BRAD BLACKWOOD: Mastering Across Genres, The Loudness Wars, and Getting Paid Upfront

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Bala ga Guitars. Founded in 2014, Bala ga guitar strives. To bring modern aesthetics and options to vintage inspired designs, go to bala ga guitars.com for more info. This episode of the podcast is also brought to you by Fishman inspired performance technology. Fishman is dedicated to helping musicians of all styles achieve the truest sound possible wherever and whenever they plug in. Go to fishman.com for more info and now your hosts Joey Sturgis, Joel Wanasek, and Eyal Levi.

Speaker 2 (00:00:33):

Hey everyone. Welcome to then Unstoppable Recording Machine podcast. It's the good old mastering month, and today we have Brad Blackwood with us who is quite an accomplished mastering engineer. Welcome Brad. How are you doing?

Speaker 3 (00:00:50):

Doing great. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 2 (00:00:52):

Absolutely.

Speaker 4 (00:00:52):

Thanks for coming on. I know that it was tough to schedule, but we've made it happen and we're stoked that you're here.

Speaker 3 (00:00:59):

Excellent. Well thank you. It's good to be here.

Speaker 2 (00:01:00):

Yeah, I just want to say for some of our listeners, just to kind of familiarize them with your body of work, you've worked with Maroon five, but then Lamb of God and Corn and the Black Eyed Peas and sick puppies, and it's quite a vast range of artists and I love that. It's so awesome.

Speaker 3 (00:01:20):

It's a bit all over the place, isn't it? It's everything from bluegrass to heavy metal and kind of everything in between seems like.

Speaker 2 (00:01:26):

Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:01:26):

I actually have a question about that

Speaker 3 (00:01:28):

Because

Speaker 4 (00:01:29):

This comes from my own experience of in my younger years when I was in bands and hiring mastering engineers to master our stuff and all that, we found that the guys who mastered metal couldn't master anything else, and sometimes it was the other way too. Guys that were really, really good at mastering r and b and Pop didn't cross over very well into heavier music. So I'm wondering, since obviously you've done both at a very high level, doesn't get much higher than corn or lambic god for metal, do you approach it differently?

Speaker 3 (00:02:03):

Not really. I mean at the end of the day in mastering your hands are largely tied. I mean, what you get is what you get and there's not really a lot of massaging that can happen in the master room. Obviously you can be detrimental, you can make it much worse, but we're not creating in the mastering room, we're really just trying to polish, and so to me, whether it's big wall guitars or something stripped down in acoustic or a synthesized baseline or whatever, doesn't really make a difference in the approach or how we do things. I will honestly say that metal stuff is among the most difficult to master simply because everything wants to take up all the space all the time. Your guitars take up everything and your drums take up everything and the vocals and everything is just pushing for its own space, so big and loud and compressed, and that makes it really difficult. Sometimes I feel like the easier records to cut are some of the more sparse records because if the tones are good on tape, there's really not a lot that you have to really worry about. Things aren't fighting for space nearly as much, but the approach, no, it's not really very different. It's the same thing. I'm just trying to listen to my room and make it sound good and try to get the vibe of the song and help people kind of feel it the best they can.

Speaker 4 (00:03:16):

I've always thought that the arrangement of metal music made it very difficult for exactly the reasons that you said it as a mixer as well. I just think it's just a tough genre to deal with and I feel like on paper if people got good at that, they should be able to handle other styles as well, but not always the case.

Speaker 3 (00:03:39):

It does seem like people are pigeonholed quite a bit in this industry and it's even further than just metal and not metal. I mean, there's guys that are known primarily if you're doing pop music, there's guys that are known for rap music. There's guys who are known for rock music and I'm a rock guy at heart. I mean, that's what I've always listened to growing up and that's still what I generally listened to when I'm on my own, but I really like not being pigeonholed. I like the fact that day to day I'm not listening to the same stuff and working with the same things, and I get that variety and difference in musicianship that you get across the different genres and different approaches and different goals that they have that makes it interesting instead of it becoming a daily drudgery job.

Speaker 4 (00:04:17):

Well, how did you prevent yourself from becoming pigeonholed? Because I know some guys who have done very, very well who just fell into a certain spot. They're the guy that does this type of metal band or something, or this is the guy that does the Latin pop records and they would love to do other stuff, but they can't seem to figure it out and I mean these are guys that are doing really, really well. It's not because they're not good, it is just somehow they fell into this pigeonhole and can't get out. How did you, it's

Speaker 3 (00:04:51):

Difficult to get out.

Speaker 4 (00:04:52):

Yeah. How did you avoid it?

Speaker 3 (00:04:53):

Well, I think a lot of the credit for that would go back to where I got my start and that was at Arden Studios here in Memphis. I moved up here in 96 and started working with them and they had closed their mastering division back in 85, and I reopened that for 'em and was the chief master engineer there until I left in oh three and started Euphonic Masters and really I think working in a fairly large facility, it was three full on rooms with large format consoles and a wide variety of clients that came through there who would often just choose to use me because the people at Ardent trusted me and liked my work. And that was a lot of exposure to a lot of different genres right out of the gate, and I think that really helped instead of, I think a lot of guys, they get started and if they don't have that, if they just start mastering records, whether it be with somebody as a mentor or open their own place, they'll have one or two records, let's say, that are relatively big records and that they become kind of known as that guy.

(00:05:50):

They were blues records or they were metal records, or they were whatever, all the blues or people or whatever. What that hit record was, start going for that reason as, Hey, well this guy, I know he does a great job on blues records. Let's use him. And I think that it can kind of snowball for some people. Mine was so many different records of so many different genres coming through that it was easy to sort of have guys go, well, he's my favorite, this guy and he's my favorite, that guy, instead of it being just one thing. But I mean, yeah, and actually I've chased records in the past and I still do that occasionally something I really like and I'll contact them and just let 'em know, Hey man, I love your music, love working with you guys and not with major artists, usually with guys who are starting off, but I just really like 'em and I want to work with them, and that also helps.

(00:06:34):

It's that constant exposure and I've really made it a point really my entire career to listen to all sorts of music all the time. I'm primarily a rock guy, but I make myself listen to stuff that isn't even my top preference musically, just because I think familiarity with the genre and what it feels like and how it moves and what's going on right now is really important. If you're going to approach music, if you try to master a modern blues record or a bluegrass record like a rock record, you're probably not going to get it right. They're different genres. They have different expectations of sound and style and loudness and all these sort of other things, and I think approaching them appropriately for what people are doing and what they want to hear right now is also important.

Speaker 2 (00:07:16):

I feel like that's so huge to really mix up, I guess the sonic experience when I'm mixing a metal song, I'll switch to listening to a pop song when I'm taking a break because sort of resets my sonic fingerprint that I'm thinking about. So it's nice to hear that that's something that's important to mastering engineers as well.

Speaker 3 (00:07:40):

Yeah, I mean, I can't speak for all of them, but for me it's definitely something I like to do. I mean, I listen to everything when I'm driving around in my truck and just getting a vibe for what's going on out there, and sometimes it's old stuff and sometimes it's new stuff. And I also make it a habit every morning of having what I call my morning, listen, when I first get to the studio for about an hour when I'm doing paperwork and answering emails and stuff before I really start cranking for the day, I'll pick out a record, just any record. It can be whatever the artist is, and I'll play the whole record top to bottom, usually 45 minutes to an hour, and that's just kind of what I'm listening to while I'm working, and it just helps wake my ears and my mind up a little bit and gives me a different perspective for that day because different records obviously sound very different from one another, from different eras and different production styles and so on and so forth.

(00:08:25):

So it's nice to have that variation. So if I'm going to be cutting a metal record that day, I might actually pick something that's completely pop and completely different like you mentioned. But yeah, that and ear breaks are huge too. Of course. I take a lot of ear breaks throughout the day. I mean, if I work for an hour, at least 15 minutes of that is in total silence. I'll stop the tape, just sit there, chill out for about 30, 45 seconds, hit play again, and suddenly anything that's wrong is apparent once again because you get used to those warts in the recording while you're working. They become kind of part of it. And that's really why I think, and I'm not trying to shift subjects and jump around too much here, but I'm going to I guess. No, it's okay. I think that's why today anyone with a workstation has the tools, at least processing wise to master a record.

(00:09:11):

If you have a good room and you have good room acoustics, everybody's got the equipment. The equipment I've got is a lot of it's custom made and so on and so forth, but it's just basically EQs and compressors and everybody's got loads of those, right? So today the reason why it's still important, I think for people to use master engineers, and I don't think this is something that's a huge deal, everybody seems to realize this is that sort of objectivity that the master engineer brings to the project that I haven't heard that song a thousand times like the tracking guys and the mixing guys have, and I haven't heard that little quirky guitar note or that snare flam or whatever a hundred times where it's become kind of part of the sonic fabric for me, it still sticks out and go, wait a minute, that's not right, or this tick or this maybe overall tone, maybe it's too dark or too bright. And when you listen to something over and over, you kind of get used to that. It's amazing how many times you're in your car and you'll throw on a record you haven't listened to in five years and your first reaction is, man, that is so bright. I don't remember it being that bright and halfway through the first song, it doesn't really sound bright anymore because your ears calibrate and your mind makes up for it and suddenly it sounds right.

Speaker 4 (00:10:14):

Yeah, it's amazing what we can get used to when by just being around it for long enough and it's not just music. Anything in life, if you don't get a break from it, you'll stop. You'll stop recognizing what it's really like because you're just used to it. You can't pay as close attention to it.

Speaker 3 (00:10:33):

So on the larger scale, yes, listening to different music and kind of getting that vibe is one thing, but taking a lot of ear breaks I think is really important. And I see a lot of guys, whether they're mixing or whatever, and I'll watch 'em work a little bit and they may work for an hour just nonstop, literally never stopping, and I get the nose to the grindstone, got to work hard sort of vibe, but at the same time, I'm not sure how you can do that and not lose objectivity completely. I mean, you're not hearing things anymore. And every time I've done that and I've worked for long periods of time and I'll stop and walk away from it thinking it's sounding perfect, I'll hit play, and suddenly it's like, wow, I've totally been chasing my tail for an hour. I should have stopped and checked this a while ago. So I think that's an important thing to keep in mind too.

Speaker 5 (00:11:16):

Something I like to do is go outside and actually, well, I don't live in a big city, so when I go outside it's pretty quiet, but I'll go and just take a walk around the block and then come back and it's amazing how refreshing that can be when you're really stressed out or struggling with something.

Speaker 3 (00:11:29):

Yeah, the mind keeps working on it. Your brain still keeps scrunching if you can't solve something or can't figure out how to do it. A lot of times getting that break and getting outside and some fresh air and you walk back in and suddenly it connects for you and it clicks and you hear what's wrong and you know how to solve it. So yeah, that's a good idea.

Speaker 4 (00:11:44):

How many hours per day on the topic of ear breaks, how many hours per day, including those 15 minutes of ear breaks per hour, but how many hours per day do you perform the art of mastering?

Speaker 3 (00:11:59):

I probably work about six to seven hours a day, five days a week. When I was starting off, it was a much more, I don't want to use the word grueling, but much more time consuming process.

(00:12:10):

Eight 10 hour days were very common, but I've gotten to the point now where, well, first of all, different people have different sort of vibes for how they want to do things. For me, efficiency is one of the most important things. I don't rush through work, but I try to work very, very efficiently because I feel like once again, back to objectivity, the more time I spend listening to something, the less objective I can be. Denny Purcell was this great master engineer, lived in Nashville, just owned the charts for many years, brilliant guy. He started Georgetown Masters, he died back in I think oh one, but he had, I met him one time and he had this great saying, he said, you only get to hear it for the first time once so true. It's a sort of concept of you've really got that gut instinct, that initial reaction, that's what you're chasing.

(00:12:56):

So when I started off, it would take me about 30 to 45 minutes a song, maybe even an hour to master each song. So 12 track record might take eight or 10 hours. Now it's much faster because basically I to it and I've built up the equipment that I have and the way that it's laid out and everything with this eye towards efficiency so that I can respond as quickly as possible to what I'm hearing and not have to dwell on it and listen to it too long. Because as I start listening, I make this mental list right away of what's right and what's wrong, what do I need to address and how to do it, and if I can immediately address those things and move to the next one, that's just less time that I've got to listen and get used to it and I can retain that objectivity.

Speaker 5 (00:13:33):

I love that philosophy, Brad. That's awesome. I do the same thing with mixing. I try to get through a mix as fast as I can because the band's going to have an opinion anyways on it, so you got to get to that. And

Speaker 3 (00:13:43):

Regarding mixing, I'm not a mixer obviously, but it's funny to me how many times it happens where people fall in love with the rough mixes and then you go back to mix it and you just fight and fight and fight to beat the rough mix. And people always describe that too, while they've gotten used to the way it sounds. And there's certainly some truth to that I'm sure, but I also wonder if you're rough mixing and you're just blowing and going, you're mixing. They did oftentimes back in the seventies before, there's automation when frankly a lot of really well mixed records came out because guys were just throwing their hands on the faders and gut reacting, and I think a lot of times when you get that rough mix, there's sort of that visceral gut reaction type of thing happening, and the mix connects with people maybe on a level that when you're trying to edit a syllable to get just the right volume level in the vocal, I think you may lose that. Some of that, I don't know, that soul,

Speaker 4 (00:14:39):

I completely agree with you, but I think it's even deeper than mastering and mixing, well, not deeper, I just think it goes down to the production level as well, because plenty of times when I've been working with bands or in my own band, the pre-pro takes were unmatchable, even if we did it, the production as meticulous as possible and took all the steps necessary technically for a great recording, there's just been some things on pre-pro that have not been matched by the real production, so I feel like there's just something in music where the first time oftentimes is the best time,

Speaker 3 (00:15:24):

And so yeah, that's another reason why, for example, a lot of times clients will say, Hey, can you listen to this track before we get to mastering? Make sure there's nothing wrong with it or can you listen to the whole record and always kind of try to avoid that if possible. It's not that I don't want to be helpful, obviously I do, it's that, yeah, I don't want to hear it and fall in love with this great guitar tone or something or this great vocal line, and then suddenly I get the track to actually master it and I'm reminded of that and I'm no longer focusing as much or unable to focus as much on the issues that are at hand. What's great about it, what needs to be highlighted, what's not great about it, what needs to be fixed, or at least sort of pushed back a little bit within the realm of what we can do obviously in the mastering room, but hearing it the first time once, I mean Denny pCell nailed it, and so that's sort of driven that sort of efficiency philosophy that I've got that I only have so much time to react to it before I really get comfortable with it, and so I don't try to rush through it, but I don't want to dilly dally around and take all day on it because that objectivity I think is really key to what we can bring as a master engineer can bring to the table.

Speaker 5 (00:16:26):

Definitely.

Speaker 4 (00:16:26):

Do you feel like that's getting lost a little bit these days because so many people can master themselves or well can master themselves or try to master themselves, have at least have the software tools available to them. Do you think that the traditional understanding of the value mastering engineer brings to the table is getting a little, I guess lost is the word.

Speaker 3 (00:16:52):

I think somewhat. I think the biggest culprit is not putting the democratization, if you will, of mastering, of making it available to everyone on their own desktop. I don't think that's really that big of an issue because I mean, ultimately I just want people to make great sounding records and they can have me help 'em out in doing that or if they can do it themselves. I mean, I know guys who will send me records to be mastered and they have already, I tweaked the mixes and stuff the way they feel like they ought to be, and I'll play it and I mean I might literally change the level of two songs and that's it. There's no processing engaged, whatever. That's a rarity. I mean, I'll be honest with you, that doesn't happen very most of the time. I feel like I can improve it slightly, but that does happen.

(00:17:31):

And so those guys could master these records and release them themselves and everyone would love it, and it represents the artist's vision and that's a win-win. I think what's been lost primarily, and this is in large part to a lot of the forums, when I had that forum years ago, mastering Demystified, the whole point of that forum to me was to steer people away from the overly gear centric or overly processing centric mindset of mastering and more towards what mastering was about. Because I've said for years, mastering is not about equalization and compression mastering is about a relatively unbiased set of ears in a room that is really well tuned that they are very familiar with, that can listen to something and objectively respond to it. Any processing that happens is the result of that if it's necessary. And like I said, if just when I get a record from a guy that I only have to change the level of one song a half DB to make everything sit and I cut parts from there, that's just as mastered as an album.

(00:18:34):

That took me six hours because every song had to be really eqd and tweaked and compressed differently and all these sorts of things, they were both equally mastered, they were both listened to in the same way and just what needed to be done was done. It seems like nowadays in a lot of the forums, the mindset is mastering is about loudness or is about what sort of EQ or this and it's gear, gear, gear, gear, gear. And really if you're going to talk about gear and mastering, you ought to be talking about what acoustician you need to hire and what kind of monitors and amplifiers you need to have in your room. Those are the key issues. Everything else is a result of what comes through that. And so I think a lot of guys miss that when they want to master their own records.

(00:19:13):

And if you mix it in a certain room and then you're going to master it in that same room, well, there's obviously some anomalies. Every room has some anomalies that make it where you're not hearing what's actually coming out of the speaker is exactly right. And so when you master in that same room, well you're probably going to compound those issues. You're not going to make 'em better because you're not hearing them. So I've told plenty of clients who say, we want to master it ourselves. Well, that's fine, just at least set up your monitors in a different space so you have a different sort of view or sound of what's going on. At least do that and maybe it'll work out great. Who knows?

Speaker 2 (00:19:43):

I like that. Definitely.

Speaker 3 (00:19:44):

I just think that definitely ultimately it's about having a different sort of a viewpoint of what you're hearing. And so when guys mix and master in the same room, I'll always kind of wonder, well, if I don't hear the record before it's mastered, I always kind wonder, well, I wonder what this could have been because they're obviously not hearing the issues that happened during the mixing in the first place.

Speaker 2 (00:20:03):

So I wanted to ask you, because in my mind this has been a pretty big topic in the most recent years and it's something that I still really don't know much about, mastered for iTunes. This is for me, this is space exploration. I don't get it. What is it for? What are the benefits and where do you start?

Speaker 3 (00:20:24):

Alright, master for iTunes, euphonic was one of the first, I think dozen studios that were certified for mfi is how I'll call it. It's whole lot easier to say mfi and essentially Apple, I believe was trying to, I don't want to say fight the loudness war that's going on or has been going on for decades. I think it's more about they wanted to try to set their product apart a little more from every other online retailer, digital distributor that's out there. And I think the concept behind it is by creating these specially, well, let's step back Sofit. An amfi master is basically a master that we take the 24 bit source file, the mastered 24 bit file, and we will listen to it through a apple supplied codec coder decoder so we can hear what it sounds like in real time as it's played back through this codec and hear what it's going to sound like once it goes through the process of becoming an A C then coming back out and being played in the real world.

(00:21:28):

So it sort of simulates the concept of, okay, we created this a C or this master file, we sent it to Apple, they created the iTunes file, they put it on iTunes, the person downloaded it, and now they're listening back to it. It does it all in the closed loop inside your mastering room so you can hear the detriment of maybe loudness or whatever and how these things impact the Kodak Apple's, Kodak. There's also another droplet they include that checks for clipped samples, inner sample peaks, things that happen when you're running a really loud master. And so when you reconstruct the waveform, it actually goes over zero and causes issues with specifically more so with inexpensive or cheap modern D-Day converters. It's basically a way that Apple I think was trying to raise the bar and say, Hey, we're going to make things a little bit better sounding, but of course it didn't take long for a lot of engineers, and you see people all over the forums talking about this now.

(00:22:24):

They just basically will take the output fader and lower it like a DB or something like that and bounce the exact same file down with the exact amount of clipping and everything else. But because it's down a DB overall, it doesn't, it no longer registers as clipping, and so there's your input file and that's what they give their clients. I really like the idea offi and what it allows, and so I spend a little more time on it tweaking and trying to find ways that we can pull the overall level back without just pulling the fader back on the master fader. Try to reduce a little bit of the limiting artifacts and things like that so that we can get something that's a little more open, a little less crushed in the process. But it's difficult because a lot of clients really still, despite all the clamoring is online from everybody that wants to say the loudness wars over. It's not, I mean, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what YouTube and Apple do. When the client walks in and says, well, it's not as loud as this record that I have, then that's what we have to do.

Speaker 4 (00:23:23):

I don't think the loudness war is something that's being fought by consumers or musicians. I think it's all pretty much engineers and gear dorks.

Speaker 3 (00:23:33):

I'll be honest with you, most of the people that complain about loudness or the lack of it are, at least in my experience of the artists, I think a vast majority of it comes from the artists. It's not from mixers or producers or anything else. I mean now there are exceptions. Any the last Lamb of God record, if you actually check it out on meters or export it and look at the waveforms, it's loud. It's not like this doesn't look like it's dire straits from the 1980s, but it's not this block of cheese. There are actually some dynamics that were left intact, and it's probably just as a wild guess, some three DB quieter than the big heavy stuff that's out there, really loud stuff right now. And that extra couple DB mix, all the difference in the world and the drums, things like that.

(00:24:17):

So they were a really great band. Trivium was another band that we cut a record on, and it was even quieter, and it has quite a bit of headroom for a metal band, but most of it, in my experience, it's coming from the artist. There's a fundamental issue that's kind of prepped into the industry, especially in the last decade or so, but it's been that way for a while and it's this sort of, not viewing art as art as an expression, but it's like a competition thing. It's not as loud as that record. It kind of makes me think, I can't imagine a great painter working and saying, you know what? This is a fantastic painting. I really love it. It represents what's in my mind and in my soul, but everybody else is using more blue, so I need to put more blue in it. It just seems kind of crazy that you would do that or everybody else is painting on.

Speaker 4 (00:25:05):

Actually, that's what I meant in my experience. The people who are against it aren't necessarily the people who are going to end up buying it.

Speaker 3 (00:25:17):

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think ultimately the consumer doesn't really, they just want the music.

(00:25:24):

And I think if the artists and the engineers and everybody together would try to say, Hey, let's not worry about what this band does. Let's make this record. Just listen to it on its own and see how it sounds, and when you love the way it sounds, then that's what we'll release. I think if everybody did that, we would see a lot of the over loud records go away. The reality is no drummer wants to hear his drums sound like just flat pieces of paper with no dynamics and no punch, and no one wants to hear the chorus gets smaller than the verse because everything kicks in and it tucks away. But I don't know. I don't know. There's this thing among a lot of artists now, most of 'em, at least in the mainstream that I work with, that it just seems like there's a lot of fear, a lot of worry about, well, it's not as much as this and not as much as that.

(00:26:12):

And I've literally never had in my life, I heard a consumer come to me and go, Hey man, I really love this record, but it is just not loud. It's not loud enough. I mean, there are probably some people out there that will complain. I mean, obviously there are dynamics issues. It's really hard to listen to a lot of classical music in your car. I don't really listen to a ton of it, but I mean, if you listen to classical music in your car with road noise and all this kind of stuff end up with this, you can barely hear this part and suddenly it gets really loud of the dynamics involved. So I understand we are not trying to make really super open jazz records or whatever, but really it's not compression that's the issue. It's this loudness and it still happens a lot, and it's a little bit frustrating when you cut a great sounding record and then everything sounds great, everybody's signed off on and they come back and go, yeah, we just need to be louder now because that really alters everything.

(00:27:05):

You can't just push another DB or two out of it if it's already fairly loud and expect it to just be perfect. It doesn't work that way. You have to readdress everything and it changes everything. And there's a record I cut a few years ago. It was talked about in interview, so I'm not going to say the name of the artist, but it was a big record. I mean, it sold a million copies. It had a couple of singles that went multi-platinum, and we worked and worked and worked on this record and made it sound, it sounded amazing. It really didn't. Everybody signed off on it. Everybody loved it. It was just beautiful top to bottom. And literally the day we were cutting parts, the parts order came in, the label calls up and says that We love it. We love it just the way it is now.

(00:27:42):

We want it two DB louder. And it wasn't super loud to begin with, but it was in the ballpark. And two DB was all the difference in the world, and it introduced some distortions here and there and just different things that weren't part of the record to begin with, and the label signed off on it, and there was nothing we could do about it. I mean, at that point everybody was like, that's the way it is. And all of us engineers that worked on it were freaked out about it, but there was really nothing we could do.

Speaker 2 (00:28:06):

At the end of the day, it's their art, right?

Speaker 3 (00:28:08):

It's their art. I mean, they paid for it. They're writing the check. It's the artist's name on there. My name is in really tiny letters if it's on there at all. And until, as one of my friends used to say is, until my name is as big as the artist's name, they get to make the call. So I don't see that call. That's good happening anytime soon. So we try to influence it. And the loudness war is definitely an issue. It's an ongoing issue. I do feel like in the last couple of years, I've had fewer clients come through that just want it to be blisteringly loud no matter what. But if every time I cut a record, I cut it the same way unless I'm told from the get-go that it has to be really loud. I cut it to where it's about as loud as it can be without being detrimental, which is usually anywhere from three to 60 be quieter than kind of the mainstream, loud, loud, loud, loud, loud stuff.

(00:28:57):

And then let them decide if they want it louder or not. And if they want it louder, then we work on that. But I always try to offer them what I consider a reasonable level where it sounds as good as it can. That's kind of the concept that I try to sell. And then from there, it's their choice. But most artists will come back and say, well, we love it, but it's too quiet. We want it louder loudness. At that point, it's not what's rarely about how it feels or how it conveys the message of the art. It's almost always about, well, when I listen to it next to this other record, it's not as loud as that. And that's always kind of sad to me that you're willing to compromise it musically, just because of competition. I don't really understand it. I'm not an artist at heart. I guess I'm more of a technician, but I don't really understand that. I would think that you would want your art to stand up and be the best it can be, but it is what it is.

Speaker 4 (00:29:48):

Do you get that pressure from labels a lot or have they started to also chill out about it?

Speaker 3 (00:29:54):

Like I said earlier, a vast majority of the response that I get is from the artists themselves that want it louder. That's almost always there. And like I said, it doesn't matter. It's not like it's, well, when I work with an indie artist, which I do a lot of, and they listen to the mainstream stuff or the major label stuff and they go, well, it's not as loud as it's not that. I mean that happens, but there are just as many well-known household name artists out there that are the same way. And I kind of feel bad because it's fear driven. It's not for the most part. There are artists who really want it to be just blisteringly loud, flat. That's what they want. They want that sound that happens. I actually cut a record a few years ago for an Australian artist that they kept wanting it louder and louder and louder, and we were just at the limit.

(00:30:42):

You couldn't get it any louder. It just had run out of room. So I actually pulled the whole thing down like two db and did a bunch of clipping and stuff, and it was just distorted and it became sort of a mess, almost, sort of like a show them, see this is as far as we can go. And I sent it to 'em and they loved it. They didn't care about the overall level. They wanted it to be this distorted crunched up. They loved that sound, and they had a hard time conveying that to me. And until I finally threw my hands up and was like, I don't know what you want, then we got it right. And they loved it, and that's fine, and that's perfectly fine. It's your art and it's supposed to represent what you're feeling and what you're trying to convey. And it was a big heavy record and it kind of made sense in that regard. I mean, if it was a bluegrass record, I would've looked at him funny. So I mean, get it. I'm not trying to say that it's never appropriate. It just feels like there is a lot of art that's being compromised just for the sake of worry that somehow someone's not going to like it or they're not going to buy it or something. I don't really understand it.

Speaker 4 (00:31:39):

I think nobody wants to be the band that's on someone's playlist at a party that sounds, everyone's having a good time listening to music, and then that song comes on and it's skipped immediately. People don't know why they're skipping it, but because it's not as loud, they perceive it as not as good and just skip.

Speaker 3 (00:32:00):

Yeah, it could be.

Speaker 4 (00:32:00):

No, I just wants to be in that spot.

Speaker 3 (00:32:03):

Yeah, that's probably part of it. And I think I listen to records differently than a lot of people do because I'm still old school. I listen to something, I generally pick out a record I'm going to listen to whether I'm driving around or whatever, and I start at track one and just let it play until it's done. And I'll change the record either if I get bored with it or more commonly when it gets to the last song and I'll pick the next record. And that's what I'll listen to when I've talked to a lot of people in the last year or two, it seems like a lot of people, even those as old as I am, really enjoy shuffle mode and things like that. And I'm not into that at all. That always throws me for a loop when I try that, and that's probably part of it.

(00:32:39):

So for me, I put the record on, I listen to track one, I adjust the volume and I'm good to go. And if I'm bouncing from track to track, it'd be different. I think if I was going to listen in shuffle mode, if I was one of those people, I would turn soundcheck on in iTunes and let Apple's algorithm adjust the overall levels. It doesn't apparently, as far as I know, it doesn't do any processing. It's not limiting or anything like that. It just examines each file and sets a playback level so that the relatively apparent level is going to be equal. And that's what YouTube's trying to do. And I think Apple Music has that defaulted to on, if I'm not mistaken. And that's the thing that a couple of guys have been throwing their lassos around and saying, look, the loudness war is over.

Speaker 4 (00:33:18):

Do you think that the normalization of YouTube and Spotify, do you think it's helping or hurting

Speaker 3 (00:33:24):

Spotify? I don't really have an opinion on other than to say that I'm not a member of Spotify. I've never signed up for it, and I refuse to based on principle, just because I am a guy that if I like somebody's music, I just go to iTunes or go to the store and I buy it and I own a license to listen to it whenever I want, wherever I want. I'm kind of against the whole Spotify streaming and hardly paying them bit. But overall, I don't know. And the reason why I think that that's a good way to combat it is if all playback system is sort of normalize or I like to use that term because that sounds like you're changing the audio because of the term that's used in workstations. But overall, just averaging out the levels by pushing certain songs quieter, that would definitely be a way to combat it, I think.

(00:34:12):

But we've had that now for a couple of years it looks like, between YouTube and I think Apple Music does that, and there may be other ones, and I'm not really seeing a drastic drop off in the number of clients who are asking for that. I mean, I would think that someone would at least question and say, Hey, we've heard this, or it sounds like this is going on. Does that mean we can cut it quieter? But it is still an issue that we deal with, not daily, but there are a lot of clients that want it really, really loud what everybody else's records. So ultimately it's their record and I just try to make 'em happy. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:34:46):

Absolutely. So what's in your listening room? What are you listening on?

Speaker 3 (00:34:50):

These are B and w Nautilus eight oh twos. I've had these now for a little over 13 years. I love 'em. Magnificent. Everybody. Monitors are like cars. Everybody has their own preference of what they like and don't like, but I really love these things. They go down to about somewhere in the mid thirties hertz range. So then on the bottom end, I've got dual velodyne DD 12 subwoofers that are servo controlled subs. They have like 3,500 watts each peak power, and they're flat down to about 15 hertz. So we've got really good bottom end all the way up to the top. The eight oh twos are powered by past labs X 600.5 monoblock amps. These are 600 watt class A amplifiers, just beasts. And it really is amazing in here. It sounds incredible. The room was tuned by northward acoustics out of Belgium. Brilliant, brilliant design group. I'll never have a room again, that's not a northward room and all that together. It really sounds remarkable. Everybody that comes in here and listens for the first time, their jaw just drops. They really most times have never heard anything like it.

Speaker 4 (00:35:56):

Can we talk a little about the room design process? Something that comes up a lot on our show and all the way from guys in their bedroom who were telling them to tear the foam down, at least build some panels all the way to people like you who hire the best guys in the world to build them a room. So it's just a topic that comes up all the time. So just curious about what your experience was going into having a room design like that and what people should expect, and then also what you would suggest for people who aren't in that spot, but who still want to have something decent to work with.

Speaker 3 (00:36:35):

Well, I've been at both extremes because when I started, it was on a bit of a shoestring budget and I focused on monitors and amplifiers and things like that. I wanted to get the reproduction, but I didn't have a tremendous amount of money for the room. So I had this small room. It was actually an extra room in a house we lived in at the time. And so it was really not unlike probably most of the mastering rooms on this planet in that regard, just standard construction walls didn't do anything special. I built a bunch of traps that are hung on the walls, a lot of resonant type traps with different thickness, different depth behind them and different thicknesses of very thin wood across the front of them to resonate and absorb the energy. But it was a small room, and what I found was right out of the gate, the bottom end was actually really quite good.

(00:37:29):

And it took me a while to wrap my head around why in this small room with really no true base trapping, the bottom end could be good. And then I realized that the standard construction walls in the space, they were basically invisible to the low frequencies. The base would just shoot right through 'em. It wasn't trapping them. And so when we built this studio, I kind of incorporated that into the design. A lot of studios are built with the whole isolation, especially the big rooms are built with the concept of isolation. You want to isolate the outside world, and so you build this room within a room and all these sorts of things, but as soon as you do that, you keep those unwanted sounds that are outside out, if you will. You're also keeping all the sounds in the room. So suddenly now you have all this base that's building up that can't just escape the space.

(00:38:13):

And that's when you start getting into these six foot base traps and ceiling traps everywhere, and you're just trying to trap as much base as you can because it can't get out. It's just building up and piling up in the room. So when we built this room, we built it out sort of in the country. I mean, we say we're in Memphis, but we're really sort of in the sub suburbs of Memphis out a little bit. We're not near any, you can't hear traffic and things like that running around. And so the concept was, Hey, let's take advantage of this. Let's build out here where we want to be, and now we won't have to worry about isolation. We don't have trains and trucks and all sorts of things all around us all the time. So I did not build this with that sort of isolation so that the base low frequencies and the base, it can zoom out of the room.

(00:38:58):

And so whatever's left, whatever does get folded back into the room, which isn't a tremendous amount, then we can deal with that. And so that really allowed us a lot more, well, to save a lot of space, a lot of construction costs, honestly. And it made this room that really sounds great, and the bottom end's tight and deep, but we don't have to have nearly as much base trapping. I mean, our base trapping is a proprietary design by northward acoustics, but the whole thing is less than a foot and a half deep across the back wall.

Speaker 4 (00:39:25):

That's actually kind of blowing my mind. I feel like I'm now starting to understand what some of the problems were in my original studio that I couldn't fix for the life of me. I tried so many different ways of base trapping and it wouldn't go away. And now it dawns on me that one side of it was against stone underground. There's no way around that.

Speaker 3 (00:39:50):

You have to trap that crazy. Yeah. So I mean, I don't really know a lot about acoustics. I read a lot about 'em, a lot of acoustics in books and such. Before I started Euphonic and while I was still at Ardent, we were tweaking the room at Ardent when I was still there. And of course when I built my room, my first room for Euphonic, I had to kind, it was trial by fire and I had to learn my way or educate myself. And I use that term extremely loosely about acoustics. And it turned out okay, I cut a bunch of cool records in that little room. But that was when it dawned on me that whole concept of, wow, we don, if you don't have to isolate, that may be the worst thing you can do. Now, obviously if you have a multi-room facility, if you have live microphones that you're recording with, things like that, that's a difficult proposition to not have that isolation.

(00:40:35):

But one of the acousticians I spoke with years and years ago, we were talking about building, when I started thinking about building onic, we were talking about building the main room and a smaller sort of production room slash B room. And his first reaction was, well, we'll just isolate the B room and leave the A room alone. And I was like, well, why would you do that? And he brought that point. He's like, well, you only have to isolate one from the other. Let's do the smaller one. It's a lot cheaper. Well, that makes a lot of sense. I didn't think of that. So yeah, so when we decided to build this new space, that's what we did. And like I said, it's been fantastic. Yeah, you can hear occasionally you'll hear some thunder or something roll, but for the most part, you don't hear a thing.

(00:41:11):

It's quiet or as quiet as any studio I've ever been in. But we didn't have the massive expense of isolation, which is incredibly expensive when you build a room within a room. And we also don't have nearly the problems with the low frequencies. It's mainly dealing with first reflections and things like that. And once we got that all taken care of, the room feels ridiculously open and comfortable, and everybody just loves it. So if I ever build another room, assuming I'm not in the city or I don't have to have the isolation, I'll do it just like this one.

Speaker 4 (00:41:41):

I completely understand that it's probably not practical to do that if you're recording, but you guys are only mastering in your room, right?

Speaker 3 (00:41:54):

Exactly. Only mastering I'll do anything else. Yeah, you would not want me mixing. I can tell you that.

Speaker 2 (00:41:59):

So I have an interesting question for you, and this is something that we've sort of been asking this month and it's going to be really hard to answer, but I'm just curious, what tool, if you only had to pick one and mastering is pretty much EQ or compression, which of those, if you could only choose one, would you want,

Speaker 3 (00:42:19):

You're not talking about monitoring anything else. If we have everything, I can just have one EQ or one compressor. Is that the question?

Speaker 2 (00:42:23):

Yeah. Yeah, that'd

Speaker 3 (00:42:24):

Be an eq, no question. Awesome. No hesitation. And why is that? Two reasons. One is because compressors are cool. I like compressors. I've got several different ones. I've got a pair of Eve 2250 fours that I had Fred Hill completely refurbish and modify, and they're super cool. I've got a pendulum OCL two that I love with some different tubes in it, a crane song, SDC eight that I've had since about 97 or 98. Great compressors, all three of them. But the reality is 80% of the tunes I get in, I don't do any compression on. The only time I do compression on them is because they need a certain amount of color or something. A vast majority of records that are cut now, regardless of genre, the compression is there. I mean, there's no need. They're not overly dynamic. That's incredibly rare. So when I reach for a compressor, it's because I'm trying to do something colorwise or tempo wise that you couldn't do otherwise. But most of the time your hands are tied. So eq, I eq, probably 99.5% of the songs that come through here probably use compression on 20%. I use EQ on almost a hundred. So it's a no brainer for me because EQ can radically change things. You can affect a lot of the same things you can with compression or at least similar results with an eq. There are some things obviously that one does that the other doesn't. But yeah, it definitely be eq. Do you

Speaker 5 (00:43:40):

Have a favorite eq?

Speaker 3 (00:43:42):

I think that depends on the day of the week. I have a bunch of EQs. I'm kind of an EQ junkie. There's only, I guess, technically two off the shelf EQs. One is a crane song, ivus. I got the very first one. I worked kind of with Dave a little bit on some of the design aspects of it. I'm not a designer, so I don't want to take any credit like that. Just some of the ideas behind the way things work and the way they interface. But I like that quite a lot. I've got an old Neve 2087 mastering EQ that I like a lot too. It's a bit colored, but it really does work a lot of the time. But the rest of my IQs are custom made. They've got a couple of custom shelving EQs and they've got a Dave Izer, which is named after Dave Collins from his a and m days a and m mastering.

(00:44:28):

It's a brilliant sounding, real broadband Peking eq. I've got what's called a VSS eq. It's the variable slope. This thing Frank Lacey builds almost all my equipment out of Oxford, Mississippi. Brilliant guy. This V-S-S-E-Q is unbelievable. It does 12 and 60 B slopes. It's shelving only, but also he's figured out a way in the analog domain to do a three DB proactive slope on a shelf. That's something I've never seen before. So it's incredibly subtle, but it's very good. It's hard to put into words what it does. I can throw something, throw a shelf on it, like six K with a three DB slope and add a half db, and you don't ever hear the knee. You don't ever hear where, well, that's where the EQ is kind of kicking in. It's just this gradual lift. It's almost like one of those tilty cues that you can tilt where the bottom goes down and the top goes up around a certain point. But the bottom, yeah,

Speaker 5 (00:45:23):

Those are awesome,

Speaker 3 (00:45:24):

But the bottom doesn't go down on this one. So you can also add on the bottom end at this three DB proactive or 60 B proactive slope, whatever you want to do. It's a remarkable eq. I've got a couple of Barry Porter net EQs that Frank built. I think the first one he built for me was probably the first commercial build of that Barry Porter eq. That's become so popular. It's just a great clean, utilitarian eq. It doesn't sound like anything really if it's set up right. I've got two of those, actually four channels. And then I had to build me a custom shelving unit that's purely passive shelf of the makeup gain stage unit. Yeah, so I mean, that's all of them. That's about what six or seven EQs there. But a vast majority would be done with just the VS s and the davely, honestly, two very sort of simple, elegant EQs that just do a lot of heavy lifting. Awesome.

Speaker 4 (00:46:18):

So here's a question from one of our listeners from Mike Glenn. So what are the most common slash aggravating mixing mistakes you find yourself dealing with when you receive mixes and short of requesting a new mix? How do you go about mastering 'em?

Speaker 3 (00:46:33):

The first one's probably monitoring problems. And I guess what's most aggravating about that? It's not that people don't go out, everybody doesn't go out and spend money on a great room, but that it sounds sometimes some guys will mix something and they never listen to it outside of their mixing environment to just check themselves or see what's going on. And you'll get mixes in that are just really, really far too bright or way too much bottom end. And if the balances aren't good within those areas, there's not a lot you can do. Because if it's too bright because just the symbols are too bright, for example, but the top end of the guitar or the vocals or whatever feels good, it's very hard to tame that without making the other parts sound worse. Same thing on the bottom end. I mean, you get a track end and the bass guitar is four db too hot, but the kick drum feels good.

(00:47:22):

Well, it just makes it really, really hard to get in there and dig out the bass. It's nearly impossible. And a lot of times I feel like if these guys would listen in a variety of places, four or five places, it doesn't matter how familiar you are with something or not, when you listen to it on a laptop, even if it's not yours, at least you get semblance of is something sticking out and really out of whack. I think that'd be helpful if people would spend a little time doing that. But that's one. And I think these sort of stereo stereo, wisers, whatever you want to call them, have become fairly popular in the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years. And you can almost immediately tell when somebody's put one on a mix, it comes in and there's this weird out of phase stuff happening.

(00:48:02):

And once it's there, it's really almost impossible to undo that. In fact, I'd say it is impossible to undo that, and that makes it really tough to try to make something sound good and have impact and feel good when it kind of feels like your head's being turned inside out listening to it. I would say those aren't common issues. I'm actually surprised nowadays at the number of really solid mixes that we get in. It's not surprising when you get one from a well-known mix engineer, you expect that to sound good. But when you get stuff from a guy that's like, Hey, this is my first project I've ever mixed, and you listen to it and you're like, holy crap, that sounds really good. That's a lot more common than getting the bad stuff in. And it may just be kind of where I am, where the people that I attract or whatever happen to be that way, I don't know. But that's my experience. It seems like there are a lot of guys out there that no one's ever heard of that are really, really very good. And so mixed problems aren't really that big of a deal anymore to me. I think most days it's just a matter of hearing little issues here and there and nips and tucks that need to be done to correct them. But definitely the phase issues and the overall sort of frequency response slash balance issues are two big ones that are almost impossible to deal with in the mastering room.

Speaker 4 (00:49:13):

Mike Collagian is asking, and he was actually on mastering month. Oh,

Speaker 3 (00:49:18):

Mike.

Speaker 4 (00:49:19):

Yeah, he's awesome. He was asking if you could go back to your first day as a mastering engineer and deliver one piece of advice, what would it be?

Speaker 3 (00:49:28):

It would be that even when things don't look good, just keep doing it. You love it. And I never gave up, but there were definitely some times where I just questioned was like, man, I wonder man, is this what I'm supposed to be doing? Because it was very frustrating early on at times, but I just felt passionate about doing this. This is what I really loved to do. I looked forward to doing it every day. And so in times when it was scary when I started Yonic, that was a pretty scary jump. I went from working for a fairly large, at least in the recording World Studio, to being on my own sink or swim. That was pretty scary, but I'm really glad that I did it that I just jumped in and tried because the opening onic was the best decision I ever made, at least in the business world.

(00:50:18):

So yeah, it would be just stick with it. Don't ever give up. Just continue trying to be the very best you can be at all times. Because I see too many guys, they get into it and they kind of get jaded after a while because this industry can wear on you. It can be hard. And it seems like a lot of guys sort of, they get jaded. Some guys it seems like they think it's cool to act like they're over everything. They hate their job kind of vibe, I guess. I don't know. I get that vibe from guys. They think that's cool or something and I don't get it. Yeah, stay focused. Always stick with it and stay in love with it because it's been great. It's been the best job ever.

Speaker 4 (00:51:00):

I feel like with your move to start EU Phonics, I think that everyone at some point, if they want something great other lives is going to have to take a risk like that just to go with it.

Speaker 3 (00:51:12):

Yeah, I mean, like I said, it was scary, but I described it to people when I worked at Ardent, it really felt like I was on this aircraft carrier. When it came to mastering. It was like if they wanted to do something like wanted to buy a piece of equipment or whatever, that was really not an issue. They had huge, everything they did was in large scale. So if they wanted to buy something, they wanted to buy Pro Tools rigs, they'd go out and buy four full-blown pro tools. Rigs that are, when they first bought 'em in the whatever late nineties, there were something like 15, $20,000 each. And that was more than my first studio cost, but they could do that kind of stuff. And when I started Onic, I felt like I was in a little, whatever you call those jet skis. It was very small, had very little relative buying power, if you will.

(00:51:59):

But I was nimble and I could dance around things where the aircraft carrier takes seven miles to make a U-turn. I could turn on a dime. And that flexibility early on really helped me because when somebody called and said, Hey, we want to do a surround project, and I wasn't set up to do surround, well, guess what? I can set up to do surround pretty quickly if I needed to. And that's what I did. I went out and bought the equipment, got set up, boom, was ready to go. There wasn't a decision making process and well, it's the long-term amortization schedule for this and that. There was none of that. It was just like, let's do this. Let's go boom, boom, boom, and we did it. So being able to make those decisions and being able to be more nimble in the market is one of the reasons why I've kept it relatively small.

(00:52:37):

I mean, most studios that are doing kind of the work that we do and the people that we should say rub elbows with are much larger places, multi-room facilities, they usually have a big staff and all this support staff, this kind of stuff. I have worked very hard to remain a one man show as much as possible throughout my career because when clients call, they want to call and they want to talk to me. They don't want to talk to my assistant or a secretary or anything else for that matter. It allows me to, keeps the overhead extremely low. Obviously now, I mean I've been blessed. We do well financially, but I mean the ability to just be able to do what we want to do when we want to do it, I love that. I love not having to worry about, well, how is this going to affect the mastery engineer next to me? Because there isn't one. It's me. That doesn't mean that long-term ever change, but for now, this is definitely, this is the way I've been for 13 years and the way I'm planning on staying.

Speaker 4 (00:53:28):

Do you have an assistant or interns or is it literally just you?

Speaker 3 (00:53:33):

I had one. I tried that in back in oh five. I had one for about a year. He was very helpful. He was a good guy, but at the end of the year he had some different ideas about where he wanted to go in his career. And I had by that time come to the conclusion that it was, in my opinion, more work than it was worth having an assistant. And so we parted ways amicably, we're still good friends, but since then that kind of got that out of my system. It was because of the efficiency that I talked about earlier and the way that I try to work. It just means that I can accomplish a tremendous amount in a relatively short amount of time. So yeah, I cut all my own parts, I QC everything, all this kind of stuff. But then I'm also a perfectionist and I don't have to worry about somebody else dropping the ball or something, not getting done exactly the way the client wanted or miscommunication about what the client wanted.

(00:54:26):

When they talk to the assistant and they say, we want this, we want that. Well, everybody talks about music and uses different terminology, and so by the time it gets to me, it might be changed ever so slightly. The one downside is, yeah, it makes it difficult for me to get on the phone with people. I tell people all the time, I'm pretty notoriously awful, awfully difficult to get on the phone with. I try to make time to do that. I try to answer calls, but I also, when I'm working on a project, I mute the ringer on the phone and my attention's on that project. It's not about the next project, so that makes it difficult. But most people email and text now anyway, so it works out. Okay.

Speaker 4 (00:55:01):

So can we talk for a second about the efficiency? Because for some reason when you talked about that earlier, I was assuming that you had people under you that you delegated tasks over nda. We talk about efficiency a lot on this show because we feel that that's one of the key things that you need to develop in order to survive in the current day market. You need be able to move fast, you need to be able to get to work quickly and not be held up by your own process so that you can meet the time demands. So what do you do to stay this efficient if you're just on your own?

Speaker 3 (00:55:39):

The first step, and this was decided before, I mean this was back when I was at Ardent. I felt this way even though we had support staff there and everything I discovered when I was at Ardent, that being autonomous was really beneficial in a lot of ways. There were some times where I'd submit an invoice and something would get twisted around between me and the accountant and between that and the client and things would just get jumbled and sometimes this would be said, but it wasn't reflected on that sort of thing. And I spent a lot of time, it felt like not a lot of time, but I spent enough time dealing with putting out fires and correcting issues that would not have happened if I had just sent the invoice directly to the client and they had paid me that while I was still at Ardent.

(00:56:24):

I became basically autonomous. I did basically everything there, booked my own sessions and everything because I also realized that I can determine how much work I do in a day, and I don't mean overcommitting or whatever and rushing through things, but what I mean is I have a good idea on a project, how long it's going to take to cut these parts. So if I have on my schedule that I'm cutting parts for this band today, I know for a fact that that's, well, they want two infants, two, they want two PCDs, they also want all this that's going to take several hours to cut all that, whereas a normal record might take 45 minutes to cut the parts on. And so by doing all of it myself and knowing what that project entails, it makes it I think a lot more efficient. So that was the first step.

(00:57:06):

So when I started euphonic, I knew right away that from a gear perspective, I also wanted that efficiency. And that's why most of my equipment in my rack is custom built. It's because I would look for something that I wanted. I wanted to do this specific thing, and nothing on the market does exactly the way I want to do it. So I'll have somebody build it for me and it costs more money to do that of course. But when you have these tools that help you and you know exactly what to do and and how to reach, I can reach for this and I can solve this problem in one click or two clicks and be done and move on, that's way better than, okay, is this EQ going to be better or should I do that for that or whatever. And so that was a part of it.

(00:57:43):

The rest of it got into the sort of boring, to me boring aspect of paperwork and organization and things like that. And that's just become sort of the way I work because I'm a one man show, I can label things a certain way and know exactly what it means. I can move about from project to project really quickly. I mean, I'll work on an average week, some 25 to 30 different bookings in five days. Now that doesn't mean I'm doing 25, 30 records obviously. I mean, some bookings are as simple as they want a revision and they want to turn this song to up a half DB and print another reference before they approve it. But that's a booking to me. It's anytime I've got something on the schedule to address, but that's 25 to 30 things a week that I can work on. And that's probably, I generally do a record and at least one EP along with a single and some parts every day.

(00:58:38):

And that's a lot of work for a lot of people. But because of the way I've got things set up and I've done it over the years, I can roll through that stuff really quickly unless I hit a problem. Sometimes you get on a record and it bogs down because each song is radically different and has radically different problems that you have to address and that kind of a thing. But for most records and most days, just the way that I've set everything up means that I can just roll through things and not have to spend time spinning my wheels, not have to spend time trying to figure out how I'm going to address this or how do I handle that. The one man show thing is difficult at times. It can be there's days where you're working and it can be frankly a little bit overwhelming. I come in and there's just so much to do and there's a dozen emails that have to be answered and there's people calling and it can be tough, but most days I'm able to just roll through it and take care of everything. And I really like being able to deal with each client. And I think the clients, most of the time, the artists really appreciate that. They like being able to,

Speaker 4 (00:59:45):

Yes, they sure do.

Speaker 3 (00:59:46):

They like being able to that. And I've had comments, many comments over the years, we really like it when we call and we talk to you and not your assistant or your secretary or whatever. And then ultimately it puts the pressure on me because I've got no one I can pass the blame onto. And that can be helpful as well because I've dealt with other guys before where you were trading files and stuff and there's this finger pointing on there, oh, well my assistant didn't do this or So-and-so didn't do that. Well, you don't get that from you phonic if there's a problem. It's like I raised my hand and go, okay, sorry, I screwed up. Let's go. Let's make it right. And that pressure alone helps keep me on my toes, I think a lot of times.

Speaker 4 (01:00:22):

So yeah, you own everything in terms of, I don't mean own the business, but I mean you own everything that takes place. It's all on you.

Speaker 3 (01:00:32):

Onic is all me, and I chose that name because when I started off in oh three, I had had a couple of decent records, but I didn't have that name. I don't know if I'd do now, but I mean, I didn't have a name where I could do Brad Blackwood mastering. And people were like, oh yeah, we got to use that guy. I love that guy. I really liked and I didn't know what the future for EU phonic was. And I still to this day don't know what the future for Euphonic is. I don't know if we're ever going to expand and do something larger than I am now, but I thought, well, let's come up with a name for the company that has a more corporate feel to it, a more established feel to it. And then if we under that umbrella, it can be just me or it can be multiple people down the road if we choose to do that.

(01:01:18):

And so far it's just been me because that's what I'm comfortable with and that's the way I like it. But yeah, everything that comes through here has got my hand prints on it and nobody else's really. My wife helps out a little bit. She's my partner in the business. When I say we, that's what I'm talking about. It's her, it's the two of us. But yeah, I mean that's it. And like I said, that puts the pressure us on me specifically to make sure that everything gets done to my standard the way I want. I deal with the clients that way. I never have to worry about a client being mean, an employee being tired and smarting off to a client or something like that. And I've heard horror stories. I've picked up work from artists before where they had bad situations with other studios where they couldn't talk to the engineer and the assistant got testy with 'em and all this kind of stuff.

(01:02:03):

And it's like that, that doesn't happen here because I'm not going to do that to my clients. So there's definitely negatives to being a one-man show. It can be rough sometimes, but I feel like the service that I can give that direct one-on-one service is better. It does mean that I'm not going to be the cheapest guy around. I'm not the most expensive guy around, but I know I'm not the cheapest guy around. There's a lot of guys that people that want to work with me that can't afford to, and I get that. But it's worked out okay so far. So we, it's just trying to keep everybody happy that we get the opportunity to work with.

Speaker 4 (01:02:39):

But also, you figured out a lot from what you said, a lot of your philosophy towards efficiency when you weren't a lone wolf, when you were working with a lot of people, you figured out exactly what was slow about large team and kind of figure it all out at that point. So I feel like that's important to be said because you didn't figure out how to be efficient in a vacuum, even though you work on your own now, I think. Would you agree that it took seeing how slow a large group of people working together can be?

Speaker 3 (01:03:17):

Oh, absolutely. No. I mean no question that, like I said, the battleship jet ski sort of thing, that comparison is valid on a lot of levels and I learned very quickly. I've told people for years, I mean, I loved my time at Ardent and I learned how to do a lot of things business wise and engineering wise there, but I also learned a lot of things not to do there that I could see the way clients reacted to certain policies that were put in place, that these policies probably had a great reason. In fact, I'm sure they had a great reason to exist in the first place, but the way they impacted people, different clients was different. Sometimes it was great for a client, sometimes it was a problem for a client. And I like the fact that I can address things and deal with things differently.

(01:04:03):

I can have a policy of all clients serve our COD, and that's my policy. You pay for the session. We have kind of a fixed rate that we do things for and you pay for the session before the session starts. And for 95 or 98% of our clients, that's the way it works. We have a few clients that we've worked with for literally 15, 20 years, and they're used to paying at the end of the session. And I'm not going to sit here and change things up and change the entire way that we've worked for this time period just because there's this new policy. And when I was at Ardent, when new policies would come out, they were generally very sweeping. It was, okay, this is the way we're going to do things now, and that's the way it was for everybody regardless. And that's not always the best way to handle it.

Speaker 4 (01:04:49):

Yeah, I mean, it's tough when it's tough to get too personalized when you have so many moving pieces to worry about. It makes perfect sense.

Speaker 2 (01:04:58):

I think it's really great advice for our audience as well. I think a lot of people struggle with sort of the technical part of running the business and the legalities and how to handle payments and invoices and all this. And to hear someone kind of put some kind of logical reasoning behind how treat people like people, that's a great thing.

Speaker 3 (01:05:23):

And there's times there are some labels, major labels, I'm not going to name any names here that their COD, they've told me, well, we can't do that every time they book a session. We can't do that. But I know historically that if I don't get paid before the session starts that it's going to be six months or more before I ever see money from them. And so I just tell 'em upfront, well, before we deliver the masters, we have to be paid. Well, we can't do that. We're not saying, okay, well then I guess we can't do the session. Well, miraculously they find a way to do it every time, but they always want to fight you on it. Amazing

Speaker 5 (01:05:56):

How that works.

Speaker 3 (01:05:57):

It's amazing. But most of the labels very quick paying. I mean, despite the reputation, they seem to have almost all the labels, major labels. If there's any issue whatsoever, they jump on it, they take care of it. There's only one in particular that I'm COD with at this point, but most everybody else, all the independents and most of the smaller labels. Yeah, I got to that point. I finally realized it's like historically this industry has worked where you either pay a deposit and pay the rest of it, the backend, or you just pay for it all before you get your master's. And the real problem with that for me is that it works under the guise of, you can't trust me to do the work and deliver it like I told you I'm going to. That's basically what the labels are saying. They're like,

Speaker 2 (01:06:42):

It's insulting.

Speaker 3 (01:06:43):

Yeah, if you think about it, it really is. It's like, wait, I'm doing the work right now and you're going to tell me that a month later, you'll pay me for it or whenever we get done. And

Speaker 5 (01:06:52):

They obviously came to you for a reason too,

Speaker 3 (01:06:54):

And I understand early on, but I mean, once I got to a certain point in my career, I kind of looked around and I thought, you know what, man, there's a body of work out there and people can look at that, and if they don't think that I'm going to deliver, then maybe we just, we're not the right facility for them. We're not the right mastering house because there's got to be a mutual respect. And so I started going a few years ago. I went to this, basically all sessions are paid before the session begins or I bump it kind of a thing. And I really expected there to be a pushback from, I don't know, at least 10% of my clients that had worked with me for years and not one single person had anything to say about it. There were just a couple of 'em that didn't quite catch it at first.

(01:07:36):

They were so used to this process and I would tell 'em, Hey, look, we're switching to this if that's okay. Oh, that's no problem at all. I mean, they had zero issue with it. And so I feel better about it now. You know what I do? I spend so much less time contacting people saying, Hey, this is still open. Oh yeah, I forgot to pay that, sorry. And all this kind of stuff because basically if it's not paid, we just bump the session back to the next date and oh, crap, we didn't pay. So they pay and then we do it, and it's not a big deal, but it's really saved me. It's like an efficiency thing. It saved me a ton of time chasing people down saying, Hey, what about this invoice? Oh yeah, I forgot about it. And I think genuinely people do.

(01:08:14):

I don't think people are bad. They're trying to not pay. I mean, I just think that they get their stuff back, they're listening to it, they love it. They're planning artwork, they're doing all the things that go into finishing up the record, and it's easy for that to fall through the cracks or become that thing that's sitting over there on the side of the desk like, oh yeah, I need to take care of that. But then it gets covered up or pushed away. And I used to spend a lot of time, basically every week there was an hour or two that I would spend contacting clients about open invoices, and that's gone away. It doesn't happen anymore. And I wish I'd thought of that 15 years ago, but I think that for anybody doing this business, if the client doesn't trust you enough to give you at least half the money up front, then you have to question whether or not you really want to invest your time with this person because you have to wonder what's their motive here? Where's this going? Why would they have a problem with paying me a little bit of money to get started in the first place?

Speaker 4 (01:09:04):

I always advise people to get as much as they can up front because especially if you're working with a-list clients, more than likely they're not going to break up. It might just take a while to get paid, but for guys on much lower levels, they have to worry about what are the band breaks up in the middle of the project, things like that, and they might never get paid. So I urge 'em to just get it done at first. And then also, like you said, it frees from having to have excessive contact about payment. I think ever since I switched to that a few years ago, my relationship with clients got better because money's always kind of weird to talk about, and once it's out of the way, it's out of the way and

Speaker 3 (01:09:50):

Done. Oh know, nobody likes talking about it and no one, it's so uncomfortable calling a client, even if they're a new client or sending them an email and saying, Hey, look, this hadn't been paid for 30 days and I know you don't need the parts yet, but it's like we need to kind of close this up and I don't know, it's just a conversation I'd rather not have. And those conversations have largely gone away now, and so that's also been a stress reliever in that regard. I don't like talking about money. I want to talk about the art. The money's something we have to deal with. Let's deal with it. Let's get it over with and let's move on and deal with the project.

Speaker 2 (01:10:24):

I think that's a good motivator for a lot of people to get a manager or a business manager or something.

Speaker 3 (01:10:30):

I've thought about that. Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 2 (01:10:32):

Just so they don't have to worry about it anymore and they can focus on the art. I know a lot of guys who are in that situation and it's worked really well for them.

Speaker 3 (01:10:41):

I think for engineers and mixers and producers, that part of the production chain where you're dealing with probably much larger sums than the master engineers deal with commonly. I mean, because talking about weeks and weeks of work and things like that, that becomes more difficult I think, because hard to look a band in the eye and go, yeah, we're going to cut this album for whatever, $25,000. We need that upfront. I mean, most fans are going to be like, dude, lemme sell my car and a kidney and I'll get back with you. But

Speaker 2 (01:11:10):

With

Speaker 3 (01:11:10):

Mastering, it's not really that big of a deal because the time period's so compressed. We're talking about a day a two, typically maybe a week total that we're working on a project with all if there's multiple revisions, things like that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):

And so it's a lot easier to stomach any kind of upfront pay. Exactly 50 50,

Speaker 3 (01:11:28):

It's a smaller amount and it's a shorter time period. They're expecting to pay it, whether it's today or five days from now, they're expecting to make that payment. So they've probably got it arranged. I think most bands aren't expecting to walk into the studio and their very first day they deliver a cashier's check for $20,000 or whatever the budget is. I think that makes it difficult. So I think a manager is really good to have there because the manager can be the bad guy and he could be the guy that goes, Hey, man, you have to give us this check. Or the session's not happening today or tomorrow or whenever the next check is due kind of a thing. And that doesn't have to get in the way of the relationship with the engineer. I've got a bunch of friends of mine who have gotten on with management and things like that over the years, and it's really, in most cases, it seems like the manager not only helps with that aspect of it, but because the manager is out beating the drum for the guy the whole time, they're able to get more work that they couldn't get because they were busy working.

Speaker 4 (01:12:17):

That sounds like an ideal situation. That sounds like a very ideal situation,

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):

But you have to get the right manager. It seems like managers are like producers now or just everybody's a manager, everybody's a producer. It's like you decide you're going to be a manager and suddenly there you are. You've got your shingle hung out and you're managing. So you have to find the right guy that actually knows what he or she that knows what they're doing and can actually get you the work and pay for whatever percentage they take. For me, it hasn't really made sense because of, like I said, the differences in the mastering world versus the production side of it where you're spending weeks and weeks and have these kind of complex contracts. A lot of times I don't have any contracts. It's just here's what it costs, pay me and we'll do it. But I do think more guys need to think more about money and the aspect of how they bill and things like that because run into a lot of guys in the industry that struggle with things.

(01:13:09):

They haven't taken the time to sit down and really think their way through it and what's best for them, what's best for the client, those sorts of things. And I have a friend that cuts vinyl, cuts a lot of vinyl, and he deals with that a lot. He, he's been a COD guy basically when he finishes the record before he sends off the masters, he has to get paid the lacquers to plating. But the problem is he feels like if the lacquer sits there for a week before it's plated, and a lot of cutting engineers feel this way, that it actually changes the sound of the lacquer a little bit. It needs to be plated as quickly as possible. So you finish the cut and you're waiting on payment because you want to FedEx this thing out, but you can't get in touch with the client and this and that and the other. And now you're worried about your physical product degrading slightly or whatever. And those are situations where you go, it'd be best if you just told them, this is how much it costs. Pay me up front, we'll do it, and let's go. And it seems to work better for me.

Speaker 4 (01:14:02):

And so I feel like anybody listening who feels weird about charging or who has gotten stiffed or has had a weird situation of pay attention to this very, very closely, take the time to learn how to invoice properly, how all that works, and to really think about what types of payment plans or frequency of payment, any of that amounts would work for your clients. There's usually a good solution, but almost anything is better than get paid at the end.

Speaker 3 (01:14:40):

Yeah, no, I agree. Yeah, because I've had situations where we've gotten stiffed. I mean, probably, I've written several thousand invoices now over the years, and maybe a half a dozen of them haven't paid for one reason or another, and they've always been independent clients smaller for the most part. One or two have been larger invoices, but you just absorb it and roll on because whatever, 99.9% of the clients have been zero problem. But yeah, that's not a make or break situation for a mastering studio. We might write 10 invoices a week, but if you're a producer or a recording engineer or you're doing all three positions, say producing in your mix on a record that's going to go six weeks and at the very end of it, the band breaks up and you haven't gotten a dime yet, man, good luck. I mean, even with a contract, good luck.

(01:15:32):

Good luck actually getting paid on that, even if you take him to court and win and all that kind of stuff. And it gets ugly. It just sounds terrible. I'd love to see people avoid that too many guys, look, there's too many guys in this industry get into it. They love music, they love recording, and they forget that it's a business. Any other, if you're going to be successful in it, you have to know how to run it like a business and whether it's a restaurant or you sell toys in a shop or whatever, you've got to have an idea. You don't have to have a full business plan, but you have to have an idea of how you're going to make money and how you're going to operate in a way that's efficient and takes care of the client, but also leaves a little bit of cheese for you at the end of the day. And if you don't have all that lined up and figured out how you're going to deal with all those issues, then you're really dealing with a hobby that you're trying to make a living off of. And that's very difficult. I would say most people that do that probably don't succeed. They end up back in the real world working a job somewhere.

Speaker 4 (01:16:29):

I mean, what could go wrong with not planning? Well, I can't think of any,

Speaker 3 (01:16:34):

I can't tell you the number of guys I've talked to. It's funny you say that, but it's, it's very real where guys say, well, I'm struggling. Why am I struggling? You start your business and I'll pull out the paperwork from the year or so that I spent researching and planning before I actually started Euphonic. And their eyes get kind of big and they're like, well, I just kind of thought about it a little bit. And it's like, yeah, I spent a lot of time really detailing stuff and figured out how many hours away I knew from day one when I started Euphonic, how many hours a week I had to bill to make the same money I was making when I was at Ardent. And it was a relatively small number, and I thought, man, I can do this. And that made it very easy for me to know all the way through what I needed, what are my marks and guys that don't do that, I don't understand. Well, you talk about having guts. It takes a lot of guts to jump out there with no plan. I thought I was gutsy. So

Speaker 4 (01:17:22):

We have one more question from our audience who'd like to ask you, and we thank you for taking this much time to talk to us, by the way.

Speaker 5 (01:17:31):

Oh, sure.

Speaker 4 (01:17:32):

This is from Giovanni Angel. He says, do you find that shadowing an established mastering engineer is still the way to get somewhere in the mastering game, or at least get good at it?

Speaker 3 (01:17:42):

I think that it's one of the probably two or three ways that you can really get good. I didn't shadow an established master engineer at Ardent. I was the only one there basically. But what I did have at my disposal was a large studio complex. I keep saying large, it's hard to quantify that, but it's a three, like I said, full room facility, three tracking rooms, two SSLs and an eve. I mean, it's a big place. And by working there with guys like John Hampton and Jim Dickinson and Skid Mills and some of these guys, Jim Gaines that were either on staff there or were regular engineers there, I really learned how to listen from those guys. They taught me how to hear things basically. And that sounds kind of weird to say that, but I mean, you don't really know how to listen to things until somebody teaches you.

(01:18:37):

I mean, you can hear, but really knowing what to listen for and what sounds good and what doesn't sound good, and why this sounds good and why this doesn't sound good. That's what you learn from just being in the trenches with somebody for a long time. So I think working with another master engineer as a mentor is a fantastic way to get started. Someone who's established and has a track record, not just somebody who is saying, Hey, I'm a master engineer. Now that working at a studio complex where you have a lot of guys who are good engineers that you can bounce things off of, and especially guys, like I said, the guys I listed, all those guys have huge hit records or really well-known engineers or producers and what they do, and they know how to listen. They know what sounds right, doesn't. So when you cut something for them and it comes back to 'em initially and they go, oh, this sounds great, but there's too much 700.

(01:19:25):

You go back and you listen and you're like, Hey, let's pull that back. Oh wow, that does sound better. And you really learn how to hear things right and what sounds good and what doesn't sound good because of that involvement. So those are the two ways. The third way would be working for a label. I think it was one of the in-house guys, some of these labels, because they do a lot of stuff catalog work, and they get to hear a lot of things. I had the benefit at Ardent of actually doing both. There was a record label there. There was a secular label and a Christian label, both based at Ardent. So I did a lot of stuff for Ardent Records as well as the Ardent's clients that came through. And so I think if you have anything like that where you are around a lot of established engineers and you get to work with them and learn from them, that's going to be beneficial. There are probably guys out there that just started mastering on their own and carved out a real nice niche for themselves, but I'm not readily familiar with any of them. It seems like all the guys that have been successful that I know of have started by working under somebody and learning for years, and then struck out on their own when they felt ready to,

Speaker 4 (01:20:29):

Well, there you have it, actually, Joey taught himself, but that's a different world of mastering. But yeah, I don't actually know of any of the mastering guys that we've talked to on Air that I've worked with who have taught themselves. Almost everyone that I've ever known has come up under somebody.

Speaker 5 (01:20:49):

I taught myself how to master. Haha.

Speaker 3 (01:20:51):

Yeah, no, there are exceptions. Like I said, I don't readily know of any art. I didn't believe you spoke up readily know of any that I knew of that were working that did that. Most guys, it seems like I done kind of what I did one way or the other, either at a mastering house or at a studio label, that kind of a thing where they just got that daily sort of, they were surrounded by. I think you just have to be around people that know how to listen. When you do that, you'll learn a lot from 'em.

Speaker 2 (01:21:16):

Yeah. It's much harder, I've feel, to teach yourself mastering alone, but none of us are alone nowadays with the internet. We're all connected, and it's really easy to reach out to even people like us through the podcast and through our private producers club and all the things that we have going on on Facebook. But yeah, I'd say if you're really interested in taking mastering to the next level with your career, go out. Reach out and email some people and find somebody to shadow.

Speaker 5 (01:21:48):

Yeah, it's an entirely different way of learning to hear than mixing and producing. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (01:21:52):

Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's different. There are guys who are just naturally great listeners. They hear things well, they know what sounds good, and if you're one of those guys and you want to struck out on your own, that's great. But I mean, I went to Full Sail. I did the old whatever, I guess you'd call this the old school at this point, not the new old school. The old school was just, you went and swept Forge at the studio, and they gave you a shot eventually. Then there was the, you go to school somewhere, one of these specialized schools, and now it's gotten back to don't go to school, just spend the money on a Pro Tools rig and teach yourself. I still kind of feel like getting some training from somewhere is probably the way to go, but there are exceptions out there of guys who've done extremely well, and they haven't done any of that stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:22:37):

Sure. Well, Brad, thank you so much for coming on, and again, we went over and appreciate you going over with us. You've been super informative and super cool, and just thank you. Thanks for sharing with us. Hey,

Speaker 3 (01:22:50):

It's been my pleasure. Definitely. Very interesting. Well, it's nice talking with you guys. Thanks so much for having me on.

Speaker 1 (01:22:55):

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