DAN LANCASTER: Landing Bring Me The Horizon, Working with Blink-182, Mixing on headphones

Speaker 1 (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

Speaker 2 (00:46):

Levi. 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]. Alright, so welcome to the URM Podcast. With me is one of the most requested guests of all time that we've had. Mr. Dan Lancaster from London, England. He's an artist, producer, mixer, mastering engineer. And you know of him because he is worked with Monster acts like Blink 180 2, bring me the Horizon. Good, Charlotte, on and on and on. Welcome Dan. Thank you for being here.

Speaker 3 (01:50):

Cheers. Thanks for having me. When you put it like that, long

Speaker 2 (01:54):

Time coming.

Speaker 3 (01:54):

It does sound crazy, doesn't it? All those acts?

Speaker 2 (01:58):

Yeah. I mean, do you ever think about it?

Speaker 3 (02:00):

Not like that. No. No, they're

Speaker 2 (02:02):

Just bands you work with, right?

Speaker 3 (02:04):

Yeah, it's kind of work. Obviously I love my job, but yeah, so when you put it in a list, it's like, ooh, credentials. That's nice. So thanks for that.

Speaker 2 (02:13):

Well, I mean, if you talked to Dan from 10 years ago, would Dan from 10 years ago believe that that would be the

Speaker 3 (02:20):

Credentials?

(02:22):

I didn't want to be a producer 10 years ago, as in I had the option of pursuing production and I didn't want to do it. Is it not like, I don't know if I will, I dunno what I want to do. It was like I knew I didn't want to do production, which is really weird. Why not? Because at the time I was in a band and I liked being in the band. I liked the record, I like the, I dunno, making the songs really well because I was crap at doing the engineering really is what it is when you start, isn't it? You haven't got a clue that was just like, oh, I don't want to do it. So I thought that that was what production was. It's funny because looking back now, it's not that at all. There's so much more to it, but back then it was like I couldn't handle the engineering and therefore I had no interest in pursuing it, actively didn't want to pursue it and I wanted to be an artist as opposed

Speaker 2 (03:20):

What changed?

Speaker 3 (03:22):

I suddenly got, it was pretty much overnight. It was like I got interested in it in a moment. I was just like, oh, interesting. Pretty much. And then that was it. I was obsessed. And that obsession lasted,

Speaker 2 (03:36):

What was that moment?

Speaker 3 (03:37):

It was pretty much when I got my own space, I was kind of given a room that my brother had spare in his factory at the time for his business. He's since gone on to move and everything. This was a few years. This was shit, this was 10 years ago. Yeah, 10 years. I'm 32 nearly. So I was like 22. Anyway, he gave me a room and that room led to Pro Tools for the first time. I wasn't using some dodgy version of something for the first time. I suddenly had Pro Tools and Interface. So it was like I had ownership of something albeit basic at that point. That spawned the kind of obsession to learn how to use it. And I always thought I didn't have enough. I couldn't possibly do what I wanted to do because I had sort of an entry level setup, which is partly true, but it was really deeper than that. It was like I didn't really know what I was doing at all. So yeah, it pretty much happened overnight. I just got really into production all of a sudden. And in particular engineering, I suppose drums and how to get them in so that I could get them towards the mixing part because actually

Speaker 2 (04:58):

What about drums attracted you?

Speaker 3 (05:00):

Because they're so hard to make sound good when you are a beginner, they just sound so bad because there's a lot there. There's so many channels and all that. I don't really see how you can get a vocal wrong comparatively to drums. You can, but you wouldn't catch me doing it. Just basically singing to them. Do you know what I mean? There's loads of cool different mics and preamps and all that stuff, but it's not that interesting to me because there's not a lot of variables because there's so many variables in the performance voice. That's the interesting bit.

Speaker 2 (05:36):

So how did you go about learning it, the drums, how the recording drums?

Speaker 3 (05:40):

Well, that's the cool thing about me and you and this kind of resource that you have. Back then there really wasn't, there was barely even YouTube. I mean there was YouTube, but there wasn't loads of different channels of people talking about the latest Pro Seven. There just wasn't. And if there was, I didn't know about it.

Speaker 2 (06:06):

I don't think there really was.

Speaker 3 (06:08):

No, it'd be interesting to go back, wouldn't it? See what there actually was and how it all worked on YouTube and stuff like that. But yeah, it's not just YouTube. Of course you have the internet itself. That was probably a better resource for learning, but it came down to trying to do it basically and failing each time

Speaker 2 (06:32):

Over and over and over, I'm sure

Speaker 3 (06:33):

Pretty much. And then kind of reading Sound on Sound magazine, that was one of the ones when nothing and all of that information is there. It's kind of fun to read through, but actually trying to find what you want isn't that easy in a magazine. It covers what synths come out last month or whatever, and that's not what you're looking for or certainly wasn't what I was looking for, but it did occasionally have something that was what I was interested in learning about. So that was cool. And then there's the odd article, isn't there back then online, but really it was just rumors of if we're talking about mixing, it was just kind of rumors of what the superstar mixer dudes were doing. Maybe some forums.

Speaker 2 (07:25):

I remember, yeah, Andy sne had his forum and he would sometimes post a few tips in there, but they'd be like one sentence or two sentences

Speaker 4 (07:36):

Just

Speaker 2 (07:36):

Be like, yeah, I like adding some distortion to the base to bring out the mids. That's it.

Speaker 3 (07:42):

And actually as a

Speaker 2 (07:43):

Piece of hinting at something as

Speaker 3 (07:45):

A piece of information, it's two things. On the one hand it's cool, like okay, there's something for me to absorb, think about and then apply. But the application on the other hand doesn't lead to what Andy Sleep is able to achieve when he talks about the mids and adding distortion on a base

Speaker 5 (08:08):

Because

Speaker 3 (08:08):

It's a different context all the time. So yeah, it's a difficult thing. It's like you've got to fill your head with it, go and try it and not achieve what these guys are achieving for quite a while. That was how I learned really. I think there was no one to teach me. I did a little bit of hustling, like meeting people who I admired and thought that I might be able to get some stuff out of some information. And actually it worked a little bit, but there was just at the point where I was so hungry to learn that I just lost myself in trying to get opportunities to work with people and stuff like that. But then that wasn't really the thing that got me stuff. Again, it was just finding snippets of information by watching them do it over their shoulder or whatever. But yeah, that's how I learned really was not through other people and not through coming up the ranks in the studio or anything like that. It's all, I've always done this on my own. I'm in my studio, I'm on my own right now. So I mean that's doing a podcast of course, but

(09:19):

I'm basically always on my own making music, mixing music, producing music. And I've only recently had someone to help me Reese, my assistant. But yeah, no, it's a very much a one man band so to speak.

Speaker 2 (09:34):

So how long do you think it took of working day in, day out on your own? Failing learning from it, then coming back again and trying to make it better? How long did it take before you started to achieve results that other people were excited by?

Speaker 3 (09:51):

Difficult to measure because part of it is when you're working on a song by an artist that has a profile large enough or significant enough for them to get their own opportunity for the music to be heard, IE radio play or something like that, you can't just produce something and get radio plays, you know what I mean? When you start out, you're not going to be working with those kind of artists unless someone, unless you're working for someone. So you have to step up the kind of ladder to a point where you reach an artist who is in that position and that takes a lot of work. So it is difficult to measure because in sound, probably quite a while before that say it took four years to get to that song being on the radio where I thought, wow, that sounds good. And actually it's done a bit of rotation on radio. So that sort of validates that it might actually be good sounding

Speaker 5 (10:51):

Halfway

Speaker 3 (10:52):

Down those four years, there would've been a point where that artist noticed you and what you were doing, thought they thought it was sounding good. So that's what led to you working with them, which is what led to the radio play. So it is very difficult to measure, but it's years. It's years. Maybe five. Let me think. I remember my first paid client was in 2009 and it was a couple of hundred quid for, I can't even remember, maybe five songs or something. It was like a rock band, like a local rock band or something. And they were really young, they were like 16, I was 22, 16, 17 they were. And that was my first paid client. That was 2009, sort of about maybe seven or eight months after I'd had my pro tools rig and stuff. And then one of the ones that sticks out to me is Here we go by lower than Atlantis is one of the first ones. And that was in 2014. So that's five years on. That's not to say that it was the first song that I ever got radio on and that I was even trying to get radio in my career. It's not really what you try and shoot for, but it's a good place to start. You know what I mean? It was probably that song where I thought, this sounds good and I still look at it now and it hasn't really changed. I have my ears changed and my songs that I do now don't sound the same,

(12:23):

But it still sounds good to me. And it was good at the time. And then it did certain things that got a lot of a-list radio one back in 2014 summer, and that was a cool measure of what people thought of the song because it came out of nowhere for the band this a-list. It spent five weeks on the A-list or something like that, which was quite an achievement. So that song sticks out for me. So there you go. That's five years, isn't it?

Speaker 2 (12:54):

Did that open you up to a whole new level of clients from that point forward basically?

Speaker 3 (12:59):

No, not really. Not the actual radio play, more like the records. So the corresponding album that that song was from would be something that would be heard by maybe their peers or the label or another label or something like that. More that than the actual radio play itself. But it certainly all contributes towards it. What it actually is, it's a combination of things and it's not always how good things sound as well. It's more of a business eater, weird a and r stuff going on. But yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:39):

Yeah, for sure. So you have worked with some huge acts in the music scene or do you have a strategy for attracting and maintaining those types of artists as clients? Or did it just happen organically for you?

Speaker 3 (13:59):

You can't really hope to get one of them as a client and actually really directly get that. That's pretty much impossible. For example, say I had wanting to work with Bring Me The Horizon just really badly in my mind it's not likely that I'm going to get it, it would be kind of chance. There has to be some sort of reason. Yeah, so I guess that's what the question is. The strategy for that to be honest is no matter how small or maybe uninspiring or sometimes some songs you're working on aren't very good or whatever, whatever's going on, whatever you're working on, always try and please yourself as much as you possibly can. So the very last detail where you could walk away and say, I think that sounds amazing, as amazing as it possibly can, you'll never be like, ah, this one doesn't matter as much as this one.

(15:00):

It's just no matter who it is. I mean, of course everything I do now, if it's a big act, I'm obviously because I'm getting paid, I'm obviously, I'm obviously trying to do my best on it. But I'm talking about coming up to, before I was working on all these acts, no matter how crappy some of the acts might have been, I would always give them sonically my best. I would do it for myself. You know what I mean? They obviously probably had an idea of what they wanted in sound, but really they just wanted it to sound good, which is easy for me because you just try and make it sound good basically. So everything was always done to the absolute best of my standards. And eventually someone heard something smaller, smaller in terms of profile in a bigger band or a bigger artist, and that's where you can open a door to get an opportunity because you're already practiced in how good is this guy? Well, let me show you. Do you know what I mean? And you give it everything. That's how it works, I think.

Speaker 2 (16:02):

So you looked at every project as an opportunity to refine your skills and to just develop excellence

Speaker 3 (16:10):

To hone my craft.

(16:12):

And now I'm in a completely different position to four years ago, let's say, with who I'm working with in terms of the profile and stuff like that. And it's still the same thing. Actually it is weird because recently I've become a mixing engineer where I'm on labels, radars and artist radars as a mixer. And there was actually a point where that was, that started, it was like a measurable time and that was when Bring Me the Horizon asked me to mix their record. I'd never mix an album ever that I hadn't produced. So before all that I was just producing and mixing and it was all kind of bundled in for the artists I was working on or I would produce and then someone else would mix it in Occasionally, I think maybe only once or twice Neil Aron did some LTA stuff, but most of the time I was producing and mixing until it got to bring me and then I was able to be seen as a mixer basically. And that's where I do a lot of mixing now, and I just make sure that I'm trying to make everything excellent basically. And I was doing that before and I'm doing it now and it is always been normal for me. And I think that's what you can just build on that

Speaker 2 (17:32):

In an interview I read with you, you talked about how you had to be hungry for what you want because there's always people out there trying to best you. What got you to that mindset?

Speaker 3 (17:43):

Partly experience. If you kind of like, I think human nature, if you're working hard, certainly for my personality anyway, if you're working hard for let's say a week where you're doing maybe 12 hours, 13 hour days, the long ones, and then you finish what you're doing, obviously you're going to need a rest to reset. But sometimes you don't always have that time to just stop. So you'll be like, well, okay, I've finished that seven days I needed to do that stuff, but I now got to do the next stuff. So day eight is day one again, and actually day eight can end up being very unproductive. You still just want to not do anything. And that happens all the time if you work a lot trying to be successful I suppose. And if you end up doing that all the time, you can feel it. So you have to balance everything and stay on top of it so that it can be so you could keep it growing it. You know what I mean? Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 (18:48):

Yeah, for sure. So did you always make yourself take breaks when you were first starting or is this something that you figured out over time,

Speaker 3 (18:58):

This is something that it

Speaker 2 (18:59):

Was just better

Speaker 3 (19:00):

As a more mature professional? I do it now when I was younger and just kind of throwing all my energy at it. I think that's a mistake to just keep, I mean everything in life is a balance. You have to balance all, but there is a certain period of time, period of years where you really do have to just go crazy if you want to get the results. And I'm still kind of doing that to be honest these days. But I just think with more kind of structured breaks and stuff,

Speaker 2 (19:33):

Well, how often do you have a break, just say in your regular life now?

Speaker 3 (19:40):

If I'm really absorbed in what I'm doing, it can be like I forget to eat and stuff. So in my mind is always kind of frantic and when I'm focused on something, normally if I'm enjoying it, so I don't really take breaks. I like to and I should do it more, but particularly the songwriting or the production, I'll just sit there for hours and I don't even know that the time's passing, but yeah, you don't want to go too mad.

Speaker 2 (20:12):

Is it like a hyperfocused where the rest of the world just

Speaker 3 (20:16):

Disappears?

Speaker 2 (20:16):

Totally,

Speaker 3 (20:17):

Totally. And that's a great sort of quality to have. I think it's been good for me that that's built inside me somewhere. It helps me to get things done without really having to try. I just kind of get in there, get locked in and just keep focused and stuff. But sometimes it can be hard to make the start for me. Sometimes it can be, if you've got a lot of work on, it's like, oh, finished it brilliant, then you've got to do the next thing. And always the start of something is not as exciting as once you're deeper into it. So that's why I have Reese to help me out, get me started, get me quicker into the creative stuff.

Speaker 2 (20:57):

I think the biggest challenge with this kind of stuff typically is just getting started. Totally,

Speaker 3 (21:02):

Man.

Speaker 2 (21:02):

I mean I know that with guitar playing too, and I've heard a lot that also with writing not, I mean music writing, but also writing words for

Speaker 3 (21:12):

If

Speaker 2 (21:12):

You write books or journal

Speaker 3 (21:13):

Any sort of task space thing, isn't

Speaker 2 (21:15):

It? Yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:16):

That

Speaker 2 (21:17):

When

Speaker 3 (21:18):

You work for yourself, you need extra special skills and motivation and if you've got them, you are going to be ahead of the other people. I think I'm still working on mine.

Speaker 2 (21:29):

Have you

Speaker 3 (21:30):

Always had them?

Speaker 2 (21:31):

Yeah, same here.

Speaker 3 (21:32):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean that's the thing. I've got a compromise because I can get myself so focused. If I'm lucky enough to be accidentally absorbed something so deeply that I can just keep going, I've got that working for me. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. But that's like when you're doing it for a job, it's like anything. Isn't it like a career working for yourself? Do

Speaker 2 (21:57):

You ever take days off?

Speaker 3 (21:59):

Yeah, I do now. Yeah, to this year, I think I'm going to be doing four holidays, but there'll be five days rather than weeks. I get bored on holiday as well. It's the opposite. If I'm sitting around doing nothing, I just want to write music or whatever. So I'll probably do 20 days properly not doing music this year, and the rest of them will be, I'll take the weekends off, take Sundays off most Saturdays I keep working.

Speaker 2 (22:29):

I think it's crucial, man. I really do. But I totally do agree with you that when you're younger and you're first starting, you have to pull the four or five years of just insane work to get good, you

Speaker 3 (22:45):

To still got to be smart with it. You don't want to just work in the wrong direction. You still got to think what your goal is, I think. But yeah, definitely. Yeah, you just find yourself, I mean studio people in general, just all kind of, anyone who's listened to this, anyone who's subscribers on your staff, they're all going to be kind of looking at their computers all day. That's what we do. So it it's just a bit nerdy, isn't it? So it's like you can easily

Speaker 2 (23:15):

Just a bit.

Speaker 3 (23:16):

Yeah, you can spend a lot of time just doing it. So yeah, you just find yourself end up a whole month can be like, whoa, what was that shit? Especially in a studio with a band or something like that, which I don't particularly like doing. It's just a little bit too intense for me. But sometimes it's got to be done. But yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:41):

So do you prefer the fact that you're getting a lot more mixing work now for stuff that you didn't produce? Do you like that better?

Speaker 3 (23:49):

I feel like it's pretty awesome because it's always the thing pretty much from day one that I set out to be good at. It was the thing that I was the worst at. And I think everyone is when you start, because in a way you can record a drum kit and it sound recorded, do you know what I mean? It's like it's the context at the end and getting to the end and that's the mixing. And you can't really be a mixer without being an engineer as well, in my opinion. You have to know what these guys are doing, so you have to kind of learn to do it yourself, to take, yeah, so mixing was the thing that I was always wanting to be the best at. That was the hardest, most interesting, most challenging, and therefore most rewarding part. So now that I'm able to mix records, I feel really lucky.

(24:43):

I have to kind of remind myself that, holy shit, I reached my goal because it took so long to get to that point. One day I was actually walking along and I just kind of realized, I was like, shit, I just mixed whatever, something big. And I was like, that's mental. And then I realized I'd hit a point, I'd hit that goal and it happened after the realization happened way after the project or whatever, because at the time it's like a really, it's work. You've got to get it done. I love that I'm doing the mixing. Yeah, I love that. It's my favorite bit, but I wouldn't say that I would only want to do that. I actually have the capacity to write songs. I'm a writer as well, so I do some artist stuff as well. And then the production of course, which half the time the mixing crosses over with, doesn't it? And vice versa. But I wouldn't want to just do mixing because for me it's like, I like that it's isolated. You're on your own and you can just listen to the speakers and sit there for hours on your own, making it sound cool. It's a really rewarding process to get to the finish line, but I wouldn't just want to do that.

Speaker 2 (25:59):

So what's different in your process between say when you first get a mix from somebody else, like something you did not produce versus when you go to mix something that you did produce?

Speaker 3 (26:13):

I actually mix other people's stuff in a much larger volume these days than I do mix something I've produced. If we're talking numbers of songs, I'd estimate it's probably about 15 songs a year. And that's if I've done an album that I would be producing and mixing myself. So one album a year roughly, and then probably given the albums come in and single songs come in and couple of songs come in as a mixing job, I'd probably mix maybe 40, 50 songs a year. I don't know, I've never counted, but so I don't really have a set process for the production to mix because I'm just not doing a large volume of it, like I say. But

(27:02):

Mixing, I've got Reese to help me start, because actually the start is where it's basically translating. If it's pro tools then it's less translation, but it's basically translating their work into your space. So I get someone else to do that for me because it's just a killer. It's not the same process. And it can be weird trying to mix the two in because I'll start doing it. I'll be like, well that needs to be there as per what I'm used to. And then I'll start mixing the snare and start EQing it. And I realize I've still got the whole song in different colors and dunno what the fuck's going on. So I make someone separate them out for me because it's quite easy if you're just doing it as a one stage, it's quite easy to just not mix in what colors should it be, where should it be, should it be labeled, what does it look like, what does it sound like? What can I do with it? And that's the cool stage. But don't, I don't like putting them together, of course. And lots of MIT engineers don't do that themselves. So yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:02):

Hey everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast, you should know that's brought to you by URM Academy, URM 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 like Bringeth Horizon, gosh, 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.

(29:01):

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. Intense 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. I always urge people to try and get someone else to do it, but if they can't afford that yet, at least do it on two separate days.

Speaker 3 (30:05):

Yeah, two separate days.

Speaker 2 (30:06):

Set the song up one day, mix it the next.

Speaker 3 (30:08):

It's a good shout. Yeah, because like I said, they're so different and when I try to do it, I can never, I just get too interested in the mixing too excited to by something that I'm hearing, want to make it sound cool and then find myself half mixing, half organizing, and ultimately not going very directly to where I want to go, but it's not really get someone else to do it. I don't think you should delegate stuff that you haven't got under your own skillset. I mean, took me years to delegate that. I only started doing it last summer. So you put that in perspective, that's a long time working on my own. I did everything. So all the editing,

Speaker 2 (30:49):

Absolutely,

Speaker 3 (30:49):

Because then I know what to do. I know in a sense you become a expert at everything you need to be able to do. So I think that's quite powerful tool for me to have. And then it just became a point where it was too much mixing and it was taking too long. So my manager was not able to, so I had to change basically. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (31:09):

That makes perfect sense. I totally agree. I mean, I don't think that people should delegate it either until they know exactly how to do it. Because if the guy that you delegate it to needs to do it according to your specifications, even they're laying samples or editing the drums or whatever it is that they're doing, they need to be doing it in accordance with what you want as a mixer or producer. Otherwise

Speaker 3 (31:33):

They're not really helping, are they? I suppose. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:36):

Yeah. So I feel like until you actually know how to do it, you can't communicate it

Speaker 3 (31:42):

And still only does the kind of simple stuff coloring and it's still a killer to the process. Like I said, we're talking about, it's not the right brain space, it's like part organizing, part mixing, but he's still not doing it to a crazy advanced level. He just knows basic things, colors, where they go, buses. So it's like I've started getting into plugins with him now as well because there's so many plugins and stuff that I use all the time on the same thing if it's a certain type of production. But for the most part, even now, it's still quite a simple ask. It can take him sometimes it can take him 15 minutes, you know what I mean, to do it. But that 15 minutes for me, I still wouldn't be able to do it very well. So he does it really well. But yeah, yeah, it's cool.

Speaker 2 (32:39):

That's the reason actually that I had someone start doing that for me was because I knew how and I knew all of what to do, but I get distracted really, really easily when doing tasks like that. So I would end up doing a sloppy job. It's not that I didn't know how to do it, it's just my brain stops focusing when I have to do those types of tasks. And there are other people who doing that kind of stuff and whose brains are better designed.

Speaker 3 (33:05):

That's it.

Speaker 2 (33:06):

To do them great. Got

Speaker 3 (33:07):

To go with your strengths. Yeah, definitely as a job, when it's your job, you're trying to work out what you've got to work out, what kind of stuff you're good at and what stuff you're not good at. Because I'm not good at it all. I'm bad at that stuff. I can't get there directly. I just lose it. Even when I'm mixing, say if I decide to do something that involves going through, I don't know, adding a snare or something simple like that, you think, oh, well actually that sample that I've just added on this little section sounds cool. I then need to go through and do it on the whole song. Maybe it's probably easier to just manually bang, bang, bang, I'll get to the last chorus and forget to finish it because something else will be interesting to me. And when I'm mixing, a lot of the time I'm just swimming around the song at the end, just doing things in different places all over the place. So yeah, it it happens when I'm actually doing it because at that point you wouldn't calf and say, oh please can someone else do this for me? You just do it yourself, don't you? You are working on it.

Speaker 2 (34:16):

So how did bringing the horizon enter your life? Just changing gears. I mean you kind of said that that was a big turning point.

Speaker 3 (34:23):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they were the first album that I mixed. There was like, are a Mixer now, can you please mix? We like the sound of your mix. So although I'd done it before, I'd never done a record, I'd maybe done a couple of tracks that were just mixing. So anyway, how did we get there? It was quite simple. The band had a song that they had going on Radio One, and it was a kind of song for a specific show. So they'd written it for this show. It was actually the rescoring of the soundtrack to a movie called Drive with Ryan Gosling. It's a weird situation. So they wrote a song for it.

Speaker 2 (35:05):

I've seen that movie. It's good.

Speaker 3 (35:07):

Yeah, it's cool. Zane Lowe, who was a DJ at the time, curated a new soundtrack for it. It was quite unusual thing. Anyway, so bring me the Horizon or one of the artists for that song. That was the song that I was mixing. It's called Don't Look Down. I think you can find it on YouTube. I dunno if it's on Spotify actually. It's probably is. But anyway, it's on YouTube. I know that Don't Look Down. And they produced it themselves as per they ended up doing for the album, but they'd done it with electronic drums, sampled fake real drums, you know what I mean? It was basically a situation where they wanted it mixed and if they got a good mix out of it, it was like a bonus. It didn't really, it wasn't a huge problem. Do you know what I mean? It's kind of weird. So there was a friend of mine, Pete Miles is a producer and he's got a studio down in the corner of the uk, a place called Devon.

(36:03):

And he was friends with Jordan is friends with Jordan. And Jordan said to Pete, can you mix this track for us? It's not huge budgets, very small budget. And Pete was kind of busy or whatever, but you should give it to my mate Dan. So Pete put me in touch with Jordan and Jordan said, here you go. And I said, yeah, sure, great, bring me the rise and I'll do it. And as we were talking about earlier, I gave it everything. I made it sound, I just wanted to impress Jordan. I didn't know him, but I just wanted to impress Jordan. That was my agenda. So I did that and it worked and Jordan thought it was good. Six months passed and they used it and everything like that. So it went on the radio, whatever six months went past, they'd written an album and they asked me to do a mix of their song Drown, which came out around a similar time to this don't look down song.

(37:02):

Anyway, they asked me to do a test mix. The song had already been released, they just gave the stems to me and three other dudes and they were going to blindly test do a shootout. And my one obviously was favored. And that led to them just going literally, here's the dates, here's the deal. You're mixing our album. Are you interested? And I was like, yes. So that's how it happened. It was cool. Interesting about the first song that I did for them though, it was a Saturday afternoon and they wanted a quick turnaround and I was not in the studio, I was not around the speakers at the time. My studio was an hour away where I would've been comfortable mixing. So I just got my headphones out and I had an iMac and I started, I thought I'd do what we were talking about earlier, what Reese does for me.

(38:00):

I just kind of get it in the right shape. Ended up mixing the whole track on headphones and as a result was reluctant to send it to Jordan because I'd never done that before. And I was like, but it sounds sick. And by the way, these were headphones that were nothing extraordinary. They're actually, these are Sony, WXH, I dunno what they are, but they're the new Bluetooth ones. This is the equivalent of these, but the Bose ones. But they were wired, they weren't like studio headphones. So I'm saying they were listening headphones, but I'd listened to so many hours of music on them that I felt like they were a relevant thing to wear on my ears. And that was crazy. It sounded good. And I had no speakers to check my song on it, and I just decided to send it to Jordan and he was like, yeah, it sounds really good. And I was like, it

Speaker 2 (38:49):

Was like, fuck it. Fuck

Speaker 3 (38:50):

Yeah. I was like, fuck it. I was like, this sounds cool. I've been doing it all day and I was really happy with it, but I just didn't have that confidence, that safety net of putting up on Pro tools and blasting it out of the speakers, or not even blasting it, just having that flat comfortable space. Anyway, so I did it with headphones and then that was kind weird because it proved to me that if you get good at making things sound good, you can kind of do it anywhere To a certain extent. It's not very comfortable to do it in that way, hence why you don't, I think. But it can be done and a seriously, a seriously kind of powerful circumstance for my career. It turned out to be as well. So I thought that was interesting to tell you about because

Speaker 2 (39:40):

I think that's very interesting because lots of people follow Nali, for instance, in our community and Will Putney as well. And I know that Nali, when he's not home, he mixes stuff in headphones. He did our nail the mix in headphones and it sounded great. I know that Will Putney when he's been overseas and has had to mix stuff, he's done it in headphones too.

Speaker 4 (40:04):

And

Speaker 2 (40:05):

What it shows is exactly what you said, that if you know what you're doing and you understand your listening device, your headphones, well, you can make it work. It might not be ideal, but you can make it work for sure.

Speaker 3 (40:17):

Because actually when you start mixing, you think, oh, it's so frequencies, which obviously everything is frequency and it's all relevant, but I think more often it becomes more about the sounds. So if you know how to make a snare, for example, sound good, or to your ears at least you can do that in headphones the same way you're not listening to the absolute flattest perfect sound because you don't need it. You know that the snare needs a drastic EQ compression set of stuff running on it to make it sound good to your ears so it can be done. You don't need it to be perfect, the speakers to do that. It's going to sound massively different from zero to when you're finished mixing the snare or most of the time anyway. So yeah, you don't always need the, I mean, I'm not one to talk, I've got Barefoot Emma 27, so I spent 10 grand on my speakers, but hey, yeah, I mean you do need them, but it's just interesting that you can wouldn't pick me the horizon. Well, I certainly wouldn't at that point in my career to do a HEPA mix on headphones. It made me very uncomfortable, but I did it anyway and it was kind of cool. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:35):

So how did that lead to bands like Blink 180 2 and Good Charlotte? I mean those bands are massive

Speaker 3 (41:43):

Because the record was big, the Bring Me Record. Yeah. I mean my expectation was a little bit different to the reality of it in terms of what would happen to my name or certainly how my name was on or not on the map after the album came out. So I thought it would be like, right, doesn't bring me no horizon, that's it. I'm massive.

Speaker 2 (42:03):

I have arrived.

Speaker 3 (42:04):

I'm a massive mix engine. It's not the case. It's a process as ever with everything of years. And now we're looking at, well this September will be three years, crikey, since the album came out and it hasn't been three years, it's a long time to do some big records in, but that was where it started, man, because there wasn't any other way for anyone to know about me until you get a lucky break. In a way, it was a lucky break really, because it was definitely that directly led to John Felman calling me up and saying, Hey, can you mix a few songs for me on Blink? Because he'd heard the record and everyone liked the album and it was a big album. They'd bring me an amazing job. It was like a near perfect campaign for them I'm sure. But people heard it and it sounded good. So there it was.

Speaker 2 (42:55):

That reminds me of something Andrew Wade said on the podcast a year ago or something that nobody's going to care about your work until you do something worth caring about.

Speaker 4 (43:07):

And

Speaker 2 (43:08):

That's just the way it goes. You could be the best mixer in the world, but if you've done no bands that anybody cares about, obviously, I mean it's so obvious, but it's so true. Nobody's going to care in that case.

Speaker 3 (43:20):

The

Speaker 2 (43:21):

Moment you do a project that other people care about and you nail it, that's when things begin.

Speaker 3 (43:27):

And honestly, I'd been really good at mixing for on a kind of like I could compete with whoever level for a couple of years before that and before that I was good at mixing and confident mixing maybe not the best in the world or totally amazing, although it's all difficult to measure. But yeah, it was exactly until something connects where my career took a turn for the better and I wasn't just like suddenly I was good at mixing. I've been good at mixing for a while and yeah, it takes a long time, man. So if anyone's ever wondering about how to get there, yeah, I don't really know how, but you definitely need to keep edging yourself towards the right clients, you know what I mean? Because without the right client, John Felman wouldn't have called me up and stuff.

Speaker 2 (44:23):

Exactly.

Speaker 3 (44:24):

The biggest one that I picked up from in terms of opportunity from Bring Me was probably one okay rock, I would say because it sold so many units in Japan, it was a huge album in Japan, so that was the one that was sick because now they're still a client and I love those guys and stuff. So I ended up writing with them as well. And it was all because of mixing Bring Me. That's crazy.

Speaker 2 (44:50):

Nice. I love how that works. I mean that is the way it works. There's no real tricks. You just have to do good work until someone notices it and gives you an opportunity, do even better work.

Speaker 3 (45:02):

So thank you Jordan, Jordan for bringing their eyes and cheers mate. Thanks for giving me that chance. Thanks

Speaker 2 (45:08):

Jordan. So I've got some questions here from our listeners for you that I'd like to ask you. Like I said earlier, they're very, very excited that you're here.

Speaker 3 (45:17):

That's cool.

Speaker 2 (45:18):

Here's one from Fab Horn. How do you manage to do this amazing low end mixture of kick and base on here we go, single.

Speaker 3 (45:27):

Oh, he is talking about, here we go, we're talking about that. How do I manage it? That's a good question, thanks as well. Well it's probably, there is no answer, is there? It's, it's kind of almost impossible to answer, not one thing. It's kind of the low end going with the mids, going with the top. You could have a wicked sounding low end and something kind of not working elsewhere. So firstly it's a balance obviously, but I think a lot of it's probably back then I was using a, I can't remember what it's called, but there's a Waves, like a sub harmonic thing. I'm sure there's millions of album out there, but I use the Waves one probably adding some sort of octave of some description to deck space guitar and just giving it quite of boost at 50 Hertz. So try that. I don't think the kick drum was particularly crazy in the low end, so you kind of don't really want to have both of them going nuts. But I dunno, it is a groove, that song, isn't it? It's 50% that as well. So who can say? But I don't know, try those things.

Speaker 2 (46:44):

It is amazing though how much the writing and production of a song and how the groove feels makes a difference in mixing decisions. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (46:55):

Because you are going to try and

Speaker 2 (46:56):

The context, the

Speaker 3 (46:57):

Dude who asked that question may very well try and kind of, what's the word, imitate, whatever's going on in that mix. But whatever's going on in that mix is a result of what was written musically. So you're not ever going to get it. You want try and do something on your own for whatever it is your artist is giving you and then it's hard, it's just not the same frequencies, you know what I mean? It's a little bit more to do with the song I think. And that's why I think that song sounds good is the song is good. I dunno, that's not very helpful to an aspiring mixing engineer, but

Speaker 2 (47:31):

It is actually. So here's one from Adam James Brockwell, which is when and for what reasons did you decide to move into a commercial space as opposed to running a professional home studio?

Speaker 3 (47:44):

I think that wasn't really to do with anything other than the songwriting world that I'm in. My studio serves me as a professional work space and somewhere to bring my clients in and record somewhere, somewhere for me to mix. Most of the time, just me. But it has the capacity, you can't really see. But if you go on my Instagram and there's loads of photos, it has the capacity to have songwriting sessions basically they've got the two rooms split. I've got an A and a B, I've got two pro tools rigs, they're kind of mirrored together, not real time, just they have the same shit on them. So everything opens. If you move a session, people can jam on the piano out there, sing a verse while I sit and nerd out over the chorus production, all of these things sort of make you more powerful as an entity. You can quickfire songs, you can get a better feel for it, you can enjoy your job more. It's just an investment that the time was we were ready to have a new space, me and my manager, we just needed to have the capacity for that.

Speaker 2 (48:54):

Makes sense. So Luke Manel Ward is wondering, do you have any tips that you could give other producers and mixers about what to do when working with big producers like John Feldman?

Speaker 3 (49:09):

Yeah, you have to be, one of the most important things I've learned is being good to work with. How I go about doing that and whether or not I am, I'm not sure, but I like to think that I'm good to work with. I'm reliable, I'm kind of personable, I'm friendly and all these things, but the most important is that I deliver on time and to a high standard because the minute you are slow or anything creeps through of your reputation, you're dead. That's it. You're going to lose. So you have to be good to work with basically you have to be open-minded, you have to want to learn. Those are the main things that I carry with me in my back pocket when I meet someone who I might be able to have a good relationship with.

Speaker 2 (50:02):

Makes sense. Here's one from Charlie Madai. First of all, congratulations on Don Bronco's killer new release. And how did you manage to get that huge tone off your guitars, especially those on lower than Atlantis or Don Broco? Did you get that from Real amps?

Speaker 3 (50:19):

Oh, that's cool. Depends on what song, but the answer is mainly confidence because when you actually break down what I've done a confidence in what you're doing with a guitar sound. Second most important is the song and the part and the kind of arrangement. You can have a really, really good sound and tone if you give it space to be good musically. So make sure it's all working together, be musical about it. But if you actually break down what I did on a kind of an engineering level, they're all a bit random. Do you know what I mean? They have kind of a thread that runs through 'em with the mics and the cabs and whatever, but they're nothing innovative. I'm not reinventing the wheel. So for Don Bro's album, I remember it's a lot of single string. I'm assuming he's talking about the choruses and stuff.

(51:16):

I guess the big sounds, it's going to be like some size going to be playing some sort of single string ship and they sounds like there's going to be an octave pedal on and that's something I've been doing. So it's like an octave lower on the clean signal before it goes to the distorted stuff. And that's going to be a combination of an amp probably Cy was insisting on using this Kemper, which I've no reservations about doing. They're cool. And then yeah, it would've been a al with an octave pedal. It's kind of a single string thing, otherwise you have to lose the octave pedal because it just breaks up in the part. And then it's going to be probably three mics. I probably got rid of one of them and ended up using two. So let's say two mics on the al, one on the Kemper played twice. So essentially it's four parts played simultaneously. That is pretty much what I did on Don Broco and it didn't make sense to deviate from that all that much. We had some fun with it. But yeah, it's pretty much that from memory. And this is a year ago now, but LTA has a kind of similar thing with Octa pedals and stuff, but I think it was more varied in song to song. So it just depends. Again though, playing music, all that stuff, got to get that down. I dunno. Hope that helps.

Speaker 2 (52:32):

I'm sure it does. Here's one for Mike Cocking, which is what's your writing process? Each new release you worked on seems more and more experimental with style and instrumentation. How do you build towards something like that? Are there any practices or methods you use to develop that part of your craft?

Speaker 3 (52:50):

Well, I go into something knowing that I have to step up whatever I'm doing every time. You always have to add something or think in a different way or use a different fucking sample library or you always have to make something novel to yourself. Otherwise, if you're making a lot of songs, a lot of them are going to sound the same or whatever. So you've got to push yourself to do that. You've got to push your client to do that as well. And you've got to understand what they want and try and steer it with them. And then you've got to push each other. So a lot of the time the client pushes me, no, it's not good enough, Dan, make it better. So you have that as well. You've just got to keep pushing what you're doing and being open-minded. It's not really a process, it's kind of the same. It depends on who you're working with. If you're collaborating with someone else, it can be completely different to another thing. But yeah, it's pretty much pushing to make sure something is exciting you, that you're stepping something up in some way all the time. Otherwise you're over. See you later.

Speaker 2 (54:07):

Here's one from Cornelius Lee Duke, Vernon Boose. He's got five names in there. It's a long one. So what's been the most rewarding part of building your studio and what was it like working on the new blink?

Speaker 3 (54:22):

The most rewarding part was plugging it in neatly. Weirdly. It was just so difficult to wire the studio, but then make sure that it was done permanently and it was done tidily and smartly so that you can basically never see a cable pretty much. You can literally not see any cables in my studio, which I really like. But it took 17 hours and once I started in one day I was mad. Once I started, it was just I had to finish. So that was really rewarding. Of course I finished it and it just looked so neat and it all worked and it was just great. What was it like working with Blink was the second question, wasn't it?

Speaker 2 (55:08):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (55:08):

Well Blink. Blink was fun. It was like a bit of an emotional rollercoaster though, because the situation kept changing from the minute I first got wind that I might be able to do it. It was like, am I going to be doing it? Am be doing it. I have to wait for the answers. Then I got it and then I to do this and did that. I did a few songs, a song, and it was like, okay, it's mastering now. We're not mastering. And it was like that and because it was so big and for me and I wanted to be a part of it so much, it was actually quite hard. It wasn't like bring me the horizon, which was just like, here's the dates, here's the deal, here's the songs, let's do it. It was just up, down, up. So it was really difficult to be fair and almost by the end I was just like, forgot that I was doing Blink. I was just like, whoa. It was a whirlwind. It was cool though, really cool. I think the best bit about it was getting the whole doing it and the emotional rollercoaster was kind of tricky. It really tested me, but getting the call was fucking amazing. So yeah,

Speaker 2 (56:16):

I'm sure. Alright, final question. This one's from Simon Lawson. He says, I vaguely remember reading something somewhere that you recorded the drums for Curious Electric in a sports hall or something to get that amazing natural reverb you can hear on the record or am I thinking of something else? And what were the biggest challenges you faced when doing this? And also when will you finally stop teasing and give us another masterpiece from yourself? I need to hear the whole song. He posted a song link. He said he needs to hear some song that you posted on Instagram.

Speaker 3 (56:48):

Instagram,

Speaker 2 (56:49):

The whole thing.

Speaker 3 (56:50):

Well, firstly, thank you. That guy obviously knows, follows stuff I do. So that's fucking cool. Curious Electric was almost in a sports hall. It was in a factory, basically a large unit, and that was at the time, I was less experienced with the novelty of a large room and therefore room mics that you could have a lot of fun with. So I was kind of obsessed with room mics at that point. So I was like, right, we're going in this factory. We were doing it ourselves. So the most challenging part was the fact that it wasn't recording studio, so we had to put the drums in there and then get the sound and move things out of the way in the factory. That was the hard part. And then I had to engineer it from someone's office. It was weird, but was fun. Yeah, there we go. And when am I going to release? Definitely a hundred percent this year. And I wish I could say when, because I don't actually know, but it's been a while because loads of reasons, but it kind of made sense to wait and just keep writing and stuff. The stuff I'm doing is, I don't know, evolving all the time, but it will come this year. So 2018, there we go.

Speaker 2 (58:06):

Great. Well, Dan Lancaster, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks. It's been a pleasure finally talking to you, and look forward to hanging out in la.

Speaker 3 (58:15):

Thanks for having me, man. I can't wait for la. It's going to be amazing.

Speaker 2 (58:18):

Yeah, it's going to be a good time.

Speaker 3 (58:20):

Yeah, that'll be really fun. Cool. Thanks for having me, man.

Speaker 2 (58:22):

Thank you, sir.

Speaker 1 (58:24):

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