Dan Malsch: His 11,000-sq-ft Studio, Getting It Right at the Source, and Pushing Analog Gear

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by two notes. Audio Engineering two Notes is a leader in the market for load box, cabinet and mic simulators. Gunner, the days of having iso rooms or having to record an amp at ear bleeding volumes to capture that magic tone. The Torpedo Live reload and studio allow you to crank your amp up as loud as you want, but record silently. Check out www.two-nodes.com for more info. And now your hosts, Joel Wanasek and Eyal Levi.

(00:00:36):

Welcome to the Stopping the Recording Machine podcast. I am Eyal Levi with me as my co-host, Joel Wanasek. Joey Sturgis is on a trip, so we tip our drinks to him for all our fallen homies. He'll be back soon though, and with us is an amazing guest, Mr. Dan Malsch, who Joel seems to know very, very well. If you don't know who Dan is, Dan founded the Sound Mind Academy in 2014, which he offers in-person lessons on tracking, mixing, mastering. He's also worked with a ton of awesome bands like Framing Hanley Emotionless and White Barry Your Dead Forever, the Sickest Kids, the Killing Floor, all kinds of cool stuff. And apparently he's got more gear than anyone I've ever met in my life, according to

Speaker 3 (00:01:25):

Joel. Maybe not as much as Ocean Way, but man, when I was there, Dan and I worked on a project back in what, 2010 or 12?

Speaker 4 (00:01:33):

Yeah, it was a while back. I'm bad with dates. But yes,

Speaker 3 (00:01:35):

It was a great time. And we went out there, I had done, it was like an electronic dance, it was like a crossover between, I would call it Andrew Wk Meets Club Rock

Speaker 2 (00:01:45):

Or

Speaker 3 (00:01:46):

The Club. So we went out there and I remember walking in Dan's room and he's got the full SSL, the fricking 24 inch tape machine. All of it still works, and he doesn't even have a damn tech, which is crazy too. He's got like 50 channels of Neve, 10 84 racks of ap, just every piece of gear. And then there's that piece of shit, summit Compressor that he's got. But

Speaker 4 (00:02:05):

That's why I have a shitty car. I got all his gear.

Speaker 3 (00:02:09):

So aren't you doing a new studio, Dan, because I've been following you on Facebook and it looks like you've got a whole new build that you've been doing and it looks incredible. So what's up?

Speaker 4 (00:02:17):

Yeah, so probably about a little over three years ago, my wife just called me out of the blue and said, I'm going to go look at this buildings for sale. It was this old resort that had closed down and they had a bunch of different buildings and stuff, and she went and looked at this building and it was for sale, and it was just this incredible, it's a large building. It's got nothing around it, but it's really close to everything. So my studio right now has nothing around it, but it's 10 miles away from everything. So this one, definitely, yeah. So this one has, it's on its own five acres. You pull into a gate, but you go out and bar is right around the corner. You could walk to places, five minutes shoot to everything. So I want to be a little closer to stuff, and I try to do a build out on this studio that I'm in now, which is large. I've been here for 16 years. It's a large studio if gel's been here. But I'm always bigger, better as studios are getting smaller. My crazy mind wants to make a studio bigger, which I have kind of no idea why, but just

Speaker 2 (00:03:25):

Because,

Speaker 4 (00:03:25):

Yeah, just because, I mean, I don't drive fancy cars. I don't have nice stuff. I just have a lot of gear in a nice studio. But this building was amazing. It's 11,000 square feet. Jesus. Yeah. The one that I'm in now, it's two. So I started out, I was going to do a bunch of different rooms and then really at this point, I'm trying to kind of scale back what the projects that I bring into the studio.

Speaker 2 (00:03:53):

10,000 square foot live room.

Speaker 4 (00:03:55):

No, no. I wish.

(00:03:57):

No. You mean cave. Yeah. So what I did is I basically, I separated the building. We actually put our new home in the building because I wanted it to be originally, and this is a long-winded story, I was going to have both studios. I have houses up here, but I've just want to consolidate everything. So eventually we're going to sell the buildings that I'm in now. We put our new home right next to the studio at the new location. But the studios, it's got a really large control room as I wanted because we spend most of our time in the control room. It's got a really large live room, and then it's got six isolation spaces. It's got a big isolation room for my piano, which I really wanted. And it's got a couple other isolation rooms in the live room and then located down below it has four different isolation rooms for amps and guitars and stuff. And then, so I'm going to have two studios, an A and a B room, kind of how I do here. And then we give classes. So I'm going to have some classrooms in it.

Speaker 2 (00:04:56):

That sounds insanely awesome.

Speaker 4 (00:04:59):

Yeah, it's been a ton of work. It's been three years of basically spending every dime I have and a lot of stress because trying to work on projects and building a new studio has been because this studio is really busy all the time. So it's not like I'm sitting around waiting. It's balancing a ton of things. So these past three years have been definitely super difficult, but got a beautiful studio coming along.

Speaker 2 (00:05:27):

You start the teaching thing within the past three years.

Speaker 4 (00:05:29):

Yeah, we did that too, which was kind of crazy. As everyone knows, budgets have really taken a hit. I mean, I'm a little old enough to know, I've done some records in the mid nineties and early two thousands where budgets were really big, not great, but much bigger than they are now. You take a band like Tantric that I did, their first budget was three or four times bigger than the budget that I worked on their last record on. So I didn't want to have to take a lot of projects that I really didn't want to work on. So I said, well, what can I do? I started giving some classes to bring some income in, but it turned out that I really liked teaching. I didn't think I would because I was never really good in school. I didn't like classes at all. But I think how I teach is really hands-on, not a lot of books, not a lot of studying. It's just we're constantly playing with gear. We're working on different projects that come into the studio. So I really like teaching. So it's what it's done is it's made me be able to say no to certain projects that I don't want to do. Not that they might not be good projects, just something that maybe I'm not really good at or just don't really think that I could do a lot with the project. So yeah, it's been pretty good the school,

Speaker 2 (00:06:52):

And it's kind of like these days while the budgets are shrinking, the amount of people who are getting into recording, well, that number is exploding.

Speaker 4 (00:07:01):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:07:02):

It's huge. So in my experience, that's a great move that you made. So got a quote from Einstein here, which is that if you can't explain it simply, then you don't know it well enough. And just wondering, do you find that teaching audio engineering has helped you develop deeper understanding of engineering?

Speaker 4 (00:07:21):

It really has because as I teach things and I explain things, I'm like, wow, that helps me. Because what I try to teach people is how everything works. Exactly. So if something's not working, you know where to look. You don't just guess why it's working. I teach people from beginning to end signal chain, why this EQ does this, why this compressor does this every different way it could possibly work, but it's definitely from teaching without a question has really brought my skills up to know really. Sometimes they'll question, well, I know how to do that, but why exactly am I doing that technically? Why am I doing that? We all have been doing this a long time, so we just grab and do it. But when you show someone what you're actually doing, it's like That makes sense.

Speaker 2 (00:08:08):

So your course introduction to audio recording, it's 10 weeks long and you go over all kinds of stuff, daws, mic placement's, routing. Can you tell us a little bit more about it for anyone listening who might be interested?

Speaker 4 (00:08:21):

Sure. I mean, I think one of the good points about coming here is we have a ton of gear. So a lot of people have a lot of gear envy like, oh, I don't have this $6,000 Neve preamp, so I can't make this sound like this. So even though I have a lot of gear, I'm not really a gear snob at all. I mean, I'll record on anything. I believe you can make pretty much anything these days. Sound good. So I think I'll go through Neve different when Neve mic pre API, Mike Pre Wonder, Mike pre. And the difference is a lot of times what I show these kids is very subtle. I mean, is there a huge difference between a thousand dollars Mike pre to an $8,000 Mike pre, not really. It's like a fancy car collector's car. They're both go just as fast.

(00:09:14):

So I think one of the strong points about what I do is I'm an older guy. I am 44 now, so I came up in tape having to get the takes, right? Can't punch and fix every little thing. So I come from kind of an old school way of setting things out and setting up sessions. But of course now these days you have to move at a certain speed and you have to know all the latest commands and plugins and mixing techniques. But I think what I do is I really teach people how to get things right at the source. Even tuning drums, making sure phasing is right in your drum kit, making sure everything is correct before you press record. It's down to showing people how to intonate their guitars, how to set everything up before you record. And then we go through, I show guys, here's this.

(00:10:06):

Like I said, here's this hugely expensive mic brie. Okay, here's this hugely expensive mic. We just some recording with that. But then we go to something that's a little more modest that most people record. And honestly, you guys all know it's not that different. I mean, maybe you have to boost the low end a little. Maybe you have to do something with the top end. But kind of what I preach to kids because, and then what a lot of times I've been doing lately is helping kids set up their system because people are like, well, I can't afford this. I can't afford that. You really don't need a ton of stuff. So that's what I do is I go through everything from soup to nuts, setting up sessions from the beginning.

Speaker 2 (00:10:45):

I think that that's super important also because if someone doesn't have a crazy amount of gear, they can really hold themselves back by thinking that they need it. And then also, if they don't have a ton of gear, in all likelihood, they're going to end up going to different studios to do different things. Like

Speaker 4 (00:11:03):

Say

Speaker 2 (00:11:03):

Someone just has a small project studio or a mixing room, they're clearly going to go to another studio to track drums and move around local studios probably. And it helps to know exactly what does what and just how much of a difference it makes or doesn't make. And if you have all the basics nailed, how to get great source tones, you can make things work anywhere you go.

Speaker 3 (00:11:28):

I think I really want to touch on a point here that I know we've said many times on this podcast, and I feel like it's just never ending. You can keep reiterating it over and over and it just never becomes less important. And that is, and which is basically what you've just said, Dan, the importance of fundamentals in recording, mixing, producing, et cetera. Everybody always glosses over the fundamentals. They always want to do complicated instead of simplistic things, techniques, et cetera. They always want the more complicated explanation. It's not, oh, I just eqd it and used balance. That's not good enough. They're like, well, what parallel process and did you use saturation and they want all the fancy stuff. And that was actually something I think I learned from you watching you mix, because that was the first experience I had in a room with somebody on a console. And I remember listening to the bass sound coming off the board. I was like, dude, that bass sound's sick. What's your bass change? And you just turned around and you looked at me and you're like, oh dude, it's just EQ right into the board. I'm like, are you fucking kidding?

Speaker 4 (00:12:23):

I'm

Speaker 3 (00:12:23):

Like, no. And you're like, yeah, that. And I got it high past at 85 and I was like, wow, I'm going to go turn off all 40 of my bass plugins when I go home. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:12:33):

It really is like that though, Joel, because your mixer sheets, you get a lot of sessions sent to you, and some of the stuff I get sent to me, I'm like, whoa. And what I end up doing is basically strip everything down to almost nothing. There'll be like 78 plugins on one thing. And don't get me wrong, I do that sometimes. I'm searching, searching, searching. But if I record it myself or if it's mixed properly, simpler is almost always better. I mean, right. I mean it's kind.

Speaker 2 (00:13:03):

I know 10 times, yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:13:04):

You keep putting more and more and more stuff on and more stuff and you're like, wow. I think if people look at my mixes, they're like, well, what did you do? I'm not that much. It's like leveling and using your ear to put stuff in the right space. I mean, there's a lot of tricks to fix The stuff I always like people say, I would rather mix than fix, fix everything that that's the fundamentals that come in. I mean, if I record a record, then I'm saying I will try to get everything. So when I'm mixing, I'm basically just setting some levels. I mostly filter a lot of stuff. I mostly take away a lot of stuff and create that space. A lot of people just pile on, pile on, pile on, and it's like, it's not that much room in a recording. You can't have this huge bass and then a huge bass guitar, huge bass drum. And I struggle a little bit, not to go off on a tangent. I get some stuff sent to me. I just got some Fetty Wap stuff sent to me to mix. And there are so much bottom on that, it's just wow, crazy. So it's like you usually end up really taking away, taking away, taking away, but you still have to make it sound absurd. But plus these days you guys, it's like, right. I mean there's just so much everything, so much bottom, so much volume.

Speaker 2 (00:14:28):

I think getting things to sound absurd is more of a matter of getting the elements to work together fit like a puzzle

Speaker 4 (00:14:37):

Than

Speaker 2 (00:14:37):

Adding and adding and adding.

Speaker 4 (00:14:39):

Definitely. Yeah. Because adding and adding is a mess usually.

Speaker 2 (00:14:42):

Yeah, totally. There's this moment where when you cut the right stuff in the right places and you level things properly where it's like, it's like a Rubik's cube almost. It gets unlocked, especially with low end. It's like once you fit those magic pieces together, suddenly your mix sounds absurd in a good way. Suddenly it has life and you don't get that by just boosting and boosting and boosting low end. It's called mixing for a reason.

Speaker 3 (00:15:11):

Yeah, you can't just boost and boost low end. Damn,

Speaker 4 (00:15:14):

You can't. I've been doing it wrong. As we get older and we start doing this stuff more and more and more and more, there's some producers I've worked with that I've learned a lot from and some guys where, but there's been a couple guys that I really learned a lot with as far as tracking. One guy, I don't want to mention his name, I think he's a nut, but he's done some shady stuff, but I learned so much from this guy. He tracks so simplistic, he gets all the parts just right, and he drills, he drills, he drills. I remember him saying to the drummer, they were doing this kind of Fleetwood Mac thing, and he said to drummer, if you do that drum fill one more effing time, I'm going to come out there and kill you. Because he'd be like, I just want it simple. I just want it simple. But he would drill it and drill it and it still had the feel. He wasn't taking the feel away, but he got, and then you just pulled up the faders and it was like, wow. It's amazing.

Speaker 2 (00:16:16):

Absolutely. That thread of death, that's kind of cool. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:16:19):

It's a good thing. It works though. It worked it all the time. I have a pizza shuttle application and a McDonald's application love I used keep on that wall love, and I would just turn around when the guitar player can't play his shit and I'd point at it and then they just know. And then they go and shame and play the next take. And then the third time they hand me the guitar and I play it for them. Correct.

Speaker 4 (00:16:35):

Yes, exactly. And another thing I wanted to bring up, but I know how to say this is not sound like a jerk, but we can all fall into, I think because we could fix so much stuff these days and we might be working on three or four projects at the same time, and a lot of times we do go, oh, okay, I got to get this down, I'll fix it later. So I think we all do do that, but there's nothing like getting the take. It's just nothing like it. And I think a lot of younger kids could really, because I'm sure you guys have singers come in, don't worry about it, I'll get it, I'll tune it. And you usually can, but you can't tune the feel you can't tune. A singer just gets on the mic and they're just killing it. It's just like, okay, you almost try to do everything not to screw it up.

Speaker 2 (00:17:27):

I do want to throw in one thing that I do want people to keep in mind, which is really important. I a hundred percent believe in getting the performances in the source of course. However, I feel like one skill that a producer needs to have is that they need to be good at reading the situation and understanding who they're recording and understand when pushing them is not going to yield a result. Maybe they don't have the talent or the skill to pull that off, and in which case, that's why you have all these tools to get out of that situation. There's some people who literally will not be able to do what you want them to do. It's not going to happen. They're not good enough or it's not in their wheelhouse or whatever it is. Maybe they're sick. I don't know. There's a million reasons, but it's really important to also learn how to read the situation and know when the source stones are not going to be as great as they could be. Because reality is you have this person that's just not that great.

Speaker 4 (00:18:34):

I agree. And there's always that moment. Some singers really want to be pushed, they want to be pushed. They don't wake up. They don't wake up until you push 'em. So you're write about reading that and some guys, you push old girls and they just go into this cave and you'll never get it. Some guys, you literally just have to have them do two, three takes down and you do have to fix everything because they're not punch it. They're not going to punch in, they're not going to fix certain things. They're just going to kind of go with the moment. I work with an artist, Michael Graves, who was the second misfit singer,

Speaker 1 (00:19:07):

Totally

Speaker 4 (00:19:07):

Cool guy. This guy, he's just all about vibe. He just wants to sing, sing, sing, sing, sing. And then he just says, okay, Dan, now you put it together. Not that the takes are bad, they're all pretty good takes, but he doesn't want to sit there and work on this word or work on that word. He just wants to do maybe three or four, five or six takes, and that's it. For him, it's all about, it's a punky thing. It's all about him getting in his head and getting it out, and that's it. And

Speaker 2 (00:19:35):

That's actually a great example of when it's not about the person sucking, maybe it's just the person wants to be in the moment when they're recording and by carving it together I guess, or piecing it together, they'll lose the moment. And then again, you have this wide array of tools with which to conquer the situation.

Speaker 4 (00:20:01):

Yeah, I mean everyone's different. So you're right about knowing, and that's also, every project is different. It's so different. So an even gear that we choose, I try to use different gear every time if I can just because I get bored. I'm not a guy who, okay, I need to use an LA two A on this and that. I just get bored. So I just kind of set up whatever I look at first sometimes, and if it sounds like crap, I'll usually change it. I have an SSL console here of 4,000, and I spent, I don't know, five years pretty much never recording drums on the console because I'd be like, oh, I have knees and I have Wonders, and I have APIs and stuff, but the past probably year, unless it's like a rootsy, a real big bottom bluesy, something, I'll reach for the knees.

(00:20:53):

I've been using the SSL to record all my drums, such a smack and a snap on it, but I'd be like, oh, I can't use the SSL to record drums. Yeah, I know, right? Well, because back in the eighties and the nineties, that's all we used, and then everyone came out with all these unbelievable mic previews for this, this and that. So you'd be like, oh, I can't use the SSL anymore. Right. It's supposed to be just a mixing console basically, but there's nothing like the smack on those compressors. So yeah, I mean, I had this console sitting in front of me for five years or whatever it was, and I never recorded drums on it, ever, which is kind of ridiculous.

Speaker 3 (00:21:31):

That's crazy, isn't it? That's amazing. Absolutely. It's really ridiculous. Congratulations,

Speaker 2 (00:21:36):

I think. Yeah, Joel said it. Congratulations. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:21:40):

I don't even own an SSL and I feel like it's taboo to record anything just from what you read, but there you go. I mean, stay off of gear sluts guys and actually use your ears and learn the tools and what they're good at

Speaker 1 (00:21:52):

And

Speaker 3 (00:21:52):

Where you can use them effectively on your session as opposed to just listening to somebody opinion on it and say, oh, the SSL sucks for recording groups. Well, maybe it's brilliant for one project and it's absolute dog shit for the

Speaker 4 (00:22:04):

Next. Right, exactly. That's the thing. And I own the thing and I'm sitting here staring at it, and you're right, if I listen to something, they'll be like, oh, Mike PreOn SL suck. I'm like, oh shit, do they suck? Maybe they do something like shit. And then I recorded drums at one time. I'm like, holy shit, it sounds like the drummer is right next to me. I mean, that's literally what it sounds like. It sounds like the glass is not there anymore, but the snap is just so it doesn't have that big cushy round thing like a Neve does that bottom octave thing, but sometimes that can be way too soft. So it's just something that when I recorded with the SSL, it was almost like the glass was gone from the drum room to the control room

Speaker 2 (00:22:52):

With all these gear and options. Is there any piece of gear that's just a standard, you must use it, or 99% of the time,

Speaker 4 (00:23:06):

There are some things that I'll pretty much grab a lot for snare drum. I have a Pole Tech two bq,

Speaker 2 (00:23:14):

Very nice,

Speaker 4 (00:23:15):

And without it, it does something to the 200 range of the snare drum, wherever. I'll insert it in the snare channel of the SSL to track. And without it, it just always sounds thin. There's something when you boost the a hundred hertz because it's fixed at a hundred hertz, you got 30, 60 and a hundred, I put it on a hundred and I boost the low end. There's just something about that fatness with the SSL, the combination of an SSL, I wasn't doing that when I was using the Neves, but with the SSL, there's something that gives it that it's really, really thick and pretty much always now for vocals, I'll be using my DW firm Pres.

Speaker 2 (00:23:56):

I'm not familiar with those.

Speaker 4 (00:23:57):

Oh, those

Speaker 3 (00:23:57):

Are really expensive and really nice. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:24:00):

It's a two company out of, it's in pen there in Pennsylvania, northeast pa, kind of outside of Philly. It's a pretty, not super well known, but they're definitely high end. If you look at the box, it's crazy. I don't even know how many tubes it has in it, but it's just, once again, it just, it feels like the singer is right next to you. It feels like there's nothing between the microphone and the singer. Now for some things you might not want that, but if I want a really super transparent, but that tuby thing, so at the bottom is kind of round and warm, those are the kind of two pieces of gear that I always reach for. And most of the time I'll use it 1176 for vocals, compressor, I tend to be pretty heavy handed on compression. I'm not one of those guys that will track with just a little bit of something. I'll pretty much get it how I want it to sound. Thank you. Me too. Yeah, if I fuck it up. Oh, sorry. Can you curse on this?

Speaker 2 (00:25:04):

Yeah. Oh yeah. You can fucking curse on this fucking podcast.

Speaker 4 (00:25:08):

Yeah, so if I fuck it up, I'm like, ah, shit. If I'm hitting it a little hard, and sometimes with the Neve preamps, there's that sweet spot where you click it up, you click it up, you click it up, you hear a little too much distortion and you click it back once. That's kind of the spot. But sometimes if you're using what I find, at least if I'm using a tube microphone, I've been using a flea 47 a lot lately. Sometimes if the singer starts hitting it a little too hard, we'll get this. It's a nice distortion, but sometimes it'll be like a little honky. That's the only danger. If you're using a pretty loud tube microphone with the knees, you kind of want to hit the knees pretty hard and then click one back. But then if the singer starts laying into it, you could kind of distort the pre. But I try to do all that when I'm tracking, but it's a little more dangerous because you're not so safe that you have all this headroom that you basically can't fuck shit up. I like to kind of be on the edge of a lot of compression, a lot of everything. That's just my style. I mean, some people are no compression, no eq, no nothing. I kind of just get it how I want it to sound, and hopefully I don't mess it up.

Speaker 3 (00:26:20):

I feel like with analog gear though, that's where a lot of the magic happens when you push it sometimes into the red or you bury out the needle. They all have a certain way they distort bend and just a certain tone that they impart. And even if I'm not compressing in the way in aggressively or anything, I usually like to track through as much gear as I possibly can. I like the coloration

Speaker 4 (00:26:41):

That

Speaker 3 (00:26:42):

It gives, and I mean, a lot of the stuff I've got is pretty subtle. I've got the shadow hills, which is that subtle, don't call it very, yeah, it's very elegant, but it definitely has a sound, but it's kind of on the transparent and elegant side. It's not dirty and gritty or I track a lot through the massive passive eq, which again is,

Speaker 4 (00:27:01):

That's nice.

Speaker 3 (00:27:01):

It's fairly clean, but it just has a little bit of, there's just something about running through some tubes and some transformers that when you're going into the computer, when it comes back out, it never disappoints. It makes it so much easier to mix and it just adds a little bit of character and vibe that's really, really hard to recreate digitally.

Speaker 4 (00:27:20):

Yeah, I think kind of my thing is you're spending all this money for the gear, and you're right, you want something super transparent. It has transformers, so it just sounds big and open. But I tell people a lot of time we spend money on this gear, let's hear it. So instead of, and I do, I tend to use a lot of compression people a lot of time tell me I use too much compression, but I don't know. I just kind of hear they know. Yeah, exactly. You can never use too much. So I'll tend to cream it with the 1176 if I think it sounds good, and then it, sometimes I'll cream it again with a plugin. It's like, I don't know. And one thing, I'm just at a corner of my eye. I'm looking at some APIs out of the corner of my eye. What I never realized. How do you have any API over there, Joel?

Speaker 3 (00:28:08):

I've got the 5,500 dual eq, which is the rack version of the 500 series, but it's got the, trying to think how to describe it, the switchable mid band where you can control the octave so you can make it more subtle and more gentle instead of the Q width is more gradual. You can adjust that. And

Speaker 2 (00:28:27):

I've got your standard 31 20 fours. Oh,

Speaker 4 (00:28:30):

Cool. Those are preempts, right? Yep.

Speaker 2 (00:28:32):

Love them.

Speaker 4 (00:28:32):

Four channel is that one.

Speaker 2 (00:28:34):

That's the four channel.

Speaker 4 (00:28:35):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:28:35):

Only thing missing is an output knob.

Speaker 4 (00:28:38):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:28:39):

Dan's got like 32 of them motherfuckers

Speaker 4 (00:28:42):

No output knobs though, which is really annoying. Really annoying with APIs, isn't it? I mean, especially a lot of news that we do, it's so loud. It's like, I don't know why the knee racks that I have in the Wonders, we actually put output pots on 'em, so we could cream the input and then lower the output.

Speaker 2 (00:29:01):

That's actually what I'm about to do is I'm about to

Speaker 4 (00:29:03):

Put, yeah, you

Speaker 2 (00:29:04):

Need to pads on the output so that I can drive them hard.

Speaker 4 (00:29:07):

Yeah, because not really using, and then the pads on those, sometimes I don't like the sound as much. If we pad 'em,

Speaker 2 (00:29:14):

Yes, it does something negative to the

Speaker 4 (00:29:17):

Sound. Yeah, I don't know exactly what it is, but I never seem to like it. What I was saying about the a p, I never realized how thick the low mid was on 'em compared to something else. And a friend of mine has an ax effects and he brought it to the studio. He had some really cool patches that he made this kind of Metallica black album type of guitar tone he was going for, and I plugged it into the API out of the ax effects into the API. And he's like, no, that doesn't sound like what I have. It was adding so much low mid to it, then I plugged it into the SSL, and it was kind of pretty much what he wanted. It was just pretty transparent. So I never really realized, and I should have realized this, but I never really concentrated on how much low mid thickness there was in the APIs. Really colorful.

Speaker 3 (00:30:09):

Yeah, definitely. They have a sound and some people love it. Well, I think almost everybody universally loves it, but I'm sure there's some detractors, but they do a thing mean

Speaker 4 (00:30:19):

Well, definitely. They definitely do a thing.

Speaker 3 (00:30:21):

I do love my EQ and I wish I had a rack of them, but I don't really track them much anymore, so I don't need it because it's all mixing now.

Speaker 4 (00:30:28):

Are you mostly mixing now?

Speaker 3 (00:30:29):

Yeah, I've been for the last, I think two or three years almost exclusively. I mean, I've tracked three days worth of stuff this entire year.

Speaker 4 (00:30:37):

Yeah, I would like to get to that point too. I mean, I definitely enjoy mixing a lot more. I think I might be semi antisocial. No, no. But I just like the tweaking. I just like to, being a scientist now more, but I still track a lot. I have these nice tracking room and I like to track, don't get me wrong, but I like mixing much more. I think that's where I would like to be eventually more.

Speaker 3 (00:31:06):

It's even more fun when I come and bring a project to you and you hang out with us. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:31:10):

But it sounds great. So what do we do? We didn't even do much. We just kind of No, it's definitely, and I think some of the thing too with my career is I never really specialized in, I mean, for me, if I could do big heavy guitar music all the time, I think that would keep me happy. But from having the studio and having so many different producers in it all the time, I've gotten to mix a lot of different projects. So I don't think people think I specialize in anything, which is, I don't know if it's good or bad, but kind of got to mix. I mix everything from jazz here, which is definitely not my strong point, but I think I did a decent job to sing a songwriter to, I don't mix a lot of super heavy stuff anymore. I wish I did. I tend to get more modern rock stuff sent to me.

Speaker 2 (00:32:03):

Do you have any advice for people who are just starting to make a living at this or maybe they've been making a living, but they feel like they're pigeonholed into one genre. Do you have any advice for branching out into several genres? I know lots of our listeners, they love metal and that's their main thing,

Speaker 4 (00:32:26):

But

Speaker 2 (00:32:26):

They would also love to be doing country records when they get jazz, whatever, and just expand so that they can do this as full-time as possible and not just rely on one genre.

Speaker 4 (00:32:41):

Yeah, I think that's a tough one because I think I'm a little bit of an introvert, so I think if I had to rely on myself going out and getting my own work, which is what I'm trying to say, is the studio kind brings in all these different projects, all these different producers, they happen to hear something that I mixed or something that I work on, and they're like, well, maybe Dan could do this. So I've been lucky enough to get really super different projects, everything from these United States, which are kind of like a Fleetwood Mackey thing to something super heavy to just doing some Fetty Wap stuff just because a rap friend of mine producer recommended me. But as far as, I guess what I would kind of recommend is maybe go find the band that you like and maybe mix something of theirs for free. Maybe find the band that you like that's really different than what you're used to doing, and then see if maybe you can mix a song for 'em for free, see what they think. But that's a tough one. I wish I could give some better advice.

Speaker 2 (00:33:54):

Well, I think that that's great advice. Working for free is kind of the way that most people I know got started,

(00:34:02):

And when challenged with branching into a new genre, what I feel like people need to understand is that there's, while it's not a hundred percent starting over, especially if you have a studio and years under your belt, you're not starting over in terms of your experience. But what you are is starting over in terms of a market that you have no name in, and you kind of got to go back to the beginning in a way and start doing the same kinds of things that you did when you wanted to establish yourself in say, metal. You have to start doing those same things in say, country and try to record people for free, socialize, do those same exact things, and then you should be able to move faster than when you were first starting because you're that much more experienced and hopefully better at your craft. But my advice is always to kind of go back to what did you do when you were first starting to achieve what you have already achieved? Try that.

Speaker 3 (00:35:08):

Yeah. And you got to just put in the work. I mean, that's the real crucial part. It's interesting. We are talking about this. I literally just got off a one-on-one session today with a subscriber of ours, and he lives in kind of a more remote part of Australia. And he was like, all right, I just put my job. I want to do this for a living. How do I get clients? So we were just talking about different strategies and different ways he can go out there. And one of the things I told him that's really important is not just walking up to somebody and be like, yo, let me record your band. Lemme produce or mix your single, you got to build rapport. You have to show genuine interest, you have to understand psychology and things like that. But more importantly than all that stuff is you have to sit down and do it and put in the damn hours and the work necessary, and it's a couple hours a day you should be working on and growing your customer base and focusing. He's like, well, I got 12 hours. And I'm like, okay, spend four hours a day practicing, mixing four hours a day, learning about it, and then four hours a day working on marketing and going out and trying to actually meet people, network and get gigs. And then there'll be a point where that balance, it changes where you're spending more time mixing, less time learning and heard the anytime networking so damn booked and you're so busy, you can barely keep up.

Speaker 2 (00:36:16):

I wonder if someone actually did that six days a week, like say they had six months and six months to do this, make it happen. And they actually were disciplined. You just recommended four hours a day of learning about it, four hours a day of practicing, four hours a day of career growth. I'm sure that almost anyone listening to this podcast could at least get some sort of a client base if they actually followed through with it in a disciplined way and didn't totally suck.

Speaker 3 (00:36:44):

Yeah, you just got to put in the work period. I mean, that's really what it comes down to and not suck, but you got to have the talent obviously, but you know what I mean. You got to put in the work.

Speaker 4 (00:36:53):

I agree with what Joel said because the work, it's a lot of work. I mean, we dedicate our lives to this. You're a slave, but when you have a studio like this, people like, Ooh, you have this studio and it's says, I'm a slave to the studio. I fix it when it breaks. Stuff breaks all the time. You're never off. Your phone rings constantly. And I sometimes have a hard time finding a balance. I think Joel is better than I am. I think at least you have to talk to my wife. So before, yeah, I don't know if you still are, but you're answering the phone all through the night. You're sending texts, you're messaging, you're trying to keep everyone happy.

Speaker 3 (00:37:39):

You're describing me.

Speaker 4 (00:37:41):

Yeah. It's just you

Speaker 3 (00:37:42):

Live the same life. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:37:44):

There's no way to survive in this business. If you want to have a nice life, you want to have a house and nice things or keep yourself fed, basically. How

Speaker 3 (00:37:54):

Many kids do you have, Dan?

Speaker 4 (00:37:55):

Two.

Speaker 3 (00:37:56):

Okay. I got three now. So the kids are expensive. Very, it costs a lot of money, and it's like it doesn't go away. It's like a mortgage. You know what I mean? You can't like crazy. Yeah, I can pay that bill next week. It's like, it's hard.

Speaker 4 (00:38:10):

It's very hard. And people, they're like, oh, well you are made, you're here. And they're like, I do the same thing every day that I did 20 years ago, but I just have way more responsibilities. There's no difference. Difference really. I mean, I work just as hard, probably harder just now. We have more responsibilities and more on the line. So it never gets easy unless maybe if you get to the point of somewhere, I don't think it ever gets easy. Even the most successful people I know in the world, I don't gets easy.

Speaker 3 (00:38:41):

Would it be worth it though if it was too easy?

Speaker 4 (00:38:43):

No. No, it wouldn't. Because I'd be bored as can be. And if I'm not stressing biting my fingernails, I mean, I put on the act for people as I sure you do. It's like everything's cool. I think that's kind of my, when I'm in the studio, I'm pretty mellow, but inside I'm not all that mellow.

Speaker 2 (00:39:04):

I think there's a misconception about what it's like at the higher levels, and I don't think it gets easier. So you have nicer amenities, right? Maybe a bigger paycheck. And I don't think those things are superficial. I think that there's a mindset that you can get in that's very positive if things like that are taken care of because you don't have to worry about them so much anymore in it. It's nice to be taken care of, but when it comes down to it, the pressure at the top is way, way more intense than at the bottom. You're dealing with millions of dollars and multinational corporations. That is a level of pressure that the bottom can't even fathom. And then when it comes down to it, at the end of the day, you strip everything else out of there. You're still recording or writing or mixing a track in a studio with an artist or foreign artist, and you still have to deliver the goods. There's no way out of that. And that doesn't get easier.

Speaker 3 (00:40:08):

No, it's exponentially harder.

Speaker 4 (00:40:10):

It's harder. It's way harder, right? I mean, perfect example is, and I'm not really a hip hop guy. I don't do a lot, but a friend of mine happens to manage road manage Fedwa, and I am developing this younger kid who just got to deal with Atlantic. His name's Liam Liss, young, 14-year-old kid, but he's actually very talented. TI WP did a track with him. So then I ended up doing some stuff with ti and then I got his last tour ready for him as far as intros, interludes, just to make sure everything's right. But now his new tour, but that's such a high level that he's got like a billion streams, whatever, it's It's crazy. It's insane. It's insane. And his manager's tough when you're at that level. And honestly, I don't make that much more for that than I do for a lot of things. People think, oh, oh, you working with Fedwa? You could basically retire. No, not even close. You

Speaker 3 (00:41:10):

Tell 'em you're accepting donations.

Speaker 4 (00:41:11):

Yeah, definitely accepting donations. I'll absolutely take donations, Kickstarter, whatever you have. But it definitely on that level, there's a certain, the manager will call you all night long, we need this, we need this version, we need this thing and we need this thing. And you really have to deliver. And you can't say no, you can't say. So it's definitely, you're right. You have to deliver. And when that deadline is set, it has to be there. I mean, they have a tour, they're going Jones Beach, him and a bunch of other bands that needs to be there.

Speaker 2 (00:41:44):

No, people are not playing at that level.

Speaker 4 (00:41:47):

No.

Speaker 2 (00:41:48):

You're dealing, even though you might not be the one making extreme amounts of money, there are extreme amounts of money on the line. Oh, absolutely. So yeah, I definitely think that people getting into this need to understand that the pressure only increases as you go higher. And that's why actually, we were talking about this yesterday, but there are some guys who make a living off of local only clients who do very well, make lots of cool records, and make a good living for themselves without ever going to the national or international level. And that's perfectly fine for them. Lower pressure, still decent money, and still a good time.

Speaker 4 (00:42:32):

I mean, actually, in some ways, that's kind of a great scenario. I mean, you get to work with it really is. It really is. I mean,

Speaker 3 (00:42:41):

When you're there and you're looking upward, it seems like it's not as cool. But when you're upward and you're looking back downward, you're kind of like, man, I remember when it was easy to get paid. Right?

Speaker 4 (00:42:52):

Yeah, absolutely. Right. Joel, the bigger artist you work with, getting paid becomes more difficult nine

Speaker 3 (00:42:58):

Months later.

Speaker 4 (00:42:59):

Yeah, I think that's actually great career if you're happy with that. But people are always like, well, don't you want to work with Metallica? I don't know. Honestly, quite honestly, that's just an example. That's a lot of everything. You're definitely, you work with them and it's a big record. I only using them as an example, but it's a lot of time away from your family. That's a big commitment. Definitely. And

Speaker 2 (00:43:33):

A long commitment.

Speaker 4 (00:43:35):

Right? Yeah. That could be a two year commitment to get drums. Totally.

Speaker 2 (00:43:39):

So we've got some questions here from our crowd for you that I'd like to ask you. The first one is from Rodney, and that is, could you describe the vocal tuning process for Framing Hanley?

Speaker 4 (00:43:53):

Ah, sure. Nixon is a really good singer. I used Waves Tune, not I go back and forth between the two. I think Waves Tune could kind of tweak out the system sometimes a little bit more, but I like the way it sounds a little bit better. But with Nixon, we would do, lemme talk about the recording real quick. We would do a bunch of takes and then we would kind of narrow down parts that we thought we had to fix and work on. But there's not a ton of tuning on his vocals. There'll be more tuning on the backing vocals on the harmonies, but not a ton of tuning on the lead vocals, but I would use Waves Tune.

Speaker 2 (00:44:36):

All right. Hunter Driscoll is asking, were there ever any moments where you thought about giving up? And if so, what got you through those moments?

Speaker 4 (00:44:48):

If I thought about giving up, it was for maybe 0.1 seconds. I'm not that type of guy, but it gets very difficult. It gets very, very, very difficult. But to me, I have too much, I don't know what the right word is. I don't want to sound like an asshole. I have, I never want to give up. I mean, I'll fight, fight, fight and fight, and there are probably things that are easier, but I don't know. My brother's a doctor and he stresses out more than I do, and it's very difficult. I'm sure he has the same thoughts about, wow, this is really difficult. But I mean, compared to other things, is this really that difficult? Probably not.

Speaker 2 (00:45:29):

That's a good perspective, right? Well, I mean, people's actual lives are not on the line,

Speaker 4 (00:45:35):

Right? I mean, my brother never sleeps, works seven days a week. He's gray already. Sounds

Speaker 3 (00:45:44):

Like recording.

Speaker 4 (00:45:45):

Yeah, right. Yeah, it's actually very similar.

Speaker 2 (00:45:50):

Gary's asking, how do you figure out what piece of outboard gear you're going to use on any given project? I know the question may sound like a no-brainer, but you have more gear than anyone I've ever worked with, right?

Speaker 4 (00:46:02):

I mean, okay, so we'll narrow a few things down. Just try to keep this simple. If I'm doing a guitar, I'm usually going to reach for something that's a little thick, thick in the low mids type of thing. So for me, I'll either use my Chandler Preamps or my API preamps. I think the APRs are a little faster. I think the Channelers are a little more neish, but the Channelers have this thick switch in them that really does something really good on the low mids. But from doing this for so long, you kind of have that thing, this singer's voice is a little thin, so I need something to thicken it up a little bit. Or this guy's got a lot of bottom on his voice. I need to use something that'll thin it out a little bit. So it's kind of just listening first to the instrument and then picking the preamp or picking the compressor. So it's you listen a little bit first, especially the singer, but sometimes you already know the singer, you listen to their previous records. And I don't usually play things safe. I usually don't say, well, let's just get it, let's just get it clean to tape. I usually try to get a vibe going, but there are certain things that we all reach for 1176 ERs for vocals, summit overheads. Well, the summit is if you don't have a summit on overheads, you just can't make a record or for your talkback Mike. Right.

Speaker 3 (00:47:29):

We actually do the summit. I should just say it's a really excellent compressor. It it's a long story. A good joke.

Speaker 2 (00:47:35):

Yeah. So what is the summit story?

Speaker 3 (00:47:38):

Oh shit. Do we want to go there, Dan? I can probably do the short version. Alright. This has kind of become infamous around here at least. So I went to work with Dan several years ago and I had seen, I forgot who the producer, very famous guy. He did an Alison Chains record, and it was a mixed magazine ad. It was just surrounded by walls of Summit Gear, exclusively used Summit Tube gear on every record, blah, blah, blah. And there's a dude standing there and I'm like, huh. So I remember seeing that ad and I'd never seen a summit in action. And I'm going through Dan's exhaustive racks of just amazing gear, and I'm like, yo, Dan, what's up with this summit? And he's just like, oh dude, it's really sick. And I'm like, what's it good on? And this is kind of like when I just met Dan, so he didn't realize what a sarcastic goofball I am. I have a very ridiculous sense of humor. I say a lot of things that are just absurd because I think it's funny

(00:48:35):

And either you get it or you don't. And he's just like, well, he couldn't think of anything. He was like, I like it on overhead sometimes. And I'm like, so it's fucking garbage, so it sucks, right? And then Dan got it right away. He got the sense of humor. He just started laughing and because the fucking worst compressors, the one you throw on overhead, you shit, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. So dude, it was so funny. So for the whole week, I just trolled the fuck out of this piece of gear. It just became a whole fiasco. The band was in on it.

Speaker 4 (00:49:03):

It's great. You're still doing it.

Speaker 3 (00:49:05):

Yeah, I'm still doing it. Still messaging me and it never gets old. So this is the real rub though. The SSL blows out on the second last day that we're there, the third last day, the tech comes in and I'm kind of just bullshitting with the tech and we're talking about whatever. And then Dan walks in the room and I'm just like, you know what, Dan and I just said this in a straight face. The tech has no idea what the hell is going on. And he's just kind of not paying attention. And I'm like, Dan, I bring my band all the way out here from Chicago. We come in your studio, I bring you this nice budget. And I walk into the studio, I see a fucking summit. I'm like, you get this fucking piece of shit out of this studio. And I said, this stone cold with anger and hatred in my voice. And I was like, you train that fucking thing to the back of your truck and run it down the hill. I'm not going to let you fucking fuck this record up by putting that piece of shit. And I started laying into the dead, fucking lost his stack, and I was trying to keep a straight face and the guy just stands up. He's like, oh,

(00:50:00):

He had no idea what was going, you don't like summit either Dan and I in chorus turn like, dude, it's fucking garbage. And he's like, oh man, I used it back in the eighties on drums and I didn't like it that much and we fucking lost it. Holy shit. So that only exacerbated the situation In the last day, the vocalist, he had to punch something in because, I don't know, he just spent too much time at the bar and he was doing a shitty job. And he gets in the booth and I'm screaming at him, he's singing absolutely a one out of 10 and Dan puts him through the 1176 purple and I'm like, dude, it fucking doesn't sound right. It's too bright. And he goes, I know. And he goes, and he plugs it into the summit and that thing sounded fucking awesome. And I was just like, bastard,

Speaker 4 (00:50:41):

You know what? The summit does really well, just to, I hate to even say it in front of Joel, you could put a shit ton of compression on something and it won't sound like beat up and super compressed. It's pretty transparent for that, but you can get a ton of compression if someone's all over the place on their vocals, you can get a ton of compression and it's so easy to use. It's two knobs, you know what I mean? It's like you got fast, medium and slow attack.

Speaker 3 (00:51:12):

They got a fucking garbage button on there too, or

Speaker 4 (00:51:14):

What?

Speaker 3 (00:51:14):

Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:51:15):

Yeah, they do. It's funny. I'll looking at these things right now. One

Speaker 3 (00:51:19):

More caveat then that story. I had a producer then fly in from LA who pretty big guy. He had a co-ownership in the Sonic Ranch in Texas, which is a really incredible studio. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:51:28):

It's a crazy studio.

Speaker 3 (00:51:29):

And his name is Steven Short. He's recently passed away. He came up and the first to produce a record and he sat down in my studio and we started talking about gear and the first thing he says like, man, I really like Summit Compressors, dude, I fucking lost it. I turned around and I just told him the whole story. First thing I was like, fuck the summit. That thing's a piece of shit. He was just like, bet that he got it right away. He saw that it was joking. So we started joking about it. So bastard, a week later, he sends me a picture of a refrigerator, hit the studio and he took the summit out of the racket and it was just sitting in the fridge and I just text him back. I'm like, dude, why is the summit in the fridge when it clearly belongs in the motherfucking garbage? And I dunno, it was just out of control. So summit's

Speaker 4 (00:52:05):

Going to be after you, Joel. They're going to put a hit on you.

Speaker 3 (00:52:08):

You know how many summits I just sold? Probably like none.

Speaker 4 (00:52:11):

Yeah, right. People are going to be returning them.

Speaker 2 (00:52:15):

You actually have only used it once though.

Speaker 3 (00:52:17):

A couple of times I think. I don't know. Who knows?

Speaker 2 (00:52:20):

And did it rule both times?

Speaker 3 (00:52:21):

Yeah, it was fantastic. They are really good. Yeah, it's a great piece of equipment, but it just all because of that article. I saw that ad with the dude who did Alison Chains because he had a whole rack of it and it's just like, I use nothing but Summit. Not just like, I don't know. It was fun. It was just having a great time.

Speaker 4 (00:52:38):

Sometimes Joel, it's funny, when I'm using the summit, sometimes I think of you and I'm like, does this fucking thing really? I'm not even kidding. I'm like, maybe I shouldn't be using this.

Speaker 3 (00:52:49):

Oh, that's amazing.

Speaker 2 (00:52:51):

Now I want to try one.

Speaker 3 (00:52:53):

Oh dude, it was just so absurd. It was great. That was just a really really fun time. I mean, when you're making a record, there's a lot of pressure and you obviously want it to be the best. And I've always believed in trying to have as much fun with the band as you possibly can because hey, if they enjoy spending time with you, it's like they're paying the hang out with you, then they're going to come back to you

Speaker 4 (00:53:11):

And

Speaker 3 (00:53:11):

They'll probably come back to you multiple times.

Speaker 4 (00:53:13):

Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (00:53:14):

It increases their lifetime value. If you want to talk nerdy marketing terms.

Speaker 4 (00:53:18):

No, I agree. Because hanging is really, sometimes I wish I was a better hanger. Some guys I know, man, they're just so, they're a good hang. They drink and they go and this, I try to be super fun in the studio, but I'm not like a go hang and mingle. I probably should be more. I'm always getting shit about that. But

Speaker 3 (00:53:38):

Don't tell your wife you said that.

Speaker 4 (00:53:39):

Yeah, yeah, I know.

Speaker 2 (00:53:42):

Yeah. I don't know about the hang and mingle. I used to. I'm over it.

Speaker 4 (00:53:46):

Yeah, I know. My wife says, yeah, you should go. And like I said, look, I have the studio that brings me people over and over again because I think the studio's name is bigger than mine, which is kind of whatever. It's fine.

Speaker 3 (00:54:01):

Well, here's the formula, right? Hang and mingle. In the beginning of your career, you have to build rapport and relations and repeat clientele. As you get bigger and you get more and more credits, your name is going to do its work for itself and bring you clients and you have to do less hanging and mingling because there's no damn time. You have too many tracks to work. Got

Speaker 4 (00:54:17):

To work. Yeah. That's why I always tell people I'm working, did you hear this, this, this and this band? I'm like, fuck. I'm usually mixing or working on something, but then I usually have to go out and listen to it. But I don't know. Joel, you seem pretty busy. I think we're in the same boat.

Speaker 3 (00:54:35):

You got to keep at it, you know what I mean? It's a taker's world. You got to go out and if you want to do something and you believe in it and you got to go do the work and you got to go get it. And if you do that, you get to live and enjoy the good life and all the perks, like seven day a week, 16 hour days and no life and no fun.

Speaker 4 (00:54:55):

But

Speaker 3 (00:54:55):

At least you get to make cool records and occasionally people download the illegal. This is one that just went on vacation

Speaker 2 (00:55:00):

For two months.

Speaker 3 (00:55:01):

Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:55:02):

That's pretty neat. Joel. I got to tell you, I was jealous.

Speaker 3 (00:55:05):

You know what? You'd be surprised though. The irony of that vacation is it actually cost me less money to go there because of daycare and all that stuff. To go there and spend two and take two separate vacations while I was on actual vacation than it was to stay at home and grind it out. So

Speaker 4 (00:55:20):

Daycare, that's got to be a killer. Not to get got sidetracked, but dude,

Speaker 3 (00:55:25):

It's over like 30 grand a year. That's crazy. Fucking sucks. But you just got to enjoy life. Got to get up this way. Getting,

Speaker 4 (00:55:32):

Making that big mix money.

Speaker 3 (00:55:35):

I'm look at it this way. I can always make more money, but I can't get more health. You know what I mean? I can at least walk now sort of and move and breathe and talk kind of. So I might as well go see and do stuff while I can do that before I'm in a wheelchair with gray hair because I mix too many records.

Speaker 4 (00:55:51):

No, it's awesome. I mean, that's really awesome that you were able to do that. You've probably come back a little refreshed.

Speaker 3 (00:55:57):

Yeah, it definitely helps. Except now I have an avalanche of shit to get through it. I'm back to where I was before I left.

Speaker 4 (00:56:03):

Yeah, I believe it. Everyone's yelling at you and where is this?

Speaker 3 (00:56:06):

Yeah, everybody's pissed. But the thing is now I don't care because I just came back and I'm all relaxed and I'm just like, it's all right. I'll get it done. It's coming. Chill out. It's not that big of a deal.

Speaker 4 (00:56:16):

I wanted to ask you, you got to, how do you deal with, I've been doing this for a long time, dealing with it, it's like you can only get things done so fast and keep stuff at a super high quality. My biggest critic, I can't just phone something in. It's just not going to happen. I have my OCD things that I have to do in every mix, just an OCD thing. I need stuff to look organized. I need stuff to be organized. I need to know that I went through everything. It's just kind of, and I don't know, sometimes it might be better or worse. I'm not sure, but it's just what I do. I just, I'm not a fast mixer. I think you're a fast mixer, right?

Speaker 3 (00:57:00):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:57:01):

I mix Joe's insanely fast.

Speaker 3 (00:57:03):

Yeah, I mix upward of about 500 tracks a year when I want to take on that much work. So I've got a couple answers to that question, Dan. First off, you need a damn good assistant who really knows the shit,

Speaker 4 (00:57:15):

And then

Speaker 3 (00:57:15):

You have to spend a bunch of time refining the actual system. So when I get a track back from him, all my shit is already routed, everything is on it. I literally sometimes just have to write automation and I can whip through a first mix in 30 minutes. If we already have a first song approved on a record and it's like a metal record or something like that. So there's not a lot of variance. The artsy bands obviously take more because they get all DIY about all that shit, dude, my snare need to be 17 db higher. Well fucking play 'em better next time. Yeah, exactly. I know we don't have any more money,

Speaker 4 (00:57:48):

So

Speaker 3 (00:57:49):

That kind of bullshit. So I get a lot

Speaker 4 (00:57:50):

Of those bands.

Speaker 3 (00:57:51):

That's a big part of it for me is just really having an organized system. But the other thing is at some point in my career, I feel like I learned to really live 80 20 and I realized I can spend three days on the sickest drum zone in the world, but if I send the first mix to the band and they're like, it's garbage, dude, that's not what we wanted at all. It just wasted three days.

Speaker 4 (00:58:09):

I know.

Speaker 3 (00:58:09):

So I literally try to get the first mix done as fast as I possibly can and go like Chris Lord algae on that, send it over to the band and then just see either I'm on, I have work to do or I'm way off and I need to completely rethink my process. And from that initial feedback, either I've nailed it and then it just needs a little bit of revisions. I mean, on the bigger bands, obviously if I'm doing something like Machine Head, I'm going to sit there and obsess over every little micro hair

Speaker 4 (00:58:32):

Of course. But

Speaker 3 (00:58:33):

What I'm working on something that's not that high level, it's really just about getting it done, making it sound great, something you're going to put your name on, but at the same time, not overthinking it, knowing when to just say, okay, enough is enough. Send it to the band. They're going to have an opinion anyways. And it doesn't really matter if this snare drums a DB brighter or Hi my mom, when you listen to this band, she says they're going to be like, this song is good or it's shit. And being able to accept that is really difficult. But the day that that happened is the day that my mixing got a lot faster

Speaker 4 (00:59:00):

And

Speaker 3 (00:59:01):

I don't feel like I sacrificed any quality, if that makes sense.

Speaker 4 (00:59:04):

No, it does make sense. It really is. Obviously it's the song, right? I mean, if the song is great, you could almost mix it like shit, and it's going to be a great song. A lot of times we don't deal with great songs mean, so it's almost like you are trying to make something sound perfect. That's really, at least in my head, obviously, when you have a great band, great. For instance, the Tantric, you may not like the style, whatever the case may, but one of the records I did with them, I literally mixed the whole record in a couple days because it was recorded so well. The band is all really good players, really good players that it was almost, it was nothing to mix. It just sounded great. I recorded it, mixed it. That was easy, and I let it go. And the good thing about that was I thought I had a couple weeks to work on it and I had a few days, so it be like, really, this has to be done two or three days, and I just blew it out and it worked. But there's other times where bands will obsess and obsess and obsess and I'm sometimes too accommodating. But if I feel that I tell bands, if I feel that you're starting to really mess up the stew, mess up the song, I put a stop to it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):

You have

Speaker 4 (01:00:26):

To. But I will probably go longer than most people will with revisions.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):

You kind of have to these days it's kind of expected, I think.

Speaker 4 (01:00:34):

Yeah, it's like the never ending. It's never done, right? I mean, just bands this, they think that you just load up your session.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):

Well, they have pro tools

Speaker 4 (01:00:44):

Now.

Speaker 2 (01:00:44):

Right? Right.

Speaker 4 (01:00:45):

Don't you just call it up? I would be like,

Speaker 3 (01:00:50):

It can be a real circus. Something that makes me think that just inspired a thought is I think a key process to mixing quickly too is the gut, right? So a lot of your best mixing, I feel is when you're not thinking about mixing. You're just like, you throw up the faders, all your shit is edited, tuned, whatever, set up the way you like it, and you just kind of start going with your impulse, and then you get that rough first balance and start writing some automation and the song is feeling good. And at that point when you're about to become a nitpicky bastard about it, that's usually when I send the band the first mix.

Speaker 4 (01:01:23):

Yeah, yeah, you're right. I agree.

Speaker 3 (01:01:25):

Sometimes I've nailed it and it doesn't need anything more, and anything that I'm going to do is actually detrimental. I'll spend all this time EQing guitars only to find out that if I took all that damn EQ off and just made one wide cut, it would've just sounded better.

Speaker 4 (01:01:36):

Yeah, I agree. Sometimes when you deal with, I don't want to go on and on and on about this, but sometimes you have a band, and it happens in rock bands a lot where you have two or three members that all want to be the leader. So it's like, you know what I mean? You're dealing with, I just dealt with that on a project where I'm getting notes and they're the littlest most ridiculous things, but the band hasn't gotten together on the notes. Oh, shit. You know what I mean? So it's like, then you have to go do the whole thing, guys. You got to talk about it with each other, decide on something, a consensus with the band, then send you notes to me. But then it's this guy in the band's fighting with this guy in the band, so they don't want to talk to each other sometimes. So it's that whole thing. Sometimes you got to be a therapist too.

Speaker 3 (01:02:20):

That's where systems come in place because if you establish the ground rules in the beginning, I never Bix attended. Very rarely do I ever, I say, okay, one guy sends me things, pick a point guy for the band and send me notes. If I get a note from anybody else, I'm going to hit delete. I'm not even going to open it. I don't give a shit.

Speaker 4 (01:02:37):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:02:38):

Same.

Speaker 4 (01:02:38):

That's awesome.

Speaker 3 (01:02:39):

And that saves you so much time. Then the band knows not to fucking waste your time because they're going to be like, all right, this guy's really serious. He's really busy. And it kind of like you have to put a premium on your time and make the band feel like you're doing them sort of a favor, but at the same time, you're obviously trying to give them all you can, but we're trying to avoid is them wasting unnecessary time because it could just be spent doing so much more things. It's like, guys, I can sit here and read your fucking notes and argue with you back and forth, or I can be spending that time automating one of your songs and making it pop more, putting more time into being creative. What do you want?

Speaker 4 (01:03:09):

Yeah, I agree. So that's the thing that I try to, you do establish that in the very beginning and then what happens occasionally. The reason why I'm saying this, because I actually just had it happen last week, bands will be screaming at each other, management this and that, and I'll be like, guys, you just got to get your shit together. Send me. I'm saying, this shit is getting worse and worse and worse. And I always do my point, version point, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4. So I keep the ones that I like the best, but I'd say one out of every very few projects this happens. But the reason why I bring this up is because it just happened and it was really like a nightmare trying to finish, trying to keep the two main guys in the band happy, keep the management happy, and it was a good budget. So it was one of those things I was like, it was for labels. So you wanted to keep the label happy, but it was a tough one.

Speaker 3 (01:04:03):

Definitely. Well, Dan, thank you so much for your time. It was super awesome catching up with you again.

Speaker 4 (01:04:09):

Hopefully I wasn't rambling as I did.

Speaker 3 (01:04:11):

Oh no, not at all. So people want to check out your stuff. Where can they check it out online?

Speaker 4 (01:04:16):

Alright, so Facebook page is just Daniel Mulch, producer mixer. That's Daniel. Then M-A-L-S-C-H, and then sound mind recording.com. That's sound mine, MINE. And then you can check out Sound Mind Recording Academy for the schooling. But there's a link on the Sound Mind recording page with some music a player. It should be pretty updated.

Speaker 2 (01:04:41):

Yeah, we'll make sure to link to this in the show notes as well. Awesome. Cool. Well thanks for coming on, man.

Speaker 3 (01:04:47):

Can I tell you guys what my dream is real quick? So someday I'm going to have a new studio and I'm going to have a summit in the wall right before I enter the studio, which I'll walk in. I will curse at it every day, but it will be hardwired.

Speaker 4 (01:04:59):

Yeah, just punch it.

Speaker 3 (01:05:00):

Yeah. It'll just take a verbal bashing every day. I'll get all my anger out on it. I'll go into the studio, I'll mix a project, but it'll always be hooked up in case I want to run overheads through it. Yeah, it's good. That's my dream. I'm going to spend like four grand on a compressor just so I can swear at it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Do

Speaker 4 (01:05:14):

It.

Speaker 3 (01:05:15):

That's living the life I back your dream.

Speaker 4 (01:05:18):

I would probably do that actually. If I had an extra four grand I would do it.

Speaker 3 (01:05:22):

Why not? I mean, some people like fancy cars and shit like that. I just want to swear at a summit.

Speaker 4 (01:05:26):

Yeah, yell at compressor. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:28):

And then use it and not tell anybody that I like it.

Speaker 4 (01:05:30):

Yeah, exactly. It's on every lead vocal.

Speaker 3 (01:05:35):

Oh shit. Amazing.

Speaker 4 (01:05:37):

Awesome guys. Thank you. I'll talk to you soon. Bye-Bye. The Unstoppable

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):

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