ZAKK CERVINI & MATT PAULING: The John Feldman Workflow, Vibe Over Perfection, Earning Your Weekends

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Ivanez Guitars and Basses. Ivans strives to make high quality, cutting edge musical instruments that any musician can afford and enjoy. Visit ivanez.com for more info. And now your host, Joey Sturgis. Joel Wanasek and Eyal Levi. Hey everybody. How you doing today? Good, how are you? Fantastic.

Speaker 2 (00:25):

Terrible,

Speaker 3 (00:26):

Terrible.

Speaker 2 (00:27):

Just kidding.

Speaker 3 (00:27):

With us today we have Zach Cervini and Matt Pauling. How are you guys doing? Great. How are you? Doing good. Doing good. For those of you who might not know, Zach and Matt are the right hand men for John Feldman, is that right? That is correct, correct. That is awesome. I have to say, how the hell do you go to sleep with those choruses stuck in your head all day?

Speaker 4 (00:46):

It's rough, man. There's a lot of choruses. It's all about the chorus.

Speaker 2 (00:50):

How long have you guys been working with him?

Speaker 4 (00:54):

I've been with John for about two and a half years. And Matt's How long have you been there? A year and a half.

Speaker 2 (01:01):

Yeah, a year and a half. Okay. I seem to remember Zach, when you kind of got that gig, I think I that I remember you getting it and since then I just have noticed that you've just done awesome thing after Awesome thing after awesome thing after awesome thing. So congrats. Thank

Speaker 4 (01:20):

You. Yeah, it's been a long road, but honestly it's been pretty quick, I feel like, because I've only been in the industry for two and a half years.

Speaker 2 (01:26):

I was about to say you're pretty young for having gotten a gig like that and kept it, so that's pretty cool. Congrats. How did you go about landing that?

Speaker 4 (01:37):

Okay, so yeah, so pretty much, I mean, I've been recording bands since I was 14 years old. My parents, my mom is a really honest person and she's just the first person to tell me anything I do sucks. And growing up I was terrible at, I was terrible at sports, I was terrible at pretty much everything, but I picked up a guitar and could just kind of play it and she was like, bought me a guitar and then I was messing around with Audacity. You guys remember Audacity? It was like that. Yeah, it was the greatest. And that was in seventh grade. I was really young and I recorded a couple songs and I just loved doing it. So my mom bought me a MacBook and when I was a freshman in high school, I recorded my first band. I got a little m audio interface with two inputs, and I really ghetto rigged this thing together.

(02:27):

And then I just kept recording a bunch of bands through high school. And when I was 17, I produced my first signed band. I guess they were this band that was on artery, and it was a really small thing for me, but it was really cool. And I was just hustling while other kids were at parties and stuff, I was just always in my bedroom just recording in my basement or whatever, and I just worked super hard. And so when I graduated high school, I got accepted into a college called Drexel, which at the time had a really good program for recording and producing and stuff. But I'm a hustler and I hit up just tons of people who were out of my reach all the time. I was just messaging and messaging and messaging tons of people, and no one would ever really hit me back.

(03:16):

But one day I messaged Will Putney, who at the time was working for Machine who was my favorite producer ever. I looked up to him throughout all of high school and Will was like, yeah, you should come down to the studio. And I was 18 at the time, I was a freshman in college. And so I went down to the studio and I just hit it off with Will and Machine instantly, and they were like, you should intern here. I was like, cool. So I interned there and Machine really took me under his wing and almost like apparent, he just broke me into the industry and just showed me just not even on the technical side of things, but just how to deal with people and how to work with bands, that kind of stuff, which I feel is equally, if not more important than the technical aspect.

Speaker 2 (04:05):

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 4 (04:06):

And so I worked with them for about a year and a half as their kind assistant guy. And I would track vocals, I would track bass, I would edit, I would do mixed notes. I would do tons of small stuff. And I actually produced a couple of bands on my own Machine would be going away and he'd be like, yeah, the studio is free, so do whatever you want. And so I would just be like, okay, cool. So I would just go out and find a band that I loved and bring him in and make a record. So, so we had a really great relationship and then Machine decided that he wanted to move to Austin, Texas, and I wanted to move to Los Angeles, California. So he sent an email to John Feldman, just telling him that he's got, he had this, so at the time I was kind of machines engineer, but he sent an email to John that was like, I got a kid who would like to intern for you. So I moved to LA and I just started over as an intern. This was two and a half years ago. So were you getting paid as an intern or free intern? No. So you just moved across Country

Speaker 2 (05:06):

Ended, did it for free anyways, yes. Awesome.

Speaker 4 (05:09):

You got to take the financial hit a lot of times to get into things like this. But the thing is, when I got to Feldman's, his engineer at the time was over. The job just wasn't, they weren't really a good match and he wasn't feeling it. So he put a lot of the work onto me, which is great. So I wasn't getting paid, but I was doing a ton of the work and a ton of the productions and stuff. And it was like I was coming from the metal world where I was used to just bass guitars and drums and stuff, and I was just being thrown into this world of all these crazy instruments and crazy different sounds and crazy songs and all these different styles and stuff. And it was really cool and really fun, but also really difficult. So I started interning in June of 2013 and his engineer left in October of 2013.

(06:00):

And that was right before we started to do a record with the used, and John needed an engineer, and I was just like, I'll do it. Yeah, you were there. So yeah, I, I made that record and I went on to make tons of different records and there was a time a couple months later we did an album with a band called Stick to Your Guns where John had a medical emergency and he had to get this crazy surgery that put him out for a month. So I produced the entire Stick to Your Guns record on my own and just did that one front to back pretty much just by myself, editing, no help, nothing. And that just kind of proved to John what I could do, I think, even though it was a metal record. And so ever since then, our relationship has kind of grown to where I'm not really his employee, but it's more like we work together and now it's just grown over the years where I co-write tons of songs with John. I mix everything we do and we co-produce things together, which I think is really cool.

Speaker 2 (06:57):

That's the perfect example of how to do it, I think. Cool. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (07:03):

It's

Speaker 4 (07:03):

Pretty

Speaker 5 (07:03):

Rare.

Speaker 4 (07:04):

How

Speaker 3 (07:04):

Does Matt

Speaker 4 (07:05):

Come into all of this? Matt, you want to tell a little bit about your story?

Speaker 5 (07:08):

So I come from more of a touring background. So I grew up in Orange County, California, and I just started playing guitar when I was 14. My dad was like, yo, you need to play football. And I played one season and I was just like, yo, fuck this dude. I got to do something else. So I picked up a guitar and just taught myself how to play and then started a band. And from the beginning we were just playing hardcore. My favorite band was Hate Breed and in Flames and just hardcore shit. And we'd have shows in our friend's parents' garages at four in the afternoon before they got home. And so I come from that whole kind of background of just DIY, just hardcore punk rock mentality.

(07:57):

And then when I was 18, my little brother actually brought this demo I made to his friend's dad, and he owned this label called Science Records, and he called me Instantly and my band, the Confession got signed and then we ended up touring with Avenge Sevenfold bullet for my Valentine Mega Death and all these crazy bands just like that. Out of nowhere. It was like instant. It was pretty gnarly. I can't explain. I feel like I got super lucky. Both of you guys have an insane story. And then from there, we broke up in 2008. And then that's when

Speaker 4 (08:40):

Didn't Matt produced your record too, right?

Speaker 5 (08:43):

Yeah. Matt Shadows from Avenge produced our album alongside with, he co-produced it with this dude Fred Arch Bo who just did the new Atree record. He was

Speaker 2 (08:53):

Actually on,

Speaker 5 (08:54):

He was just last week. Oh, cool. Yeah, Fred's my boy. No way. No way.

(08:58):

Yeah, Fred's so cool. Yeah, he's the nicest sweetheart ever. But before that, after the confession broke up in 2008, that's when I was like, okay, dude, I got to get on Pro Tools and learn this whole thing. And so that was my whole journey into the world of recording. And the dude that recorded the Confession's first ep, his name is Paul Miner, he played bass in a band called Death by Stereo. And so after I learned Pro Tools for a little bit, I hit him up and was like, yo, you have any openings at your studio? And he's like, I don't really need anybody, but I'll teach you how to use the studio and you can come in and I'll show you some stuff and you can bring in bands whenever you want and we'll go from there. And so I kind of learned from him a little bit, but mostly I just taught myself.

(09:51):

He just kind of set me up and then was like, yo, you're free to fly. And so after I learned a little bit from Paul, I was running this little studio in Orange, California, and so I got a few bands in there. And then after that I got an opportunity to join a band with Brandon Saller from a REU called Hell or High Water. And then we ended up touring for three years. We did some cool gigs, we did the Uproar tour and all that stuff. And in 2011, and then the band was just kind of stalemate. It wasn't really doing much, it was almost kind of regressing a little bit. And Brandon was talking about getting back with the REU and stuff. So I was like, yo, I got to jump ship. And I ended up reaching out to a few people and I talked to this dude Sean, the used tour manager, and he was like, yo, what are you doing? What are you up to? And I was like, I'm looking for a gig in a studio. And he's like, let me hit up Feldman for you. So he just hooked me up with an intro email and Feldy was just like, yeah, cruise in. So I kind of started how Zach did just from ground zero. I went in unpaid internship and stuck it out for a few months. And then he was like, yo. And then one of the other engineers, he ended up leaving. And so yeah,

Speaker 4 (11:13):

It is like John's always had one engineer guy, and then when I became his engineer, we found another person. The workload was just insane. So we had two people, but that guy just didn't really work out, so he left. And yeah. Matt just kind of, sorry to interrupt you Matt, but Matt just kind of stepped in there.

Speaker 2 (11:30):

So how many people hit him up for internships generally? Is it nonstop flood?

Speaker 4 (11:37):

Yeah, well, he has kind a separate email that all of those go to that our interns and our assistants go through. So yeah, I think it's a lot. What's the vetting process? Basically you can't be a five seconds a summer fan. That's the first credential. I mean, our interns, just to be honest with you, we're looking for interns to help with menial tasks. A lot of times it's like a lot of food runs, a lot of coffee runs, that kind of stuff. And then if they really are into editing and stuff, we get 'em started on that. Sometimes it's like to become an intern pretty much, you just need to be really cool and able to be frank, just be able to need to take a lot of shit. Pretty much A lot of people don't last more than a week.

Speaker 2 (12:33):

Every guy that we found on who has made it in the LA scene has said the exact same thing, which is their internship started with a bunch of menial tasks and they were the best at those tasks, getting the food order, and that's what got them the opportunity to try their editing on stuff. And then when they did that right, for long enough, it eventually equaled work.

Speaker 4 (13:02):

Exactly. The thing with our interns is if you really have to do a lot to make an impression on John, you have to be really good with getting the food, but you just have to go above and beyond in ways that you have to figure out how to do on your own, no instructions. And basically it'll be like you'll intern for however long unpaid and take a lot of hard things, and then you could not hear from John for a year. And then a year from now someone will call John and be like, I need someone to do this. And John will be like, John will ask Matt or me, who do we know that would be a good fit for this job? And we'll be like, oh, this person was an incredible intern. And so then we'll hit them up. And more often than not, they're down for that. What gets someone instantly deleted, let's lying, stealing.

Speaker 2 (13:59):

Oh, I mean from the point where you get the email, is there something about the emails that make them get to the top of the pile, I guess?

Speaker 4 (14:12):

Oh, those emails. Okay. Basically, a lot of people send in a lot of resumes and stuff, and we have an awesome assistant named Ali and she's really good at going through this kind of stuff. So basically every email that we get that seems like it could be a good fit. I think it's really cool when people have go to college or have school experience or something, or if they have a SoundCloud and I listen to it and I'm like, whoa, these tracks are super cool. We just get a lot of kids who I'll check out their SoundCloud and nothing sounds very good or anything, and then we meet 'em and they just don't seem like a very driven person. Our assistant, when we're looking for an intern, she basically tries to meet every person possible in the emails and she just tries to figure out who's the most driven person out of all of them and who's just has a great attitude and just always smiling genuinely and just is stoked to go get coffee, which people are.

Speaker 6 (15:18):

That's a great point because I'll give you an example. We're having the same problem right now in my building. I got a guy across the hall and we have separate businesses, but we work together on a lot of stuff and he's trying to find a new building intern and he's had four or five guys out of here, and he's got these two guys that are pretty lazy in here right now. And they come in, they talk really big, they say, yeah, I can do this and I can do that. And either nodding your head when you're telling 'em how tough it's going to be and how they need to stick it out. And then when it comes time to brass tax, they don't show up on time, they don't care, they don't take out the garbage without being prompted. And even after prompted, they argue they're too high above doing something like that and you're just

Speaker 4 (15:55):

Like, seriously. Exactly. Yeah, they have to be stoked to do everything and we have kids that are, and it's great when they just do things without being asked, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (16:08):

Yeah. So just question for you. You said that you came from a metal background and had to learn all this other stuff, and I remember talking to you online about the amount of programming that you had to learn how to do. How did you go about mastering that stuff? Did you just jump right in and how did you go about getting better at it so that I guess maybe he wouldn't notice that you didn't know it yet?

Speaker 4 (16:33):

Okay. Well, John pretty much just threw me into it and I was like, yeah, I can do this. And I had no idea what I was doing, and I sent him a couple tracks and he quickly found out that I had no idea what I was doing, but he just would help me. So we have a lot of go-to sounds and stuff like a lot of starting points in terms of, I dunno whether it be a synth patch or a mixed setting or anything. We have a lot of starting points that we tweak from. And then we also go off and just experiment and do tons of crazy unique stuff all the time. So basically the dynamic that I have when I work with John, which is really cool, say so he will have a song idea, whether it be a melody or a chord progression, and he will just kind of hum it and then send Matt and me a voice memo and be like, make this sound like the police meets Taylor Swift in 2016.

(17:26):

And we're like, cool. And so we build up a track and then we send him that track and then he just sends us hundreds and hundreds of voice memos just being like, change this, change this kick sound, make this piano sound expand after the gunfight preset three. And we just communicate through voice memos and he just tells us how to refine stuff and everything. And honestly, I think just learning the programming just took, I've probably produced five or 600 songs since I've been with John that are all over the genre spectrum, everything, and it just comes from doing it and failing and trying it again pretty much.

Speaker 2 (18:10):

I think that it's important to be willing to fail at this stuff. It's the only way you'll get better.

Speaker 4 (18:15):

Oh yeah, yeah. No matter how successful you are, you're going to fail.

Speaker 5 (18:19):

Another thing that I've learned from working with John, the dynamic is that you can't be precious about anything. You can love what you're doing, but it has to constantly evolve. And that painful growth, like him being like, dude, this sucks and you just spent 18 hours on it and you stayed up all night and then he crushes you. And then I learned after a while that you have to just be a cool, I'm learning, I'm growing, and this is something that you have to deal with as a songwriter, an engineer or anybody trying to do music. So I think that's important. I think it's a numbers game, man.

Speaker 2 (18:57):

The more you do, the more garbage you're going to put out, but also the more good stuff you'll put out. So it's just a matter of getting through the garbage to get to the good stuff.

Speaker 5 (19:08):

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (19:09):

Yes, I agree. Yeah, we do a lot of things. So let's talk about those starting points you mentioned. Where do those come from? You got something awesome on one record and so it's like, yeah, that worked. We'll use that. Or is it stuff, okay, so it's not stuff you'd just do in a vacuum?

Speaker 4 (19:30):

No, it's like things that John's just built up over years and years and years that he's just like, I love this and I'm going to do this on every record. He is been producing records for 15 years or so and he just has so many little things along the way that he's just like, I love this EQ on a kick drum, or I love this gate on a snare drum and we're always going to use this and I don't see a reason to change this. It's things like

Speaker 2 (19:59):

That. Yeah. I had a question. I was wondering if you guys have a permanent setup or anything and how much of your rig is analog versus digital, but you kind of answered it inadvertently by telling me that you guys have, are they templates

Speaker 4 (20:19):

Or it's just mixed settings? I'll just go to a mix that's kind of similar to the song that I'm mixing. I have different styles of mixing. I mean, the two types of songs that I look at mixing are, we're very drum centric studio and I look at live drums versus program drums. And when I say program drums, I don't mean programmed real drums, I mean pop program drums. We always tend to center the mix around the drums at John's. And I have a live drum starting point that I go from all the time. And then when I'm programming drums, I have a program drum starting point mix setting that I go from as well and I tweak from there. That's pretty much how I start. Joey, isn't that similar to what you do?

Speaker 3 (21:06):

Yeah, I kind of have different starting points for different types of people. For example, like Frankie from a Mirror kind of has a way that he likes to layer vocals, so I would have vocal template that suits him but would be completely wrong or different for someone else. So it's more of a time saving thing and not really, it's not about being lazy or anything like that. This is how this guy likes to work, so I'm going to condition my gear and set up my situation so that it is the most effective for that kind of workflow.

Speaker 4 (21:44):

I think it's a time saving thing, and I also think it's a thing where I'm like, I feel like I could spend a week on messing with it and not get something as good as this anyway. Is

Speaker 3 (21:55):

Tried and true.

Speaker 2 (21:56):

Yeah,

Speaker 4 (21:56):

Exactly.

Speaker 3 (21:57):

I had a question because I've heard that John is a little bit of an eccentric guy and I think he's a lot like me when it comes to being creative, which is you attack something with a machine gun basically. How do you guys, if that's true, and tell me if it is or not, but if it is true, how do you guys actually deal with that and how do you keep up with him and do you find it hard keeping up with him?

Speaker 4 (22:25):

Oh yeah. It's so hard to keep up with him. John. I and I personally just think John's the greatest producer in the world. He's incredible at what he does. He is amazing and his mind is just all over the place. So in any given day, I'm working on four or five different things. Yesterday I started out my day, I came in two days ago, I did a Christmas cover song with this girl, Juliet Sims, who's Andy be Sack from Blackville Bride's girlfriend. So I did a cover with her and we made it kind of like Tim Burton nine Inch Nails esque. It's really cool. So I did that and I mixed that yesterday and then I did six or seven hours of writing with Black Veil Brides who we're working with right now. And then after that I produced and mixed a song for a band called Trophy Wives who's an up and coming pop punk band from Rhode Island that we're going to start developing, I think.

(23:22):

And I think keeping up with John is just being on your game and just being willing to pull 16 hour days every day and not sleep and just pretty much, it's just that kind of thing. You have to be able to work really hard and work really smart and just have the end goal in sight and just be like, what's going to make John stoked? Because ultimately what's going to make John stoked is what's going to make the world stoked probably. And just from working for John for so long, I've just like, I know John and I, I know what he likes a lot, so that makes it easier. When I was starting out, it was like it would take me a week to do a song and now we can crank out 10 songs a week. So it's just from working for him for so long and just working so hard. I think that's how we keep up. Joel's kind of like that with his

Speaker 2 (24:18):

Mixing man. How many songs a month do you mix?

Speaker 6 (24:20):

I've gotten up to about 67, but usually, geez, 60 cents usually. I mean, well, I've definitely had several months where I've cleared like 50, but usually I can do two to five songs a day. I've even mixed a whole record in three hours and I mean it turned out pretty good. It's just having it dialed into that level of perfection.

Speaker 3 (24:42):

Well yeah, that record that you're talking about was one session. Every song was queued up from left to, so there wasn't any opening or closing of any sessions and stuff, and they

Speaker 6 (24:56):

Weren't very picky either, which was great.

Speaker 3 (24:59):

And you have your system in place to where your assistant can jump in and go disc kick that snare, this guitar tone.

Speaker 6 (25:09):

Literally when I get a mix from my assistant, he's so badass that all I have to do is pretty much write automation, maybe flip out a sample and do a little bit of spotty queuing. It's not even like, I mean, I dunno, just everything is dialed into the point where it's basically framed. I know what he designs all the guitar tone stuff for the amping. We figure out what samples we're going to use. So by the time I hit play, all I have to do is sit there and mix. I don't have to sit there and be like, Hmm, is this kick triggering right or wait, it's this natural drum gated or I don't have to figure any of that crap out. It's great.

Speaker 3 (25:40):

Yeah, and I think there should be, people listening to this hopefully can start to realize that presets and starting points and things of that nature are designed to just basically put up with higher amounts of workflow. Now, I think there's two different types of people. You've got your people who are like, and I could be wrong about this, but Steve Albini is going to sit there and turn knobs and spend hours and days on the sound of certain things, and then there's going to be other guys who want to just get to the point, get the song down, get the idea down, and mess with the sound of it later and use a starting point. And I don't think that either of those methods is wrong or right, it's just different, a different way of working. And I think different types of music lend themselves to different methods.

(26:32):

So some bands who need more of a unique approach would go with the more hands-on guy who would just start from scratch every time and forget everything he's ever learned and just mess up and find his way. And then there's other types of music, which I would say John Feldman is in tune with is the sort of the more popular approach or the more structured approach where the workload is massive, but at the same time, your hooks are sort of understood, your song structures are sort of understood and there's not a lot of guesswork that needs to go on.

Speaker 4 (27:08):

Just kind of playing off what you said in terms of mixing and starting points, I just think for me, mixing to me is just making the song have an emotional impact and just making me feel something and it can sound terrible and still make me feel something because maybe that's the way it's supposed to sound, but for instance, I just want to get the song sounding good, and so then I could start actually mixing and actually automating things and making the chorus hit and everything. But I always have the fan in mind if I'm mixing a five seconds of summer song, the girl, all she's going to be listening to is the singers. She's just going to be listening to the vocal and she's not going to be emotionally impacted by the frequency of the high hat or something. You know what I mean? I

Speaker 6 (27:55):

Think that's an amazing point. Allow me to interject because I think this is the biggest takeaway, at least for working on a large volume of work in a short period of time, is to not focus on things that don't matter. The high hat song matters to us audio nerds, but when my mom listens to a song, she hits play and she's like, oh, I love this song, or This song is terrible. She doesn't care about the snare drum. If it's 0.5 DB louder and you have a boost at eight k of 0.2 DB with a Q width of two, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 4 (28:23):

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 6 (28:24):

You got to focus on what matters. And that's vocals the emotion of the song. Does it feel good? Does it sound like a song? If yes, you're 90% their mixing.

Speaker 2 (28:33):

Speaking of vocals, just to illustrate the point of that emotional impact makes more of a difference than technical quality. I remember Zach, you told me and some other people the story about recording something on a hill. Can you explain that real quick for everyone who thinks that you can't get good sounds with not the best situation?

Speaker 4 (28:58):

Yeah. Well, for every record we do, John's just kind of known for just going and taking trips. So we just have my laptop and we take an inbox in an SM seven and we'll just go, yeah, that specific time was during the Sleeping With Sirens album, first of all. So there's a song on that album called The Strays, which I think is just the best song on that album. And John was sitting out by his pool when he wrote that song and he was like, this song was just waiting for me here. And John was just sitting there with Kellen, the singer, and he was like, Zach, bring a mic out by the pool's right next to the studio. And so John was like, just bring a mic out to the pool and it feels really good right here, so we're just going to record the vocals to this song right here. So I brought a flea 47 out to the pool and recorded it on an mbox on my laptop, and that's the vocal sound for that. And then we went And

Speaker 5 (29:56):

John was swimming in the pool at the time?

Speaker 4 (29:58):

Yes, exactly. He was. And then yeah, on the 4th of July we went to the top of, I think it was Mulholland Drive, and we just watched fireworks and recorded the vocals to a song called Left Alone. And it's just like a cool experience and when you listen back to the song, it just makes you smile kind of. And even though the listener wasn't there, I feel like some of that just kind of rubs off on them. It just gives it a good feeling. And we do tons of that stuff. We go to the beach a lot to record and go surfing and stuff, and we take a lot of trips and do that kind of stuff, and it's just fun. And I just feel like I once heard an Italian pizza chef say that the secret to making a good pizza is to just be happy when you make it. And I feel like that's the same case with records. So nobody

Speaker 2 (30:50):

Who bought the record noticed the inbox converters,

Speaker 4 (30:54):

Nope. Strange. You'd be shocked at how much stuff we record on an inbox. Actually, we would not be shocked. I think a lot of other people would be shocked.

Speaker 6 (31:06):

I'm going to go leave a YouTube comment now. Oh, it sounds like it was done on an inbox.

Speaker 2 (31:13):

What do you guys use back at the studio for converters?

Speaker 4 (31:17):

It's the one 90 twos. Yeah. Yeah, we just use the one 90 twos. It's so weird. I know the gear that we use, but I'm such not a gearhead when it comes to gear. I feel like an idiot when people start talking about gear and stuff because half the time I'm just like, I don't know what the heck you're talking about. I just kind of nod and smile. I know the equipment that we use really well, but I don't know the equipment that we don't use.

Speaker 2 (31:44):

Well, let's talk about what you guys have going on there.

Speaker 4 (31:47):

So yeah, so a huge part to our sound is we have an X logic SSL 9,000 bus compressor, and we set it to the fastest release and the slowest attack, and we never change the settings, and that's used on the two bus of every mix that we do. And it's super aggressive compression. That's what John likes, but he likes to hit that thing at four to five DB on the master bus, and I'll try to sneak and back off of it. I think it's a little too extreme sometimes, but that's a huge part of our sound is that across the stereo bus and another huge part of our sound, the soft tube fe compressor, I'd say I use that on 90% of vocals just because I think that to me, that's the plugin that just does it for me. I don't know. I've tried a million things and that plugin, just the way it compresses the vocal just really gets all the nuances out and everything.

(32:49):

And the other 10% of the time I use, if that doesn't work or if it's a not super in your face song or something like a ballad or something, I'll use A-U-A-D-L-A two A or something on the vocal. But yeah, the SSL compressor and that fe compressor are both a huge part of our sound. We use the fe compressor on the drum bus too in parallel. So on our drum bus, we just have that soft tube fat compressor and we just adjust the parallel compression knob to get parallel compression in. So it's super simple. Our setup is extremely simple.

Speaker 2 (33:26):

How many rooms do you guys have?

Speaker 4 (33:27):

The studio, it's a lounge and then it's a control room and a live room.

Speaker 2 (33:31):

So when you and Matt are going at it, you guys in the same room the whole time?

Speaker 4 (33:36):

Matt will typically be, so we have a really cool dynamic. It'll be, so there's two different kinds, or I guess there's three different kinds of days. There's writing days, which are the majority of our days. We write a ton of songs and we record them as we write them. So a lot of the, because again, yeah, I just feel like a lot of the excitement and stuff of like, oh wow, this song is really cool. Let's just record the vocals for right now. Cool. A lot of that quote pre-pro writing stuff we do actually ends up on the record just because when we try to redo it, we can't really beat what we had originally. So there'll be a writing day where it'll either be John's running the writing session and I'm running the computer and John's writing and I'm programming and building up a track.

(34:24):

And then Matt will be in the lounge on his laptop, like programming either another song or working on the same song that we're doing, and then he will keep coming in and giving me files and stuff, and we're just building this crazy track pretty much. Then there's days where we're actually recording bands, which that will be Matt and me just in the control room, just tag teaming it, just coming up with guitar parts, getting cool tones, programming cool stuff. So we work together on that. And then there's days where we finish songs or days where we produce songs on our own or just mix songs where there's not a band in the studio. And for those days it'll be like, I'll do some editing on the main rig and Matt will do some programming on his laptop, and then he will give me the programming that he has, and then I'll start to mix the song and I'll look at what Matt did and I'll say, okay, this is cool.

(35:18):

Give me something like this or give me this, and then I'll do my own programming on the song and then I'll mix it. So it's all a really collaborative effort, but we're constantly basically just bouncing ideas back and forth. And sometimes we're in the same room and sometimes we're not. How often is John there? John's there a lot. It depends if there's a band there. He's very vocal centric, so he records 95% of the vocals. I would say I record vocals too, but he records a lot of the vocals when he is writing, so that's mainly when there is when he is doing vocals. But Matt and me pretty much produce and do everything else on our own. So John pretty much will write the songs with the bands and do the vocals with 'em, and then it's off to us.

Speaker 3 (36:10):

So when John is out doing things and touring or maybe playing shows or whatever, I think he probably still does some a and r stuff and whatnot, traveling.

Speaker 4 (36:22):

Oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:24):

How do you guys handle that and what's the protocol for that?

Speaker 4 (36:27):

We're just always working and we're just constantly texting back and forth with John. I'm sending a voice memos back and forth to each other about things like, yeah, whether John is there or not, we're going to make the music happen pretty much. And even if he's not there, it's kind of almost like he is there because the studio is a guest house at his actual house, so his house is on the same property, so a lot of the time he's there. And to be honest, yeah, he doesn't tour that much anymore. He plays maybe 20 shows a year or so, but he's very involved with just taking meetings and finding new bands and a and r, stuff like that. He's very involved with that kind of stuff, so if there's not a band or if we're just doing guitars or drums or making tracks and doing anything that's not vocal oriented, John will be around just taking meetings, just trying to get us really cool projects.

(37:25):

And then at the same time, he will be like, I'll be sending him songs and he will be jamming 'em in the car and sending me notes. And then he will come home and he will pop in the studio and we'll chat and hang out and he will listen to what we're doing and give us suggestions and stuff. So he's kind of just all over the place, just bouncing around. But it sounds like you guys have a pretty well-oiled machine going on though. Yeah, I would say that we do. It's pretty cool. How close to the studio do you live? I live with Matt actually, and we live 20 minutes away. The studio is just outside of Los Angeles, maybe 30 minutes outside. And yeah, we're right in LA pretty much,

Speaker 5 (38:06):

Yeah, Zach and I are together 24 7 basically studio, then back to the apartment, then back to the studio, just over and over.

Speaker 6 (38:15):

What do you guys do to get away from it?

Speaker 4 (38:17):

Well, something that's really cool. So when I started working out for John, I worked seven days a week, just like nonstop, and it was gnarly. I once went eight months without a day off. It was just crazy. But I was cutting my teeth and I loved every second of it. And John would literally come to me and be like, dude, you got to take a day off. Come on, you got to take a day off. And I'd just be like, nah, nah man, I'm good. I'm good. But then on the last five seconds of summer album, we did five Seconds of Summer, is a and r guy. He's like the pinnacle of a and r people. I think. He's incredible at what he does. He's amazing, and he's just super straightforward. He's British and he is just brutal. He is absolutely the most brutal person I've ever met.

(39:05):

He scares John and that's very rare, but he came to the studio to take two meetings over the course of making that record and each meeting we played him a ton of songs and he walked away from both meetings being super pumped. He usually doesn't make it through the first 10 seconds of a song. And the second meeting, he made us play a song for him three times in a row, which he said is unheard of. And John was just so pumped on that, and he was like, I'll give you whatever you want. What do you want? You want a new car? What do you want? And I was like, can we have weekends off? And he was like, yeah. So it, it's great now that, I mean, we'll still come in a couple hours on if I'm really feeling something, I'll come in on a Saturday or Sunday to do it, or if we really need to do something like John really needs us to get it done. I have no issues working a weekend, but for the most part we have Saturday and Sunday to relax, and then during the week we pretty much don't sleep and just go super hard at the studio. So that's been amazing. Do

Speaker 2 (40:13):

You feel like the quality of your work has gone up since you've earned your weekend?

Speaker 4 (40:16):

I do. Oh yeah.

Speaker 5 (40:18):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (40:18):

100%. Because

Speaker 4 (40:20):

The thing is, I always look forward to Friday, it feels like kind of being in high school again, but I always look forward to Friday stoked to sleep in on Saturday and go chill with my friends and stuff. And then I'm always stoked to get back in on Monday because over the weekend I'm constantly just thinking about what we're working on and I come up with ideas that if I was just working seven days a week, I don't know if I would've thought of the ideas that I think of that come to me on a weekend.

Speaker 3 (40:47):

You can't have creativity without some rest.

Speaker 4 (40:50):

Yes, I agree. And I think the weekend is a luxury that not a lot of people get to have. So I'm really fortunate that I have it right now.

Speaker 2 (40:57):

I just think you got to earn it, basically.

Speaker 4 (40:59):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (40:59):

There comes a point where you can demand it like you did, and I just think that it takes proving yourself long enough to where you can just say, look, I need a day off or two days off a week and a story upfront and cool. No problem.

Speaker 4 (41:14):

Yeah, it's been great. It's awesome. I think it's good for John too. I think John likes it too. He's never really done that ever before. He's just used to working seven days a week, but now the whole thing kind of just stops over the weekend. And the thing is, labels take weekends off and managers try to take weekends off a lot from my experience. So

Speaker 2 (41:37):

Yeah,

Speaker 4 (41:38):

They do. I dunno, maybe not managers, but it's like no one's working on the weekend anyway, so that's why it's a great thing if I want to go catch up or something while no one's working, I could go on a weekend. But otherwise, it's just knowing that we don't work on weekends. And the bands love it too. Joel is super

Speaker 2 (41:57):

Strict with his hours with bands like,

Speaker 6 (42:01):

Oh yeah, I got bankers hours over here. They come in at eight in the morning and I go home at five o'clock now. I usually end up coming in early and staying later and working in weekends at all kinds of crazy hours. Sometimes you got to come in at 1130 at night and stay till 4:00 AM and then get up at six and repeat. But aside from that, I find most people are really receptive to it too. A lot of bands have made the comment, especially the LA bands that are used to come in and starting at noon when they come out here, they're like, dude, this is cool. I can go home and watch the game, watch some tv, eat dinner, relax, then wake up, recharge, and come back to the studio. I mean, it's not for everybody, but when you're producing a record, you call the shots and everybody else deals with it.

Speaker 5 (42:41):

Yeah, I think it's great. And when you're there too, they know it's go time. The band's like, okay, we have eight or 10 hours and we got to get shit done.

Speaker 6 (42:50):

You can be super focused and go super hard. I mean, I'd rather go really hard for eight hours and not move and take maybe one 15 minute food break or something like that than I would sit there and screw off all day and work every other hour.

Speaker 3 (43:03):

I'm the opposite. I like to do,

Speaker 6 (43:07):

Done

Speaker 3 (43:08):

30 minutes of work and an hour of break and just repeat that.

Speaker 2 (43:14):

I get periods of intense brain activity and then it stops and I feel like the light bulb turned off and I need to kind of, I've just noticed that this is how I work, so I'm more like Joey in that the light bulb turns on and it's fucking great, and then the light bulb burns out and you got to just stare at a wall or do something and then yeah, you guys

Speaker 6 (43:41):

Got to come hang out with me, man. I even pissed with a sense of urgency. Oh,

Speaker 2 (43:47):

Well, there's a lot of urgency when the light bulb's going. Yeah, absolutely. It's intense.

Speaker 3 (43:53):

What's one of the most ridiculous requests from a band, if you've had any? What do you think, Matt? I

Speaker 5 (43:58):

Think most of the ridiculous requests come from Feldman himself. When I first got there, it was like my first day and he was like, yo, so I really like the soy milk from Starbucks, so you're going to have to go down there. They're not going to sell it to you, but you're going to have to make 'em sell it to you. So get on that. And I'm just like,

Speaker 4 (44:21):

Yeah, every intern's done that one. It's like you got to go to Starbucks and literally fight the Starbucks employee to give you soy milk.

Speaker 5 (44:28):

I feel like that's

Speaker 4 (44:29):

The first test of the Sendai master. He goes,

Speaker 6 (44:33):

Oh, how did you accomplish that task?

Speaker 4 (44:35):

I remember he asked our intern Brian the other day, he was like, can you make my dog's breath smell better? Just stuff like that. I love that. I mean, yeah, in terms of bands, I don't think, I guess the most ridiculous request would be a singer asking to sound like Michael Jackson or something when they sound nothing like Michael Jackson. But I think for the most part, the bands are usually pretty. I just feel like we've been super fortunate over the past year and a half. We've just worked with great bands and got along with all of them amazingly, and it's just been really smooth.

Speaker 5 (45:16):

Fortunately, we live in a day and age where that kind of pompous rockstar asshole attitude has gone away somewhat, where we don't have to deal with that and everybody is kind and sweet and we realize that there's a common goal and there's not the asshole asking for all red Skittles in a fucking bowl. They're not big enough to do that. No one will put up with it anymore. And so that's the kind of cool thing about all these bands is some of them are sizable, but yeah, it's not like what's coming.

Speaker 4 (45:52):

I honestly feel like when I worked with smaller local bands years ago, there was more of rockstar attitude than there is with bands all time low five seconds of summer or something. I don't know why that is, but it's so weird to me

Speaker 3 (46:08):

That I think it's because we've identified this before. It's the local guy who's known for being really good at drums or something if that ever goes away, it's pretty much all he has. So

Speaker 4 (46:20):

They

Speaker 3 (46:20):

Guard it as if it's I'm the best and no one can touch

Speaker 2 (46:25):

Me. Not just that. Also, all they know about the reality of the music industry is zero. I mean, they've seen what they see on YouTube or documentaries, which are always bullshit, and that's their impression of how stuff works. So they go to a studio and expect that it's going to be how they've seen it with their favorite bands and just have no idea that first of all, it doesn't actually work. You see it in those documentaries and second of all, you're not Pantera.

Speaker 3 (46:56):

Yeah, exactly. We have some questions from the audience and then I have a question that I want to ask after that. So is that cool if we jump into those?

Speaker 4 (47:06):

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (47:07):

Okay, so let's see here. First question is from subscriber Nathan. I love the way the guitar sound on Weird Kids by We Are The End Crowd. What was his work on that?

Speaker 4 (47:20):

Okay. Weird Kids was, all right. So we have a stack of Boutique Amps at the studio. We have a bad cat, a Sano, Matts EVH 51 53, which is awesome. A Hi Watt and a Ketner, A Husen Ketner Weird Kids was The Rhythms were, I think they were all Bad Cat, which is awesome. That Amp is super spongy. Yeah, the rhythms were bad Cat. And then the leads were Sano, that's my go-to lead Guitar Amp. And yeah, they go through this old Marshall cab that John used to tour with that has vintage thirties in it, and it's just like super beat up and old. And then, yeah, it's through John's famous mic position, which is the old school. Sure. Beta 57 on one speaker and then a sure KSM 32, which is, I don't know why he uses that on guitar, but it sounds really good. And that's just tucked underneath the beta 57. So then that goes into Pro Tools and those two signals get blended together. And then the EQ that we do on guitars is, or for that record, was the Waves, SSL, just pretty much cranking up the eight K to wherever it sounds good and doing anything else you need. And then the Renaissance X just to compress it. And that's it. John on

Speaker 2 (48:45):

Red is asking two part question. How do you typically pan your overheads in drum room mics relative to the guitars in the mix and how tightly edited was singularity.

Speaker 4 (48:58):

Okay. So yeah, overheads in rooms, I pretty much just always do a hundred percent either way. And then Singularity, that North Lane album. Yeah, that was when I was working for Will Putney. That was a while ago. Will doesn't, we grid the drums and stuff, but Guitar Wise Will doesn't edit guitars. We just track them until they're good enough. So I guess the drums were really tightly edited, but the guitars were not. And that must take a while. Yeah. I think the way Will tracks guitars, which I think is really cool, is he uses logic, and Logic is amazing with looping things, so he just loops his section over and over till they get it right. Which I think that's a really cool way to do things.

Speaker 2 (49:43):

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 4 (49:44):

Especially for Extreme Metal. Well,

Speaker 2 (49:46):

Yeah, because they'll get it right time number 14 out of 28. Yeah,

Speaker 6 (49:53):

Just play it

Speaker 2 (49:54):

For Well, yeah, but even if I was playing it for him, sometimes it'll be like that, just like, because you got to get into the flow of it, and then once you're in the flow of it, things start to get the tone of it. And then

Speaker 6 (50:05):

I'm hearing a lot of excuses. I dunno,

Speaker 3 (50:08):

That's

Speaker 2 (50:09):

Worked for me. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (50:10):

That makes sense. A all, yeah. Yeah, I like that. Why? That's cool.

Speaker 3 (50:13):

Ruhi is asking, did stick to your guns come in with the Crown as it was, or did you make it that way? I really liked the long melodic part going into that simple but really effective breakdown. I was wondering if it was the producer's choice or if it was already written that way.

Speaker 4 (50:28):

I think a lot of the music to that song was written, which is strange. I could talk about this later, but John usually does vocals first before anything. But yeah, stick to your guns. A lot of the music was written to that. And then, yeah, John just worked on the vocals pretty much. So yeah, that was a production thing. All right. So James Casper's

Speaker 2 (50:47):

Asking, how do you handle ultra high pitch vocals like Kel and Quinn? Do you use a lot of low harmonies and are backing vocals to achieve a thick vocal

Speaker 4 (50:54):

Sound for any harsh vocalist or just something, or, I don't want to say harsh, but anything that's just really high that might have some undesirable frequencies? I'll use the UAD, I think it's the a RT 1 0 2 or 2 0 2 tape machine to smooth it out a little bit. And then I'll do a little bit of surgical EQ on the high frequencies. And then I'll use, I'll do a lot of desing. Sometimes I'll have three DSRs going, and sometimes I'll actually just go down and adjust the gain of each S if the S's are too gnarly and stuff. So it's pretty much just finding ways to warm it up like that.

Speaker 2 (51:36):

Okay, awesome. Someone was asking which D you use, but you use Pro tools. I know that. So

Speaker 3 (51:41):

I have one question. Okay. Have you heard the Secret Attack Attack album?

Speaker 4 (51:46):

I have, yes. I want to hear it. Or actually, I think I've only heard, it's funny that you mentioned that we were looking for that last week for some publishing thing, but I've, I think I've heard two songs. It's really cool. It's really poppy, but really heavy. But yeah, I haven't heard the whole album, but yeah, I've heard some of it.

Speaker 3 (52:10):

That happened right after me. They worked with me, and then the next thing they did is they did that whole album with Feldman. I was like, oh, really? Yeah. So I was like, okay, well, I want to hear What's the big Deal. Never came out.

Speaker 4 (52:25):

Yeah, I don't know why. I dunno, I guess it happened. Did the band explode

Speaker 2 (52:29):

Or implode?

Speaker 3 (52:31):

No. Well, yeah, the band Implo, but also I don't think that they were ready to take that step, which got it. Yeah, if you've heard the songs, it's scary. Yeah. If you've heard the songs, then it's probably a little bit more in that commercial vein.

Speaker 4 (52:47):

Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely choruses and simple structures and stuff. If it's a Feldman production, I dunno, bands, I think that's the most important thing of when bands come into me, the number one most important thing is to be open-minded, because a lot of bands come in and they're really scared because John likes to, in general, he just likes to push things really hard in his life. And with bands, he just loves to push a band as far out of their box as they can go until they start really screaming that we need to take it back a little bit. And that's one of his secrets to making great records, I think. And a lot of bands are really scared to go outside the box and experiment and do I think you got to

Speaker 3 (53:34):

Do that

Speaker 4 (53:34):

Completely different? Oh, no. Yeah. I think it's crucial. And I think just being open-minded to anything and just giving everything a shot and just seeing what happens is crucial. And I think that's what makes some bands last for a long time. And some bands just kind of

Speaker 3 (53:52):

Die. I had a vocalist for Ms. May I come in and kind of tell me like, all right, this is pretty much my vocal range. This is as high as I can sing, and this is as low as I can sing, et cetera. And I'll be writing a melody and it just needs that one note that can't hit. It needs to go up there, man. And he's like, I don't know, man. I don't know if I can do it. I'm like, you're going to do it because you got to branch out. And six months later he's on the road and he's sending me little cell phone videos of him hitting those notes live and going, thanks so much, dude, for pushing me, because I do this every night now and it's awesome.

Speaker 4 (54:39):

How nice. Yeah, I just saw 'em this past week and they're great. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:43):

I got to say that, just to wrap this back to what we were talking about earlier, that by having, we were talking about starting points and templates and all that stuff, having that stuff taken care of to where you can just get to work is what will allow you to experiment and push bands when you're on the clock and under the gun and you have to get shit done. And a lot of it done that, having all the dumb stuff just taken care of is what will give you the time to even start to be creative.

Speaker 4 (55:14):

Yeah. I think another way that comes into play is so when, say a band comes in for a day and they write a song, it's like John will go outside and do his yard and walk around for a half an hour with his acoustic guitar, and then he will come back in with a chorus, and if the band loves it, then we'll go with that and work from there. And if they don't like it, then he will come up with something else. But once he has that chorus, he basically goes, to me, make it sound like a hit in five minutes so that the band gets stoked. Because some people don't realize how good a song is until they hear it fully realized. And just being able, when you have such a short time with a band and just being able to get your ideas out quickly is crucial. So that's how starting points come into play.

Speaker 2 (56:03):

Well, thanks dudes for coming on. You guys are great guests and great people, and everyone should aspire to be like you. Thanks,

Speaker 5 (56:10):

Man. Oh, thank you. Pleasure.

Speaker 2 (56:12):

But actually, no congrats on everything that you guys have accomplished. And yeah, kick ass. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for

Speaker 5 (56:19):

Having us, man.

Speaker 1 (56:20):

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (56:20):

Yes.

Speaker 1 (56:21):

The Unstoppable Recording Machine podcast is brought to you by Ivans Guitars and Basses. Ivans strives to make high quality cutting edge musical instruments that any musician can afford and enjoy. Visit ivans.com for more info to ask us questions, make suggestions and interact. Visit urm.academy/podcast and slash podcast and podcast.