JOHN DOUGLASS: Creating Your Own Luck, The Power of Outsourcing, and Producer Perfectionism

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome 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-A-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. My guest today is John Douglass, who you really should know already through URM. I mean, he has done a lot of fast tracks with us. He's been on the podcast before and he's just a part of the community, but the reason I'm having him on is because he's great. He's an Atlanta based engineer, mixer and producer that's worked with some of the biggest artists and producers in the game and throughout his career, he's amassed credits with artists such as the Contortionist, Corey Taylor Alluvial, Nick Johnston, Mr. Bungle, and a bunch More, as well as TV and films like Rick and Morty, the Walking Dead Archer, Aqua Hunger Force, and again, many, many more. Let's get to it. John Douglass, welcome back to the URM Podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:02:32):

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's been at least a couple years

Speaker 1 (00:02:36):

More.

Speaker 2 (00:02:36):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:02:37):

I think it's been like three or four years.

Speaker 2 (00:02:38):

Yeah, I was kind of just going through my hard drives, trying to look at all the stuff that has happened and get a sense of what we can talk about. There's definitely been a lot.

Speaker 1 (00:02:48):

You've been pretty prolific, man.

Speaker 2 (00:02:50):

That's always been the goal. That word in particular stuck with me ever. I heard Devon Townsend say it in some interview like 10 years ago or maybe even longer of just my goal in music is to put out, is to be prolific and have that consistent level of quality and I can't think of anything a better goal than that, so I've just kind of stolen that for myself, and a lot of it has just been getting lucky with the right people and doing good work and then getting recommendations from that. It's really all been word of mouth.

Speaker 1 (00:03:23):

You can't really get around that aspect. I think,

Speaker 2 (00:03:27):

Yeah, it's been maybe a relatively slow buildup to where I can now start to transition into more full-fledged producing and engineering rather than assisting or mixed prep and that kind of stuff, but I feel more prepared for it now anyway. Yeah, it's been a cool journey.

Speaker 1 (00:03:46):

What do you think the luck factor is? I'll tell you my opinion on it, but I want to know yours. You did mention it and I definitely do think there's luck involved in any career in a creative field. What role do you think it plays for you or where would you define it?

Speaker 2 (00:04:03):

I mean, I guess there's little bits of luck everywhere, but I probably mentioned this on one of the other podcasts, but I think the Luckies moment was back in 2009, 2010, me deciding that I'm going to learn drum editing and take that on as a serious thing and try and take mixing more seriously, and then having you be in the position of actually having clients coming to you and just happening to mention, Hey, if you need some drum edits, then I can do that, and you happen to need drum edits, so that's pretty lucky to get hooked up so quickly right off the bat. I mean, I didn't have nobody recommended me to you, although we knew each other

Speaker 1 (00:04:45):

Well. Yeah, you were friends with my brother. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:04:48):

So

Speaker 1 (00:04:48):

The lucky thing was you meeting my brother.

Speaker 2 (00:04:51):

Yeah, that's true too. At a Battle of the Bands in 2005. That was the only time I played drums live too. That was an interesting day. But yeah, that was cool and just getting to hang around and I guess also thinking back on it, being friends with your brother and being around when you were going through the process of getting signed kind of gave me a more realistic view of what the music industry is and could be, and even just through that very narrow lens of signing a record deal and being around people who are actually doing the thing that you want to be doing, or at least you think you want to be doing. It kind of maybe shakes any sense of, well, somebody's just going to come along and discover me, or if I play enough local gigs, then the Roadrunner guys are going to come around and it's clearly nothing of how crazy that

Speaker 1 (00:05:41):

Sounds.

Speaker 2 (00:05:41):

Right? Right, exactly. They still have local bands who are like, man, we've got X number of Spotify listens, but it's just not quite there, and we're playing these local shows. There's the disconnect for a lot of artists where they don't see quite the reality of how to get their music into a bigger audience, and so for me, similarly, I guess it was kind of just an insight to be backstage at shows and hanging around recording sessions, seeing you write records and seeing how long and how detailed of a process that was. There's a lot of that stuff that was just kind of a reality check, so I'm lucky that I had that. I didn't have to wait until I tried to be serious and went out on tour or got a job and then got shocked into reality.

Speaker 1 (00:06:28):

I don't think the luck is getting offered the deal or getting offered a job or succeeding at it or any of that stuff. I think the luck is meeting the right people at the right time. Totally. When they're ready to present you with something or they're ready to show you something or meeting the right person who introduces you to the right person. When they're able to introduce you to that person, met them before they were ready, then what difference does that make or after they're ready, what difference does that make? Right, so the luck factor to me is is that stuff that you meet the right people at the right time in your life and their lives for it to turn into something else. You can't control that stuff. That's just some people are lucky and meet the right people and some don't, and I've always seen the luck for me as being that not anything else. The success of URM is not luck.

Speaker 3 (00:07:37):

No,

Speaker 1 (00:07:37):

That stuff's not luck. The luck was meeting the people that I met when I met them. For instance, 2009, I went to the Golden God Awards in LA and the metal sucks. Guys were there and that's when I was writing the blog for them and Finn, that's when he wrote his blog for them as Sergeant D. It was just luck that he went there too, and I met up with them to have dinner before the show and he was there had I not met him, things could be completely different right now there in no creative live, who the hell knows.

Speaker 2 (00:08:14):

You could have met somebody else who could have slightly cooler or slightly less cool. You never know. I could have met some other producer who was involved in indie pop or whatever. Could have,

Speaker 1 (00:08:27):

But yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:08:27):

Could have,

Speaker 1 (00:08:28):

Could have, but also could have not.

Speaker 2 (00:08:30):

Right. I guess I was more thinking once you have some experience, you're not looking for that first initial break, then you have a little bit more leeway in saying, well, is this project going to take my career further than this project might? And then there's some luck involved with choosing what you take and what you don't take.

Speaker 1 (00:08:54):

Yeah, absolutely. Because you're not psychic.

Speaker 2 (00:08:56):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:08:56):

You're not psychic, but you also don't know if someone that you meet is going to become an instrumental part of your life five years down the road. Very true. I see that as the luck factor too, and the thing though is I think, tell me if you agree with this, I don't want to turn this into a self-help episode or anything, but I really do think this shit's important because every single person I know who has a creative career attributes some of it to luck.

Speaker 3 (00:09:26):

They

Speaker 1 (00:09:27):

All do. I mean, I know a bunch of them believe in, believe that it's all their work, which is a huge part of it, but they also believe that there was timing involved in who they met and all those things. But I do think that you can set the stage for better luck to happen by surrounding yourselves with the right people and putting yourself in situations where the likelihood of something good happening is I guess elevated.

Speaker 2 (00:09:59):

Yeah, I don't think I could say it much better than that. You just got to put yourselves in positions where that luck can actually happen. If I didn't take the initiative to learn drum editing, then there's no chance that I could have lucked out in whatever way of getting work through that. So there's the work that comes behind it, and you have to have some kind of internal motivation to get to that initial step. No one's just going to throw you, Hey, random dude on the street with no skills. Why don't you be my intern for the next 10 years or whatever,

Speaker 1 (00:10:34):

Man, anytime that I've tried something like that, it's been a huge ass failure.

Speaker 3 (00:10:38):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:10:39):

Also the luck that if somebody hires you on something, there's the luck that thing you got hired on. Well, those people got lucky in their careers and built up something to a certain level that you're now getting to be a part of, but if they hadn't met the right people and hadn't done all those things, then this opportunity wouldn't exist for you either.

Speaker 2 (00:11:07):

Yeah, that's a great point. I hadn't really thought about it that way. What I had been thinking about lately was you don't really even need that many lucky breaks. It seems like. No, every time I pick up one client that then proceeds to give me a constant stream of work, I'm reminded that I don't really need to say yes to everything. I just need to get the right clients and maintain those relationships. I kind of recently expanded into doing mastering stuff and I mean I master my own mixes, but I don't mix that many records. Most of my masters have been for one guy, this Jack Daniels, who is in a band called War of Ages and has a studio out in Missouri and is doing some cool metal core tech death stuff and needed somebody to master his stuff and happened to hit me probably because we had talked about one of his band's records, but going back and forth and just doing a few masters now I'm his mastering guy, so seems like he's booked out indefinitely as far as I can tell. So that's all it took for me to get a completely different income stream in a field that I did want to expand into mastering because it has certain advantages of being able to turn around stuff faster. You don't have to deal with the mixed notes side of things. There's a lot of advantages to just being able to pump out something quickly like that and move on. So that's been great. And along with that, I've been doing I think maybe four years now of prepping stuff for Jay Rustin

Speaker 1 (00:12:43):

Who is godly, by the way. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:12:45):

I mean I remember when we were working together, we would listen to his mixes, his avatar mixes and be like, just feel like God damnit, and last year I worked on three avatar live streams during the pandemic and plus their last two studio albums. I think So mean not being involved with those guys. Avatar guys don't know who I am, but I got to work on the album and see the tracks and go through the process and see how Jay does things more or less. So again, it's been a constant stream of work from him because I guess he had people in LA laying samples for him and it would just be like, Hey, are you available? Is this guy available? And it would be coming from different sources, and then somebody recommended me to him. I think it was, it might've been Mark Lewis or Soff, I can't remember, but I did a couple songs just doing samples as saying, Hey, I can do what you normally do, plus I can also do this multi-band gating thing that he hadn't heard before. And then I think it was on one of the Stones Soer records that I did that for him the first time, and then that his engineer was like, how the hell did you get these drums that clean? Which kind of from then on, I was the guy for all the records, so he's not sending stuff out to three different guys depending on who's available. I just stole all their work by being better, solving

Speaker 1 (00:14:17):

A problem that he didn't even know he had. It sounds like, in addition to the problems that he knew he had.

Speaker 2 (00:14:23):

Right. That's been a good strategy for me is coming up with these slightly being technically inclined, I can sort of come up with new solutions, whether it's creating macros for stuff or a different way of cleaning up drums or creating contact kits of the kit that we just recorded and doubling 'em up, stuff like that. Just trying to add value wherever possible and separate myself from other people. I could certainly, it's good now it's at the point where I can take as much of that work as I need and then outsource the more busy work stuff like aligning MIDI notes. I can outsource some of that and just focus on the stuff that I do well and that I only know how to do, which is the building, the contact kits and the particular gating settings, although more people are learning that, so I've got to pick up more skills, which is where the mastering and all the other stuff comes in.

Speaker 1 (00:15:24):

Outsourcing is such an important thing to do because even in or maybe especially in something that time is traded for money, or even if it's not exactly time for money, maybe it's just X for this many tracks, how quickly you get that done translates to money, and so the same job could end up costing you money or making you money and not just that, the more efficiently you're able to get through these things, the more of them you can say yes to. And so there comes a point where it's just impossible. Without outsourcing,

Speaker 2 (00:16:03):

I felt like I was hitting that wall. So I've been outsourcing stuff to Evan Salmons who we've

(00:16:11):

Known and used for years. Cool. It's no brainer. I mean, he's been doing the same style of drum cleanup stuff that I did for however many years, so yeah, it's no brainer. And I'm sure one day he'll have an assistant to dump his stuff off to, but yeah, the mental relief of being able to get rid of something that you really just don't want to work on anymore is huge. I know for myself, I could sit there for hours staring at the screen and just be like, I know I have to do this, but I don't fucking want to. Or I could send it off and have somebody else turn it around for me in an hour and be happy about it that I sent them some work. So that's an easy decision to make

Speaker 1 (00:16:49):

And what difference does it make as long as the work is great.

Speaker 2 (00:16:52):

Once you get past that pride thing, then

Speaker 1 (00:16:54):

Well, the way I see it with that whole topic is if Jay's coming to you or whoever is coming to you wanting something done, well, how it gets done isn't what matters. All that matters is that it gets done, and so if you don't have the time or the inclination one or the other or both to do a hundred percent of the job, but you have someone who you trained that you trust and is just part of your team, fuck yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:17:32):

Yeah. I let Jay know. I was just like, Hey, I'm way overloaded, so some of this stuff is going to be done by this guy, but he's my guy and it's cool. Yeah, there's no problems. And he was like, okay.

Speaker 1 (00:17:44):

It's interesting because I don't know a single producer or single person who has got into a certain level of work where they don't have to outsource somebody, man, and even I talked to some people on the podcast who tell me that they're lone wolves and there's no way, there's no way that you do this much work and you're a lone wolf. It's like, no, man, it's just me and we'll be talking and then it'll be like, well, yeah, but there's this one guy that cleans up my Toms, and it's like, so you're not a lone wolf. People don't exist in a vacuum. You need help.

Speaker 2 (00:18:23):

Going back to the kind of saving your creative energy for when it matters, and the whole 80 20 thing is, I kind of feel like the prepping of the mix is the 80 and then the actual execution is the 20. So if you're spending all your time prepping mixes, you're not going to have the proper creative energy to go in and knock that mix out afterwards unless you're just super, super stoked on it. But that's not been my experience.

Speaker 1 (00:18:52):

I'm trying to think. I know that some people have control issues, I guess, where they're afraid to let somebody else mess with something. They want everything done a particular way, but my thoughts are you just haven't had the right person helping you because the right person is going to learn how you want things done and is going to do it that way.

Speaker 2 (00:19:17):

Or maybe you're not great at teaching in case which case, find somebody who can teach it the way you need it to be taught. But yeah, I think you're right.

Speaker 1 (00:19:26):

That too.

Speaker 2 (00:19:27):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:19:28):

Well, I mean, I outsourced a lot of my work to you, but the outsourcing concept was something that I really started to think about a lot more in 2010 and 11, and when I started to realize that my head is elsewhere, my head is not in this kind of like you just said, there's things you don't want to do anymore. There's a point in time where my head was no longer in it for aligning mid or in it for certain things, and my head was starting to get into this creative live thing I just did, but these projects have deadlines. People are expecting them, and that's when outsourcing really, really started to make perfect sense. And the difference between someone who knew how to do it versus someone who didn't was so stark that that's why it pretty much went to you every single time. The reason I'm saying this isn't to flatter you or anything, but for people listening, it wasn't like I wanted to have 15 different people to outsource to, which I did try, if you remember.

Speaker 3 (00:20:43):

Oh, yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:20:44):

Yeah. We tried that too. But as it turns out, you ended up with a bunch of bullshit and then you did the job, so it kind of made sense to keep going to you. And I believe that was Jay Rustin. He probably got sick and tired of having multiple people and different levels of quality coming in and

Speaker 2 (00:21:04):

Oh yeah, I can imagine if you're trying to mix a record and three different guys are sending you drum samples, they're going to probably be at different levels and different velocity settings and all that kind of shit, and you don't want that.

Speaker 1 (00:21:15):

Yeah, my problem wasn't the same as his. I wasn't mixing big records, but it's like I have two different producers that are expecting mixed prep and all that. Then I have my own projects, then I have this stuff starting to build With Creative Live, it's just impossible to get all that much stuff done, but when other people are expecting work, if I outsource to someone who does a shitty job, that's not helping anybody.

Speaker 2 (00:21:40):

No.

Speaker 1 (00:21:40):

And there's not that many people who know how to do a good job. There's just not. So it ends up that the same people end up getting all the work, which actually is why I believe that there's not that much competition out there. If you really know what you're doing and know how to talk to people, there's not going to be that much competition. Most people fucking suck,

Speaker 2 (00:22:02):

And I think you're right. For me at least, I mean aside from just being anal retentive and trying to make everything perfect, it's been the experience factor of how many records I've been able to do on this. I do get a little bit better, a little bit faster every time I do it, but yeah, I can imagine just a lot of these guys thrown into the deep end with a death metal record would not do so hot. But I think Creative Live and URM have helped a lot with sort of that base level training. Originally I was making those videos of just screen capture videos of this is how you align MIDI and this is how you cut Toms, and now we're a little more sophisticated than that. I think most people have.

Speaker 1 (00:22:42):

That's common knowledge almost now.

Speaker 2 (00:22:44):

Right. That's good. I'm glad we've gotten to that point. I'm glad that I don't have to be the only person.

Speaker 1 (00:22:50):

So when we did that, that was I believe for the mixing class, right? Yeah. One of those, or the drum class, man, there were so many, but I remember that when we had your segment on that it was teaching people a dark art that they had never heard of how to do before, and that level what you were teaching on my Creative live classes, that level, I mean, not everyone knows how to do that, but that level, there's far more people who can at least get it to a basic level of quality now than before. Now people who are exceptional at it, that's still rare, but the overall bar I think is higher and I think that's a good thing. I know some people don't think that's a good thing.

Speaker 2 (00:23:35):

Yeah, it's going to make records better.

Speaker 1 (00:23:38):

I'm not concerned about individual people's fears about their work disappearing. I'm concerned about music as a whole and as a whole. If the bar is raised, that's great for music and that's great. At the end of the day for everyone in music, there might be a couple individuals that are scared, but it's not my problem.

Speaker 2 (00:23:56):

Yeah, totally. If there's a set of processes that we just discovered that will make music sound 10% better, you better believe I'm going to use it If it doesn't matter how long it takes, if it's in the budget, I'm going to do it.

Speaker 1 (00:24:10):

Yeah, exactly. And the beauty of it of things like that becoming standardized knowledge is that it then gives you, for instance, that you as one of the people who helped make it standardized knowledge, I really do believe that those creative lives and the URM stuff has been one of the big reasons. So you're one of the people behind helping make it part of the repertoire. That right there, like you said earlier, forces you to evolve at your own game because you need to keep on being ahead of the pack. So now there are other things you need to do in order to keep developing, which is great because so you help other people raise the bar forces you to have to raise your own bar and always keep improving.

Speaker 2 (00:24:57):

Another side effect is we get to listen to better records when we want to listen to records. We don't have to listen to shitty gating and one shot samples everywhere because nobody knows how to get a decent snare tone out of a natural snare mic, but as far as I remember, it was us and probably Putney and Machine were doing that at the time, but I don't know many if anyone else who was kind of going that far with it. I remember I taught that stuff to Christian from crypto and then his mixes started sounding

Speaker 1 (00:25:28):

Fucking fucking crazy.

Speaker 2 (00:25:30):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:25:31):

God, he's great.

Speaker 2 (00:25:32):

He was bugging me about it and I talked to, I totally fanboyed about, dude, you got to learn how to do this stuff, and I sent him a Pro Tools template and it seems like he's been killing it ever since then, and I think he's taken it to some, he was using MIDI to gate symbols, if I remember, which is taking it to a whole nother level, so already innovating on the process.

Speaker 1 (00:25:54):

Yeah, absolutely. Man, dude, Christian is really fucking good.

Speaker 2 (00:25:58):

Yeah, he's a real cool guy.

Speaker 1 (00:26:00):

Yeah, very, very nice. Did you see his nail the mixes?

Speaker 2 (00:26:03):

I saw some of it. I didn't watch the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (00:26:05):

My favorite one was the crypto mix. If you got a chance, you should just check it out. It's just so badass. Well,

Speaker 2 (00:26:11):

I got a chance to assist Jason Soff on the crypto EP a while back, and I think that was kind of spurred this. He asked me afterwards, how did you get the drums to sound that natural? And that started his learning process. So Chance Encounters, he happened to hook up with me through hooking up with Soff and everybody learns.

Speaker 1 (00:26:33):

Yeah, it is a really, really great thing. So I guess I know the answer to this, but do you feel like there's been kind of a renaissance in quality music, like production?

Speaker 2 (00:26:49):

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of crap out there too, but that comes with the territory.

Speaker 1 (00:26:53):

There's always been a lot of crap.

Speaker 2 (00:26:54):

There's always been a lot of crap. But yeah, there's definitely, I think production levels has gone up a lot despite budgets going down or remaining the same, and I think it is directly attributable in a lot of ways to the online learning stuff between URM and all the other platforms. It's just that stuff didn't exist and the stuff that did exist, it was more big budget, big pro tools, icon systems using the fancy plugins that you couldn't afford, and so it kind of didn't make a difference. I remember watching this one, I think somebody else mentioned it on the podcast called Mix It Like a Master or something like that, and it was this guy,

Speaker 1 (00:27:38):

I wonder where they got that name,

Speaker 2 (00:27:42):

Sorry. Or mix it like a pro. I can't remember. I stole a lot of ideas from him. My basic focal chain from 2012 was basically, and vocal effects chains and stuff was based on all that. I didn't know what else to use. I was like, okay, this guy's a pro. I'll just steal all that. But it was really like I put this vintage tape plugin on every channel and then I put the tube plugin on every channel and then I notched this frequency and it was just really not sophisticated and it was kind of like, yeah, it seemed like the sort of thing where you have the assistant mix the record and then the guy comes on and moves some faders around and says, gets the paycheck. I got that vibe a little bit, and the e-learning stuff now is much, much different where, I mean, you can really dive into a topic and get multiple people's opinions on it and see what they're doing. Exactly. Download examples, get the multi-tracks. I mean,

Speaker 1 (00:28:36):

It's a different world.

Speaker 2 (00:28:37):

Yeah, it's a totally different world.

Speaker 1 (00:28:39):

When I was doing Creative Live, the format I felt was super limiting. They have union rules, so you could only go X amount of hours and then you literally had to stop. There's no way around it, and there were just, you had to deal with a lot of people that weren't audio people,

(00:29:00):

Which makes no sense. So I wasn't able to ever really get to the level wanted it to get to. And I remember asking Finn if they could hire me and me and him could take over the audio channel, and he was like, I'm not even going to ask. It's not happening. So I was like, all right, well then you're going to have to deal with the fact that I'm going to make my own. And the whole idea was to do everything you just said because what was out there before was like you could almost get there with Creative Live, but not quite because of their limits, their limitations, and then everything else out there was just like, yeah, so we'll put a high pass on every channel

Speaker 2 (00:29:44):

And I use this compressor.

Speaker 1 (00:29:46):

This compressor is great for this and just use it every time. And

Speaker 2 (00:29:50):

I use this one setting and I never change it,

Speaker 1 (00:29:53):

Which is better than nothing, I guess. I mean, it's better than what was around in 2005. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:29:57):

I mean those people made mixes that people listen to, so you're learning something, but

Speaker 1 (00:30:02):

You're learning something, but this field is way too complicated to learn it that way. So I think that a lot of people who had reservations about the e-learning stuff is because they remember how bad it was

Speaker 2 (00:30:16):

At

Speaker 1 (00:30:16):

One point in time. For sure.

Speaker 2 (00:30:18):

Looking at nail the mix, just being able to practice. What did we have to practice on zero, if anything, it was somebody's cover of a metal core song with midi drums and bass and no vocals, and that doesn't teach you much of anything.

Speaker 1 (00:30:32):

No, you don't learn what the standard is or anything like that. So I want to talk a little bit about the work that you've done in the past few years too. So I'm curious about it. So newer contortionist material that you worked on has a completely different feel. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:30:51):

It's

Speaker 1 (00:30:52):

A lot more cord heavy and jam centric, which I'm not surprised by because of the record I did with them. I always knew that was in them. I'm not sure that listeners know that that was in them, but it seemed to me like they were going to do that at some point in time. It was going there, and I remember that they wanted things to be looser and more in that way, which, so they've gone back and forth with that, but seemed to me where things were always going to go. And I'm just wondering if this looser performance approach also evoked a looser production style from you, and if so, what does that mean? Because you are a very, very regimented style engineer.

Speaker 2 (00:31:38):

I think what I learned working with them and working with some other bands that have that sense of very precise musicianship but also want to sound very natural. That's a tough needle to thread and exactly how you go about that. In our case, I think the drums in particular, the thing was to get them super tight. If they're on the grid, that's fine. A hundred percent doesn't matter. As long as the tones are great, that's really what we're focusing on and try not to sample or replace too much. So we did stuff on one of the songs. We recorded SMS and drums separately, layered different kits, layered different snares that he actually played rather than just sampling them. Vocals were a way deeper process than they've probably gone before. I don't know exactly what the session was like on language with Jamie. They did a lot of vocals there too, but as far as layering, I love stacking vocal layers to the moon, so that's definitely something we did and Mike was really into, and I think trying to keep everything really clean, really on point on beat, but just get the absolute clearest, cleanest performance and signals possible.

(00:32:56):

Honestly, it was pretty easy considering how good of musicians they are. They are good. I think the hardest part is really just rounding up a group of people to agree on an idea, and that's when you don't necessarily have one guy writing all the songs and then just presenting it and saying, okay, here's the songs to learn it and record it. It was all a very collaborative, six guys in the room trying to decide where the bridge is going to be.

Speaker 1 (00:33:22):

Interesting. That's actually what I found to be the biggest challenge of working with them, and they had some members that aren't as good as some of the members they have now

Speaker 2 (00:33:30):

That

Speaker 1 (00:33:31):

There was some tension with. But that aside what you just said I thought was the biggest challenge was rounding it all up.

Speaker 2 (00:33:37):

Yeah. I think they have a tendency to push everything to the last minute, and the pressure is just, that's part of their process, unfortunately or fortunately, I would like to be able to take a little more time with the next record, but we'll see how it goes for them. While they were here, a lot of it was they were asking a lot of questions about what I thought was the best way to go about this and when are we going to do this and how are we going to do that. This whole stylistic shift is fairly new to them too, and you're saying how to best execute the sound that they have in their head. It's still kind of coming to full fruition. We spent a lot of time tracking the ep, and then it took a long time to get mixed because they kept going back and forth with mixed revisions while they were on tour, which is not the most ideal situation.

(00:34:25):

After that, we had the live streams that we did during the pandemic, which I was mixing and mastering as well as engineering. So my kind of goal for that whole process was to get their confidence in me up to let me mix the next record. We were all pretty stoked with the EP when we finished tracking it, and then maybe we're a little less stoked with the final result just because it had so many revisions going back and forth and everybody had heard the song so many times and it's only three songs, so you get sick of it pretty quick.

Speaker 1 (00:35:03):

That is a problem. You lose objectivity and then it's almost like the audio equivalent of body dysmorphia. You don't know what you're listening to.

Speaker 2 (00:35:15):

There was definitely moments where we were like, wait, should the other one have been the single? Did we just totally screw this whole thing up? But for me, we got through that and we're kind of hoping for a little more traction and maybe didn't get as much traction with that EP as we would've liked. So I wanted to make sure that the next time we do a project, it comes out exactly or as close to exactly as how we're all envisioning it as we can. That whole sending files off to mix is a tricky thing. I've only done it a couple of times. We did it with that Contortionist EP with Jamie King, this new alluvial record I tracked, and then we sent to Jeff Dunn to mix, which was amazing. Who Killed it? Yeah, it sounds amazing. But other than that, I can't really remember tracking something and then sending it off to somebody else to mix for budget reasons and because I just wouldn't trust him. I mean,

Speaker 1 (00:36:13):

It's a scary thing.

Speaker 2 (00:36:14):

It is a scary thing. You wonder how you've got however many hundred audio tracks. You're just waiting for whatever problem is going to happen. They can't get the Dropbox or this file's missing. This is out of tune, whatever.

Speaker 1 (00:36:28):

I think I got lucky on that because one of my first experiences doing that was Colin Richardson,

Speaker 2 (00:36:36):

Right?

Speaker 1 (00:36:36):

So I got to one of my formative experiences with somebody else mixing my stuff. I had one before that. That was a fucking disaster that I'm not going to name names, but Colin Richardson mixing stuff that I recorded

Speaker 3 (00:36:51):

That

Speaker 1 (00:36:51):

Would be, which is not very well, but hearing how incredible it could possibly sound when the right person is on it opened my mind to the idea of having other people mix stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:37:06):

I'm much more open to it now after working with Jeff.

Speaker 1 (00:37:10):

Yeah, like when you hear how good it, it's not saying that you couldn't do something good, but when you hear how good it can be in the hands of somebody else because it's going to sound different than anything you would ever do somebody else, it's like, oh wow, this is awesome.

Speaker 2 (00:37:24):

Especially now for stuff that I'm writing for myself, I'm realizing that we were talking about the Lone Wolf thing. It's like once you get through that process of producing a song to completion and it's time to mix it, do you really have what's left in the tank? Do you have enough to mix it properly or are you going to have to send it off?

Speaker 1 (00:37:46):

I definitely didn't think I did. I mean, I don't think I was good enough back then to do what I wanted to do, but I could have made it sound okay, like an underground death metal record, but to actually do it right, there's no way I could have written it, recorded it, put it all together, and then had the juice to mix it. It's just too much.

Speaker 2 (00:38:05):

There's a few, a couple people out there who can do that, but not that many.

Speaker 1 (00:38:11):

And they typically get help.

Speaker 2 (00:38:12):

Yeah, they get help from somewhere too. Yeah, they certainly have teams.

Speaker 1 (00:38:16):

Devin is one of the closest to, but

Speaker 2 (00:38:19):

He's got helpers too. So

Speaker 1 (00:38:20):

That's my point is even Devin, who is one of the most genius geniuses I've ever met in my entire life, one of the most skilled people, even he has people that help.

Speaker 2 (00:38:31):

Absolutely. And getting to chat with him for a couple minutes on the phone a few months ago, I mean, he's my hero. So getting to talk with him about and giving him some advice on computer stuff was great, and just that mental thing of like, oh, I can actually provide something of worth to this guy who has provided me with so much enjoyment was really nice. But even he is as the kind of poster boy of being able to do it all. He's got a solid team behind him who helps make it work, and I don't think it, he's had records that didn't work as well as the records he's putting out now, and there's probably a reason for that.

Speaker 1 (00:39:16):

Well, I think that this idea of the person that does it all themselves, like the Trent Resner idea or whatever, that's all bullshit, that's all like PR bullshit because Trent Resner never did it all himself either. He was the star, but he never did it all himself. He always had a partner, the guy's name Atticus,

Speaker 2 (00:39:41):

And then even back in downward spiral days, you have Flood and Alan Mulder and whoever mastered it. Danny loaner. Crazy, crazy lineup.

Speaker 1 (00:39:51):

Yeah, exactly. I mean, yes, there's always got to be a visionary. You need a leader. People need a leader. There needs to be a visionary. But why they're considered great leaders and visionaries is because they can communicate that to other people and mobilize other people to help them fulfill this vision that's great for everyone, but what kind of leader are they? If they can't communicate that vision and then have to do it all themselves and it gets compromised because they can't get a team going.

Speaker 2 (00:40:25):

Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people run into that thing of having the vision, but not being able to communicate it or not having the resources

Speaker 1 (00:40:33):

Vision's not enough.

Speaker 2 (00:40:35):

Right. That's true.

Speaker 1 (00:40:36):

Having vision is obviously super important, but I think it's more common than people realize. Just think about how many stone conversations you've had with people who had a great idea and then nothing happened. I mean, I'm sure that somebody had the idea of a self-driving car in some dorm room smoking weed. I'm sure it happened millions of times, but the people who actually made it happen, that's the real stuff.

Speaker 2 (00:41:11):

Yeah. I definitely, being around certain people, I think I've tried to create a rule for myself that I don't try not to be that guy who's like, man, I'm going to write this really cool record until it's written, because as soon as I announce, as soon as you do that social thing where you're bragging about the thing that you're doing, then the motivation for doing it kind of goes away.

Speaker 1 (00:41:37):

Well, you're rewarding yourself for something already.

Speaker 2 (00:41:40):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:41:42):

I've heard that. The reason is, yeah, you're giving your brain the rewards for having done the work before you did the work, so your brain's like, we're done.

Speaker 2 (00:41:52):

Yeah. Yeah. That seems like the norm for a lot of those stone conversations was like, man, it would be cool if we had a song like this. It would be cool if we did a record like this.

Speaker 1 (00:42:02):

You

Speaker 2 (00:42:02):

Got to actually step up and do it.

Speaker 1 (00:42:04):

Yeah. That is the tough part. And everybody, not everybody has the whatever it is, the fire or the balls or I don't know, to actually be like, no, this is happening. This is how it's going to happen. Let's do it. But I want to talk about Louisville. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:42:25):

Let's talk about it.

Speaker 1 (00:42:26):

First of all, Wes is god damn incredible.

Speaker 2 (00:42:29):

Yeah. Wes is like,

Speaker 1 (00:42:30):

Holy shit.

Speaker 2 (00:42:31):

Yeah, Wes is amazing. He's one of the hardest working dudes I've met and one of the most perfectionist dudes I've met. So it was an interesting experience going through this record with him because his outlook on it was kind of like, I mean, I know he's going to do more records because this one turned out so great, but at the time, his kind of outlook was, if I only make one more record in my life, it's going to be this one and it's going to be goddamn perfect. So I was like, okay, sounds like we're going to be spending some time. He had apparently gone through a couple other singers, engineers trying to get that thing going, even just with guitar and vocal tracking, and it wasn't happening. So I'm not sure exactly how it came to me. We had done a few things before shooting old tune track promo videos, but I don't know how I convinced him or how he decided on me, but the first thing we did was record vocals, which I thought was a good move because it gave the record some structure, although he had already written a lot of the vocals and recorded them with some other guy.

(00:43:52):

So we had Scratch takes for a lot of the vocals too. But as soon as we brought in Kevin Mueller, and it was me, Wes, and Kevin in my studio just blasting through vocals over the demos that Wes had recorded these songs four or five times each, which is I believe it. So he knew to 'em inside and out, and we were kind learning 'em for the first time and figuring out, and Wes definitely took on the producer role very seriously. He was much more than just the guitarist and leader of the band. He was writing everything, writing almost all the lyrics, played bass and making producer type decisions. We need to cut this part and I'm going to write a different riff, or that vocal needs to be a high vocal. This needs to sound more long. This needs to be this way or that way.

(00:44:50):

Which was interesting because, well, for a lot of reasons, but he's coming to it from a pretty inexperienced point as a producer, obviously tons of experience with music and guitar and writing riffs and writing songs, but actually getting a singer to do what he has in his mind or recording vocals in general was just not something he had much experience with. So I was kind of like the translator and trying to build confidence between 'em both by showing 'em, okay, Kevin's actually sounds awesome over your guitars in these songs, so this is going to work. And that didn't take long. Really. I think he would agree that within the first two days it was like, yeah, this is it. So we spent I think seven to 10 days doing vocals and it was just a lot of fun. Wes sitting on the couch in the back of the room saying, do it again. And Kevin just walking around and being Kevin, he's kind of a happy, lucky go Twitch streamer guy. We did a Twitch stream on one of his vocal things and he made 50 bucks. I was like, wow, this is a real thing. You can make money doing this. We took a couple months off, I think maybe a month, and Wes came back to start doing guitars for real.

Speaker 1 (00:46:07):

Did you ever have any disagreements with him about what takes were good enough? The reason I'm asking is because I know this from experience with something that can't talk about yet, that his level of skill is so high, so unbelievably high, and his standards are so high. It's on a level I've never seen before, and I've seen some pretty amazing guitar players that what he thinks is not good enough, dude, and I'm a real hard ass when it comes to guitar players. I've got super high standards, and he thinks that stuff that's fucking incredible isn't good enough.

Speaker 2 (00:46:49):

Fucking

Speaker 1 (00:46:50):

Incredible.

Speaker 2 (00:46:51):

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. It wasn't so much as arguing. It was more like, there may have been points where I was a little annoyed just like, we're really going to do this for the 15th time, but most of it was just like, if you hear it, then I'm going to let you go for it. The legend, man, if you're hearing something in your palm mute that is not quite the way you want it, then let's just do it again. There was some back and forth. Some of the stuff he wasn't guess. He wasn't used to having someone edit his takes just on the fly. So it was kind of, for him, it was either It's a good take, it's a keeper, do it again. Whereas I could be like, Hey, let me just nudge it like two milliseconds to the left and then play for him, and he'd be like, oh yeah, that's perfect.

(00:47:34):

So there was a little back and forth there. But yeah, I definitely gave him more leeway because he was, most of the time when I would be like, yeah, that was good. He'd be like, eh, I think I can do it a little bit better. Yeah, definitely the only person I've encountered who would just sit there and try five different positions for a palm mute for some crazy technical riff, and they would all sound good, but you'd be like, alright, I need my hand to be exactly here and this much pick velocity and this much pressure and this pick. Yeah, it was pretty crazy.

Speaker 1 (00:48:09):

It's not like you haven't worked with great guitar players. He's on another level,

Speaker 2 (00:48:12):

He's on another level, and just the stuff he hears in his playing is stuff that I might miss. And like I said before, he knew exactly what he wanted to hear for the most part, or it at least had to exceed a certain set of expectations that he had for himself when he came in. So I had no problem letting him just go. Obviously, I'm not used to spending that much time doing the same thing over and over, but if it ends up with a better record and I think it, people dig it. So I think it all worked out.

Speaker 1 (00:48:45):

And you also want him to be happy with it.

Speaker 2 (00:48:47):

Yeah. If he's not happy with it, he's just going to want to come back and do it again, or he is going to fire me and have somebody else do it,

Speaker 1 (00:48:54):

May as well,

Speaker 2 (00:48:54):

Might as well just get the job done.

Speaker 1 (00:48:56):

Yeah, I agree. Hey, everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast and 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 OPEC shuga, bring Me the Horizon Gaira 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.

(00:49:50):

And these are guys like TLA Will Putney, Jenz Borin, 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 gain, 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.

(00:50:44):

Enhanced 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. The Jay Rustin stuff, man, I want to talk about him for a second. Sure. I don't want to say he's the best kept secret in metal. I think a lot of people know who he is, but he's not out there in the public. Some of these guys are, but he's one of the absolute very best period. He's incredible,

Speaker 2 (00:51:29):

And the efficiency that he gets through these projects is pretty amazing too, especially with all the live streams that we did over the pandemic. There must've been, we had the three for Avatar, maybe even four, I think it might've been four, and there was a Marth I think had one. There was the Corey Taylor one that was in an arena, and it was three hours long, and all of these would be like, I need the files in a week, and then he would have it mixed in another week or something. Like the pace that I was keeping with cleaning up the drums, he was keeping with mixing the songs, which was just bonkers to me. But he's got a sound and it really works, and I think everybody he's worked with seems to really enjoy working with him. Going along with that, he seems like he's one of the few current heavy metal heavy rock producers who is very into bands recording live in the room and keeping the imperfections, all that avatar stuff is pretty loose, especially in the drums. Despite all the new league guitar playing, it still sounds great. It still sounds like a band playing together, but it's definitely not gRED at all, and a lot of it's not edited.

Speaker 1 (00:52:48):

I believe it. I mean, it sounds like real music.

Speaker 2 (00:52:51):

Yeah, I think that's what probably what's is drawing a lot of people to him is he's making records that sound like real bands playing, and there's not a ton of autotune on the vocals. He is very outspoken about that, and the drums sound natural. The stuff that the samples I end up printing for him don't really, I've heard mixes where I print samples and I'm like, oh, there's that sample. I know that scenario, and this isn't like that. It just kind of seems to blend in with whatever project he's working on, which is really, really cool and something for me to think about. I mean, when you have one shot samples and you have your standard set that you're using on everything, I dunno, it just makes me think more about finding your sound and finding what works for you and your workflow because it's going to be different for everybody. He keeps stuff pretty simple and it works really well. So I think it's a good reminder that you don't have to go way overboard on complexity or any of that stuff. I mean, the most complex stuff that's going on in his mix is probably the this side chained gating stuff that I do for him before he even gets to play with it.

Speaker 1 (00:54:08):

He just has a great ear and it sounds like he does a lot of the work, a lot of the heavy lifting on the way in.

Speaker 2 (00:54:14):

Yeah, he's definitely doing some EQ and compression on the way in. He knows how to get good tones. You get the vibe listening to the songs, like the band is having a good time and they want to be there. Especially with all the Corey Taylor stuff and the more radio rocks kind of style stuff. It's fun.

Speaker 1 (00:54:34):

So when you're working with someone like him who has a looser approach than some of the more extreme metal people you've worked with and knowing also how detail oriented you are, so what is it that you have to dial back and how do you do it?

Speaker 2 (00:54:53):

I don't really have to do much of anything. It's more of a learning experience for me of being like, wow, this is really loose. And then hearing the final mix or hearing the whole session together and being like, but it still sounds fucking awesome, and I should probably take that into account next time I record a band and feel like I'm over editing. I'm certainly prone to do that. Yeah, I mean, my process is essentially the same regardless of how tight the performance is, because all I'm usually doing is messing with the drum samples and gating and that kind of stuff. But certainly after you go through the process and you hear the process gated kit and you're like, yeah, I mean, I don't think it would've made it better to quantize it to the grid. So yeah, it's a good reminder that good musicians sound good, and you don't have to just do the standard post two thousands processing to everything.

Speaker 1 (00:55:48):

It's interesting. I know that when we have a nail the mix session where something is looser or there's some bleed on something where the producer was cool with it,

(00:56:04):

Some people will be, I'll see questions about how are you dealing with the fact that these drums are behind the beat or that there's this bleed. It short circuits their mind, and what's interesting to me about, it's like, dude, you're hearing what was released. I get it. Some of the stuff we've had is a miracle that it sounded so good in the mix. Some of it is stuff that was recorded not so well, and the mixer just performed a miracle, and that's fine, but that's the minority of the stuff we have on. Most of it is recorded fucking incredibly, and some of it is on the looser side like that. A lot of people don't understand to just let it be, mix it. Just mix it, let it be. It's like that for a reason,

Speaker 2 (00:56:51):

Right? Mix it first before you start looking for problems like that who

Speaker 1 (00:56:56):

Says there are even problems. That's the thing. It's

Speaker 2 (00:56:58):

Not a problem unless it sounds bad, and to just have some context because it's really only in the last 20 years that we've been accustomed to that sound. If that's the sound I get the feeling that a lot of people just get so used to hearing their gridded program, drums in their demos. That's what they want to mix when they get actual drums. If it doesn't sound like their preset drum kit, then something's wrong. They're trying to take natural drums and mix 'em like that, which is not really the thing. If you listen to any of these, even the pre-processed drum kits that get released don't sound great just in a mix unless you do some serious massaging and automating and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it's a bit of a kind of context thing as well as just not listening to the song for the song itself and looking a little too much at where the transient is in relation to the bar beat line, which I've totally been guilty of,

Speaker 1 (00:58:05):

And for some stuff that's what you should do.

Speaker 2 (00:58:07):

Yeah. If you have technical death metal at 260 beats per minute, you may need to check and make sure it's on the grid. But we've been listening to music for many, many decades, and most of it is not to the grid. So take that into account and maybe listen to more music that isn't on the grid, maybe see if that changes your outlook on things, or force yourself to mix some of these songs that aren't on the grid and see if that changes your outlook. Yeah, it certainly did for me.

Speaker 1 (00:58:39):

So what about this scenario? Okay, so if you're prepping or editing or whatever it is you're doing, cleaning up something that Jay produced, then that the performances are what they're supposed to be unless he tells you exactly something right, that needs to be fixed. Totally. Okay. It's pretty safe to assume that there is what he wants to be there.

Speaker 3 (00:59:02):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:59:02):

What about, and obviously not naming names, what about a situation where he's hired to mix something that somebody else produced where maybe it is kind of fucked up. Maybe it's loose, but it's not supposed to be loose. Maybe that bleed really shouldn't be there. How do you judge the difference?

Speaker 2 (00:59:23):

In the few cases where that's happened, he's been pretty forward and just listening to it ahead of time and being like, this is not the way I would've recorded this. I think he has somebody else who would take care of the drum edit side of things if that was something that needed to be fixed. But there's stuff like, this guy has a bunch of crappy ghost notes that don't need to be heard, so just ignore 'em. Or there's little kick beaters flapping against the head when it shouldn't be, so ignore that. Other than that, I can't really think of much that changes.

Speaker 1 (00:59:55):

So he'll communicate with you though, that's the key.

Speaker 2 (00:59:58):

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's not something where he would just drop it on me before listening to it once himself just to see what's in there. So that helps certainly. And I would ask him if I encountered anything that I thought was just too weird, I would definitely ask, but at this point, with the amount of stuff, you hear those avatar drums, he'll do the kick and snare rolls sink together, and they're just flaming the whole time and sounds fine. Let's leave it. And that's totally something I would've fixed five years ago on anything that somebody sent me and still would for certain projects. But yeah, getting some, it's definitely a confidence booster of like, okay, this guy is a real deal mixer and he's making these tracks sound awesome and it's raw as fuck, and people dig it, so I should take that into account and integrate it. We're applicable.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):

The big takeaway for me is communication has to be dead on and there's not much assumption going on. Right. He's not assuming that you're going to just psychically know, I guess, and you're not just assuming something is the way it's supposed to be if it strikes you as weird.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):

Yeah. I mean, there's always that tension when you're doing work for somebody. You don't want to ask too many questions, but well,

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):

Yeah, of course,

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):

Once you get a few rounds in with whatever project, it gets it a lot easier to distinguish what might be a technical mistake and what is just their style. Honestly, I can't remember a time where he sent me something that was messed up because of something he did. Well, of course, I couldn't see that happen. I've never been like, Hey, did you, there's some popping on this track or whatever. So yeah, it's pretty easy with him. Definitely with prepping stuff for mix with other random bands that send me stuff. I'll go back and forth and be like, Hey, you need to rerecord such and such, but that's nothing new.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):

Yeah, no, definitely not something new. Am I correct that you've done some front of house work lately?

Speaker 2 (01:02:09):

Sort of. I engineered the contortionist live streams that they were doing, which wasn't live Live. We took over drunken unicorn, which is a venue in Atlanta. I don't think I ever saw you play there, but I think you saw us play there one time.

Speaker 1 (01:02:29):

Drunken Unicorn. Remind me where

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):

It's on PAs across from the former murder Kroger

Speaker 1 (01:02:37):

Drunken Unicorn. I never played there.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):

It was like you walked down some stairs into a dingy little hole.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):

Yes. No, I've never played there. I think I saw 1349 there or

Speaker 2 (01:02:49):

Something, right? Yeah, that sounds right.

Speaker 1 (01:02:50):

Or one of those bands that had goat's heads,

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):

That's where they would allow goat's heads for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:02:56):

Or it was watain.

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):

Ah, right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:03:00):

Lots of goat's heads.

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):

They seem to get some of the acts that just don't appear anywhere else. Like, dude, that band's touring. They're playing drunken unicorn, holy shit. But Eric Gunther had a connection with the guy who runs the place. So we got a good deal on just renting the place out for I think nine or 10 days or something, and I was set up back up at front of house with the Beringer X whatever, X 32 board. The band had their X 32 in their rack, which was taking in all the signals, and then we just ran an ethernet cable back up to the front of house, and I could control all the gain and levels and then just take a USB out to my laptop and record all their rehearsals. Then we would go home at night and pull in the tracks, listen to it in the studio, figure out if I need to move mics the next day.

(01:03:59):

We had, I think four days of pre-production or something like that, four or five days of pre-production, just them rehearsing and me trying out different setups. I mean, it was much more of a real micd up drum kit than you would do live. We had 16 mics on the drums and then just kind of used whatever else we could for the rest of the band. We did end up using all 32 channels, and it turned out really well. Actually, I didn't do front of house, so to speak, that we didn't have the actual monitors on because that would've been chaos for the Volvo mic. But it was cool when we did it, we had a pro light rig come in. We had the band lighting guy come in and design stuff. We had three guys. We had a camera crew come in that's pro, and they were shooting really good stuff. It was really well planned out, and I think people really enjoyed it. The feedback we got from it was that it sounds as good or better than the records, which that's all I wanted to hear.

Speaker 1 (01:05:13):

That's good.

Speaker 2 (01:05:13):

Yeah, probably they'll end up getting released as Blu-rays or something in the future. We did put a lot of work and production into it, and it was really cool to be able to go through that whole process. I haven't done that whole live production thing on my own with a band before, and it went actually smoother than I probably expected to. But going back to your question about the contortionist being a very precise, but wanting to sound natural band for the live tracks, it was kind of an evolving process of how far do I want to take the extra production and how far do I want to take the mix? At first, I was kind of like, I should just do a rough live mix and maybe spend a day or two per song or whatever. And then I started doing it and being like, I think this would sound better if I tightened it up a little bit more. And everybody started to kind of agree, and it got to the point where I was doing a good bit of just tightening up on the drums and making sure the bass thumps were lining up with the kicks on certain parts and just subtle stuff. It was less than I would do on a normal record, but it was less editing that I would do on a normal record, but everything else was pretty much as I would do, as I would mix and master a normal record.

Speaker 1 (01:06:40):

So the process is the process. There's just the details change.

Speaker 2 (01:06:44):

They gave great performances. We did a couple takes per song, so we made sure that we got what we needed, and then the video turned out great too. So it's like I've been really impressed with some of the other live streams too, and I was really glad that we were able to make some kind of product that was competing in that arena, like Tesseract put out one that was just unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (01:07:03):

Yes, they did. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:07:04):

Devins was pretty awesome. The one that he did with Wess.

Speaker 1 (01:07:07):

Yeah, that one was kind of ridiculous in a good way.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):

We were watching that while we were rehearsing for this and being like, all right, that's basically our quality bar that we have to surpass. We're not going to be in space, but we're going to do our thing.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):

Got some questions from listeners. Then. I want to ask you, Alex Parra is wondering how do you balance work for other producers versus projects you get on your own? I guess in a time management sense?

Speaker 2 (01:07:34):

Well shout out to Alex because we've been trading gear back and forth. He's here in Atlanta. I think he just won the last nailed the mix competition. I think you're right. I've recorded a couple of his bands, or at least the drums for him, but I believe he's been doing some work for Jacob Hanson, so this is a good question from him. It's tough. I mean, I feel like I just kind of had a one track mind. I don't have a lot of other stuff in my life that I have to attend to. I don't have a wife or a girlfriend or kids or any serious family stuff going on at the moment that I have to balance out with all this stuff. So I kind of have a one track mind as long as I keep myself relatively healthy, and that's the way it's kind of been for a long time.

(01:08:18):

Back in 2010, 2011, I was interning at a studio in Atlanta and then going home and doing drum edits for you, and that just kind of continued into doing edits for three different people at once. I mean, you do have to make some distinctions between what you know about that producer and how soon they need it and how serious of a project is. It's hard to, I don't want to say how serious, but I'm struggling to come up with a better, I know what you mean. If you're doing work for a J Rust and he's got Corey Taylor in the studio, you can't put that on the back burner for some local band. It's just you.

Speaker 1 (01:09:00):

No, as serious as the local band's project might be to them,

Speaker 2 (01:09:05):

And it probably will help you too. It's

Speaker 1 (01:09:07):

Corey Taylor we're talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:09:08):

Right. Just got to take care of business more. That can go wrong from messing that up. So usually it's a pretty obvious kind of thing of just like if I have too much stuff, I've either got to outsource the less important thing, or I just got to tell 'em I can't do it right now. I can do it in a week or whatever. But yeah, I mean, it's just long hours and trying to keep a system going to where you don't get caught up on anything. I think that's another big thing is just make sure you have your templates and if you're printing drum samples or tuning vocals, whatever, you need to have presets and key commands and all that just to speed it up as much as you can. So it's not so much of a dreadful process. You're not sitting down like, God, I have to go through six hours of work. It's just part of your normal day. It's just like, okay, here's what we're doing.

Speaker 1 (01:10:01):

I think that what people have a hard time realizing is that having a balanced life and doing all this stuff is very difficult.

Speaker 3 (01:10:10):

Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:10:11):

I don't have kids or an active social life or anything like that. I have a girlfriend and this.

Speaker 2 (01:10:16):

Yeah, it's going to take some time to figure out that balance, and there's probably going to be a few years where you're just kind of buried under it.

Speaker 1 (01:10:24):

Well, yeah, there was five years where all I did was work. It is what it is. I think that if people want to do a lot of stuff with their career, there's a lot of other stuff they just can't do at the same time. That is,

Speaker 2 (01:10:40):

And going back to the outsourcing thing, it's just a matter of priorities in a lot of these cases where

Speaker 3 (01:10:46):

It's

Speaker 2 (01:10:46):

Like, yeah, I do want to do both, but I physically can't, so I'm just going to have to let one of 'em go to whoever can do it,

Speaker 3 (01:10:54):

And

Speaker 2 (01:10:54):

At least I can be involved in some way. I'm not just removing myself from the project, I'm just letting somebody else do the busy work that I don't have time to do. It's taken a while for me to get to the point where I'm totally fine with that, but I am fine with that now. I don't feel the pressure I'm going to lose that gig if I outsource something.

Speaker 1 (01:11:13):

Okay. I want to talk about that for a second. So one of the biggest fears or complexes that people have for many years in their careers is saying no to something, and then that transitions into outsourcing it because someone might take their work, which I mean, hey, part of me outsourcing stuff to you was because I wanted you to replace me.

Speaker 2 (01:11:36):

Yeah, take my work, please,

Speaker 1 (01:11:37):

Which is what happened, and that's what I wanted. I knew that that was where things were going to go, and I wanted it to be you. I didn't want it to be some fucking schmo, but that's what happens is if someone is doing an amazing job, it's not like they're going to take all your work if you keep working, but they're going to start getting their own jobs. And so that's scary to a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (01:12:07):

It's scary. At the same time, you got to remind yourself that you don't want to be doing the same thing that you're doing forever and you've got to evolve yourself. So currently the same thing is kind of happening where a lot of the stuff that I would be doing for Jason Soff is now going to Evan Salmons, and I'm fine with that because usually I'm still involved in some portion of the project, just I get to be involved in the part that I want to be, or I'm needed to be.

Speaker 1 (01:12:36):

I mean, you're still checking Evan's work or something, right?

Speaker 2 (01:12:39):

Yeah. I'm not necessarily checking it, but well, going over it and then doing the part of the process that I know better than he does, which is the building contact kits and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (01:12:52):

I mean, seems like a natural evolution.

Speaker 2 (01:12:54):

Yeah, it's been great, and especially having someone that I've known for that many years being able to take over the work that I was doing, I have no qualms about him doing it wrong and no qualms about, oh man, that guy took my job, or anything like that.

Speaker 1 (01:13:12):

Well, and I think you probably feel about it the same way I felt about passing stuff to you is like, I had known you forever. You had proved yourself over and over and over again. It just seemed like the natural way to go. And with Evan, it's like, was that 2013

Speaker 2 (01:13:32):

Where we met him somewhere around there? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:13:34):

Yeah. Or 12, maybe it was 2012. We've known that guy for a long time.

Speaker 2 (01:13:39):

Yeah. Yeah. 2000, I guess they did their record with you in 2013, right? Or is it 12? I can't remember,

Speaker 1 (01:13:45):

Man. It was so a long time ago, but it wasn't too long after that that he started asking questions about editing drums and things like that. So he's been at it for a long ass time, and I know that in 2014, he helped me on a creative live with the MIDI on the advanced drum programming class. He helped me. I'm not going to pretend like I know how to write style ghost. No beats the way that he could. That guy is an awesome fucking drummer. So yeah, he helped me come up with some of those examples in a way that only a great drummer could.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):

Right? Yeah. You got to recognize people for their strengths, and I mean, it's a no-brainer to have a great Prague drummer working on metal drums. I mean, if there's any worry that the guy you hire is not going to understand what's supposed to be going on, it's like, is that triplets into a 16th into he's going to understand what's going on? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:14:45):

It's like, so yeah, the examples had to go from building a simple beat into adding ghost notes into adding dynamics in the symbols into something that you would hear on an pec record. That's not something I'm going to be able to do quite like

Speaker 2 (01:15:03):

Evan

Speaker 1 (01:15:03):

Could.

Speaker 2 (01:15:04):

Yeah. You might as well get somebody who can teach the real thing.

Speaker 1 (01:15:08):

Yeah, exactly. So, alright, next question here is from Eugeni ov, sorry about the pronunciation. How often do you rest?

Speaker 2 (01:15:17):

I get pretty good sleep. I try to get eight hours a day or else I start feeling like crap. Same. So I'm definitely not one of those people who just sleeps like four hours and can function like that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:29):

Dude, I don't do that anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:15:31):

I've never been able to do that. If I wake up with four or five hours of sleep, I'm nauseous the rest of the day and that's pretty much the worst feeling for me is nausea. I just can't focus in a way that I would be able to focus. That seems pretty self-explanatory. I don't go out much. I don't have much of a social life at the moment, but I really do enjoy being in the studio and working on this stuff. And I enjoy being a part of projects, whether they're mine or not. And I enjoy the process of getting better and a decent, I've got a dog and some cats and I sit around and watch my tv and I have my friends who I talk to, so life's not bad. I'm not out being a social butterfly all the time, which was never my forte. Anyway. That doesn't seem like you Anyways. I'm the absolute opposite of a social butterfly. I'm a social cicada or something.

Speaker 1 (01:16:32):

So speaking of liking your studio, Jay Ruhi says your home studio set up is way more in depth than most. Obviously being home is always nice, but do you have any preference between working out of your own studio and working at any other studios and why?

Speaker 2 (01:16:48):

Well, I haven't had that much experience working at other studios other than when I was interning at Doppler Studios in Atlanta and I did a session or two at Southern Tracks in Atlanta before they knocked it down. But yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of a no-brainer to me that once you have the ability to set things up in a way that is conducive to your own workflow, then that's going to be your preference over going somewhere else and trying to figure it out from scratch. Especially when you're doing repetitive tasks like cleaning up drums or whatever it, it's tuning vocals. Even just engineering, I don't need a big stack of hardware. I've got an 1176, I've got a distress, I've got my preamps for my drums and I've got an interface and whatever other little things around here that I have, it's built exactly for what I need it for.

(01:17:49):

I don't need to go out and spend a million dollars on a studio and I don't need to spend 600 to 1200 a day at a commercial studio for stuff that I'm not going to use. And it would actually probably slow me down. I've done those things where I would take a session when I was interning, I would take sessions that I was working on at home and then put it on the SSL 4K desk and spread out each channel onto a different fader and everything. It's just a waste of time for me. That's not the way that I work. And to try and force myself in it is a fun experiment to see what is the sound of analog summing and what does it feel like to try and mix something on a console. But the idea that just magically bringing it there into a more professional space is going to improve the end result is fallacy. I've spent a lot of money by my standards on my studio, but it is really tailored to what I need. I vocal chains, drum preamps, some guitars with evert tunes in them, some mics. That's basically it. And plenty of acoustic stuff because important

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):

Kind of, yeah. Just a little question from Charlie Williamson. You've been renowned as one of the best guys in the community, especially when it comes to the technical side of things such as editing. Was it your original intention to specialize in that area or did you always just get those jobs naturally?

Speaker 2 (01:19:24):

Well, thanks, Charlie. Depends on how far you go. Back when I was in college, I was thinking I was going to be a plugin developer and then that would fund my musician career. And then once I realized how hard DSP is and all the math that I would have to take in addition to all the math that I had already just barely passed, I was like, oh, okay, this is not for me. And I also realized that I didn't really want to build tools for other people to make music. I wanted to make music. I kind of changed my outlook on what I was going to focus on for the next few years while I was at college to be like, alright, I need to work on anything regarding being able to make a mix sound professional, just whatever the secrets are I need to learn.

(01:20:13):

Obviously we didn't have nail a mix in URM at this time, so I was on Andy Sneak forum for most of that, and that's how I'd spend most of my time. It was just like, let me get through whatever homework bullshit that I have to do and then spend the rest of the time demoing songs or trying to make a decent mix out of a pod and a superior drummer. So that's how I spent most of the college years. And then after that, I guess I had a few opportunities to sit in with local bands where they were recording live drums, which I hadn't really done. I recorded my own little four piece kit in my room with four mics, but I didn't really count that. It did teach me the basics. It's of Beat Detective though. That was kind of a funny experience of just thinking I was a decent drummer at 16.

(01:21:01):

I could hold a beat at least, and then I recorded myself with just a kick, a snare mic and two overheads, and then tried to beat Detective It and be like, wow, I suck. And then also being like, oh, that's the sound, that's the of records when they're edited. And same with messing with sound, replacer back then dropping in snare samples and be, oh, that's how they make those snares sound like that. So I had a little bit of insight into the more technical side of production and just my natural interests lean toward computers and technical stuff. I went to, my degree is in an offshoot of computer science, so that was always something that I was doing and felt very comfortable with. The more I felt comfortable troubleshooting computers, I felt comfortable doing installs and messing around in ways that I feel like other people like artists tend to not want to mess too much with their technical equipment because they just want to get the art out. So I felt like I had a strength there in being able to still have some kind of creative energy, but also have the energy to endlessly fuck with these technical things and learn more about synths and learn more about plugins and different ds, which is another thing I think it has paid off is just the constant experimentation with different Ds and learning how to interface with those.

Speaker 1 (01:22:31):

You do know quite a few of 'em.

Speaker 2 (01:22:32):

I've been learning more. I bought a cubase license and have been working with Jesse Reti going back and forth with him. That's been cool. But yeah, I think just natural inclination towards the more technical side. If I wasn't interested in this kind of computer sciencey stuff, I doubt I would be as interested in editing drums or being as precise about it. I probably wouldn't have focused on that so much. Maybe I would've focused more on vocal production or something like that. So yeah. Did I miss anything in the question there?

Speaker 1 (01:23:04):

No, that was a good answer. Alright, last question. Sean O'Shaughnessy is wondering, are there any recent workflow tricks or hacks you've been doing that you want to share? Ooh, had to ask.

Speaker 2 (01:23:13):

I think I've changed some stuff about mastering since I did that Mastering Rescue Fast Track or whatever it was last year. I've started using that flat line plugin from Systematic Audio

Speaker 1 (01:23:27):

Iman's

Speaker 2 (01:23:28):

Company, Iman's company, using a lot more of the clipping to take away to knock down the transient level. And then just using a limiter on the end just to do one DB of limiting rather than having the limiter do six or more DB of reduction. I found that that gives me a much cleaner, punchier kind of sound. I think that's becoming more of the standard for mastering engineers coming up. Other stuff, I guess I would say I've been spending more time going along with the phase Fast track that I did last year. I've been kind of interested in figuring out what exactly plugins that I like are doing. So using this program called Plugin Doctor has been a big thing for that, which I used in that phase Fast track bit, just being able to say, pull up the SSL 4K strip and dial up the eight K band by three DB and then see what that's actually doing on a frequency graph rather than just assuming that it's boosting eight K by three db. It's not, and learning that kind of stuff. And I guess really I've been shying away from those console strip style plugins just because I'm much more tuned into, I know I need to cut this frequency, so I don't want to guess around with mislabeled knobs and colors and stuff. I know people do fine with that and especially people who came up on that style of mixing.

Speaker 1 (01:25:01):

I think that that's the key that came up with that.

Speaker 2 (01:25:03):

Right. Yeah. That's just not how my ears work. I'm much more comfortable with a fab filter eq, but it's been very interesting researching why certain things sound the way they do. I do like the sound of a little bit of that SSL high end on a mix. I had a mix recently where it just wasn't quite spicy enough and I would just start copy pasting that setting of just the 4K with a little bit of the red knob turned up and I was like, why does that make everything sound so much better? And what can I do in Fab Filter to recreate that? And it was just like a one DB thing at 10 K. So I was like, okay, well I can just do that from now on. Similarly, plugin Doctor can show you how the phase response changes depending on processing that you apply to Signal, so you can see exactly why you take the case of a snare top and bottom mic and whether you want to EQ them separately or differently.

(01:26:05):

You can see exactly what the phase change is in one mic when you apply a certain setting, which makes it really obvious to why there would be a possibly negative phase interaction if you process your mics in that way. And again, people have done it both ways for many years and have made great records, but not just taking someone's word for it, but actually going and doing the research and having a tool that is actually able to give me the data that I need. I feel like I need to learn this stuff and feel confident in the decisions that I make has been a big thing. Yeah, it's a pretty amazing tool. I can't really recommend that enough. Pro Tools has made a lot of updates in the last couple of years since I've talked about it. So since they added folder tracks, that's been huge.

Speaker 1 (01:27:01):

Finally,

Speaker 2 (01:27:02):

God, yeah, if they had waited any longer, I probably would've just jumped to Cubase, but it immediately changed the way that I feel about my sessions. It is definitely more of a feel thing than a practical difference, but just being able to feel like my session is under control. It's a hard thing to explain, but when you have a hundred plus tracks just sitting in a line, it's intimidating. And then you're like, oh, I need to make a change on the base. And you spend a minute scrolling down, finding the base track, it just feels better. You have everything color coordinated and I can, especially the way my mind works with folders within folders within folders, that sort of grouping and organization makes a lot of sense to me. So I'll have my raw drum mics feeding snare reel bus, which is feeding a snare main bus, which is feeding a drum bus, which is feeding a drum, all which is feeding a mix bus.

(01:28:02):

And those can all be folders that can be folded down to a very minimalist view, which is really great. They have some small stuff. They let you pick a playlist that is the main playlist, so there's a shortcut that just lets you jump to the main playlist all of a sudden before you would have to either click and then scroll all the way up to the top playlist if you had a hundred takes or whatever. They've making some improvements there, and I've been happy about that. Allegedly, there's finally side chain delay compensation. I haven't been able to test it

Speaker 1 (01:28:39):

Allegedly. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:28:40):

I haven't been able to test it. Not on the right os. But yeah, there's not that much that's changed. I think that's most of the pro tools stuff that I've been thinking about. I think, yeah, as far as workflow stuff, maybe in general, the first thing that comes to my mind is that I'm really enjoying doing vocals early on in the process when doing records because it gives me a structure to work around, especially because very tuned into vocals and lyrics, and I know there's a lot of producers who could give a shit what the actual words on the record are and are more about the feeling of it or the rhythm and that sort of thing. But I definitely connect with the lyrics. It's just an unconscious thing that I'll have the lyrics memorized within a few listens, and I definitely hone in on should we use this word or that word, and I enjoy that vocal production process, and I find it's a good way to kind of break the ice with the band because being one of the more important things, vocals are the thing that everybody, everybody's going to listen to first.

(01:29:48):

There's some people who are going to be obsessed with guitar and some people are going to be obsessed with the drums, but everybody's going to hear those vocals and immediately make some kind of decision about whether they suck or not,

Speaker 1 (01:29:58):

And that's going to affect how they feel about everything.

Speaker 2 (01:30:02):

For the listener's sake and for the band's sake, if we can just get the confidence level up, we've got the vocals out of the way, we've got a solid skeleton to build around. There's no guessing games of like, is this lead going to be unnecessary or are we going to have to cut something to make room for vocals or just makes things a much more enjoyable process For me, it feels like you're listening to a song the whole time rather than kind of trying to imagine how it's going to sound in your head.

Speaker 1 (01:30:32):

Great answer. Well, John, I want to thank you for taking the time to hang out. It's been a pleasure having you on. Again.

Speaker 2 (01:30:38):

Thank you. I really enjoyed being on. Again, looking forward to the future of all things URM.

Speaker 1 (01:30:45):

Thank you, sir. 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 me at al. At m Do Academy, that's EYAL at M dot aca DMY. And use the subject line answer me Al. All right then. Till next time, happy mixing. You've 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.