you don't want to, I've noticed you don't want to have serious strategy meetings or talking about the future or stuff like that on there,

Speaker 5 (00:23:32):

Or

Speaker 2 (00:23:32):

Serious meetings that should be done elsewhere. But I think Slack is great for teams to attack problems when they can't be physically

Speaker 3 (00:23:42):

In

Speaker 2 (00:23:42):

The same space. That's cool.

Speaker 3 (00:23:44):

And you can assign a task and assign someone responsible to it. I do a similar thing, but I just use a Google Doc spreadsheet that

Speaker 5 (00:23:53):

Works

Speaker 3 (00:23:54):

Great too for the product management that we do with Nuclear Blast or with human warfare for releases,

Speaker 2 (00:23:59):

All

Speaker 3 (00:23:59):

Goes into one of those and has a timeline and a responsible party list and a check checkbox,

Speaker 2 (00:24:03):

And we use the shit out of Google Docs

Speaker 3 (00:24:06):

And Dropbox. Dropbox is another thing I've got to give props to. If I didn't have that, I would be dead.

Speaker 2 (00:24:12):

So here's my issue with Dropbox, it ended up, well, here's the thing, I was using it for production, so it ended up swallowing my hard drives hole and we,

Speaker 3 (00:24:25):

Yeah, you got to delegate what you sink to your hard drive and what you don't sink.

Speaker 2 (00:24:29):

It's tough though because for instance, this just came up two days ago. So we do a lot of video content. We're always putting out courses and on a lot of them, I'm kind of like the final line of quality control or something along those lines. I get it. I'll be involved at the very beginning making sure that it's what it needs to be and then step back in the final stages again to make sure that it's what it needs to be. And so for instance, there's 40 videos I need to review now, and Google Drive, which they were on, made a very unreliable, I couldn't really download them well,

Speaker 5 (00:25:12):

And

Speaker 2 (00:25:12):

Apparently we needed to sync it the way that Dropbox syncs, but if I do that, we're going to end up with a sink. I'm going to end up with a sink of terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of video

Speaker 3 (00:25:22):

And

Speaker 2 (00:25:23):

How do I decide which to do and which not to do. So it becomes confusing, at least for me when dealing with that much content of that size, I guess because it was bad enough with band stuff. So with video stuff,

Speaker 3 (00:25:40):

Talking

Speaker 2 (00:25:40):

In order of magnitude,

Speaker 3 (00:25:42):

I can imagine.

Speaker 2 (00:25:43):

But for I guess, what kind of stuff are you sending back and forth on Dropbox?

Speaker 3 (00:25:49):

I use it for record keeping. Oh, that's great. In a similar way that I'm using the cloud for sharing notes to myself or to others.

Speaker 2 (00:25:57):

Perfect for that.

Speaker 3 (00:25:58):

Dropbox is a great central system that I can access remotely as long as I have internet access and I'll adjust. There's a selective sync option so you can decide what goes on your hard drive and what stays up in the air. I'll go through once a week and kind of audit that. What do I need? What don't I need? Clean up my Mac, but it's fantastic. So I have a lot of different folder hierarchy templates that I keep. Here's a tour template, has all the different folders, all the spreadsheets that I've developed, all the paperwork that I'm going to need for a tour. So

Speaker 2 (00:26:34):

Bands and So do they link to a Google Doc spreadsheet template or something?

Speaker 3 (00:26:38):

No, no, no. I've just created them in Excel and then put them in. So if you are going on a tour tomorrow, I give you this folder on Dropbox and you go into it, you name the folder your tour,

Speaker 4 (00:26:50):

It's

Speaker 3 (00:26:50):

Going to have your accounting, your merchandise, your settlement sheets, beautiful agent information, ad mats, the whole thing, and you just populate it with what's relevant to that tour, fill out the paperwork that's already in there and Bob's your uncle and they're all categorized by year. And

Speaker 2 (00:27:06):

He is my uncle, Bob's my dad. How do you know? Is that Australian slang or so shit? I think so, yeah. Amazing. Bob's your uncle. I know you never heard that one. No, but I'm about to start using it. Yeah, well Bob's my dad. Did you know that? Bob's your uncle?

Speaker 3 (00:27:19):

He's your uncle.

Speaker 2 (00:27:20):

That's so cool. But we have the same uncle. Maybe I'm not Jewish uncle named Bob, but it doesn't matter. Bob

Speaker 3 (00:27:30):

Mom is matter. Yeah, he might be the tertiary party that links us together.

Speaker 2 (00:27:34):

It could be. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:27:36):

Probably not.

Speaker 2 (00:27:36):

Hey Bob, if you're watching. Alright, so you actually give them an actual Excel file?

Speaker 3 (00:27:44):

Yes. Yeah. And it goes in there and you can collaborate on Excel files. You can even have them open at the same time. It has this little down arrow. Someone made a change where both in the file, you just click that and it will re-sync and update

Speaker 2 (00:27:57):

It. So is similar to the Google sheets.

Speaker 3 (00:28:01):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:28:02):

I was unaware that you could do that with Excel.

Speaker 3 (00:28:04):

Well, you can do a lot of things with Excel.

Speaker 2 (00:28:06):

Well, I know

Speaker 3 (00:28:07):

That Excel nine seven used to be able to play a little video game inside of you put a special code in.

Speaker 2 (00:28:10):

I know you can do a lot of things with Excel. I just didn't know that you could do the living document thing.

Speaker 3 (00:28:16):

Yes, you can with all of the Microsoft Suite. So I've got the Microsoft 365 subscription, five devices, synchronizes and does all this crazy shit. So very, very cool. But yeah, various different templates for anything that I might encounter. We're going to do a record, we're going to have a contract for that record, we're going to have accounting for the record, studio, time, flights, accommodation, what do we need to do, demos, all of that. So it's prebuilt. When I start working with a new band, you just create their folder and it's going to have all of this stuff prebuilt into it and it's ready to go.

Speaker 2 (00:28:52):

That saves so much time.

Speaker 3 (00:28:54):

Oh yeah. I mean it took me a period of time, probably a year I'd say, all up in the background, updating, refining, making things more efficient until I got to a place where I go, this is, I tour the world for a living every day. So you're going to run into different problems all the time. And this now covers any issue that I've encountered. And if it's something that you run into one in a thousand times, then I'll just add it in there as security. But for anyone else, they would get this and be more than well prepared.

Speaker 2 (00:29:25):

Alright, so you've covered having a set of simple tools that integrate into your life, having it all on the cloud, having a set of templates, making sure that everybody that you work with is well aware of their schedule well in advance. And then making sure that you're aware of everything you need to get rid of work-wise so that you can properly devote your brain to the projects you take on.

Speaker 3 (00:29:54):

Yes, all very simple tools that anyone can have. It's just about maximizing the power that they have.

Speaker 2 (00:29:59):

Is there anything else you do for time management or is that going to, I mean that sounds pretty comprehensive, but

Speaker 3 (00:30:05):

Yeah, that's about it. Otherwise, just go with the flow and when you're doing something, trying to enjoy it and not be thinking about other things.

Speaker 2 (00:30:18):

Well, it's funny. Who's seen Indiana Jones in the last crusade? Of course I have. Well, not everyone has remember the book that he wrote everything down in and he left the book behind or with the girl and they had to go back to the castle to get the book

Speaker 5 (00:30:35):

And

Speaker 2 (00:30:36):

Because he didn't remember the way to the city and he's like, how do you not remember it? He's like, I wrote it down so I won't have to remember it. And that's actually really a really, really deep, a deep thought in that movie. One of the reasons that you use these tools and you get everything out of your head and even if it's down to just something like journaling your life or whatever, not even talking about time management, but the reason beyond the actual direct benefit for putting all this stuff into a medium is to free up your brain ram to be able to focus on the task at hand to be more present.

Speaker 3 (00:31:19):

Definitely. And that's something that I learned the hard way the last few years is I got busier and busier and busier and you're at dinner with your folks and you're thinking about work or you're at dinner with your partner and you're thinking about work. And it really started to become, not destructive, but just very distracting to me and I was never really

Speaker 2 (00:31:38):

Relaxing. Well, it can be destructive. So

Speaker 3 (00:31:40):

For certain people, I mean certain people tend to become destructive when they're over unburdened. I just try and grip my teeth and get through it all. But now being more organized and planning allows me to enjoy my time a lot more, which is good. When I'm working, I'm working a lot harder and more efficiently.

Speaker 2 (00:32:02):

It's interesting, I get a lot of my best work done on planes and in sky lounges and I think that it's because you have a compressed period of time. You're being in that sky lounge for 40 minutes and then you have to go, oh yes, so that's it. So you better knock this shit out now. It's great.

Speaker 3 (00:32:24):

Go and get yourself a little snack, little coffee and you sit down at the bar and smash

Speaker 2 (00:32:27):

It. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:32:28):

John Cleese gave a very good lecture about the power of creativity and getting tasks done, and an important aspect of that was setting a beginning and an end for play and play is a very critical component of accelerated learning and task completion. The sense of it's a game

Speaker 2 (00:32:46):

Junk. Lee's the comedian.

Speaker 3 (00:32:47):

Yes, because obviously he's a fantastic creative and writer, so if he had to work on writing some stuff and coming up with comedy, he would say, I'll start at seven, I'll finish at nine. And whatever happens between then is the time that he's allowed to work on it. And then after that you have to stop and breaking different tasks down into small time chunks, makes things a lot more like a game and seem more achievable and then you work harder and faster and more efficiently towards it.

Speaker 2 (00:33:16):

What's interesting about that is that I think it's very difficult to do. It's not a natural thing to just do. Yes. I think the natural thing to just do is to just get lost in whatever you're doing and just keep going, keep walking

Speaker 3 (00:33:31):

And walking

Speaker 2 (00:33:32):

Or get into or start spinning your wheels, like chasing tail and then just keep going

Speaker 3 (00:33:39):

And

Speaker 2 (00:33:39):

Going and going and going. I think that the way that for me, planes and the sky lounge make these limits, these constraints, they make them real. There's no way out.

Speaker 5 (00:33:51):

My

Speaker 2 (00:33:52):

Partner, Joel, one of the things that he's always said is that having a family was what enabled him to crush the amount of work that he does because he has to be done at a certain time because there are human beings

Speaker 5 (00:34:10):

That

Speaker 2 (00:34:10):

Depend on him. He has to, and so he has only X amount of time to get everything done and then it's over. There's no way around it. See, I don't have something like that in my life, so it's a lot harder for me to impose

Speaker 3 (00:34:28):

Because

Speaker 2 (00:34:29):

If you're imposing it on yourself, it's a lot more difficult.

Speaker 3 (00:34:34):

You can just tell yourself, no,

Speaker 2 (00:34:36):

No, just keep going or whatever. Be relaxed or not be relaxed. How do you handle it when you're not in a situation where there's like real life constraints, like catching a flight or the plane is landing?

Speaker 3 (00:34:52):

One of the things that I do is geographically separate myself from what is my life and what is a workspace. And I don't have a consistent workspace. I have a few different locations in the world where I regularly go to work, but otherwise I'm traveling. So it's as simple as where do I spend most of my time on tour, on the bus. So go find a coffee shop with really great internet

(00:35:15):

And go there and complete your tasks and then go back to your life, which is for me on the road a bus when I'm at home. If I don't have a place that I can work at at home, go and find a coffee shop, go there with the intention of working and just walking into a different physical environment really can change your mindset, I feel. I totally agree actually. So that's a big one. And then otherwise I'm on a plane a lot. So like you said in the lounge, crush it for 45 minutes and then get on the next one.

Speaker 2 (00:35:45):

Yeah, it makes a huge difference. I know some people like to just use timers.

Speaker 3 (00:35:54):

Yeah, I've heard about this. When

Speaker 2 (00:35:55):

They're in the studio,

Speaker 3 (00:35:57):

There's a particular system, I forget what it's called, Pomodoro method. Yeah. 30 minutes or something.

Speaker 2 (00:36:02):

20, 20

Speaker 3 (00:36:03):

Minutes time.

Speaker 2 (00:36:03):

Or maybe it's adjustable. Maybe it's like you start with five and then you go, I don't know, because lots of people have made variations on it. But I think if, maybe I'm wrong, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that you're supposed to build up your ability to focus on one task at a time. So you start at five, you set the timer at five so that it's no big deal. Anyone can focus for five minutes kind of idea. Of course I can.

Speaker 3 (00:36:29):

I'd challenge that notion.

Speaker 2 (00:36:30):

Well, but that's what you should be telling yourself.

Speaker 3 (00:36:32):

I've met a few people, I can't focus for five seconds.

Speaker 2 (00:36:34):

Well then do one minute. So you know what I mean? That's like the idea is you pick a time amount increment that you feel confident you can do. And that's like, come on dude, just do one minute. Just do five minutes.

Speaker 3 (00:36:50):

Don't get distracted, don't pick up your phone

Speaker 2 (00:36:53):

With

Speaker 3 (00:36:53):

A snack. Can

Speaker 2 (00:36:54):

Five minutes.

Speaker 3 (00:36:55):

You

Speaker 2 (00:36:55):

Set the timer and then it's almost like we're so addicted to these distractions that, so when the timer goes off, then you're supposed to check Facebook, check your text, do all that stuff, get out of your system, and then go right back into set the timer again. And over time then it becomes 10 minutes, then it becomes 15, then 20, then 30 an hour,

Speaker 3 (00:37:18):

So people can develop an attention span, something that we're losing pretty quickly.

Speaker 2 (00:37:22):

It's really, really important, man. Oh yeah. One of the things that I've noticed that is common among every single successful person I know across fields, whether they're producers or businessmen or musicians, whatever, is they all have the ability to focus when it comes time to focus. Whether they have a DD or not, it doesn't matter, or

Speaker 3 (00:37:48):

Some kind OFM spectrum thing, which I think a lot of 'em do,

Speaker 2 (00:37:51):

I'm sure. I think a lot of them do too, at least in music. But they figure out a way to just zone in. Oh

Speaker 3 (00:37:59):

Yeah. And the puzzle factor becomes such a huge part is how to engage your brain. And for particularly a lot of producers and mixers, how do I make this song better? I've got to make it better, or how do I make this mix better? I've got to find niches to carve out and build up, and I have a lot of experiences watching will work, for instance. And sometimes that guy doesn't stop working for hours, he doesn't look at anything. He just

Speaker 2 (00:38:29):

Is zoned right in.

Speaker 3 (00:38:30):

And there must be some kind of fascination with solving the puzzle for sure. Because he is a machine.

Speaker 2 (00:38:38):

Does he talk to you while he's doing it or

Speaker 3 (00:38:39):

Is it just like sometimes, I mean, I don't always go into his room and bother him, but we're talking about a guy that sometimes is working 140 hours a week and he doesn't get worse. He's just a phenom in that regard. I don't recommend it for the average mere mortal.

Speaker 2 (00:38:58):

Yeah, it's important to note that what the outliers can do shouldn't be, you shouldn't get discouraged and also, but

Speaker 3 (00:39:08):

You shouldn't also be striving to attain that if you can't do that. There's a certain amount of people that can thrive on a very short amount of sleep and some people

Speaker 2 (00:39:16):

Just can't. Some people are born seven feet tall and great at basketball and some

Speaker 5 (00:39:22):

Aren't.

Speaker 2 (00:39:23):

And it is what it is, but it's better to not kid yourself about what you are because it doesn't mean that you can't achieve success or your goals. It just means that you have to go about it a different way.

Speaker 3 (00:39:41):

And for some people they will get to that limit of their energy and they'll push through it and really they're just doing themselves a disservice. Have a good night's sleep, whatever idea that you are struggling on for four hours from 10:00 PM till 2:00 AM if you just slept, you might've come up with it in five minutes by the time you wake up. And that happens to me all the time. So it's just reminding yourself, hang on, I'm not being productive consciously tell yourself you're not being productive right now. You're just kind of traipsing through things, do something else, or go to sleep and come back to it later.

Speaker 2 (00:40:15):

It's interesting when recording drummers, I encounter this a lot and the tough part is there comes a point where they just aren't playing as well. They hit the peak, it's downhill from there. They could keep going physically because they're professionals, but it's just, it's past the peak for the day. But they're the kind of people that the reason they got so good is because they pushed themselves. They are some of these drummers, some of these metal drums,

Speaker 3 (00:40:50):

Extreme athletes.

Speaker 2 (00:40:51):

Yes, exactly. They are extreme athletes that I always used to call them like the Olympic athletes of music or something. So they didn't get there by chilling out. And so when you're in the studio and you're like, all right, let's wrap this and do it tomorrow, you sometimes get the reaction that like, no, I want to get this now. And they get mad. It's hard to, sometimes the pride issue, there's a pride involved. And also speaking on a personal level of being able to stop and feel good about it. That's the tough part in my opinion, is stopping and being chill about it.

Speaker 3 (00:41:32):

I think once you start stopping yourself and realizing when you start again, you'll be better. It is just something you have to start doing. It is hard to say by not doing work, I'm going to do better work.

Speaker 2 (00:41:43):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:41:44):

Counterintuitive,

Speaker 2 (00:41:46):

But it's so true.

Speaker 3 (00:41:47):

Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:41:49):

I mean there's a reason for why the weekend was invented too, and it really does make a difference,

Speaker 3 (00:41:57):

Even

Speaker 2 (00:41:57):

Though I don't take them very often.

Speaker 3 (00:41:59):

No,

Speaker 2 (00:41:59):

Me either. So I mean, how many days off do you get

Speaker 3 (00:42:05):

Me this month? None. I had a day off a couple of weeks ago. I had a week off. That being said, the week off was spending the day with my daughter and then I'd go back to my hotel and work until about 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM

Speaker 2 (00:42:23):

That sounds like a week off.

Speaker 3 (00:42:24):

Yeah. I mean, you do eight hour day instead of a 16 hour day. So that's a day off for me.

Speaker 2 (00:42:30):

Do you ever get an actual full?

Speaker 3 (00:42:34):

I do try to take them off. I try to spend time with my girlfriend or with my daughter if we're going to do something crazy, but otherwise, not very often. There's always something to do. I get probably 200 emails a day, so that's another thing. So you

Speaker 2 (00:42:55):

Can't really take that much

Speaker 3 (00:42:56):

Time. No. And if it's a Sunday somewhere, it's a Monday somewhere else, and if it's a Saturday somewhere, it's still Friday, somewhere else. And it's really, you only get this small timeframe on a Saturday night where people aren't going to bug you too much for me at least.

Speaker 2 (00:43:13):

Hey everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast, then you should know that's brought to you by URM Academy UM Academy's mission is to create the next generation of audio professionals by giving them the inspiration and information to hone their craft and build a career doing what they love. You've probably heard me talk about Nail the Mix before, and if you're a member, you already know how amazing it is. At the beginning of the month, nail the mix members, get the raw multi-tracks to a new song by artists. Bring me the horizon. Go asking Alexandria Machine Head and Papa Roach among many, many others. Then at the end of the month, the producer who mixed it comes on and does a live streaming walkthrough of exactly how they mix the song on the album and takes your questions live on air. You'll also get access to Mix Lab, our collection of dozens of bite-sized mixing tutorials that cover all the basics as well as Portfolio Builder, which is a library of pro quality multi-tracks cleared for your use in your portfolio.

(00:44:12):

So your career will never again be held back by the quality of your source material. And for those who really want to step up the game, we have another membership tier called URM Enhanced, which includes everything I already told you about, and access to our massive library of fast tracks, which are deep, super detailed courses on intermediate and advanced topics like gate staging, mastering low end and so forth. It's over 40 hours of content. And man, let me tell you, this stuff is just insanely detailed. Hence, members also get access to one-on-one office hour sessions with us and Mix Rescue, which is where we open up one of your mixes on a live video stream, fix it up and talk you through exactly what we're doing at every step. So if any of that sounds interesting to you, if you're ready to level up your mixing skills and your audio career, head over to URM academy.com to find out more. So I want to switch directions here. We've been talking about this for a while. I want talk about your history a little bit. We talked about it on Creative Live, but I'm sure that most of our listeners have not seen that episode. So you have a very, very interesting history, and I want to just go into that because one thing that I've admired about you is the ability, your ability to envision your future and then create it. And you were in the hospital, right?

Speaker 3 (00:45:45):

Yeah, 15 years ago.

Speaker 2 (00:45:47):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:45:48):

Can you talk about that a little bit? I played rugby most of my life to a pretty high level, and just one day some guy kneed me in the face in a game and it crushed the right side of my face. So my nose, eye sockets where I have the glasses, cheekbone jaws all broken my nose.

Speaker 2 (00:46:08):

It destroyed you?

Speaker 3 (00:46:09):

Yeah. My nose is not attached to my face at all. Wow. All messed up. Depending on which way I sleep every day it goes a different way. So yeah, that was pretty brutal. And I'd been thinking about playing rugby through college and maybe taking up as a professional career.

Speaker 2 (00:46:27):

And then the doctors, so you were in it?

Speaker 3 (00:46:28):

Oh yeah. Yeah, I was in it. I was training hours and hours every day of the week,

Speaker 2 (00:46:33):

Sometimes

Speaker 3 (00:46:34):

Six to eight hours a day for schoolwork and

Speaker 2 (00:46:37):

All right. So this was like what you were doing with your life?

Speaker 3 (00:46:40):

Yes. This is what I was doing, and I was going to go to college and whatever and see what happened. And then I crushed my face brutally and basically had nearly a year off school, grade 12, which is your final year in Australia? I was 16, turning 17. So they're like, no more rugby for you, no boxing, no anything where you're going to get hit in the face real

Speaker 2 (00:47:03):

Well, because that's how long it took to just heal to wear

Speaker 3 (00:47:07):

That. And there was some residual damage that can't be corrected. There's a piece of bone inside of my eyeball and there's a piece of bone missing out of my eye socket here. And they're just like, no more sports. You can't do sports. I'd have to have crazy corrective surgery and get a plate or something that are really invasive stuff.

Speaker 2 (00:47:26):

So when it happened, could you feel it?

Speaker 3 (00:47:30):

I played the rest of the game. Jesus Christ,

Speaker 2 (00:47:33):

You guys are fucking animals, man.

Speaker 3 (00:47:35):

Yeah, it was crazy. And then I guess I didn't really have the wherewithal to know what was going on.

Speaker 2 (00:47:41):

And no one on your team or the coach? Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:47:43):

They iced it,

Speaker 2 (00:47:44):

Hey, your face is

Speaker 3 (00:47:46):

Melting. Dudes in my team that would crack their scalp open and they'd just put staples in and I had my eyebrows stapled shut one day to go back out and play spray, some kind of numbing start. I dunno what they would do on it and just keep playing. It's not like American football where you got all these pads and stuff like that. Rugby union is the brutalist sport there is, I believe. And then I guess somehow I decided to walk home and no medical staff or whoever stopped me. I just kind of snuck off and started walking home and this friend of mine's father was driving home, found me on the side of the road and took me home. And then I didn't do anything about it. I just kept going to school.

Speaker 2 (00:48:32):

Wait, so your parents didn't notice?

Speaker 3 (00:48:35):

No, no, no. It was like a slow thing. So everything had become separated. The point of impact was on

Speaker 2 (00:48:41):

A cheekbone. I see, I see. And then it slowly started. Okay, so you took a hard hit, but there wasn't a lot of visible

Speaker 3 (00:48:47):

No, it's not like my face immediately caved in. Oh,

Speaker 2 (00:48:50):

Okay. So it wasn't like a sucking chest wound or

Speaker 3 (00:48:52):

Yeah, no, it's not like I got shot in the,

Speaker 2 (00:48:55):

Okay, I see. So just a really hard hit that did a lot of internal damage.

Speaker 3 (00:49:00):

Yeah, yeah, totally. And no one could really tell some hectic concussion. And then I started having problems focusing at school, and I didn't realize that I'd actually just been blacking out. And this teacher who actually interviewed me to attend this school, who was a great mentor of mine, was like, you're sleeping in the class. I'm like, I'm not going to sleep. She's like, you just keep being asleep. Then she realized one day I just went, bang.

Speaker 2 (00:49:28):

Like an narcoleptic?

Speaker 3 (00:49:29):

Yeah, I guess she got my parents involved and they're like, okay, this guy's got to go to the hospital. And I got cat scan after cat scan, after cat scan, and they're like, your whole face is broken. Surprise. They pulled me out of school and everything.

Speaker 2 (00:49:42):

Were you playing rugby this whole time?

Speaker 3 (00:49:44):

No, no, no. I'd had a little bit of time away from the rugby. Okay.

Speaker 2 (00:49:47):

Just by chance.

Speaker 3 (00:49:49):

Just by the fact that my face really hurt.

Speaker 2 (00:49:51):

Okay. So it did hurt? Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:49:53):

It hurt brutally. I smashed my whole face, but my household was not a go to hospice. Got it. Broke your arm.

Speaker 2 (00:50:00):

Let me fix that up for you. I'm just trying to understand because my mom, for instance, has a intense knowledge of medical stuff. And so it's the kind of thing where I hit my head once as a kid and it was immediate

Speaker 5 (00:50:17):

To the

Speaker 2 (00:50:18):

Hospital. There were no fucking around. So it's just different. I'm just

Speaker 3 (00:50:24):

Trying

Speaker 2 (00:50:24):

To understand. So

Speaker 3 (00:50:25):

Very, very, very old school upbringing. Both my parents were in the military, so

Speaker 2 (00:50:32):

Just suck it up, just walk it off it off.

Speaker 3 (00:50:34):

And I tried to, I didn't realize the seriousness of it, and when they started giving me cat scans and everything, they're like, oh, your whole face is pulled apart. Jesus Christ. So yeah, my whole jaw, the bite and everything is out. Everything's wrong with my face at the moment.

Speaker 2 (00:50:49):

Alright, so what happened when they were, your face is broken, dude,

Speaker 3 (00:50:52):

So obviously I couldn't play rugby anymore. I'm just sitting around going, well, what the hell am I going to do? I couldn't go to school. But did

Speaker 2 (00:50:57):

They put you in the hospital or anything?

Speaker 3 (00:50:58):

Yeah, yeah. I was in hospital. I was on bedrest and they were trying to fix my face and stuff, surgeries, and then,

Speaker 2 (00:51:07):

Okay, so you're in bedrest than surgeries,

Speaker 3 (00:51:10):

Different stuff to try and keep my face the way that it was. Got it. Then I go back to the school, I'm like, oh, well you need to do some kind of sport. I start playing volleyball just in a physical education class, and my school was the Australian champion volleyball school for decades.

(00:51:30):

So everyone's real good. I don't play, but I'm like, oh, just participate. Some dude spikes the ball into my pinky finger and just shatters. Shatters it, call a spiral fracture. It goes straight down through the knuckle into the hand and the bone came out. I'm like, I've been at home for ages, doing nothing. I come back to school and this happens. And the teacher goes, oh, hey guys, remember we were learning about subluxations last week? Let's have a look at this. This is a classic. Subluxation goes to correct the finger. I'm just like, this is screwed up. You teacher? Yeah, yeah. Not a doctor. And he personally thanked me for not suing him. Here goes, just goes to put it back in and the bonus goes beep. And he was just, Nope. So I had it like that for a day or something while they had to.

Speaker 2 (00:52:23):

Oh, so you didn't go

Speaker 3 (00:52:24):

To the hospital? I had to go to the hospital the next day or whatever. It was brutal. You didn't go right then. No, no. Lock that off too. So they put a little splint on it and bandaged it and they're like, oh, this guy are going to have to get his finger put back together.

Speaker 2 (00:52:38):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:52:38):

No big deal. So yeah, they did that. They put my finger back together.

Speaker 2 (00:52:42):

So this is after

Speaker 3 (00:52:45):

The face crushing and all this. This is the middle of my final year of school.

Speaker 2 (00:52:49):

Okay. So how much, like what, nine months at elapsed? Eight months, nine months?

Speaker 3 (00:52:53):

Oh, no, less like three or four months.

Speaker 2 (00:52:55):

Okay. So your face probably still hurt and

Speaker 3 (00:52:57):

Yeah, it still hurts now,

Speaker 2 (00:52:59):

Particularly

Speaker 3 (00:53:00):

In the cold, but break the finger, have to go into the hospital, can't do anything, can't play sport. My teachers agree that I've completed all of the, what do you call it? All of the tasks that I have to do to be graded. I mean, I'd completed them mostly in my 11th grade. Anyhow, it's another story, but I finished my schooling rather early and just kind of stayed. So break the finger early. Midlife crisis. I can't play rugby, my hand's broken. What am I going to do? I really like guitar. Asked my mother to buy me a guitar magazine while I'm in the hospital. And then I just started teaching myself how to read tabs

Speaker 2 (00:53:43):

While in the hospital bed

Speaker 3 (00:53:44):

Without knowing how to play a guitar or anything.

Speaker 2 (00:53:47):

So have you heard of the band Opus?

Speaker 3 (00:53:49):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:53:49):

By any chance. Okay. They were

Speaker 3 (00:53:51):

Crazy Tech grind.

Speaker 2 (00:53:52):

Crazy tech grind. Yeah. From the mid 2003 through eight era, the guitar player, Chris Arp is a genius and he went to prison for something or jail for a long time. I don't know what he did. He's a great guy, so I forgive him. And it couldn't have been that bad. He wasn't there for that long. But while he was there, he got a cardboard piece and drew a fretboard on it and wrote his whole, and you know what their music's like?

Speaker 5 (00:54:27):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:54:28):

Okay. He wrote their whole next album in his head, looking at that fretboard.

Speaker 3 (00:54:32):

That's some crazy,

Speaker 2 (00:54:33):

That is some crazy shit.

Speaker 3 (00:54:34):

Crazy old school composer stuff. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:54:36):

But so anyways, you taught yourself tab reading,

Speaker 3 (00:54:41):

Reading. I just started learning to read tabs, what they meant, decoding, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (00:54:47):

How did you translate that to, were you imagining yourself playing? Well, no, because

Speaker 3 (00:54:51):

I didn't know technical facility or how to hold a guitar or whatnot, but I knew how to approach loading the guitar, so I've just been a very slow version of the matrix. Downloading all this information, what is the string? How do you tune the strings? What are the numbers on the tab mean? You put your fingers here, here's things that one finger per threat, all these different rules. So by the time that I could play a guitar, I couldn't play one, but I knew how to.

Speaker 2 (00:55:20):

Interesting.

Speaker 3 (00:55:21):

It was a matter of translating that information into physical, technical facility.

Speaker 2 (00:55:26):

How long did you spend matrixing this info?

Speaker 3 (00:55:30):

Oh, months. Six months or so,

Speaker 2 (00:55:32):

And then

Speaker 3 (00:55:33):

I started college the next year and got a guitar and just started trying to figure it all out.

Speaker 2 (00:55:38):

Alright. So a period of minimum six months from when you got your first guitar magazine and the input, the downloading sequence began?

Speaker 3 (00:55:48):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:55:48):

So when you first got your first guitar,

Speaker 3 (00:55:51):

Well, I must disclose, my first guitar was a two string acoustic. I stole from the neighbor's mother and I didn't know what a pick was, so I would cut pieces of my school diary and try and play things. So really I did play a little bit of guitar, but when, probably about a year before that, then someone urinated into the sound hall of the guitar, so I didn't play it again. I think it might still be in my mother's garage. Hey,

Speaker 2 (00:56:20):

That was nice of him.

Speaker 3 (00:56:20):

Yeah, it had two strings bottom. Two strings, only ones you need to be in my band.

Speaker 2 (00:56:25):

How long did you have that guitar for? That's hilarious.

Speaker 3 (00:56:29):

Well, I dunno, I got urinated in and so

Speaker 2 (00:56:32):

Should have said it on five to say pretty quick,

Speaker 3 (00:56:34):

Rather quickly.

Speaker 2 (00:56:35):

Okay. Yeah, I'm just trying to understand elapsed time with all these things and to understand.

Speaker 3 (00:56:41):

So this is moving into 2004 and then I probably joined or started my first band later that year while I was in uni.

Speaker 2 (00:56:49):

Okay. So for all intents and purposes though, you got your first guitar after six months when you started college and

Speaker 3 (00:56:58):

That's when I started just being obsessed with guitar and playing.

Speaker 2 (00:57:01):

But how weird was it? I'm trying to,

Speaker 3 (00:57:06):

It was totally weird.

Speaker 2 (00:57:07):

I'm trying to articulate

Speaker 3 (00:57:08):

Weird. Nothing that I did in so weird my whole life. Whatever I thought I was going to do, I could no longer do. So I'm going to college going, this is boring, and guitar's cool and just figuring it out. Very dark time. A bit

Speaker 2 (00:57:24):

Weird. I was about to say, were you depressed?

Speaker 3 (00:57:28):

No, I don't think that I have depression or had depression.

Speaker 2 (00:57:32):

But you said it was dark.

Speaker 3 (00:57:35):

Well, because I was going into a place where I had no knowledge, got it. Playing football, doing math, all of those things that I would do through school were all things that I had extensive knowledge about and to some extent like a proficiency and then all of

Speaker 2 (00:57:51):

A sudden, so the lights had been turned on

Speaker 3 (00:57:53):

And then all of a sudden I'm going into things that I dunno anything about. I decided, oh, I want to do psychology and law and those are things, if I had have followed the logical progression, I should have done a math major or whatever and played football, but now I'm playing guitar and doing something else, so

Speaker 2 (00:58:11):

It's all new shit.

Speaker 3 (00:58:12):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:58:13):

And how weird was it when the actual process of learning how to physically take that information that you had been downloading into your head? How weird was it? Especially at first when you got a guitar, it's like, okay, I understand all these things that are probably way more advanced than I can imagine playing for a while.

Speaker 3 (00:58:33):

Where

Speaker 2 (00:58:34):

Do you start?

Speaker 3 (00:58:35):

Just the basic building blocks. Early on I was reading all these guitar magazines. I was finding out about players that non guitar players probably wouldn't notice or be interested in. Paul Gilbert, John Petrucci, Steve Wise, Satriani. So I'm like, who the hell are these guys? I didn't even listen to music growing up.

Speaker 2 (00:58:55):

What have they done?

Speaker 3 (00:58:56):

I'm like, I don't know who this guy is. And so I just read all these different exercises and a lot of the stuff was over my head and I don't think that that should discourage people. It just piques my curiosity on what the hell is this modal axis system that Steve i's talking about and what is this chromatic exercise? What's chromatic? I literally didn't know anything aside from what I'd been reading, reading. And so I'd just find these different lanes to take. Then I got the guitar and I'm like, okay, so let's just start with these chromatic exercises and start doing that. And some days I'd do it for eight hours a day and just be a real brute to myself.

(00:59:39):

And then there were a lot of things I'd buy the records and I hadn't really listened to much music at that point in my life, so I'm getting these dream theater records. I'm like, this sounds pretty out there. I'm not really into it. And then the guitar playing, I'm like, that's crazy. And I knew nothing about recording. I'm like, how's this guy doing it? There's got to be some kind of wizardry. And then I got the live at Buddo car DVD from Dream Theater, and I'm like, this is going to be good. Let's see how good this guy really is. No one can actually play that fast. And then he did it. I'm like, like you really do just have, I mean, in all their interviews they would just be talking about, I played for 12 hours a day.

Speaker 2 (01:00:18):

I remember once I read an interview, I think they went to high school together or they went to high schools near each

Speaker 3 (01:00:26):

Other. All those guys are from Long Island

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):

Except

Speaker 3 (01:00:27):

For PJ I think.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):

So they knew each other and they had a rule where they each had to put in a six hours on high school days, not on weekends. They each had to put in six hours on their own before they'd be allowed to go to this hangout spot they would all meet at. So they knew that if they saw the other guy, they had

Speaker 3 (01:00:46):

A punch they're going to bring get in

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):

If you're whoever from Gene Theater and John Petru rolls up to hang out at their high school hangout spot, he's put in his six hours. They kept themselves to it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:00):

No, I definitely did a lot of partying and drinking at that time too, but a lot of metronome work, just developing the basic techniques and whatnot.

Speaker 2 (01:01:11):

Did you, I mean, most people don't start with that stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:01:15):

That's what I started with. I wasn't learning stupid chords or songs. I was straight into rock discipline. That was the first thing that I tried doing.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):

I imagine you advanced pretty quickly.

Speaker 3 (01:01:26):

So if I had a free day, I just set up a metronome every time I played an exercise three times perfectly, I'd speed it up four BPM. If I made an error, even if it was on the last note or the third time around, I'd slow it down eight BPM and I would just do that. Yeah, man ages. So yeah, been

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):

There.

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):

I was already way ahead of myself knowledge wise. And I take that approach to almost everything that I do develop as much core understanding and knowledge about a thing. Even if you don't have time to practice or the physical ability when you have the time, it's really just about taking that information and putting it through the muscles and making it happen.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):

Something that the old concert master for the Atlanta Symphony told me, and for anyone who doesn't know Concert Master is the lead violinist. They're number one. The person who comes out tunes the orchestra. That person usually gets in a symphonic season, gets one solo concert where they're the feature. And what she told me was that the way that she really knows that she knows a piece that she's about to do a Beethoven violin concerto or something insane, that is after all the physical practice, she lays down on the floor and just closes her eyes and imagines herself playing it from start to finish

Speaker 5 (01:02:54):

And

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):

She will fuck up while playing it in her head. And so if she'll go back to the beginning and she knows that once she can play it in her head from start to finish, she's ready to go on stage.

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):

That's

Speaker 2 (01:03:07):

Cool. Yeah, same idea.

Speaker 3 (01:03:09):

Visualization and mental preparation is probably one of the biggest things that I use to acquire skills very quickly.

Speaker 2 (01:03:18):

So where did you see it going? Did you want to get into a band?

Speaker 3 (01:03:21):

Oh, I had no idea. I was just going to uni and I had a new girlfriend and some friends of mine that I played with in school played football with, also played some music and they were teaching me how to apply the technical facility into songs. They're like, Hey, you should check out this band and you should play this song and we'll teach you how to play it. Because I never really enjoyed music. I didn't have a musical family. I didn't have time to listen to music. I'm just playing football or doing math or going to school. So they're just bombarding me with all of this new information and culture and going, if you can play guitar, you can play songs with other people. I'm like, really? Okay. And

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):

Interesting idea.

Speaker 3 (01:04:05):

Yeah, we started going to gigs together. I'm like, okay, this is pretty cool. And so that first year in university, I was just doing a lot of that, going to uni, working, practicing guitar, and then people were going, Hey, come to this show and let's go and see this show and whatnot.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):

It's funny though that you say first year man to get to that point, most people are already playing five years just to get to that point,

Speaker 3 (01:04:29):

But

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):

So when did you get to your first band and wasn't it already?

Speaker 3 (01:04:32):

It was right away

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):

Within a year, right?

Speaker 3 (01:04:34):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):

And wasn't it a pretty big band?

Speaker 3 (01:04:37):

No, no, that was two or three years later.

Speaker 2 (01:04:40):

Oh, okay. Got it.

Speaker 3 (01:04:41):

I started playing guitar for this band called the Amity Affliction, which is now the biggest rock band in Australia.

Speaker 2 (01:04:47):

So within two or three years of playing guitar.

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:04:49):

It's insane. So your first band, was it like a nobody band?

Speaker 3 (01:04:54):

Yeah, I mean I wouldn't even say that they were bands. It was like a couple of this group of friends, we get together and play music and then this group of friends, we get together and play covers and that they're just making me play songs by bands that I don't even know. But it was great because I'm acquiring songwriting skills or different techniques and whatever to play the material. And then some of these guys and some of those guys want to start another band. And

Speaker 2 (01:05:18):

It

Speaker 3 (01:05:19):

Was that playing a little bit of metal, mostly punk rock. It was a lot easier.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):

But then how does that lead to getting into a big band? Within two or three years of even just starting music

Speaker 3 (01:05:31):

Networking, I made lots of friends. Troy Brady, who's the former guitar player of that band, became a close friend of mine. So when he was like, Hey, we need another guitar player to come on tour, he was just like, you can do it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:45):

Well, was that your goal at all to join their band? I didn't even know. Oh, okay. They

Speaker 3 (01:05:48):

Were one of the first bands that I'd even seen. So it was that band and Parkway Drive, which is another band that I've played guitar for. So it's kind of weird. They were my first two shows that I saw because they were local to me and it's just coincidental that I ended up playing guitar for both of them and they ended up becoming the two biggest heavy metal bands from Australia ever.

Speaker 2 (01:06:10):

So you understand how weird that is.

Speaker 3 (01:06:12):

It's very coincidental. Yeah, it's very bizarre. So I started doing that and he really took me under my wing in terms of writing popular music in a heavy context. We would do a lot of writing together. He started teaching me about making demos and recording and basic pro tools usage. Gave me my first real guitar, which was an ESP Viper, like a LTD 1000 deluxe back when you guys used to make cool guitars. Quality's not so good anymore, but they were fantastic guitars. I had an army of 1000 Deluxes and they were awesome. So he gave me that and I used that to play in his band and just kept playing that guitar. And that's where I did the majority of my formative time was with that particular instrument. The frets are so ground down, it's unbelievable. It's just totally unusable now.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):

So how did that lead to, I guess, Parkway Drive and then Thy Art, and at what point in time, how long had you been playing guitar? Dude, it's just, let me just say what's the thing that's crazy and I'm sure you know it, but when you hear about dudes and bands and stuff that are big or the biggest in their scene, you're talking generally about guys who have been playing no less than five years, but more like 10

Speaker 5 (01:07:36):

Who

Speaker 2 (01:07:36):

Have been into music since they were 12 and who have had several bands along the way. Not guys who didn't even play guitar until two years ago, taught themselves in a hospital bed and then joined the two biggest bands in their country. It's just weird.

Speaker 3 (01:07:53):

I dunno, that's cool. My place right time. There's a lot of other things that, I don't want to say that they're deliberate movements socially, but

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):

There were deliberate moments socially,

Speaker 3 (01:08:05):

No, well, not with their end goal in mind, but certainly positioning yourself as someone that people like that someone respect, being reliable, having, I'm not very talented, but having some base level of talent that's usable. And then if the requirement ever appears, then you might be selected.

Speaker 2 (01:08:26):

Well, how would you get to the point of even being respectable enough in their eyes? Okay, so say that my band was back together or something

Speaker 4 (01:08:40):

And

Speaker 2 (01:08:40):

We needed a new guitar player, and I knew a kid that had been playing for a year and a half who was very talented and he wanted to do it. I still wouldn't let him in, but I mean, I'd probably help him get better and get him to the right coach and watch his career and maybe be like, well, maybe in five years we can do something. Because typically they're not nearly good enough at that point. But so I wouldn't even see it as an option. That's the thing. Not even a respect or disrespect thing. It wouldn't even be an option in my head.

Speaker 4 (01:09:18):

So

Speaker 2 (01:09:20):

What did you do to be able to even be an option to get the respect enough as a musician in that quick period of time to where they would even consider it?

Speaker 3 (01:09:30):

Yeah, I dunno. I guess the first stage is having the technical ability to perform the music. Obviously we're talking about a whole other set of social skills that one requires to be on the road for a lengthy amount of time, being very malleable, adaptable, having good endurance mentally, emotionally, physically. So just having that skillset. And you see people on tour all the time, it's like he's a fantastic guitar player, but I would never let him play in my band because let alone in my house, yeah, he's just going to create too many issues. He's going to be too demanding. He's going to be grumpy, he is going to be like, oh, I need to do this. It's like, go and do it then don't trouble me with it. So just being kind of independent like that, but also being able to play in a team.

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):

Team, I guess maybe your sports background did prepare you in that way,

Speaker 3 (01:10:23):

A big team. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of independent and team training. So with the Amity thing, I just was friends with Troy, he saw me play guitar all the time. He knew that I was pretty good at guitar and that band's not a technical band, it's about the songs. So he was like, Hey, you can play the stuff. It's not hard, just play the songs how they are. So I did that and then left that and started playing in a hardcore band called Abraxis, which is like this underground holy terror, hardcore group in Australia. And I'd been doing that and learning some basic engineering skills. And this is in the late two thousands, 2008, 2009. And then I'd been working at a independent record label in Australia, which put out Dieters motor CDs. So I would see them, they would come by when they were on tour and whatnot, and they were like, Hey, we need a guitar player. The bass player's not working out the back.

Speaker 2 (01:11:21):

The

Speaker 3 (01:11:21):

Guitar

Speaker 2 (01:11:21):

Player, were they established at that point? Were they,

Speaker 3 (01:11:24):

This is 2009, they'd done their ep. They were working on the album, the Adversary, and I've been playing guitar for four or five years at this point. And so they needed a guitar player and

Speaker 2 (01:11:40):

Sean, but were they like a big band yet?

Speaker 3 (01:11:43):

Not internationally, no. But

Speaker 2 (01:11:44):

In Australia?

Speaker 3 (01:11:45):

In Australia, probably a couple hundred at a club. Okay,

Speaker 2 (01:11:47):

So

Speaker 3 (01:11:48):

Doing on

Speaker 2 (01:11:49):

Their way

Speaker 3 (01:11:49):

Shows. Yeah. Not like a major headline act, but in the world that art exists in, at that point in time, that was about as big as it was getting. There was one band bigger called the Red Shore.

Speaker 2 (01:12:00):

So it's actually kind of a step down for you in a way.

Speaker 3 (01:12:03):

Well, no, it was more to my taste.

Speaker 2 (01:12:05):

Okay, got it. But I mean, in terms of size, they already played it

Speaker 3 (01:12:11):

For sure. Band. Yeah, the band was definitely much smaller. I mean, Amity will play to five to 8,000 people a night in Australia. If we play to a thousand, we're happy. And that's now. So they needed a guitar player and I was like, okay, yeah, I'll do it. I've got nothing on this week. They go, okay, your first show is tomorrow and you need to learn 15 songs or whatever. So I learned them and then played a show the next day.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):

How did you go about learning 15 songs in one day?

Speaker 3 (01:12:40):

Good

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):

Enough for show?

Speaker 3 (01:12:41):

I dunno. They just taught me the songs and I wasn't even a fan of the band's music. I was into metal and being a technical guitar player at that stage. So I was like, this is a perfect vehicle for me to get involved and learn more about writing metal songs, play guitar solos, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):

Well, so I don't know if you know of a guy named Kevin Talley. He's an old drummer.

Speaker 3 (01:13:06):

Drummer,

Speaker 2 (01:13:06):

Yes. Used to play with him, but he's been hired by lots of bands lots of times same day. I remember once with Devil Driver, John Berkland Beck, when he was in got Food poisoned in the morning. They bought Kevin a plane ticket at 11. He arrived by three, did a soundcheck. They played a show he had never played with them before. He learned the set on the flight,

Speaker 4 (01:13:35):

And

Speaker 2 (01:13:35):

He's done that multiple times and saved bands that way. And

Speaker 3 (01:13:40):

That's how did Parkway.

Speaker 2 (01:13:41):

Yeah, he learns it in his head. And then what happens happens in real life. So with 15 songs, was there a method, do you remember? Was there a method that you organized the material or that you got it under your fingers?

Speaker 3 (01:13:58):

I think a lot of it comes with freeing up your brain entirely and not thinking about anything, and then just really driving home repetition as fast as possible because developing the neural network and the muscle memory is super important. You're not consciously going to remember that many notes in a night,

Speaker 2 (01:14:19):

But I mean developing muscle memory for 15 songs in one night is also,

Speaker 3 (01:14:23):

Yeah, it was actually the morning of the show, so we were driving to the show and they were teaching me in the van and I didn't even know their songs. So I'm listening to the songs for the very first time and just going through it that way.

Speaker 2 (01:14:38):

So it was interesting. How did the show

Speaker 3 (01:14:39):

Go? It was fine.

(01:14:40):

Okay. It was like the start of a two week long tour and then I was in the band. So then we just started going from there. And then with the Parkway thing, it was a similar situation. I'm friends with the guys now. Their production manager's a great friend of mine. He's also the arts production manager in Australia, and we were doing a tour together in Australia in 2015, and he calls me up as I'm boarding my flight at LAX. He's like, Jeff's just torn his hams. He's got to go in for surgery, he can't play. You have to learn. He's the set list. And I'm downloading the songs to my Spotify to learn on the plane. And then I got to Australia and started doing shows with him.

Speaker 2 (01:15:23):

That's amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:15:25):

So that was just another instance.

Speaker 2 (01:15:27):

Obviously

Speaker 3 (01:15:28):

No one wishes that upon someone, but they needed someone, they knew that I was able to do it. They knew that I wasn't a dickhead, so I learned the material and then that turned into a two year long part-time thing where someone else got injured. And I've played both guitar parts and bass for the band.

Speaker 2 (01:15:46):

It's interesting when people talk about, a lot of people give advice about the music industry, they're like, most important thing is going to be the word of mouth generated about you. So what people think of you, if you're going for something like what you do, hugely important. And that is just the perfect example of that in action.

Speaker 3 (01:16:10):

Yep. I guess. So be good enough and be a good person, and if an opportunity arises, maybe you'll get selected.

Speaker 2 (01:16:17):

Exactly. So we've been talking for a while and I know you got to get out of here. So I want to just ask you a few questions from our listeners that Sure. The first one is from Charles Elliott.

Speaker 3 (01:16:35):

Oh God.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):

Hello

Speaker 3 (01:16:37):

Charles. He

Speaker 2 (01:16:37):

Said, how sexy is your publicist slash product manager on a scale from one to 10?

Speaker 3 (01:16:44):

I

Speaker 2 (01:16:44):

Say 11,

Speaker 3 (01:16:45):

Honestly. Oh, I don't know. He didn't put zero in there, but it's a firm Zero. Charles. Yeah, zero. Sorry Charles. He never comes and hangs out with me. So

Speaker 2 (01:16:58):

It's a zero. Here's one from Adam Humphreys. In your experience, what's the most difficult thing people don't usually mention about touring besides the money part or missing home?

Speaker 3 (01:17:11):

The most difficult part is, oh geez, there's a lot of difficult parts. I try to circumnavigate those or find solutions to make them not be difficult. Logistics a big one, good planning organization leading and controlling of the situation is essential. And most people screw that up big time.

Speaker 2 (01:17:37):

That is tough at first

Speaker 3 (01:17:39):

Do it. So tough. Flights, visas, vehicles, equipment, moving the equipment, merchandise moving, the merchandise, accounting, all of that. It's a big thing that when it's done correctly, makes the experience for all the crew and the band members far more enjoyable because they're not stressed out about stuff. They're going to have what they need. And having familiar stuff as well is important.

Speaker 2 (01:18:04):

What's interesting too is not only does it make the experience better for you, but say that you're a smaller band, say you're second out of five, how together you have that stuff reflects on how you're going to get treated and whether or not you're going to get asked to do other tours. Oh

Speaker 3 (01:18:22):

Yeah. We always tried to act very professionally and be very prepared and organized. And I think as more opportunities present themselves, you are more likely to be invited to step towards them.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):

Absolutely. So here's one from Max Geffen at many local shows, especially metal ones, whenever a guitarist has a lead part or a solo, it's almost impossible to hear what they're playing through the rest of the band. When you guys played in Brisbane on your tour in February, the one thing I noticed was how clearly your lead tone stuck out from the mix. How did you manage to keep a consistent lead tone in a live setting without it getting drowned up by the band

Speaker 3 (01:18:59):

Kemah? I've got some special profiles that aren't available to the public. They're the profiles off of the album, dear Desolation that we put out last year. So it's like basically the tone on the record will has a way of going back and reverse profiling are already recorded guitar part

(01:19:20):

Because you keep the di, so it makes it a little bit easier. So we put those on there. Obviously they're great profiles from the get go. And then great guitar, great pickups using the Ernie Ball Music Man Majesty series. Not the biggest fan of the bridge pickup, but most of the soloing I do is on the neck pickup. And I don't know what John Petrucci and DiMio did, but those new neck pickups are perfect for me. That really helps cutting through. And then secondly, I guess the barrier to entry to having good sound is being able to afford a good sound guy. And it's an unfortunate reality that younger or more developing bands that aren't earning as much money can't afford a great quality sound guy. I always prioritize in our budget sound guy, because regardless of anything else, yeah, it's a business. Oh, we've got to sell t-shirts, we've got to make money, we've got to look cool, we've got to have lights, we've got to play. Music is the first thing. That's what we're known for. And I want the music to sound good. We try really hard to make good music, then we try, we're not the greatest live band, but we try really hard to be as good as we can.

Speaker 2 (01:20:27):

You can.

Speaker 3 (01:20:28):

So why not extend that to having it be presented the best way possible? And the first element of that is the sound. I mean, having the lights and having the this and the production comes secondary to that to me. And so we invest in Good Sound Guys.

Speaker 2 (01:20:44):

Tip for bands lower on tours is if you get to know the sound guy from the direct support or the headlining act, if you guys get cool with each other, oftentimes they'll be happy to do it for like 30 bucks a night, 40, 30, 40, 50, just a little. Sometimes

Speaker 3 (01:21:02):

I ban my sound guys from doing that.

Speaker 2 (01:21:04):

Yeah, well I was about to say as long as they're allowed to do it.

Speaker 3 (01:21:08):

But no, you don't want 'em wearing their ears out. And also, I mean, not to be like a dickhead about it, but they're yours. Yeah. We're paying the money, so don't try, try it. Tour with them. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:21:22):

If you get a die artist murder,

Speaker 3 (01:21:24):

If we're super friendly with another band, but otherwise it's like, well, we vetted and found and discovered this guy and we pay him really well and we'd look after him. You do all of that if you want to have a great sound guy. So good sound guy at that particular sound guy. And that tour was a guy named Brandon Cagle out of Knoxville, Tennessee, used to play guitar in white chapel and talk about overcoming adversity. He was in a motorcycle accident, lost the use of one whole arm from the shoulder down

Speaker 4 (01:21:49):

Jesus.

Speaker 3 (01:21:50):

He goes, I still want to be involved with the band that they included him as a member still. He's a part of our group. And so he just learnt sound and learn everything about live sound. And he's their live sound engineer.

Speaker 2 (01:22:05):

And

Speaker 3 (01:22:05):

Thankfully sometimes they're not on tour. So he comes with us.

Speaker 2 (01:22:08):

Nice.

Speaker 3 (01:22:08):

So we share one guy with White Chapel and the other guy Twan, we share with Cannibal Corps.

Speaker 2 (01:22:14):

Nice. And they're the two dudes. Okay. So these questions here, one guy has a few questions. If these are will Putney questions, just say that. Sure. But I'm sure some of these are,

Speaker 3 (01:22:26):

I can probably answer them

Speaker 2 (01:22:27):

Are good for you?

Speaker 3 (01:22:28):

Pretty close.

Speaker 2 (01:22:29):

So from Justin de Shao, Hey Andy. How do you go about finding and creating guitar and bass tones for the context of Studio mix versus live use?

Speaker 3 (01:22:39):

Well, we use the studio guitar tones live through the power of the Keer now being able to profile those tones. This last record has, it's probably my favorite guitar tone that we've had. And I literally were in a room amping for hours, dialing tones. And it's funny because we're on tour with Dying Fetus at the moment, but I was referencing the guitar tone to Reign Supreme by Dying Fetus. He was like, yeah, it's sick. I'm like, yeah, I want something like that. Let's go for that. So going through all these different amps, cabs, pedals, it's the beauty of amping. You don't have to think about playing the guitar, just focus on the sonic quality and we're trying forever. And what if we use this amp or do this, or maybe it needs to be more scooped. What frequency does the scoop need to be at?

Speaker 2 (01:23:27):

And so you're finding, just to clarify the frequency scoop through the miking,

Speaker 3 (01:23:33):

Through miking will obviously has a lot of outboard as well. So I mean you can go through and all the mics will come back through a summing mixer. So we get one line back into the computer. He's very confident in committing like that. I mean obviously he's a very talented engineer so he can commit to things that I would be too afraid to.

(01:23:54):

So everything gets summed. So he's able to put outboard effects on that one channel. Otherwise you'd have, I think we ended up using seven or eight microphones on three different cabs and two or three different amps blended to make that sound. And being able to profile that is only possible because we summed to one channel, so we're doing that going over and over it for hours and hours. And then he goes, I know why we can't get it. Kind of the exact same vibe. And I was like, what is it? He's like tuning. They're in a different tuning. We're like, no wonder it sounds more punchy. Ours is going to sound a little bit sludgy because the lower tuning. So then we were like, okay, well we're in the ballpark, let's just dial it. And will's a guitar tone master. So he is just doing his super science dog hearing, bat whistle bullshit and he got it. And then we use those tones on the road and you can get the tones from the last two records through his Kemper bundle pack, which is for sale on the internet

Speaker 2 (01:24:56):

STL tones, right?

Speaker 3 (01:24:57):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:24:57):

Okay. That's the one. Cool. Here's one from Garrett Prater. And again, some of these are engineering questions, so if they're for you, cool. If not cool too.

Speaker 3 (01:25:08):

Let me just disclose. I'm not the engineer Will does everything because he's a mad scientist. But I can probably give some insight onto the processes.

Speaker 2 (01:25:18):

What are some of your general moves when it comes to overall punch and clarity throughout vocals, drums, guitars and bass like in defective breeds, super punchy. Especially while working in bass drops. And what's your go-to flow for hard banding guitars as an effect while maintaining fullness of the sound? Do you also pan base like in laceration penetration? Those all sound like will Putney questions.

Speaker 3 (01:25:38):

Laceration penetration is before Will. Okay,

Speaker 2 (01:25:41):

There you go.

Speaker 3 (01:25:42):

So obviously has lots of different techniques that he employs. We adapt some of those to the live use. And also we mix our own ins, so we've adapted some of those. One important thing is a parallel mix bus. You have mixed bus compression. If you put an 8 0 8 into it, you're just going to compress your mix more and do that really shitty thing that happened in Death Core 10 years ago where every time the 8 0 8 hit, the music just disappeared. So being able to send things outside of your mixed bus compression is super important. And you can float vocals, overheads, all that kind of stuff outside of it. You need a little bit more volume and you find that it's just triggering your compression more. Send it outside of compression. It's pretty simple solution. Obviously phase relationships pretty important. We hard pen guitars. One of the things our band's known for is the this thing. Some people pull 'em in we're just 100, 100. So yeah, that's that. And rarely if one guitar is playing for a substantial amount of time that it's pulled in. So if you had headphones on, you'd get something over there.

Speaker 2 (01:26:47):

Oh, okay. And this will be the last question. I know you got to get out of here. It's from Charlie Chugs. I bet you that's not his last name. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:26:54):

No.

Speaker 2 (01:26:55):

What are some of your favorite tools for writing pre-production songs?

Speaker 3 (01:27:00):

Pro Tools. I'm a big pro tools fan. Will's been trying to get me to use Logic for years. It would probably make the process of porting our stuff into his system a lot smoother. But then you'd be

Speaker 2 (01:27:12):

Using Logic, then

Speaker 3 (01:27:13):

I'd be using Logic. I mean those dudes that graphic nature, fly on Logic. So

Speaker 2 (01:27:19):

They still edit drums and Pro Tools though.

Speaker 3 (01:27:21):

Yeah, yeah. Unless it's like a live, lately they've been doing a lot of live recordings with some of the hardcore bands and then they're just really going for the takes and doing basic comping. And it doesn't have to be gridlocked. Like in Beat Detective, you can just take the bar and nudge each start of bar, so it's a little bit tighter. But yeah, they use Pro Tools and Beat Detective as does pretty much everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:27:46):

The reason that I'm bringing that up is just because we have content on learning how to edit in Pro Tools, Reaper and Cubase. And we didn't do Logic. It's not great for editing. And a lot of people

Speaker 3 (01:27:57):

Seeing the grid is like,

Speaker 2 (01:27:59):

Yeah, it's weird. It's not designed. It's not designed for it. It's a great do, but it's not designed for that. And so

Speaker 3 (01:28:05):

Very creative workspace. But

Speaker 2 (01:28:07):

Yeah, it's a great DAW for what it's great at. But a lot of fans of Will or Nolie are like, yeah, but these guys make great sounding records. And the answer so was like, but Will and his whole crew do not. These edits we're talking about doing the crazy stuff is not taking place in Logic.

Speaker 3 (01:28:24):

Oh yeah. Yeah. Again, maximizing the usage of your tools. They don't like doing anything else in Pro Tools.

Speaker 4 (01:28:31):

They

Speaker 3 (01:28:31):

Don't like editing drums in Logic. Just use each tool for what you get the most out of.

(01:28:37):

But Pro Tools got one of those, is it the Apogee Duet with the Silver Wheel? Probably had a few of those. They just always, someone steals them or someone else in the band takes one home and then we have another one or it gets returned. So that is great. I mean it's small USB into the MacBook and now that we have Kempers generally with us using that, never taking a DI we're not that. We don't care about the takes really, it's just about getting the idea down. But before that, we were using Revolver for the longest time with the 50 on 50 and that was it. And oh and Superior drummer obviously, I think his name's Bill down there sent us some superior drummer stuff. Bill Terrell, thanks a lot. But we've literally used Superior Drummer to write all the records. When we get to Wheels, he just does a mid dump and uses whatever he uses contact, I think. But Superior Drummer is huge. And at the start of a session I'll just make, and Sean will do the same, just make all the different kinds of drum beats that we're likely to use a db, a blast beat, a bomb blast, a ride blast, and just put a bar of that at the beginning and it's just dragging, dropping, putting in stupid fills. And it's so quick.

Speaker 2 (01:29:54):

So much like your time management skills, you've incorporated that into your writing so that you can get the most out of your sessions.

Speaker 3 (01:30:03):

Oh yeah. It's as easy as having a writing template that has a few of those drum beats already written in the midi. Just copy save as or whatever. You have your track with your guitars in there. All the usual routing that, I mean, I like to, even from the demo stages, I'm putting a little mix bus compressor and having everything kind of sounding pretty good. You record the thing and then it's done. So it's just about saving time and maximizing the use of your brain on being creative as opposed to fighting technical issues.

Speaker 2 (01:30:37):

Yeah, I mean, who wants to do that? Anyways, no one. Andy, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Very cool that you were able to even in the middle of a tour and have a happy and safe rest of your tour. I'll try to Thanks to

Speaker 1 (01:30:54):

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