DAVID BENDETH: The “Signature Sound” Lie, Learning from Legends, The Sempiternal Snare

Speaker 1 (00:00:01):

The Unstoppable Recording machine broadcast is brought to you by Empire Ears. In collaboration with Grammy winning producers, engineers, and their family of touring musicians, empire Ears has developed a line of in ear monitors that deliver what you need for every mix. When it comes to unrivaled stage clarity, or needing a flat and honest reference for your latest studio mix, empire Ears has got you covered no matter where you find yourself. And now your host.

Speaker 2 (00:00:31):

Welcome to the URM podcast. I am Eyal Levi, and I just want to tell you that 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 you one of the world's best producers to mix a song from scratch, from artists like Lama God Shuga, periphery the Day to Remember. Bring me the Horizon, Opeth many, many more, 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, which are pro quality multi-tracks that are cleared for use in your portfolio. You can find out more and nail the mix.com. Hello everybody. Today's episode's a cool one. I got to speak to one of my production heroes, Mr. David Bendeth. And let me just say that after talking to him, I'm not at all surprised that he's had the success he's had or become as great as he is at production because it seems like his whole life was just engineered to create a great producer, as you will learn everything from the way he was brought up to his formative years as an a and r executive at CBS International and as well as vice president of a and r for BMG Canada.

(00:01:58):

This guy was in every aspect of the music industry, like I said, as a musician, as an executive, and he also got to work with all these great producers. So he had all the greatest producers and mixers as his mentors. Of course, he was going to become great. Obviously he's already a super intelligent guy with a ton of his own talent. But then it was developed, that talent was developed through mentorship and through experience, and that's what led to him becoming a great producer. And when you look at the lives of great people, they aren't just spawned great. There's always a great backstory and there's always real intelligent and wise choices that they've made along the way, which I love to get into. And that's why I had a great time talking to him. And I hope that you are inspired by this episode, entertained by this episode, and it gives you some food for thought about what kinds of moves you can make in your life to try to uncover your greatness. Enjoy. David Bendeth, welcome to the URM Podcast. Honored to have you here. Thank you for taking the time. How are you doing today?

Speaker 3 (00:03:20):

I am awesome. How are you guys doing down there? Where are you in Florida?

Speaker 2 (00:03:25):

I'm actually in Atlanta. We have a headquarters in Florida, but I live in Atlanta. I try to not go to Florida anymore than I absolutely need to.

Speaker 3 (00:03:34):

Right, I understand.

Speaker 2 (00:03:36):

Yeah, it's a bit of a hellhole. Are you up north?

Speaker 3 (00:03:41):

I am about 12, 15 miles due west of New York, Manhattan in New Jersey.

Speaker 2 (00:03:47):

Okay, got it. Have you always been there?

Speaker 3 (00:03:49):

Well, for the last 20 years or so, yeah, I have.

Speaker 2 (00:03:52):

Okay, got it. So let's just dive right in. One thing that I've been curious about with you is something that I hear from lots of producers and musicians who have been at it a while, which is they say that they didn't choose music. Music shows them they didn't do it because they wanted to. They did it because they had no choice. Did you feel the same way when you were starting out?

Speaker 3 (00:04:22):

I think to a certain degree. I mean, I was lucky enough to be able to be born in a musical time where it was really just starting to get exciting. I was born in the mid fifties, so by the time I was a teenager, music was kind of hitting what I consider to be one of the peaks of the last a hundred years as far as creativity goes. So when you're surrounded by something like that, for that whole time period, from the age of probably eight right through to 16, 17, it became part of me and certainly I gravitated towards it. I knew at a very, very early age, maybe three, that I was going to be in music. I think my parents tell me that, at least though they had told me that

Speaker 2 (00:05:15):

Three. That's interesting you say that because that's the age I started playing music as well. Apparently I started playing piano and violin at three, obviously I don't remember, but I made them make me learn how to play. So you were a teenager when basically rock and roll was transforming into what we know it today kind of.

Speaker 3 (00:05:45):

Well, you have to imagine a 12-year-old, 13-year-old, which is really the age today. Kids get turned on to music.

(00:05:53):

And that year for me all in one year was like Kareem and Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. I mean, it was just such an incredible time. You also had a war happening in Vietnam, which also spawned a lot of phenomenal artists and a lot of songs that really wanted to change the world. And so to be there, and of course when you're a teenager, you want to change the world too because you're fed up with your parents' world, whatever that was. And certainly it was something that I wanted to become a part of in the sense that I would hang out at night and we would listen to music records. It was vinyl back then and record players and certainly any concert we could go. I mean, I remember seeing Jimi Hendrix when I was 13 and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. So things like that are going to change your life. They're going to affect the way you feel about certain things and certain, I saw Kareem, I saw Led Zeppelin when I was 14. It was one of their first shows in North America. There was like 700 people there. So yeah, it was a great time to be loving music.

Speaker 2 (00:06:58):

So it seems to me like it's when you're 12, 13, 14, those are transformative years anyways, but you had your transformative years at a time period where the world in society as we know it, were evolving rapidly.

Speaker 3 (00:07:15):

Yes, politically everything was changing and when that always happens, great music always follows. I mean, it's just an eventuality. Anything to do with the way the world is changing. Music is a mirror.

Speaker 2 (00:07:29):

I've heard people who were around in the sixties who experienced that transformation who have said that they haven't experienced a, I guess such a tumultuous time period up until now since then. Do you think that's accurate?

Speaker 3 (00:07:49):

I do. Although I'm trying to think. I mean the obvious fallout for music right now because of those things is rap music. So that's become the new rebellion music.

Speaker 2 (00:08:00):

Yes, definitely.

Speaker 3 (00:08:02):

But I'm really not sure it has the same impact of what I had to deal with and what I had to see in the sense that pop music is still very, very prevalent and rap has become pop music to a certain degree. So the way I see this, I think you're right, it hasn't been tumultuous, but I think what we're talking about here is sort of a bigger movement worldwide. It was about love, it was about peace, it was about hate. To a certain degree, it was about war. So the music was different than it is now for different reasons. Yes, but I can see why you would say that. I just don't think it was anywhere near the degree, and I'm not trying to say, well, hey, I'm an old man. It was a lot better back then. I just remember it being completely different. That's all.

Speaker 2 (00:08:49):

Well, I'm curious about that difference because I wasn't there, so I don't know, I'm just taking your word for it, but I guess it just, from what I understand, even if it was different, there hasn't been anything quite like it since, is what I'm understanding.

Speaker 3 (00:09:11):

That is true. I mean certainly as I grew up, there was not two ways to do something. There was always like, this is the right way to do something. If you wanted to learn to be an engineer or whatever, a producer or a guitar player, it was a whole different way to learn how to do it the right way and the wrong way.

Speaker 2 (00:09:34):

When you started learning, so I guess you learned how to do things the right way. I'm guessing if that was the only option you had. Did you go for seek out formal instruction?

Speaker 3 (00:09:47):

I did, and my parents were non-supportive. They wanted me to go to college and university and that was really, really a big deal for them. My father was a doctor and that was his plan.

Speaker 2 (00:10:00):

Understood.

Speaker 3 (00:10:01):

And at the time, my high school class in Toronto was really crazy. I had Getty Lee from Rush and Alex Lifeson, the guitar player from Rush, and I had Howie Mandel and the Talk show guy, and I had Alana Miles in my class and Garth Richardson, who produced the first Rage Against the Machine, he lived right behind me with his father, who was also a very, very famous producer. He did Night Moves for Bob Seger. So I would hang out with all these people and they were all at times, I could keep going on that list by the way, but there was definitely something in the water where I was, I mean Rush played at my girlfriend's Sweet 16 party, so there was a lot of musicians where I lived, and then we would go to other high schools and we would meet other players.

Speaker 2 (00:10:59):

Were they rush yet? Were they like a big local band?

Speaker 3 (00:11:02):

They weren't big, but they were 15 and they were playing high schools and junior high schools. They were playing Led Zeppelin and David Bowie covers.

Speaker 2 (00:11:12):

That's actually kind of mind blowing. Do you mind if we talk about that for a second? Because we all know bands that we've watched go from a local band to well-known, but Rush, I'd say that's a little bit beyond well-known fucking legends. I think that's fascinating. Could you tell that they were going to be great or anything, or were they just some high school band you knew?

Speaker 3 (00:11:40):

Look, they certainly played the hell out of Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. They were playing, they were kind of in dispersing their own songs at the beginning of this. There was a different drummer in the band. I feel like when Neil Pert joined the band that they definitely opened up in a completely different way, but they were playing bars too when I was 17, so I think that they had a future. I think Neil Pert was the guy though that took that band to the next level. The band I saw was more of a cover band and one of 20 that were in my area.

Speaker 2 (00:12:15):

Got it. So something interesting, a parallel to my own life. My dad is a pretty well-known symphony conductor, and so I grew up around lots of great musicians just my whole life. They were just around, they're his friends and that's just who we hung out with because musicians hang out with musicians. So it was just a normal thing to have the guest soloist for who's playing with the symphony that we can come by the house and use our piano or something. That's just how I grew up. So I grew up just assuming that it was totally possible to make this work. I didn't think anything different. I mean, I had friends parents who didn't think it was possible, but to me, everyone around me was just doing it and was great. So I just figured I'm going to go into music. I didn't even question it from being, I know you just said, I know you just said that your parents were non-supportive, but from being around so many people that were doing stuff and active and good at it, do you think that that helped just push you in the direction just to go into it?

(00:13:47):

Do you think that that environment in and of itself was supportive and formative?

Speaker 3 (00:13:52):

I do, and I think I changed my friends as I got older because my search for Knowledge on music started to change. I mean, remember I was listening to Hard Rock Music from the age of probably 12 through to 16, and I really hadn't had my light bulb moment yet, and then I ran into a few people that changed my life musically and how I think about music. So I was lucky to be able to know people. We would hang out in the bars and we started to go see Jazz on the weekend. It was matinees, and then I ran into a couple of people that sat me down and said, okay, look, this is what you've been listening to and it's good, but this is the next thing. And at that time it was Fusion Music and Real Players. It was the Maha Vishner Orchestra or it was Chick Korea and Return to Forever, and it was the Brecker Brothers and all these phenomenal bands.

(00:14:49):

And then somebody sort of sat down and played Miles Davis for me, and I think that was the end of it. I heard Bitches Brew and I went, okay, forget it. What I know, this is what I want to know. Then I finally graduated high school. I was 17. The first thing I did was leave home permanently at that age to go to England, where I felt I would have a better chance in 1973 of creating a career for myself, because that was where it was all coming from. I'd been getting Melody maker and New Musical Express magazine sent to me every Saturday, and I would read about all these different bands and gigs, and at that time it was the height of phenomenal music. It was three years after Dark Side of the Moon and Bowie and all of these great acts. So I got to be in England. I worked in a record store and I played on the weekends, and that was my beginning of my professional career.

Speaker 2 (00:15:49):

When you say it was the beginning of your professional career, did you give yourself any other option?

Speaker 3 (00:15:55):

Well, yeah, I mean, I got into university and that was going to be my option, and fair enough, the idea of it really blew me away. I was glad to get out of school. I didn't like school that much. I passed. I got my high school education, but I was always destined to be a guy that was going to go out on the road and I was going to play guitar, and that was my instrument. That's what I loved, and I was going to join bands and I was going to tour and play with people. That was what I was going to do, and that's exactly what I did. I wanted to make records too. I mean, that was number one as well.

Speaker 2 (00:16:35):

How did it transition from guitar into the David Benith? We know you as

Speaker 3 (00:16:41):

Well. That's a culmination of probably 15 years. Eventually after touring for about 10 years, I got fed up with that. Fair enough. At that time, there was not a lot of tour buses that we could all hire and we were traveling or always in a van with a trailer and it got in Europe, we would get the double Decker bus. That was okay, but now I'm 30 and I needed a job. I mean, I had a son, I had a baby, and I needed a job, and there was back then a bunch of different labels. Now there's three. There was about 20 back then, and I had heard that CBS records, which is now Sony, were looking for a creative staff producer, and I went and applied for the job and I got the job working on the corporate side and a creative side at the same time. So my gig was to go into the studio, make records mix, and also happen to sign artists and attend meetings and do all that other stuff. So that was kind of like where it transitioned.

Speaker 2 (00:17:51):

Got it. So you're 30, you had just toured for 10 to 15 years. You're over it. What kind of opportunities were there though back then for transitioning into the studio world? Would you say it was more abundant than now or was it much harder to get into?

Speaker 3 (00:18:11):

No, it was pretty easy. I mean, there was a ton of studios. You have to remember, I was in a city like Toronto. There had to be a hundred recording studios there. It was a city of 3 million people back then. I think every major city in the world had a hundred studios, whether it was la, New York, London, Nashville. So you could go in and work as an assistant. You could go in there and engineer on the weekends and make dance music, whatever it was going to be. I think there was way more opportunity back then to learn your craft.

Speaker 2 (00:18:43):

So when you started doing that, how did you first learn to record properly?

Speaker 3 (00:18:50):

Well, I had assisted other producers. Got it. I had worked with, we all came out of a studio in Toronto called Phase One, which was in Scarborough, like a suburb of Toronto, and it was a pretty major studio. So at that time it was like Rich Chickie who just produced all the rush records. He was there, Randy Staub, who did the Metallica record and nickel bass.

Speaker 2 (00:19:14):

I've had Rich Chickie on before.

Speaker 3 (00:19:15):

Yeah, rich was there, cool guy, a guy called Bill Kennedy. There was Bob Rin who was like a mentor and Jack Richardson. It was Garth Richardson's father who did all the Lou Reed and Guess who. And then he assisted for his father. I mean, there had to be 10 of us all there at the same time. So it was a great environment. You could learn as much as you wanted to learn. I mean, the first thing we learned how to do was load a dishwasher properly and unload it. We had a set of instructions to do that

Speaker 2 (00:19:46):

More. I imagine that that was more just to make sure that you could follow instructions.

Speaker 3 (00:19:51):

They told us that if we didn't know how to do that, we couldn't run a signal path.

Speaker 2 (00:19:55):

Fair enough. It's funny, the guys that I've had on who talk about those types of tasks and how they came up through the studio industry, obviously starting by making coffee, loading dishwashers and all that stuff. They said that, for instance, my friend Josh Duel who got hired by Lincoln Park for 10 years, the reason he got the opportunity to work for them was because he never fucked up their drink orders or lunch orders. So he always got that right. Then when the time came to their engineer got sick or something and they needed some edits, they decided to give him a shot precisely because he never fucked up their drink orders and his attention to detail was there. They felt like because he cared that much about something trivial, like what you want in your coffee, that he would then care that much more about getting this drum edit or this vocal edit. Correct. And I imagine that it's the same type of thing. If you can't even load the dishwasher correctly, how are they going to trust you with a record?

Speaker 3 (00:21:11):

Actually, it was a lot different than that. The way I remember it, we would get screamed at and threatened to be thrown out of the studio if we did do something wrong and there was a hierarchy. You had to respect that. I mean, there was no talking back or talking behind people's backs, or if you did something wrong, the whole place knew about it. It was terrible, and you would get berated and that was the law of the studio. So I wish it was just making drinks. I mean, they used to send me on trips to go get things when they didn't even need them, just to see if I would go somewhere and where I'd go. I mean, it was a lot of mind games, but it was all training.

Speaker 2 (00:21:56):

Yeah, I mean, how long did that time period last for you? I could say the hazing or the character building, if you want to call it that,

Speaker 3 (00:22:07):

Enough for me to never be an engineer.

Speaker 2 (00:22:11):

Is that what made you want to be the producer?

Speaker 3 (00:22:13):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:22:14):

That's incredible.

Speaker 3 (00:22:16):

The guys that were the most patient and the calmest and the most levelheaded and the most logical and the most practical were always the engineers. They were always chill, and the producers were always the ones that were absolutely nuts. That's just the way that was. And I never remember it being any different.

Speaker 2 (00:22:35):

So do you think that you understood that your personality, or I guess your psychological makeup, was that of a producer more than an engineer, and that showed you that this was the proper path, or you just hated the hazing so much that you said, fuck this, I'm doing that?

Speaker 3 (00:22:56):

The truth is, I was never really any good at it. I never liked patching. I never liked recalls, which is what the job was. I never liked running to get dinner. I never liked trying to, I was the guy that they would find the tube that's broken in the amp to this day, I know how to go through an amp and find the wrong tube and see which one's glowing and exchange it. And I mean, I was a guy that was more of try to fix things, make me do that, or they'd try and make me do technical things. But I had a basic understanding how everything worked. It wasn't a matter of that. It's just my passion lights so much more with music than it did with the technical side.

Speaker 2 (00:23:38):

Well, there are people whose passion is the technical side. I say let them do that. I know that the technical side is a little different now, but for instance, those guys who are happy to edit drums 16 hours a day, I mean, I feel like in that time period, they would've been the same people who would look for the broken tube or who would've been great at fixing a board. But that type of personality, they are very happy doing that. That is their calling. So I feel like it's very important, and correct me if I'd love to hear your opinion on this, but I think it's important for people to understand what drives them and what they're good at. And if what drives them is not the technical side of things, that's okay. You should find what it is that drives you. You'll do way better at something that motivates you and energizes you than trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Speaker 3 (00:24:45):

I think technology today has also made it completely different because the set of rules that applied to us back then as far as working with SSLs and needs and outboard gear doesn't really apply to anybody today because no one owns any of that gear. It's all about computers and plugins, and that's become the new technical side of things. So it's almost like anybody with a computer that plays a video game can learn how to make a record if you spend long enough at it. And the other part of it is that we had somebody looking over us when we were doing everything, and that was a totally note. Nobody's looking over anybody right now. You sit in your room and you do what you do, and it's all YouTube guesswork. If you want to know about something, you Google it and you pull up a YouTube video. So it's a different thing. And the engineer of today is not like the engineer of yesterday, and that might be a good thing or a bad thing. It certainly has streamlined that job and made it a lot simpler. But again, I do it, but I'm not attracted to that part of what I do, and I'm not as passionate as some of the phenomenal engineers I've got to work with in my career. And those guys that do that all day still blow me away at what they do and their passion for it, and I'm really happy to focus on what I'm best at, which is more of the making of the music itself.

Speaker 2 (00:26:17):

When you figured that out, was it like a light bulb went off in your head? What was it like when you figured that out or did you go in kind of knowing that already?

Speaker 3 (00:26:26):

No, I mean, to be honest with you, I really wanted to mix because every time I would do anything, somebody else mixed it and it would always come back to me and it would always sound weird. And I remember spending months and months on certain projects and then getting the final thing back and going, what the hell? This has nothing to do with what I recorded. And the kick drum and the snare and the way the vocals were and guitar solos were low. And so this happened over and over for years. And the labels back then, it was very political who they used to mix. It would be the same 10 guys every day. And it's probably not that much different, but it's certainly a lot more people are getting the chance to mix. But I hated my mixing, and I was very frustrated at the fact that I hated my mixing and I never liked what anybody else did. So I became this impossible person that you could never make me happy every time I would do anything. I hated it. I couldn't do it, and neither could anybody else. So that was my light bulb moment for me somewhere around 1991 where I realized, okay, you better start to learn about this or you're not going to get anywhere. And so I did everything out of frustration pretty well.

Speaker 2 (00:27:50):

Frustration is a great motivator, and especially if I imagine that it sounds to me like you're very comfortable with people, like you said with engineers, your mind is blown by those people who are passionate about that thing you're not passionate about. I imagine that if you were happy with other people's mixes and you didn't frustrate you, then you probably wouldn't have gravitated towards it quite as much, but since nobody could do what you were imagining in your head and you couldn't do it yet, that was a huge opportunity to create something. I think.

Speaker 3 (00:28:33):

Well, again, working at a label, I had a phenomenal opportunity. I mean, I had an opportunity that probably not many people have had, and I think people forget that about me. I worked for labels for 17 years, so what did I do? I went and sat next to Tom Lord Algae and Chris Lord Algae, and Jack Joseph Puig and Andy Wallace and Michael Brower for weeks on end. I was there watching them mix the projects I was working on. So if you sat next to 10 mixers for two weeks at a time, you're going to learn something.

Speaker 2 (00:29:13):

Of course. That's great.

Speaker 3 (00:29:15):

And so I had that opportunity I think nobody had, and when something was wrong, I got to experience that firsthand as well, because we would play the mix for the band or the label or radio people or the manager, and we would get feedback. So I got to sit there and watch them get reamed.

Speaker 2 (00:29:33):

Wow, that's an incredible way to learn. So basically, you not only got the benefit of getting mentored by a great producer, you got basically mentored by lots of great producers and mixers.

Speaker 3 (00:29:47):

I actually put the success of my career down to be able to be in the room with those guys for years on end. Yeah, I mean, I'd always pick the best producers to do my projects so I could learn something

Speaker 2 (00:30:02):

That's incredible. So 17 years at Label, I actually didn't know that. I didn't know that. It's interesting in dealing with labels, there are some of those a and r guys or project managers who are very much non-musicians or producers, but then there are those who I feel like in an alternate universe, they would've been a producer because they care so much about the production side of it. It's like, dude, why didn't you just do that? Why are you doing a and r when you should be producing records? And it sounds to me like you're the one who actually followed it, followed that curiosity.

Speaker 3 (00:30:47):

You also have to remember, again, going back to 19 85, 86, when I started, every major label had three, four staff producers. That's what they did. I mean, I was one of many people. I was a staff producer my whole career for 16 years. I would sign on as I became senior VP of a and R for RCA records, but it still said staff producer. So right up until probably, I'm going to say the year 2000, every label had, I mean, Warner Brothers had 25 staff producers between the years of 85 to 2000. Wow. If you go back to records like Van Halen and go see you produce the records, it was a staff guy. It wasn't some guy off the street. The guy was trained to be a producer. He worked at the studio, the Warner Brothers studio. I can tell you so many examples, Arif, my idol, my mentor, he did Saturday Night Fever. He did Aretha Franklin Respect, he did Chaka Khan, he did Prince. He's a guy that was a staff producer for Atlantic Records for 40 years. So there was no a and r people the same way we think about it today. In fact, a and r people would go to the staff producers at the company to get their opinion on whether a record was made well or not.

Speaker 2 (00:32:16):

That's a whole different world right now. I hear about a label that will work with one guy a lot, but not as a staff producer. It'll just be like their go-to guy. But it'll always be for mixes, but it won't be like someone on staff fulfilling that role that you just described.

Speaker 3 (00:32:37):

The labels were in the music business. They all had their own recording studio. All of them did. And they're high tech state of the art, like Atlantic Records, recording studios in New York was like five amazing rooms. So was the RCA studios. So that's what was different. I mean, they were in the music business, they had studios, they had producers, and then it all changed when we went to computer. You didn't need those guys anymore. People started working out of their house, so who cares? It's like there was no overseeing anything. You just go make a record. Most records people make today, no one's showing up to the studio every week. They come at the very last day, take the band out for dinner, buy 'em dinner, and then listen to the record and go home.

Speaker 2 (00:33:26):

Yeah. That's my experience of labels actually is they show up on the final day, take everyone out for dinner and go home. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:33:36):

When I worked at RCA Records pretty well, every one of us as a and r people were in the studio every day with our artists. That's what we did. That's part of the job. We didn't sit around in our office making phone calls, we were making records.

Speaker 2 (00:33:50):

So how many records at a time would you be working on

Speaker 3 (00:33:53):

At any given time?

Speaker 2 (00:33:55):

At any given time?

Speaker 3 (00:33:56):

Three to 10.

Speaker 2 (00:33:57):

Interesting. And so basically those three to 10 would be in different phases. One would be in mix, one would be pre-Pro, and you'd kind of bounce around between those.

Speaker 3 (00:34:08):

And then I had people reporting to me that were a and r people that had their own records too,

(00:34:13):

And we would all talk to each other about what we're doing and how we're making the record. And yeah, it was definitely, I mean, Michael Hor, who you just had on, I must've seen him a hundred times in my office. He did all sorts of projects for RCA and we would always hear great stories about Michael. I heard great stories that he actually built a tent at the, I'm trying to think of the studio. I think it was the hit factory. He built a tent because he didn't like the way the speakers sounded. So he had somebody go out and buy a tent, a real tent, and put it around him in the studio so he could listen to it properly. There was all sorts of people that would come and go, and you would hear great stories and learn things.

Speaker 2 (00:34:54):

Man, with that many people working on these projects at all times and that many projects going on at the same time, I imagine that that must've been a super inspiring environment.

Speaker 3 (00:35:07):

I mean, I couldn't wait to go to a studio in LA or Nashville or Florida or London, wherever we were going to go. You experienced all sorts of different rooms with different engineers and certainly different a and r people, different managers. You got to know a lot of people in your career.

Speaker 2 (00:35:24):

So when it started to switch over to computers, is that when you started to become more of, I guess more of how we know you now? We know you as David Beeth, this great producer mixer who's worked with great bands. This whole label thing is, I think I had heard that about that, but that's not how I know you or how my peers know you. So this transition into how we know and think of you now, how did that work for you? Did the work just get less and less of labels or how did that happen?

Speaker 3 (00:36:10):

I worked at RCA Records for, as I said, those 16 years. I got transferred to New York in 95. I did this record for RCA, this Elvis Presley record, which became his biggest record. I mixed it with Ray Barini and produced it, put it together, and then it sold a lot of records, and then we got laid off because they owed me a ton of money and they couldn't pay me. It was so much money. I had a point on my a and r deal, and then Clive Davis was taking over the label. So basically I was told to go to the beach for five, four years or something. I had a contract where I wasn't supposed to work. And of course, the first thing I did was I went into a studio and started to find bands as if I was still working for the label, except I was going to sign them to my own production company.

(00:37:01):

And I walked into the studio one day and there was a young assistant engineer in there called Dan Cornif, and I liked Dan, although he screwed up my first session really bad. He recorded everything at a wrong rate. I think he was at 48, we were at 44. Something funny happened, and I fired him pretty well the second day, but then I called him back. But basically what we did was we were doing anything and everything. So that was kind of the beginning of me being an independent producer. Even though I'd done it the whole time, I'd never done it exclusively. And certainly mixing I wanted to do, but it wasn't something I wanted to do every day, like the Andy Wallace's of the world. So I just didn't want to do it every day. I thought I felt I was going to be bored out of my mind, and I hated the idea of me working all day and then sending something to someone and having them tear it to shreds.

(00:38:00):

So we started to just start make records, and we were lucky enough to get into a studio where there was nobody in it. It was dead, and it was a rap hip hop studio in Times Square. And then we started making records, real Records. We did the first Breaking Benjamin record there, and then that took off a bad out of of hell. I think we ended up doing 2 million records within a year. And the next thing you know, your phone's ringing. And then it was like we were just lining 'em up one after another, red jumpsuit, Paramore Breaking Benjamin again, Hawthorne Heights. It just kept going and going and going. One year, we had four platinum records in a row, so it was also a time where people were buying CDs and it was a healthy environment. There was no streaming. Cell phones were kind of being used, but not that much.

(00:38:59):

We had Motorola, whatever, not Motorola, but those flip phones. I mean, it was a different technical time. And in the studio one day, Dan Cornif was the one that said to me, we should get off of this tape business, this half inch and two inch shit that you're so hung up on, because I love tape. I knew tape how it sounded. And then he played me one of my mixes off of the dig, and he blindfolded me and they turned me around in a chair and they said, okay, tell us which one is half inch and which one is dig. And I picked the wrong one, seven out of 10 times. So that was the end of my tape life. It was so much easier to not work on tape.

Speaker 2 (00:39:42):

Around what year do you think that was when you decided to drop tape?

Speaker 3 (00:39:48):

2003.

Speaker 2 (00:39:50):

Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:39:51):

We just decided not to do it.

Speaker 2 (00:39:53):

So when you were transitioning, I mean, I guess when you got laid off and decided to go independent, were you scared at all or did you feel very confident like, fuck it, I can just do this. I'm just going to make it happen?

Speaker 3 (00:40:10):

There's a few people in my life that I've always depended on to get a straight answer. And about two days after I got let go, I was pretty devastated, but I knew I was still going to be in music no matter what. And I phoned this guy, David Foster, the famous producer David Foster, because he was at Warner Brothers working as an a and r guy running his own label. And he's known me, I've known him since he was, whatever, a young teenager. He played keyboards in Ronnie Hawkins band. And then he went on to produce Celine Dion and the rest of the world, earth, wind and Fire and everybody. So he was always like a guy I looked up to and I said to him, what should I do? And I'll never forget this. He started laughing on the other end of the phone, and he says, you're kidding, right? And I go, no, what should you do? You should be making records all day. And I went, oh, like what? He says, I don't know. You play guitar, right? I go, yeah, you're a songwriter. Yeah, you're a producer. Yeah. He says, what are you talking about? Just go do that now. And that's exactly what I did. So I have to create David with telling me within a couple of days, don't lose your career path over this. It certainly wasn't worth it.

Speaker 2 (00:41:30):

So basically just do the same thing you were doing before, but for yourself rather than for a label.

Speaker 3 (00:41:36):

Exactly. And he said, whatever you do, don't work for RCA, which I didn't.

Speaker 2 (00:41:43):

So it's interesting how for him, it was probably so obvious that answer that just, dude, just go do what you do. Don't even worry about it. Just go do what you do. But I'm sure that for you, you probably felt a little bit lost and what the fuck is going to happen?

Speaker 3 (00:42:05):

Well, I'll tell you, it was like a death. You go through those different emotional periods of the anger and the remorse and the denial. Now it happens to anybody that goes through that kind of thing in their life, which is life changing. I still had a mortgage on my house. I had a young daughter. I didn't know what the hell I was going to do. So you became desperate. But then something that always has got to me through my whole career took over, which was revenge. And I know that sounds pretty crazy, but it was revenge.

Speaker 2 (00:42:37):

No, honestly, I've been there before, so I understand.

Speaker 3 (00:42:41):

I wanted to bury the label.

Speaker 2 (00:42:44):

I get it. It's interesting. I totally relate to that. Been, I don't know, man. People have told me that I shouldn't be motivated by it, but at certain times with certain situations where I felt like I got fucked, that revenge is kind of what drove me to do something better, even if it's just for me to prove to myself that I could do something better than the situation I was in before that revenge has driven me and has caused some pretty great things. So I don't think it's crazy. I think a lot of people are motivated by that and just don't want to admit it.

Speaker 3 (00:43:37):

We might not want to call it revenge, but people are motivated by a lot of different things. And I think if enough people tell you that you can't do something and you shouldn't do it, and you disagree with them, and then you get knocked down, I mean, people say to me all the time, what do you attribute some of your success to? And I would tell you this, and I was taught this very early. It's the way you recover from failure that gives you true success. Because if people keep knocking you down and telling you you're not good, certainly in my life, mixing, I was told hundreds of times, my mixes sucked. They were the worst thing we'd ever heard. The drum sound garbage. The vocals are buried, there's too much reverb. The guitars are too loud. Whatever it was, it would happen over and over. And then back then you didn't have the opportunity to fix it. You have to pay for a whole new studio day with all the rentals and everything, so you couldn't fix it. Not like today where you pull it up in 13 seconds and there is the track. So you never got the chance to make good. And that was really frustrating.

Speaker 2 (00:44:51):

It's just something that would build up and stick with you over time. It seems to me like you would have to make good on it in a much grander way than if you could just fix each individual instance.

Speaker 3 (00:45:04):

I never realized how to fix my mistakes. It took me a long time.

Speaker 2 (00:45:10):

Okay. So you were motivated by this revenge against the label for letting you go. Obviously they made a mistake by proof is in the pudding, I guess, that if that many platinum records happened that quickly, did you feel validated or vindicated? Did you get that revenge?

Speaker 3 (00:45:35):

It was really interesting. It wasn't like I didn't have success before I got 2001. I had signed and produced a lot of records. I signed the Cowboy Junkies and the Crash Test Dummies in Canada, and I'd made records that had sold hundreds of thousands of records in Canada. And I started to do American projects. I mean, I signed Vertical Horizon at RCA. I had already had big success, but this time it wasn't the label that was getting just a label that was getting something out of it. Because remember, I never got paid as a producer. I got paid as an a and r person. So it was different

Speaker 2 (00:46:12):

Once

Speaker 3 (00:46:13):

I started working for myself. It changed. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:46:18):

When getting paid by a label, just was that like a salary or did you get royalties? Do you mind explaining a little bit about how that worked?

Speaker 3 (00:46:29):

Yeah, we would get a salary and then we would get one point in all the projects that we signed.

Speaker 2 (00:46:34):

Got it. Okay. So there was some merit based pay there where if the record did great, you'd get some reward for it? For sure.

Speaker 3 (00:46:44):

Yeah. I mean, yeah, absolutely. I certainly, when I left the company, I definitely felt pretty insecure, had that great security for so long, but there was something really exciting about it at the same time.

Speaker 2 (00:46:57):

So how long did it take, though? So you said that once it got going, it really got going, but how long did it take between when you were let go and when you had that first platinum record with Dan?

Speaker 3 (00:47:11):

Well, that's funny. It's a good question. Listen, I had some real help. I mean, remember I was an a and r guy for a long time, so I would target certain bands no different than if I was going to sign them, if that makes any sense. In other words, I would do my homework.

Speaker 2 (00:47:31):

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (00:47:33):

I would find out which bands are next and if they're going to break and what the label commitment is. I could tell within 20 minutes whether the label was committed to working on the project. Absolutely. So I had a huge advantage and it took me six months to get a platinum record.

Speaker 2 (00:47:54):

That's incredible. That's actually really incredible, man. That's one thing that I try to tell producers who want to build their careers. That's something that I've always told them to do that I don't think many people do, is that you should do your, it's like intelligence work. You need to get the intelligence on these bands because it's a lot more than just the songs. You need to find out what kind of team they have backing them, how committed the team is. Are there family problems in the band? Is this band going to break up within a month of the album being done? All these different factors, you need to know them all and go for bands that have all the right, it's not just the good songs. They have to have that committed team. They have to have a stable membership, all those things.

Speaker 3 (00:48:58):

And sometimes it's a little bit different than that in the sense that you might come across a band that has nothing going for it as far as their business side. They might not have a great manager. They might not have a label, they might not have a lawyer, they might not have an accountant or an agent, but what do they have? They have great songs. So that's when you jump in and you go, guess what? I'm working for free. I'm going to go for backend. And so I've gambled on that horse many, many times in my career because I really believe something was going to work. And all you need to be is right a few times with that. And people look at you a little bit differently. So it's not just a matter of being there with your handout, waiting for a check. Sometimes you've got to take on things that you believe in and not expect something right away or anything right away. That's called risk. And if you gamble on yourself, that's a whole different animal. You can win if you know what you're doing.

Speaker 2 (00:50:04):

So I mean, I think though that your understanding of the whole game would allow you to make good decisions even when taking those risks. So even if that band didn't have management or a label, you could still assess whether or not you thought the music was strong enough to overcome those things, or you still understood the whole picture and how that band fit in.

Speaker 3 (00:50:36):

I was trained in working for labels and being in those meetings, those marketing meetings, those promotion meetings, those sales meetings, they will be talking about all of the things we just talked about, managers and publicists. And you'd see if the band had personality and they had drive, it would be worth it to take chances. And I think that's what a lot of people doing. Certainly today in the rap business people or even in the country business. I mean, one of the biggest businesses in country right now is songwriters in Nashville writing songs and then selling them to an artist. And the label people are getting $25,000 for a track. They're just selling the track as is. And it's a demo. It's a whole different business. So it does show you can't sit around and wait for the phone to ring. No,

Speaker 2 (00:51:32):

I think that that's always going to be true. It's always been true and always going to be true. I think that with the phone ringing, there will be, throughout a successful career, you will have time periods where the phone rings more than others. But I feel like anyone who gets comfortable with that is setting themselves up for disaster eventually.

Speaker 3 (00:51:58):

Well, look, you get hot and you get cold. That's what happens. One minute, your Atlantic Records favorite mixer and their favorite producer, and then the next minute, I don't like your work anymore. Then you go to Sony or then you go to Rise Records or wherever it's going to be. You go in and out of different phases of doing lots of work for a label, and then you go back to Sony five years later, and there's a whole bunch of different people there. So you walk in and you say Hi, and if you've got a hit, you play it for 'em. That's how it's been working. But with rock music lately, it's been really, really rough because that music is pretty well non-existent the way it was five years ago, especially in the younger 18 to 25-year-old band bracket. There's not a lot of opportunity the way it was.

Speaker 2 (00:52:49):

It really, I think you're absolutely right that rap is kind of the rebellion music of now. And what's interesting too is you see a lot of these newer rappers come from a rocket metal background too. It does seem to me like those kids that would've been making heavy music five, 10 years ago are now making rap.

Speaker 3 (00:53:14):

Yeah. I mean, most of the music today has nothing to do with record labels. It's music that's homegrown.

Speaker 2 (00:53:19):

Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (00:53:20):

They put it up on SoundCloud or wherever they're going to do, and people love it. And it's like it's true democracy of music. Nothing shoved down your throat anymore.

Speaker 2 (00:53:29):

And since you had the experience of seeing it both ways, do you prefer one? And do you think that it's worthwhile for people to sit around comparing them?

Speaker 3 (00:53:47):

Comparing?

Speaker 2 (00:53:48):

Okay, so I see a lot of people who did not experience the old industry comparing now to the old music industry. And I understand, I understand why people do that, but I think that me personally, I think that sometimes they naively think that things are going to revert back to how they were. And I don't think they're ever going to revert back to how they were because the world doesn't work that way.

Speaker 3 (00:54:14):

That's insane. That's like saying we're all going to go back to

Speaker 2 (00:54:18):

The typewriter. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:54:19):

I mean, no technology is here. It's not going to go anywhere. It's going to get better. It's going to be stronger, and music is going to reflect that. But you're still going to, I mean, today's producer is not really a producer. Today's producer is a songwriter.

Speaker 1 (00:54:36):

If

Speaker 3 (00:54:36):

You don't write, you're not going to get any work. I really believe that it's going to be practically impossible. Or if you're a producer that doesn't write and doesn't have 10 guys to call to write your songs for you, you're also not going to be a producer either. It's taken on that shape.

Speaker 2 (00:54:54):

I think you're absolutely right. And I've seen quite a few guys who a few years ago they were getting calls to come in and save songs on records. Their whole gig was writing. A lot of these guys have transitioned into becoming pretty successful producers. Now. I actually think you're absolutely right.

Speaker 3 (00:55:19):

That's the way it used to be as well. I mean, the question is, can you be a producer and not know the notes in a C chord? And the answer is, of course not. You can't. And that's the way it used to be, which is a good thing, I think. I mean, most bands can't name you the names of the chords they play, but if the producer can't either, you got a problem.

Speaker 2 (00:55:42):

Yeah, the producer should be the expert as far as I'm concerned. And it's interesting that you bring up the writing. I think that, correct me if I'm wrong, but there used to be a time period where an engineer or producer didn't even have to be a musician. But now then it became where producers and engineers were almost always musicians. But it seems to me like it's evolving again into where not only do engineers and producers have to be musicians, but they have to be writers.

Speaker 3 (00:56:17):

Yeah. The landscape has changed. And I mean, when you talk about hip hop, you're talking about, as everybody knows now, it's no secret. It's eight to 15 writers on one song.

Speaker 2 (00:56:30):

Wow. So do you feel like the fact that you, back to what we were first talking about, you're pulled by the writing, by the creative side of it more than the technical side. Do you think that that's part of what's kept you going and kept you relevant? The fact that your passion is kind of what the industry evolved into?

Speaker 3 (00:56:55):

Look, I mean, for me, there's been so many different eras. I can't remember them all anymore. But I really try and not think about it too much. If I do, it hurts in the sense that music is ever evolving, and you have to keep up with whatever the technology is that's important. But at the same time, if you don't keep up with the emotional inner side of creativity, it doesn't matter what kind of technology you've got, you're not going to do anything that means anything or inspire anybody. And certainly when I do a project, that's the most important thing for me. Whether it sounds great or not is important, but nowhere near as important as is it good? Is it worthy? Is it creative? Is it special? Is the performance is great? That's so much more important.

Speaker 2 (00:57:52):

When you go for that, for and asking yourself those questions, is it one of those things where you know the answer when you hear it?

Speaker 3 (00:58:03):

Well, again, it's being in touch with your artists that you're working with. That's the thing. I mean, it just helps if you get to know them, you get to know about their life. You ask a lot of questions. You don't talk about yourself that much unless they ask. And you find out where the song comes from, where it lives, where it's been, what's supposed to happen. That's really important. And to do that as a producer, you've got to be very unselfish. I mean, a lot of times today, producers are making records for themselves. You see that more and more. But when you're working with other people, I mean, if you're working with Britney Spears or you're working with, they come into the studio, KA Perry or whoever it is, and they're singing for a week, and then they go home. We're back on tour again. Wherever it is, it's different. But when you're working in a room in close quarters with a band for a month or six weeks or two months, it's a totally different experience. So it helps to get to know them. And what's important.

Speaker 2 (00:59:08):

You were telling me when we were chatting once about how your goal, and I'm paraphrasing, this was like six months ago, but you told me that your goal is to strip away the bullshit and get to the deepest place you can get artistically with them, with your artists, and to get them to express their true self as much as possible and sound. How do you know you're getting there and do you find that you need to use different techniques with different types of people to get that out of them?

Speaker 3 (00:59:51):

Yes, absolutely. I mean, some artists don't care about what, they don't want to tell you anything. So you have to guess. And others are very open, and you have to break them down slowly. When I say break them down, it's really not about breaking them down, it's about trying to find the song within them and their performance with it. Because most people are not trained how to sing or write songs that I deal with. They're not people that know music the way it was in the sense that they've studied it. Just because you listen to a Fleetwood Mac record with your mother doesn't mean you know about music now. It just means that you listen to Fleetwood Mac when you were 10.

(01:00:39):

So we're all a culmination of our favorite music. That's what we are. We're a product of what moves us. And so I always ask people instead of if I can't get through to an artist, I'll say to them, good, so you don't want to tell me anything? Well, that's okay. So now play me a song that makes you cry. And now play me a song that makes you happy and now play me a song that you hate and now play me a song that you want to listen to on the way to your vacation. And by listening to those five songs, I don't really need to talk to them much anymore. It's all there.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):

Interesting. That's actually great. I've never heard someone give that answer before about how they get it out of an artist, but I guess if you know someone's musical tastes emotionally where they're at,

Speaker 3 (01:01:41):

Well, to coin a cheesy phrase, music being the soundtrack to where lives, we don't realize how much it permeates our thoughts and our feelings. In fact, every time we talk about a breakup in a love affair or meeting a new love affair or being depressed at the loss of a friend or a parent, there's a song that goes with that. And without that song, a lot of us could never, ever have gotten through it, not really. And so it becomes an aid. It becomes a powerful, powerful tool that changes the way we think about doing it. So if I'm in the studio and I'm trying to make a record like that, I have to look for that. I have to find that feeling. I have to find that inner strength to make that song be that powerful.

Speaker 2 (01:02:42):

So I guess that sometimes probably very often finding that expression isn't something that someone is going to be able to tell you verbally. So finding out what turns them on musically is probably actually a much better indicator than what they would tell you verbally. Anyways.

Speaker 3 (01:03:11):

As crazy as this might sound, and I'm going to be completely honest with you right now, before I mix anyone's record, I probably speak to them for three or four hours, like in one shot or over time, over a period of a week, I will speak to them.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):

And this is to get to know, to know them. I'm assuming

Speaker 3 (01:03:39):

You're making a custom suit.

Speaker 2 (01:03:41):

Fair enough. And do you do this with every member of the band or

Speaker 3 (01:03:46):

The creator of the music and the producer? I mean, I've mixed three or four records for Andrew Wade Data, remember? Or Ghost Inside One Hour last night. I mean, Andrew Wade and I talked for hours on each of those projects before I did anything. Nothing. I wouldn't touch anything without having that conversation with you. That's another mistake today that's made over and over again where people say, Hey, I do my thing. You better like it. Well, that's not necessarily true.

Speaker 2 (01:04:24):

One thing that I think the internet ruins is what you get from talking to people, whether in person or on the phone or whatever, but I feel like the whole text medium gets in the way of this. But nothing beats actually getting to know somebody through their words or in person. But you can't always do in person, but nothing text wise will even come close to the kind of connection you can get to somebody through talking to them.

Speaker 3 (01:05:01):

I'll give you an example. Bring me the horizon. We mixed the Cent paternal album. Well, at that time, England is five hours ahead, right? That's not too bad. I mean, you finish a mix at 10 at night, it's three in the morning. They can listen. But in this instance, Ollie Sykes was in Bali. Ouch. So now every morning at nine 30 and Ollie, he was having a good vacation. I don't think he was partying, but we would Skype at nine 30 in the morning for half an hour or an hour to talk about that day's work, and that's what, 10,000 miles away in a different world while he's on vacation. So that's what technology has brought us, and through those kinds of things, we're able to make better records, but take advantage of it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:51):

But that's still talking. That to me is an evolution of the telephone. So you're still talking, you're not texting, you're actually engaging. I think that that's one of the best things actually about the modern day is that we can do that with people 10,000 miles away and not just in music. I think that lots of relationships are safe because of it too, because of the fact that people can travel and keep in touch with their loved ones, but actually see them and talk to them. It is the next best thing to being in person. So if you do use the tools of today for their true potential, I think that you can make connections a lot deeper, but you have to actually use them. I guess that's the key, I guess. When you have these conversations with the people you're working with, I guess is this something that developed over time? This became something that you do or have you always done that? Where do you think that came from? Because not everyone does that.

Speaker 3 (01:07:04):

It came from the fact that I would get records back that I hated, and nobody ever called me to ask me what I thought and I was a producer or I was a songwriter or in some cases a musician. So it came from being 19 and probably making my first album and having my producer leave halfway through because he was getting a divorce and having me stuck there and hating every moment of what happened afterwards. I didn't know what I was doing.

Speaker 2 (01:07:32):

Hey, everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast and you should know that it'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 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 remember, you already know how amazing it is. At the beginning of the month, nail the mix members, get the raw multitracks to a new song by artists like Lama God, Opeth, chuga, bring Me The Horizon Gaira 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 of the album and takes your questions live on the air. You'll also get access to Mix Lab, our collection of dozens of bite-sized mixing tutorials that cover all the basics and Portfolio Builder, which is a library of pro quality multi-tracks cleared for use of your portfolio.

(01:08:35):

So your career will never again be held back by the quality of your source material. And for those who really, really want to step up their 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 gain staging, mastering loan and so forth. It's over 50 hours of content in, man, let me tell you. This stuff is just insanely detailed. Enhanced members also get access to one-on-one office hours 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 slash enhanced to find out more, and you don't ever want to be that guy for the people you work with or you don't want things to be left unsaid.

Speaker 3 (01:09:43):

Look, there's a lot of scuttlebutt that happens, that's talk in the background talk behind everybody today, and everybody has this reputation. I mean, I know mine, I hear it all the time. It's really funny because people say, well, he's not going to listen to what you have to say, or He is not going to, it's going to be intense, or he is going to demand this from you or this, and then they get to work with me. They're like, well, wait a minute. This is nothing. I thought what I do that's maybe a bit different is I spend a lot of time with the artists and get to know them and their song, and through that, that becomes quite painful. Sometimes it's not that much fun, but I find it a necessary evil. So to answer your question, I could sit in my high castle and do whatever I do all day and say, here it is. Here's your dinner, eat it. Or I could say, what do you want for dinner? I could make that just as easy.

Speaker 2 (01:10:42):

That makes perfect sense. And I actually think that I want to key in on something you just said, that it's not always fun. Go through to talk about these things or to explore them because talking about some painful, some potentially painful things. And if you're trying to understand the feelings of somebody before you're about to go make a record that expresses those feelings and they're coming from a painful place, of course it's not going to be very much fun to talk about it. But in the same way that therapy is not supposed to be that much fun, but important

Speaker 3 (01:11:24):

Bands basically, they come off the road and they're told to go write a record. They've been out on the road for a year and a half. Good, now you got three months to write your album and you got another two months to record it. And when they come off the road, they're a train wreck. They're tired, they're lonely, they could be drunk, high emotionally distressed, and then they run back into studio for two or three months, and I'm the one that gets 'em. I'm the one that has to sit with them. Their parents wouldn't even sit with them for 12 hours a day, six days a week for three months. They couldn't. So there's something that has to happen, and it's a recuperation period, and it's a period of time where you find yourself again and through your music, you set your path for the next year. It is not that simple, to be honest with you. Most people cave under the pressure of touring and making a record. They don't do very well at all. Most of the bands that are successful do not make a record after they tour most of them because they haven't written anything good in the bus. They just think they have.

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):

That's not a good environment for riding at all. It's a terrible environment for writing. I think also, not just that, I guess you're helping them recuperate psychologically. I think that also one thing that happens when you're in the music industry is, especially if you're successful, is you get yes a lot and you don't get a lot of honesty from the people around you because especially successful bands having their asses kissed all day every day and are living this kind of alternate reality lifestyle and that lifestyle and getting your ass kissed all day is not exactly conducive to being in touch with deeper, darker feelings. It doesn't necessarily go together. So I think that not only are you helping them recuperate from this insanity, but you're providing something that it's not really common in the music industry. But that's really, really important actually for creating art, which is reconnecting psychologically.

Speaker 3 (01:14:06):

If there's one thing I've learned is the best records are usually the ones that are the most tumultuous.

Speaker 2 (01:14:11):

Yeah, I mean that's probably the same reason that you hear about great artists being nuts or there's always a story about how a great movie was made or a great record or a great artist cutting off their own ear. I mean, art doesn't come from a fun place generally, I think.

Speaker 3 (01:14:31):

No, I mean, I've lost a few artists that I've worked very closely with too, to all the bullshit that goes on outside of it. And when you hear it, one party is upset and frustrated and sad, but another part of you is not that shocked.

Speaker 2 (01:14:47):

I mean, yeah, I totally agree. It isn't shocking. It is a very fucked up lifestyle, and I think when I was a lot younger, it was glorified a lot. I've thought about this a lot recently when I was a teenager and I see magazines and watch MTV and stuff. It was very glorified and the kinds of addictions that become normal for artists, and it was just made to seem really, really cool. As I've gone on and lots of people I know have died from it, and you see the death count rising from just people in bands, it almost seems like we're police officers or something with the amount of people we know that drop like flies. It's insane. The reality of it is very, very different than the way it's portrayed. It's not cool at all. And being in the business of tapping into that type of stuff, it's got its negative consequences for sure. It's not necessarily fun stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:16:06):

The seventies and the eighties, which we talked about before, was an era of promiscuity. In fact, I would say half of the songs that were written were written about being promiscuous and it was the norm. All of that was the norm. You were allowed to talk about anything, it didn't matter, and you were allowed to do anything after the show. Now a comedian can't get up anymore in front of a college audience and they don't want to because it's changed because rock and roll was based on promiscuity and sex, drugs and rock and roll. Now that's gone away. So is rock and roll.

Speaker 2 (01:16:47):

Yeah, it's almost like you can't have one without the other. What's so interesting about that is I'm sure that you've noticed that lots of times artists who were great, who also had horrible Coke addictions or something would get sober and then their music would start to suck and they would go in magazines or interviews and talk about how their music's better than ever. But you would hear it and it would just sound castrated. And it really bummed me out because I really do. This happened so many times. I really did like their art better when they were really fucked up people and I don't wish them any harm. I don't want them to die from an overdose or anything like that. So I haven't yet reconciled how I feel about the whole thing because I feel like the lifestyle that's needed to really get there is also deadly. And so it kind of sucks.

Speaker 3 (01:17:58):

A lot of people do a lot of things for different reasons. We don't really know the reasons why. A lot of them are spurred the moment reasons. But yeah, I mean artists definitely go through phases and those phases make them who they are. That's why there's not a lot of longevity in our business. How many artists can we think about that we loved that were 40, 50 years ago that are still writing great songs today? People were talking about Prince when he died, and I love Prince. I mean, he's one of my favorite artists of all time. But I had never heard a good song from Prince in the last 20 years that I was excited about. When you look at his body of work at that period in his life, it was sensational. There's only a few people that have withstood 40 years in this record business and still are successful. It's not a business for longevity, not really.

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):

Not as an artist, at least

Speaker 3 (01:18:55):

I meant as an artist. Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:18:57):

Yeah. It's interesting though how I look at parallels to other creative fields and you have actors for instance, that's an artist, but you have actors who manage to be incredible for 40 years, 50 years, or directors who just keep on doing great stuff. I wonder what's different there than in music to where it seems like in music you have your time period where you're great, you have that peak where everything you touch is gold and that peak is different for everybody. Sometimes it lasts 10 years, sometimes it lasts six months, but like you said, it almost never lasts 40 or 50 years. So what's different about music?

Speaker 3 (01:19:46):

Music's different because acting is acting. Music is not acting music comes from a different place. It's not a matter of reading a script that's been written for you. You are writing your own script and that's the difference. And so you live and die by that sort, and you're only as good as your last song. That's why things come and go. A great example in the acting world right now is Johnny Depp, who everybody's thought everybody loves, all of John's movies, they're phenomenal and he's phenomenal. But right now he just got booted off the Pirates of the Caribbean. So he's going through a terrible time in his career. But the truth is, Johnny Depp going to be a major threat in five or 10 years. And if you're a gambling person, you'd say yeah, because that's the kind of actor he is. He's insanely good. And if he cleans up, what's the other guy that cleaned up really, really well? And now

Speaker 2 (01:20:45):

Robert Downey Jr.

Speaker 3 (01:20:46):

There you go. There's a great example of a rehabilitated actor. Johnny Depp could very easily be Robert Downey.

Speaker 2 (01:20:53):

Yep,

Speaker 3 (01:20:54):

Absolutely. This is the thing, it's like you look at your work over your lifetime. You don't look at it over three or four years. And if you're serious about what you're doing, I've been very lucky to say I've been doing what I wanted since I was 17. That's a long time to be making records. That's all I've ever done. I've never known how to do anything else. I can barely screw in a light bulb. But you do that because it's what you love and you're passionate about it, and hopefully you're good at it eventually, but it's a long ladder and you have to be prepared to fall down the ladder a few times and still get back on it again. And it's not easy sometimes I can honestly tell you that I felt like not getting back on the ladder some days. I mean, I try to write every day. Some days I wake up and I feel I don't want to write anything today, but I know I force myself to do it because I have to do it because it keeps me alive or awake or whatever you want to call it. And I think that's another thing about our business. There's a lot of uptime and there's a lot of downtime, and you've got to find yourself within the downtime too, to keep yourself moving.

Speaker 2 (01:22:11):

So how have you found yourself during the downtime? I

Speaker 3 (01:22:13):

Write every day.

Speaker 2 (01:22:15):

So is it one of those things where I guess, I mean, you just said you're right every day, so no matter what you're creating something.

Speaker 3 (01:22:25):

Yes, try to. And it doesn't work out that way. If I'm not in the studio making a record or mixing a record, it's like being 85 years old and you start to lose your memory, well, you better start playing Scrabble even though you don't want to. So yeah, well, I don't mean it that way. I mean, look, you can be 25 years old and still struggling and trying to get projects, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't work every day as if you were working. And I've had periods in my career where I've worked every day for four years, not every day, but six days a week, at least 340 days a year for four years in a row. Most people would want to just retire at the end of that. You've done, I remember, was it four or five years ago? I think we did 10 records in a row. Wow. 10. We started with Bring Me the Horizon asking Alexandria Mice and Men, bare Tooth, I prevail. I mean, it just kept going and going and going and going with no end in sight. But after a while, you do start to lose your mind really not learning anything, doing a lot of the same thing. And I'm sure I just forgot sleeping with Sirens young guy. We just kept going.

Speaker 2 (01:23:54):

So John Crews, the actor was 57 years old. He could slow down if he wanted to. He's as rich as anyone could ever dream of being as successful as anyone could ever dream of being in a hundred Lifetimes. And someone who his assistant was just interviewed. And he still gets up at 4:00 AM every day now nowadays and still goes for it. Like he's 23 and has not become successful yet. And apparently he's been like that his entire career regardless of up times or down times. And he's definitely had a few downtime his career. But I like to find out what the super achievers do because like you said earlier, it's not about the success, it's about what you do to recover from the failure. And so come to find out, of course, somebody who says successful still gets up at 4:00 AM and goes that hard even if he doesn't have to. Of course. So when you tell me that you did 10 records in a row just very recently, it's like, of course you did. That makes perfect sense. That's exactly what I would've expected.

Speaker 3 (01:25:18):

Here's the funny thing too. A lot of people are driven by money and that becomes really important. Not necessarily about the art form, but it's really funny because when you're working really that hard, and I've kind of worked my life like that, there's no time to spend any money. You're not going to enjoy your money. So what you get to drive to work in a nice car and it pretty well ends there. It's not like you're going out and buying clothes and lying on the beach and traveling the world and you can play golf and go fishing or whatever it is you do, you do that. You work for your family, you work for other people around you to make them happy. It's a whole different dynamic. So that's the other thing to me, and I heard this early in my career was surviving is making it in the music business. Just being able to survive is being successful.

Speaker 2 (01:26:17):

I think that there's a lot of truth to that actually. It's a badge of honor. If you can survive in this industry, let alone prosper, but survive is anyone who survives in it. I have some respect for

Speaker 3 (01:26:30):

The music business has definitely attracted a certain kind of people, that's for sure. And some of them are fantastic and are in it for all the right reasons and others are in it for all the wrong reasons. And you kind of figure that out really quickly in your career. You can tell by sitting down and having it, like you and I have been talking now for two hours about music and the music and making of music. But you can tell someone that isn't because after five or 10 minutes they'll start talking about the New York Yankees and how well they played last night. And that's when you know that that person just happens to be in the room and they start talking about something that has nothing to do with music. And I call those people the best 10 minutes in rock and roll.

Speaker 2 (01:27:18):

I mean, look, I like making money just like anybody else does too. And it's important. But like you said, it's not about the money. We don't get to enjoy it anyways. And even though I'm not producing now, I'm running the URM, it's still the music world and it still consumes 16 hours a day and it's the same thing. It's still the same type of lifestyle. I'm still dealing with music all day every day, and the money is for other people. It's for me being able to set up my kids when I have them and maybe I can go to the airport in a nice car, but I don't get to, it's not about the money. It's definitely not. And I feel like if it was about the money, there'd be other things to do that I could do with my life that would make a lot more with a lot less effort.

Speaker 3 (01:28:26):

Producers and engineers that are really true to themselves, they take all that money that they make and buy gear with it.

Speaker 2 (01:28:32):

Yes, they do.

Speaker 3 (01:28:34):

That's what they buy and say, what? Did you go on a vacation? No, but I bought a new compressor and a new plugin and a new computer. Yeah, I mean reinvesting in yourself in the music business is a great business for people selling us stuff for sure, because there's always something new to buy.

Speaker 2 (01:28:51):

Yeah. And I can tell you from running a business that myself and my partners, we could pay ourselves a lot more if we wanted to, but we reinvest in the business always because I mean, dude, if you're in this and you've survived, chances are that there's something deeper that's driving you. Because like I said, there are other ways to make money in life that are far less work and far less painful. So if you're in this and you've survived, there's something deeper driving you. And any chance that I have to enhance it that get closer to the goal, the deeper goal I'm going to. And so when the money comes in, I reinvest it right away. I think about where that money could go, and I think that reinvesting it in the future is the best possible place it could go rather than a vacation or lining my pocket a little bit more.

(01:29:59):

So with that said, and we have been talking for a while, and I want to respect your time. We have a few questions from our audience that I'd like to ask you if you're willing to answer. I'm not going to ask all of them, but I'd feel bad if we didn't go through a few of them. Here's one from Russell Miller, which is Mr. Beeth. You're known for getting incredible drum sounds, but good tones only shine on a great performance. Sometimes the recording process can interrupt a drummer's creative vibe with technical details or having mics on their kit may cramp their playing style. Can you talk about your approach to balancing the quest for great horse tone against coaching a great performance out of maybe a less experienced drummer?

Speaker 3 (01:30:47):

So the question is how do you get a great performance out of a drummer that's not that good? Is that the question?

Speaker 2 (01:30:55):

How do you balance keeping the drummer's psychology right with decisions that you need to make for the engineering side of things that might interfere with their vibe?

Speaker 3 (01:31:09):

I probably have a different approach than most people. First of all, most of the drummers we work with, I would say 80% of them have no studio experience. And the ones that have somebody just takes all their drums and throws 'em into time and then basically throws 'em out of the studio. So they never actually get to learn how to play anything in the studio. The minute we work with a session musician, we get the album done in two or three days. So I've had a situation maybe 10, 12 times in my life where we've been working with drummers that can't really play that well, and we get through it as best we can, but it is a painful thing for everybody involved. It really is. And especially when we have to program, it just takes three times longer. But a lot of the problems come here from the guitar players that are doing demos and they start being the drummer in the band. They write parts that are phenomenal that nobody could ever play.

(01:32:07):

So most of that is bullshit to me. It's like, why would you try and make your drummer do something well, because they know the engineer is just going to recreate it anyway. So when we say the drummer's playing, they're not really playing. It's just that nobody tells them afterwards that they didn't play. Okay, so now to answer your question a little bit simpler, what would I do if I went the other route? Well, of course you want to have the best drums you can get. You want to have the best heads you can get. You want to have somebody that can tune the drums. You want to have somebody that has the right sticks. You want to have the right microphones in the right room with a great way to record through some kind of mic breeze, and you want to have a doll that the engineer understands. But none of those things could make a drummer play better. So I would just tell the guy to take lessons.

Speaker 2 (01:33:02):

Fair

Speaker 3 (01:33:02):

Enough. There was a situation where I had a drummer that wasn't very good, and I ended up playing guitar with him, and I played a completely different song to the one he was playing, and he didn't care anymore about the song we were playing, and he just played drums and he's relaxed and he stopped thinking about it. So there are ways to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:33:24):

Fair enough. So tib Wheaton's, wondering, after engineering, mixing and mastering across so many decades and the constant redefinition of what a modern mix entails, how does one continually evolve without losing their signature sound?

Speaker 3 (01:33:42):

Well, that's a good question. So first of all, I don't know anything about mastering and most, I don't think most mixing engineers go anywhere near the master of their record. I'm talking about from my school today. It's fairly expensive to master records, so people have to do it. It doesn't mean they're any good as far as a signature sound from the way I see it, at least that could be the kiss of death too, because a signature sound like take Andy Wallace, who I think is one of the best mixers that ever lived. Well, you haven't heard his Whitney Houston mixes, by the way, long before Nirvana, long before Lincoln Park, long before Limp Bizkit like Andy Wallace mixed probably a hundred number one pop songs. So what's Andy Wallace's signature sound? It's his hit mixes, and I don't necessarily think that there's signature. I think he basically evolves to the track and you become that. The minute you think that you're going to put your stamp on everything and you're going to brand it, I feel like that's dangerous. And you're not going to get calls to do different music, which today would also be a big no-no. That means you can't do hip hop because you're doing country or you can't do rock because you're doing hip hop. You can't limit yourself. So your signature sound becomes the artist's sound. That's the way you should do it.

Speaker 2 (01:35:12):

Great. Alright, and one more question. This one's from Charlie Sandberg. David, you said in interviews that you sought under oath out to mix because you didn't think anyone got them yet, and that album has a crazy mix and I love it. What was the thing you wanted to bring to that record, and did you have a vision for all that weird awesome craziness before you heard the record? Or did that come about in the mix process?

Speaker 3 (01:35:41):

Well, okay, so we're talking about this record lost in the Sound of Separation.

Speaker 2 (01:35:45):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:35:46):

That record. Yeah. Well, okay, so I had made friends with the drummer. I had done his record, the almost, so I really liked Aaron G. Gillespie, I thought he was super talented, an amazing drummer and a great singer. And I heard this record. I did this band Red Jumpsuit. Then right after I started to listen to this record Define the Great Line, which I thought was amazing, and actually Chris Lord Algae mixed that record, I just thought it was really interesting, but it wasn't violent enough for me. So when I heard they were making a record, I phoned Aaron and I phoned Spencer and I said, look, give me a chance to do this. I think I can do a great job. And it was done by two or three different people. I'm not sure who the producers were, but it was done by different producers and different songs were done.

(01:36:33):

So it kind of came in. It was a bit weird the way it came in, but the songs had keyboards and they had screaming and they had rapping and they had guitar solos, and it was very, very enigmatic. I kind of saw the band as a Radiohead type band for Modern Rock. And the great thing about that project for me at least, was that the band showed up to mix. So they were there for everything, and that was really exciting, having them give me input as we worked. And I think Dan Cornif was on that project too, and he did an amazing job sort of taking the drums and really taking them to the next level. And there was a lot of fine balancing going on that record. It was a very challenging record sonically to put together. In fact, I can also say that if we didn't do that record, I would never have gotten to do Bring Me the Horizon. They wanted it to sound like that record, the sym paternal record. They actually said that to me.

Speaker 2 (01:37:34):

Okay. Well, speaking with sym paternal, I know I said that that Charlie Sandberg question was the last one, but since we've got in about 20 questions about se paternal, and you just mentioned that they wanted to sound like that, lemme just ask you this one question that kind of encapsulates all the se paternal questions. And this one's from Ben Palmer. He says, chasing the snare drum sound on sym paternal is a big part of what got me properly into a recording. Could you shed some light on how it was captured and what your mindset was?

Speaker 3 (01:38:06):

Certainly. Well, first of all, Brian Robbins was the mixing engineer on that project, and Brian has been working with me for eight years. In fact, he started as an assistant. He's an extremely talented engineer. He's a great mixing engineer. He hears things a certain way. And at that time and place, Brian had just started really working with me on a full-time basis. He started as a guy that ran the studio. And so we had a lot of practice in the months coming up to that record. And Brian really had a chance to work every day on his craft too. So when the record came in the door, we knew that it was a really good record. And it's funny, we talk about that snare drum because we put our best foot forward with that record when we sent the mix in. And the very first comment we got was, can we change the snare drum?

Speaker 2 (01:39:03):

Wow, that's hilarious.

Speaker 3 (01:39:04):

We thought the snare drum, what we had going on was a lot of body to the snare drum. It was dark and it was fat and thick, but it had the crack in the top end. And Brian had nailed this to the wall and the first thing they did was change it. And of course we did because we weren't going to argue with them. Terry dad actually wrote me a note that he felt that we had missed the boat on it and we should make it brighter. And of course, Brian, it took him maybe I want to say it took Brian 10 seconds to change it, and we fired the mix back off and they were jumping up and down. This is the best thing they've ever heard. But I would credit Brian a lot for basically having the intuition to work really hard with me on that project straight through.

(01:39:51):

And we went through multiple mixes of different songs. That was really hard because of the amount of tracks. There was at least 200 tracks on that record. So every day was a challenge. And we only did one recall, which is pretty good when you consider. And the recall literally, it took two hours to recall, or three hours to recall it, maybe 15 minutes to fix it. It was a tiny little thing, but the snare drum was born out of a lot of other things. And in a way, I'm really happy we went with what they had, but equally so I feel like what we had to begin with was just as good if not better.

Speaker 2 (01:40:30):

It's interesting. It kind of has become a legendary snare and people fucking love it. Well, David, thank you very, very much for taking the time to talk to me. It's been awesome talking to you, and I'm sure we could have gone on for another two hours if we wanted to, but I thank you so much for taking the time.

Speaker 3 (01:40:50):

My pleasure.

Speaker 2 (01:40:51):

And I would love to talk to you again at some point in the future. So have a great rest of your day.

Speaker 3 (01:40:57):

You too, my friend.

Speaker 2 (01:40:57):

Take care. Welcome back, Mr. David Beeth. Thank you for taking the time to go through these questions. Just for those of you guys listening, we finished the first part of the podcast. It's actually pretty long. If you're listening to this point, then as you know, the episode is almost two hours long, and I wanted to respect David's time just because I did, however, you guys asked so many questions, we weren't able to get to all of them. I spoke to David online about it and offered him the chance to come back at some point and to just cover your questions. Some of them are really, really good, and he was generous enough to suggest that we just do it now like two days later. So here we are. So David, thank you for your time again and welcome back.

Speaker 3 (01:41:51):

It's great to be back. And I was just telling you that this is probably going to be good for a long trip over the ocean on an airplane.

Speaker 2 (01:42:01):

Yeah, absolutely. I was telling you though, I really do think that longer form podcasts do real well, which is interesting because with the advent of internet streaming and YouTube and all that, one of the common wisdoms for a long time was keep everything short, keep it short, keep your videos short. Nobody wants something long. But I think that maybe that might've been true at one point in time, but I think that's kind of underestimating the intellectual ability of the audience. And maybe there's a theory that with the way that the evening news has degenerated into just people yelling at each other and there's no place on TV or really in the news anymore to get anything intelligent, people have shifted over to podcasts to replace that. And it's not necessarily podcasts about the news, it's just podcasts about stuff that they're interested in. And they've replaced hours and hours of taking in info through the ways they used to, through listening to podcasts about topics they really, really like. And then the other thing that people say is the reason that podcasts are doing great is because for years people are used to watching the news or that were TV or radio things that are very sanitized. And there's no rules on a podcast. You can say whatever the fuck you want, and that's great about it. And the creators love it because there's no boss, no corporation that's going to pull out the advertising. You are free. This medium's totally free. And I think the public has been starved for that.

Speaker 3 (01:44:02):

Yeah, I agree. And I think even with YouTube, you're able to see things on YouTube right now that you haven't seen a year ago.

Speaker 2 (01:44:11):

Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (01:44:12):

A lot of them are an hour, an hour and a half, whatever they are interviews, whatever it is. So I liken it to this is I guess when Amazon started and they started that idea with somebody reading a book to you and that really did well for a while, I think it's kind of like somebody reading a book to you in a way.

Speaker 2 (01:44:34):

It is. And actually audiobooks are also doing great. I love them. I absolutely love them. And I guess for me personally, I love this format because I used to really watching some of the great interviewers on TV like Charlie Rose or even I used to listen to Howard Stern. I thought he was a great interviewer, but when Howard Stern was on NBC or there was only so far he could go. I mean, I know that he walked the line a lot, but there was only so far he could go. And with Charlie Rose interviews, he did real well within his confines, but there's only so far those guys could go. And so now that they've moved off of those formats, like Howard Stern's interviews have gotten so much better. I just love the fact that people can be honest. It's great. With that, let's get to these questions. The first one is from Donald Spac, and it's a bit of a long one says, could you talk a little bit about the Cria records you did? They are much better sounding records than the ones that came before, but also slightly less technical from a performance standpoint. Did you work with them on simplifying the arrangements in order to achieve more impact or were they already going in that direction and was it difficult or was it a difficult process to get them performing at their best after the van accident?

Speaker 3 (01:46:15):

Oh, okay. Yeah. So this is the first record that was made with them. I think they put out three or four previous albums, and this was the first record they put out since they had a terrible, terrible accident with a van on the New York Throughway, which ended up rolling. And everybody ended up in the hospital and was, you can imagine it was a massive lawsuit and the name of the record, and the premise for the record was, what Doesn't Kill You Will Make You Stronger. And that's the name of the album. And so when we made this record, we did it in New York at this great studio at the time called Mirror Image, which was a holdover from the original hit factory. The very first hit factory was on 42nd Street in Times Square, and these guys had taken it over and sort of made a wrap room out of it.

(01:47:04):

So this record we made in that room, and yeah, I mean we really worked a lot. First of all, the drummer in the band is insane. Candy's just an amazing drummer, and he wanted to play everything no messing around with anything. And he could, in fact, what everybody in the band was great. And it was also a record where the singer wanted to switch over from screaming to singing. This is like 2002. And so he ended up over at my place for about two weeks and we ended up writing four songs together, him and I, and lyrics and melody, and I think some of the music was written, but we wanted to try and get on the radio.

(01:47:49):

And so that record became an incredibly technical record. The beauty of the record for me was pretty well, every record I went on to do after this record, I did with a guitars tuned to a D or a CAB or an A Sharp. And this record was in E Standard with a couple of tracks in the E flat. So it was standard tuning and it was still heavy as hell, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me how it got to be that heavy in the key of E. It was mind boggling, but that's the key they played in. And the bass player, I think he was right after that, he went to a band called Poison the Well. But everybody in that band was desperate to make a great record, and it was a lot of hard work and a lot of fun and maybe one of the best technical records I think I've ever done as far as playing goes.

Speaker 2 (01:48:50):

Great. This is a question from Henrik Ud who is, I don't know if you know him actually. He's actually a really great, really great metal producer and mixer. He says that you have a quote out there that says, of course, every studio has a lexicon for a DL, which I love. I'm not using it on the drums, just on vocals, on drums. I'm using in a MS reverb. And he's wondering, what's your favorite program for vocals on the four 80 L? And the same for drums with the A-M-S-R-M-X 16?

Speaker 3 (01:49:28):

The lexicon I've used for years, obviously it's a double sided stereo. So one side, I always love to use an eighth note delay reverb with about two or three seconds. I loved it when the vocal was clear and the reverb just came a little bit later and you time it, and especially for ballads, it's an incredible tool for that. And I had learned that years ago watching people delay reverb. And so you'd always get that clear vocal with a bit of space on it, but we ended up using it mostly that tool as a wood room or a small wood room. And I would use it, we would use it for background vocals. I guess I should have used it for more. But then you end up with a lot of different reverbs and you get used to the way they sound. So that I used the wood room or any, there was also a great program that sounded like a toilet on it, like a quick kind of a slap room.

(01:50:32):

And I liked that. And then originally when we got it, we used it on drums. On the snare drum, we would use probably again, the wood room. And then the A MS came, this is probably 2005, and I'd been using an A MS since 1982. I think it was the very first sampling unit I ever used. And we used it for the snare. When we first got the A MS unit itself, we would use it to go up and down, so we would go like 99.9 to 1 0 1. And so it would duplicate what today is known as snare samples. They wouldn't sound the same. They would fluctuate back and forth randomly. So the A MS was an incredible unit and you got to use an extender so you could sample for, I think originally it came, it was two or three seconds, then you would get the extender, and I think it went literally to six or seven, which became great. Then they made this reverb, which I ended up buying.

(01:51:37):

And the sound that always blew my mind on it was the nonlinear. I love that sound. It was real, it sounded like a room. And again, that was the beauty of the reverb, which I liken to the sampling unit because it would randomize and give you different sounds. So that blended with let's say an SBX 90 or what else do we use on reverb? I used to use, I can't remember the name of the Swedish company, I'm trying to remember it now, but we would use it for the longer reverbs or the SPX 90 for the longer reverb and the am MS for the short room that the actual room itself blended was a fantastic sound and is a fantastic sound. So hopefully that answers that.

Speaker 2 (01:52:29):

I believe so. Alright. So Danny Salant has a multi-part question, so I'll just ask them one at a time. First of all, he said yes, yes, yes. In all capital letters and multiple exclamation points. He's very excited that you're on the podcast. So question number one is how do you go about deciding the proper key and tempo for a song? Is it just feel for you? Do the bands get it?

Speaker 3 (01:52:54):

I guess after working on so many songs in my career, I started to see very, very clear lines that I would always notice when writing the song itself. The first thing I noticed was that most songs when they're written are written too fast or too slow, one or the other. So I would always realize that whatever tempo I'd written the song, it was probably going to be wrong. And the second thing I noticed was that usually the key is too high. So the rule of thumb for me with this, first of all when dealing with the tempo would be to deal with the tuning first and then deal with the tempo. So the way I dealt with the tuning would be, let's say that the singer wanted to sing the song in c, I would then try and tune the guitar to a C sharp or play it one half step up and then go down to the tone.

(01:54:00):

So I would notice when it got to the chorus, which one felt better, especially when you're starting to hit those high notes. And usually I would always air on the side of bringing the song down in pitch to make it believable. And I also had to consider the live show. When you're singing live, it's not easy to hit those notes that you're going to hit in the studio. So in regards to the tempo, I would use the gauge of the lyric and how well the phrasing of the verse fit in the groove. And I would speed up or slow down and see, I would go up two or three clicks and I would go down two or three clicks and do exactly the same thing I would do on the key. I would always want to hear it both ways. And then I would ask the singer, what is good for you? Do you feel comfortable? And I really never cared much about what a drummer or bass player guitar player felt a song was too fast or too slow unless it was an instrumental song. So hopefully that answers that question.

Speaker 2 (01:55:03):

Absolutely. That makes perfect sense because if the vocals sound rushed or lazy, it's going to kill it.

Speaker 3 (01:55:13):

And I don't think musicians realize that what their singers go through when they have to get up on stage every night for two years if it's a success and singing keys that if they have a slight cold or a slight cough, they're never going to be able to sing. But always the issue would be is the verse melody too low? And I would never really care that much about it being a little bit strenuous and care way more about whether the chorus was going to deliver in the right pacing and the right key that was comfortable for the singer to sing without the voice crack.

Speaker 2 (01:55:50):

Makes perfect sense. Okay, so part two of his question is, you love reverbs. What's your ratio between verbs and room sounds and do you send live tracks to these reverbs? Do you usually gate these tracks? Do you EQ your returns?

Speaker 3 (01:56:04):

Well, there's multiple answers.

Speaker 2 (01:56:06):

Yeah, God,

Speaker 3 (01:56:07):

I mean every track is different, but I would say the rule of thumb would be that the room was always a big part of the drum sound. It was from the beginning. It has been my whole career, and the blending of that room is so important. The issue would always become, you would get into a room and you'd love the way it sounded, and then the first thing that would happen in the mix is that you would have the snare in the mix and you didn't want it to sound like the other drums, so you would add a different kind of reverb to it. So it's really just a matter of taste and blend how you want to do it. Many times if you're doing a raw band, the idea would be to not add a lot of reverb to it and use the room and compress it.

(01:56:52):

And certain reverbs definitely clash with room sounds, especially if you're in a smaller room and you've got a long reverb. Sometimes it sounds very strange to me, but I would stick to five or six different reverbs and I would know the parameters. I guess there were parts in my career where I got really pissed off at using the same gear because it doesn't work for every song. But at the same time, because we were in the same room for a long time, we knew it worked. So I think the rule of thumb, for me at least, again, I would go back to tempo. If you're dealing with a slow song and you want to mix something in with a room, you have to almost understand that the room at that point is no longer relevant. And what I always love to do was record the Toms and put them and the kit and put it almost on a separate track and then be able to blend it with that long snare drum reverb, which would be in a ballad, for example, or a mid tempo song.

(01:57:59):

So I think we're dealing with the question now of lengths, and if you're dealing with a punk pop song, the same thing you've recorded in this big room and you've got big, big long room drum sounds, two, three seconds, but your tempo is 180 6, so there goes your room. So you have to almost recreate a short room that works with the kit, and that's another challenge because you can't get rid of a room sometimes. So again, you got to be very careful. This is where you start to use, what we used to do is always use CapEx gates for fast songs so that the drums didn't bleed into each other or any kind of a gate and then create your own room. Sound

Speaker 2 (01:58:37):

Great. Thank you. His last question is how many layers of vocals do you like to have and who's in charge of writing them?

Speaker 3 (01:58:46):

Writing? I think he means writing the parts.

Speaker 2 (01:58:49):

Yeah, he actually looks like he said wiring, but I think he meant writing.

Speaker 3 (01:58:55):

Oh yeah. Okay. So who's in charge of writing them, but I'll address that first. What you always do to guarantee you're going to get what you need is you're first going to want to record your lead vocal, and that's going to become what I call God in the track. What I usually love to do when I'm doing background vocals is first of all, create an octave down of that vocal if possible, and then also doubles. And then you want to use either your third harmony, your fifth harmony, or a moving harmony. Now I've gone back and forth over the years as far as placement goes. With rock, it's highly dangerous again, because you're dealing with a lot of information, guitars, keyboards, symbols, room, all going to the sides, far left, far right now. Once you start putting your vocals in those instances, they start to get washed up in the instruments.

(01:59:54):

So again, if I'm dealing with a larger chorus, I'm probably going to serialize at nine and three, then keeping things in tight, 10 and two, as far as your doubles go, having your harmonies at say 10 and two, and then having everything else kind of spread out just a little bit or off center so that you can hear it. The biggest challenge for background vocals, and this is very, very common, is having the lead singer sing the background vocals because the truth is that a background vocals are an instrument no different than a guitar or a piano sonically, and so they have to have some kind of texture. When you're using your lead singer to do vocals, there is no different texture, so things start to sound exactly the same because the same tonality is in it unless you can recreate them with the singer using a different kind of a voice.

(02:00:57):

In the old days, they used to have professional background singers that would come in and know exactly what to do when shadowing background vocals on a track. By giving it some kind of a dimension through sound. Today, the only way you can do it is to manipulate the vocal, and even sometimes when you manipulate it and you tune it, you're going to end up with a lot of tracks that run into themselves and they're going to sound very, very samey and they're not going to cut properly because the texture is exactly the same as what's in the lead vocal and sometimes can ruin the lead vocal by taking all the innuendo out of it.

Speaker 2 (02:01:34):

Great. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (02:01:35):

I think I just recommended everybody using a different background vocalist.

Speaker 2 (02:01:39):

Yeah, I mean, you know what, I've done that many times. It works great. So I think that's actually great advice. This one is from Michael Bivens, which is what kind of systems do you have in place to ensure the record making process goes smoothly? I'm thinking along the lines of assistance and engineers, file transfer, mix notes, tracking and mixing, session prep, anything to make your process more efficient?

Speaker 3 (02:02:05):

Well, okay, first of all, you can prepare and prepare and there's always going to be something, and you learn this by the many, many mistakes. I would say the number one mistake that producers are making and engineers are making today is going into the studio, having the band unprepared, not necessarily themselves. Because as you know, if we have a ground lift problem, it's easy, but if the verse has not been written for the song, it's not easy. And most of the mistakes or unpreparedness come by having songs not completed before going into the studio and then bands, an artist deciding to write in the studio, which ends up to be an extremely expensive process and really a fucking complete waste of time and money, and everybody gets frustrated, especially if you don't finish the song.

Speaker 2 (02:02:54):

Yeah. Yep.

Speaker 3 (02:02:56):

I've been there. Having said that, a producer has to be very, very careful that the most important way for them to be prepared is to have the artist prepared. In other words, if it's a drummer, you're going to want to make sure that they've got heads on the drums and that they've got the right sticks and they've got the right symbols. If it's a guitar player, you're going to want to make sure that the band has the guitars, intonated, or you are going to have guitars ready for them to play, and the right size strings are on the guitars, and you've got the right amplifiers or you've got the right microphones. And as far as the bass player, the same thing. Intonation the right size strings, is the bass player going to be playing bass or is the guitar player going to be playing bass?

(02:03:41):

All those things have to be prepared ahead of time. Lyric sheets, number one, I don't go into the studio anymore until I see the lyrics. Before I get into the studio. I want to know what the song's written about. I want the band to understand what they're going to be playing about or what the idea of the song that we're getting across is emotionally. That's very, very important to me. And then of course, all the technical side of things, which I usually not. Usually I always leave to the engineers because they're the ones that have there. You're only as good as the equipment that you're using. And a lot of times we'll get into the studio and we'll have a computer down a microphone, down a piece of gear that's just not working and you don't know why. And you have to be prepared for those things and get immediately to work arounds so that you can get through the session.

(02:04:32):

When you're dealing with large consoles, those things are always prone to break. And let's say that you're doing a mix and you've got 48 strips of which nine of them decide they're not going to work that day. Then you've got to start to malt tracks and you put tracks into what we call static mode, where you know they're not going to be ridden. Let's say it's a shaker or a workarounds are really important. And knowing where those workarounds are before you start your mix is very important. So I'm saying that you can prepare, but the most important thing you can prepare is the artist in the song. And when you're dealing with singers, you got to prepare for bad weather, colds, all sorts of problems, how high they get, whatever it's going to be, how the night before was. I mean, there's certain things you can't prepare for, but I would say preparation really starts the day of pre-production.

Speaker 2 (02:05:31):

Great. Okay, so I can't read this guy's name. It's in Russian. It's literally written out in Russian. There's no chance. So Russian dude, just know that we've got your back here. I'm actually, you know what, I'm going to translate it. See, maybe Google can help me out with this one. I love to get people's names on here, but no, not finding it. Okay. The question is, David is my number one producer and mixer. Ben has some amazing growls on both fovea and deer agony. Did you use the same mic as the one for his clean vocals? And do you remember what the recording chain or mixing chain was for them? Did it change over time for both records? Since both records are a few years apart?

Speaker 3 (02:06:22):

Okay, I'm going to go back. I mean, yeah, he's definitely got the gerr. First of all, he's a big guy. I think he's like six three. And he used to love listening to Korn and imitating that. I think that's where he learned his ger. As far as the microphone goes with him, we would never change. We would just use the same microphone pretty well. From what I remember, and I'm trying to think, both records, we had a road with him and we had a U 47, a mirror image. We had one and I think at 87, but it would always be the same microphone, and he would just be part of his performance. I mean, one thing we had to do with him was back him off about a foot, that's for sure. Or get him to turn his head to the side pretty drastically. But mostly he would. And the chain, I think, if I remember right, I think it was just an SSL mike pre with an 1176. That's what we used every record.

Speaker 2 (02:07:27):

Oh, okay. Cool. That always works. Let's see here. Linus Cornelius sin was wondering, I could never mix a song without at least blending a bit of your trigger two snares. How is it possible to get so much low end in a snare without it sounding muddy or dull? Is there anything you do that you think others don't that makes it possible?

Speaker 3 (02:07:49):

I don't know. I don't know what stare they're talking about in particular. But for the SSD slate, I mean, Brian and I worked on that. The one thing Brian had always had when he started working with me was he figured out really quickly how to get a lot of bottom end on everything, whether it was the base or the snare or the kick loads of it. And it was just a matter of finding balances and stuff. One thing that we really, or I really insisted on our state pack that no one had ever done because there was the Chris Lord algae pack and the Terry Day pack, but there were no samples. And I was thinking to myself, well, what's the purpose of these packs unless there's any samples on it? So it was a very, very difficult process in the sense that you had to have 10 different hits, different levels.

(02:08:43):

So it would start very low. So you could do a fill or a snare or make a fill, get louder, and it would go all the way to let's say number 10 or whatever it is. And we would make eight, nine, and 10 would have the samples. So everything before that really didn't have anything. But then when you got to the loudest part of it, there would be a ton of bottom, like out of nowhere. And it was that slap I feel that gave us, and again, on that pack specifically, we only had two snare drums and one kick drum and one set of Tom Toms. Everybody else had multiple kits, but I just said, look, screw it. Let's give them what they want. They're going to want a kick ass drum kit with a ton of slap. The snare would slap you and the kick would slap you. And we ended up using all of our gear that we would normally use, whether it was a DR, all our reverbs. We put all the effects on there, we slammed everything. And I figured, what the hell? What's the difference? It's not like you're going to put, if you put your samples on there, someone's going to steal it and make one of your songs. Who cares? So I think we were the first sample pack to literally go with at the time, what was known as our samples, and it hadn't been done that much. So it was exciting.

Speaker 2 (02:10:06):

Great answer. This one's from Charlie Sandberg. As a guy with a prolific career, not only as a producer but an a and r as well, what can aspiring producers do to help bands have a more successful release? Is a wise to be helping independent bands plan the rollout of a record in terms of promotion and distribution.

Speaker 3 (02:10:26):

Producers today have to be writers, number one, songwriters, and then if you happen to be able to mix or you happen to be able to be an engineer or whatever it is, all of that is good. But there's always that great saying, you have to go back and remember Jack of all trades, master of none. If there's one thing I did in my career that I regret, it was trying to do too many things at once. A doing a half-ass job at them. In other words, it was really difficult to produce a record and at the same time mix another one. Or it was very difficult to write a song and then produce a band at the same time. It was the two Don't go together. So trying to be the promoter of an artist after you produce them, I guess it's somewhat of a necessity today, but so people are going to hate me when I say this, but I'm going to just come out and say it because I don't care.

Speaker 2 (02:11:21):

Say it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:11:23):

Everybody that's a mixer today is apparently a mastering engineer. And I've worked with some of the best mastering engineers in the world, Bob Ludwig, Ted Jensen, George Marino. I mean, I could keep going. Tom Coyne, there's a deal. They don't know anything really about mixing, and I really don't know anything about mastering, and you'll never see any real mixer name as a mastering engineer on a record. Now let's back up. I know what's going to happen next. Everyone's going to say, yeah, but no one can afford those rights, and it's impossible to be able to afford those guys. So we just do what we can and we try and mimic it. But the truth is, in my opinion, that there's those guys and then there's everybody else. And we're not talking about just level. I'm talking about specifically eq, phasing center information, sending stereo EQ to the sides, how many mixing engineers know really about that.

(02:12:32):

And the truth about mastering is that most of those guys learn the hard way by making mistakes. What they do is a feel no different than a mixer. And so to pretend you can do all that is crazy. I think. I don't know how you teach somebody how to master, I don't know. But I think a lot of these guys that I love all started with vinyl, and that was another thing. It was a different sound and that vinyl integrated itself into digital world and became a lot more complicated if you want, because there's no tape involved. So I think trying to do all those things is dangerous.

Speaker 2 (02:13:14):

I completely agree with you. Actually, one last question here. Okay, yeah. From John Tate, in regards to your music career in engineering, what advice would you give your 30 5-year-old self? I think it's a good final question.

Speaker 3 (02:13:31):

I have to take the word engineering because again, I keep going back to the fact that I've never ever pretended to be an engineer in the true sense of the word at all. Everything I learned from an engineering standpoint, I learned by watching great, great engineers around me, and I would always surround myself with that. It was never my passion. So to wind back the clock, I would take that sentence and replace engineer with producer and mixer and certainly songwriter. I would tell myself to write way more songs, and I would tell myself to write way more different styles of songs. And in regards to production, I would've told my 30 5-year-old self the same thing I'm telling myself today, which is, why the hell didn't you take an arranging course for strings? Which is something I've always regretted doing. And I feel like that is such a huge part of being able to go back to what we just talked about, which was background vocals or being able to come up with harmonies in seconds by having an arrangement degree. And also being able to do film soundtrack, which is very, very integral to string arrangements, horn arrangements, background vocals. So I would chastise myself for not taking an arranging course.

(02:14:56):

And I feel that at that point in my career, the great thing about it was I was working all the time, and the bad thing about it was that I was working all the time. And once you work all the time, you lose touch with what's happening very, very quickly. In other words, you're in the studio, you don't really know music's changing. Sure, you can go home and turn on your turn on a video or something, but the truth is, music is changing all the time. So just because by the time you get great at something, something's changed. So I would say trying to keep up with what I was doing with my career and trying to be interesting was a challenge for me. When I was in a and r, it wasn't because that was my job pretty well all the time, but once you're in the studio, you're segregated from the population. And so I would say I wish I would've got out more. I wish I would've met more bands. I wish I would've seen more live shows. I wish I would've had more friends in different parts of the industry.

Speaker 2 (02:16:02):

Interesting. That's a great answer. Well, David, thank you for taking the time to answer these questions and come back on.

Speaker 3 (02:16:11):

Of course. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:16:12):

Yeah. These have been great answers and appreciate you being just so honest and so forward about everything. Back to what we were originally saying, where I think that the reason that people are gravitating towards this medium is because of the honesty and because there's no rules as opposed to traditional TV or radio. I love it that we can take advantage of that and really get to the heart of the matter. So thank you again.

Speaker 3 (02:16:44):

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 (02:16:46):

Great. We'll talk again soon.

Speaker 1 (02:16:48):

Okay. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is brought to you by Empire Ears. In collaboration with Grammy winning producers, engineers, and their family of touring musicians, empire Ears has developed a line of in ear monitors that deliver what you need for every mix. When it comes to unrivaled stage clarity, or needing a flat and honest reference for your latest studio mix, empire Ears has got you covered no matter where you find yourself.