MATT BROWN: Mastering the click track, recording drums in bad rooms, and working with legends

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Line six. Line six is a musical instruments manufacturing company that specializes in Guitar, amp, and affects modeling and makes guitars, amps, effects, pedals and multi effects. We introduced the world's first digital modeling amp, and we're behind the groundbreaking pod multi effect, which revolutionized the industry with an easy way to record guitar with great tone. Line six will always take dramatic leaps so you can reach new heights with your music. And now your hosts, Joey Sturgis. Joel

Speaker 2 (00:35):

Wanasek and Eyal Levi. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Joey Forum podcast. How's everyone doing today? You got me sick, dude. I know.

Speaker 3 (00:44):

Did you guys just nail the mix yesterday?

Speaker 4 (00:47):

Yeah. Yeah, it went really well. We talk all over each other. We're in the same house. We're both sick. We may as well be eating from the same plate and going to the bathroom together. We're talking all over each other and yeah, this is what happens. Yes, we nailed the mix yesterday. And Joey, thanks for being a trooper. I know you were feeling like death and you stuck it out through that whole thing

Speaker 2 (01:15):

Like a champ. Yeah. Well, it's important to me. I really believe in the program. I think that it's a one of a kind and it is awesome. So I'm there until the end. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (01:29):

I didn't notice you were sick. I mean, I know you're sick, but you weren't acting like it, so that's cool. I'm just kind of saying this because it takes a lot of energy to talk to the camera for that many hours straight. So anyway, kudos. How are you doing, Matt? Oh,

Speaker 5 (01:48):

I'm doing great.

Speaker 4 (01:49):

Matt Brown is here. He is our special guest. Matt, I guess I'll introduce him because I've worked with him the most. Matt Brown is one of my favorites. Out of all the people I've met so far in this music world, one of the good guys, there aren't that many good guys. So when I say Matt's one of the good guys, I mean it. I've met him as the capacity of him being a drum tech for me in Florida on various albums, and out of all the drum techs I've worked with, he was the best. So I would always hire him, and the drums just always sounded better. And then I realized that it's also a killer engineer, so I've learned a lot of engineering tricks from him, and it's really nice to have a drum tech who I can ask engineering questions to or who can give suggestions because it's not just about how the drum is tuned, and it's also about how you're capturing it. So it's good to be working with someone who understands that. Then turns out that he's also a killer drummer and has had a professional career as a drummer and has his own studio, so kind of living the dream and would be just got a lot to say. So we're happy to have you on.

Speaker 5 (03:01):

Oh, thanks for having me, guys.

Speaker 4 (03:03):

Absolutely. Well, episode done. Thanks for coming up.

Speaker 3 (03:06):

Thanks for the introduction. That was great. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (03:08):

Cool.

Speaker 3 (03:09):

Well, we've also hired Matt for Drum Forge and man, he is quite the tech. So time to pick your brain. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:17):

Okay. Yeah, so why do you do this? No, no, no. Actually, in all seriousness, because I know that you're a drummer and an excellent drummer at that, how did Teching come about? Because I know that sometimes musicians don't see that as a possibility.

Speaker 5 (03:40):

Yeah, I guess it all starts with, I mean, my history with drumming in general, but not only drumming but drumming and studio work and engineering, it all comes from my family. My father and my mother, both musicians or were musicians. My dad had a career when I was born. He was a touring drummer with a Christian folk band, and so I kind of grew up around him playing in his band. We went on the road as a family quite a bit, and I started playing drums when I was three and was sitting in with his band by the time I was five and just kind of doing what little kids do and parents showing off their kids when they can kind of a thing. But it stuck with me and I really enjoyed it. And then when they kind of called it quits for touring, he had set up a studio in the garage.

(04:38):

This is in Jacksonville, Florida, so I remember being a kid and I had my own drum set in the living room, but he also had his set up in the garage where his big drum set was. And I used to go out there and play the records and it was awesome. And so I kind of just always played drums. They were always around and I wanted to be my dad. And so I did that and I did the normal middle school band thing and high school band and marching band and all that stuff, and I was just consumed by everything drums. And then when I was in high school, or shortly after that, shortly before that, I mean my dad, when we moved down to Orlando, he took a job with Heartland Records, which was the Christian record label associated with Full Sail at the time back in the eighties. And he was one of the a and r guys for Heartland Records. So as a little kid, I was running around the beginning of Full Sail, which was with Gary Platt and Gary Jones.

Speaker 4 (05:37):

That explains a lot.

Speaker 5 (05:39):

So I was running around the studios and the classrooms, and as a kid like 6, 7, 8 years old, hanging out in that environment of like, okay, there's recording studios everywhere. Everybody's a musician, that whole type of thing.

Speaker 4 (05:54):

So nobody ever told you that this is unrealistic, you just grew up on it. So probably, and I share this because my dad being the conductor, I grew up around him and all the guest soloists are the best in the world, and just always traveling to concerts. And it didn't even dawn on me that a music career is unrealistic for most people.

Speaker 5 (06:19):

Yeah,

Speaker 4 (06:19):

It's how I grew up. It just made sense. I bet it's exact same thing for you.

Speaker 5 (06:25):

Oh yeah, totally. And my dad and my mom both were nothing but supportive of music. My mom is an angel because I had my dad's drum set set up in our new house down when we moved to Orlando. I set it up in the garage and I would play it every night, and literally one drywall wall separated the garage from the kitchen. And so I would be playing drums as loud as I can, and the rule was I just had to stop when dinner was ready and that couldn't play it anymore after that. So she would put up through me playing whatever I was into at the time, which ranged from Huey Lewis in the news, to to rush to whatever drumming stuff. I was inspired by a lot of Toto as well, but playing that kind of stuff. And all she could hear was the drums coming through the wall while she was making dinner every night.

(07:18):

My parents were nothing but supportive. And then to kind of fast forward through the story, my dad ended up becoming the house engineer for Harcort Brace Givi, which was the publishing company that used to own SeaWorld and a huge corporate book publishers. And of course, they always had the company book on tapes to go with those language programs or the math programs or whatever. So he was the house engineer for them when they downsized the company and laid him off, he opened his own studio. So this is right at around the time that I was like 14, just started high school. He opened his own studio. He happened to take all of the work that he was doing at Hardcore Brace as well as was now able to work for other corporate people doing these book on tapes and doing Foley work for films and whatever, plus a little bit of music here and there. So I started working for him when I was 15.

Speaker 4 (08:17):

So let me get one thing straight though. Was he like a trained engineer or was he a musician who fell into engineering?

Speaker 5 (08:24):

He was a musician who started school for electrical engineering and decided that he wanted to learn how to record. And so in the seventies, he started reading and everything he could find on recording. And of course, his band had been in several studios, so he had learned from the environment that he was in, but also he's one of those guys that he's very, very intelligent and he learned a lot from reading on his own and then experimenting and experimenting. And I mean, honestly, he's one of the best engineers I've ever met ever. And I'm not just saying that he is my dad, I'm saying that because he gets some amazing sounds out of his studio. So I started working for him when I was 15. I edited tape, I edited dialogue on tape for six months, and then he was one of the first people to, and at least in Florida, to invest in this new thing called Digital Audio, which was Pro Tools version one, which was known as Sound designer. In 1991, he put up the thousands and thousands of dollars to buy one of the first rigs in Florida.

Speaker 4 (09:36):

How much was it back then? Because I know that even now if you get the full scale Pro Tools, HDX, you're spending in the five figures. But

Speaker 5 (09:45):

What

Speaker 4 (09:45):

Was it back then?

Speaker 5 (09:46):

I believe it was, I mean, you had to buy a Mac two FX computer, which was like 3,500 bucks to begin with.

Speaker 4 (09:55):

Wow. They've always been expensive,

Speaker 5 (09:56):

Haven't they? Yeah. And then the Pro Tools stuff, the interface, and I believe that was another 30 grand, and then the hard cheat

Speaker 4 (10:05):

Sheet. Wow. I almost spit out my drink. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (10:07):

Well, the crazy part is the hard drives Giant two space rack mount hard drives, 128 megabytes, which was massive for the time, and those would run two grand a piece. So when you're running dialogue and those big books and stuff that he was, those programs that he was recording and editing, we had probably at one point we had three computers up and running with Pro Tools HD on 'em or the old hd. And then we had these giant rack space, probably 12 space racks filled with hard drives and three different rooms.

Speaker 4 (10:47):

So does it blow his mind where it's at now where a terabyte is nothing and people can just record on a Mac Mini even?

Speaker 5 (10:58):

I mean, sure. I'm sure he is blown away by all of it. I mean, he still has all that stuff. We have it at one of his studios. He's got it all storage, and it's kind of there on display the history of Macintosh computers plus the history of hard drives. It's pretty crazy

Speaker 4 (11:15):

Pro tools

Speaker 5 (11:16):

And pro tools as well. Yeah, he is got all the gear, all the ones he didn't trade in at least. So yeah, so that kind of brings me to where I was learning how to really play drums, being in high school and being exposed to players that were better than me. But I was also learning how to edit dialogue and record and engineer on this brand new thing called Pro Tools all at the same time. So the most influential years of what I would consider most players if they start young, usually the teenage years are the part where is a time where you go crazy, learn how to play as fast as you can and as many notes as you can. And

(11:55):

I'm crazy about this and I'm going to learn how to be as fast and as best as I can be. Well, that happened at the same time that I was learning engineering side of things as well. So it was kind of like, well, if I'm going to learn how to play, I might as well learn. How do I make things sound good as well? And that's when I dove into the drum tech side of things and I just started dissecting the drums. I am one of those people that it's in my nature to when I get something, the first thing I do is take it apart and see how it works and then try to put it back together other. So that's what I did with, I started doing that with drums and I realized, oh, this drum has a different type of bearing edge than another drum does. And these are different types of wood, and why do they sound different? Or this is a different depth and a different diameter. All these different things happen to these different drums. How do I get them to sound the best for what they're doing? And of course, that opened the door to drum heads and everything else involved with making a drum sound the way it sounds.

Speaker 4 (13:04):

So it was just an extension of your passion for playing and learning music. It wasn't like a chore, because the reason I'm saying that though is because for me, setting up a guitar is a chore, and I know a lot of people like that, and it doesn't make them a better or worse musician. I just know some people would rather just not deal with that kind of thing. The kind of person who doesn't take things apart and then put them back together. It's a personality trait and not everyone has it. So that's why I was just kind of curious where that came from, because I think that to get really, really good at something like that, you have to be passionate about it or you'll be so bored that you'll quit.

Speaker 5 (13:46):

Yeah. Well, I always viewed it as I didn't really think about teching for other people until I started working for you and the other guys here in town, which is really, yeah, yeah. Well, because before that, people just hired me to play on the record, and part of hiring me to play on their record was me bringing my drums that sounded better than anybody else's. So the figuring out how to tune drums and choose the right heads and get the sound that somebody wanted was part of one, identifying myself and giving myself my own sound. But two in an age where before editing got super popular with drums, it was either you could play the part or you couldn't. And I spent most of my twenties, actually almost all of my twenties, where most guys would be out on the road with playing with bands and touring and kind of getting better that way.

(14:43):

I was the guy that played on everybody's records. Instead, I was hired, I was the first call studio drummer for anything, rock and pop and country in town, and worked with a lot of great producers in town. So I spent my twenties playing as a studio drummer, not getting credit on records, and basically the guy behind the closed doors not really supposed to talk about who I'm playing with, but I'm playing on this record today type of a thing. And part of the reason I got picked for that wasn't just my ability to play to a click and be creative, but also my drums sounded better than anybody else's. And that was probably the first reason that most people called me is his drums sound great.

Speaker 4 (15:25):

Something that's interesting, whenever you do a drum session with me, whenever I do a drum session period, I always take samples of the kit. I think lots of people do that. It's just a really commonplace thing to do. But just for everyone listening, when I'm doing a record with Matt, which is nine out of 10, when it comes time to take the kit samples, I'll actually have Matt hit the drums on the kit rather than the drummer in the band because it just sounds so much better. It's unbelievable how much better it sounds.

Speaker 3 (15:59):

I'll back that up. I mean, I've recorded enough drum samples in my life that I can't think of a better example of where we talk about the player mattering all the time, guitar playing, et cetera. It's amazing how five different drummers can hit a drum and do a drum sample. I've literally had, for example, the guitar player walk in and hit the drum better than the actual drummer. I was recording with the band that day on the kit, and just the way they attack it, the way they hit it with the stick, it just sounds better.

Speaker 4 (16:26):

Yeah,

Speaker 5 (16:27):

It's definitely in the hands, for sure.

Speaker 4 (16:28):

Yeah, so I mean, I guess you put all that together, the right hands with the right tuning

Speaker 5 (16:33):

And

Speaker 4 (16:34):

All that in a high pressure situation, of course, you're going to get called back

Speaker 5 (16:38):

And I can actually play to a click. So that was like, oh, he can play to a click. So that's good too.

Speaker 3 (16:44):

That's amazing. How many drummers,

Speaker 4 (16:49):

I actually had no idea about that part of your career.

Speaker 5 (16:52):

Yeah, like I said, I spent my twenties in the studio a lot, and the other thing that I was doing during that time was playing at Disney World, and when you play to the shows out at Disney World, all those shows are on click because of the character voices. And so I was playing with guys here. There I am at the Magic Kingdom playing in front of the castle with guys that are my dad's age and guys that are legends. There's horn players that played with Phil Collins and Buddy Rich, the rhythm section guys, like the bass players that had toured with countless big bands and just legends on a whole nother level and a different era I was a part of. And I was playing drums on the show with them because I knew how to play to a click. And I learned how at Disney to not just play with a click, but how to play around a click because the Disney shows half of them were done as a pre-programmed, okay, this is an actual metronome click.

(17:55):

And then the other half was the band went into the studio, recorded the tune without a click, and then they took the band out for the live shows, and somebody added a click in by hand. So you had to learn how to average a tempo between the first four clicks of the first measure, and then look at a longer phrase and how the vocals line up with that phrase and kind of move around with this beak, beak, beak, beak going in your ear the whole time. So it really kind of helped develop this ability for me to play exactly on a click push ahead of the click pull behind a click push single limbs in front and behind a click just to make things feel a certain way. And that was a big part of the reason that was getting called to do studio sessions as well. They could put a click up and it wouldn't feel like a robot.

Speaker 3 (18:48):

Can I just say that I feel like as a producer, one of the biggest and most overlooked skills that I seen drummers absolutely fail at is being able to play to a metro drum. I've watched guys who will blow your mind when they play and then they walk into the studio all cocky. They sit down and they record the song for eight hours and they still even can't even get through the verse. And it's happened to me so many times, and it's almost to the point where I used to have it as part of my, you'd hire a tracking engineer, you give 'em a mix sheet, I'd always send it in the email, make sure your drummer learns how to play to a click, or I'm going to send them home or call somebody in who can.

Speaker 4 (19:22):

Yeah, I feel like there's three stages to it, just to take what you just said a step further. Okay. So there's that stage where they don't know how and they're scared of it, and that just sucks. But then there's the stage where they kind of know how they're still kind of scared of it, and the best you can hope for is right on the click or right on the click until they hit a fill where they rush it and then they catch back up. And then there's the third stage, which is the best stage where the drummer is so comfortable with the click that he can push and pull depending on what the feel of the music needs. And he can make music around the click, and you don't even really hear it. It's like it almost disappears into the drums. The drums are giving so much pocket. That's rare though. That's very, very rare, but that's my

Speaker 3 (20:13):

Favorite. I almost feel like every drum set ever made you come with a little metronome or a click track iPod thing or something. So every drummer from day one learns how to play to a click because it's just such an invaluable skill.

Speaker 4 (20:24):

Dude, I got to say though, when I started recording a lot, there were many fewer people, at least in heavy music who played to a click. When I started recording drummers playing to a clique, that was almost unheard of. Only very few guys who would come in would've done them. They were always the super serious ones, obviously, or guys who had come up through band or something like that. But nowadays, it's a lot more commonplace. I mean, 10, 15 years ago, at least in this style of music, it was really rare to find a drummer who would even consider it. There were deathly terrified of it. Well, I don't think so anymore. But there was this weird misconception that playing to a metronome would kill your style or your feel or something.

Speaker 5 (21:10):

Yeah, I could see that. Well, I mean, the biggest difference I've noticed is I'm a little bit older than you guys and kind of a little bit in that weird area between generations as far as how technology has affected music and specifically how technology has affected the players. We're in a place right now where a lot of the younger players, and by younger I mean in their mid twenties and younger, are playing to records that are perfectly quantized when they learn how to play music. So as a drummer, you're not really developing a sense of feel by playing to records. I grew up, and my dad, even my dad was a drummer, but he never taught me how to play drums. He just showed me how to work the record player, and he gave me three records to play, and this is going to show my age, but those records were Elton John Yellow Brick Road, the first ABBA record and the Beatles White album.

(22:09):

All great records, all great records, and they're all great on their own, but I mean, those weren't done to click. None of those records were done to click. So as a drummer, as a young kid, learning how to play to that, I developed this sense of push and pull that is natural with those records. Now you fast forward to the past probably, I would say probably almost 15, maybe even 20 years now, we're going on where everything has been tracked to a click and not only track to a click, but heavily edited to be almost exactly, if not exactly in time, very close. And you have generation of players that have grown up playing to music like that, developing their sense of timing on a whole nother level that I could never do. I mean, I could, but it would take me a lot longer because I'd have to unlearn a lot of the things that I've done to make myself sound like I sound. And a great example is Alex Inger that kid's a machine, and you don't need to edit him, and you don't need to quantize him because he's perfectly quantized. And I think a part of that reason would be the fact that he grew up playing to records that were already edited and quantized to begin with. I'm seeing it not only in drums, I'm seeing it in guitar players, and even singers are starting to sound like they're automatically auto tuning themselves as well. It's really weird.

Speaker 4 (23:34):

What's interesting about drummers like Alex, I've known a few guys like him that are machine-like, I mean really, really crazy good. And one of the first ones I ever met, he told me that he got to that level because he didn't realize that there was a such thing as editing. He just figured that that's how his heroes could actually play When they sat down to play that, that's what came out. So he forced himself to get that. Good.

Speaker 5 (24:02):

How disappointing must that have been when he found out that wasn't the case? Well,

Speaker 4 (24:08):

He's got a career now because he can actually do it. I think it's the same thing with Alex. I mean, from working with Alex, and I know from working with Alex that as soon as you hit stop on a take, he goes over to the practice pad and keeps playing.

(24:26):

Doing a session to Alex Inger means that you're going to be hearing something being hit with a drumstick all day long. So he has his drum set when you're recording, and then a practice, practice pedals with a practice like snare pad. And literally he will wake up in the morning and start playing on that thing for maybe an hour and a half, two hours. Then you'll track, and then if you need to take a break, if he maybe will get a drink or something, and then he'll be right back there for however long the break is. He's still there practicing his double bass, his blast beats. It's insane. It's almost like an Olympic athlete,

Speaker 5 (25:09):

I think. Yeah, it's crazy. He's insane. He's insane.

Speaker 4 (25:12):

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what it takes to be able to keep it up at that level, I think. Yeah,

Speaker 5 (25:17):

For sure.

Speaker 4 (25:18):

So I'm actually a little bit surprised that you started teching because of us and stuff. I am actually surprised that you weren't doing that before.

Speaker 5 (25:28):

Well, I mean, I'd always teched on my own recordings, and even if I wasn't playing, if I was producing band or recording whoever, and there was drums, I would always tech on that stuff. But honestly, it came down to the fact that I was on the road for a good five year stretch between two different bands. And when you're on the road, most of the year, people just forget that you're home. And they, well, he's on the road, obviously, and they just think that. And so it took me a while once I stopped touring in 2012 to really put my name back out there in town, like, Hey, I'm home. And not only am I available to play, I'm available for session work as a drummer, I have a studio and I can also drum tech.

Speaker 4 (26:18):

So how is it different? I mean, it might seem obvious to me, but I'm actually curious how different you have to differently. You have to approach it when you're working with somebody else versus doing it for yourself.

Speaker 5 (26:33):

Oh, well, when you're working for somebody else, the first thing I try to do when I'm working for anybody is have them send me examples of the sounds that they like or give me an idea of what they're going for by playing me a finished recording, a master, preferably

Speaker 4 (26:53):

When we work together, I'll always do that with him. We'll pull up the latest Gaira mix or something that Jay Russin did or what the band says that they want it to sound like. But we always will have a meeting, just me and Matt in the room for 10, 15 minutes and go through some records and be like, we kind of want a combination of the size of this, but with the punch of that and blah, blah, blah. Yeah,

Speaker 5 (27:17):

Yeah.

Speaker 4 (27:17):

And

Speaker 5 (27:17):

That for me is useful because for one, I know not only what drums are going to be picked to help get those sounds to begin with, but from an engineering side of things, I've dissected so many records, so I know what goes into making the drum sound the way it does, including the room mics and the mics, close mics and what choices you have. And even down to, I can tell most of the time what type of stick the guy was using, and it's like those type of, I've dissected what makes a drum sound the way it does under a microphone so much being on the engineering side of things as well. So it's very helpful for me to hear what the producer has in mind when we go into a project together.

Speaker 4 (28:05):

It's always good, I think, to have a vision for what you're going to to be going for. Otherwise you can just get into an endless loop of is this good? Is it not? Is it good?

Speaker 5 (28:19):

Right,

Speaker 4 (28:20):

Is it not?

Speaker 5 (28:20):

Yeah. And I feel like on my own side, like me when I produce stuff, I have a finished product in my head already before a single thing has been recorded, and I have an idea of, okay, if I want it to sound like this at the end, then I obviously need this type of drum sound. I need this type of bass tone. I need this type of guitar thing, and the singer, I want to have kind of this thing. So when I'm producing a project or have control of something like that, I already know what it's going to sound like from the time they've played me the demo song. I hear it and I go, okay, here's what I want to do arrangement wise. Here's what I want to do with the sounds. And I just go and I follow my instinct. But when I'm working for somebody else, I'm not in their head.

(29:06):

I need information. I need them to tell me what they want. So the easiest way to do that is just to get audio examples. Here's what I want to hear. And then that allows me to kind look at what's available in the studio, wherever we might be, not only with drums, but also with heads and microphones and kind of go, okay, if you want that sound, I know it's going to be these drums tuned with this way with these heads, and it's probably these mics, but we can mess around with the mics once we get the drums up. But I know that at least ballpark wise, we're this area, and I'll have two snare drums that are definitely going to be the culprits and a tuning range for the Toms that fits within that style, depending on how much attack and tone there are and things like that. So that's the main difference between when I do things myself versus working with another producer.

Speaker 4 (30:01):

So that might sound really, really scary to some of the people listening because they might just have one kit and a shitty room and a small budget microphones like the shore drum microphone kit or something. So how would you approach that, say that I hired Matt Brown and Matt Brown shows up, and all I have is this trashed out kit and five microphones and stuff. What would you do? And also what would you recommend for people who are in more of a situation like that who are trying to get better? Face it. Some of the situations me and you work in are unrealistic for a lot of the people listening.

Speaker 5 (30:45):

Oh, yeah, I'm completely aware that I have 25 snare drums at my studio here

Speaker 3 (30:51):

Only. Come on. So

Speaker 5 (30:52):

Disappointed. Well, I mean, it's all I have available right now, but yeah, I realize that that's not the case, and most people only have one of anything really. It all depends to me. I've recorded a lot of great things and really crappy situations as far as the gear sounds like crap, the room sounds like crap, and these are cheap mics and whatever, and no preamps just using a Mackey console and I've recorded some stuff. That sounds great. By tackling it from the idea of embracing what you do have, looking at the strengths of what do you have that is in your favor. So if your room has a massive low end buildup, use it to your advantage by tuning the drums to where they don't have a lot of low end to begin with. And that way the room kind of balances out the kit itself by the amount of low end the room has in it, or vice versa.

(31:53):

If the room isn't very bright and you need more brightness to it, so will tune the drums to get to or choose the heads that would give you more slap and more attack and less round, less fat. Approach it from the idea of a scale if you have the benefits are, I have this pretty cool sound and snare drum in this room. It sounds great. I don't really need to change it, and I like the way it sounds, and I noticed that the room has this nice blossom on the low end for the snare drum, but when you take that snare drum out of the room, you realize, okay, this is very thin sounding everywhere else. Well, that would tell you that your room has a low end buildup, so how do you make the rest of the drums sound the best in that room?

(32:41):

You just kind of go with the idea of, okay, just let's additive or subtract the eq. You wouldn't want to boost things that already had a lot of low end. You'd probably want to shave some of that stuff off to make it sit better in the mix. Same type of thing with tracking. Go from the point of what are the strongest things of this kit that I have? Well, it has a lot of attack. Perfect, okay, let's get some heads that help accentuate those good qualities. And if it's really, really bad and there's nothing you can do to get it to sound better at, that's the point where you go invest in maybe some triggers and use an idea of getting a balance and using room mics, like setting up a pair of room mics that can capture somewhat of a room sound, even though it might not be the room sound you're using, but something to glue the whole kit together and then slap some triggers on there and just record the clicks, go back, replace the sounds, and then that room mic that you've captured, maybe just squash it and turn it into something interesting to layer in with those trigger sounds.

(33:46):

And that way it kind of sounds somewhat natural and not completely and altered and fake.

Speaker 4 (33:55):

I got to say too, that how you're talking about low end resonance buildup in a room, that's not just something that happens in small crappy rooms.

Speaker 5 (34:06):

It happens in every room.

Speaker 4 (34:07):

For instance, Matt and I were just in LA filming for the upcoming creative live that we did with monuments, and it's a very expensive studio we were in, but that drum room that had that 300 build up, remember in everything, it was in every single microphone, no matter everything, just 300 was just building up. And we had to compensate for that across the board.

Speaker 5 (34:32):

And I mean, that was one of those situations where we chose, in particular the base drum heads without even knowing I had chosen the head that would be best for the job on the kick drum. We were kind of going with the idea of like, well, we want to get something a little bit more attack out of the kick drum. So I went with a clear pinstripe, which is a very old school choice for drum heads. If you listen to Toto four with Rosanna and Africa on air, that's a recording custom with a clear pinstripe bass drum head on it, and it has a lot of punch and a lot of attack, and the low end is hyped. It's not necessarily there on its own. It's definitely eqd into the mic. And so the idea was like, okay, let's get a little bit more slap out of this drum to begin with so you don't have to boost the highs and cause even more bleed and phasing problems with whatever's coming into that microphone. And it just so happened to be the right head choice for that room just out of luck, really.

Speaker 4 (35:33):

Yeah, it was a crazy amount of buildup, but every room is going to have its quirks. So I say that, that people realize that what Matt's saying is probably the best advice you can get work to the strengths because once you get into that mindset, you take that mindset with you everywhere you go, because no matter what, even in big studios, you're going to be solving problems. It's not like you one day get to a big studio and everything's perfect. It's definitely not like that at all.

Speaker 2 (36:06):

Yeah.

Speaker 4 (36:06):

Here's a question that comes up pretty frequently since we're on the topic of less than ideal scenarios. Lots of people ask how do they go about getting usable room sounds or simulating them? One trick that I would do is I would sometimes at my old place, not the Florida place, the one I used to have in Atlanta had a really bad drum room, but the hallway next to it sounded really cool for rooms. So I would mic up the wall and that would give me a good mono room sound. Somehow it worked and I've just learned to be creative. But what would you do?

Speaker 5 (36:46):

I mean, the hallway trick has been done in almost every studio I've worked at really, I mean, awesome. When I was doing session work, it was not uncommon for people to prop open the door to the tracking room and put a mic in Omni or an MS configuration in the hallway outside. I mean, if you can do that and you don't have bleed from the control room coming in, then I mean, you can create some really cool sounds by miking in other places than the actual room that the drums are in. If your room is super small and dead, which I've also done work in and had to make recordings that way and make 'em sound bigger that way, what I would do is a set of overheads, but not in a spaced pair, I would set 'em up in either an XY or a bloom line configuration, which is similar to the xy and basically that second set of overheads, you can press them to the point where they're not crunching out, but compress 'em.

(37:49):

And then instead of adding samples of a room or whatever, go to a nice reverb or a room sound on a reverb and start dialing in a mix of that verb, like tailor the verb to the length of the room you want, and then start mixing that in directly on that channel as opposed to using as it a sin, make it a direct plugin of the room reverb on that channel of that stereo room and start dialing it in until you find that point where it's like, okay, I'm not getting too much symbols now, it's kind of calmed down and I'm getting the impact of the drums in the room themselves via a reverb. And you could get away with some magic that way without even really trying.

Speaker 4 (38:32):

I want to harp on something you just said because Joey is a huge advocate of using inserts. Joey, you don't use any sins. I always have thought that it shouldn't be an argument. People argue sins versus inserts. Sins versus inserts. It's just another one of those dumb arguments. I've always said, just use what works best. It's cool to hear you coming from a legitimate engineering background, putting a reverb on an insert.

Speaker 5 (39:01):

Yeah. Well, I mean, there's nothing wrong with it as long as that's the only instrument you want to use that reverb on. I mean, I like to think of the insert the inserts as this is the individual channel sound that I want, and the sins are going to be, well, I'm going to send multiple instruments to this, whatever it is, and to get that kind of glue that happens when you send multiple things to a send.

Speaker 4 (39:23):

Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. So what about if there's just nothing usable in the room at that point, would you just try to get a fake room on there? Literally nothing.

Speaker 5 (39:33):

Yeah, and I've done sessions like that. I just mixed an EP for a local band, like a jam band in town, and they're like, we need this demo mixed. And they tracked it themselves, and the root sounds were pretty horrible to begin with, but there was no room mics. It was literally just overheads and close mics, and they used the same mic on every instrument. There's a guy here in Florida that's making these things called shotgun mics, and they're basically small diaphragm condensers in a shotgun shell, which is whether it's good or bad. Oh, I've seen those. I've heard of that.

Speaker 4 (40:10):

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Do you mean shotgun mic as in the shotgun mics that I

Speaker 5 (40:16):

Associate

Speaker 4 (40:16):

With video

Speaker 5 (40:17):

Or you mean? No, I mean the mics are inside of a shotgun shell,

Speaker 4 (40:20):

Like the shotgun that you shoot?

Speaker 5 (40:22):

Yes. The shotgun shell is the housing for the microphone. And that's his gimmick. That's his thing, yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:28):

Okay. They look sick. They look

Speaker 5 (40:30):

Really, they look sick. I'll tell you right now, from experience, the pickup pattern is super tight, which is good. Super, I think is the pattern on it, which is great, but they sound really, really bad. No top end to any of the microphones whatsoever.

Speaker 3 (40:49):

Maybe that's a good thing in

Speaker 5 (40:51):

Today's

Speaker 3 (40:52):

Day and age,

Speaker 5 (40:53):

I guess so. But I had to work really hard to get the drums to sound good by themselves, just in the close mic situation with that. And the majority of the mixing was the first track setting up the drum sound to make it sound good. And what I did in that situation, I had no room mics to work with, and everything was recorded live in the same room, so you had a little bit of guitar bleed coming into the overheads and a little bit of a bass coming into the kick drum and stuff like that. So what I did is I set up the drums once I got 'em there, and I was gating a little bit to kind of get rid of the bleed, but I set up a post fader, send on everything to a bus and then put in, I use the TL space, the IR convulsion room plugin, and I have that set up and there's a drum room on there that I really like. So I set up a post fader send to that drum room and use the fake, completely fake room on the whole thing. You listen to it and it's like, oh, it sounds pretty good. It's like it's in a room.

(42:01):

There's tricks to get around. Here's the other thing. Room sounds aren't necessary in certain genres. Sometimes rooms get in the way, and

(42:12):

You don't always have to have drum rooms on the recording. I mean, listen to ZZ Top La Grange, and there's no drum rooms in that, and it's super dry. I mean, it is like you can hear him breathing practically. It's so close micd on everything, but it sounds absolutely amazing, and you don't miss it. You don't miss the drum rooms at all. So it depends on what genre you're going for. And once again, this comes down to embrace the strengths. If you don't have a great sound and room to get room mics, maybe you should just approach it from the side of a more alternative type of approach, like more queens at the Stone Age or something like that, where it's super close mic sounding. And I tell you right now, if you can get a mix to sound great with no reverbs and no rooms, you're doing something right, because that is really, really hard to do when everything's super dry and super close micd only. It's really hard to get that to sound big and punchy and competitive with today's market. And if you're able to do it, you're going to be that much more of a better engineer on the backside when you do have that stuff available.

Speaker 4 (43:22):

It's interesting also in metal, some mixers use barely any room mics at all. Some do. It's a very popular trick to use a snare room to make a snare room sound to make the snare longer. But in terms of actual room mics, there are some guys who they'll get them and we'll mute them. Yeah,

Speaker 5 (43:47):

I mean, it all depends with the metal genre in particular. I've noticed that a lot of the stuff is so fast that if you are in a bigger space, kind of like your space in Florida or any place that you have the length to get away from the kit, you got to be careful because at a certain amount of feet, that length becomes a 32nd note in your production, not a room sound. And so you're faced with this situation where, yeah, I got this killer room sound until he does the blast beats, and all of a sudden the kicks and the snares are playing on top of each other because that's the timing of the microphone away from the kit in the room. And so is it good to have room mics at that point? I wouldn't say it would be. It'd be distracting. It'd be just making a muddy mess of those super fast beats.

Speaker 4 (44:35):

Well, that's why we put up a wall of gobos. Whenever we work with a super fast drummer in my room in Florida, we definitely build a fort, a gobo fort around the drums and behind, because otherwise, yeah, it's just a washed out mess. So that's another thing that I think people should realize is that sometimes having a big room is not to your advantage, especially if you're working with super fast music. However, tiny rooms can also suck.

Speaker 3 (45:09):

Yeah, they're pretty difficult. I had a tiny room for seven or eight years where it was like 10 by 11, and it was fun.

Speaker 4 (45:16):

How did you conquer it?

Speaker 3 (45:17):

Reverb and room samples cut in much bigger rooms than I had.

Speaker 5 (45:21):

Yeah, that's a great thing. You bring that up. The room sample thing is, I mean, yeah, you don't necessarily have to trigger the close mic sound, but if you trigger the room sound on a whole kit, it'll bring your whole kit to life in a whole nother way. That's a great alternative to sending to a reverb as well.

Speaker 3 (45:39):

Yeah. Then you just got to get it right on the overheads and make sure you don't screw them up. I mean, for example, vinyl Theater Ale was done that way in a little teeny room like that, and if it wasn't for all of the great room sounds and stuff that I had for samples, the drums wouldn't sound that cool. But I actually recorded that in recorder, man. So it was a very natural sound and that I blended that in with the sample and added ambiance accordingly in compression to make that room not sound like it was 10 by 11.

Speaker 4 (46:08):

Now, this might sound like heresy, and your answer might be never, ever, but at what point would you say, okay, maybe midi drums are better?

Speaker 5 (46:23):

Never. I just wanted to know. I only say it because I tried it. I produced a project for a female artist a long time ago, and I really liked, at the time, the v drums, it wasn't when they just came out, but was, I had just been like, okay, these things are pretty cool, but I hated the way the symbol sounds. So I tracked V drums with real symbols. I put up a set of overheads to capture the symbols and then played v drums, and it was a horrible idea. It was really, really bad. The only time I think that the electronic drums are really acceptable is if you're doing pre-production, the players just don't play the same. I play on electronic kits a lot. One of the gigs I was playing at Disney was on a v drumm

Speaker 4 (47:10):

Kit. Oh, oh, wait, wait. I didn't even mean playing. I meant programming. I meant programming from scratch.

Speaker 5 (47:17):

Here's the thing though, is a drummer doesn't play the same. So playing on an electronic kit, the drummer's not going to play the same way. He's not going to hit the same way. His timing's going to be messed up because he's not getting the same sounds. He's not hearing what he wants to hear. So I mean, if you don't play drums and you need drums on a piece and you can do it on electronic drums, then yes, that'll save you time from doing it on the keyboard by all means. And it's not to say that I just wouldn't do it. I have a friend that does this. He does TV commercials and stuff like that, drum sessions, and now he got rid of his studio and he does it all on a set of v drums with slate samples and then sends the midi and the slate, the printed slate samples to the house. And they use that all over the place. But that's also an industry. And what his gig is is so time, it's such on a quick turnaround that he doesn't have time to rent a room and go mic up the drums and all that. It's just much easier for him to sit down at electronic kit and play. But for me personally, I don't do it ever.

Speaker 4 (48:26):

I figured that that would be your answer. And even in the metal genre, I always see that as a last resort. I mean though, sometimes it does have to happen, or sometimes we do have to do that hybrid that you mentioned where

Speaker 5 (48:41):

It'll

Speaker 4 (48:42):

Be like sampled shells with real symbols or whatever. I always view that as the last resort, but at the end of the day, I would rather have great sounding program drums than mediocre sounding performed drums.

Speaker 5 (49:00):

Yeah, I mean, it's all preference. I don't really work in metal a whole lot except for the drum teching side of things. As an engineer and as a producer, I'm more in an alternative straight ahead, I guess. Not radio rock, but hard rock and even jazz and a lot of classic rock. I work with a lot of classic rock artists, and

Speaker 4 (49:23):

You should mention who some of them are because it's crazy.

Speaker 5 (49:26):

Well, I have the Beach Boys coming in on Wednesday to do vocals on a couple different projects and

Speaker 4 (49:32):

Yeah, that's just crazy, man.

Speaker 5 (49:34):

So I work a lot with that type of artist with the older guys that did it for real back in the day I, so I did the new Blues image record with Mike Panera and Mike Panera is one of the original members of Iron Butterfly in Aga DaVita, that song that everybody knows as well as Blues Image. And we did a new record here that was all remakes of Blues Image and Iron Butterfly tunes. The producer, the guy who owns the studio that I work out of, he was like, sonically, you do what you want to do. So I approached it from the idea of like, okay, we're doing obviously a classic rock record, the late sixties, early seventies, what are the most iconic sounds from that period and how do I capture them all on one record with the most fidelity? So my choice was John Bonham has probably the most identifiable drum sound in history that's from that era.

(50:35):

So I went with the drum sound of John Bonham and I have my vintage. I tuned them up and micd them the same way, and luckily we had a player that was a jazz player, the same kind of background, and I got those sounds that were very iconic for that era. So the way I am approaching things from an engineering standpoint is I would much rather have real anything, even if it sounds like crap versus a fake something or other, because I would embrace the crappiness, so to speak. How does these things sound by themselves in a raw file and how can I kind of go back to the first thing I said, use your strength and Okay, this drum sound isn't the best, but man, it sounds really cool if it's super trashy. So I would go super trashy with it, and as long as the genre permitted that thing, that type of approach, I would go that way. I mean, ultimately, I'm not going to be trying to do something that I don't feel I belong in the genre makes. I'm not going to get into the death metal genre as a producer ever because it's not my thing. I don't identify with that style of music personally.

Speaker 4 (51:53):

What's funny is, and this has happened quite a few times, is and bands will go to someone who is an awesome metal bands will go to someone who's an awesome producer, engineer, mixer in their own, but who just don't do metal thinking that just because a guy is great, that it'll go great and they come back with such a piece of shit

Speaker 2 (52:14):

And

Speaker 4 (52:15):

Then it always has to go to one of us or one of our friends to completely redo. That happens a lot. It is a genre that you have to know and be into, and I think staying out of it if you're not into it, is probably a smart idea.

Speaker 5 (52:32):

Yeah. I mean, the other thing is it sounds like after working with you guys, it sounds like there's a whole lot of work involved that I just don't really want to do. There's a lot of editing, there's a lot of tuning, there's a lot of things that I'm just not into. I'm used to, I work on the other side of the spectrum where as an engineer, it's important for me to have the sounds up as soon as possible and record everything because the first or second take from some of these older guys is the take, and sometimes

Speaker 4 (53:03):

I wanted to ask you about that actually. What is it, those guys, so there's guys whose names we can't mention, but let me just say that you've worked with some of the greatest all time legendary classic rock guys that everybody knows and everybody worships. How is that different than working with new guys?

Speaker 5 (53:22):

Well, first thing is, like I said, you're always recording. Even when you're getting levels, as soon as they start playing the instrument, you record because that magic thing that everybody talks about that happens in the studio, some of these guys, everything they play is magic. Literally everything that they touch, as soon as they start making noise, even if it's wrong, it's amazing. And so that's the first set of things is like, I don't have time to really spend getting a sound. I just have to get it up and get going and record as soon as it goes. And it's the producer's job to kind of dial him in and say, yeah, we need to get that again, because I want to change the sound. He's the one that speaks up and does that. As an engineer, I just have to make sure I'm capturing everything.

(54:10):

The second thing that's different is you don't tell them what to do. You don't have to. I mean, really it comes down to is the fact is when as a producer, I'm working a lot with, I'm really in an interesting point in my career because done so many things, but as an engineer and as a producer, I'm kind of on the way up working with a lot of really big names without having, you guys have these gigantic lists of artists that you've worked with, and I have a list of artists, but it's not massive. I just happen to be good at what I do, and at that luck meets time type of thing, I'm at the right place at the right time, and I have the skills to be able to move forward with it and not get fired. And you don't tell the older guys what to do.

(54:58):

The new guys, it's like force feeding everything or just kind of babysitting at sometimes to kind of get the performance that you want, or that's something that's usable. Even with the older guys, you don't have to do that at all. It's literally everything they do, even if it's terribly wrong, is still amazing. And so that's really cool. The amount of tracking time that you spend on things is so minimal in comparison to working with a younger band and a younger project, and it's definitely capturing the moment versus trying to make something that is amazing at the forever. It's a big difference of those two things, the older artists, they're mature and they've grown into what they are. By the help of somebody who was, they were young telling them what to do all the time, somebody's already done that work for them. For me, really, I don't have to do that anymore. I don't have to say anything except for, yeah, how do you feel about it? Do you want to do it again? They know, know how they feel about it. They know at the end of the take, oh, I messed up this one word. Let's punch it in.

Speaker 4 (56:12):

You did mention the beach boys, so we can just say that. Okay, so they're coming in. What are you going to try to tell those guys how to structure their harmonies or something?

Speaker 5 (56:23):

Not at all, not in the least bit. That is not my job is going to be to set up four microphones and press record and just let it happen. That's the thing is like we were talking earlier, the sound, the artist, they have their own sound and it's just about, I'm lucky to the point where all I have to do is capture the sound and I have to capture it as well as I can, and that's how I keep working is the artists are always very pleased with what they hear, which is great. So I'm doing something right, but that's my job, is to make sure they sound as good as possible. As far as performance goes, they don't need help from me. They know what they're doing.

Speaker 4 (57:06):

Sounds like a dream. Well, Matt, thank you so much for being here. Had a great time talking to you. Oh, thanks. Just that stuff just kind of blows my mind.

Speaker 3 (57:16):

Very, very interesting and it's so cool to get that perspective.

Speaker 5 (57:19):

Yeah, I, and ultimately I would say this is as any advice to young artists out there, whether you're engineers or musicians or whatever, is you need to have the drive to get to the point where you're considered one of those older artists. I think a lot of that is missing in today's music and in today's artist is like, there's no idea that I have to be the best ever so that everybody else's job is easier. That doesn't exist anymore. There's always this, well, they'll fix it later type of approach, and I really don't think that that's going to do anything for your career, regardless of what career you choose, but especially music, approaching things from the idea that somebody can fix it later doesn't mean success in a long career. It means that you might get a couple things that hit because you happen to be at the right place in the right time, but it's really not you. It's the other person doing the other work to fix you, to make you sound better is the reason that you're successful. Try to develop your own sound and try to make everybody who works around you feel like it's so easy to work with you. That's the ultimate point. And whether you're an engineer or a singer or a guitar player, that's how you want the other person to feel. That's on the other side of the glass, whatever side glass they may be.

Speaker 4 (58:43):

Absolutely right. Well, thank you, sir.

Speaker 5 (58:45):

Well, thank you.

Speaker 4 (58:46):

All right, we'll talk again soon. Sounds

Speaker 1 (58:48):

Good. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is brought to you by Line six. Line six is a musical instruments manufacturing company that specializes in Guitar, amp, and affects modeling and makes guitars, amps, effects, pedals and multi effects. We introduced the world's first digital modeling amp and we're behind the groundbreaking pod multi effect, which revolutionized the industry with an easy way to record guitar with great tone. Line six will always take dramatic leaps so you can reach new heights with your music. Go to www.linesix.com to find out more about line six. To get in touch with the URM podcast, visit urm.com/podcast and subscribe today.