SIMONE PIETROFORTE: Building a Career from a Small Town, Modern Metal Mixing, Handling Rejection

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome to the URM Podcast. Our guest today is Simon Pietroforte, who is an Italian producer mixer who is on the come up. In my opinion, he's known for his work with bands such as Blood Runs, black Reflections, signs of Swarms, and many, many others. He's one of those people who in the nail of the mix community and the URM community, his name just comes up more and more and more if you hear his work. It sounds massive and I really think that in the next few years you're going to be hearing this dude's name a lot. I thought it was a cool episode, man. It was funny. I'm curious what you think about this, Joel, but when we started URM, remember our original tagline,

Speaker 2 (00:50):

The Next Generation of Audio Professionals.

Speaker 1 (00:52):

That's right.

Speaker 2 (00:53):

Creating the Next Generation. Yes.

Speaker 1 (00:55):

Yeah, so we said it's going to be like a five, 10 year thing before you start to see whether or not that came true. So whenever we talk to someone like Simonean where they came up through the system, it's like, wow, it worked.

Speaker 2 (01:15):

It makes me very, very proud and he is just crushing it right now. And to even have a little even 0.01% thing in somebody's life that helped them. It's good.

Speaker 1 (01:30):

Yeah, it it's really, really cool. Alright, we're going to stop affiliating each other. And here's the episode, Simon Pietro, welcome to the URM Podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:42):

Thank you guys. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:45):

It's a pleasure, man. I've been seeing your name a lot, a lot lately, seems like, seems like things have really, really been picking up. And one thing that I was curious about is at what point do you feel like things started to get serious for you and how did you deal with managing managing that time? The reason I'm asking is because it's a common thing for producers and mixers who everyone starts with local bands and then eventually they start working for somebody bigger or they start getting more and more bands, then more successful bands, and then their schedule explodes. And typically at the beginning they don't know how to say no to clients and they don't know how to schedule their time properly and things get wild and crazy as far as delivering things on time and sleeping and maintaining their humanity. So there's two things I'm wondering is at what point did things start to really get moving for you and how did you deal with the scheduling and the time management and keeping people happy?

Speaker 3 (02:59):

Okay, first of all, I will say it was a pretty slow process. So I started out 10 years ago and a lot of other people I just started with recording local banks basically. So from there it was just me trying to build a solid portfolio in order to then get some exposure for bands from abroad. And so yeah, it was a slow process and I think when it started to get more bigger for me it was when I, maybe after 2018, one big thing for me was when I started to work with this producer from Chapter Republic, his name is Ney, I hope I pronounce it good. And text to him, I started to work with bands that were bigger. And so for example, thanks to him I got to know bands like distance. I mean they got to know me through the work I did within.

(04:31):

And so yeah, it was around that period of time and again, since it was pretty gradual, like a slow process, it didn't overwhelm me at first because I practiced a lot with dealing with local bands. And even if with local belts it's not the same thing, I still got time to practice. So when bigger brands starts to come and even a smaller belt, but not from here but from abroad, I was prepared to be honest. And so for me to organize my schedule, it wasn't a very big deal, but that was basically when I started to get bigger for me.

Speaker 1 (05:28):

Something interesting you just said that you considered it practice. I see this in the URM community sometimes, and I try to destroy this attitude when I see it in people, but a lot of people get frustrated when they deal with local bands and you'll see them posting comments about hating their clients or boy getting really bitter and burned out and I get it, but I feel like that's the wrong attitude. The right attitude absolutely is to try to make it as good as you possibly can because if you can get that to sound good and you can finish that, then you can do anything. And so it's the best practice in the world.

Speaker 3 (06:18):

So at the beginning of course I was very frustrated because I got to work with

Speaker 1 (06:25):

People

Speaker 3 (06:25):

That were basically kids playing the instruments, not really knowing what they were doing. And so yeah, that could be, that is for sure frustrating. But at that time I knew that I needed to make it work because when you're starting out, of course no one knows who you are. And so you need to just be humble and understand that you need to grow with the bands you are working with. And so even when they are not musicians, you need to understand that this is where you need to start and then just have some patience. But yeah, I absolutely agree with you. It's kind of bad attitude to just, I dunno, blaming the clients because you have to understand that this is how it works not only with local bands, but sometimes even with bigger band, to be honest, during, I mean, when you are starting a career, you need to understand this. You need to understand that not everyone you will encounter will do stuff in an organized way. They will not all be reliable, reliable, you need to accept it.

Speaker 1 (07:59):

That's the music industry.

Speaker 3 (08:01):

Except

Speaker 1 (08:02):

I think that people have this weird idea that the unprofessional stuff only happens at the local level and then once you start to work at the more and international level that everything just works and that's just not the case. It's chaotic all the way to the top. And there's a lot of people at the highest levels who, there's bands where there's members who aren't that good, but they just happen to be in the band with someone who is really good and they get along great, they're like a positive member of the band, but maybe they're not a good musician, but for whatever reason they've been in the band the whole time. So just because a band is big doesn't mean that every member is some amazing musician. And so you deal with some of these issues still at the higher levels. And then also some of the geniuses, the geniuses that you deal with are you have to have a special understanding of the type of person you're dealing with because lots of times they're gifted in one department and terrible at other things like being organized or being normal to communicate with. So that's why I think that when you're dealing with local bands, you really should take that as the best training possible because those problems don't go away. And if anything, it's harder the higher up you get because there's actually, there's stakes, there's money on the line, people's careers and livelihoods on the line.

Speaker 2 (09:54):

You got to approach it with a degree of stoicism where instead of looking at any particular interaction is good or bad, but just looking at it as an opportunity. So if the band is difficult, it's an opportunity for you to learn how to work with somebody like that and how to thrive and how to take that and turn it into something great.

Speaker 3 (10:14):

One thing I really loved to do back then was to, how can I say it, educate local bands. I had to deal with people that, for example, guitar player that didn't know that they had to change their strings or fixing their guitars. You know what I'm talking about? And the very beautiful thing. It was that back then when I started out, I didn't knew that too, but then there was this masterclass lesson from Joyce Steward and this was way before nailed the mix. It was on a platform, I don't remember the name. Creative

Speaker 1 (11:04):

Platform, creative

Speaker 3 (11:05):

Life. Exactly, exactly.

(11:06):

Now Joey did this masterclass and that had a very, very huge influence on me because it wasn't just, wasn't just showing the mixing process, it was showing the entire process from recording to fixing the guitar before recording, stuff like that. And so I was taking that information and I was applying that to my local band. So I was basically educating my local scene through that information that I was getting from Joey because keep in mind that I come from a very small place from Southern Italy. And so when you are from a place, the one I come from, it's not like you can go to a bigger studio and try to be an assistant or something like that. And I know you guys know what I'm talking about. Back then I was just me messing with these tools and I didn't have any information. The only way I could get information from the internet was mostly forums, like in the snip forums, there was YouTube already back then, but it wasn't anything like today. Today you are kind of overwhelmed by informations from any kind of YouTubers doing tutorial and stuff. Back then there was some tutorials, but it wasn't like to date. And so when you guys started nail the mix, and again, even before Nail the Mix, the finger was telling you about

Speaker 1 (13:00):

Just little detail, that Creative Live stuff was basically us as well. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:05):

So

Speaker 1 (13:06):

Yeah, me and Finn started that audio channel and then I introduced him to Joey and basically helped Finn find all the producers that came on there and then tried to get, it's just a little detailed, tried to get creative live to hire me so that we could start what my URM idea and the answer was, fuck no. Which I'm very glad about because what I told Finn was that, okay, I'm going to do it on my own. And that's where URM came from. But yeah, because there was nothing for metal back then except there was nothing at all.

Speaker 3 (13:57):

You have to imagine a young person like me trying to mess with audio, trying to record my own band back then. And I didn't knew what these tools were doing. I didn't know what a compressor was and a cube and I could Google stuff and go into the forums like Andy n Forum. But the problem with forums was that the information available on those were like, how can I say it to you? Add a bunch of people telling their own opinion, which is cool, but it wasn't anything like what you guys did with Nail the Mix because then again, that first live stream from Joy Storage, and I saw it many times, I watched it many times, it was so important because it was showing all the basic information you need to know to start out. So yeah, that was huge for me.

Speaker 2 (15:13):

It's interesting about that is when I met Joey in 2000, and I want to say seven, Joey and I were both too self-taught. Same thing you're describing where I come from a basement in Wisconsin, which if you've never heard of Wisconsin, because no one has it's place, a plane flys over in the United States with no music scene. And I taught myself and I met Joey in this random little city in Indiana on a random project, and he was a self-taught person working out of a garage. And we were the best friends right away because it was the first time we'd ever met anybody that was into audio production. We both taught ourselves. So it's kind of funny that we all started in the exact same scenario. There was no good information available and you would go for hours through a form to find one nugget from a credible person and then go home and try to figure it out and decipher the two lines of text they wrote.

Speaker 1 (16:04):

It was so frustrating. But you know what I think is really cool about your story, Simone, is one of the questions that we get all the time and we've gotten this question since we started is, and I'll paraphrase, I live in the middle of nowhere, either in the middle of nowhere in the United States or in another country. It could be anywhere from I live in the middle of Iran to the middle of Italy, to I live in the middle of Idaho, but just I live in a tiny place. There's no studios around me, there's very few bands. What do I do?

(16:45):

And I see people such as yourself who lived that scenario and still made it work. And my answer was always, well, you have two choices. One, you could move somewhere else, or you're going to have to find a way to get good and show people in other places that it's worth hiring you. Those are your only two choices. There's no other way. So you're going to either have to figure out how to get good and stay where you're at and use the internet or you're going to have to move other. You have no other options, A or B, you decide both of them work. Both of them work. I've seen it work both ways for people. I've seen people move across an ocean and start a career both ways. I've seen people go from California to Sweden and Josh who helped start Boren Digital with Jens. I've seen people go all the way to LA and get their careers going, but then I've also seen people such as yourself who didn't leave where they were at and figured it out kind of in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 3 (18:05):

But see, at the beginning I was pretty aware of the fact that I needed to move because otherwise I couldn't make it this as a full-time job. In fact, I realized that this could have been a full-time job way later actually, because at the beginning I didn't understand how powerful the internet can be in this regard. The overall concept of remote mixing or remote recording, whatever. I mean in general, working with people remotely, I didn't knew anything of this stuff. I realized that way later. So at the beginning it was mostly a game for me. It wasn't like, oh, I'm going to be an audio engineer. No, I was just having fun. I like this. I love the idea of recording music. And so I just wanted to know better about this stuff. And so that's what I did. And there was also another thing I wanted to say at the beginning.

(19:22):

I also had this idea that in order to make it as a full-time job, like a serious job and be a pro, you needed to have the classic big studio. And so you needed to invest a lot of money to buy fancy gear and stuff. And one of the people that made me change this idea was actually joy again, because when I started to see stuff, and then also you guys as well, the basic concept that he was pushing was that, look, I did all these very pretty famous records, for example, asking Alexandria and stuff like that. And I got pretty big records and all I'm using is I mostly working in the box and I'm music platform. And at the time, for me, it was mind blowing. It completely changed my view because especially in the Italian audio community, there was this pretty old school idea, you need to have the big studio with all the gear, otherwise you are just a kid playing in your room. You're not making serious stuff. You can't be serious with this. Digital technology in general was seen as a set of toys,

Speaker 1 (21:00):

Like a video game.

Speaker 3 (21:01):

Exactly. They were like, yeah, you can do pretty good demos for your band, but if you want the serious stuff, you need to go to the big studio. And Joyce George just changed this idea. I had this prejudice I had and motivated me into explore this more and eventually make it a career out of it. And again, you guys as well, I remember even Joel, I don't remember if you were telling this mix or maybe Instagram, I don't know, but you were telling people a basic concept and it was don't focus too much on the gear. Focus on building your skills, which mean practice every day, do this every day because it's like going to the gym. Your ear needs to be trained.

Speaker 2 (22:06):

Well, if you want to be an Olympic swimmer, you don't just study swimming and watch it on tv. You go to the pool every day and you eat the diet and you work out and you train with the swimming coach and you swim laps every day and you get the right, you know what I mean? It's a whole thing. So yeah, at first you have to train the skill period. Everything else comes after that.

Speaker 1 (22:28):

Yeah, I've told people that the ear training, the hearing part is a lot like building a muscle is obviously it's not the same thing. You're hearing doesn't physically get better. So it's not like a muscle that physically gets bigger or when you practice an instrument, like your fingers get stronger, but your brain gets stronger when you work on how to hear things and how to listen properly and your ability to perceive smaller and smaller and smaller details, the only way that works is by working on it and developing it. It's a skill and it doesn't happen overnight. It takes years. And the thing that we notice, and I mean I've noticed this myself obviously in my own work, and then I've had the privilege of seeing it in thousands of people too. But you don't know what you're not hearing at first because your hearing is not developed.

(23:30):

So when someone is first starting to mix and they learn a skill, and so it's the first time that they're doing something a little bit better than they were before, they think that they have solved the world's problems for audio, but because they're not hearing everything else that's wrong with it because their hearing isn't sophisticated enough. But then once they get used to that, the first time that they added a kick sample, remember how cool that was the first time you figured out a kick sample and suddenly you had a metal kick. That's a big deal. If you didn't have that at one point and then you did, that's a huge part of the metal sound. So I've seen, and I was the same way, people get basically get drunk off of that feeling and think that their entire mix is now that, but it's because their hearing isn't sophisticated enough at that point to understand what you don't know, what you don't know. So it takes a long time, and just because you get more gear doesn't mean that you're going to be able to use it better. And I've always told people, if your skills aren't developed, you're just going to have really expensive shit.

(24:58):

That's basically it. It's going to be really expensive shit.

Speaker 3 (25:02):

Yeah, I really understood this when I started to mix every day because of course at the beginning I wasn't mixing every day also because this wasn't my main job. I had another job that I done left. And so when I started to mix every day, I started to actually understand what like Joel was saying when he was saying, you need to do this every day, every day. Because if you do it every day, then you start to have a different perception of the spectrum. You start to perceive the upper mid range, the treble, the low end, your hear starts to get more detailed about how it perceive the sound. So yeah, at the beginning it's more like you perceive this wolf thing, which is all connected and you are not able to distinguish the different section of the spectrum. So this was the big change I noticed when I started to mix every day. This again, as you said, is a slow process. You need to be patient about it. It's not going to happen from night and day, and it is never ending process as well. You are going to get better even after 10 years, 15 years, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (26:41):

Oh yeah. It never stops.

Speaker 2 (26:43):

There's different levels to this stuff. And this is something I've talked about on YouTube and things like that. And people don't understand that the skills you need to get from, say if we're playing a video game, it goes to a level 100 from level 10 to 20 is very different than what you need to go from 50 to 70 or 70 to 80. And every time you shift up a level or a group of levels and your skills and your hearing and your perception, you have to go through a whole different type of pain process to get to the next level and a whole different mentality and a mindset. And when you look back, say five or six levels higher than you were say 10 years ago, you sit down and you think about your mentality and you're like, wow, if I would've thought this instead of that, things would've progressed much faster. So that's a trap I think a lot of people fall into is when you're on a certain level, you think the game ends. If you're on 20, you think it ends on 30, but then when you get to 30, you unlock that it goes to 50. And when you get to 50, you unlock.

Speaker 1 (27:42):

Yeah, you got to do different things. I mean, it's the same thing with guitar because I had the not unique but pretty unique experience of quitting for long enough to forget it all and then relearning it basically from the beginning. And what I've been realizing is that you do different things at different stages. So when I was first relearning guitar, I spent a little bit of time on lots of different things because everything was gone. I needed to get everything back. So I would have this routine where it's like, okay, five minutes of down picking five minutes of tremolo picking, five minutes of strumming, five minutes of core, it's five minutes of scales because all of it was gone. But then after a while, just five minutes is not going to, once you're okay, comfortable, kind of comfortable with all these things, you're not going to get very far.

(28:39):

So then at that point you have to start specializing. So it's like 30 minutes on one thing and then short bursts on the others. But then if you do that for long enough, then you get everything to a point where unless you start to really change how you're doing things, you're at a ceiling. So now that I'm at this place where I'm reaching, I don't want to say physical limitations, but things where I have to change again. So now instead of doing things the way I was doing them, now, the thing is to reach greater speed thresholds and tightness thresholds instead of doing things the way I did them before, which is you start slow and then you gradually work up, which is the traditional way of doing things. Now, and I learned this from Rafael Trujillo, who is the lead guitar player in my band, is a fucking insane, insane. He's

Speaker 2 (29:33):

So good, dude.

Speaker 1 (29:34):

God, so good, dude, it is insane. I agree. But the philosophy is you can only get fast by playing fast. You don't get fast by playing slow. You learn things by playing slow, but you don't get truly fast unless you play fast. So how do you play fast if you don't know how to play fast? And the idea is you break it into fragments. So if you have to learn an eight note passage at like two 50 BP 16th notes or whatever, eight notes, who cares? And you can't do that. Well, can you do two of the notes? Okay, if you can do two of the notes, play two notes, rest two notes, rest two notes, and once you have the two nos, perfect, then three rest, three rest before it, you'll have the eight at tempo. But that's not the way you do it when you're starting to build speed, when you're starting to build speed, you do it gradually with a metronome adding a little bit each day. So it's a paradigm shift on how to build it. But point being the things that you do once you're at a certain level, the things that you have to do to keep going and to keep improving, you have to also change those things. So it's never ending. But if you keep doing the same things the same way forever in mixing in music, in exercise, whatever, that's when you basically stop progressing, in my opinion.

Speaker 3 (31:03):

And for example, there were time in my career where I mixed this band and the band was happy, the label was happy, the people, the audience, the people on YouTube comments, wherever they were all happy, we were commenting, doing positive comments on the mixing. But I still was like, okay, cool. I did a good job. What can I improve then? And so if you are able to keep this attitude, you will keep evolving. So it's all about having a balance between accepting failure, for example, one event reject your mix or they're not happy with it and not be too much discouraged, but also not try to be like, oh, I did the best mix ever. So it's over. Oh, I'm the best mix. That's stupid. Of course, that's silly. And so yeah, you need to have a good balance. And I always do that every time I do a mix.

(32:15):

And I am never one under, even when I'm fully satisfied with a mix I did one month later, two months later, I'm like, I dunno, maybe I can next time I can do this better or maybe I can, or sometimes I'm still happy, but I'm like, I want to try this new technique, I want to try this, this. Or maybe I get inspired from another Audi engineer and I say, dude, this kick sounds so good what he's doing, why is it sound different for mine? And so I start to get inspired by it. And that's the kind of attitude I think I always had and it made me evolve.

Speaker 1 (33:04):

What I noticed nail the mix is not for pros. I mean a lot of people that come on or who, sometimes I'll meet some pros who will feel bad when they tell me they're not subscribed or they used to be and they're no longer, and it's like, dude, this is not for you. It was, but it's not anymore. But there's a whole group of pros who are subscribed. They never post that. No one knows that they're in there, but they're in there and they're in there and they watch and they watch because they want to know. They still have that same curiosity as they always had. And maybe they don't watch the whole thing, they don't take part in the mixing competition and all that. Maybe they'll watch it once a month for a few hours. But I mean you better believe that there's metal mixers who want to know what Jenz Borin does or what Dave Otero does or whatever.

(34:08):

And not because they're the competition, but for the same reason you said they'll hear something and be like, what is this guy doing? And that curiosity never goes away. But one thing I am wondering, something you brought up is the rejection aspect. That's something. So I think in addition to having this attitude of always needing to improve something else that I think is really, really important in building a career is learning how to deal with rejection because it's going to happen. It happens to everybody. And how you deal with it really, really makes a big difference because I've seen people ruin their entire careers or at least really hold themselves back by dealing with rejection in a bad way. And I've seen it at the pro level where people had went nuts over rejection and then burned bridges and didn't get more work and developed a better reputation or at local levels where they got super depressed about it and got discouraged and quit. I've seen it ruin people, but it's something that everybody has to learn how to deal with. So my question is how do you deal with it and how have you dealt with it?

Speaker 3 (35:35):

Of course, it's not easy at all, especially if you are like me, I am pretty hard on myself. And so there was a period where I had this feeling of quitting. I wasn't processing the failure in a good way. But there are a couple of things that you need to understand. First of all, rejection doesn't necessarily mean that you are not good. It could mean a lot of different things. For example, it could mean that you are not the right person for that specific band or that specific. And so again, this doesn't mean that you are not good. It may just mean that that band needs another style, another type of, how can I say, mixing, I dunno. And also another thing is that when you get rejected, you need to find a way to transform that sense of rejection into a positive energy. When it happened to me, I was always like, okay, this didn't work out, but I want to get better. I dunno how to explain it. It's difficult because it's like you transform that negative energy in positive energy, like this drive, I want to get better, I want to be successful next time. So it's also that, yeah, that drive, it's a drive. But it comes from, I think the fact that you love what you do. When you love what you do, you deal with failure in that way.

(37:40):

Yeah. Because

Speaker 1 (37:41):

It goes bad and it's not like you're going to stop doing it. So Exactly. Figure out what

Speaker 3 (37:48):

It's like. Your passion goes beyond that feeling of rejection.

Speaker 1 (37:56):

Yeah. Your passion is stronger than any one project.

Speaker 3 (38:00):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (38:01):

Exactly.

(38:03):

I think that's when people say that you are not your job. I know what people mean, but I think that's in some ways it's bullshit when it comes to music. When it comes to music and the arts, it's kind of bullshit because in the arts, I mean you kind are your job, you are and you aren't. I mean, yes, it's a job you're hired, it's the band's record. In this case, it's the band's record, right? So it's their art, so it's more theirs than yours. However, if you are putting yourself into it in a very different way than if you go to an office and are working for somebody else, and I'm not saying there's any, it's not a value judgment, it's just different. It's different when you're working in the arts and you're working on something that's so personal to so many people and something that requires so much passion to get good at, it is part of who you are.

(39:07):

So in lots of ways, you are your job when it comes to the arts, there's or you are a lot more of your job in the arts than in other lines of work. And so you have to remember when you get rejected that you're in it because it's who you are and your passion is bigger than any one project that you're a part of. You're bigger than any one project that you're a part of or it's bigger to you than any one project that you're a part of. So losing one project, not the end of the world, or at least it shouldn't be.

Speaker 2 (39:47):

Sometimes those artists will come back years later too, where you might not have been the right fit now, but in two years you're the perfect person and they'll end up working with you and you'll make a great record.

Speaker 3 (39:58):

Yeah, yeah. It's important to transform that disappointment. You are into, again, positive energy like that, great for learning and wanting to improve. That's how I dealt with rejection always. And sometimes it was very bad, but then I understood how to make it work and you need to find a balance there because it could be bad for your mental health. So yeah, you need to be in that attitude where you know can always improve, but at the same time, don't be too bad on yourself because

Speaker 1 (40:44):

It's not good. So speaking of always improving, I think we are starting to run out of time, but we should talk about some mixing stuff and audio stuff. So in the spirit of always improving, what's something that has gotten you very excited lately in the world of mixing? What's something like a technique that you're working on or something that you're trying to develop in your sound that you're excited about?

Speaker 3 (41:21):

I'm not sure. I worked mostly with core band, so very extreme stuff. And the thing is that you always want to find ways to create the sense of huge impact. And one of the very challenges I face is to control the low end. And so what makes me excited about is technique on how you can have a big low end, but not to the point that it becomes a mess to listen to. So for example, I'm really stoked on this recent plugins like Suits or Bloom, and I know they get a lot of weight, but I cannot do not agree. I really love when a plugins comes out and it's plugins that is doing something that you couldn't do with other plugins before. So it's kind of like a new thing that I think is something that gets me excited because it opens up to new possibilities. And so yeah, I will say that. And beside that, I dunno honestly,

Speaker 2 (42:52):

How are you using soThe and believe in the low end, for example, I think Soothe is one of the best low end side chains in terms of docking a kick versus a base for example.

Speaker 3 (43:03):

Yeah, okay. So regarding Oak sound stuff in general, suit is something I mostly use on guitars, but I also started to use it on like Kick. Sometimes I use it on low end too, not with Sidechain, but just for example, on the instrument bus, that's when I use the Bloom as well. I dunno if you guys have tried Bloom,

Speaker 2 (43:41):

Just that dam. I haven't actually downloaded it, but it looked really cool. And I mean Oak Sound obviously makes really fantastic plugins and they really know what they're doing.

Speaker 3 (43:50):

They're

Speaker 1 (43:51):

Revolutionary.

Speaker 3 (43:52):

Yeah, I don't agree with these plugins. CI understand why a lot of people out of engineers don't like them because of course, like any other plugins, if you don't know how to use them, they can previously ruin your mix. I understand that. And for example, suit is something that it pushes you to use it in a very heavy way, especially if you are, for example, like I do, if you're mixing with phones and your here gets pretty fatigued, you can be pushed to use suit in a very extreme way. But if you use those tools in a very subtle way, to me they are cool.

Speaker 1 (44:43):

I think the hate is unwarranted. And it reminds me that any single time there's a new piece of audio technology that comes out that solves a problem that before it solves a problem, that before you had to do three things to solve the problem, now you do it with one thing. Anytime that happens, people don't like it. And the same type of hate happened when Slate trigger or Drum of God came out when the Kemper came out, EQ matching. There's so many. Anytime that something comes out that removes steps that you previously had to meticulously do or had to have a crazy long chain for or whatever, people hate it. And then also you hear people saying that plugins like Soothe make you make people not learn how to eq. But I think that's bullshit. That's bullshit. Because I've heard people ruin mixes with Soothe so much that I've realized just from watching and paying attention that the people who know how to EQ are the ones who are going to get the best results out of the Soothe. Clearly it's not going to show you how to eq. And if you use it, instead of learning how to eq, you're going to become a shitty mixer. So it's not the plugin, the plugin is just the tool, it's the people. It's never the plug.

Speaker 2 (46:20):

Here's the dangerous, it's Soothe. And I think it's more of a levels thing and a philosophical thing where anything, if you overuse it, it has negative things. And I think

(46:31):

If you're, let's say in a lower level of mixing experience, meaning you haven't been mixing for a very long time, you can overdo things. But once you get to a much higher level and you're competing for, let's just say label projects, if you were to overuse something and it starts making things sound samey, and you've got a bunch of people that now are starting to do that same trend after a while, it's very detrimental to you because you're losing your signature sound. And I've seen people professionally do this and fall into this trap where it's like you're listening to, let's just say a particular chart. And you're sitting there on Spotify, you're like, oh, over sooth, over sooth, over soothed, over soth. And then you're just like, you guys all sound the same. Now you're easy to beat. So at a certain level

Speaker 1 (47:15):

Level, that's not the plugin though. That's the people.

Speaker 2 (47:18):

Well, I agree, but these are people that should, I mean at that level I'm saying you can really, you just got to be careful. That's all.

Speaker 1 (47:26):

Think about when Andy Snip did that Kill Switch record and used that snare sample, which I believe he used to fix a problem because of, I don't know for a fact, but I think that on that Kill Switch record with the famous snare sample, and he was trying to solve a problem. He wasn't trying to create a trend, he was trying to solve a problem and then it became a trend and then suddenly everybody's snare sounds like that, but it's not the tool. That's just because every band wanted that snare and every label wanted that snare and every mixer wanted to sound like Andy snip. And then it always happens that way. But that's the people not the tool. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (48:13):

It's just one of those things, like any tool, I feel like awareness is important. If you use the tool incorrectly, it will be to a detriment to you. And if you use it correctly, it's a wonderful, positive, creative thing.

Speaker 1 (48:26):

The guy in the band who just got a whammy Pedal,

Speaker 2 (48:29):

Yeah, right. Wawa on every solo.

Speaker 1 (48:33):

Yeah. It's literally, we all have seen that local band where the dude just got the digitech. It is literally five times in every song. So it's the same

Speaker 3 (48:46):

Thing. It's similar to when you use one shot samples on drums. They are super cool and we know that they make the drum sounds so consistent and powerful, but if you don't know how to blend them in a more natural sound, you will also lose the feeling of the real kits, which can, I mean it can be cool. Some bands did that in the best, some metal core bands for example. But on the long run it could become China dull of flats. I don't know. So it's the same things for me with suits. It can be asked, for example the 4K range, which is always annoying, but at the same time, you need to understand that you need that part of the spectrum because that's where the bite is. And so to me, a good engineer understand this and so he understands how he can use the tool without making it ruin the entire mix. That's a pro mixer for me.

Speaker 1 (50:05):

Agreed. So we're almost out of time. So we're going to ask you a bunch of quick questions and just give us one or two sentences is first things that come to mind about these questions.

Speaker 2 (50:21):

Okay. Alright. First question, favorite compressor and why?

Speaker 3 (50:29):

Very compressor? I would say the Distressor because I always use it on drums. I think it's the only one that can give me that, I dunno, that Punchiness.

Speaker 2 (50:45):

Yeah, it's got a smack to it, that very signature sound. Okay. Best new plugin and why?

Speaker 3 (50:56):

Yeah, probably Suit is the one I use most. Also Blue. And again, as I already said, it's because they are doing something that no other plugins did in the past.

Speaker 2 (51:11):

Favorite mic preamp and

Speaker 3 (51:13):

Why? Favorite mic preamp. I don't have one to be honest. I am not a huge nerd about gears and most of the time I don't do tracking, so I'm not very into that type of gear, so I don't have a favorite one.

Speaker 2 (51:37):

Makes sense. Okay. What's the best microphone of all time?

Speaker 3 (51:43):

SM seven B? Just because it's the one I always used and it always worked. It always did its job.

Speaker 2 (51:52):

And which project are you most proud of that you've worked on? Doesn't even have to be the most famous band or anything like that.

Speaker 3 (52:04):

No, no, no, no. The first that comes to my mind is the reflection song, old Scapegoats. I think that's one of my best mixes.

Speaker 2 (52:17):

Great choice. I've done some mastering for that band. They're really, really great guys. And they are really doing great right now.

Speaker 1 (52:23):

You're saying stuff. Honestly, one of the best guitar tones I ever dialed in my life was for that band back when Charles was in the band.

Speaker 3 (52:34):

I actually did a very, very weird thing on that track that I can tell you about. But I basically used four amps at once from neural DSP, and I face aligned them and I blended them using that Blue Cap plugins. And it's probably the weirdest thing I did on guitars in general, but it sounded great. Four Amps with one Di. Yeah. Nice. And then I face aligned them and it sounded weird, but that's what I was going for.

Speaker 1 (53:19):

Interesting. I'm saying interesting because that guitar tone that took me on reflections took me a long time to nail. And I remember doing some weird phase stuff too, because I remember it was almost like noise. It has to

Speaker 3 (53:41):

Exactly.

Speaker 1 (53:42):

To get it right for that band. It's got to be almost noise, but not quite. It's hard to explain. If you heard the guitars soloed on, I guess the song, my Cancer is a perfect Example. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (53:58):

I remember.

Speaker 1 (53:59):

Yeah, it's almost noise, but there's something about it that's not, and it's super sick and it took a lot of weird stuff to get there. So interesting that you kind of went through the same thing.

Speaker 3 (54:14):

Yeah, that's because Jake from Reflection, which I think is the main songwriter of the band end of things about songwriting in a very unconventional way. And I remember one thing that he told me that notes are not really important. It's mostly sound design. And so in a way that makes the mixing the mix way easier because you don't need to focus on the notes clarity, but it kind of becomes yeah, a sound design thing really.

Speaker 1 (54:52):

That's a good way to put it. That's a very good way to put it. Well, Simon Moon, I think it's a good place to end the episode. I want to thank you very much for taking the time to hang out with us. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Speaker 3 (55:05):

Thank you guys for having me. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (55:07):

Anytime.