JOEY STURGIS, JOEL WANASEK & EYAL LEVI: The “Fix It In The Mix” Myth, Pro Guitar Tones, Vocal Mixing Tricks

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Creative Live, the world's best online classroom for creative professionals with classes on songwriting, engineering, mixing and mastering. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is also brought to you by Savior Custom drums, quality crafted drums, handmade in Denver, Colorado. And now your host, Joey Sturgis, Joel Wanasek and Eyal Levi.

Speaker 2 (00:00:24):

So Whatcha

(00:00:24):

Guys doing right now? Other than playing with your junk? Playing with my Schnauz and with my, what else would you be doing with my big Shae? I don't know. I like to think of interesting names for penis, but no, I'm about to mix this really cool band from France called Hypnos. They're one of those bands that's I think better known in Europe than here. I think they do lots of cool tours and they sound like Mr. Bungle meets Gora meets O meets sugar. Whoa. So yeah, it's a cool collection of things. So they're coming here, we're going to track some drums and then mix it so they have everything else recorded and apparently their drummer is a beast and I really, really like them, so that should be cool.

Speaker 3 (00:01:09):

I want to hear that. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:01:11):

It'll be cool. It'll definitely be cool.

Speaker 3 (00:01:13):

Hell yeah. I am doing nothing actually. I've got a nice little break and I'm just kind of putting some of my energy towards new plugins and I'm working on a new Amp Sim right now and working on some stuff for Drum Forge and just doing cool stuff like that. I've got a lot of bands coming in 2015 and I got one more band here at the end of this year. I'm working on the Concord Divide record that's coming out on artery recordings. I have no idea when it'll come out, but we're recording

Speaker 4 (00:01:47):

It in a month. Well, I'm just working on some nineties rock. This week I got two bands that are kind of in that genre, except one of them is mixed, really modern and really heavy and huge, and the other one is mixed, like a Pearl Jam record. So nothing too exciting in terms of, I'm working on some really awesome, crazy high budget record or anything. But no, I'm working with two pretty cool bands and just making some nineties rock.

Speaker 3 (00:02:14):

Actually, you sent me one of the early mixes and I listened to it. It was pretty cool. I am always fascinated by older recordings. You say one of them was recorded back in the nineties?

Speaker 4 (00:02:28):

Yeah, that was a little one, one that wasn't heavy. That drum mix, the whole drum set and all that stuff was cut back in 92, so the band was on a development deal for EMI, but they broke up and then what ended up happening is 20 years later, the guy's got the masters now and he decided that he wanted to have it mixed. So he called me up and I was like, yeah, let's do this. So all that stuff was tracked back to tape, and what's really amazing and cool about that, those tracks is everything is already committed, so there's already a limiter on the snare and the bass drum's already compressed and eqd and I literally just threw up the faders and I'm like, holy shit, this is mixed. I hardly have to even do anything.

Speaker 3 (00:03:06):

Yeah, I mean, shit, the more time you spend on the fucking engineering, the better the mix is going to be. Isn't that a big shot

Speaker 4 (00:03:14):

Back when people used to care about engineering?

Speaker 2 (00:03:16):

Yeah, it's really, really sad to me how much the whole producing engineering thing has taken a backseat to mixing. I feel like people have it backwards now. I mean, sure you can spend forever on a mix, but it's so much easier and it's so much better and it's so much more rewarding also as a mixer to be working on tracks that are well recorded and having that phenomenon where the song mixes itself or things just come together, that's only really possible. I feel like if things are recorded well,

Speaker 4 (00:03:57):

It's almost like you feel like you're not even doing anything because you're like, wow, this sounds great. You guys hire me. I'm used to just absolutely saving a disaster from occurring and trying to make things that sound like crap, sound not like crap and get a good mix out of it. I'm not used to like, oh my God, these tracks sound amazing. How am I going to make this sound better? I'll just add a little bit of EQ and just a good two bus chain run and it's done.

Speaker 3 (00:04:25):

See, I think that's how it should be though. Agreed. Absolutely. Mix a mixing engineer. I mean, the word mix itself is blending. You should be making all of the separate parts of the recording work together, not amping guitars, not replacing drums, not fucking tuning vocals. When did all this shit happen? When did all this change

Speaker 4 (00:04:49):

Daw? When the DA came out?

Speaker 3 (00:04:51):

Yeah, when computers came into the picture.

Speaker 2 (00:04:55):

I think it changed when bands decided to start recording themselves way too much. I think that's when it really became crazy. There was a while when Daws existed, when bands still didn't have a producer in every lineup. Now every band has some dude who's a producer or some guy who is starting a studio back home that just wants to look over your shoulder and steal everything. That guy now records his own band every time, and I feel like when that became a thing, that's when the quality of the tracks that I was getting from other places really started to go downhill.

Speaker 3 (00:05:45):

I think it's important to realize that the more time spent on the production and on the engineering is going to directly affect how easy the mix. I mean, obviously it's going to directly affect how easy the mix is going to be, but it also is going to make your final product come together more easily. One thing I've noticed with a lot of the work that I've been getting or doing is it involves a lot of revamping and a lot of drum replacement. And then you send that mix out and what happens is the band is like, well, we don't like this snare. And I'm like, well, yeah, but the snare you sent to me is garbage and I'm sure you don't like it either. So what do you want me to do? I just have to come up with a snare sound out of nowhere for you and I'm basically guessing what I want or what you want.

(00:06:39):

And then I'll send them, I'll say, Hey, can you guys give me some examples of what you're looking for? And of course they give me like, oh, we want the snare to sound like slip knot, but their song has no resemblance of slipknot whatsoever. And having a snare like that in the song would make no sense. So you just kind of throw your arms up in the air, and I really wish that people would pay a lot more attention to what they're doing in the studio and try not to leave so much of it to be fixed in the mix.

Speaker 4 (00:07:11):

What this really boils down to at the core is the importance of fundamentals when learning how to do things, and this is something I'm really passionate about and I think about a lot and that irritates the hell out of me, is it's really, I would say very often a lot of people really want to skip over the fundamentals because let's be honest, it's picking up a guitar and learning to play a couple of power chords and learning to strum correctly. It isn't very cool. You don't feel good about doing that. You want to grab the guitar and look, I can sweep on day three and impress your friends. It's the same thing with engineering. Everybody wants to come in and Oh yeah, man, I I molt my bass into 72 different parts and use 86 different compressors on every single one of those 72 parts and have it all this parallel.

(00:07:54):

And they use all these really advanced techniques and then you listen to the kids mix and you're like, it sounds like you started mixing last week. And I'm thinking to myself, my God, sometimes when I've had the luck and the fortune to sit down in some A-list guys mixing and just watch them, you'll be like, what do you got going on in base? And they'll be like a board EQ and a little bit of board compression and that's it. I'm like, that's it. They're like, that's it. It sounds incredible. So really just getting the fundamentals down, and I mean with anything engineering, editing, things like that, mixing before you start doing crazy techniques, it usually saves you a lot of trouble downstream and makes for a much better product in the end.

Speaker 2 (00:08:37):

I can echo that on guitar from my own experience. Last year I had to do some songwriting for a very, very huge artist and I had to impersonate their lead guitar player who's got a very, let's say, distinct style. Everybody knows this guy and it's pentatonic, blues based stuff, and that's not anything that I ever really learned as a guitar player. Anyone that knows me knows that I don't do that stuff, and I hadn't played for about a year, so I decided to start taking lessons. It was kind of scary. It was like, can you do this for something that's arena level without having played guitar in a year in style that you don't play? So I got three guitar teachers and I decided I was going to go back to basics, learned my pentatonic scales from the ground up and just learn the blues rock thing.

(00:09:36):

And I'd say that after about three weeks of practicing beginner level stuff for six hours a day, I was actually better. I was before a guitar when I was at the height of my playing compared to last year, I think I was actually better last year and it came from working on the basics. And I can tell you that as far as mixing and engineering goes, if I ever get into these kicks where I'm like, I'm going to get better and I start spending an hour a day or something, just learning new things about mixing or recording the times that I make the most progress are when I work on basic things, really basic things like hearing EQ better, mastering compression, just a little more, that kind of stuff gives me way, it pays way better dividends than trying to figure out the math on a convolution reverb or something.

Speaker 4 (00:10:39):

Yeah, there's like a macho thing associated with using really fancy algorithms. I have 20 plugins on my base and why, I mean, I dunno about you guys, but I'm kind of like a minimalist mixer. I mean, I feel like at least for me, having a really good sounding rig that does a lot of the heavy lifting where you've optimized all of the gain structures, whether you're doing we're talking ITB or OTB really doesn't matter, but like I said, having a really good rig and set up routing and chains,

Speaker 2 (00:11:08):

It v

Speaker 4 (00:11:10):

Getting a setup that is going to sound good right off the bat where you've got everything bused correctly and it's all gain structured properly. And then if you've done that correctly, you don't need a bunch of fancy, flashy, crazy processes most of the time to get really good sounding mixes. I mean, I mix pretty minimalist sometimes. It's just basic EQ compression and balance. It's all it needs.

Speaker 3 (00:11:32):

Yeah. One thing I hear constantly people ask, how do you get big Toms or how do you make vocals sit in the mix? Well, the answer's not simple because it involves knowing some fundamentals. Big Toms come from having a clear signal and having the drum tuned correctly and having the mic in the right spot and using the right pre and then processing it a certain way. And it also depends on the key of the song and what kind of are the guitars playing at really low tuning and are they going to be fighting with the low end of the Toms and all that kind of stuff comes into play. So I like that we're stressing the fundamentals for sure.

Speaker 2 (00:12:21):

Yeah. Well, I think that the problem with getting away from the fundamentals is that people will lose sight of what they're doing. And for instance, I've had people come in and show me their mixes and they'll have seven EQs on a guitar and I understand having seven plugins on a guitar if they all make a bit of difference or if it's like minus two DB somewhere here and then a little bit of compression and then a tiny bit of EQ and you're making your EQ changes over the course of many plugins with a few different processes. That makes sense and that's some advanced stuff. However, what I'm talking about are massive EQ changes and someone can't get it right the first time, so they add another EQ to correct their previous EQ and then they still not quite right. So maybe if I add this EQ that I saw in Pinto's Place, maybe that'll change it because some guest likes the EC and that didn't quite do it, so we'll add another eq. I'm sure you've seen that.

Speaker 4 (00:13:31):

And then you go full circle and you're like, ah, it sounds like shit. And you turn everything off and you're like, wow, the raw sounds better than the mix and you restart and you go through the same process two or three more times

Speaker 3 (00:13:40):

Or just go back to the tone and fucking work on your tone. And then sometimes it's not even the tone, it's the playing. If the playing is bad, the tone's going to sound like shit.

Speaker 2 (00:13:50):

Yeah, that's a funny one. This came up on my creative live forum actually. Somebody was asking about if their pickups, I mean if the guitar needed a new battery and they posted a clip and it was obviously a dead battery and want to know something funny. I have a funny story about this. I was mixing a single for a band that's actually pretty big, and they were recorded it themselves with their idiot friend, and I know this because their idiot friend recorded something else. I was involved in mixing a year before that, and that's a dude who I mailed a kick padd to who didn't understand how to mic it up. But anyways,

Speaker 3 (00:14:43):

Did he put a mic in front of a kick?

Speaker 2 (00:14:45):

Yeah, he was like, there's something wrong with this kick Padd you sent us. It sounds kind of weird to under the microphone. So yeah, that's the guy who recorded them a year later.

Speaker 3 (00:14:57):

Oh fuck.

Speaker 2 (00:14:57):

Okay, so I am working on it. There's like 180 tracks in this song. It's crazy, and I was trying to get guitar tone and something's wrong. It just sounds like shit. And I decided I'm going to listen to these di and it's obviously a dead battery. It's like, okay, they sent me a song with a dead battery, this sucks. So I hit them up and I'm like, I think there's something wrong. I think the batteries are dead on the rhythms. I am driving myself crazy with this, but I think that the battery's dead. And then the answer was, that's impossible. The guitars don't have active pickups. So I had no idea what to do and I feel like ultimately the guitar tone really sucked because I honestly didn't know how to fix it because they swore up and down that the guitars were passive. So that was always a big bummer to me. Fast forward to a year later where they're doing an album with somebody and it turns out that they did six songs with that guitar with the dead battery before the producer realized that the battery was dead and made them redo all six of the songs. So their guitar player hit me up and he was like, Hey dude, you're in the clear, we gave you tracks with a dead battery.

Speaker 3 (00:16:31):

Oh my gosh, how long was that? A year later?

Speaker 2 (00:16:35):

Yeah, this whole thing. Yeah, so I did that song like a year and a half ago and then a year later they were working on an album with somebody and they were like, you're in the clear bro. It wasn't, you

Speaker 4 (00:16:50):

Thought you can go to bed at night knowing that you haven't screwed up so

Speaker 2 (00:16:54):

Well. Man, it was really traumatic. I really wanted to do a great job. I was going to ask them to retrack it, but since they said that the guitars were passive, then I figured it was my fault or something. You had to take their word for it

Speaker 4 (00:17:11):

Or the guitar player had absolute shit pick attack and didn't know how to pick a string,

Speaker 2 (00:17:16):

But that's not the case. That's not the case. The really great guitar player in this band, that was the thing. Guitar player is fantastic, one of the best, and he's one of those guys where you just put his di through any tone and it's going to sound good just because it's him playing. So that's why this was kind of a traumatic thing. But yeah, just to take it back to Joey, what you said that sometimes it's the tone, sometimes it's the, I mean if the DI is not straight, you're not going to get a good tone no matter what you do, and then all the mixed settings in the world are not going to save you.

Speaker 3 (00:17:56):

Yeah. This goes along with a question we have here from Chandler Hayden. He says, I'm wondering if there are any tips to get note definition on guitars, play better, be a little more vibrant,

Speaker 4 (00:18:07):

Pick better you stickers thicker strings, and when you're recording, absolutely break it down into micro sections to get the best pick attack for every part of the riff.

Speaker 3 (00:18:15):

Well, here's what he says he say other than saying new strings, playing style strictly post-production or creative EQ or plugins, here's the problem, Chandler, is that you are narrowing your question to you don't understand that it is from better playing. It is from new strings, it is in the hands, it's in the guitar. Just like what Al said that that guitar player is so good that it wouldn't matter what Tony played through.

Speaker 4 (00:18:46):

Here's a good example. I personally have had many times, and I'm sure you guys can attest to this, where let's say you have two different bands back to back and they're like the same band, same style, same genre, same kind of riff. They come in with the exact same guitar and you plug into the same rig in a blind shootout and they're like, I like that one. So you end up with the exact same guitar rig say two weeks in a row with two different bands, and this has happened to me multiple times and one guitar player from one band sounds fricking amazing. Just the tone blows your mind. The next guitar player where you've got the same EQ settings, the same guitar, the same pickups, et cetera, picks up the guitar and the guitar tone sounds like absolute dog shit, and you're sitting there scratching your head, you're like, what the hell is going on? It's the same fricking tone, but the difference is the pick attack and the way the guy's hitting the string is completely different.

Speaker 2 (00:19:38):

And this is actually, I'm going to throw in a shameless plug here, but this is why these bootcamps that I'm throwing and that Joey's coming in to help out on this is part of what's so good about them and why they help people out. They actually get to hear what it means to have a tight guitar performance because I feel like that guy asking you the question about anything besides the playing probably doesn't understand what we actually mean by tight playing and Intune playing. That's what I've noticed is the guys who typically don't want to hear that answer typically don't know how to actually play well enough to make this happen

Speaker 3 (00:20:24):

Or they don't have an ear for it. That's one thing I've noticed is you can show someone a riff and ask them, okay, was that riff played really well? And nine times out of 10 they'll say, oh yeah, sounds really good to me, but I'll be like, fuck no. That sounds like garbage.

Speaker 2 (00:20:40):

You

Speaker 3 (00:20:41):

Got to have to know what you're listening for and you have to know in your head what would that riff sound like if it was played absolutely perfect or if it was played stylistically. Perfect.

Speaker 4 (00:20:53):

Well, let me piggyback on that and the thing is with guitar playing guitar players, and this is coming from a guy who's played for over 20 years and spent more hours than I'd ever want to admit playing the stupid instrument is that the last thing any guitar player ever really thinks about is how they're picking the string or how your pick is attacking the string, how much tension you have in your picking hand versus how loose you are in your arm, et cetera, and the kind of tone it's representing. They just grab the guitar and you just start playing. You never really think about how you're playing, and if you want to get great guitar tone, you really need to sit down and think about how the hand is picking the string experiment with different types and styles of picking different firmness and tension in your hand and how hard you're holding the pick and how hard you're attacking the string.

(00:21:37):

And once you work out those variables and figure out what sounds best first genre X, y, and Z, then you can start really getting the performances down because you'll know what you should be looking for When a kid picks up and you're like, man, your pom needs sound like dog shit. You grab the guitar, you go and you're like, it's supposed to sound like that. Then you look at how he's playing and how you're playing and say, okay, look, change your angle like this, do this. Hold your pick firmer and boom, boom. Now you're chug. Sound good?

Speaker 2 (00:22:00):

Totally. I do this thing at the bootcamps, which basically you take a simple riff in the song that we're recording and we have the artist play it. In the last one we had Rob from Chimera, and so chimera riffs are simple, so I had him play the riff that we were recording and it sounded great, just sounded awesome, just like crushing and heavy and well articulated and perfect. Then I was like, all right, so you guys think that this is an easy riff. I want you guys to play it. So we passed the guitar around the room to the guitar players and try to have them track the same riff as Rob, and it sounded like shit every single time. I mean, they could all play it, they could all play the notes, but this was mind blowing to them because

Speaker 4 (00:22:52):

It's an art. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:22:53):

Yeah, dude, some of them are actual guitar players and they couldn't understand how it was possible that on a three note riff that hovers at the first, second and third frets that goes whatever, that it could sound so wildly different, and that's my way of proving that tone is in the hands, and when we say it's got to be tight, we mean fucking tight. So I don't know. I think that that guy who asked that question is probably, probably in a little bit of denial and needs to work on his guitar playing.

Speaker 3 (00:23:36):

Right. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt though, and let's pretend that, and maybe he does, but let's just pretend that he records people who are fucking amazing at guitar and he is

(00:23:47):

Legitimately trying to get some tips on note definition and making the guitar more vibrant. The first thing I'll say is that you need to understand what guitar tone is, so it's the di being completely hammered to hell and back and squashed and turned into a square wave almost, and then from there it goes through the cabinet and let's say that you mic the cabinet, so now it's going into the air from the speaker, and then it's going through a microphone, and then it's going through your ad and then it's going into your computer. So there's so many variables in there, right? But let's just assume that you have the most amazing microphone set up your cab rules, your fucking amp head is awesome. The guy playing the guitar is amazing. What are some mixing tricks that we could tell Chandler about to make a note definition or the guitar more vibrant?

Speaker 2 (00:24:44):

One K.

Speaker 3 (00:24:46):

One K

(00:24:47):

One K, yeah. The first thing to know is, okay, the notes, where are the notes going to come from? Well, it depends on the tuning, but you definitely want to do some frequency checking there. I know for example, let's say your guitar is in drop A and everyone knows the A is the four 40, right? So if you take a guitar that's tuned in drop a, and you play the A note on the bottom string and you look at it on a frequency graph, there's going to be a little bit of a spike around four 40. That's how fucking sound works. That's how frequencies work. So if you are messing with a guitar track, you're trying to mix the guitar, you're trying to get more note definition, you have to pay attention to your tuning and you have to pay attention to what frequencies you're boosting and subtracting also, what else is going on in the song? Is there a scent that's also playing an A because now that A and the guitar and the a synth are going to blend together and mask each other, this is a problem me and Joel had a couple months ago, A band kept giving us a note like, Hey, we can't hear the piano, turn the piano up. And we're like, dude, the guitar and the piano were playing the same fucking note and the singer singing the same note. There's no way

Speaker 4 (00:26:13):

In the same octave.

Speaker 3 (00:26:14):

Yeah, how can we make it any louder because the way you wrote it is just fucked. You just can't. It's all the same frequency. So it comes down to at the end of the day, it comes down to frequencies and how you're adjusting them, I guess.

Speaker 2 (00:26:33):

I think also it needs to be said that people should probably chill out on the gain in terms of how much distortion they're using from the amp

Speaker 4 (00:26:46):

Pick, harder, less gain. Listen to devil driver's guitars.

Speaker 2 (00:26:48):

Yeah, exactly. Or monuments. Monuments is a great example because he plays on almost a clean sound. It's like a little bit of overdrive, but that heavy, that crushing heavy tone, it comes from how hard he plays.

Speaker 3 (00:27:04):

I think this is why overdrive pedals are so popular because it does allow you to get away with a little bit, I should say, even less gain.

Speaker 2 (00:27:12):

Yeah, definitely. I think one of the first people that I remember talking about this in detail was Andy sleep talking about when people would ask him how the testament guitars ended up sounding so crushing, how high was his game? He was like, I have my gain at four For him. He just plays so hard that that's where that's that crushing tone comes from. But if you notice that there's a certain point where you add more gain and you're just adding fizz and noise, and I've seen a lot of people's settings when they send me the mixes for critique and their gain is boosted. So far I feel like it sounds like a basic thing, but turning the game down, it is not a joke. You definitely turn it down. And then also I think when people are notching frequencies or doing subtractive EQ on guitar, I feel like they're looking at forums a lot and they'll read, well, someone says that they don't like six K, so I'm just going to take six K out, just blindly notching things out and that's the wrong way to do it. You have to actually find where the offending frequencies are in that guitar tone and remove them.

Speaker 4 (00:28:39):

Let me piggyback on that too because that was what I was going to recommend too, was notching. I feel like one of the things that really, really helps no clarity is going in and finding little resonant rings once you train your ears to hear them, it's pretty obvious. There's areas where in any a symbol or guitar for whatever reason, frequencies build up and they kind of ring and you can go around with a tight cue, high boost notch there on the EQ and you can slide it around and all of a sudden something will jump out and it'll go, fuck, that hurts my ears, and cut that a little bit, just a few db down with a really tight EQ and then pop it in and out and see if that adds any more clarity to the top end of your guitars into your attack

Speaker 3 (00:29:20):

On a mix. CRI Monday, we were talking about some of that. It's almost like a feedback in the certain frequencies. Another trick, and this is kind of a mixing thing, and this really depends on having your tone perfect and you're playing perfect. One thing I like to do is use the limiter because what happens is there's a lot of dynamics even in a tone that's completely crushed and distorted to hell and back, you're still going to have some notes that are quieter than others. Even if you go from playing a chord that has four or five strings or notes in the chord to playing a single note melody, you're going to have a giant volume difference there, and limiters can help you bridge the gap, so to speak, make the melodies just as loud as the chords, and that's another thing. You could either do it with a limiter or you can do it with volume automation or a compressor, but whatever it is, you need to be paying attention to the dynamics of the tone as well.

Speaker 2 (00:30:27):

And let me just say that ever since you guys turned me on to doing that to guitars, I'm way happier with my results.

Speaker 3 (00:30:35):

I remember that conversation. Are you using compression or limiter?

Speaker 2 (00:30:39):

Well, I've started using both actually, but a few weeks back you guys turned me on to using limiters on guitars and I started to and boom. And then a few a week ago I started trying some compression stuff you told me about and more. Boom. And the reason that I'm saying this and why it's a big deal is I come from a school of mixing and recording where compression isn't really used on guitars besides multi-band in the low mids,

Speaker 3 (00:31:17):

Right? Right.

Speaker 2 (00:31:18):

I come from a place where compression on guitars, compression on guitars is considered a no-no.

Speaker 3 (00:31:24):

I thought you were going to say, I come from a land down under, well, I

Speaker 2 (00:31:27):

Am in Florida.

Speaker 4 (00:31:28):

Yeah, that's like the whole Andy Snoop, Colin Richardson, soff thing. All those mixes, if you listen to their low end and their guitars, they swing around a lot and you can hear the boom, boom, boom on the chugs like the 1 28 blasts. And as opposed to Joey and I, we crush the shit out of our guitars and I feel like it adds a little bit more headroom in the mix too. It kind locks 'em in and gels now it doesn't always work. It's one of those things that I'll sit down and I'll throw a limiter on and it'll be like, eh, or ooh, that sounds way better. But sometimes when it works, it definitely adds a little bit more, I would say headroom and more space in the mix. It kind keeps 'em pinned more and you can kind of get 'em up there and get 'em a little bit more in front and apparent.

Speaker 3 (00:32:10):

Getting them more apparent is the key for that for sure.

Speaker 4 (00:32:13):

And I would say I have better luck using limiting amp sims harder than I do using real amps, so I find if I limit at least, like I said, I can only speak for me, but in my experience, if I limit the crap out of an actual amp, it doesn't seem to respond as much as an AMP sim does, so I tend to limit the sims a little bit harder than I do the amps.

Speaker 3 (00:32:34):

You can also change the reaction of certain frequencies by using a subtractive eq going into a limiter. For example, let's say you're using a limiter and you're crushing down on the guitar a little bit to even out the dynamics, but the guitar tone has a lot of 4K in it. That limiter is going to make the guitar sound one way with the 4K there, but it'll sound different if you remove that 4K and then limit it based on that change like a pre EQ into the limiter. It's kind of crazy. Next time you're playing around with guitar tones, put a limiter on there and just fucking lower that threshold by 20 db. Just do something ridiculous and then take an EQ before the limiter and mess around with some frequency sweeps and you'll hear what I'm talking about. It can totally change the tone drastic. It's hard to explain unless you actually experience it and try it, but that's part of the strategy is that I, I'm trying to use subtractive EQ to make the other things that I want to hear come through better, and I'm using a limiter to enhance that. It's not all just straight EQ because when you start doing some drastic EQ stuff, you're changing the phase. You're also changing the volume. So that's how the limiter counteracts that.

Speaker 2 (00:33:53):

And let me just tell everyone that on that volume issue, the fab filter ProQ two plugin now has a makeup gain, which is kind of cool.

Speaker 3 (00:34:07):

Oh yeah, that's awesome. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:34:09):

Interesting. Yeah, it's the first EQ I know of that actually has makeup gain, but it's a very cool eq. It's got tone matching, it's got frequency, it's got before and after frequencies. You can choose before you can choose after, and it's got auto makeup gain, which is super fucking cool and I wouldn't say it's a hundred percent accurate, but it gets you within one or two db, which is still, I mean, that's still really good. Wow.

Speaker 4 (00:34:46):

Yeah, that's a cool feature. I could see that can be very useful.

Speaker 2 (00:34:49):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is relatively new, so that's why I figured I'd throw that in there. But yeah, if people find that they're having a lot of trouble queuing stuff and keeping their volumes where they need to be, then maybe look into that plugin

Speaker 3 (00:35:07):

And I mean, if you're looking for some wild ideas, try, I mean, there's so many things you can do. One thing you could do also is take a DI and completely limit it or clip it so that it's just a square wave and then EQ that and mix it into your guitar tone and you'll get your notes to pop out more. But that's kind of some advanced stuff that I wouldn't say if your tone sucks, I wouldn't say go try that. That's not going to fix your tone. That's something you want to do if you have a really badass tone and you're just trying to kind of be competitive with sonics, I would say

Speaker 2 (00:35:45):

Yeah, that I feel like I agree with you completely. The tone needs to be sweet to begin with before you start adding di into it because heard some people screw that one up and usually it's because their tone sucked to begin with and then suddenly they've got a clean tone in there that they don't know how to manage, and then it sounds goofy shit. Soup becomes a mega portion of shit soup, I guess.

Speaker 4 (00:36:17):

Well, it just goes back to as we were discussing earlier, getting your fundamentals and making sure that the pick attack and the playing and the strings and the player and et cetera, everything is right and it's engineered correctly and it makes your life downstream infinitely better because recording is about a bunch of little teeny small things across an entire system adding up downstream, and that's the difference between that one or 2% you hear at the top tier of things is all of that attention to detail.

Speaker 3 (00:36:47):

That kind of leads to this next question that we have here from Nick Hans Lip, and this is cool. This is a cool question. He says, when and where is it more important to be technical than to be musical when mixing? Because we're talking about note definition of guitar, so it leads to being musical versus being technical isn't

Speaker 2 (00:37:08):

Mixing the marriage of the two really?

Speaker 3 (00:37:10):

Yeah, yeah, it really is. And when you're in a mix, I guess I would say you would want to limit the amount of technical stuff that you need to do as much as possible. You don't want to be moving drum hits around, you don't want to be routing stuff. I consider all of the technical part of mixing to be the prep and then the musical part of mixing is actual the process of actually mixing

Speaker 2 (00:37:40):

And I guess if they mean technical as knowing exactly what your tools do, for instance, what MS processing is or something. I'm just trying to think of different ways that they could mean technical. Yeah, they could mean technical as in the mix prep part of it and the routing and all that. They could also mean technical as in doing some MS process that's very math intensive or something.

Speaker 3 (00:38:09):

Yeah, it's like if you don't understand the tool, then I don't think you should be using it.

Speaker 2 (00:38:14):

Yeah, exactly. And I feel like that should be done on your off time figuring out how to do big technical things like that. You should practice that stuff the way you would practice an instrument so that when you go to mix, you're just being musical. That's my take on it at least.

Speaker 4 (00:38:31):

Yeah, that's definitely I think a very important point is that when you're mixing, the less you think about it, usually the better it turns out. I mean it goes back to, I believe we're talking about on an earlier podcast like Chris Lord Allergy for example. He has a three hour hard limit when he mixes a song or approximately, and if he doesn't have it going by, then it's faders back up and let's restart. So it's kind like when I approach a mix, it's already prepped for me. I have an amazing assistant who does an incredible job, but I am going to hit play and I'm just going to listen to the song and then it's going to hit me and it's going to speak to me and I'm going to start moving faders and try not to think about, Ooh, well those guitars need like one DB at three K or this or that, or just hit play, listen to the song.

(00:39:15):

What does it need? Is the bass and the drums gelling? Are they not Just things like that. You got to go with your gut instinct a lot and then when you want to sit back after you've kind of gotten that out of the way, your initial creativity when your car testing it for example or laptop speaker testing, you can kind of be more analytical and be like, all right, something's not right in the high end of the guitars. Let's use this and do some crazy notching stuff or this or that and DI tricks, for example, to remedy some of those problems.

Speaker 2 (00:39:43):

You want to know something or something that I get asked a lot is what are some DI tricks that can be done to fix a shitty di? And maybe we can cover that too because I feel like a lot of guys who are trying to get good guitar tone are dealing with bad and maybe we've got some tips and tricks on how to salvage a shitty because I know there's some stuff that I do to di, but there's sometimes that you can't do anything if the battery's dead.

Speaker 4 (00:40:22):

I've had some luck with using a transient designer for example. I like a lot on bass sometimes for whatever reason, if the bass player's kind of sloppy and a lot of the notes ring together and they don't have good left hand fret control where they're able to mute the other strings that they're not playing. Or like a guitar player for example has a lazy right hand, so when they're palm muting the B string on top is running out. If you're in standard tuning, standard tuning, who uses that?

Speaker 2 (00:40:51):

I've heard of it, I've definitely heard of it.

Speaker 4 (00:40:53):

I just realized what I said. But for example, when you've got a really kind of sloppy bass player on a base di, sometimes going in with a transient designer and tightening up the sustained can get the base a little bit tighter in relation to the kick drum and fast passages where there's double bass and things like that. Or enhancing the attack transient on a guitar track can make the guitar player seem, again, not always, but it's one of those things you got to try and either you're going to be like, yeah, or it can make the guitar seem like the kid picked harder if he has a lazy hand and doesn't know what he's doing,

Speaker 2 (00:41:22):

You got to watch out though because you want to not have these weird spikes though

Speaker 1 (00:41:30):

Going

Speaker 2 (00:41:31):

Into the, that becomes the problem with using a transient designer incorrectly on a di.

Speaker 4 (00:41:38):

I very, very, very rarely do those types of things because sometimes you can create more problems than you're actually trying to fix.

Speaker 2 (00:41:47):

Yeah, I think the biggest way to fix it is to retrack it, but I've definitely used the transient designer. I find that sometimes using a transient designer and then compressing it a little bit after the transient designer, I dunno if you guys have ever tried that, but doing that after the transient designer can sometimes tame it to where it doesn't sound like it's, it gets rid of those weird spikes if you know what I'm talking about, but it still gives a little bit more attack.

Speaker 3 (00:42:23):

I'm not really on this train in terms of fixing di. I got some cool DI tricks that I use to fix frequency problems and to make tones sound better in certain ways, but it's not really to fix shitty Any other, what are some of your other tricks that you've got?

Speaker 2 (00:42:41):

Well, definitely EQing say that you don't have a good overdrive pedal for instance. One thing that is important to know is what is an overdrive pedal doing? It's normally doing a gradual drop off, like a tube screamer for instance, from three 50 on down and that's pretty much all it's doing. If you're using it without any drive, which most people do, so say that you don't like the tube screamer, but you still want that tightening up effect that the tube screamer gives you or you just don't have one at all and none of the sim overdrives are working for you, you can just simulate that with eq, find out exactly what the pedal is doing, what the pedal in mind does, and then apply that EQ to the DI before it hits the amp. And so with a tube screamer, yeah, so around three 50 on down, it gradually slopes off. So add that to the DI and presto, it will pretty much sound like it's got a tube screamer on it. It sounds really simple, but that's something that my engineer and I have been doing lately to di in order to skip overdrive pedals because sometimes they add some unwanted stuff. You don't have to use an overdrive pedal just because people use them. Sometimes it's better not to use them, but you still want some of the benefits. So that's how we've figured out to get around having to use them when we don't want to.

Speaker 3 (00:44:30):

One of the most powerful things you can do with in terms of mixing tricks would be to actually automate the DI into the guitar amp and you, it's easy to go crazy with this, so definitely don't do it a lot, just do it where you need it. Usually for me, I have to do it in leads. If I'm doing a tone for a lead, I've got the tone sounding really cool and I got it how I want it, but somewhere in the lead there's a note that the guitar player hits and it just makes a gigantic spike in the 2K area. That could be because of how loud that note is going into the amp. And a lot of times you can have notes at the wrong volume, like an unnatural volume because you've punched in so many little performances that you're getting. You're an unnatural frequency sound.

(00:45:28):

I guess it's really hard to explain, but I'm trying my best here. So what I would do is I'd go through and I would find the problem areas in the lead where I think certain notes stick out in a bad way, and I'll experiment with turning those up and down, going into the amp, like pre-amp to see if that will fix it. And a lot of times it does, and if it doesn't, you might have a situation where, let's say the lead is a pull off lead and you've got this drone note that is going through reverb and delay and it's repeating over and over, and every time they do a pull off, it goes to that one note and that note repeats and then it overlaps with itself with the delay and the reverb, and now you've got this one frequency spike that's just fucking killing. You can put in an EQ adjustment before the amp to kind of decrease the amount of that note. Those are just some of the things I've done. I mean, I'm trial and error. I don't know if those things are retarded or not.

Speaker 2 (00:46:29):

They're not. I've done that too. I've actually, no, I've done that too actually. That's a really great method. I've done that too, especially if I'm getting tracks from someplace else and they're not fixable by re-tracking.

Speaker 3 (00:46:45):

I think the important point is that a lot of people think mixing is like, okay, put my track through some eq, put it through some compression, but I tend to think that mixing is way more complicated than that sometimes, especially with metal where you've got the noise effect and the wall of sound, it really does require you to get dirty in a lot of tracks to really dig into the lead and fucking sit there and automate EQs on and off and fuck with the volume of the going into the amp and all this stuff you have to do to get that performance to really come out the way you want it to.

Speaker 2 (00:47:25):

Yeah, absolutely. And that's also, say for instance you have a fast picked part where the guy starts to trail off or after halfway through or something,

Speaker 3 (00:47:44):

Or

Speaker 2 (00:47:44):

There's some sort of a pattern where at the beginning of the pattern he's playing hard, but then it becomes only the first note of every pattern grouping where he plays hard and then it's like hard, soft, soft, soft. That sort of approach the fixing, automating the EQ or automating the volume to make it consistent it needs to be is a great way to get around that. I've used that lots of times and it definitely works and definitely as far as leads go, I feel like that not only solves the problem of if a guitar player hits a note and makes a weird frequency spike, it solves that, but it also solves the problem of, well, when the guy goes down to is doing a fast passage and goes down to lower notes on an arpeggio or on a run, and suddenly those notes start to disappear, that's a great way to solve that problem.

Speaker 4 (00:48:49):

You ever do that on base because I do that often where the bass player would be playing on the low A or whatever tuning they're in and then all of a sudden they'll go up to some high note, it'll be really, really quiet and tiny on the grid and I'll sometimes I'll jack up those notes so there's no loss and perceived low end when the guy goes up. So when I get to actually amping it, for example, it'll always have the same amount of low end energy just at a different frequency.

Speaker 3 (00:49:11):

Yeah, you got to do that.

Speaker 2 (00:49:13):

Yeah, it's crucial. I also have the problem where when a bass player goes to a higher note on a higher string, that note just pops out. The low end is gone, but the note itself pops out in a really annoying way, and I feel like that's the only way that I know of to really fix it.

Speaker 4 (00:49:35):

You could always EQ like an automation. I mean that would be pretty cumbersome, but you could EQ some of the top off and boost some bottom just on that one note. But I mean, if you really got a lot of time to spend on the mix, it's something I wouldn't play with very often. So

Speaker 2 (00:49:49):

Some of these guys spend a long time on their mixes though. I've had to critique some mixes lately where guys were working on their mix for a year.

Speaker 4 (00:49:57):

How does that happen? I mean, I guess I understand if you're doing this and it's like your hobby and you're playing around, but in the real world it's like if I don't get at least two or three songs done a day, I feel like I haven't done anything with my life and I was not productive enough and I've absolutely failed at my job.

Speaker 3 (00:50:12):

And I think the people that are still in the learning process have the luxury of fucking around with one song for a year. But that's also, I mean, that can also kind of put you in a weird space because then everything that you think you know about kicks isn't really true. It's only true for that one kick in that one song and then you fucking go to the next song and you're like, oh, I don't know anything about kicks.

Speaker 4 (00:50:36):

That's one of the things too I feel like really separates the men from the boys in mixing is that anybody can sit there for fucking a year or two and make this amazing mix when if you sit there and tweak and tweak and refine and refine, but in the real world, it's like as a working pro, sometimes you only have a few hours or a day or two to mix a whole album and it sucks, but you just have to do it and you got to be fast and you got to be able to rip out really high level results on a time crunch with who knows what the hell you're getting either in terms of tracks, it can be tracked like dog shit, but you've got to put out something that sounds brilliant. You spent a year of your life in each one of these songs, but you've got two days to do it.

(00:51:14):

You've got 15 songs to get through. So I mean, that's where learning and learning to mix fast and mix good fast really pays off because there's just so many scenarios where somebody calls you the day before or the labels are notorious for this, they'll be like, oh yeah. So in the last three months while we were waiting for the record to come out on radio, now everybody's mixing base up about two DB hotter than the last mix you turned in, so I need you to go back and remix the whole fucking record, but add a lot more bass. And you're like, well, you can't just turn up the bass. It's going to fuck this up, this that. So I got to, and then you got to do it tomorrow despite whatever else you have going on in your life, and you have to get turned in on time and it just all

Speaker 3 (00:51:52):

The life.

Speaker 4 (00:51:53):

The life,

Speaker 2 (00:51:54):

Oh yeah, the glamor. Well, I feel like, yeah, maybe it you don't spend a year on the mix, but you spent years learning how to mix.

Speaker 4 (00:52:05):

Yeah, absolutely. That's a good analogy. Or a way of putting it.

Speaker 2 (00:52:08):

Well, that's how I see it, because what I feel like these people are doing wrong when they spend a year on a mix is they're totally screwing up their perspective. Like Joey said, you spend all this time learning one thing, and that's not how you learn mixing. You get better by doing lots of songs. Just like with songwriting, it's not about writing the one perfect song, it's about writing 500 songs and maybe 20 of them are great. And I really do think it's the same with mixing. The more songs you do, the better you're going to get over the period of years to where you really only need to spend a day or a few days or a week on an album and you're good.

Speaker 4 (00:52:57):

I think that's an amazing point, and the reason I say that is because something I get artists, I'll argue a lot with artists over, they'll be like, we could sit there and we could tweak something, just little minute things that don't matter. I'm like, you guys are missing the fucking point. You have to get your damn music out so people can listen to it. No one gives a shit if the snare is up 0.02 and a half db other than you have to get something out. There's a certain point of diminishing marginal returns where it sounds good. It sounds like a song. You've done your job, you have to get material out so you can get on the road, you can tour, you can make money and work on your band.

Speaker 3 (00:53:33):

Yeah, it's really about the ticking time bomb. Once you've written a song, it's already old, so you got to fucking, okay, you wrote the song now fucking put it out. You got to hurry because it's based on a lot of shit. It's based on what's going on now. It's based on what happened. And if that song comes out two years later after you wrote it, it's just going to be behind.

Speaker 4 (00:53:57):

I've noticed a direct correlation between my artists that are very successful in mine that are not in terms of how they get songs written, for example. And I'll tell you, the bands that spend a lot of time just nitpicking the shit out of one song. And dude, we spent seven months working on the song. They usually don't get as far as the guys like, listen, we wrote 40 songs this month, and out of those songs, a few of 'em are brilliant, some of 'em are good, and the rest of 'em are shit. But we tried to write an amazing song every time. And then after time in many years of doing it, you would say their batting average kind of creeps up and they become really good, and then they can write better songs in a shorter myriad of time. You just have to keep writing and keep mixing. And I mean, it all ties in. It's the same thing.

Speaker 2 (00:54:38):

Well, nobody bats a thousand and good batting average. Exactly. A good batting average is in the 300 range, which is 30%. So I'd say

Speaker 3 (00:54:50):

I think it's more about consistency.

Speaker 2 (00:54:51):

Totally. If you're writing great songs 30% of the time, that's phenomenal though with mixing, you probably should be hitting the mark more than 30% of the time.

Speaker 3 (00:55:03):

Yeah. Here's a cool question, and I have a pretty good answer for it too. I want to see what you guys think as well. Kevin Newland asks something that personally bugged me for a long time and still does from time to time, I will get a sweet sounding instrumental mix, but then when I add the vocals, they get buried or lost. How do you keep a solid vision of leaving room for vocals to sit while mixing only instruments first? I actually do work like that. I don't know how you guys do it, but I usually mix all the music first and then I mix all the vocals and then I put 'em together.

Speaker 2 (00:55:40):

Yeah, same here.

Speaker 4 (00:55:41):

I do the same.

Speaker 3 (00:55:42):

Okay.

Speaker 2 (00:55:43):

Everyone I know works like that in metal.

Speaker 3 (00:55:45):

That's cool.

Speaker 2 (00:55:47):

Cool. So I'm not far off the mark.

Speaker 3 (00:55:49):

I

Speaker 4 (00:55:49):

Kind of answered that question last week, not last week, but a few weeks ago we were talking about my mix bus chain, and how I get around that is when I do my mix, I get my instrumental stuff going on a separate bus compressor, and then I add in my vocals on top of that mix and mix that in meaning, so they're floating over the top and it's a lot easier to get them. If you turn up the vocals too hot, then it starts pumping down and clamping on the guitars and stuff. So it's kind of like a Fox Michael Brower type technique where I separate my vocals from my instrumental mix and I get my instrumental absolutely slamming and compressed, but then I don't run my vocals into send bus compressors, so it doesn't negatively affect the balance. I've spent two hours getting, and then I put just a little bit of a kiss on my mastering comp to glue that vocal to that actual mix, and I find it has a more, I would say less detrimental effect in terms of you can get the vocals clear and with more apparent volume,

Speaker 2 (00:56:42):

But that's OTB.

Speaker 4 (00:56:43):

Yeah, well you can do it ITB too, but

Speaker 2 (00:56:46):

You can PI ITB.

Speaker 4 (00:56:49):

It helps you get the vocals to sit and kind of lock in with the mix, but you can't have more control over the vocals and the relationship with the mix. It's not when you have a really dense vocal section, it's not going to kill your bass and your drums and your guitars.

Speaker 2 (00:57:02):

And to take that a step further, if you're doing it in the box, you can always add the track spacer plugin to Joel's method and side chain, the instrumental mix to the vocals. If anyone's wondering what Track Spacer does is it's a side trainable EQ to where it will give the opposite curve to what's coming in. So for instance, if you side chain the vocals with the music and you put the EQ on the music, when the vocals are going, it'll duck those frequencies in the music automatically. And so if you had that set to a pretty subtle mode to not neuter your music, that will help as well.

Speaker 3 (00:57:57):

I actually have never heard of that, but that sounds really cool.

Speaker 4 (00:58:00):

You got all the cool plugins and shit over there, don't you? Every week, man,

Speaker 2 (00:58:05):

I've heard of some cool ones lately, man. I've definitely had some really, really cool plugins come my way in the past few weeks. But yeah, track spacer, that's a really, really, really good one. It's a little CPU intensive, but it is really, really cool.

Speaker 3 (00:58:21):

We only need one instance, right?

Speaker 2 (00:58:23):

Yeah, you only, well, I guess you can use it multiple times, but for this particular scenario setting, I guess for this particular situation, yeah, you only need one instance. You put it on your instrumental mix and have it side chain to the vocals where the vocals are the key input to the plugin and then it will turn down the vocal frequencies and the instrumental mix.

Speaker 3 (00:58:53):

And Kevin, I'll tell you what I do, and I think this is kind of, maybe you guys have seen this too and let me know. I think people are afraid to EQ vocals. What do you guys think? I

Speaker 4 (00:59:06):

Eq the fuck out of mine. So I don't know how to react to that statement.

Speaker 2 (00:59:10):

I EQ mine quite a bit as well.

Speaker 3 (00:59:12):

Yeah, and for me, the very first thing I do is I look at the mic and the vocalist and I'm like, okay, do we got a lot of head voice? Do we got a lot of chest? If we've got a lot of chest, we need to make some low mid to lower frequency adjustments. And if we got a lot of really tinny frequencies, get those out of there. That's the first thing. And those are just the prerequisite before you start doing any other processing, just get those things taken care of. Next thing I do is a multi-band compressor and I use that to control the performance. So there might be some notes that have too much base, there might be some notes that have too much trouble. The multi-band gives me a nice flat line version of the performance, which wouldn't be possible otherwise. Then I go into a normal compressor.

(01:00:00):

And the normal compressor is to even out the performance, not just frequency wise, but volume wise throughout the entire performance. And then I start doing EQ and I do additive eq. I like doing a lot of additive EQ and vocals. I think that microphones actually have a natural EQ curve to them, and a lot of times there are boosts in there, but I think production has gone as far as just needing a lot more. We're used to hearing really trebbly vocals or we're used to hearing vocals really loud, and now we're used to hearing vocals that are perfectly in tune. So when you go back and listen to an old Aerosmith song, you're like, oh, that note's kind of flat. They didn't have autotune. So there's a lot of things to it to prevent it from getting lost. And it all stems from being able to understand all of the instruments where they're sitting frequency wise and being able to know how to counteract that.

(01:01:02):

If you've got guitars that are playing a lot of low notes, you're going to be a little bit luckier because it's going to be easier to make melodies stick out because usually the melodies will be one or two octaves way above, but let's say the guitars are around the same octave range as the vocal. You're going to have a hard time, you're going to have to do a lot of additive EQ to get those vocals to really stick out and punch through the mix. So don't be afraid to use eq. I use a lot of it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):

Okay. I was afraid to EQ vocals once upon a time as well, because being too extreme, I felt like they started to sound like they're in a telephone booth or too bassy or kind of harsh or it was just kind of weird. And then I got a vocalist a few years back who just sounded like shit, and I had huge hopes riding on this record and I just was like, fuck it, I'm going to go extreme on this and not stopping until this sounds great. And ever since then I've been pretty brutal with EQ on vocals and I really do feel like it makes a huge, huge difference. So I don't know. I'm not afraid to EQ vocals. That's my

Speaker 3 (01:02:14):

Story. Yeah, you're not going to get there by just leaving the microphone flat because a lot of the microphone designs that we have are all based on really old things a long time ago, and no one has really come through and been like, okay, let's change microphones. Let's add fucking six DB response at 16 K. That's just not,

Speaker 4 (01:02:37):

I believe there's a blue mic that they made. It's very unpopular. The rep was telling me, but I went to a clinic and the guy was saying they made some mic, it's about a thousand bucks and I cannot for the life of me remember what it's called, but there's a mic that is specifically made to be a little bit more mix ready than the standard condenser. And as soon as he heard it, everybody in the room was like, oh, that sounds like shit. And I'm like, that sounds like a mixed vocal. I'm like, I get that. And the other guys were like, ah, that sucks, dude. And I'm like, well, you guys work at Guitar Center. So

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):

Yeah, it's kind of like when you get your first drum mic pack for the first time and you are really stoked, you go out into the garage and you hook it all up and then you start hitting Toms and you're like, God, these sound like shit. It's like, yeah, well no one's really changed the design of the Tom in the last 30, 40 years or whatever, so they still sound like crap. And you do have to put a ton of EQ on a tom to make it sound like the way you hear it in records. Also, there's all these myths. I feel like a lot of people say, oh, you always have to use an SM 57 on the snare. Have you ever tried a fucking condenser on the snare? It sounds way better.

Speaker 2 (01:03:49):

Oh yeah, dude, I love using a KM 84 on the snare. Holy shit, it sounds so good. And lately I've tried an SM seven B on snare and wow, just life changing.

Speaker 4 (01:04:04):

You got to experiment. You can't be afraid to fucking play with stuff. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):

Don't put, I mean, don't go putting fucking kick drum mics on snares. Maybe try that. I don't know. But you got to just think outside the box. Let's say you mic up a snare once every two or three weeks and you're like, man, always sounds like shit. Try different mic, try different snare. Maybe it comes down to the drummer too. There's a lot of drummers who hit like pussies. You got to fucking hit the drum really fucking hard to make it sound badass

Speaker 4 (01:04:39):

When I started. It's kind of funny you mentioned that because when I started learning to record, there was some book I forgot by Bobinski and he was talking about in the very first chapter recording some band from the eighties, like Men at Work or something, and they were talking how they used a U 87 on every single direct mic and overhead of the entire drum kit. And I just calculated the cost of that and I was like, holy shit, that's like $30,000 a U 80 sevens just on drums. Like what the hell?

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):

Wow. Well, something interesting is that John Brown, the dude from monuments, the guitar player is a killer engineer and both him and Jay Rustin, who is God when it comes to producing and mixing and everything, both turned me on to using condensers on Toms. They like four fourteens on Toms, and I would've never thought of doing that, but

Speaker 3 (01:05:34):

I love that. I love that Mike on Toms too. Holy

Speaker 2 (01:05:36):

Shit, it's so good. I mean, it's so different than how I learned. I learned four 20 ones on Toms and that's just how I was brought up and trained in everything. And now I've been using condensers and my Tom sounds are so much better.

Speaker 4 (01:05:53):

There's a mic I really like on Toms, and it's by a company called Stellar Audio. And what they do is they take old famous mics, like U 60 sevens and et cetera, and they take a Chinese donor body, but they do the same circuit with modern parts, but they're like six or 700 bucks. They're not really that expensive, but they're really, really good mics for the price. And there's a mic that I like and that we used when we did drum forge. I think it's the CM six I think, or is it the CM five? I don't remember which one. And my assistant's going to kill me. I screw this up every week, but

Speaker 3 (01:06:27):

I love, we use both of them.

Speaker 4 (01:06:29):

I love that mic on it and I like to put mine three feet up and actually, or time shift the sample up to match the direct, because when you have a condenser on the Tom, it sounds like the drum actually sounds in the room as opposed to a 4 21, which is just like a m that spiky clicky punchy smack. It's got

Speaker 3 (01:06:48):

A filter sound to it. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (01:06:49):

It's just a cool sound and it's definitely something I enjoy experimenting with when I have time.

Speaker 3 (01:06:55):

It's amazing to hear the difference for the first time, especially when you put that condenser on the Tom and you hear it in comparison to a 4 21, but what blows my mind is how many people will just never try it. Yeah, never try it. That's the thing. That's

Speaker 4 (01:07:08):

The beauty of sampling is when you're taking samples of a kit, you could throw a whole bunch of mics that you couldn't really use in a real world situation. You wouldn't want a $3,000 mic on a Tom when the dude comes around the roll and then smacks it and breaks it and then you want to kill the drummer.

Speaker 2 (01:07:22):

But when

Speaker 4 (01:07:23):

You're sampling it, you can put that mic right there and he can hit away all day and you're not going to be in jeopardy.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):

Yeah, I mean obviously you have to not do stupid things like use a $3,000 mic when you have a Neanderthal hitting the drums. But yeah, that's a big, big thing for me is once I started to try things like that, that were outside the box, outside of how I learned, my recordings actually got a lot better. And it's not that there's anything wrong with using four 20 ones on Toms. Lots of great Tom sounds have come from that, and lots of great snare sounds have come off of a 57, but the point is that that's not going to work every single time. And if you do that every time, A, you're going to be using the wrong mics sometimes, and B, you're going to stagnate, which is the ultimate killer I think of recordings, is an engineer that's burned out and stagnating, and you got to keep yourself from doing that. The way to do that is to try new things. Now, it doesn't mean that because you tried a four 14 on a Tom and because we said it's cool that it's going to work for you either, but what it means is that your brain is going to keep on developing an ear for recording. If you try stuff like that out, doesn't mean you have to go with it.

Speaker 4 (01:08:46):

There's that famous saying, and I don't remember what it is exactly, but there's a very famous quote for people that are into self-improvement and success and things like that and read those types of books, but there's something like your successes determined on how many degrees outside of your comfort zone that you're willing to step, and I think there's a lot of truth to that. It echoes what you just said, Al.

Speaker 2 (01:09:06):

Yeah, I totally believe that. And also to take the whole thing about microphones not being developed much in the past few decades, SM seven B, which is kind of like the gold standard for screams and all that. Don't forget, Michael Jackson's thriller was recorded with one of those, and obviously great sounding record classic, but we're talking what, 30 years or almost 30 years. So there is a lot that you have to do in order to get it to sound modern anyways. If that was the mic that pop hits were being recorded on 30 years ago, it's definitely not up to par by itself. There's just no way though. I have had a few vocalists where they just start singing and they sound phenomenal. It doesn't end up holding up in a mix. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):

You forget about the Well, I was going to say, it's nice when you have someone that can sing and it makes you forget about the mic, the chain, you're just not even thinking about it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:12):

Yeah, that is a wonderful, wonderful thing. But then I always do end up having to process them a lot anyways, not because their voice isn't great, but because there's a wall of noise going on that they have to cut through

Speaker 3 (01:10:25):

And a lot of cutting through is just EQ and ride the volume knob, ride the fader.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):

Speaking of riding the fader, I'm curious if you guys have ever used this plugin because I get asked about it all the time and I used it once and never again.

Speaker 3 (01:10:45):

Lemme guess. Vocal rider. Yeah. Fuck that plugin. Yeah, I don't really like it. I mean, it's a really, really cool idea and I wish I had thought of it because I bet they sold a fucking butt ton of that plugin, but when it comes down to the real world, I don't see it being used, and I personally don't use it

Speaker 4 (01:11:09):

Too much of a control freak. You let a computer make a decision. If I'm mixing, I can't let the computer do volume adjustments. I want to be able to see it. There's no way.

Speaker 2 (01:11:18):

Totally. Yeah. I tried it once and was like, what? No,

Speaker 3 (01:11:24):

I do a lot of mine. I think mine are a lot more technical moves. I'm not really doing a lot of R artsy writing. I'm just kind of going into the course. I might say, oh, I want this little part of the vocal to stick out, so I'll do a little three DB bump. Oh, that wasn't enough. Let me try five. Okay, that works. Go to the next one. And for stuff where I need to get a little bit fancier, I'll use a fader port. It's a PreSonus product and I think it's compatible with all daws. It's a USB thing. You plug it in, it shows up in your devices and you could just hit right and it's got a little motorized fader on there and you just move the fader. It's just one fader. So whatever channel you have selected allows you to control.

Speaker 2 (01:12:13):

I'm looking it up right now,

Speaker 3 (01:12:14):

Fader pull. It works pretty good. The only thing that's a bummer about it is that if you want to use the motorized functionality, you have to have it plugged into the wall, so you got two cables coming out of it instead of just one. But other than that, it's pretty cool. It's got play stop, fast forward, rewind, record buttons. There's some other functions on there, but I mainly just use it for a little motorized fader. I think it's only like 200 bucks,

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):

1 29.

Speaker 3 (01:12:44):

1 29. So there you go.

Speaker 2 (01:12:45):

So you just use it for writing automations?

Speaker 3 (01:12:48):

Yeah. If I need to do something that I can't do with my mouse or that I am not going to type in or draw with a pencil, I pull that up, pull that out, plug it in and go with that. It's kind of like having a control surface without a billion channels. You just got one channel and it works on each, the one that you have selected,

Speaker 4 (01:13:10):

They got iPad apps you can do that on and stuff like that too now, which is kind of neat.

Speaker 3 (01:13:13):

Yeah, I'm not the type of person that needs to move three faders with three different fingers all at the same time. I can do it one at a time, and so it works perfectly for me.

Speaker 2 (01:13:24):

That's cool. I don't like controlled surfaces very much. I

Speaker 4 (01:13:28):

Never use mine.

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):

I could see that one being handy, but more than that, it's kind of like, wow, this is quite a pricey paperweight.

Speaker 3 (01:13:38):

Yeah, it looks cool. That's the thing, people walk in the studio like, dang, this is awesome. One of my good friends has a Neve board and it's like a, I dunno, 48 channel Neve board or something, and it doesn't work, but he has it. It's in the room and it's like turned on and stuff, and people always walk into the room and they're impressed. They're like, oh man, this is going to be a great record. He's got this giant board and everything, but you never hook anything into it. I was like, damn, that's a pretty expensive table that you've got there, dude. He's like, yeah, I know. It sucks.

Speaker 4 (01:14:19):

Just put it on Vegas mode and let the lights amuse the band.

Speaker 3 (01:14:24):

Yeah, bands love Vegas mode. They really do. I think you were telling me that a Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:14:29):

Well, I haven't actually turned on Vegas mode in a long time, but that's kind of like the thing that the one amateur producer in the band always wants to see. It's like

Speaker 3 (01:14:43):

I've always dreamed of having a board. Does it do that thing where the knobs move?

Speaker 2 (01:14:47):

Yeah, Vegas mode. I don't even know how to turn it on. God, I haven't done that in so long. But yeah, Vegas mode is a good crowd. I call those things client appeasement tools, motorized faders, things like that. I mean, I get it, motorized faders are useful, but for those of us who don't really use control surface much, which is most of us, I think that stuff like motorized faders are there more to impress people who don't know anything.

Speaker 3 (01:15:26):

Alright, we're getting to the end here. I've got one more question. I guess we'll answer this and wrap it up. This question comes from Taylor Borden and he asks, do you guys have any little tricks that don't change the sound of a whole track but make it better? Also, how do you use dynamic compression on a master?

Speaker 4 (01:15:44):

I'll take the first one. One thing that I like to do a lot of my masters, and this kind of goes back to EQing guitars and symbols we were talking about earlier, is notching out little frequencies. So as soon as I print my mix down off my analog bus, I'll usually go and grab a little EQ with some really teeny notches and just try to find little things in the mix where there's just frequency buildups across the whole spectrum that just annoy the shit out of me. I always hate 3.2 to 4K just pisses me off. I cut it out of everything and there's always too much of it downstream when the mix is done. So I always go and try to find that little bit of harshness in there and just kind of notch it out a little bit. And sometimes having a really tight queue deep cut on a master and having a few little frequency cleanups. When you ab that on and off, you'll notice an absolutely huge difference in the mix sounding that extra 5% better, but you're not really changing the mix. You're just kind of cleaning up a few rogue frequencies on the master.

Speaker 3 (01:16:38):

Yeah, I have some go-to frequencies that I definitely mess around with on every, well, when I say every track, I mean every song I've noticed. A lot of my mixes, or maybe I should say a lot of my masters have a lot of 4K it seems like, or maybe I just fucking hate that frequency as we all know. So fuck 4K. I take it out to the car and I'm like, Nope, it's got too much 4K, and I'll go back in and I'll adjust it. And I really feel like it improves the whole track, but it doesn't really change the sound of it. It just kind of gets rid of that annoying little thing that I don't want to hear. Also, in terms of individual tracks like drums or guitars, I mean, gosh, there's a billion tricks that you can do. One thing I like to do with drums is I'll take the whole drum mix and I'll duplicate it into another track and I'll put distortion on it, and then I turn it all the way down and then whenever I want my drums to have just a little bit more energy, I grab that fader and I pull it up and it's like a parallel distortion, and so I drive that in there.

(01:17:49):

Maybe I want the chorus drums to just pound a little bit harder. I'll drive that up, automate it into the chorus, and then pull it back down. It's also a cool way to make your verses and say the verse beat in the chorus beat are pretty much similar. You can make those two beats sound differently by using a parallel to automate in and out.

Speaker 2 (01:18:08):

I think one thing that I do that probably nobody listening to this is going to do is I have this unique called an 88 by a company called JCF Audio. They have this really weird function called PEP that I'm not sure exactly what it does, but it makes everything better. So there you go. That's a simple thing that I do that put things through and suddenly, suddenly they sound better.

Speaker 4 (01:18:39):

That is a really expensive toy.

Speaker 2 (01:18:41):

Yeah, it is really, really expensive. Do you guys ever play with making your choruses wider?

Speaker 4 (01:18:48):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'll give you an example. For example, when we did drum forge, that was one of the ideas between tracking it XY in space pair and being able to switch behind so you can drop a space pair on the chorus and increase your imaging and your width. So in terms of actual mixing, I mean, yeah, sometimes guitars, I mean I usually don't use a lot of widener and things like that, but sometimes just taking the panning from 80 to a hundred for example, or symbols, same thing with the panning. There's just a lot of little tricks and things you can do to make the chorus pop out and be wider and more in your face.

Speaker 3 (01:19:22):

For me, it's not a lot of mixing tricks, it's more production tricks, but I guess that line gets blurred quite a bit. I don't find myself doing crazy stuff like say a song comes in and I'm just mixing it. I'm not going to do a lot of crazy stuff. I'm not going to go grab my guitar and play chords and stuff, but if I'm recording a song, I might do that. If I want the chorus to have a bigger, wider sound, I might go in and say, add a crash. That's hard panned on the right in addition to the crash that the guy's already hitting. So it just makes it sound like, oh wow, the crash is way over here now and then now there's two extra guitars that are just super wide and oh, now there's all these extra vocals that came out of nowhere that are hard pan left and and have reverb and stuff. So for me, it's a lot of production stuff. I don't really find myself using Widener or, I mean, I just don't do a lot of mixing tricks to make it wider. It's more production for me.

Speaker 4 (01:20:23):

I totally agree with that

Speaker 2 (01:20:25):

From, I feel like the arrangement should be doing it, but I just heard, I remember reading this week that somebody said that they do that on choruses. They try to kick a widener on the guitars to make them sound wider and just been thinking about that. That's

Speaker 3 (01:20:42):

Kind of cool. Yeah, I'd like to maybe try that.

Speaker 2 (01:20:44):

Yeah, it seems like a good idea, right?

Speaker 3 (01:20:48):

I to do stuff that is, I like to do what I would say cost effective moves.

(01:20:55):

So instead of if I can figure out how to make a double sound wider without making the vocalist do it again, I'll do that because it's more cost effective. If I can make one guitar track sound bigger by adding a little bit more bass or something, like for a certain part, that's more cost effective for me to do that than to actually go in and find a guitar that has more bass and record it. And those are kind of extreme examples, but it's important to realize the difference between doing that or being lazy and just trying to fix it in the mix. There's definitely a difference where you're like, you're weighing your options like, oh, do I want to make the vocalist do two more hours of vocals to fucking double everything we just did? Or is there a way that I can just do a chain that makes it accomplish my goal?

Speaker 2 (01:21:50):

Yeah, there is a real fine line, but I feel like the fine line is what you're doing actually going to accomplish the goal or not, and if it's going to actually accomplish the goal, then why is it cheating? I feel like sometimes people try to get away with shortcuts and then they end up short changing their mix or their production, but if it's not short changing it, then what's wrong with it?

Speaker 3 (01:22:22):

Yeah. I don't think there's any such thing as cheating either. I mean, it's all just a show. When I listen to a crystal Lord algae mix, I'm like, dude, this is fool of cheat. It just blows my mind, and I think that's what a mix should do. I don't think it should be like, oh, yeah, I can tell they used a 57 on a mesa. Yeah, that's what it sounds like. No, I want the guitars to just fucking blow your mind and be like, what is that? What did you do? How does it sound like that to me, that's what the mix needs to do.

Speaker 2 (01:22:51):

Agreed. Absolutely. Alright,

Speaker 3 (01:22:53):

That's going to wrap it up for this episode. I want to thank you guys for tuning in. I also want to thank Chandler Hayden, Nick Hand Slip, Kevin Newland and Taylor Borden for asking questions on the forum. Hopefully some of our answers will help you guys out, and if not, let us know. You can always go to www.joeysturgis.com/podcast and give us feedback. Tell us what to talk about, ask us questions. See pictures of us spew hate. Email us your phone numbers. Maybe we can text, we can text each other back and forth. It could be real cute sext. Other than that, thanks for listening and tune in next week.

Speaker 1 (01:23:37):

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