GREGORY SCOTT: Analog vs. Digital Philosophy, Using Faders for Groove, Making Digital Feel Analog

Speaker 1 (00:00:01):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Kush Audio, a premium manufacturer of top quality audio, hardware and plugins. The high end just got higher. Visit the house of kush.com for more information. And now your host, Joey Sturgis, Joel Wanasek and Eyal

Speaker 2 (00:00:21):

Levi. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Joey Sturgis Forum podcast. I'm Joey Sturgis, and with me as always is Joel Wanasek and Eyal Levi. Hello. If you're listening to this episode and you're still at the listener level, let tell you a bit why you should be at the fan level. First off, you're getting all the shows, which is great, but you're still missing out on our Tips and Tricks episodes and our monthly live q and a. Now, the tips and Tricks episodes are going to give you knowledge that we don't just drop in our normal episodes and we make this stuff exclusive because it's hard hitting info that is really hard to come by. We ask questions, people don't answer in public. You're going to want to hear the stuff. The information contained in these episodes alone has allowed some of our upper subscription members to improve by leaps and bounds.

(00:01:04):

We want you to know that it's available to you. The next thing you could be getting also is the monthly live q and a where we hop on video chat live and we answer your questions live. You can ask us anything. We usually spend about an hour to an hour and a half throwing knowledge away, catered specifically to your situation. And our current fan level members have praised us for these events, so you get the opportunity to interact with us in real time and we get a better shot at and proving your skills. We also offer exclusive promotional discounts on various stuff like plugins and more during these events. So if any of that sounds cool to you, please upgrade your subscription today and get access to that stuff. Awesome. And today we are talking with a developer of plugins and hardware and maybe we'll be able to give away some of his stuff in the future, and I'll let one of you guys introduce who it is.

Speaker 3 (00:01:56):

Well, we got Gregory Scott of Kush Audio and Sci-Fi Digital, and I'm personally so stoked for this episode because we're going to have a really nerdy discussion about compression and EQ that I feel like is not something you're going to find out an internet forum unless you really, really, really know how to use that search function. And you're super nerdy about it. Gregory makes a ton of really, really awesome gear like the Clara, and he makes some really cool plugins like the UBK one. And I feel like out of all the guys on the internet that I have ever read, Gregory is one of the most articulate and well thought out and comprehensive people out there. I've always read his posts and pinned them on any form I've ever seen them for the last 10 years, for example, on websites like gear slots. And so for me, it's just really awesome to be on and get to talk to somebody like this. So I can't wait to pick his brain.

Speaker 4 (00:02:46):

And let me just say that from my perspective as someone who is not a hardware junkie, I'm the type of person who, if I like a piece of gear, I'll use it and buy it. But I'm perfectly okay with plugins too. I don't care. And I don't believe in the hype about a lot of analog gear. However, when I've used his stuff like the Electra for instance, or the hardware versions, it's one of the only times in my life where I've been like, oh my God, this is why people love real gear. There's something magical about the stuff he makes. And so I hope that hope that he can actually describe what the thought process is behind that or how his brain converts musicality into hardware and plugins because the thing that his pieces always share is they sound musical. That is just such an amazing, amazing feat. So I'm not just kissing ass. His stuff's amazing.

Speaker 3 (00:03:56):

Yeah, we're going to be brown nosing a lot. We,

Speaker 4 (00:03:59):

Well, I mean well-deserved the thing. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:04:03):

I love his gear. I am just in love with the pieces that I have.

Speaker 4 (00:04:06):

Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to talk this way about gear I don't believe in. I will tell you if I think a compressor is cool, I think a DBX one 60 is really cool on drums, but I'm going to sit there and tell you that there's something magical about it, that it does what people on forums actually think that hardware supposed to do. No, I'm going to tell you, it helps make drums make a little more punchy. But there's also some plugin versions that are kind of cool. I like the hardware version better, but whatever. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that there's some sort of magical power in this compressor, just a compressor. However, the first time I used some of his gear, I kind of felt the magic. I felt the power. So I'm excited about it. I think the brown nosing is rightly so.

Speaker 2 (00:04:58):

Well, let's get 'em on, huh? Yeah. Hey, welcome to the show, Gregory. How are you doing? I'm doing great,

Speaker 5 (00:05:02):

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Speaker 2 (00:05:03):

Awesome. Great to have you. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:05:05):

We're super excited. We've got some of your hardware and some of your plugins, and we love them. We use them a lot on a lot of different things,

Speaker 4 (00:05:13):

And it have been for years as well. I was commenting earlier that your gear is some of the only gear I've ever used in my life where the first time I used it, I realized that the hype was actually real and not just something that people were inventing on forums. And the thing that struck me the most was how musical it made things sound and how easy it was to make things sound more musical, more vibey, and just Right. Is that something that happened by accident or is that kind of something you think about when you're imagining a piece or working on a piece?

Speaker 5 (00:05:56):

Oh, I think it's just really an inevitable consequence of how I hear everybody. We all hear a specific way, and the way that I tend to gravitate towards is I love things that are on the dark side. Usually the softer, rounder, warmer, thicker. And so when I'm tuning sounds, when I'm tuning circuits and everything, that's what my ear naturally gravitates towards. And ironically, I make a piece of gear like the Clara, which really takes you in the opposite direction. And part of that was because I came up against walls constantly because I'm always mixing and my mixes are so fricking dark when I'm done, and so, so I had to make a piece of gear that could reverse my own tendencies in a way that wasn't offensive to me. So I had to come up with a kind of brightness that wasn't harsher or zingy or anything like that. But yeah, all the gear that I make is definitely, I'm a color hound. Most of the music I listen to is quite old. And so there's a lo-fi aspect to it compared to modern sounds. And even though the Kush gear is perfectly capable of making a very modern, bright forward, huge aggressive, punchy sound, it can swing equally as far in the opposite direction. And it's critical to me that my gear be able to do that, accommodate my tastes and the world at large.

Speaker 4 (00:07:10):

Well, the guys that I know who use it, I mean us especially in our contemporaries, we work on heavy aggressive music and it works just fine for that. There's a question that I was wondering with. I've seen the pictures of where you work and your racks of gear and all that, and I know a little bit about your philosophy, what made you leave the world not leave, but what made you go beyond just the world of hardware? Because a lot of guys that are hardware purists don't think that plugins are legitimate, and

Speaker 5 (00:07:48):

You've

Speaker 4 (00:07:48):

Not only made plugins, but you've started a second plugin company and your plugins are great. So what caused that? Are you just an open-minded dude or,

Speaker 5 (00:07:58):

Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it really is. Let's see. But long before I was making gear, I was spending too much time talking about it on the form gear sluts. I don't spend much time there anymore. I think that's true of a lot of people of my generation perhaps. But my handle there underneath my name UBK, it says Pragmatic snob. And I think because that's how it is, is like I'm a huge snob. I know what I love and I know what I don't love, and at the same time, I'm a practical person. And I mean that in a couple of senses. Number one, just from a business sense, it's healthy for a business to acknowledge the world around it and flow with the market and the world is continuously moving more and more into the realm of the digital. And I actually, as an artist, I think that's an amazing and very good thing.

(00:08:47):

And put on another level, aside from the business, just the pragmatics of being a working artist, making music, whether I'm mixing for somebody else or just doing my own stuff, plugins are absolutely indispensable to any sort of remotely efficient, modern workflow. The nostalgic in me and the romantic loves the big console and the tape machine, and that's it. And there's something really cool that happens with that. But by and large, that's a very narrow, very limited sort of approach that only works really well in a very narrow set of circumstances, namely a full band that knows what the hell they're doing and is really well rehearsed. Other than that, it's not very appealing and the romance quickly fades. So just as part of my regular workflow, I make music in my bedroom and in that space, the workstation plugins, working mixes, heavy track counts, all this stuff that's just real.

(00:09:41):

And I acknowledged that and I embraced that. So both as a manufacturer and as a human being, as an artist. So that was really it is I wanted a UBK fatso and I wanted five of them in my mixes. I wanted one on my drum bus, and I wanted one on the mix bus, not doing any compression, just doing saturation. So our first plugin, the UBK one, we modeled up the UBK fatso, and then I had what I wanted, all my stuff. Kush is, it exists primarily because I'm really selfish, I want stuff for myself as an artist, and everything that I make is born out of making art. I come up against creative walls and I'm like, I really wish I had an EQ that was tighter than this, API, but punched harder. And so that's where the electric came from. And so it's stuff like that. It's that mindset that led to branching away from analog and into plugin.

Speaker 3 (00:10:30):

That's awesome. So tell us about scifi brand new company.

Speaker 5 (00:10:33):

Yeah. Scifi is, well, the digital side of Kush is primarily two things. We either completely emulate and model our own gear, like the electrode, the conic, or doing things that really don't kind of exist in nature and aren't emulations of anything at all, but they're still kind of steeped in an analog mindset. And so that's where the pusher things like that come from. But I have gear in my racks that's not Kush, not a lot, but I do have some pieces that have stood the test of time for me. The distress, API 2,500, I got a couple of five 20 fives vintage, five 20 fives, some API EQs and that stuff. I wanted to, there's so many emulations out there and some of 'em are actually quite good, but I've modified my gear, that's what I do. I tinker and I take circuits apart and I just play around.

(00:11:25):

I don't know much about electrical theory, but I know how to look at A PCB or a schematic and kind of suss out what's happening in general. And so I've got a modified stressor here, which is mostly the mods that where the signal path. So it's a squeaky clean, really pure sound. It doesn't have that typical forward aggressive distress. So it's an amazing machine to have the distress or compression, but transparent tone. And I was like, ha, so what if I modeled that instead? And I didn't try to be faithful. I didn't try to say, here's the stressor exactly as it is. I gave you my version of the distress. I think it's cool and useful and you can't get it anywhere else. And the same thing with the API 2,500, I got a 2,500 here that does over compression. It goes into the negative ratios and does a couple of other cool tricks that stock 25 hundreds don't do. And if I'm clever enough, I will do my best to model that up as well and put that out there. So that's what sci-fi is, is it's these sort of circuit bent emulations of circuit bent analog gear.

Speaker 4 (00:12:28):

Do you think that maybe plugins miss the Mark A. Little bit when they try to make super faithful recreations?

Speaker 5 (00:12:36):

Oh, that's a good question. I've always been transparent about this. I make hardware, I make plugins, but at the end of the day, it's generally matter of public record that I've, I just prefer analog on almost every level. The exception being convenience and value. It's absurdly expensive and it's really a pain in the butt in terms of if you're working on three songs at the same time, switch 'em back and forth, you got to change all the settings and all these knobs and things don't

Speaker 2 (00:13:04):

Workflow,

Speaker 5 (00:13:05):

They don't recall quite perfectly ever, no matter how anal you are. So in that, yes, they do, I prefer the analog precisely because there's a tone that happens. I think that what analog does best is it adds things to sound. And I think what digital does best is it takes things away. That's what I'm learning, and that's my current approach to plugins is

Speaker 3 (00:13:26):

Yeah, I agree with that.

Speaker 5 (00:13:27):

Yeah. So for noise reduction, absolutely nothing can touch isotopes. Deno, it's just the most amazing thing.

Speaker 3 (00:13:34):

It's incredible.

Speaker 5 (00:13:35):

Never in a million years could you get a piece of analog gear. Analog creates the problems that that thing tends to fix. So that's the symbiosis here. You got the analog, everything it gives away. And so then I use digital to sort of reshape and correct the things that I didn't quite like that the analog put too much of in. And I pull it out because also I have 30 some pieces of analog in my rack now, and that will pile up the low mids and slow the sound down just too much really on most mixes, especially the more dense your mix gets. So again, digital helps to clean that stuff up. But in terms of the attempting to emulate faithfully analog, they do miss the mark in terms of the tone. There's something about the transient behavior of analog gear that digital doesn't quite capture to my ears correctly.

(00:14:27):

It's not that it's wrong or bad, it's just not accurate. But ironically, the analog gear itself I think is what's inaccurate. So digital, it can't capture the inaccuracies of analog. And all that happens, I think in the first millisecond, under the first millisecond of sound, it's a tiny little window that these transients happen in. We can't even really measure them accurately, but our ear can certainly hear them. And it's that difference in tone on the front edge of the sound that makes a difference to me between the analog and the digital. And in that one respect, I think the plugins still fall short. They've gotten closer and closer in every other respect in terms of the overall frequency curve and the timing and the constants on the attack and release and the ratios and all that on a compressor. But that little slice of sound on the front that really defines the tone of a sound, I still hear a pretty dramatic difference. I say dramatic as a geeky engineer, but I still hear that difference between the two mediums. And I don't know that they're ever going to bridge that gap because I just think it's inherent to the nature of the technologies that they're fundamentally different in a few different ways.

Speaker 3 (00:15:35):

What kind of goes into modeling a piece of gear? I mean, do you do all your coding?

Speaker 5 (00:15:40):

No, not even close. I work with all the things I do on Kush analog and digital. I work with other geniuses. I had learned this earlier. I think this is one of the other things, this is one of the reasons I branched into plugins where most of the diehard analog manufacturers don't is because those guys are literally the do it all guys. They design the circuit from the ground up. They're like rocket scientists, literally. Some of 'em are like aerospace engineers. They are super geniuses and they have skills that I'll never be able to touch, not a circuit designer. I'm a product designer, and so I work with guys. I can do a basic breadboard or whatnot, but I work with geniuses who clean up my circuits and make them less noisy and perform more accurately in the way that I want. And the same thing on the digital side. I work with coders. I can do basic stuff. I do the graphic interface. I'm able to put basic, I do XML things inside the framework of the code, but I can't generate an algorithm. I'm not smart enough. And it also, it doesn't really grab my interest. I'm not interested in being a coder. I'm interested in bending sound. And so rather than spend five years learning how to do that thing, I think I'd be capable of it. I'm just not interested.

Speaker 2 (00:16:45):

I share a little common thread there where I make plugins as well. I have my plugin company, Joyce Georges tones, and I'm the same way. I would rather be thinking about the product and what this thing actually does for people rather than trying to formulate algorithms and how that works. So it's much better to have someone else thinking about that.

Speaker 5 (00:17:06):

It really is. I think that the success of any sort of collaborative endeavor, whether it's a band or a plugin company, is that the smartest, most successful people know when to delegate. And really it can be a curse to be really good at a lot of things because you get so lost, bouncing from one thing to the next to the next, trying to perfect all these different things. And progress gets really slow and you focus on the wrong things. And the bottom line is no matter how good you are at all these different things, generally, you're not extraordinary top of the game at all of them. And so I think the more you just sort of discover yourself and you figure out, okay, I am really, really, really good. I'm at the top of my game when I do A, B, and C, so D through Z, I'm giving it over to other people who are at the top of their game on that. And when you do that, so much amazing stuff happens on so many levels. And so I just think I'm learning that lesson in art and in the business world, it just applies everywhere. So human beings collaborating, geniuses and geniuses, it's the secret to life. I think.

Speaker 4 (00:18:15):

I actually think that in music, when you hear about a solo artist where there's a whole narrative about them, like say a Trent Resner or something, somebody who is known for being the guy behind the sound, when you really look into the story, it's usually the famous guy plus the two or three guys that have been working with him the entire time

Speaker 5 (00:18:42):

That

Speaker 4 (00:18:43):

Are just not the stars. I mean, I think that the solo show idea is good for biographical movies and specials on TV, and they make good stories, but in real life, a team is what gets everything done.

Speaker 5 (00:19:03):

Absolutely.

Speaker 4 (00:19:03):

A team with a good visionary at the front.

Speaker 5 (00:19:06):

I totally agreed. And it's interesting. I'm sure there's a lot of people listening out there who are wearing all the hats, maybe out of necessity, maybe out of some sort of need to just control the whole process or whatever, but whatever, it's just there's, you can do it all. And I truly don't mean to discourage anybody or say you can't put out a great record if you record it and produce it and play all the instruments and write all the songs and master it and distribute it, do all that stuff. It's just that really whether or not you realize that you are limited and you're limiting yourself, and more importantly, you're limiting the thing you're working on, the art, whatever that thing is, allowing it to be bigger than you is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself in the world. And as soon as you incorporate other perspectives in who are on a level where you have a trust and you have a vibe, it's just magic happens as absolute magic and it's more enjoyable from a selfish perspective. It's just so much more enjoyable and rewarding to have that experience when something happens between two or five people. And the thing in the middle that you're focused on just pops and becomes exponentially larger and more amazing than any of you could have done on your own. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:20:14):

Definitely.

Speaker 5 (00:20:15):

Completely agree.

Speaker 3 (00:20:17):

So can we jump gears here and let's get nerdy. I feel like Gregory, out of all the people that I've ever read, and I've been on gear sluts since probably 2002, but I probably have less than 150 posts I'd like to lurk and I like to read, but out of all the guys on there, you're like one of my favorites. So every time you say something, I always sit down and I always read it. I know it's going to be very intelligent, it's going to be very well thought out. And I've also heard your work, so I know you have a certain level of credibility, whereas anybody can give any advice, but you know how it is on forums. Everybody's an expert, a-list mixer, the way they talk, but

Speaker 5 (00:20:50):

Only

Speaker 3 (00:20:50):

1% of them are

Speaker 5 (00:20:53):

Hell. Yeah. Well, thank you for the kind words. I truly appreciate that.

Speaker 3 (00:20:56):

What I want to talk about is compression, because I feel like you have a grasp and we do a lot of metal stuff like that. And on the forums there, not a lot of people talk about compression in terms of movement and density. And we'll talk about the Michael Brower type stuff, like waving and things like that. And that's something I really wanted to talk about because it's kind of virgin territory for this show. And it's very, I would say, a very analog thing where you're sitting down and when you're moving into a piece of gear, you can feel the movement of the compressor. Whereas when I'm in digital, I feel like most of them now they've gotten better, but I feel like most of the plugins choke out when you push 'em to a certain amount of, there's just a certain limit to it where I feel like it kind of brick walls, for example, I was doing a mix today and I had the waves SSL on in the box, and then when I switched to my summing mixer and I threw the real one, the real G comp, it was just like you could just push it so much harder and it just gave back.

(00:21:48):

So I really want to nerd out about some stuff like that. I know you've went to France and you worked with Michael Brower, and like I said, I feel like you have a grasp on compression that exceeds that of what most people have.

Speaker 5 (00:21:59):

Thank you. How can I help?

Speaker 3 (00:22:03):

Well, I don't know. So you tell me. Let's talk about movements in a mix,

Speaker 5 (00:22:08):

What

Speaker 3 (00:22:08):

I was describing. Does that make sense to you? Am I talking nonsense or?

Speaker 5 (00:22:12):

Yeah, no, it does, and I mean, I have no technical explanation for why it is that analog gear tends to feel better and feel more responsive, especially when pushed hard. I know that it is, and even when you get the technical stuff down with a plugin and well, I mean I've literally seen a plugin compressor and an analog compressor measure out the same compression curve, but they feel very different. And that's because just the way we measure compression curves, it's not done with bursts of sound, it's not done with a tambourine or a snare drum. It's done with tones that are run through at various levels, and then you just sort of measure how much game reduction is happening over a relatively slow period of time. And again, it's the transient, it's the fast stuff that really, really defines the knock of what I call the knock of this gear, how it hits you back. And so, I don't know, it's a broad question. I'm trying to focus it a little bit.

Speaker 3 (00:23:12):

Yeah, no, definitely. I mean for, okay, I'll talk in my perspective. So I remember reading Michael Brower's whole spiel on multi buss compression and sitting down and then trying it. And I tried it in the box at first because I didn't have any gear and it just didn't make any sense to me. And then as I got way better at mixing and I made enough money to buy some real gear, I went out and got a bunch of compressors and I plugged them in and I tried it again a few years later, and then I was like, holy shit. The guitars were moving at one speed and the bass at a different one, and all a sudden I heard this sort of movement and density in the sound that I was never able to hear before and it blew my fucking mind. And then I went back to the computer and I just couldn't get it. And it was just like an odd mind blowing experience, and it's not something I can talk to a lot of people about because most people don't have the gear anymore to sit down and screw around with that kind of stuff.

Speaker 5 (00:24:02):

Yeah, no, I hear you. And I have that similar experience. I think it's when you go into an analog piece of gear, a lot of stuff happens to the sound that's completely irrespective of what the piece of gear actually is supposed to do. So with most compressors, when you go into them, even if there's no transformers in there and it's just a pure, solid state piece of gear with chips in it and ics, it's still just coming into the line amps, the buffer amps on the input side of that, it slows down the transient a little bit. So you could take an analog compressor, even the cleanest one, and set it flat and run a signal out and back in. So you've just looped through the gear, you haven't compressed anything, and then look at that waveform compared to the waveform before it went out and in.

(00:24:46):

And you'll see every fricking transient is different, and they're not just necessarily shorter, it's not like it's reduced the spikes of the transients, they spread out more over time. They have a different frequency content. The closer you zoom in on the waveform, the more you'll see these weird differences where you're like, what is going on there? And I have no that we can't get the math to replicate those little changes like that yet we're not there. I think maybe when we're sampling it like a megahertz and we have so many more slices of data that we can do finer and finer things with, we might be able to do it, but there's things you can do on the digital side then to begin to compensate for that, which is one of the reasons the UBK one is the way it is, is that before you get to the compressor section, you have a distortion and saturation section. If you slow down and change the envelope of the signal before it hits the compressor, especially in the realm of digital, you will very much change how that compressor responds and how it swings around. And so I think that, I dunno how much you do that.

Speaker 3 (00:25:49):

Yeah, I love the U BK one. It's my go-to on synths for example. I like it on overheads. It's a great guitar saturated, it just does a lot of things really well on all the digital compressor plugins. It's definitely one of my favorites and gets used on almost every mix that I do in some way, shape or form.

Speaker 5 (00:26:04):

Thanks. Yeah, same here. I think that's key. And you can do this with any plugin compressor. Just stick a saturation, not so much a distortion thing, but a saturation plugin before your compressor and spend the time to get the transient so that you don't want a really overt change to the sound, but just turn it up to where you can kind of hear it and then back it off to 50% and then copy that plugin, put another plugin after that that does the same thing that just sort of barely saturates, but almost doesn't, and then feed that to your plugin compressor. So get two stages of microscopic slowness added to your sound and then see how that compressor responds. I find that, again, it doesn't really bring you fully to the analog space, but it gets you a long way there. It starts to give you more of that, okay, the compressor's being a little more spongy, it's not as clinical, and I'm able to get that sort of pushing into a soft wall and feeling it pushed back against me, kind of feel that I think analog is so good at.

Speaker 3 (00:27:07):

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I don't code or make hardware or anything like that, but when you explain it in those terms, it just kind of clicks. You can kind of take your own experience what you're hearing and then quantify it with words. And sometimes you have a feeling about a piece of gear, I call it give on a compressor. Like a compressor has a certain give or a certain blowback on the audio where it's like a movement and it's like you go into it and it springs back and when you explain it, it always clicks for me. So I think that helps a lot. And that's actually something that would be really cool for a lot of our listeners to experiment with. I'm definitely going to try playing with it more because I've never actually heard it broken down like that.

Speaker 4 (00:27:42):

Cool. Yeah, that's actually the first time I've heard it said like that too. That's a great answer.

Speaker 5 (00:27:47):

Right on. Yeah, I mean it goes deeper. I dunno how geeky want to get, it goes deeper than that because when you get inside the analog circuits, there's things we don't, even though companies say they component model, it's really a lot of components actually physically can't be modeled right now. Like really small capacitors that kind of give you high frequencies in an eq, you literally can't model them. Everything falls apart when the math, but when a compressor releases, what it's doing is it's charged up a component called a capacitor, which stores electricity for a brief period of time and then slowly leaks it out. Different capacitors will leak that energy out at different rates. And then if you stick a resistor in between the capacitor and the ground path that it's leaking on, you can also adjust the rate. And that's what a release control is on a compressor essentially is it's adjusting the resistance that happens between a capacitor leaking it, its energy out and the place that it leaks it out to.

(00:28:36):

So I say all this because digital model of a compressor is going to have a certain sort of curve to the release. How fast it lets go, how fast it in the analog realm, it doesn't quite work like that because generally the harder, the more energy you put into that capacitor, it doesn't leak it all out at a linear rate. It leaks the first little bit a little faster, and then the second is slower. And if it's fully charged up, it takes a brief second before it releases any energy. So these analog components have a really, really interesting sort of living quality to them that the digital doesn't. It just sort of takes a very broad brush and paints over the whole picture and it gives you sort of a reasonably accurate resemblance of the whole. But all the little tiny things that go into an analog circuit, we're not even close to replicating all those miniature physical, they're almost like little universes into themselves.

Speaker 2 (00:29:30):

It's a pixelated version of what's actually going on.

Speaker 5 (00:29:33):

Yeah, that's another way of looking at it. It's the details, all the little tiny details that go into, it's the little society in there. All those little components are little personalities and they've all got their own quirks. And until we really get in and nail every single one of them as an individual and the relationships that they form, the plugins are just going to give you, they're going to get you in the ballpark, they'll get you 90%. And that's, for most people, that's really good enough. But then for the rest of us who are just insane or snobs, we got to have the racks and then both.

Speaker 4 (00:30:10):

So do you think that there's a randomization that is so, I guess so complex between the elements that we, maybe we just need a few years to be able to have computers to do that?

Speaker 5 (00:30:23):

I don't know. Honestly, I don't know if it's a question of computing power so much as a question of being able to measure such an enormous scope of almost intangibles. I don't know if it's worth anybody's time to do it. And for all I know a different approach, and I suspect this is probably true, is a different approach to creating processors will evolve that maybe will give us more of the, so it's not like we're not trying to model one-to-one. We get there through some other back alley that nobody was expecting, and some guy comes out of left field and is like, Hey, I did it this way. And it feels the same. We're not taking the same streets to get there, but the destination is identical. And I suspect that might be more what's going to happen.

Speaker 2 (00:31:13):

Yeah, I think you would really need, if you want to get there completely, you would need to have some sort of construction of all these different elements and have a way to virtually connect them all together in different orders and different scenarios to basically recreate the same circuit. As far as math goes, you'll never ever get there. Exactly. You just can't. It's infinitely impossible to get there.

Speaker 5 (00:31:46):

Infinite is a good word to invoke because if you just think for a second about, I don't know how many people out there have taken physics classes and especially advanced physics classes, but if you actually have any sort of exposure to the mathematics of the physical universe, that's not what's happening inside a computer. We're not work. That's really like if you're religious, you call it God. If you're atheist, you just call it physics. So whatever it is, it works on a level that is so far beyond even our ability to conceive of how it works, let alone replicate it. And all that stuff is happening inside these humble little machines that we process audio with. That's the physical universe is living in there and obeying laws and doing things that we just, were not there. I don't think we're ever going to get there. And I think actually my suspicion is that as time goes on and the generations come up younger and younger generations, I don't really think they're going to care too much, honestly.

Speaker 4 (00:32:48):

Here's a question about younger generations, actually. I'm sure you've noticed that there's a growing movement of DIY gear builders, the guys who order the kits and will start putting together some 500 series units or whatnot, like the hairball audio stuff, and because they can't afford the really, really nice stuff, so they start building their own off of kits, clearly they're not designing circuits or anything like that, they're following a recipe. But what are your thoughts on that whole thing? Do you think that that's going to hurt the market for high-end audio gear like you put out? Or do you think that that's going to help it by just getting the younger generation into hardware in the first place?

Speaker 5 (00:33:43):

Well, I mean, good lord, predicting the future.

Speaker 4 (00:33:46):

Alright, well, what has your experience been thus far

Speaker 5 (00:33:48):

Then? My experience of the world in general is that the way things seem to be going, not just in audio but everywhere, is that everything is in vogue, everything's in fashion, and there's space for every approach. And I think that's one of the most amazing things about the internet age as opposed to the pre-internet age, is that before we all had access to all the information all the time for virtually free, there were taste makers, there were gatekeepers in every realm, whether it was sound, the sound of popular music, whether it was the fashion and the looks that were on the clothing racks, anything, you name it. This stuff was set from on high. I don't know who did it, but they did it and everybody just flowed with it. And about once every decade or so, there was a complete turnover. Nothing resembled what it did 10 years before.

(00:34:36):

And this is a very narrow 20th century perspective, but this is the modern world perspective I'm looking at. And then the internet comes along and now everybody can see everything and hear everything and be exposed to ideas from since we started recording ideas really. And as a result, everybody gets very specific with their tastes. They're like, oh, I like a little bit of this, and a little bit of that mixed with a little bit of that. And no two people's tastes are the same, and you get sort of these overlaps, but by and large, everybody can sort of narrow cast their preferences onto the world and figure out who's making what I like, or do I need to make it myself? Maybe I need to make it myself. There's information on that. So I think every approach is valid now and will just expand. So I think DIY will expand as will boutique analog, as will plugins. And I don't perceive a threat. I think that we're in kind of an infinite playground here that just keeps expanding in all directions.

Speaker 4 (00:35:30):

See, I actually completely agree with you. I think that the notion, I mean, clearly there's always going to be competitive nature between people and competition in the world, but it's very different now than it used to be because with access to information and products and anything being limited, there was only a limited number of people who could do anything in any field really. But now, like you said, with everybody being able to have access to anything, do anything, learn anything, I think that there's enough room at the table for just about everyone who's providing value to other people.

Speaker 5 (00:36:13):

I agree. Amen to that. And I think it's a wonderful thing too. On a pragmatic level, getting back to your question, specifically, the DIY community, I can tell you man, it's a pain in the butt. Even when you get a kit, it's a pain in the butt to build something and then it's a pain in the butt to get it working right? And some people are down for the challenge, they get fed by it, and then at the end they got this pride of ownership. I built that and everything. And so they're happy with that. I don't think most people are interested in that experience in the same way that I'm not interested, we're not interested in coding. We we're like, we just want to have a coder and make the code for us. So we want to make the product. Most people don't want to build gear. They want to use it and they don't want to fuss with anything. And even if they wanted to, they're nowhere near technical enough to construct a kit and troubleshoot it.

Speaker 4 (00:37:06):

Hey, that's me. And when I was a guitarist full time, I didn't tech my own guitars either. I always hired an expert. And it's not because I don't know how to set the neck or do the intonation, it's because there are guys out there who live and breathe that stuff.

Speaker 5 (00:37:23):

So

Speaker 4 (00:37:23):

Why not let them do it? And I feel the same way about gear. There are guys who love making this stuff and who devote themselves to it, so why not let them do it? I'll focus on using it.

Speaker 3 (00:37:35):

I got into DIY electronics for about two months and I was about to order my first put it together kit, and I was just like, I don't have time for this shit. I don't want,

Speaker 5 (00:37:44):

There's a lot of kits out there sitting in somebody's desk that just haven't gotten put together. It really is a significant undertaking. And as far as I could tell in the world today, we're all busier, information's flowing faster, life is swinging by and we just have less and less time for extraneous activities. And so yeah, I dunno, it is an amazing world also. But on the flip side, you can't get a cush tweaker in the DIY world generally. All you can get is the classic designs, which are great. But if you want something that's newer or more interesting or just offers you a very different take on the audio approach did not available, you don't have the option.

Speaker 3 (00:38:27):

Yeah, definitely. So let's switch gears here for a little bit. So Gregory, how amazing was it going to France and studying a little bit with Michael Brower?

Speaker 5 (00:38:35):

It was really at the risk of sounding cliche, it was life-changing on several different levels. I think that on a personal level, I met people from all over the world. There's something so cool about hanging out with other engineers who are really good at it, but who come from different cultures. So their music, sometimes the scales and the tones they use are very different. And the way they hear reverberance and the spaces that their ears are tuned to is different because in Turkey for instance, most of their spaces are hard plaster or concrete and are either really large or really small. So it's just like they hear reverb different than we do. It is just so cool to get tapped into these other perspectives that you just can't because you are and you're raised in your culture and you just hear the way you hear.

(00:39:26):

And then on the sort of geeky level, I think what was most amazing with Michael Brower experience was it wasn't anything technical. It was just he did this thing every day. He would pull up a random song or two that he had mixed sometimes like 20, 25 years ago, sometimes last week. And he would stand between the speakers facing us, close his eyes, and then as the music played, he spread his fingers out like a piano player and just grabbed faders and was basically, I don't think he was consciously doing it, but he was just kind of replicating his mix moves. And

Speaker 3 (00:40:02):

That's crazy.

Speaker 5 (00:40:03):

Yeah, it really, it took me a day to realize what he was actually doing. And I was like, holy shit, he's not just doing this weird dance. He's actually remembering the orchestrations that he executed on the console. Holy shit. And so I started to just obsess about all of his different fingers and trying to connect it to the music I was hearing and what's he doing there? And so there's one song where the music's going along and it's like, and he's got his one hand has got the middle fingers going, wow, wow, wow. Up and down. And I'm like, what the hell is that? And then I realized that way down in the music, there was an electric guitar part buried that he was pumping up from silence to barely audible and back almost like a human LFO or a gate kind of a thing.

(00:40:47):

And it was adding this extremely subtle ear candy level pumping to an otherwise kind of slow quarter note dragging groove. It just added all this movement and energy for a track that I think otherwise would've been thrown away. It was just another sort of droning guitar. And I was like, holy shit. He is creating rhythms and movements with sounds that I'm not even aware that they're in the mix. And that was one of the biggest life-changing moments for me. I was like, oh, wow. I got to really rethink my approach to automation and what a fader is actually for. It's not just for setting a level, it's for moving stuff around in ways that I hadn't even conceived of before.

Speaker 2 (00:41:27):

I think in the analog world that some of that stuff is a little bit more powerful than digital, though you can certainly go through and automate all kinds of layers and stuff, but it just seems to have more power to me in the analog realm.

Speaker 5 (00:41:41):

Well, yeah, because it's expressive, it's played an instrument. And he acknowledged this that he was a musician and he sort of dropped out of that because he realized his success and his fate was in the hands of other musicians is not necessarily the safest place for it to be. So he learned to play the console like an instrument, and that's what the man does, and I think all the great men do and women at this point in time. And so having my ears opened to that, I was like, okay, I get it. And just also to watch how exaggerated everything got during transitions, which I just thought were transitions, I was like, oh, wait a minute. He's taken the bass and pushing it there. He's taken the guitars and pushing it even more, and every transition has this sort of feel to it. And I was like, oh, and I connected that with classical music, which just sort of does that as a matter of course. And I was like, okay, so we have these sort of small dynamic crests happening across a measure that peak out on beat three and then subside. And so just hearing all the ways that he augmented or even manufactured dynamic movement and swells and crests and pumping and stuff just with the faders, that alone was worth the price of admission.

Speaker 3 (00:42:57):

That just blew my mind. Holy shit. That makes me think about modern mixing workflow and the DAW. You imagine sitting there trying to recreate something like that with a pencil tool or using a lying tool by hand, it would be a pain in the ass.

Speaker 5 (00:43:11):

You can only do one thing at a time with the mouse, and that's where the having, even just having analog faders are just, you can't replicate them because they're instantaneous and the best control surfaces in the world have a lag. When you pump a fader up and down on an icon workstation, it's still that movement is trailing ever so slightly behind your finger and you can learn to work into that. You can learn to compensate for that. And I advise people to do that actually. But I think one of the coolest things in the world is the touchscreen and just getting a $50 V control from Narin or the logic built-in application that they have for the iPad and get your fingers on multiple faders at a time, and even before you worry about automating and whatnot, just like as you're building a mix, be aggressive about grabbing five faders with your two hands and just push and pull them, not quite randomly, but almost randomly, and just see what happens when you make the drums a lot louder than you thought they needed to be and the bass a lot quieter and vice versa.

(00:44:15):

And then shove the vocal up in your face and then pull it back down. You can experiment and explore when your hands are on faders so much more than you can with a mouse. And so I recommend that.

Speaker 3 (00:44:26):

It makes me want to take the dust off my old nacky control and plug it back in.

Speaker 5 (00:44:31):

Yeah, it's worth having around.

Speaker 3 (00:44:33):

So have you tried the, what is it, NIC makes VT Control Pro?

Speaker 5 (00:44:36):

Yeah, I did, but they stopped developing for Logic, which is what I use because Logic came out with their own, so Gotcha. Yeah, so now I just use the one that Apple makes.

Speaker 3 (00:44:47):

Have you tried slates, Raven?

Speaker 5 (00:44:49):

I have not. No.

Speaker 3 (00:44:50):

Yeah, I'm curious. I've always been a mouse mixer. I grew up in a daw, but I've always mixed hybrid, so being on a fader really feels weird to me. But then when I go to an analog room and see somebody who grew up mixing on them and like you said, just watching them move a set of faders with their hands,

Speaker 5 (00:45:06):

It's

Speaker 3 (00:45:06):

Really cool. It is just a very different workflow, but it doesn't matter what the workflow is if the result is amazing.

Speaker 4 (00:45:12):

Is the Raven the touchscreen one?

Speaker 3 (00:45:14):

Yes,

Speaker 4 (00:45:14):

I've heard that. It's amazing, but I can't wrap my mind around working on a touchscreen. Yeah, I'm with you on that.

Speaker 3 (00:45:22):

It's like a big screen of faders, so you can do the multiple hand thing and it's got multi touch. It's like a huge iPad basically.

Speaker 4 (00:45:29):

Well, I know people who own it and they love it. So what I'm used to is I bought an iPad controller for Pro Tools once that kind of gives you the mix, gives you some faders and then the transport controls, and I just couldn't get into it. But I'm sure that the Raven is a completely different ball game than that.

Speaker 5 (00:45:54):

Yeah, I think that my resistance to it comes from the fact that I try in life in general, I try to minimize the amount of time I'm looking at any screen for any reason. I just don't enjoy it and it makes me tired after a while, my eyes glaze over, my blood sugar drops and I get cranky and I got to take a break and everything. And so I like having the iPad specifically for the little fader action that I get, but that's all I use it for. And then I have a hot key assigned to my computer so that when I swipe the mouse down to the lower left corner or I hit the right key combo and the screen goes dark, most of the time I don't want to be looking at the screen. And I know that's hard for a lot of people and if you're working in the box, it's impossible.

(00:46:38):

But really I resist the idea that the touchscreen becomes the only way that I interface with the music and I have to have it in front of me really close up. Right now, my computer's off to the side. It's not in between my speakers. So I have a free fields and my imaging is really nice and I don't want to screen between me and the music, and I don't want the ergonomics of having my fingers up on the screen generally. I don't like iPads in general. I don't like touching what I'm reading and looking at. So yeah, it's a different mindset and being a little bit of a screen aversion that I have, I don't think the Raven is for me, but it seems like an extraordinary product.

Speaker 4 (00:47:20):

I've heard that. It's great, but I feel you on touch screens. I have a question about your EQs. The hardware versions

(00:47:30):

The first time that I ever used them, and I've used two of them. Like I said before, it amazed me how musical they were. I've used a lot of different things like your standard fair, classic hardware, EQs, I've used all of them, you name 'em, I probably used them. And the first time using your 500 series units and the how musical it was and how easy it was to dial things in really kind of blew my mind to where I was perfectly with EQing going in, which I'm usually not that okay with. What's your thought process behind getting an EQ to actually not just do the function of EQing but also somehow be musical? Is there an actual thought to that magic?

Speaker 5 (00:48:27):

Yes, there is. I mean, a lot of this comes down to the fact that in so many ways I suck as an engineer and I need tools. I need tools to help me suck less eq. I don't know why, and I know I'm sort of asked backwards on this. Compression always came very easy to me, and equalization was always a mystery. I just couldn't figure it out. And I think it's because in retrospect, touching on what you were kind of getting at most EQs to my ears ranged from being either really boring to actually counterproductive something about the swath of frequencies they grab or the way that the bell evolves as you increase the gain. It's not useful to me or it doesn't resonate with my ears. It doesn't bend sound the way that I want. And so I could never get to where I thought I wanted to go. And so when it came time to develop an eq, and I think we're talking about the electra here,

Speaker 4 (00:49:24):

And I've used both the Electra and the CLA

Speaker 5 (00:49:28):

Both. Okay. Yeah. Well, like I said, the CLA was there to help me get over my super dark mixing and overcome my fear of brightness in general. The Electra was born out of this sort of like, I don't fricking understand EQing, what's wrong with me? And so we worked. I knew I liked the way the API EQ punches, especially in the mid-range. There's something so interesting about the mid-range texture on those EQs, but at the same hand it was like it's too coarse. Two DB steps are too huge and it's way too wide at low gains for me for the kinds of things that I generally wouldn't be doing. And so the mid bands on the Electra are the same style. They're proportional cue, but we tuned the queue until it got to the point where when I'm sweeping that around, it sounded like music and not frequencies.

(00:50:21):

And that was the key. That was the first aha moment. It was like, aha, I've got an EQ where because I hear textures, I hear boxiness and hardness and S spikiness. I don't hear 5K, I don't know what 5K is. You could put a 400 hertz tone up and I would blindly guess at what the frequency is and I'd be wrong. So I'm like, okay, here I have an EQ where I'm like, okay, if that's snare is just too boxy, this EQ can laser in on Boxiness and then suck it out. And so that was the mid band. There's two mid bands on that eq and that's the way they work. And it just kind of resonates with what my ear wants to hear, which is textures and colors and families of sound rather than frequencies.

Speaker 4 (00:51:06):

It's funny you say that because the first time I ever used the Electros was as an experiment instead of the APIs on some Toms that were micd with four 20 ones, and I think four 20 ones are okay for this genre, but they're one of those microphones that require a ton of eq. You're not going to get a 4 21 to sound right in metal without just EQing it to Helen back. And so myself and my former partners would always use the APIs to try to get them closer before getting them into the computer. And so we got the electros and tried doing the same thing that we would've done with the APIs just to see, and it just blew our mind how quickly we got the Toms to just sound right and sweet and just awesome. It was fast. It was fast, and it was great.

Speaker 5 (00:52:07):

That's how they were. I like to work fast and I like to work intuitively. I don't like to think because it just takes me out of the creative space. And I think that is the hallmark of that EQ in particular is like it's, there's something about it that's so easy to tell when you're helping and when you're hurting. And I cherish that because I'm not an EQ master, so I'm like, okay, here's a vocal. I don't quite know what's wrong with it. Let me try boosting some mid range and I'll boost it up 60 B and I'll sweep around a little bit. And it just sounds wrong, wrong, boom, there's something, right? You can hear the sound just literally pop out of the speakers with this EQ when you've got it right. And I treasure that

Speaker 3 (00:52:51):

You guys are making me want to buy a pair. I've been looking at them for like a year.

Speaker 4 (00:52:54):

They're phenomenal. You know that I'm not going to recommend you gear very often. I'm not just saying this because Gregory's on the show.

Speaker 3 (00:53:01):

Yeah. I have the Clara and I love it. I use that on every freaking mix unless I'm mixing a hundred percent ITB, which is only for metal core because the kids love that sound. But definitely I've wanted a pair of electros forever. I've just always been looking at them. I like the proportional style stuff and I've watched the video probably 20 times and I'm like, dammit, I need to just pop and get a pair.

Speaker 2 (00:53:23):

So as much as this conversation is awesome, we need to jump to the viewer questions. And also we have a ton of questions from Dan Corn, which is really hilarious.

Speaker 4 (00:53:33):

Yeah, yeah. Oh my god. Well, I don't know if you know Dan or not if you don't. He's a amazing producer engineer, tons of huge credits under his belt, like Paramore and whatnot. And he also makes gear and is one of our resident genius guest friends and stuff. And we always have our listeners submit questions for our guests, but he decided to submit a lot of questions for you.

Speaker 2 (00:54:10):

How

Speaker 3 (00:54:10):

Many? There's like 20 questions. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:54:12):

We don't have to ask 'em all

Speaker 3 (00:54:13):

My mind is blowing reading. List list. I'm just, wow. This is great.

Speaker 4 (00:54:17):

Yeah, we love Dan. Let's

Speaker 2 (00:54:19):

Start with the viewers first.

Speaker 4 (00:54:20):

Okay. Alright, so well, this one you already kind of answered, and this one's interesting to me. Sean O'Shaughnessys asking what piece of gear still leaves you mystified?

Speaker 3 (00:54:32):

We stomped them.

Speaker 5 (00:54:34):

Yeah. Let me think about that a second. You know what? No. Okay. The API 5 25 compressor, it has this just extraordinary combination of S sponginess and punch, which is really cool. And that was the only thing it did. I would have the ones that I have, but it also, it takes away the air. Anything over 12 k, and I don't want to say you can kiss a goodbye, but it pushes it way to the background. And somehow it's almost like it transposes the air down into the four to six K range and gives you in what is normally an offensive and aggressive presence space gives you a softness and a clarity, but it's so hard to describe, but it's a magical sound. And there's nothing else in the world that sounds like it. There's no 5 25 plugin. It's the weirdest compressor ever. It's really hard to use. So I have a few preset settings on. I never touch the settings on the compressor. I don't really understand how it works. I've just found a couple of magical spots and I feed signal into it at various levels. And that's my threshold control. And just on focals in particular, I just am addicted to it. Every vocal now goes through the 5 25 and it has a way of popping it at the front of the mix and making it feel bright. But there's no brightness. And I don't know how it does that, but I love it,

Speaker 3 (00:56:07):

Joey. We need that on guitars. Yeah,

Speaker 5 (00:56:08):

That's why you myst fight.

Speaker 3 (00:56:10):

We hate 4K. So on guitars you just,

Speaker 5 (00:56:13):

It's hard to like that frequency, but some gear gets 4K, right?

Speaker 2 (00:56:17):

Well, they make the lunchbox version of that, the 5 25, right?

Speaker 5 (00:56:22):

That's the only version of that. Yeah. It's only existed as it was originally a module in the consoles, the old consoles in that format. And as far as I know, that's the only way to get a 5 25 is in the 500 format. I like the vintage ones. I'm not going to lie. I like the vintage ones a little more than the new ones out of spec. The two that I have here are very different from one another, and they have sort of that old magic to them.

Speaker 4 (00:56:49):

So Nick ERT is asking, he's got two questions. Number one, are you developing a preamp? And number two, do you have any more special tips on using the tweaker?

Speaker 5 (00:57:00):

Huh? Okay. Yeah, generally I shy away from talking about anything that I'm doing. Fair enough. Which I think is fun. It's fun because I drop it on the world and nobody was expecting it. And they're like, Hey, all good. But that said, just for your listeners and everything, I'll say yes. In fact, I am developing a preamp. In fact, the sound of my voice right now is going through it. And now there's anything particularly special about just an re 20 through a preamp, but it is a very special preamp. I shied away from preamps since the beginning of the company, even though my sales manager was like, look, I got the data 500 series preamps, man, you got to do one. And I'm like, yeah, but I can't do a piece of gear unless I can find some way of coming at it that's truly different and truly special. And I never had any such, I'm like, what can you do with a pre-amp? It amplifies a mic signal. It could sound great, that's great, but what can you do with it? And I figured something out. And so I'm excited to be dropping it, I think, and I'm hoping we're going to be showing it at NAM this coming year, 2016, and it's a very special piece of gear. So I'm kind of proud of it and I'm looking forward to dropping it. I'm sure it is. Guess

Speaker 3 (00:58:14):

We'll have to come

Speaker 4 (00:58:14):

Visit your booth. Right on. And what about any tips on using the tweaker?

Speaker 5 (00:58:19):

Oh, tips on using the tweaker? Yeah. It turns out that because we are always tweaking things on the circuits, I'm up to the last minute. We're literally building the first production run and I'm still adjusting things. It turns out that the lowest ratio on the tweaker, even though in the manual it says two to one, and I think in my videos I made it said two to one. I changed it after that and it now goes down to 1.5 to one, and I have come to a door that ratio tracking, I turn it all the way down to one, to five to one, open up the attack halfway because the widest attack on tweaker is super slow. So I put the attack at 12 o'clock and the release fully counterclockwise set to fast and the lowest ratio, and you can track anything through that and compress it as hard as you want, and you will never know that you did anything to it. It's the most amazing tracking compressor and it makes your life so much easier when you go to mix because there's something about it that's been hugged, but it doesn't sound like you've done anything.

Speaker 4 (00:59:22):

There you go. That's a great tip. So Michael McDonald was wondering, you've written in the past about common misunderstandings regarding how compressors work at a technical level, but in term of a compressor's musical or creative use, was there ever a eureka moment when you discovered something that unlocked your understanding of how to actually use them?

Speaker 5 (00:59:43):

Oh yeah. Well, this gets back to the Michael Brower thing. It was learning the difference between sort of rote level control or dynamics control, like literally reigning in and packing transience in order to create a more controlled, coherent sound, getting beyond that and into the realm of density, which was the next layer. But to really take it over the top for me was Michael, explaining to me that the compressor's strongest use is in defining the movement of a sound and in getting my ears tuned. And I honestly, if you haven't been compressing sounds for three to five years, you probably don't need to worry about this. You literally can't hear it. And you need a good acoustic environment as well. But once you really learn to hear how a compressor adjusts the swing, you get into a whole new layer of drawing emotion out of anything, whether it's a straight up guitar track to a whole mix, you have such enormous power there to shape the groove. You can make a drummer who played soft and stiff sound like he was hitting it really hard and swinging nicely if you know what to do with your attack and your release and your ratio. So I would say stop thinking of these things as ways to just smash sounds down, pushing them down and start thinking of 'em as ways to get sounds to wiggle and dance.

Speaker 3 (01:01:10):

Here's a question because I wanted to touch on that and we kind of brushed it earlier, but this is something I really actually wanted to get into movement in particular. What is the best way you would recommend for somebody who's starting out? So some of these kids that are listening to this and they want to learn how to hear movement, what would you recommend?

Speaker 5 (01:01:27):

Oh, okay. Set your compressor to the highest ratio, slowest attack and fastest release, and then dig in really hard so that you're going to get a lot, you want to be swimming in compression. You don't ever want the game reduction meter to be going below zero. How hard you dig in beyond that is up to you. But dig in pretty zealously. Get yourself 6, 8, 10 DB of reduction happening, and then close the attack off to 50% of whatever its maximum is. So you have a medium attack now. And then just listen to that for a minute. Give yourself a solid 60 seconds of just listening to the sound. Go back to ground zero, like to take your timeline back to the beginning of the sound again, push play, and then take the release from its fastest and go to 25% of maximums. So I guess if you have a potentiometer in front of you, turn the release to nine o'clock, say and listen to the difference, and then take it back to fastest release and then back to nine o'clock.

(01:02:31):

I find that the ear is most able to hear changes in sound when it toggles back and forth rapidly, relatively rapidly. Like go to nine o'clock, fastest nine o'clock, fastest nine o'clock fastest. Keep doing that until you can hear the difference. I think what people do is they change a setting and then they stop and they listen really hard and you've already, but by that time, you've already forgotten what the original sound was. So I think the ear is able to hear differences when you switch back and forth more frequently. So that would be my advice. So then go from fastest to nine o'clock, fastest to nine o'clock, and then after 30 seconds of that, go from fastest to 12 o'clock, fastest to 12 o'clock. And you'll hear really quickly like what the release is doing. You may not be able to describe it and you may not know how to use it, but that's the first step is just being able to hear it.

(01:03:21):

Once you can hear something, you will eventually learn to master it. So it's always that first step of what the hell should I be listening for? Once you got that, you can kill it. And the same thing with eq, just to switch gears real quick. Take your eq, be flat, set a frequency at one K and crank it up to 60 B and back to flat 60 B and flat. And once you got that, cut it in half, do three DB and flat three DB and flat and see how small you can get that little movement and still detect the change in gain. And if you really are doing it right and your ears is sensitive enough, you'll be able to detect a quarter of a DB once you know what to listen for. It's phenomenal what the brain can actually hear.

Speaker 4 (01:04:00):

I find that that's actually the most important thing for people coming up, is knowing what they're hearing and knowing how to know what they're hearing. Because the thing that amateur guys don't have any access to is generally people to tell them what to listen for, and they just don't have the references to know what good is and what good isn't or what anything is. So that's great advice. So let's move on to Dan's questions because he's got quite a few, bring 'em. We're not going to be able to cover all of them, but so he is wondering, how many prototypes on average do you make of a unit before it's deemed worthy for public consumption?

Speaker 5 (01:04:43):

There's no average with the preamp. We nailed it in one with the tweaker. There were six prototypes over four and a half years. So really it's so dependent on the circuit. The preamp of course, is simple. It's a 500 series, so there's only so much you can do with it. Whereas the tweaker, tweaker started off with five knobs and now it has nine. So there just was a lot of development and a lot of changes over time. As I got better at compression, I wanted more out of my compressor. So my personal development was intertwined with the development of the product. And then as I added a feature and then I was like, oh, wait a minute, it's great that it does that, but now I also wanted to do this. So really they're all children and some of them are problem children, and the problem children get more of your attention and take more of your time and energy, and then when they're out the door, you're happier than ever. So

Speaker 4 (01:05:40):

Yeah. So he said all of your gear appears to be based on vibe. Being that electrical engineering is a very technical feel. What is your theory or your team's theory on identifying the parts of a circuit that contained that character?

Speaker 5 (01:05:56):

Interesting. Okay. I thought it was going to be a different question there. So I was ready for a different answer. Let's just say that I frequently disagree with my team and vice versa. I respect them enormously and I think they respect me, but we frequently disagree on what's important and what's not. For me, everything matters. Well, that's not true actually, capacitors don't matter to me. I thought they did, but they don't. I like to get rid of them. But once the capacitor's in the path, I don't think the type of capacitor matters. I focus in on anything that changes the gain of a signal is going to have a serious impact on its sound to my ears. So the op amps, the choice of op amps, the CLA has a very specific op-amp chosen for the way that it treats high frequencies. It's like the CLA and the electro, both they're flat from dc, they'll pass DC if you let 'em zero hertz up to I think like 500 kilohertz, and then they taper their three DB down at 700 kilohertz.

(01:06:57):

Something insane like that with the tweaker. Nothing in the tweaker was designed or manufactured after like 1974. I'm using components in there that are literally scoffed at. If most of the designers knew or if they bothered to pop the lid on a tweaker and they saw what I chose to put in there, they would have probably even more disdain for me than they already do because it's just these things. They're not known for having anything remotely like a Hi-Fi sound or a clean sound. They have really bad slew rates. They have high distortion, they're very slow. They roll off frequencies, way lower than people want. And yet when you add them all together, they make such an amazing vibe that this compressor, it sounds like it has transformers in the signal path, but it doesn't. It's just all amps. But it's the amps and the way they interact. That's everything. So for me, I guess it's mostly it's amps, whether they're discreet or integrated circuits and chips. And then after that it would be transformers and tubes. The component selection is huge. Where I get the most help from the geniuses on the team is figuring out how to make them interact such that they produce the sonic result that I want.

Speaker 4 (01:08:11):

Makes sense. So do you model your circuits in LT Spice before you prototype, or do you guys grab a pencil and do the math first?

Speaker 5 (01:08:22):

I don't think we do either, to be honest. I think we breadboard stuff up. We just go for it. You just go for it. We just go for it. We're just like, okay, let's start with an RC EQ circuit and let's just, because look, here's the thing. All this stuff's been done. There's really only four types of EQ and the tweakers of vca a compressor. There's nothing new in any of this gear. It's all been done a million times. It's the way you chain things together and the way you make them interact, and then the components that you choose inside of the circuits that matters. That's everything. So yeah, there's no modeling happening here.

Speaker 4 (01:09:04):

And what are your feelings on 500 series gear in terms of pros, cons on both technical side and usability?

Speaker 5 (01:09:10):

Well, there's no denying the extreme value they bring to the table. I also appreciate the fact that some of my Northern European customers early on hipped me to the environmental benefit of favoring a 500 series thing, because literally smaller. So you're using less stuff to make them, there's less paint, the boxes are smaller, there's less fuel consumed and shipping them around. So they're kind of a green product, which is cool. The flip side for me is I have stubby little fingers, so I don't necessarily love how crowded they can get. I don't really have that problem because all I use in the 500 world is my own stuff, and that's reasonably spaced. But some of those modules stuff is packed on there. You're limited to a 16 volt power supply, which for some people is a huge deal. And I got to say, honestly, I don't buy into it.

(01:10:01):

I think that the whole, you need a linear power supply that needs to be over speced and all this extra current and blah, blah, blah. I would challenge anybody. I think that's the speaker wire of our industry. I think that it's phantom, it's crap. I would challenge anybody with golden ears who thinks that they can tell the difference between a 24 volt linear tube circuit going over here and a 15 volt switch power supply happening over there in a mix when you're working on stuff, soloed out, whatever, I don't think they're going to hear the difference. I guess I'm pragmatic. I don't focus on these things that most people do and I don't know. So anyway, for the 500 series, it's a very practical thing for me. I like the spread out space of the rack gear.

Speaker 4 (01:10:51):

So alright. The physical layout of UBK gear is unique in terms of color knobs placement. What's your inspiration for this? I know that you said earlier that you do all of that.

Speaker 5 (01:11:03):

I do, yeah. It's all trial and error really. And it's the one aspect where I kind of hate to admit this, but I have to be rip and stoned. I have to, if I try to come up with an interface and I'm sober, that's funny. I just push things around. I push virtual knobs around. I come up with silkscreen graphics and it's all boring and meaningless and then I just spark up and five minutes later, something interesting starts to happen and I understand how it wants to be. And then it's much like the development of the circuits of the gear. It's just a process of gradual refinement. I'm like, okay, this knob needs to be actually lifted and these two need to be below it. And I try to make, with the tweaker, I try to group the controls so that they actually make sense the way they're grouped.

(01:11:54):

So on the left side of the thing, there's the drive, the mix and the output. So those are your signal levels and your signal path. And then in the center, it's the threshold and all the side chain shaping. So that's like the, when does it compress and why does it compress? And then on the right side is the attack release and the ratio and the curve controls. And so that's all, how does it compress? And so I try to, as a user, understand I'm coming at this piece of gear to do things. How do I want to group these controls? How do I want to label them? How do I want them to interact in a way that I don't have to be thinking about stuff, I can just reach for a knob and get the results that I want.

Speaker 4 (01:12:34):

I was wondering also, what's your craziest shop story? Ever blow anything up? Catch fire?

Speaker 5 (01:12:40):

Oh, let me think about that. No, it's really mundane stuff. I burned the crap out of my finger once from touching a capacitor that was still charged by the tubes. But that's it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:55):

I think it comes from the fact that Dan has definitely caught things on fire. I've seen him post about it on Instagram. Yeah. Well,

Speaker 5 (01:13:01):

Yeah, I think I saw that as well. Actually. I did blow a capacitor once and realized that it was probably just like it hit the corner of my eye, a big chunk of something hit the corner of my eye on the outside and it was like a quarter of an inch to the left. And it probably would've blinded me because it, it was ferocious when caps, it's vicious.

Speaker 4 (01:13:23):

The last question from Dan here, which I think we never really covered this, but I think this is something we ask all our guests and particular to what they do, whether they're a musician or a producer or entrepreneur or what. So what advice would you give to up and coming guys who want to design gear, they want to design

Speaker 5 (01:13:46):

Gear to use or they want to,

Speaker 4 (01:13:48):

No, to do it for real, like you to start their own gear company with pieces that they design. What advice would you give to the unknown genius who wants to do this?

Speaker 5 (01:14:02):

I guess that sounds like a dinner and a conversation. Really. There's so much. Just a couple of things is offhand is that ideas are a dime a dozen. They really are great ideas. Everybody's 'em literally, everybody's got a lot of them. What matters the most in any endeavor is having the resources. And by resources, I mean the time, the money and the connections to get stuff done. It's ludicrously, ludicrously, tedious and painful and challenging to get gear manufactured. It's very, very simple in relative terms to just design a piece of gear and to develop a prototype, but to get yourself to the point when you can turn that prototype into something that can be built, 50, a hundred, a thousand at a time is a whole other game. And so in order to get this stuff done, you need connections. You need human beings, you need relationships.

(01:15:01):

So if this gets back to that musician art conversation, if you're going to do everything yourself and your vision is to do it in a garage and sell 10 handbuilt pieces of gear a month, that's eminently attainable. But if you want to get into manufacturing, understand that that's a whole other thing than designing gear. And you need to start working on your relationships and your resources now because if you design a piece of gear and then get to the finish line with that and then start your manufacturing, it's going to be another year to two years before you even get a pre-production unit to look at.

Speaker 4 (01:15:32):

Great answer. And isn't that just the case for everything in life, that execution trumps ideas every time?

Speaker 5 (01:15:40):

Absolutely. Absolutely. And so when you find yourself frustrated by somebody who's successful making something crappy or being an idiot, now you understand why. It's not because they're intelligent or had a great idea, they did it. That's all it is. That's the only secret in life is you forgot to freaking do it, get shit done.

Speaker 2 (01:15:58):

I wanted to ask one other question, if I may. Please

Speaker 5 (01:16:02):

Do.

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):

It was an interesting question by Dan. So he asks what would be considered the shittiest piece of gear that you own, but you still use?

Speaker 5 (01:16:09):

Oh. Oh, let's see. I don't know. Does the valley people dynamite count as shitty? I think for a lot of people it is, because it's semi-pro gear from the eighties and everything. I just think it's one of the most extraordinary compressors I ever made, and it was a huge inspiration for the tweaker. So yeah, I say the valley people, dynamite is one. And then I'm looking around here,

Speaker 3 (01:16:39):

You just raised the price of it on eBay by $2,000.

Speaker 5 (01:16:43):

Everything's creeping up. Basically the rule is if it's not made anymore, it's slowly creeping up in value.

Speaker 4 (01:16:48):

So that means that midi verbs will one day be worth $60. It's instead of $20.

Speaker 5 (01:16:56):

And then again, I guess it's hard to call this stuff shitty gear. I love it. So to me, it's amazing. But there's a spring reverb unit called the master room that I just adore. It's grainy, it's full of chips, it's springy, but it's got such a vibe and I love the sound of it. So that's in heavy rotation here as well. And then I'm a huge fan of cheap delays. Just love them. Yeah. Well

Speaker 2 (01:17:23):

Thanks so much for being on here, man. Really appreciate your time and great answers all around.

Speaker 4 (01:17:29):

Yeah, you've been a fantastic guest. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:17:31):

Incredibly interesting discussion. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:17:33):

Thanks.

Speaker 1 (01:17:34):

I had a great time. This is great. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is brought to you by Kush Audio, A premium manufacturer of top quality audio, hardware and plugins. The high end just got higher. Visit the house of kush.com for more information to ask us questions, make suggestions and interact. Visit URM academy slash podcast and subscribe today.