CHRIS KELLY: Managing Band Egos, Programming Realistic Drums, Finding Your Sound

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Sonar Works. Sonar Works is on a mission to ensure everybody hears music the way it was meant to be across all devices. Visit Sonar works.com for more info and now your host, Eyal Levi

Speaker 2 (00:00:19):

Welcome to the URM podcast. I am Eyal Levi, and I just want to tell you that this show is brought to you by URM Academy, the world's best education for rock and metal producers. Every month on Nail the Mix, we bring you one of the world's best producers to mix a song from scratch, from artists like Lama God, Ms. Suga, periphery A Day To Remember. Bring me the Horizon pec many, many more, and we give you the raw multi-track so you can mix along. You'll also get access to Mix Lab, our collection of bite-sized mixing tutorials and Portfolio Builder, which are pro quality multi-tracks that are cleared for use in your portfolio. You can find out [email protected]. Before we get into the show, I want to tell you about a brand new product we just launched the Complete Beginner's Guide to Recording Rock and Metal.

(00:01:05):

It's a short two hour course hosted by Ryan Fluff Bruce, where he walks you through every single step of the process for recording a complete song from scratch in a simple home studio. If you've been thinking about getting into recording but you weren't sure where to start, this is for you. He gives you a list of exactly which gear that we suggest you get, shows you how to set it all up, then gives you a step-by-step guide to record a guitar, bass, and vocals and programming, midi drums, everything you need to record an awesome high quality demo with no more than a few hundred dollars worth of gear. And just to make sure you have absolutely everything you need. The course includes copies of Tone Forge Menace, and Gain Reduction by Joey SGI tones and a virtual drum plugin from Drum Forge. That's over $200 in software included with the course.

(00:01:56):

So it's pretty much a no-brainer. If that sounds cool to you, you can get instant access to the course and all the included [email protected]. And one last thing I want to tell you about, and this is really cool. I want to tell you about a cool new partnership we've got with Empire Ears. They make a quality in ear monitor that lets you bring your studio with you anywhere seriously. You can mix with these. And I know it sounds crazy for me to say, but it is absolutely true. If you're at all mobile with your audio or you are in a situation where volume is a problem like you mix out of an apartment, you may want to check these out. And here's how it works. Basically, URM users are getting hooked up with an exclusive discount and personalized support. And think about it like this, how sick is it to be able to take your reference with you Every single place you go with Empire Studio Response Monitor, you can have a flat response sound you can trust every single place you go. So for more info, just reach out to [email protected] for details. That's D-Y-L-A-N at EMP I-R-E-E-A-R s.com. Alright, here it goes. I will shut up now. Chris Kelly, welcome back to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. Third time. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:03:26):

Take three.

Speaker 2 (00:03:27):

Actually, fourth time. Fourth time. Well, you were on once before.

Speaker 3 (00:03:32):

No, I don't have an episode yet.

Speaker 2 (00:03:34):

You don't? No.

Speaker 3 (00:03:35):

Are

Speaker 2 (00:03:35):

You?

Speaker 3 (00:03:35):

I'm 100% positive. We recorded what was supposed to be my first episode, decided it wasn't good enough, added onto it, and then couldn't edit the two together, and so now we're redoing it

Speaker 2 (00:03:49):

Completely. So it's been such a long span of time

Speaker 3 (00:03:54):

Between

Speaker 2 (00:03:54):

Them that for some reason I felt like we released one and then we tried to do a second podcast and it didn't work, and then we tried to do a third one and it didn't work, and now we're trying. So it's never even worked in the first place.

Speaker 3 (00:04:08):

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, we just keep fucking up on one end or another.

Speaker 2 (00:04:13):

See, I guess because we had a header image already the first time, I guess somewhere in my mind months later, I had it associated with already done.

Speaker 3 (00:04:25):

Yeah. Yeah. I think both times we were close to releasing. We had the header image done and ready to put out, and then something would come up every time that was like, yeah, this isn't good enough, or this isn't working, or whatever. So man, I really hope this one works. I feel like after three or four tries, I'm no longer worth it.

Speaker 2 (00:04:54):

It's the universe conspiring or it's not. But I mean, every once in a while I have to can an episode or something happens. It's, there's been certain times where you're capable of having a great episode with somebody, but something about the conversation just isn't what you hoped it would be or there's some technical thing or something.

Speaker 3 (00:05:27):

You could end up closing out the conversation by talking about parasailing or something. And then because where we ended our first conversation, you

Speaker 2 (00:05:37):

Don't like parasailing.

Speaker 3 (00:05:39):

Maybe we shouldn't get into that this time. I feel like it got us on a tangent last time and it just totally took us out of it.

Speaker 2 (00:05:47):

Fuck parasailing. We'll just leave it at that. Fuck

Speaker 3 (00:05:49):

Parasailing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:05:51):

Yeah. I mean, I'd say that one in 25 to 30 episodes kind of just gets ditched, but I love it when people can redo it. I guess it's really similar to redoing a take or something or when have you ever had that when you're recording where shit is just going shitty one day and tracking drums or something and it's just dude's left, foot's not working, he's playing a little kid and it's just dumb. No idea. The click just, you know what I'm saying? Just problems and you can't get into it.

Speaker 3 (00:06:35):

Yeah. Everyone's off their game and you just spend an entire day trying to grind through it, and

Speaker 2 (00:06:41):

Then you come back the next day and it's great.

Speaker 3 (00:06:43):

Right, right. Yeah. But you come back the next day and listen to everything that you got the day before and you're like, oh, this is fucking garbage. Why did we, we spend the whole day.

Speaker 2 (00:06:54):

Sometimes I won't even listen to it.

Speaker 3 (00:06:57):

I to, I can't bring myself not to because I always have this inkling of hope that when I come back in it's like, well, maybe I was just in a bad mood yesterday. Maybe I was just fair enough being overly picky. You know what I mean? And maybe it's fine, but nine times out of 10, my instincts are correct.

Speaker 2 (00:07:17):

That's an interesting point because that's happened to me plenty of times, and I know it's happened to plenty of people on here where it was getting late in the night and everything was sounding like shit. Especially on mixing, this normally happens on mixing, and then you come in the next day and you're like, I don't know why I was going so crazy. It sounds fine,

Speaker 3 (00:07:39):

But

Speaker 2 (00:07:39):

The thing

Speaker 3 (00:07:40):

Is, mixing and writing is

Speaker 2 (00:07:41):

What

Speaker 3 (00:07:41):

Happens,

Speaker 2 (00:07:43):

Not necessarily with drum tracking. I feel like I'm a pretty good judge for what a shitty performance is, and if I'm not feeling it, I'm probably not going to feel it the next day. And so I've just gotten to the point where the reason I'd want to just ditch it and not even hear it is just to not give it the chance to be rescued and don't even give it the chance to have someone be like,

Speaker 3 (00:08:12):

Not give yourself the opportunity to settle on something that's not up to par,

Speaker 2 (00:08:18):

Especially when you know that the person you're working with is capable of something great. I feel like sometimes if you're working with great people, their bad days are so much better than most people's best days that you can come back and be like, it wasn't that bad. Some editing, et cetera, et cetera. But if you know, it could be a lot better, I just say, fuck it. And I try to not give myself the chance to psych myself into going with something worse. Then it doesn't always work out that way, but that's at least the goal.

Speaker 3 (00:08:59):

If it's in the case that you're talking about where you know that the performer is sick, then at that point you can say, you know what? I'm not even going to listen to the take from yesterday. Just throw it out because you know that you're going to get something good out of them. But sometimes dudes just suck sometimes. So in those cases, keep the takes from the day before, do more, takes today,

Speaker 2 (00:09:22):

I mean, in some ways, keep all the takes, but when I say I get rid of 'em, I don't actually mean get rid of 'em forever. I just mean get rid of them as in don't open them back up and start from scratch. I very rarely actually delete anything.

Speaker 3 (00:09:40):

See, I'm so much more absolute with my choices on that. It's like if I don't like it, it's like I don't put things well with drums. With drums. I'll put things onto playlists or I'll save them into a folder or something like that so that I can hear everything later. But with everything like guitar tracking, vocal tracking, anything, if I'm like, yeah, this isn't good enough, or No, I don't want it to sound like this. It's just delete gone clear unused audio.

Speaker 2 (00:10:09):

Yeah. Well, yeah. Okay. I guess I need to clarify when there's the possibility that the person might not be able to do better and that that's a possibility and you're running out of time, then I guess the delete function, it needs to be used a lot more wisely, but at the same time, there's no reason to keep anything crappy around. It's just taking up space and cluttering things up. Just get rid of it. Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 3 (00:10:41):

Yeah, had, especially with drummers, I've had records where just take after take after take after take, and it's like there's always the one part that they keep fucking up. Sometimes somebody will do a take and then one section will be messed up, and so you think, well, if I do another take, they're not going to fuck that section up both times, but it's the same thing every single time. So I'll have drummers where they come in, they don't do anything, and I keep going, going, going, going, and then eventually I'm just like, all right, you know what? Just give me 10 good hits on each drum. And then I just program the drums and I layer in the samples from them hitting the drums just so that they can say that there's a natural sound in there. I'm very quick to, with the drummer, that's not worth it, especially, I'm very quick to give up on that because it's not worth anybody's time or money to try to force a dude who can't play the parts to keep like, oh, maybe he'll get it after six hours of trying and not be exhausted. And even worse than

(00:11:46):

No way. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:11:47):

No way. So the thing is, where I think that people screw this up or just need to think about it a little bit more logically, is that yes, as a producer you are supposed to pull the best performances out of people. That is a hundred percent true. However, as a producer, you're also supposed to understand what they're capable of. And the only way to understand what someone is capable of, it's to understand what they're not capable of. And I mean, there might be some gray area, people can impress you, but there's an edge, there's an outer edge to that gray area typically. So if the reason that a drummer's not doing a good job is that they just don't know the parts that well, okay, a few hours of learning the parts with a great drummer and you could be in really good shape, but if the reason the drummer's not doing a very good job is he sucks and his technique's not there. Well, next,

Speaker 3 (00:12:41):

In

Speaker 2 (00:12:42):

My opinion,

Speaker 3 (00:12:42):

Yeah, I mean sort of elaborating on what your job is, the producer is okay, especially in the instance of a band and or drummer, that sucks. It's not only your job to be able to recognize what somebody is or is not capable of, but it's your job to make everything sound good because that client is likely not going to be able to differentiate between, this sounds like shit because we sound like shit, and this sounds like shit because you're a bad producer. Right,

Speaker 2 (00:13:11):

Very true.

Speaker 3 (00:13:12):

So it's something that you're putting your name on, especially when you're starting out. I'm by no means a household name even remotely. So it's very important to, you're in my house. Oh, that's nice. I appreciate that. But yeah, it's very important for me to make sure that anything that I put my name on sounds as good as I can possibly make it sound. And so there's, I guess a bit more of a burden that comes with that because that usually leads to a lot more frequent difficult conversations because until you're at a level where people are just banging down your door to work with you, you're just kind of taking what you can get. And so when you have a client that's not totally up to snuff, again, they don't understand that something sounds bad because they sound bad, they think it's your fault. And so you have to have that conversation and try to navigate that headspace of saying, no, dude, it's because you can't play. You know what I mean? You have to try to get that across without alienating the client or losing their business

Speaker 2 (00:14:17):

Sometimes. I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent of the time. Here's why. If they can't differentiate between them sucking or you sucking as an engineer to say that giving them a logical explanation will bridge that gap. I mean, we're not always talking about logical people. So sometimes they might just get mad at you and still think you suck. So I think that at the end of the day, what actually matters most kind of what you said is what it sounds like. And so I think you just got to do what you got to do.

Speaker 3 (00:14:53):

Yeah, that's fair.

Speaker 2 (00:14:53):

You can't blame the bands. And I think back to high school, my band recorded at a studio. We went to a studio, I saved up for it out of some money I worked for over a summer. Nobody else in the van paid. I mean, it was only $250 total, but still at 14 and 15. That was a lot. And so we went in and I was a guitar player and we had another guitar player, and when it came time for him to record his parts, it was just, man, this is one of my clearest memories from back then. He couldn't fucking do it. Just songs that we had practiced and he was fine with. He was just falling apart in the studio, and this was on tape. There was no way to really edit it. We didn't have budget knowledge or anything like that. Was this guy's turn to go and the going was not going good, and everyone was in the room and they were kind of laughing behind his back and he could hear them, and it was traumatizing him until he left. And then the engineer turned around, or the producer or whatever you want to call him, and was like, you want to try? It's like, okay. So we knocked the whole thing out in two hours. The next day the guitar player came back, and I guess he recognized my playing because we sounded completely different, and he was seriously offended that we were best friends. Our friendship never recovered. We were best friends that inseparable high school type of best friends.

(00:16:39):

It ended the fuck out of that. And I guess the thing that to this day I take was that it was obvious that his parts sucked. There was no question about it. Everybody knew including him, that his parts sucked. In addition to that, he didn't pay any money for the recording, so he had no say whatsoever. Right.

Speaker 3 (00:16:58):

So shut up. Right. So shut up. Exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:17:01):

But that doesn't matter. That's logical, right? So you would think that if you fuck up that bad to where someone's giving you a ride and you can't do what you were supposed to do and someone else does it, you might want to thank the other person for swooping in and saving the day. But that's not how emotions work. And I'm giving, I guess, a logical explanation of how I think it should have gone if everyone just worked on Pure Logic,

Speaker 3 (00:17:33):

But

Speaker 2 (00:17:33):

They don't. Well, I think

Speaker 3 (00:17:35):

That's a real symbol, being able to operate on logic, whether the band is a quote professional band or not. I think that being able to operate under that type of logic is a real differentiator between a pro band and a non-pro band, even at the local level. Because I just had a client in fairly recently, and it was my first time working with them, and they came in and one of them was left-handed, one of 'em was right-handed, which means they weren't going to be able to use the same guitar, which was concerning for me for a local band. I hadn't heard them play yet. I didn't know what kind of inconsistencies I was going to be dealing with

Speaker 2 (00:18:13):

All of them.

Speaker 3 (00:18:15):

So I started, I was like, what kind of picks do you guys use? What kind of amps are you guys trying to use? What kind of strings does everybody play? And every answer was completely different from both of them. And I was like, this is going to be a fucking nightmare. And so I tried to start the conversation of, okay, we might want to, and the lead guitar player was like, lemme stop you right there if you want, Alex, that was the other guy. If you want Alex to do all the rhythms, have him do all the rhythms. I don't give a fuck. And I was like, you're the fucking man. You just made my life so much easier. Okay, great. We're going to have Alex do all the rhythms and we'll have you do all the little melodies and the lead things, and perfect. Their devotion was to making the product sound good, and they left their egos at the door. And I think that being able to do that, whether it's in a recording scenario or in a performing scenario, anything musical or otherwise, if you're able to just know what your strengths are and acknowledge when somebody else is better at something than you are, and allowing that person to take the lead, I think that's a real, that's a really valuable quality.

Speaker 2 (00:19:21):

It's a huge advantage

Speaker 3 (00:19:22):

In general, being able to check your ego. But I mean, with your story of having to redo that guitar player stuff, I mean, I had a similar experience, not with playing well, I've had experiences with playing where I have clients where neither of the guitar players can handle it, and I know that the egos are Eagles egos are fragile, and so when they leave, I just have to retrack the guitars myself. And if it's that bad, they'll usually not notice. They'll just be like, dude, you made us sound sick. But with my band, not with Galactic Empire, but with my other band that I've had since high school, the first record that we did, I was producing that record, but I didn't have a drum room. And we had signed to this shitty scammy label at the time, and they were like, we have a studio for you.

(00:20:18):

So we're like, fuck yeah, we're going to go there. And when we got there, the whole time I was telling my drummer, and this part was on me. I was basically telling my drummer that he didn't have to be a hundred percent perfect because Pro Tools was going to fix it. So I was that guy. But we got there and they didn't have Pro Tools. How could you, we weren't tracking to tape, but it was the first step towards the digital after tape. So we were tracking analog and then running it into the computer. The engineer was legally blind, and so he wouldn't have been able to do any precise editing. Anyway, so we tracked the parts. We spent two or three days in the studio tracking technical death metal, and it was a nightmare. My drummers feet were not where he claimed that they were.

(00:21:06):

All the usual issues that you expect when a 16-year-old is like, yeah, I can play death metal drums. And so I did exactly what I mentioned before. We didn't have him take samples because I didn't know that was a thing back then. But I basically waited. I looked through the tracks, and when I got them back, and I waited until I found a slow part where there was just an isolated snare hit, an isolated kick, hit something. And so I just took one shots of all the drums, and then I programmed everything in Superior and then just pasted everything in there. I didn't even phase a line of drag because I had no idea what I was doing back then. But yeah, my drummer didn't know what he was doing. And the engineer, he knew what he was doing within his own, but he didn't know what we were after. He wasn't used to recording that type of music. So I had to just fix both people's mistakes, and I didn't tell anybody, and no one was any of the wiser.

Speaker 2 (00:22:01):

What's weird to me about your story is on one hand, you were the dude who was telling your drummer, it's okay if he's not that good. Then on the other hand, you were the guy who was saving the day. So what sounds like I don't get it, because normally the dude that's good enough to save the day knows that the drummer shouldn't fuck off.

Speaker 3 (00:22:22):

Right. Okay. So I guess,

Speaker 2 (00:22:24):

Or was it just youth?

Speaker 3 (00:22:25):

Yeah, I, so I guess I should rephrase. I wasn't telling him that he didn't have, you don't have to play that. Well, what I was saying was if you're not a hundred percent on the arrangements, it's okay because we can do stuff in sections and the engineer will be able to edit bad things in or out. And

Speaker 2 (00:22:48):

We have this technology called punching in.

Speaker 3 (00:22:50):

Right, right. And when we got there, I was saying, yeah, so I'm thinking maybe we can do, just have him hit the verse a bunch of times until we get a good take and then the chorus a bunch of times and so on. And the engineer was like, what? No, that's not how this works. He's going to play from beginning to end, and we're just going to go until we get a good take. And his justification for that, which again, the guy was super old school, so I understand his thought process, but it's also get with the Times. It's like if a high school kid knows what's up, then, so his justification was like, Mike Portnoy doesn't let anybody edit his drums. And I was like, cool. Well, my drummer's not Mike Portnoy. Can we maybe consider the possibility that we might have to finesse this a little bit?

Speaker 2 (00:23:40):

Man, whenever I hear shit like that, there's two things that sends off two major alarm bells in my mind, and I immediately think I'm talking to an idiot. But whenever I hear, I've talked about this before, but there was this one time that a band, local band came to my studio and rented it for video because it a really nice studio in Florida, and they did an unplugged thing, so had candles and acoustic guitars,

(00:24:11):

And the vocals were horribly out of tune. And they were like, it's okay. Alison Shane's unplugged this out of tune too, and it's like, they could do it. We can do it too. It's like, bro, you're so delusional right now. So anyways, when people say that kind of stuff, number one, it's like, how do you know that Mike Portnoy doesn't get his drums edited? Were you there or did you just read that in some article? Or did some guy that doesn't know Mike Portnoy tell you because he knows some guy that doesn't know Mike Portnoy that told him,

Speaker 3 (00:24:44):

Or I mean, in the absolute best case scenario in that this dude's 100% correct. And Mike Portnoy has never had a single hit of any of his drums edited. Well,

Speaker 2 (00:24:55):

It's Mike fucking Portnoy.

Speaker 3 (00:24:56):

Exactly. Yeah. The dude at the time, he was still in Dream Theater. So it's like, yeah, that dude's been in Dream Theater for 25 fucking years. He's really good. My guy is 17. There's got to be some room for error here. And also, for what it's worth, I'm not going to say the parts were harder because they weren't at the time, they weren't nearly as progressive kind of stuff that Portnoy would do. But the double base was certainly, at least the goal for what the double base parts were supposed to be was a lot faster. It was a lot closer to behemoth than anything that Mike Portnoy does. Mike Portnoy never triggered his kicks. So yeah, I mean, it's just comments like that. I mean, like you said, they make you feel like you're immediately talking to someone who doesn't know anything because it's like either you don't have any idea what you're talking about, or you're so out of touch that it's no longer worth it for me to be working with you,

Speaker 2 (00:25:56):

Or both.

Speaker 3 (00:25:57):

Or both.

Speaker 2 (00:25:58):

Or both. And I think that lots of the people who have been on Nail the Mix and on this podcast actually started their studios because of experiences working with guys like that. So any guy out there, girl too, who has that attitude towards your clients, you are creating your competition,

Speaker 3 (00:26:20):

Right?

Speaker 2 (00:26:21):

Straight up.

Speaker 3 (00:26:22):

And I'm fairly certain, I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that studio is out of business now. If they're not, it's just the dude recording his friends. You know what I mean? Because it was kind of like a hole in the wall in Philly. I can't imagine It was something that was costing him a whole lot of money. So maybe it still is up and running, but it's not putting out anything that anyone listening to this is going to recognize. It is probably all local Philly bands in the same position that my band was in Young or old. They don't really know what the studio experience is supposed to be like. They know that there guy has a studio, they see that there's a console in the picture, and they're like, that's where we need to go.

Speaker 2 (00:27:04):

I also think that people will be like, well, Kurt Loot does shit raw. What the fuck? He's always done shit raw. And it's like, well, are you the guitar player from a legendary band who became a producer?

Speaker 3 (00:27:17):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:27:19):

Are you working with nails? Is that the record? You're going to record Raw the Nails record?

Speaker 3 (00:27:25):

Or are you Kurt Ballou recording something raw? It doesn't just mean that that's the end product on either end. First of all, are you that good of a performer, or is the engineer that good of an engineer? I could tell you right now, you put me in Kurt Ballou's studio, I can figure out how to get everything plugged in, but I grew up in the digital age. If you're having me track a whole record analog, it's not going to sound as good as Kurt Ballou. It's just not. So just making those broad blanket statements is incredibly ridiculous and uninformed when I was in college, so I was one of those people who went to college for audio engineering because I didn't realize that having a degree in this field means jack. Shit. So

Speaker 2 (00:28:14):

You got the degree?

Speaker 3 (00:28:15):

I got the degree. Yeah, I got the degree. Good for you. It's a Bachelor's in science, so it's a little bit better than a bachelor's in Arts. It looks a little bit better on paper, but still equally as useless. But yeah, I mean, at the time, the schools always tell you, oh, we have all these connections and all these great studios and all these great broadcast houses, and we'll find a place for you. If you come here, you'll be set for life. And of course, none of that happened. I found my own internship with Carson and Grant, which then ended up with me in Galactic Empire. So I mean, technically that school did get me here, but they didn't do it. It was all me. But anyway, for my final project, I to mean, they basically let us do whatever we want based on anything that we had learned in the curriculum.

(00:29:02):

And so I chose to record a band what I was trying to do, and it was a friend's band from high school, and they're kind of like this indie rock sort of artsy fartsy kind of band. And the studio at the school was actually really nice. They had an SSL duality and all kinds of fancy outboard gear and a room with variable acoustics and all kinds of shit. So it was a nice space, and so I brought them in there, but it was a nice space, but the room was not huge. It was probably the, I don't even know how to compare in terms of square footage or whatever. It was a nice room, but it wasn't a huge room is what I'm getting at. And so we micd up the drums and I put two or three room mics on it, and the guitar player was like, we need more room mics. I was like, why?

Speaker 2 (00:29:54):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:29:54):

And he said, well, because on that Nirvana album in utero, I heard that there were 30. That's awesome. I heard that there were 30 room mics on the drums. And I said, okay, well, I don't know anything about the production of that record. I think 30 room mics sounds a bit excessive. That being said, if they were using 30 room mics, they probably were in a giant room that also had some kind of a loft and then an attic, and then a hallway, and then a stairwell, and they were

Speaker 2 (00:30:25):

Using, and it was Butch vig,

Speaker 3 (00:30:27):

Right? Well, I mean, I didn't know who Butch Vig at that time was, but even so I was like, and it's Nirvana, whoever they have and whatever they have at their disposal is absolute state-of-the-art.

Speaker 2 (00:30:38):

Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. In utero, I don't know if it was Butch vg, hang on.

Speaker 3 (00:30:42):

Oh, but right. Butch vg. Butch V was never mine. I think it was Steve Albini was in utero. I think point is, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 (00:30:51):

No, no, it is. It is. Steve, I just actually need to correct this before I get slayed.

Speaker 3 (00:30:56):

Right before the internet slain

Speaker 2 (00:30:58):

Before I get slain. So Steve,

Speaker 3 (00:31:01):

Yeah, but I didn't know who did it at the time, but I said, it's also Nirvana, the facilities and the people, and anything that they had at their disposal is the absolute best that you can get. And money is not an object. You're getting this recording for free because I'm doing it for a project. And also, again, that room was probably a huge room with a loft and an attic and a hallway and a stairwell and everything. And they put mics in all those different places just to make sure they got every ounce of reflection that they could possibly capture. We have one room, I don't even have 30 mics to set up, but if I did, they would all be capturing the same exact fucking thing. So we're not putting 30 room mics in here. So yeah, I mean, just a million stories to illustrate that comparing your project in any way, shape or form to somebody else's project as an argument to why something should be done a certain way is not the way to do things. Do things the way that you or your engineer know how to make things sound good, because that's going to be your best bet.

Speaker 2 (00:32:08):

So how people say that at the beginning of an artistic journey, you have to copy people and from copying people, that's where you develop your own style. Lots of jazz musicians say that, photographers say that, artists say that, or you can just copy

Speaker 3 (00:32:24):

People and stay that way and wear a Darth Vader costume like me.

Speaker 2 (00:32:28):

Yeah, true, true, true. No, but have you heard that saying that you start by copying people and then eventually your style emerges?

Speaker 3 (00:32:37):

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think that rings very, very true, especially.

Speaker 2 (00:32:41):

So where's the line though, between that and stop comparing yourself to other people? You're not nirvana, you're not Alice and Chains, you're not Mike Portnoy get realistic. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:32:55):

I think it comes, just comes from experience, because whether it was with writing or mixing, for me, I started out that exact same way when I was writing. I was trying to be Lamb of God or Dream theater or whatever band I was into at the time. And when I was mixing, I was trying to be Nali or Taylor Larson. I mean, those are more modern examples. I grew up on stuff as I lay dying and whatever. So I know that Colin Richardson mixed a bunch of those records and stuff, so I was always trying to achieve whatever sound those guys were putting out, Andy snip, whatever.

(00:33:32):

But I think the more that you, there's always going to be that bug that's like, I have to make it sound like that guy. If I can make it sound as good as that guy, then I'm golden. So you're always going to be chasing that, or at least for a while, but then you're never going to get there. You're never going to make it sound like their stuff because you're not them. But after a while, you're going to start realizing that on this record, I was really into N'S stuff, so I was trying to make my stuff sound like N's, and on this record, I was really into Colin Richardson stuff, and I was trying to make myself sound like Colin Richardson. But both of these mixes sound pretty similar, and I think that's where you start picking up on what your style actually is, and then that's when you start developing your kind of go-to tricks or your go-to plugins or whatever, any of the technique that comes along with that.

(00:34:20):

I think you just have to eventually realize that I tried to sound like all these different people, and it just ended up sounding like me every time. And that's when you finally learn to embrace it. What happened with music for me too, again, not with Galactic Empire, we don't write any of that stuff, but with my other band, again, it was Lamb of God Dream Theater, the faceless for a while as our tastes progressed, so so did my attempts to sound like those people that I was listening to. And what eventually emerged was something that at least in my opinion, is unique in its own. So I think it's just a matter of trying, failing, trying, failing, and then realizing that something good actually did come out of those failures because you finally have found your identity.

Speaker 2 (00:35:07):

How long did that take before you realized that

Speaker 3 (00:35:10):

With writing?

Speaker 2 (00:35:12):

Just the first time you ever realized it? Ever elapsed time.

Speaker 3 (00:35:17):

I mean, it was different for, I've been writing music longer than I've been mixing it. So for writing with my other band was probably six or eight years, something like that. Basically when we were writing our second record and I started realizing that if I tried to write a Lamb of God riff, it just sounded like an illustration riff. So it was probably about six or eight years of doing that. And then with mixing, I think it was a little bit quicker because I think I hit my stride with that in a shorter period of time than I did with writing or playing. So that was probably three or four years, but it still took some time. I started out just kind of doing whatever I could figure out how to do. It wasn't until later in my production career that I was into the whole emulating people thing, but now if you go on my website, my stuff all sounds different depending on the client. But if you listen to the different death metal examples that are on my website, the snare sound, the kick sound, things sound pretty similar. And I think that was what really made me understand that it's like, okay, I actually have a sound that's

Speaker 2 (00:36:33):

And tendencies.

Speaker 3 (00:36:34):

Yeah, I have tendencies. I have a style that's starting to show itself here. And instead of fighting that, because I think that's also an instinct that might come up. It's not what you were going for at the time, but it keeps coming out of you and you're like, why? I want it to sound like this. Why does it keep sounding like this? And I think eventually,

Speaker 2 (00:36:55):

Well, it's the same reason that when you buy new gear, it doesn't really change the way your mixes sound. It's the same exact thing. Your style is all the good stuff and the bad stuff. And so if you have a tendency to mix things a little too thin or a little too harsh, that's your style at that point in time. So no matter how warm the analog EQ that you bought is, you're going to dial it to where it sounds harsh because that's your style. That's

Speaker 3 (00:37:29):

What your ear is looking for. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:37:30):

For some reason, maybe because it's not developed enough, maybe because you hear things weird, maybe because you just haven't refined your tastes or hearing yet, whatever it might be. But I feel like what you're talking about is the exact, I mean, it has a different meaning, I guess when you're talking about the style you're going for, but I think it actually technically is probably the exact same thing as you wanted it to sound like Colin Richardson, but sounded like you wanted it to sound like Nali, but it sounded like you wanted your mixes to get warmer by buying the cq, but they sound just as harsh as ever you

Speaker 3 (00:38:11):

Yeah, yeah. I mean, your ear, especially, I don't think a lot of people, I think they don't realize how powerful your ears are. And I don't mean that from a listening standpoint. I don't mean your ability to pick out like, oh, that's 4K. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (00:38:27):

As in they control every single decision you make.

Speaker 3 (00:38:30):

Yeah. It's not just, I think people, when they're training their ears or they're hearing people say it's the ear, not the gear, I think they're approaching that from like, okay, these people have refined their ability to hear certain things. And this end of it is true, by the way, but this is sort of where it ends for a lot of people is they've refined their hearing ability to be able to pick out certain things. And so they've managed to bring what is in their heads into their speakers or out of their cabinet or whatever. They know how to manipulate sound to a point where it sounds like what they want it to sound like, but the thing is their individual ears. So your goal then is not to try to figure out how to get Andrew Wade's guitar tone because you like that guitar tone because your ears are never going to want that guitar tone, even if you think they do, even if you hear it and you like it, as soon as you start dialing stuff in, your ear is going to be looking for something completely different.

(00:39:31):

And like you said, they dictate every single decision that you're going to make, especially if you're a musician or an audio engineer. So I think having those realizations of trying to sound like these guys have a different goal every time, but it always ends up sounding more or less like me, that's when you have to, it's on you then to make that decision to embrace everything, like you said, the good and the bad, because that's the only way that you're going to solidify an identity for yourself. And it's better that way, I think, because totally

Speaker 2 (00:40:01):

Better.

Speaker 3 (00:40:02):

If I had succeeded in making myself sound like Nali, I would basically just be budget nali like, Hey, you want your stuff to sound like Nali, but you don't want to pay like 20 grand for a mix or whatever he charges, alright, come to me. Which immediately narrows your niche. So if you can just embrace what your brain just naturally makes you do, then I think people will find their way to you because that's why a band goes to a producer is because we like the way your stuff sounds. We want you to make us sound like that.

Speaker 2 (00:40:38):

Hey, everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast and you should know that it's brought to you by URM Academy UM Academy's mission is to create the next generation of audio professionals by giving them the inspiration information to hone their craft and build a career doing what they love. You've probably heard me talk about Nail the Mix before, and if you're remember, you already know how amazing it is. At the beginning of the month, nail the Mix members, get the raw multi-tracks to a new song by artists like Lama, God, Opeth, Shuga, bring Me The Horizon Gaira asking Alexandria Machine Head and Papa Roach among many, many others. Then at the end of the month, the producer who mixed it comes on and does a live streaming walkthrough of exactly how they mix the song of the album and takes your questions live on the air. You'll also get access to Mix Lab, our collection of dozens of bite-sized mixing tutorials that cover all the basics and Portfolio Builder, which is a library of pro quality multi-tracks cleared for use of your portfolio.

(00:41:40):

So your career will never again be held back by the quality of your source material. And for those who really, really want to step up their game, we have another membership tier called URM Enhanced, which includes everything I already told you about, and access to our massive library of fast tracks, which are deep, super detailed courses on intermediate and advanced topics like gain staging, mastering loan, and so forth. It's over 50 hours of content. And man, let me tell you, this stuff is just insanely detailed. Enhanced members also get access to one-on-one office hours sessions with us and Mix Rescue, which is where we open up one of your mixes on a live video stream, fix it up and talk you through exactly what we're doing at every step. If any of that sounds interesting to you, if you're ready to level up your mixing skills and your audio career, head over to URM academy slash enhanced to find out more. And same with if your mixes are coming out too harsh or something. Once you realize that they do that, no matter what you put them through, no matter what tools you're using, that's when you can start analyzing, well, why do my mixes, what am I doing here? What am I hearing fucked? That's making me make a bunch of decisions that lead to this super harsh, thin outcome?

Speaker 3 (00:43:08):

And you can learn to compensate for that, but you have to be coming at it from the right perspective.

Speaker 2 (00:43:14):

Yeah, absolutely. So on another topic, how much of your time does Galactic Empire take?

Speaker 3 (00:43:20):

Not as much as a normal working band. I think especially, I mean, we've only been touring for two or three years a band at our level at this point, to maintain any kind of relevance would be on the road four or five months out of the year. Some of us are, I'm in my late twenties, grant. Carson are in their mid thirties. Some of us have kids. We have jobs and houses and things like that. So we're not about the grind life. So we might do the longest we'll be away usually is about a month for Galactic Empire. We'll do a month in the States, two weeks in Europe. We did a week in Japan last year.

Speaker 2 (00:44:02):

But I mean more from the preparation standpoint,

Speaker 3 (00:44:06):

Oh, that's almost zero now.

Speaker 2 (00:44:07):

Oh, really? Wow. That stuff is seriously difficult sounding, at least.

Speaker 3 (00:44:13):

Yeah, I mean, it is definitely hard. It, it's demanding musically, while we were learning the songs, it was very, very difficult and took up a lot of our time. We basically just had whether or not we had day jobs or whatever, any free time that we had that wasn't devoted to something else, we had to be working on the songs. And sometimes sacrificing free time in other areas in order to learn those songs and learning the songs was definitely the hardest part anyway, because our one guitar player, Mikey calls it the world's longest game of Simon because nothing repeats. And if it does repeat, it's just a little bit different than the last time, whether it's Key or Tempo or OneNote changes or whatever, because it's the writing of an orchestral composer, not the writing of a metal band.

Speaker 2 (00:45:00):

Isn't it funny how people say that metal is just orchestral music with in a band setting? It's like, no, it's not

Speaker 3 (00:45:08):

Right. See,

Speaker 2 (00:45:09):

Not

Speaker 3 (00:45:10):

I understand why they think that, right? Because I think that,

Speaker 2 (00:45:13):

But they're wrong.

Speaker 3 (00:45:15):

The types of melodies, especially in a neoclassical, if you're talking about early children of Bodom or something like that.

Speaker 2 (00:45:21):

Yeah, no, that's not even the types of melodies. That's the warmup exercises that classical musicians use,

Speaker 3 (00:45:28):

Right? Yeah. But yeah, I mean, sometimes there'll be complex, multi-part harmonies in a solo or something like that, or it can be very dark and moody or whatever, and very dynamic. So I get it. I understand. And to somebody who's not very familiar with classical music, which I admit I'm not super familiar with a lot of it, but Empire has given me a bigger insight into it. If you hear a neoclassical composition and then you hear somebody play a neoclassical melody on a guitar, you're like, oh, that guy's playing an orchestral song. But when you actually dive into it, you're like, okay, no, this technical death metal song is still just verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge, chorus end. Even the progressive stuff that doesn't follow that typical structure, it's still way more typical than almost any orchestral piece you're going to hear. So learning that stuff was really difficult, but especially just with how much you drill it and with having to wear the costumes while you play, you have to devote that stuff to muscle memory. So we're all at the point now where we can probably close our eyes for a good part of the set and still be able to play, but probably not perfectly. I'm not trying to toot my own horn here. I mess up plenty of times. But yeah, so now it's so just baked into our psyche, our collective psyche.

Speaker 2 (00:46:57):

Well, what into learning it

Speaker 3 (00:46:58):

Just hours, hours of

Speaker 2 (00:47:00):

Well, yeah, but how did you go about learning it? What did you do

Speaker 3 (00:47:04):

Just in individual stem? So we recorded the first two or three songs before we had any intention of making it a band. We were just going to make, we made our one music video, and maybe that'll be it, but we have these other two songs in case the video gets some views and we want to do something with it. But the first video got a million hits in eight hours, and then we were getting hit up by TV stations and stuff. So we were like, fuck, we actually have to do this live. So Grant basically combed through the songs and figured out, okay, these are the melodies that your ear is always drawn to in terms of what's carrying the song. So that'll be guitar one, so he'll put those into guitar, one stems, and then so on and so forth for guitar two and guitar three.

(00:47:49):

Bass is obviously just bass and drums is just drums, and then anything that doesn't get put into those stems just gets put into the backing tracks. So he was very helpful in that regard because he broke everything down and then just sent everyone the stems and Chris, cj, Mike, and just named everything so that we knew, okay, everything on this stem is my parts, and we learned it from there. It was just learning by ear, just putting it into a pro tool session and playing it over and over and over again and learning it by ear until we had everything.

Speaker 2 (00:48:20):

How long did that take you, man, that stuff is really, really involved.

Speaker 3 (00:48:25):

I'd say the better part of five or six months probably, because the first music video came out in December of 2015, I think whenever the Fours Awakens came out, whenever episode seven was debuting because the world was just foaming at the mouth for anything. Star Wars,

Speaker 2 (00:48:44):

Not anymore,

Speaker 3 (00:48:45):

Not anymore. So probably going to have to jump ship sooner or later. But at the time, the world was just going crazy for Star Wars related things. So we put that out. But again, we didn't have any intention of making it a live thing. It was just going to be a music video for fun. And then when it took off the original, the first thing that made us like, okay, we have to actually prepare for this, was we got hit up by E Entertainment. And they were like, we want you to come play that song on our red carpet coverage in la. And we were like, you don't understand. We don't know how to play this stuff. We don't have costumes. The costumes that we use in the videos are just impossible to exist in, let alone play an actual show. And so we had to rerecord our individual parts based on the stems that were sent to us.

(00:49:41):

We had to rerecord our parts, leave all the mistakes in there, with the exception to grant grant's, drums were live, but the rest of us were just miming on tv, and we wore these STH robes because we didn't have our costumes yet. We didn't know what to do. So basically we went from that point, we arranged the rest of the record, recorded it, and that was just me, grant and Carson that did that because the other guys weren't super involved yet. And then in the meantime, we were getting the label stuff figured out. So we didn't play our first show until almost a year later. We didn't play our first show until December of 2016. So between finishing the record and then learning everything was better part of six or eight months, I'd say.

Speaker 2 (00:50:25):

So it did take a lot of your time.

Speaker 3 (00:50:27):

It did. I don't know. I guess I'm better at compartmentalizing and splitting my time than I'd like to think I am. So we were all just using our free time in between our day jobs and things like that.

Speaker 2 (00:50:41):

So let's talk about compartmentalizing your time and splitting it up.

Speaker 3 (00:50:44):

How

Speaker 2 (00:50:45):

Did you split it up? You obviously still had to be a parent and a husband and person who earned money and all the above. It sounded like you could drop your life to go do a Star Wars cover.

Speaker 3 (00:50:58):

It was a lot of late nights, early mornings, wake up before anybody else is up, run through the set after everybody goes to sleep, run through the set. I mean, my wife is very, very understanding and very supportive, and she knows when I'm learning something that it's because I have to, it's not just because I want to learn this cover song for YouTube. Sometimes she would even be like, she's like, look, I know you want to spend time with us and we want to spend time with you too, but you have to learn these songs. Go back there and learn these songs. She has a better work ethic than I do. So that helped. But yeah, it was just any ounce of free time that I could muster really while still maintaining all of the necessary things in my life. But yeah, social life went out the window, but that goes out the window once you're married and start having kids anyway, so it wasn't a huge hit. But yeah, like I said, just eating all of my free time. I didn't take any clients in that time. I worked a day job. It just was delivering pizza just so that I could have a nine to five or relative an eight hour workday, and then just any time in between there that I could.

Speaker 2 (00:52:16):

So you basically took one for the team stability wise in order to be able to spend the rest of your time doing this?

Speaker 3 (00:52:24):

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, well, taking one for the team is pretty much the perpetual existence of anybody who's in the musical field at least early on is your stability is never quite guaranteed. But yeah, I mean it was just, alright, what do I have to do to make sure that I have my bills covered? So that's priority number one. And then try to make time for the family as much as possible. That's priority number two. And then anything that's not, those two things, just it's gone. I wasn't doing anything with my other band at the time, and neither was Mike, the other guitar player in that band too. We were all just learning the stuff and then it was rehearsals, which we didn't do a whole lot. Well, I mean, I guess we did a good amount of rehearsing, but we were only able to do it on Sundays. That was the only time that anyone was able to make themselves available. So it was like every Sunday for six weeks, eight weeks, something like that.

Speaker 2 (00:53:23):

So the actual practice though, how did you divide that up?

Speaker 3 (00:53:27):

Like band rehearsals or?

Speaker 2 (00:53:28):

No, like you learning the shit. How did you divide

Speaker 3 (00:53:31):

Song by song?

Speaker 2 (00:53:32):

Just playing it from start to finish. That's it.

Speaker 3 (00:53:34):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean just, yeah, so starting out, learn this bar. Okay, I got it down. Learn that bar. Okay, I got it down. Basically go until I'm no longer able to retain any new information.

Speaker 2 (00:53:46):

How long is that for you? Usually

Speaker 3 (00:53:48):

Depends. It depends on how tired I am or how much I give a shit that day. That will always vary, but it's usually a couple hours probably. So I'll spend a couple hours learning and then spend a couple hours drilling the stuff that I've learned and basically do it until, because I think anyone who has any kind of practice regimen will know that or be able to attest to the fact that you'll learn the part and it'll be hard to get it. And then once you get it, you start playing it and you're like, okay, I'm getting better. But then it starts declining again because you're just getting tired and then you start getting frustrated and then it starts getting worse, and then you usually end, at least for me, I usually end my practice time pretty pissed off and I'm just like, fuck this.

(00:54:35):

I just put my guitar down on the leave. But then the next morning when I wake up, suddenly everything's a little bit better in the muscle memory. I am able to do stuff better than I was eight hours ago. I've also found that I'm up for a tour with another band that I can't say anything about, aside from the fact that I'm up for a tour, but I've been learning a couple of songs for that. And I've noticed that if I don't practice in the morning, if I just wait until the evening, I'm worse in the evening. If I get the bullshit out of the way in the morning and get the frustration out of the way in the morning, then when I get there in the evening, everything is way easier to play. And it's almost like I warmed up eight hours ahead of time, which is weird because usually,

Speaker 2 (00:55:22):

Man, I totally used to notice the exact same thing that playing shows. For instance, even if I got an hour of playing in eight hours before the show, I always played way better. And if I had a writing session or something that night or whatever, even if I had 30 minutes or one hour or that's it, and it was in the morning and then the next thing happens at night, generally, I was way better for it always.

Speaker 3 (00:55:50):

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, people always tell you that warming up is really important, but I think all of us assumption, especially if we're performers, that you have to warm up right before the show. So you'll spend two hours warming up and practicing your scales or your songs or whatever, and then you go on stage. And that does work for a lot of people, but

Speaker 2 (00:56:08):

Sometimes that's a bad idea? Actually

Speaker 3 (00:56:10):

Sometimes it is. Yeah. It depends on the person. I mean, I know for instance, Alex Rooter, I've heard nothing but that dude, anytime he's not on stage or under the mics, that dude is warming up. So for somebody like him, he's just, I mean, he's just a machine he's in.

Speaker 2 (00:56:27):

I'm not sure if that's warming up or just

Speaker 3 (00:56:30):

Being a robot.

Speaker 2 (00:56:31):

Yeah, that he is a blast beat,

Speaker 3 (00:56:34):

Basically. Yeah, he is drums, right?

Speaker 2 (00:56:36):

Yeah. But

Speaker 3 (00:56:36):

Yeah, so there's people like that who they just warm up for a few hours and then they go hit the stage and they're perfect. Or at least to everybody else, everyone's their own worst critic. But for me, that never, I was more like, that's kind of a bad idea because if I got myself feeling good before the show, I either sort of tired myself out or I gotten my own head. Alright. We just ran through that. I mean, our whole system is direct. We just used Ax Xes and we're all on in ears and stuff. So while all the openers are playing, we can be running through our set without anything going through the pa. And so we'll do that sometimes, but that's almost, that can sometimes almost be a detriment to me, because if I nail it in that pre-show warmup,

Speaker 2 (00:57:24):

That was the time you nailed it for the night,

Speaker 3 (00:57:25):

Right? Then I'm in my head, and then when I'm out on stage, I'm like, oh, fuck. I hope I play it as well as I did what I was warming up and then I never do. So for me, yeah, it works better to warm up early in the morning, have that be the first thing that you do, wake up up your guitar practice, whatever you need to practice for. Like you said, even if it's a half an hour, 20 minutes, whatever amount of time you're able to do allot for yourself, and then when you come back to it, it just feels that much more natural.

Speaker 2 (00:57:56):

It's a mental thing as much as it is a physical thing, I think. Yep.

(00:57:59):

Did you ever do visualization? What I mean by that is that I was taught a technique by a violinist once that she told me that to really, really learn a solo, you have to be able to play it with your fingers on your forearm and imagine every single note you need to be able to basically play it in your head without making mistakes, and that sounds easy, but if you actually try to do that from start to finish on something, you'll make mistakes in your mind. You think you won't, but you will. And she said that once you get that straight, you'll be fine when you're actually playing the instrument.

Speaker 3 (00:58:41):

Yeah, I think, I don't know if I do it quite that explicitly, but yeah, I mean, when I'm having trouble, for instance, these songs that I'm having, that I'm having to learn for this new tour, some of the stuff is really fast, which is typically not something that I consider to be my forte, like sustained fast picking or fast lead stuff. Most of the stuff that I do in Galactic Empire is the slower, more melodic lead stuff, because it's the melodies, the main thing that everyone's hearing, it's basically the vocals of the band. So it's not quite as physically demanding. So this was sort of new ground for me, and there was more pressure to make sure that I got it. So if there were parts that I was struggling with, that visualization really came because I would know where the notes were and I would know the order and the speed in which they needed to be executed.

(00:59:33):

But I kept just tripping over myself, and I found that things of like, okay, I have to make sure I land on this note. I have to make sure that I can't even really explain it beyond what you said, but you picture the shape that your fingers have to make. And then when you do that, somehow it helps. Like you said, it's this weird, it's this mental thing that will then aid the physical side of it. So that's been helpful recently. And it's actually also really helpful on the production side of things, especially when programming drums. The one thing that I noticed early on when I started using things like superior drummer and stuff is that I need to learn to think a drummer, even though I'm not a drummer, so if I'm programming a death metal part, I watch a bunch of Alex Rooter videos and take notice to how he moves, and then before I program a fill, I air drum it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):

Give me an example of what you mean by what he moves. What kind of things are you looking for?

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):

Well, the way that he'll do fills, or if there's multiple symbols involved, you have to make sure that, so if you're doing a roll from the snare and then down three toss and then there's a symbol hit, you have to make sure that you're hitting the right symbol, or you have to make sure that you're only hitting one. You can't go and hit both. You can't hit both of your crash symbols. It's physically impossible. But also there's just a way that when he accents, especially Rudy or Matt Halper or something, there's a way that those dudes accent certain things that can really help you if you're trying to make your program drums sound more realistic because you can watch how they'll do things. And you can see, okay, there was a couple of ghost notes leaning up to that big snare hit, and they all got a little bit higher in velocity each time. So you can kind of get a feel for that. I'm air drumming here now. No one can see it, but I, I'm talking with my hands, but you can get a feel for how that guy moves and how he hits a certain drum and how that affects the next hit.

Speaker 2 (01:01:38):

I actually think that 75% of why programmed drums sound programmed is because they're programmed, unlike the way a drummer would actually play,

Speaker 3 (01:01:48):

Or they're not being conscious of velocities.

Speaker 2 (01:01:51):

Yeah, well, that too. That part of, that's the part, well, that's not entirely how he would play. That's also how the drum responds. But still, yeah, those things. But specifically about just the programming, the parts themselves, the parts themselves are totally realistic. And what a drummer would do that's already well over half the battle, then the velocities get taken care of, and you're close, you're very, very close.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):

And I'll usually do a little bit of randomization in terms of position too. So I'll sort of quantize it or whatever you want to call it, offset everything a little bit and you just hit a little randomized button and it's like 10%, 5%, whatever, depending on how loose you want everything to be. But then that ups the realism even more because even a perfect drummer, if you slow the footage down to as slow as it can possibly go, you'll realize that the kick is not actually falling exactly where the crash does. You know what I mean? Because physically impossible to be that perfect. So just having those little inconsistencies, it's not something that you can hear really, but it's not something that you can hear and be like, oh yeah, the crash isn't hitting where the kick is because it sounds like it is. But just having that little bit of an offset makes it feel that much more real.

(01:03:14):

So yeah, that's definitely a good thing. If you're trying to learn to program drums, the first thing that you got to do is watch how a drummer plays. Even if you're, again, I keep using Rudy as an example, but if you watch a person enough, if you get to a part that just boom, boom, you can literally see in your brain how high he's bringing his hand up before he hits the snare, and that will determine the velocity at which you place that hit. Or he'll do do this thing on blast beats if he's using the ride symbol, he'll be on the body of the ride, but then hit the bell intermittently, so it'll be like, ding, ding, ding, ding. Just little things like that instead of just ding on the bell of the ride. If you notice the little nuances of things like that, it really helps.

Speaker 2 (01:04:05):

And I can confirm because I've worked on his drums a few times, as amazing as he is, and he is amazing. He is unbelievable.

Speaker 3 (01:04:16):

I've heard tracking him is just like an absolute dream. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:19):

Oh yeah. It's a phenomenal experience. However, those tracks are not perfectly metronomic. They're human to the grid. They're very human. They don't need to be very edited. They sound great. If anyone wants an example of what I'm talking about, nail the Mix has a song by band called Cognizance. It actually comes free with your subscription. So you can check out his drums that I recorded that have no edits on them, and you'll see that they sound amazing. They sound great, but they're not like they're perfectly robotic or anything. They don't need to be.

Speaker 3 (01:04:58):

Yeah, right. I think that's one of the detriments of today's technology is that assumption that you'll just be able to make it sound like that or that a perfect drummer, especially if you're programming jams like a perfect drummer, is 100% on the beat all of the time and hitting as hard as they can all of the time. That's not how it works. When someone says, use as much power as you can. Yeah, I mean, you should want to hit the drums hard because that's what makes them sound good. That's peak performance. But you have to have to know that the reason that a drummer sounds good is because of the type of dynamics that they have. If Matt Halper were just hitting everything at full blast all the time, it would sound absurd and not in a good way. It's because he'll go ahead or behind the beat or let it drag a little bit. And he's super dynamic in his accents and things like that. It's things that are, in some ways actually imperfections that are the reason that people like that have such an identity.

Speaker 2 (01:06:04):

Well, the thing is, perfection is a stupid thing to chase because it's not possible. So there's relative perfection that we're capable of, but as humans, we're not capable of that. And anyways, the results are not good. When you can create something like that,

Speaker 3 (01:06:26):

We

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):

Don't resonate with it. Right?

Speaker 3 (01:06:28):

Yeah.

(01:06:28):

If you listen to a record that is sonically perfect, it sounds sterile, there's no life to it. If every guitar note is cut right at the transient and quantized a hundred percent, and same thing with the drums and whether it's completely programmed or there's samples layered, but the velocities on those samples aren't taken care of the right way. And just if everything is over edited and overproduced and things like that, then it takes all of the life out of it. And you might, depending on your level, where you're at in terms of how, whether or not you're able to identify exactly what those problems are, you might not be able to understand what those problems are, but you'll just understand that it's like, nah, I don't really like that band. They sound weird. It doesn't sound right.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):

And the thing is, I would just make the argument that that's not perfection. It sounds weird. So perfection is something that we can't approximate, we don't understand. There's some sort of perfect number for everything, for every part in terms of how close to the grid it should be and all that, but it's different for every part. And

(01:07:46):

It's almost like trying to comprehend a math equation that's way out of our grasp. But having everything at a hundred percent is not the solution. It's something different. And we know that intuitively because when we hear things that are at a hundred percent, they sound weird, obviously, going too far the other way, it sounds shitty to us. So there's something in there that's different for every band, every song, every production, that's perfect. But I don't think everything at a hundred percent or 1 27 is actually perfect. I think that that's overshooting the mark. The thing is that you can only really get to that actual perfection by, I don't want to say luck, but by all the elements coming together just right. The players are just right at the right time where everyone was in the right mood with the right engineer, with the right gear, where the electricity is right, and nobody's hungry. You know what I mean? All of these different things.

Speaker 3 (01:08:47):

Nobody's hungry. I like that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):

Yeah. That makes you play worse, right? There's just so many different factors that go into it that I don't think you can really, you can't predict it,

Speaker 3 (01:08:57):

Right. Well, I mean, I guess one of the best examples of it of sort of illustrating that your ear actually craves what would technically be considered imperfection is harmonic distortion. The reason that a vintage mic sounds good to our ears is because of the levels of harmonic saturation that are inherent in that mic. That mic is distorting in a way that is pleasing to your ears. Same thing with a preamp. It's the reason why all of these, you get anything on the slate bundle and it's got a saturation button and you turn it on, you're like, I don't know why, but it sounds great. Now it's because it's distorting, which is technically making the signal less pure. The way that something distorts, the way that something becomes imperfect, somehow makes it more pleasing to your ears,

Speaker 2 (01:09:44):

Meaning to me, it makes it more perfect to me, pure and perfect are not the same thing.

Speaker 3 (01:09:50):

Right? Exactly. Or if you listen to a different sort of other side of the spectrum example is if you listen to a choir, right? Everybody in one section of the choir is technically singing the same pitch, but they're not, right? Because it's like 12 humans trying to hit the same note and they're all kind of feeding off of one another to make sure that they're in the right register. But not everyone's a hundred percent perfect. There's some inconsistencies in there, but that's what makes it sound like there's 12 people singing that part, singing that one section of the choir, and then when you get the whole choir together, it amplifies, right? So if everyone were singing the exact same pitch, it would all just sound like one note.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):

It's not just that. It's also the timur of their voices and all that stuff, but still, yeah, it was a good way to test this is if you have one person and you record them 12 times and then melodi or auto tune the shit out of that note, make sure that they sang it the same way every time. It's not going to sound like a choir. It just isn't

Speaker 3 (01:10:56):

Right.

Speaker 2 (01:10:57):

It's going to sound kind of weird. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:10:59):

It's going to sound very weird. And sometimes it might phase, it takes phase one another out. If you get it too perfect, those imperfections are what make things perfect. So it's a weird, but humans aren't perfect, so it should technically be natural that we crave imperfection in some form.

Speaker 2 (01:11:19):

So I think that what perfect is the feeling of just right. So an amount of something that's just right, not too much, not too little, too much.

Speaker 3 (01:11:31):

It's the Goldilocks principle. We could coin that right

Speaker 2 (01:11:35):

Now, though it is a hundred percent, in my opinion, it is because what's perfect about something that's so pure, it makes us feel weird or feel nothing. How is that perfect? That's not perfect. That's shitty,

Speaker 4 (01:11:50):

Right?

Speaker 2 (01:11:50):

Perfect is something that makes people react in the desired way. So you could take a queen recording, for instance, like Bohemian Rhapsody or whatever, some classic that people, generation after generation after generation, love it, don't just like it, love it. And maybe there's some pitch anomalies here and there and whatever, but how can anyone say it's not perfect? How could it not be? How could it be more perfect?

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):

Yeah. It's interesting that you brought up the Melodi thing because, and I use autotune and melodion and things like that pretty regularly, but that being said, when you compare it to a band like Queen or compare it to a band like Zeppelin, you wonder when you get used to using a vocal tuning software so much, you start thinking like, man, how fucking good? And this part's true, but it's like, how fucking good did Robert Plant have to be to actually sing like that and have really good, yeah, no corrections, no, whatever, and yeah, really, really good. But also the next time you listen to Zeppelin, if you try to remove your enjoyment from the experience for a minute and just be as critical as you possibly can about everything that you're listening to,

Speaker 2 (01:13:11):

Oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:13:12):

It's littered with mistakes, littered with them. There's parts like if he's singing two lines on the same melody, they're not in tune with each other. They're not ending at the same time because they didn't have vocal line back then and they didn't care. Jimmy Page on a lot of songs will use one really shitty amp and record it 15 times, and the guitar sound will be this weird amalgamation of all those different noises, and it's not something that you can recreate. It's not something that even really sounds good by itself, but in the context with everything else, it's that song that you then call perfect. Right? So I think that we've been chasing that perfection for so long that we're just getting further and further away. And I mean, look, I record technical death metal most of the time. I record these bands that just want everything robotic and perfect. So I'm not saying that I'm some pioneer of like, I'm going to bring us back, make music great again. I'm not trying to do that, but just when you get really critical of those old classics that you've just never bothered being critical of because they just made you feel a certain way, you figure it out that it's like, no, they were wrong. They made mistakes.

Speaker 2 (01:14:31):

I think that music's just fine, and musicians are just fine nowadays, and there's lots of great stuff. And in 20 years we'll have classics from now too. It's just too soon to call anything a classic living in the time period, and every time period has it's bad music. The thing is, you don't remember a lot of the bad music from older time periods, but just think, I don't know if you remember what local bands sounded like in the nineties with their demos, but holy shit,

Speaker 3 (01:15:00):

I was born in 92, so no,

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):

I don't remember. Okay, so they recorded on tape, and with all that stuff that people fetishize over now, and they in general sounded like Fucking shit horrible, worse than the bad, bad recordings you hear now of local bands. They were, man, those demos were just the most horrendous shit, but nobody remembers it because there's no record of it, right? There's no internet. So all of it just got swallowed by the void, thank God. And I guess it's human nature too, but it makes people romanticize. The past shit was a lot better. It's like, no, it wasn't. You just don't remember how bad it was because we don't have stuff constantly reminding us.

Speaker 3 (01:15:51):

Well, yeah. Yeah. And I think there's definitely validity to that, and I think that, okay, for instance, like I said, I was born in 92, so I don't have much memory, if any memory at all of the nineties. I remember a couple of days of second grade and stuff right before it became 2000. My memories are very limited, but from that perspective, it would be way easier for me to look back at the nineties and see Nirvana, who's incredibly imperfect, by the way, Nirvana, Alice Chains, sound Garden, Pearl Jam, whatever. Those big grunge bands that came out and be like, man, that's when shit was real. None of this Katy Perry bullshit right now, but it's like

Speaker 2 (01:16:35):

There was that shit. Right?

Speaker 3 (01:16:36):

Exactly. You're narrowing your scope to this one area of things. That's like when those old metalheads are like, oh, there's so much bullshit today, man, I miss it. Back in the day when it was just Metallica Slayer and Pantera or whatever, and you're just like, yeah, but that wasn't all, there was like Michael Jackson was big that time too. And

Speaker 2 (01:16:57):

There were also the 50,000 other bands that tried to sound just like Slayer and Pantera who were terrible. There were a bunch of those.

Speaker 3 (01:17:06):

No one heard them because there wasn't an internet, and so no one knew how saturated the market was with Copycats.

Speaker 2 (01:17:13):

Yeah. But they were definitely out there and they're forgetting that pop music was huge and that there was good pop and bad pop, just like now,

Speaker 4 (01:17:22):

There

Speaker 2 (01:17:22):

Was so much bad pop. And with Michael Bolton being the best of it, just think back, there was an era where Michael Bolton was big, or Michael fucking Bolton was big, and then he was the best of that bad dentist office pop.

Speaker 3 (01:17:42):

That

Speaker 2 (01:17:42):

Was big in the early nineties.

Speaker 3 (01:17:44):

I love that term. That's amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:17:45):

You go to the dentist office and you hear songs like that, but worse all the time. People say that. Yeah, music's bad now. It's like, bro, you've got a short memory. It's always been bad, and it's always been great.

Speaker 3 (01:17:58):

Yeah, those people never watched VH one classic when, I don't even know if that's a channel anymore, but they used to play just a bunch of old eighties music videos, but it was like six hours of the White Lions

(01:18:15):

And then one song from Motley Crue, you know what I mean? So it was just full of just all of the b, c, d level hair metal copycat bands, and then you'd get one song from a band that you actually knew and liked. So it's like that's the perfect example, especially in the hair metal era, is like everyone was trying to be everyone else. And I think that's really what started the mentality of like, oh, everyone's just trying to do the same thing. You know what I mean? But it's like, yeah, but then again, even if you keep it within metal, everyone was trying to do the same thing and be the same hairband and whatever. But then Metallica was like, fuck that. And now we have Metallica. So there's always heroes.

Speaker 2 (01:18:56):

That studio I talked about earlier that I went to, I replaced the guitar player. So Guns N Roses was a huge band at that time. It was like 93 or something.

Speaker 4 (01:19:07):

Guns

Speaker 2 (01:19:08):

N Roses was the biggest band on the face of the planet besides Metallica. And that guy was like, had that old guy complex of shit was better in my day. So what he would just always say was, man, they're just doing what the Rolling Stones did. And then I would hear people 15 years after that be like, avenge Sevenfold just doing what Guns N Roses did. What the fuck? People don't change. That's the thing. They just think they're the first ones to discover anything, because they weren't at the age of discovering things when earlier things happened. Obviously they weren't born yet

Speaker 4 (01:19:46):

Where

Speaker 2 (01:19:46):

They were little kids, but none of that stuff ever changes. I think people just romanticized the past. They think music was better at some point. It wasn't.

Speaker 3 (01:19:55):

Yeah. It seems like with every generation, people become more self qualified to be critics of whatever form of media they're consuming and more outspoken about it. I saw there was a satire article, or at least I think it was satire. If it wasn't, it'd be fucking hilarious. But there was an article that was Game of Thrones Writers Petition fans to write their own goddamn show if they're so smart. And it's just like, so, like you said, everyone's just so, oh, it was better back then. It was better before this happened. It was better before that guy fucked it up with all of his whatever. You know what I mean? But then people will look back on it years from now and be like, that was perfection

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):

It.

Speaker 3 (01:20:39):

No,

Speaker 2 (01:20:40):

Anyone thinks shit was perfect back then. They should try to watch the Mission Impossible TV show.

Speaker 3 (01:20:46):

There was a TV show.

Speaker 2 (01:20:47):

Oh yeah, there was a TV show in the sixties, I believe, but then they rebooted it in the late eighties a few years before Tom Cruise took it and ran with that ball.

Speaker 3 (01:20:58):

So

Speaker 2 (01:20:59):

Gloriously. Yeah, it was not cool, but people thought it was really cool back then,

Speaker 3 (01:21:06):

Man, everything's a reboot. Everything, especially with movies now, everyone's like, oh, nothing original is coming out. It's all reboots. I think I had no idea Mission Impossible was a TV show. So it's like those movies are just playing off of that. They're just rebooting that found out that the version of Flash Gordon that Queen did their song for that was a reboot of a show that came out 20 years, or a movie or something that came out 20 years before that. So the same shit's been happening forever, and it's going to keep happening. It's just the people in that era are just going to look back to whatever came before it and be like, oh, you're just ripping off that guy.

Speaker 2 (01:21:44):

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that things get rebooted. There's some great ideas out there, or there's great ideas and relevant ideas out there that just need to be repackaged or rephrased for a younger generation to understand. I mean, why not do that? I think that great ideas that are universal, that universality doesn't go away. The only thing that goes away is the style of a certain time or idioms of a certain time. So why not repackage something universal? Makes sense to me.

Speaker 3 (01:22:20):

Yeah, it does. I think if you shrink that down, it makes a better argument for people to stop telling bands and writers and directors what to do if it's stupid based on everything that we just talked about. If it from that perspective is stupid to romanticize the past being 20, 30, 40 years ago, then it's really stupid to romanticize two albums ago, right?

Speaker 2 (01:22:51):

Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (01:22:53):

If you're the type of dude that approaches Misha at Nam and is like, you know what, dude, you guys haven't put anything good out since P one, fuck you. You know what I mean? What the fuck do you know, man? Don't be a punisher. It's dumb. Stop telling everyone that they should have done what they did before. That's not how anybody progresses. Even if what they just put out was shit, whether it's periphery or anybody else, if you think that what they put out just now was shit, look at it as if things go as well as they possibly could. Then for you from your perspective, then they will eventually realize that record was shit. We need to make a better one. And then they'll put out a record that rules, you know what I mean? Everybody's human, everybody's just trying to do their own shit.

Speaker 2 (01:23:39):

I think that if they have a problem with the latest periphery, they should start a periphery.

Speaker 3 (01:23:45):

No, they should just step on a fucking Lego man. Well, that too. Just shut up

Speaker 2 (01:23:49):

Or start a periphery like tribute band, but write original. So you know how they have these

Speaker 3 (01:23:56):

Be all, be all the bands that came out like five years ago,

Speaker 2 (01:23:59):

But actually call it something after periphery, and Duke Periphery covers

Speaker 3 (01:24:03):

Ipe.

Speaker 2 (01:24:04):

You know what I'm talking about? Have you seen these tribute bands that they'll be Kiss or Iron Maiden or Slip? They're

Speaker 3 (01:24:14):

Yeah, while the band's still relevant.

Speaker 2 (01:24:17):

Yeah, so all the bands still relevant. That's the best part about it. So I think that one of those bands should start writing new songs as the band that they're imitating and see what happens. I just want to see what happens,

Speaker 4 (01:24:32):

Right?

Speaker 2 (01:24:33):

I want to see if the tribute the trip, first of all, I really like the new Slipped on, but I want to hear,

Speaker 3 (01:24:38):

I thought it was great. It was amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:24:39):

Yeah, it was amazing. I want to hear the tribute slip, not write, a new Slip not song or something.

Speaker 3 (01:24:45):

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think there was that video that came out, I don't even know how long ago it is now, but there's that slip, not Tribute band playing some neighborhood barbecue and it's got to be like Kentucky or some shit like that. And the percussionist brought a keg out to let members of the audience hit with the bat during duality. And the video is just the one dude just slamming the keg with the bat, with the bat, and there's so much recoil that the bat just fucking whacks him in the face and knocks him out cold. It's fantastic. So if there's more videos like that that come out from these bands, then I'm all for it. But who knows, maybe you're right. If you're the kid that's like everything this band's doing is everything that this band's doing sucks right now, do that tribute band and maybe you'll be like,

Speaker 2 (01:25:36):

Clone the band and write their next album.

Speaker 3 (01:25:38):

Yeah, clone the band, do it better, and then maybe you'll be hired as the singer for that band. If anyone's ever seen the movie Rockstar. I fucking love that movie when I was a kid. But yeah, I think it's based on what happened with Jules Priest, but there's a dude who's in a tribute band for the band called Steel Dragon that is currently the biggest band in the world, like the biggest heavy metal band in the world, and he and his friends are in a tribute band to this band, and they are so 100% locked into the letter within the purity of whatever that band was, that when the Singer of Steel Dragon leaves that this dude gets tapped as the singer of Steel Dragon and that it's a whole progression from there. So who knows, maybe you're right, maybe periphery sucks, and in two years your tribute band will get noticed and then you'll be the new Spencer.

Speaker 2 (01:26:27):

You'll be periphery.

Speaker 3 (01:26:28):

Probably not, probably not I'm going to wage or not, but maybe to each their own,

Speaker 2 (01:26:33):

What would happen if one of those tribute bands wrote, actually wrote the album as that band, like the Clone band did, and then people started liking the tribute band better than the original band that I just want to see this happen. I want to see this happen.

Speaker 3 (01:26:49):

Here's the thing, and this is funny. It brings the conversation full circle. I think eventually that band's going to get sick of writing periphery stuff or what they think is periphery stuff and eventually develop an identity of their own. And all that's going to have happened is they will have stolen the spotlight in this scenario. They will have stolen the spotlight from periphery and taken it and now brought their own style to it, and now they're big because people like their style and not peripheries,

Speaker 2 (01:27:13):

But there will invariably be some tribute band for that because they'll like the way they used to sound,

Speaker 3 (01:27:19):

Hey, maybe that's what we need, man. Maybe we just need, man. Well, you know what? It's funny we're coming up with this ridiculous scenario, but it's sort of true.

Speaker 2 (01:27:28):

It's not that ridiculous. That's the thing. It's not these tribute bands. Actually, some of them are running for like 20 or 30 years straight, and they're serious, serious bands that

Speaker 3 (01:27:39):

Yeah, and they have their own identities now

Speaker 2 (01:27:40):

As a tribute band.

Speaker 3 (01:27:42):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:27:42):

It's weird stuff. Alright, dude, it's been fun having you on. I think it is a good time to end it

Speaker 3 (01:27:48):

And this. Yeah, and hopefully this takes three or four. Hopefully this is the one that people get to hear.

Speaker 2 (01:27:54):

Yeah, I think so. We only covered parasailing twice,

Speaker 3 (01:27:57):

Right? Right.

Speaker 2 (01:27:59):

If anyone wants to know what we were talking about, we were talking about a video where a para sail detaches from a boat and the people riding it fly into a building. But, alright, Chris, thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:28:11):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:28:12):

Thank you, man. Have

Speaker 1 (01:28:13):

A good one. This episode of the Unstoppable Recording Machine podcast was brought to you by Sonar Works. Sonar Works is on a mission to ensure everybody hears music the way it was meant to be across all devices. Visit Sonar works.com for more info to ask us questions, make suggestions and interact. Visit URM Academy and subscribe today.