Jeff Dunne: Quitting His Day Job, Remote Production, and Creating Impulse Responses

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome

Speaker 2 (00:00:01):

To the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, and now your host, Eyal Levi. Welcome to the URM podcast. Thank you so much for being here. It's crazy to think that we are now on our seventh year. Don't ask me how that all just flew by, but it did. Man, time moves fast and it's only because of you, the listeners, if you'd like us to stick around another seven years and there's a few simple things you can do that would really, really help us out, I would endlessly appreciate if you would, number one, share our episodes with your friends. Number two, post our episodes on your Facebook and Instagram and tag me at al Levi URM audio and at URM Academy and of course our guest. And number three, leave us reviews and five star reviews wherever you can. We especially love iTunes reviews. Once again, thank you for all the years and years of loyalty.

(00:01:01):

I just want you to know that we will never charge you for this podcast and I will always work as hard as possible to improve the episodes in every single way. All we ask in return is a share a post and tag us. Oh, and one last thing. Do you have a question you would like me to answer on an episode? I don't mean for a guest, I mean for me, it can be about anything. Email it to [email protected]. That's EYAL at m dot A-C-D-E-M-Y. There's no.com on that. It's exactly the way I spelled it and use the subject line Answer me Eyal. Alright, let's get on with it. Hello everybody. Welcome to the URM podcast. Our guest today is Jeff Dunne, who is longtime friend of URM and the podcast who is an audio engineer mixer and really he doesn't need an introduction, but we did it anyway throughout his career so far he is worked with some of the bigger names of metal, such as Born of Osiris, IL Maya, make them suffer, alluvial wage war Einstein kills and the list is always growing. I got to know him through his partnership with Wizard Blood, AKA Drew Falk. You can see him on a Cubase fast track in URM and also he did the am Mure Nail the mix with Drew and it's one of the most amazing nail the mixes ever. It's just, and I learned how to use Cubase, watch his fast track and then also watch his nail the mix. But anyways, I'll stop talking. Let's get into it. Here's Jeff Dunne. Jeff Dunne. Welcome back to the URM podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:02:42):

Hey, thanks for having me back. Good to be here. It's

Speaker 2 (00:02:44):

A pleasure, man. So lots happened lately.

Speaker 3 (00:02:48):

Yeah, what has it been like five, six years?

Speaker 2 (00:02:50):

Yeah, but I think we hung out. Shit, man. Time flies.

Speaker 3 (00:02:54):

Well, you came out to LA for the Emir Nail the mix and that was 2017.

Speaker 2 (00:02:59):

Yeah, I've bummed out now that I realize how long ago that was.

Speaker 3 (00:03:04):

I mean, we've got the whole COVID gap in the middle where no one really saw anyone, so we can wipe that time from the face of it. But yeah, no, it's been a long time.

Speaker 2 (00:03:11):

I can't believe it was that long ago. Holy shit. I guess we're five years older. Well, I mean it doesn't seem like you've been wasting that time, so that's good.

Speaker 3 (00:03:19):

No, no, I've been burning the candle at all three ends where I can. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:03:23):

It's a good thing. Do you feel like your current situation, meaning having moved to Portland no longer in LA allows you to be more productive or less productive or doesn't make a difference?

Speaker 3 (00:03:38):

Probably more productive just for the state of mind. It's put me in just the overall, not a place versus place thing, but just how I'm much happier with the setup we've got here. We bought a house, I set up a new mix room. I've got a bunch of friends around in that sense, way more productive. One of the things that's been interesting to me as I get further into this career is that it's no longer like a skill-based thing that impacts my work. It's like a happiness will to work, desire to jump into it and apply myself a hundred percent. And so in that regard, a huge, huge productivity boost. I think my mixes are better than ever, so hopefully other people agree. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:04:12):

I think they do. So you think it's a mental state thing?

Speaker 3 (00:04:15):

Totally. I think that's been the number one thing I've been focusing on lately. Not gear not, I mean, you got to do things in order in terms of you have to have the technical chops to know how to get stuff in and mix it. You need to understand your room and how to acoustically treat it, and then get your monitors set up all the business side of things. How are you going to intake requests, provide quotes, invoices, all that stuff. Once you figure that out, then it's like, okay, well I'm just in the grind of it and how do you grind for me? I have to be happy or at least feeling content in some way. So getting that set up has just been, feels like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs type of thing, but been a really, really big focus of mine lately.

Speaker 2 (00:04:57):

Were you unhappy in la?

Speaker 3 (00:04:59):

Yes, but we weren't in LA for the last bit of it. I'm trying to think. We moved out of LA proper in 2018. I spent about two and a half years in San Bernardino County, so it was like a 40 minute drive, well 40 mile, probably like a 60 minute to 90 minute drive in from 2018 to 2020 and then in 2021 we moved up here. The town out there was for my wife's work and it was a smaller suburb, but it was also kind of like a cultural death spot as far as things that I'm interested in. The straw that broke the camel's back was during pandemic. The one good coffee shop in town closed unexpectedly and then it turned out to be a union busting effort. It was like, well fuck if I can't even get good coffee here and I'm an hour drive from everything else.

(00:05:42):

I've already figured out how to do things remotely in terms of working with both Drew and other clients. Figured that out, was able to figure out a work transfer with my wife's work and Portland is one of the cities and we've always loved it up here, so we took the jump. It was a really good lineup in terms of things kind of coming to a close with everything being shut down for COVID. Also just a really good new point for me to jump off of. Let's take on a lot more independent bands. Let's take on a lot more work outside of what I've been doing with Drew. I left my day job, which is weird to call it a day job. I was doing 85 hours between the two. But yeah, no, it's been great.

Speaker 2 (00:06:21):

Can you talk to me a little bit about your remote workflow? Because I know Drew is quick, he's not the type that likes waiting around for things and I know that it's a high-paced type of situation.

Speaker 3 (00:06:38):

Oh, for sure.

Speaker 2 (00:06:39):

How do you manage to do the remote thing for him without falling behind? What's that?

Speaker 3 (00:06:45):

I actually owe him some work on some sessions right now, but no, it's so funny. It hasn't been too bad to be honest. We spent five years in a room together back and forth in terms of working on the same machine and getting that dialed in and then at a certain point for productivity reasons, I just needed to get a similar setup going at home,

Speaker 2 (00:07:04):

Both

Speaker 3 (00:07:04):

Because I had become familiar with working at his place and because I was now printing, you wanted a second machine so that one guy can work while the other is doing other print stuff, either, whether it be revision stems, whatever. And so once we got that going, even in LA for a little bit, we were working out of a Dropbox folder and we still work out of a Dropbox folder. So at a certain point in the tracking stage, he'll upload a session into the Dropbox folder, I'll check it out and be able to sort through Song one while he's recording song two sometimes and we go from there. And then to be honest, I think there's a record right now we're doing the one I work on, is he tracked into Dropbox? That's a pretty common thing that we do. What

Speaker 2 (00:07:44):

Do you mean by track into Dropbox? You mean that's where the files are like

Speaker 3 (00:07:48):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:07:48):

That's the audio files folder

Speaker 3 (00:07:50):

And depending on your internet connection at the space you're working at, you might need to disable syncing for the day and then just at lunch or at the end of the day re-enable the sync so that all the good takes get uploaded. But yeah, as long as your internet's good enough, I mean it's not like you're streaming audio into the cloud that you're reading back from your dot, but using a session folder within the Dropbox folder and that way at least if you've got mirrored rigs, you can open it from either side so he can do 20 minutes of work, say, Hey, I'm really stuck on a piece. Can you jump in? I can say, yep, he closed it. I open the same session, run from there. And there's been a couple hiccups. The latest thing that's been interesting to figure out is going to be the transfer to M1 as we get to that because I have been having real issues with cross chip compatibility, like Intel sessions sometimes open on M1 M1 sessions almost never open right on Intel, so that's going to be a thing to hammer out, but I don't know.

(00:08:46):

I'm a technically inclined person and I like to troubleshoot.

Speaker 2 (00:08:49):

If anyone can figure it out, it would be you so sure you'll get that dialed. Yeah, that's a good system though. M1 aside, that seems like a pretty efficient way to do things.

Speaker 3 (00:09:00):

Yeah, it works out great. No, no complaints.

Speaker 2 (00:09:02):

I mean that's just the modern age. You have to know how to do stuff in different rooms in different locations. Basically being remote is just how things are and how they're going to be. I don't think that I'm being a doomsayer or anything. I'm actually an optimist when it comes to life, but I just don't see, and they're smarter people than me who would be fixing this, but I just don't see how the world is going to go back to how it was the natural order of things is to become more chaotic. That is how things work.

Speaker 3 (00:09:41):

Totally.

Speaker 2 (00:09:42):

You have to try to keep things ordered. Entropy just happens and now that that's been broken, the whole being in person thing has been broken and it's now in a more chaotic state, which is to me the more chaotic state is people everywhere just trying to work it is going to be real tough to put that shit together, back together. I don't think it's going to happen because people have figured out how to do the remote thing. They have set up basically their workstations and their offices and studios and everything to be able to do it and then to stop doing that. That's going to take a ton of effort too. I just don't think it's going to happen.

Speaker 3 (00:10:26):

No, I agree. There's some things that I don't think the in-person, like looking people in the face hearing, reacting without the milliseconds, a lag through Zoom or whatever is there's places where that's absolutely necessary and provides the best results, but there's a lot of places where it's not helpful to necessarily have everyone in the room. It's better to have people to be where they are, where they're most comfortable, and to be able to interact as they can for their schedule without involving a commute or travel or any of that shit.

Speaker 2 (00:10:53):

Dude, you want to know something nuts. Even with nail a mix, it's better remote, which is so weird to think about because like we had to do that because of the pandemic. We had to figure it out, but before that it was, I would've never imagined that it would be better to do it remote, but it is the only thing missing, and this is the thing, kind of like what you're saying, you can't replace hanging out with friends in person.

Speaker 3 (00:11:23):

That

Speaker 2 (00:11:23):

Side of it is just no longer there, but the actual workflow is way easier. And actually in the session itself, me communicating with the person mixing, you didn't nail the mix. I would be sitting behind you talking in the back of your head.

Speaker 3 (00:11:40):

You have to remember to not turn around and yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:11:43):

Yeah, it's such a pain in the ass for everyone. And then for me sitting at the back of the room, it's always in the weird spot acoustically for the room, so I don't know what I'm hearing. Sometimes they can't hook up an extra monitor for me to be able to see what they're doing, so I got to be like,

Speaker 3 (00:12:00):

You're just in the back squinting and yelling at them.

Speaker 2 (00:12:02):

Yeah, dude. It's just weird. As opposed to now where we're looking at each other, I can see their screen, it's perfect. It's so much easier.

Speaker 3 (00:12:11):

That's huge. The seeing the screen thing is big and I think removes a lot of the barriers there. That's been one thing that I've been finding really helpful in doing production work remotely because I've been doing some of that. There's a band called Ocean Sleeper from Australia. It's got some stuff coming out soon that we've been working on where it was literally, we set up a Zoom call with all three four of the guys and then I would share my screen, open up a session. They would send me some pre-pro stems. They had going the guitarist and Singer Yoni is a good producer on his own, so he would send over some files in advance. I would send over text notes and then we'd jump on a Zoom, but being able to just point to, Hey, this blob here might sound better over here, or what if we write the drum pattern? Doesn't matter if you're coming up with new ideas or riffing off each other. I found that pretty easy to facilitate in a Zoom context. Once you get over the initial hurdle of like, okay, you guys probably can't be doing it from your phone on public transit. You hammer out all those, the working remotely things that aren't native to most people and even productions remotely go really well. I've been finding I like it. I like that way of working.

Speaker 2 (00:13:10):

Yeah. The thing that I was curious to see was how production would work remotely, the creative process, just because I feel like pre pandemic at least, I don't think that the technology was that different. It wasn't that different. Maybe it's gotten a little better. Zoom has improved and all that stuff and it's gotten a little better, but it's not like worlds better. I think that what's changed is just that people have decided to figure out how to make it work and how to not just make mix notes work, but how to make real time collaboration work and how to just deal with it basically.

Speaker 3 (00:13:50):

No, for sure. It's been happening for a while. I have been doing, I was a product manager at a software company before it was the dual duty. We were a fully distributed company after, well, people just started moving, but I went remote in 2018 and had been working completely remote up until a pandemic at that point. The company did go full distributed, but we had been working in a hybrid approach before that in the tools. You're right, they haven't changed. Zoom was around back then. There were some differences before they had their zero day panic attack at one point. That was the biggest one I think. It

Speaker 2 (00:14:20):

Wasn't like they were something completely different than they are now.

Speaker 3 (00:14:23):

No, that's what I mean. It's exactly the same tools and now people are over the, I don't want to work on a computer screen or look at my coworkers over the internet. There's been a lot of that old head management in office mentality that's been broken and now that people have seen, oh, you mean I can just go to a meeting between fucking laundry loads that I'm doing at home, or I don't have to waste gas and money and time on a commute. As soon as people figured that out, I think they were real quick to figure out the technical things they needed.

Speaker 2 (00:14:53):

Yeah, I'm still figuring out what the right amount is for me being at something. So with these riff hard shoots, for instance, those are tough to do remote because it's more complicated than nail the mix. It's just multiple cameras. There's the audio side of it, basically the file management side of having the audio and multiple cameras just be perfectly organized for 80 guitar videos.

Speaker 3 (00:15:21):

That's

Speaker 2 (00:15:22):

A lot to ask of someone that's not pro at this. And so it's better to do a lot of these in person, but man, the amount that I need to be there to do my part is so okay. I know that it's better for me to be in the room with a guitar player because I'm also there with Nick and John Douglas and it's like

(00:15:40):

I need to be communicating with multiple people. But I have noticed that after one day or two days of me being there, they're just on a flow to where I'm not even, it's like, what am I even doing here? You guys got this. And even in situations where I feel like I do need to be there for some, there is a benefit to being there. I am realizing, well, I don't need to be there for a week. I could be there for two days and that's before all this. I wouldn't have thought about that. And I think that that's what a lot of projects and workplaces are doing now. I know that at my girlfriend's office, there's set amount of days that people come in and set amount of days that they work from home. And I think that people are starting to figure out just how much they need to be in person and just how much they don't need to be. I think that's great. Honestly.

Speaker 3 (00:16:32):

Yeah, my wife's work is the same way. There's a three, two policy kind of thing, and it's great because the office doesn't need to have as much shit. You don't need as much square footage. You can probably pick a different location as a result. There's a lot of benefits to being able to stagger your work week like that.

Speaker 2 (00:16:47):

What do you prefer, just out of curiosity, if everything was ideal, say that there was no pandemic and all that?

Speaker 3 (00:16:56):

Yeah, I really like, I'm the type of person who likes to work undirected on my own, unsupervised both for, I procrastinate randomly throughout the day reasons, and because I don't awkward hovering feels weird to me. So in a lot of ways I like to do that. I also like to listen to music while I work without headphones. I hate wearing headphones while I'm working is something I found. So being able to do with speakers without bothering other people, that's a really nice thing. But there is some stuff that like we were saying that is you can't replace and is really nice to have around. So I think my ideal would be some kind of beginning of week touch base in person even, and this could apply this to a record context. One thing I've learned is that making software, making products, making records is all kind of very similar processes.

Speaker 2 (00:17:42):

It's all the same,

Speaker 3 (00:17:43):

And doing one made me way better at the other and vice versa. So it was a really nice thing to learn. But yeah, regardless of what you're doing, you check in at the beginning of the week, you name, what do you have to get done that week? What do you have to get done in the context of the overall project? What is that week going to contribute to it? Do you have the right things lined up for that week? Is anyone blocked? Does anyone have needs that are unmet that they need to fulfill the task for that week? And then you check in the middle week, how's everyone going? Did anyone come up with any new blockers? Is anything hitting the fan? And at the end of the week you check in again and say, Hey, what did we do? What do we get done?

(00:18:14):

What do we need to set up for next week? And where are we going to go get drinks after this? So that kind of, in some of those touch touch ins, you can definitely do remotely or even asynchronously. That's a big one for me is figuring out work that you can do without having to be live in person. And I think that's even more so than the in-person face-to-face versus zoom screen to screen, but is what stuff needs to be done asynchronously versus synchronously. When do I actually have to get your live response on something? When can I leave a note, leave an example, leave a gif or a screen recording and come back later to feedback? It's a really interesting thing to figure out.

Speaker 2 (00:18:53):

Yeah, I agree. Something else that's interesting to me, not to change topics, I'm going to change topics, is you quit your day job. Yes.

Speaker 3 (00:18:59):

I

Speaker 2 (00:18:59):

Was wondering when that was going to happen. The thing about your day job is that it wasn't like one of those situations where music's not working out. Music has been working out for a while, but you actually enjoyed your day job, at least from what you told me. You actually enjoyed it. You thought it was cool and you liked it, but I was wondering, I had a feeling that at some point, given your trajectory, you were going to have to quit. And I see that you did. So first of all, congrats on getting to that point, but thank

Speaker 3 (00:19:31):

You.

Speaker 2 (00:19:31):

What was that like?

Speaker 3 (00:19:32):

Oh, it was interesting. It was a long one. Yeah, so for context, so I don't know, the audio was always working out for me. There was a funny time in 2013 where I lived with Andrew Glover from Wins of Plague. What's up Andrew? I got to go to Nashville and see him.

Speaker 2 (00:19:44):

Shout out. By the time I knew you, it was working out

Speaker 3 (00:19:46):

Well. Yeah. So I started that job in 2014, and it was through Music Connection. It was through the band. Daylight Dies. Jesse, the drummer, started that company and I knew the bassist Eagan, so we had a connection there. I started working there, wasn't doing anything audio related. Drew moved to LA posted that he needed some help. I started doing night stuff for him again, and that kind of kicked off like, oh, I actually have to do audio stuff to be happy to some extent. And I would've figured that out eventually I think. But it was just really, really well timed and I was living in la so that worked out great. And then so the software company made software for political campaigns, nonprofits, website tools, donations, email whipping tools, that kind of thing. The area of the world I'm interested in was more interested in back then, it was a really fulfilling thing.

(00:20:26):

You worked with great people to build interesting products to solve interesting problems, and that's an interest area that can span across a lot of different, I wanted to say verticals, but areas of whether it be music, whether it be software, whether it be physical products, that kind of thing. Part of it was just me being kind of a busy body, wanting to have my fingers in a lot of pies, and I kept that going for about as long as I could. It was really nice to be able to have income from one when the other wasn't working out, so to speak, and to be able to not have to have my schedule 100% dialed in. But it would come to times, and this started getting more and more frequent in the past couple of years where I was overbooked on both ends, whether we would have something launching at the company or I had too many records in flight or everything in music I find is everyone's late or early by just the wrong enough amount to fuck up my schedule a little bit. And yeah, it got to the point where I was like, okay, I can only spend so much effort on a single day caring about any given thing, so where am I going to put my time?

Speaker 2 (00:21:29):

Yeah, you only have a hundred percent to give.

Speaker 3 (00:21:31):

Yeah, A lot of it was moving to Portland, was getting to a place where it was, where we were in Redlands before was, it's a pretty boring town to be totally honest. So it was really easy to wake up at six seven, mixed for a couple hours, do day job, end at five six, and then mix for another couple hours easy to make sure I'm spending time with my significant other. The social connections were happening at work. We didn't have a lot of friends who lived physically in Redland, so there was no need to go hang out with people. Then pandemic hits and it was just like, well, what am I going to do is work, work, work? And then now that we're in Portland, there's a bustling food scene, there's great breweries everywhere. There's places I want to go and physical friends in person that I can go see now that I'm having some of that take up some of my time. I'm not just literally not wanting to work as often. And I was lucky enough to be in a position where I didn't have to bookings this year especially took off in a way where it was like, okay, I got to end it at least this year and wound up being a little bit early. I think my last day was in April. So yeah, we're two months out now and things are doing well.

Speaker 2 (00:22:32):

That's great, man. Yeah, that is great. And I do agree that this is a really important point. You really do only have 100% of your energy and focus. So as much as you like to do everything, I call it the entrepreneur curse is people who can do lots of things, try to do everything. At some point you just got to make choices as to what is going to get your energy. That's it. That's all there is to it.

Speaker 3 (00:23:04):

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (00:23:04):

Because shit will suffer if you don't.

Speaker 3 (00:23:06):

I have that curse really badly of I just want a million hobbies. Everything I learn a little bit about, I'm like, oh, what is the origin of that? What is the background? I can learn where it came from and how do I make it myself? How do I make it the best it can be? And you can only do so many things.

Speaker 2 (00:23:21):

Yeah. So what are those things going to be?

Speaker 3 (00:23:23):

I haven't done one of those. Write down your operating perspectives and decide how to optimize 'em in a while. The positions you hold in life, whether it be employee, son, brother, partner, all that stuff. Like you said, the day only has so many pockets. It has a lot when you have a lot to put in them, but it only has so many at the end of it,

Speaker 2 (00:23:42):

It always ends up being like nine o'clock, and I'm like, fuck, how did that happen?

Speaker 3 (00:23:47):

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:23:49):

How

Speaker 3 (00:23:49):

It is a good problem though. I would rather have that than be bored out of my skull and waiting for the day to pass and waiting to go to the next one in the morning. So yeah, pick your poison.

Speaker 2 (00:23:58):

Yeah, I mean, I've been there. I've been there too. I don't prefer that at all. So what was it like working with Wes?

Speaker 3 (00:24:05):

Wes is great.

Speaker 2 (00:24:06):

Wes Hawk in case anyone's wondering, but

Speaker 3 (00:24:08):

Wes and I met Wes when I was 14 years old at a guitar center in Oxnard, California because I was butchering Paul Gilbert songs, and he was like, who is this kid butchering Paul Gilbert songs? So Wes is one of my longest friends in audio, and getting to work with him on the latest record was really satisfying for a lot of reasons. I mean, he's probably one of the best guitar players on earth. I can say that without thinking I'm exaggerating at all.

Speaker 2 (00:24:34):

I think that's right. You can say that. Yeah, just

Speaker 3 (00:24:36):

Having him have full control over a band, seeing his vision to fruition was awesome. It was a long time coming from the time we were started originally going back and forth on some of the demos for the songs he had to when it came out and to when it was finished, then when it was released, another delay. No, it was one of my favorite records to be a part of so far, and I can't wait for the next one. It

Speaker 2 (00:24:57):

Sounds great, by the way. Thank you. How much did it change between those original demos to what we all know and love?

Speaker 3 (00:25:06):

Not a ton. I'm trying to think. Wes has always been the type to have He noodles on stuff and gets it pretty complete from a start to finish, but there's always little details here and there. So there were, even in the mixed stage, remember we were pasting in new kick hits and moving some things here and there, maybe like a two bar extra piece here. And there are still parts where I listened to it and I'm like, oh, I remember the first time I heard this riff kind of in some kind of Dropbox Superior drummer demo. And there's a bunch of 'em littered throughout his old, A lot of his old Playthrough videos are just noodling on Instagram, noodling on YouTube type of videos where you hear it and you're like, oh, that's that exact riff. Just maybe not as many layers, not as much insane drumming behind it. Yeah, it hasn't changed a ton, but interesting. That guy is awesome.

Speaker 2 (00:25:51):

Yeah, I heard a demo off of the new stuff. He actually played it at a riff hard q and a and it was mind blowingly good.

Speaker 3 (00:26:00):

Yeah, he rules, I saw them at Star Theater like two weeks ago, three weeks ago. It was great to finally see them as a band. They sound fucking awesome. Cool to hear a band or the rhythm guitar drops out when the guy's doing solos again. Yeah, no tracks.

Speaker 2 (00:26:14):

Panera style.

Speaker 3 (00:26:14):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:26:15):

So

Speaker 3 (00:26:15):

Is it one

Speaker 2 (00:26:16):

Guitar Live?

Speaker 3 (00:26:17):

One Guitar Live? I don't know if they have any. I know they have some tracks for, actually, I don't know if they run any tracks live. I figured they would because they're a modern band and there's bass drops in places, but Oh, there's definitely, there's intro tracks and stuff, but yeah, they don't run guitar tracks during the solos live, so it's just Tim on bass and Wes ripping it and he's real good about going back into his rhythm parts right when he is supposed to. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:26:43):

Yeah, that's cool. For some reason I thought it was a two guitar band. I didn't realize it. Well, that's even more awesome actually,

Speaker 3 (00:26:49):

Right? They're a four piece.

Speaker 2 (00:26:51):

Yeah. If anyone can pull off one guitar, it's him. So

Speaker 3 (00:26:55):

Yeah. Yeah. No, I enjoy listening to his pick attack. I would listen to it soloed, and so just having him up on stage is great. And Tim rips on bass too, so that's also cool to have behind it.

Speaker 2 (00:27:07):

Yeah, it's a sick band. It's also, I don't want to say surprised because I think it's awesome, but I'm happy to see that it's picking up. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:27:18):

It weird because Wes is 10 years older than me, but definitely proud dad moments watching that. For sure. So

Speaker 2 (00:27:23):

You being the dad?

Speaker 3 (00:27:25):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:27:25):

Interesting. Do you call him son?

Speaker 3 (00:27:27):

No.

Speaker 2 (00:27:28):

It's just weird to think of you as Wes' dad, that's all.

Speaker 3 (00:27:31):

No, but that's how it felt emotionally for the project. It was like, huh,

Speaker 2 (00:27:34):

I've

Speaker 3 (00:27:35):

Been watching this guy play in every opener band in the metal core, death core scene for the last bit. Finally got a record of his own, his stamp on it. It was just great to see. Very satisfying.

Speaker 2 (00:27:46):

Yeah. And Alluvial has gone through some morphs, I guess, too.

Speaker 3 (00:27:51):

Yeah, I wasn't super familiar with the first iteration of it. Me neither. But they had a record before.

Speaker 2 (00:27:57):

It's just good to see. Hey, everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast, then you should know that it's brought to you by URM Academy, URM Academy's mission is to create the next generation of audio professionals by giving them the inspiration and information to hone their craft and build a career doing what they love. You've probably heard me talk about Nail the Mix before, and if you're a member, you already know how amazing it is. The beginning of the month, nail the mix members, get the raw multitracks to a new song by artists like Lama, God, angels and Airwaves. Knock loose eth shuga, bring me the Horizon. Go Jira, asking Alexandria Machine Head and Papa Roach among many, many others over 60 at this point. Then at the end of the month, the producer who mixed it comes on and does a live streaming walkthrough of exactly how they mix the song on the album and takes your questions live on air.

(00:28:50):

And these are guys like TLA, will Putney, Jenz Boren, Dan Lancaster to I Matson, Andrew Wade, and many, many more. You'll also get access to Mix Lab, which is our collection of dozens of bite-sized mixing tutorials that cover all the basics as well as Portfolio Builder, which is a library of pro quality multi-tracks cleared for use in your portfolio. So your career will never again be held back by the quality of your source material. And for those of you who really want to step up their game, we have another membership tier called URM Enhance, which includes everything I already told you about, and access to our massive library of fast tracks, which are deep, super detailed courses on intermediate and advanced topics like game staging, mastering low end and so forth. It's over 500 hours of content. And man, let me tell you, this stuff is just insanely detailed and enhanced.

(00:29:44):

Members also get access to one-on-ones, which are basically office hour sessions with us and Mix Rescue, which is where we open up one of your mixes and fix it up and talk you through exactly what we're doing at every step. So if any of that sounds interesting to you, if you're ready to level up your mixing skills in your audio career, head over to URM Academy to find out more. So I feel like your mixes have, I always thought they were good, but they've turned a corner in the past couple of years, especially in terms of low end and punch. And I'm wondering, I mean, a mix is always a bunch of different things, obviously, but

Speaker 3 (00:30:26):

For sure,

Speaker 2 (00:30:27):

Is there something in the last few years that you started doing differently in order to dial low end and punch?

Speaker 3 (00:30:33):

I don't know. People ask me sometimes they'll be like, Hey, do you still use roughly the chain you used on the Amir Nail, the mix? And it's like, yeah, roughly, but I'm added to it. And so in the sense of new stuff I've been doing, I don't know if I could tell you a singular new one. It's probably what I think is a little bit of a curse, a little bit of just how your tastes develop for a long time. In my AB process, I include band's past release because you want to beat it your past, my past release or two because you want to make sure it's on par and in that ballpark.

(00:31:03):

And then something that they referenced that maybe something that's competitive right now. It could be a process of just hearing my own previous stuff and wanting to beat it every time. And so what do you do you add? I mean, for me it's been more low end and probably more drum transient, just getting things bigger and punchier and sounding better, and you build on it over time. It's really interesting to listen to some of the past stuff. Some of it sounds a little over amply, over a little bit Pliny, Pliny a little bit quiet. And then some stuff is like, oh, holy shit, I was still really loud back then. Still a lot of low end. It really depends on it. I also probably have been getting better tracks lately. It's been a nice thing working with that makes a difference, doesn't it? And that kind of thing. I mean, the Lou, everyone talks about how good it sounds. It's all my ingredients were fucking top tier. It was like drums from graphic nature. It was John Douglas engineering. The rest of it. We had Wes playing. I would've had to try to fuck it up kind of thing. There's no way it wasn't going to sound good. So that's part of it for sure.

Speaker 2 (00:32:07):

That is so important. I think people still to this day, they still discount how important the quality of the tracks is in the final mix.

Speaker 3 (00:32:18):

I can only take it so far. And to be honest, part of it's like we were talking about being happy and having mental motivation to do things. I can only care so much about improving the tracks if they sound a certain way. There's the hole. You can't polish a turd, but you can spray paint it silver. That one really applies. I don't want to be a fucking spray paint artist all the time. I don't want to fix your tracks all the time. I don't want to spend half my day aligning vocal starts and ends so that I can use the amount of compression that I want to use to get the clarity I need in the lead vocal. That's just mind numbing stuff. So if the tracks are better and I don't have to do that kind of stuff, I'm going to be able to give more of my effort on the thing that matters, which is the sonics of it, not what matters. You can't get the sonics right if the tracking isn't right. But fixing bad tracks is like, yeah, it's a decent part of the mixing. So getting good at that has been, maybe I've gotten better at fixing things up quicker and I've gotten better source tracks. So yeah, that plus taste developing,

Speaker 2 (00:33:20):

But it doesn't come up as much, does it?

Speaker 3 (00:33:22):

No. No. And I don't know, it's hard to do. Talk about things that are hard to do in person versus remote. How do you train someone to just have good judgment when it comes to guitar takes or vocal editing? It's such a hard thing to teach. So in terms of what you could nail the tracking, that'd be a really hard thing.

Speaker 2 (00:33:42):

How did you learn what a good take is?

Speaker 3 (00:33:45):

Years and years of either recording myself, recording other people, getting tracks from other people. At a certain point you start remembering, wow, certain things made me feel something. I felt compelled when I heard a guy playing in a certain way. And you just have that as a mental benchmark of what it could have been. You start getting things that aren't quite like that. Oh, okay, well this is harder to get sounding good. You start to become more familiar with what is the baseline for standard.

Speaker 2 (00:34:10):

So I feel like a really good editor isn't just anybody. They have to actually be good at music. And I don't mean they have to be some virtuoso or something like that, but they need to

Speaker 3 (00:34:22):

To be a musical person,

Speaker 2 (00:34:23):

Really good musical judgment. They have to have really good musical judgment and taste. That's what it is.

Speaker 3 (00:34:29):

And I mean, that's a tough thing to train. It's all subjective.

Speaker 2 (00:34:32):

It's all subjective. But good edits are not subjective. It's like someone editing drums, for instance. They need to know what was intended. And then also they need to know what feel is and what feels right. How do you teach someone that

Speaker 3 (00:34:47):

That's true? Yeah. I mean, thank God the grid's there if they need to fall back on that, right?

Speaker 2 (00:34:51):

Yeah, it's there. But no,

Speaker 3 (00:34:54):

I'm a hundred percent joking.

Speaker 2 (00:34:55):

Oh, well, I mean it is there. They need to fall back on that. But seriously understanding feel, I don't know how you teach somebody that. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:35:02):

I mean, well, there's understanding it and then there's how do you inject it into the tracks that have none, or how do you account for when there's too much?

Speaker 2 (00:35:09):

Yeah, exactly. And then with a good guitar take, that's an interesting one because I don't know anyone has experienced this, but when working with really great guitar players, their standards are usually too high.

Speaker 3 (00:35:22):

Oh, they want to do more takes than you think is necessary. You think you got one that's killer, you want to move on. And they're like, ah, I picked a little bit too close to the bridge.

(00:35:32):

Yeah, no, that's one of the challenges of working with more stringent musicians, but the product tends to be good. And there's a certain case where I like that, where it's like, oh, I get to turn off my quality control side of the brain. I just know that this guy's going to rip and that he's going to tell me when it's too much. And now my focus is on how do I not want to jump out of a window when we're on the umpteenth take on the riff that I thought was good. Yeah, that's a dual edged sword.

Speaker 2 (00:35:57):

Who's right though? That's the thing.

Speaker 3 (00:35:59):

The artist is a hundred percent right in that case, in most cases, we're all here to serve them. I think a lot of producers forget that. A lot of engineers forget that,

Speaker 2 (00:36:07):

But are they serving themselves always by getting that way? That's what I'm wondering.

Speaker 3 (00:36:12):

Ah, that's fair. The need to hone the artist's creative vision to represent the best version of themself because they might run out of time and budget if left otherwise. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:36:21):

And they don't always have the best perspective on it either. They have their vision and

Speaker 3 (00:36:27):

They

Speaker 2 (00:36:27):

Have their art, but they're not professional listeners. A studio engineer is so you don't know what rabbit hole they're in in their own head when tracking something to where they may have lost all perspective. Just the artist doesn't mean that

Speaker 3 (00:36:45):

They're

Speaker 2 (00:36:45):

Infallible in terms of perspective. So I think part of it is protecting them from themselves.

Speaker 3 (00:36:51):

That's really big.

Speaker 2 (00:36:52):

What's the line?

Speaker 3 (00:36:53):

I think a lot of it is, one thing that I found interesting is playback strategies like the psychology of the person you're working with and figuring out what things they hear that ruin a take for them or that make it cool. And then what context can you play that back in to work in your favor? Should I play it back with the backing band? Should I play it back soloed? Should I let him do a couple and then have it panned left so he hears the full image rather than one single soloed bit? Some guys do want to hear the soloed thing and really go off that, but no, that's a challenge. How do you determine that? What levers do you have to pull? You've got time left in the day. You've got your own energy. You've got how much longer you want to spend on it. You've got how good the take is right now and how confident you are. You can convince the artist that it was a good take and that you should move on.

Speaker 2 (00:37:34):

Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:37:35):

I don't have a great answer for you.

Speaker 2 (00:37:36):

It is a bunch of little things.

Speaker 3 (00:37:37):

Yeah. It's just what things can you tweak? What's in front of you to try to make sure it fits? And that's why those things are so hard to teach is you have to have a situational awareness to read the room, figure out what the best tool from your little box of tricks you need to work out. And I think the way you do that is be in the room a lot, spend a lot of time doing it, but also develop the tricks that you have and make sure that you have a deep bag of them if you need to.

Speaker 2 (00:38:04):

Reading the room thing, a lot of people think that that means know how to socialize, which is part of it. Actually. I think a lot more of it is what you just said is playback strategy, being able to read who you're working with and presenting things to them in the way that is going to be most productive.

Speaker 3 (00:38:21):

It can be tough, and every artist is a little bit different, and your preferred way of working might not line up with that particular artist's preferred way of working. So

Speaker 2 (00:38:30):

Yeah, it's definitely tough. Yeah, this is the stuff that I think you cannot learn online at all. No, I definitely stand behind everything we do, and I think it's great, but there's a limit to how much you can get out of it. And when it comes to those things, the nuance of working with people in real life, which is what actually matters, because what are you doing this for? You're doing this so that you can create, well help people create music that sounds really good, that then gets released. That's why you're doing it. So at some point you had to be able to work with people or you're doing it for no reason. You're doing learning all these tricks for no reason. So that being the most important part of it is also the part that you can't learn any other way, but being there.

Speaker 3 (00:39:21):

Yeah. Yeah. That's a very good way to put it.

Speaker 2 (00:39:23):

So tell me about Trello.

Speaker 3 (00:39:24):

Oh, Trello. I still use it. I'm mad that Atlassian bought them and is kind of shitting on them as a product a little bit to get people to buy into the Confluence tiers of product. So you still use it? Yeah. It's still my pipeline, so to speak. Get a request on site Auto creates a little card, card, moves through some stages as I get to my quote, given invoiced, booked inflight kind of thing. And then there's some triggers along the way that those things talk to each other so that I don't have to physically move the card a lot, but I've got this kind of dance I do with cards where there's and waiting for revisions and they bounce back and forth between those until they get put in the stems and finals column. And then I have a little, it's nice as I have a quarterly finished column so I can look back and see what did I finish in the last quarter? Yeah, it's cool to see that grow. It helps me stay really organized. There's a lot of times where I just don't want to think, what am I supposed to do today? Let's go look at Trello. What's the first card? Cool.

Speaker 2 (00:40:19):

I like the idea of taking thought out of the equation.

Speaker 3 (00:40:24):

I mean, that's a tech mantra for thing. I legitimately only wear black t-shirts next level, 3,600 just because they're fucking $5 bulk and they fit great. And I don't have to think about matching them with anything. Same thing with audio. Developing a lot of strategies to treat it like driving where you're not thinking about a thing. You're not thinking, where is the brake pedal I need to push? You're just pushing the brake pedal.

Speaker 2 (00:40:45):

It's just like we said before, you only have a hundred percent of your energy to spend. So are you going to spend it on keeping up with what you got to do next? That actually consumes a lot of brain ram if you don't have a good system for it.

Speaker 3 (00:40:59):

Yeah, I think part of it's, you have to set aside time for that. You'll know this from URM, I think I saw that you guys are about to, or recently unveiled a whole new delivery tool for how things go. Was it riff hard?

Speaker 2 (00:41:11):

Do you mean the search engine?

Speaker 3 (00:41:14):

Maybe there was a big software release update that you had posted about recently, or maybe that might be coming soon.

Speaker 2 (00:41:19):

Yes. URM switching everything over to React. Cool. And our building, we're still tweaking it, but a search engine. So the whole site by the end of the year is going to be in React. Right now the dashboard is in React, and we're working on the backend of the search. And so yeah, the way that the site is delivered to people, just their experience of it is completely different. And it's a way, I mean, you're familiar with React, it's way fast. And so that right there, just the not having to think about things just like there it is, everything you need.

Speaker 3 (00:41:55):

Oh yeah. And the people working on it get to all the fun little things that come with React and how much easier it is to work with and a lot of legacy, whatever equivalents they were working with, whether it be like a Drupal site or Yeah, no. So my point is that you have to spend some amount of time working on the business, so to speak, figuring out your systems and figuring out how to make things be relatively thoughtless or at least require the least amount of effort to do the day-to-day so you can focus on the actual thing that you are supposed to do that generates income. And whether that be setting aside 20% times, setting aside one day a month, just making sure you do it on weekends so that you're good. Yeah. You have to do that in some way. And so the Trello system was my way of taking out a bunch of just repeat kind of crap secretarial work that I didn't want to do over and over again.

Speaker 2 (00:42:40):

Yeah, it makes sense. I will say this though, it makes sense for you to do it, especially because balancing a whole other career with it and because you are technically minded.

Speaker 4 (00:42:50):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:42:50):

So it makes sense. Now, here's one thing that I see people doing in production that I think is so stupid. Have you seen amateur producers trying to set up entire CRMs and stuff like that? Oh man.

Speaker 3 (00:43:04):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:43:05):

Dude. And it's like I want to shake 'em. Just want to be like, dude, what are you doing? Stop fucking with crm. Stop fucking with Facebook ads. I don't care what somebody told you in some Facebook group, stop with that shit. You're wasting your time.

Speaker 3 (00:43:23):

Yeah. Don't get me wrong, there is a deep appeal to working on things slightly adjacent to work that are not actual work, the workflow stuff, productivity, that can be really fun. But yeah, it's like ticking off all your Slack messages. Like cool. You can read 'em all. It doesn't mean you fucking did work. Yeah, that's tough. Here's my only piece of advice. This applies to a lot of things. Only take advice from and listen to people whose results you want to emulate.

Speaker 1 (00:43:52):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:43:52):

And at a certain place, the CRM is designed to scale your own relationship building skills. It's not going to substitute for an inability to get clients in the door. It's only going to help you deal with more as they come through. It's a volume thing. If you can keep the relationships in your head and in your text inbox and whatever tools you want to use to communicate with people, if you can handle it that way and you can remember like, oh, I had this band in this time. I should reach back out. Or I know I've got this coming through. What do I need to line up next for bookings? If you can do that on your own in your head, cool. You probably can't make a sustainable living and keep it in your head unless you're working with really, really big clients. And at that point, kudos to you.

(00:44:32):

You're doing two records a year, but if you need to maintain three, four, or five bands coming through a month, then you're going to have to have some kind of system to take care of, or at least categorize things that come in, things that how they worked out. And then the reason it's nice is that with all those data points is you can look back later and say, cool, what types of opportunities that came up actually resulted in good, fruitful, either long lasting relationships or high value mix work, whatever it be, you then go back and scale your, I mean, it's lead generation essentially, but where are you looking for work? Where do you put yourself out to get work? How do you position yourself in a market to be approached for work and change that to make sure that you're maximizing where things are coming through?

Speaker 2 (00:45:17):

This is all great if you already are getting work and are the type of person who can get your head around this kind of system. And also, it doesn't even need to be a CRM. It could also be notes. It could be a combination of Google Calendar and notes or notifications. It doesn't have to be anything crazy. It could be a CRM. And if you look at someone like Mike Kian who has tons of volume of clients, it makes a lot of sense to have some automated fucking crazy system. Totally. Especially mastering engineers. It makes the most sense,

Speaker 3 (00:45:57):

Lower margin work than a lot of other stuff. You're going to have to do higher quantities of it. So the scale helps. So you do whatever thing you can to get higher scale.

Speaker 2 (00:46:05):

Totally. But to do this stuff before you are at a place where you need this stuff is

Speaker 3 (00:46:15):

It's a waste

Speaker 2 (00:46:15):

Of time. It's a waste of time. And it's like Misprioritized

Speaker 3 (00:46:22):

Probably going to set you up to be bummed too. You're going to set up all these beautiful looking funnels that are going to be empty.

Speaker 2 (00:46:26):

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (00:46:27):

And stay empty.

Speaker 2 (00:46:28):

Yeah. It's something that you add later.

Speaker 3 (00:46:32):

Yeah. If you need it, it helps you deal with a workload. It's totally, it's not a crutch. It's, I guess it's kind of a crutch. That's a bad analogy. It's something that you eventually helps you, but at a certain point it's going to be more effort than it's worth. For sure.

Speaker 2 (00:46:48):

Dude, I only started using something like that in my life in the past year or so. I've made it this far without that. So I mean, I'm not saying that that's great or not, but I use Notion, my assistant and I have this system we've been building in notion that's really sick, that it's a cool product. It's a cool product just because of how malleable it is.

Speaker 3 (00:47:14):

Totally.

Speaker 2 (00:47:15):

It's very powerful. But at this point, my network is so insane and there's so many different things happening at the same time and into the future that, and there's so many different aspects of every one thing that's happening that if I don't have something, some system, I'm going to fuck up. But I was able to get pretty far without having that going. And so when I look at people who don't have any clients trying to figure out the very best CRM for their non-existent studio business, it's like, dude, you don't even know how to mix your low end. What are you doing? You haven't had a single paying client or you've had three ever.

Speaker 3 (00:48:01):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:48:02):

You're worrying about the wrong shit.

Speaker 3 (00:48:03):

Yeah. It could be like a technology Jo type thing. When you said notion, I was like, oh, well, there's also Monday, an Airtable and a few other different systems that are totally basically glorified spreadsheet masks. They all work to a certain extent, but it's a very, the market's saturated with that kind of tool right now, and a lot of people are getting used to working with it if they're picking up a remote gig. So I don't know. I think a lot of people think they need to bolt that onto their website to have the website be more than just a billboard. But the website can just be a billboard. People can just email you and you can say, yes, I'm available these dates, let's book. It doesn't have to be like, let's build a jot form that has a delightful user experience set up. If a band wants to work with you, they're going to reach out and work with you

Speaker 2 (00:48:52):

Again. If you're a mastering engineer where you have 10 clients a day, that makes a little bit more sense. Totally.

Speaker 3 (00:48:57):

Yeah. But then you can do a cool thing, build a bunch of tools, and then start a business based around those tools.

Speaker 2 (00:49:02):

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. But the whole idea of you can just get emailed. Many big time producers do we know that their website is a serious piece of shit and is barely updated. Most of them.

Speaker 3 (00:49:19):

Most

Speaker 2 (00:49:19):

Of them. Most of the great producers that we personally know have worked with and are in our circle have the biggest joke of a website. And that it's kind of like you were saying, whose results do you want to emulate? Well, if this producer that you idolize basically has a website that looks like it's from 2008 and they're thriving, maybe it's not that important.

Speaker 3 (00:49:47):

Yeah. You can let that stuff languish if you're busy working and busy touring and busy,

Speaker 2 (00:49:52):

Because that's not how people find you. That's the thing. It's like, yes.

Speaker 4 (00:49:55):

It's

Speaker 2 (00:49:56):

Not that I'm saying, yeah, have a shitty website. Nothing matters. I'm not saying don't care about things, but I'm saying obviously that's not where the work's coming from. That's not, if you're looking at how people discover producers, it's not through their websites. So if you want to bring in work, well, you have to become discoverable in the way that people discover producers.

Speaker 3 (00:50:15):

Yeah, no, that's true.

Speaker 2 (00:50:17):

Whatever that might be. I mean, how do you discover a producer before you were in the industry and just new people? How would you learn about a producer

Speaker 3 (00:50:27):

Liner? Notes for sure.

Speaker 2 (00:50:28):

Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:50:29):

Yeah. I mean, get the physical CDC who worked on it kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (00:50:33):

So in the credits?

Speaker 3 (00:50:33):

Yeah, in the credits, in the Guitar World interview, in whatever little thing comes out where you can say, okay, this person is doing it.

Speaker 2 (00:50:40):

And I think it's the same now. I mean, it's different mediums. There's social media and all that

Speaker 3 (00:50:46):

Now. It's like who got tagged?

Speaker 2 (00:50:47):

But still, yeah, it's still the same thing. It's through some sort of credits and associations.

Speaker 3 (00:50:55):

That's

Speaker 2 (00:50:55):

It. That hasn't changed. So that's what people should be focused on, I think.

Speaker 3 (00:51:01):

Agreed. No, that and word of mouth. I think most of my business these days is like X band toured with XB Band and became friends and talked about the record experience and had heard the end product or just had asked like, Hey, who did X, Y, Z? And then they get in touch.

Speaker 2 (00:51:16):

Yeah, exactly. I mean, also doing great work. So I feel like that Alluvial record has had to have done great things for you.

Speaker 3 (00:51:25):

Yeah, I mean I've gotten hard to measure exactly where a lot of it comes from.

Speaker 2 (00:51:29):

There are no real metrics, but still this is more of a feel thing, I think. And that too, I think people who are at nowhere in their careers want there to badly be a metric so that they can measure. And it's like there isn't a lot of different things and a feel thing.

Speaker 3 (00:51:46):

There's definitely some records that I know make a bigger splash than others in terms of what results in me seemingly getting an uptick in bookings. But to be honest, a big portion of it is having people who weren't previously aware of you become aware of you, and then looking at a large back catalog, being able to see a storied past of consistent work at a certain quality or at a certain level is one of the biggest reassuring points.

Speaker 4 (00:52:11):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:52:11):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:52:12):

So I'd like to think that. I'm aware of a lot of producers, but I'm not aware of everyone. I try to keep up with who's coming up and who's new, who only seems new, but has really been there for a long time. And I always get dms from people, you got to have this person on nail the mix, et cetera, et cetera. You're

Speaker 3 (00:52:32):

Like, who the hell is that? Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:52:34):

I have never heard of this person. And I'll say that nine out of 10 times, it is not someone who should be on nail the mix. It just isn't very nice of that person to be pushing their friend. But every once in a while, if someone I haven't heard of and I go and I look and their back catalog is fucking huge, and they've worked with so many great bands, and for some reason I haven't heard of them, if it's just one band that I've heard of, I'm not sold. But if I look and it's like, oh man, they've been on great records for five or six or 10 years, I'm hitting the person up.

Speaker 3 (00:53:09):

Yeah, I mean, it's so hard to tell individually, even from liner notes or from who got tagged in a post or left out of the YouTube credits, who actually did what on our record, whose involvement resulted in that sonic excellence, if that was the case? It's really tough to say that in a vacuum, but if you start looking like, oh, all these records sound consistently good, they have a consistent set of people or a consistent person working on them, that's a much better indicator.

Speaker 2 (00:53:36):

Totally. So how do bands get in touch with you?

Speaker 3 (00:53:39):

It's a mix of, if it's an independent band, it's almost always through my website. It's still word of mouth stuff I try to work with, not necessarily seek out in some cases seek out, but I like working with smaller independent bands, especially ones that are in a developing scene or in a scene where there's a lot of young bands like them getting in good relationships with either managed grooves in the area, or there's certain guys who seem to be friends with every other band, whether they're minor producers on their own or they've just been in a bunch of the bands. That's been really helpful for getting work. Like I said, toured with friends. The amount of cold emails I've gotten lately have been more than before, but it's always a larger band who had toured with a Chelsea grin or we came as Romans or something and we're like, we like the record, we talked to them, let's work together, that kind of thing. So recently worked with brand of sacrifice because of that. Did a track for car effects because of that. So stuff comes through in that regard and then just snowballs from there. That's

Speaker 2 (00:54:37):

Awesome, man. I'm really, really glad to hear all that.

Speaker 3 (00:54:42):

Thank you. Tell me about the irs. Irs. Oh, so that was part of the move a little bit, and part of a dealing with modern record workflows, so to speak, was figuring out how can I not have to rely on a micd up guitar cabinet all the time, but also just have another creative tool at my disposal. I'm a guitarist. I really like gear, and I mean, half the time I'm like, do I even mixing or do I just want to fund a new guitar amp or something to play around with? I was always frustrated with the offerings on the market as far as amps sims, and I think a lot of people will say this now, looking back on the last decade of guitar amp simulations, although AMP simulations are there modeling a guitar amplifier is there. It's the cabinet stage that's been where people have been fucking up a little bit are not getting things right.

(00:55:31):

And the funniest thing is all the technology I'm using right now to make the IRSs to use them is all old. It's all old stuff that's been around for 10, 15 years that wouldn't get different results back then, but I think people's understanding of how they're used has improved. So there's a lot of stuff there overlook in terms of how does the amplifier react to the load it's attached to? Whether it be a speaker like a cabinet, or whether it be a load box where that load box is reactive, what kind of curve that thing was emulating, whether they use the Aiken design or not, whether it's just a passive load. Your amplifier's going to be a very, very differently in that regard. And then how you make the actual ir, there's so many different methods to make it. There's a lot of really bad methods to make them. I don't know. It's an interesting thing. A lot of people say that IRS aren't really dynamic, but they're literally a measurement of frequency response over a duration of time. And that's what dynamics are.

Speaker 2 (00:56:31):

I mean, who says they're not very dynamic?

Speaker 3 (00:56:34):

I have said that before. You probably find some dumb posts on the sneak forum that I posted where it said they weren't dynamic and they weren't static.

Speaker 2 (00:56:39):

The sneak forum, like when was this?

Speaker 3 (00:56:42):

Well, the reason that I would've thought that is because it's really easy to get into a scenario with IRSs where you are double power amping. So you are using the Guitar Amps Power Amp, and then you have baked Power AMP coloration into the IR itself.

Speaker 4 (00:56:55):

And

Speaker 3 (00:56:55):

When you stack those together, you do get that kind of wooy low end a little bit dampen top end, and things don't breathe as much. They have that kind of Prius top end thing going on. That's a little staticky, but you can absolutely make our IRS in ways that are dynamic and move and breathe. And for me, indistinguishable in an AB test, unless I'm playing, if I'm playing, I can tell a little bit the response is slightly different. Mostly in the way that the AMP reacts with the load it's attached to no reactive box completely emulates the impedance curve of a MESA four by 12 cabinet. So until it does, there's going to be a slight difference. But if I'm just ramping or listening to another dude play, I absolutely cannot tell a difference between the cab and the IRS that I've made.

Speaker 2 (00:57:41):

Yeah, I mean, look, there's going to be a difference between things that are different, but that doesn't mean it's not totally usable.

Speaker 3 (00:57:47):

No, for sure. So yeah, what I did before I moved was I made a digital library of all my cabinets. I have a couple Dyna mounts, and I took IRSs at various positions on all my favorite speakers, put one up for sale. I'm going to have a couple others soon, but I've been using, if anyone cares, I've been using IRSs on records for the last two, three years. There hasn't been a cabinet on very many of them. Some of 'em I did before then they took a while to come out and they've got cabinets. But the vast majority of my stuff lately has had irs and I don't think anyone knows. And I've gotten continually good feedback on it. I think I'm getting some of the best dones I ever have. And part of it's the workflow.

Speaker 2 (00:58:24):

It just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it works, it works.

Speaker 3 (00:58:28):

Yeah. No, it's a really nice thing. One of the biggest things is that the workflow of records these days tends to be one or two songs need to come out before the album announcement as singles. And so oftentimes I'll get tracks for the single six weeks before the rest of the album tracks come through. I can't leave the Guitar Amp set up untouched cabinet wise for six weeks. I've got other shit to work on. So being able to at least get the cabinet a hundred percent reproducible, I can always take really good recall pictures of the gear and set up the chain the same way on the front end if I don't have to worry about moving the mics again, it's beautiful. And so save the IR in the session. I use STLs. Libra is the one I use to kind of load the IRS that just stays in the session. When I get the DI's for the rest of the album afterwards, I can just load that through.

Speaker 4 (00:59:13):

That's

Speaker 3 (00:59:13):

Not my favorite way to work. I would rather get all the tracks at once, mix it all, send it back for feedback and be done with it.

Speaker 2 (00:59:19):

You got to work in the world you live in.

Speaker 3 (00:59:21):

Yeah, so they got to release the single, because they got to sell merch because they got to fund something. Probably the rest of the recording it's a thing. So being able to keep up with bands and how the workflows and demands have changed is a big part of the reason why I moved to it, but it's really nice.

Speaker 2 (00:59:34):

Yeah. Well store dot jeff Dunne.com if you want to check out Jeff's irs.

Speaker 3 (00:59:40):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:59:40):

Dude, I think it's a good place to end it. I want to thank you very much for taking the time. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 3 (00:59:45):

Absolutely

Speaker 2 (00:59:46):

Catching up with you, and I'm just stoked. Everything's going great, man.

Speaker 3 (00:59:50):

Yeah, thank you. It was good talking to you.

Speaker 2 (00:59:52):

Alright then another URM podcast episode in the bag. Please remember to share our episodes with your friends as well as post them to your Facebook and Instagram or any social media you use. Please tag me at al Levi URM audio at URM Academy and of course tag our guests as well. I mean, they really do appreciate it. In addition, do you have any questions for me about anything? Email them to [email protected]. That's EYAL at M dot aca MY. And use the subject line answer me Al. Alright then. Till next time, happy mixing. You've

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):

Been listening to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. To ask us questions, make suggestions and interact, visit URM Academy and press the podcast link today.