Eric Valentine: Vintage Console “Multiplicity”, Studio Psychology, Producing Queens of the Stone Age

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. And now your host, Eyal Levi. Welcome to the URM podcast. Thank you so much for being here. It's crazy to think that we're now on our fifth year, but it's true, and it's only because of you, the listeners. And if you'd like to see us stick around for another five years, there are a few simple things that you can do that would really, really help us out, and I would be endlessly appreciative. Number one, share our episodes with your friends. If you get something out of these episodes, I'm sure they will too. So please share us with your friends. Number two, post our episodes on your Facebook and Instagram and tag me and our guests too. My Instagram is at al Levi urm audio. And let me just let you know that we love seeing ourselves tagged in these posts.

(00:00:57):

Who knows, we might even respond. And number three, leave us reviews and five stars please anywhere you can. We especially love iTunes reviews. Once again, I want to thank you all for the years and years of loyalty. I just want you to know that we will never, ever charge you for this podcast, and I will always work as hard as possible to improve the episodes in every single way possible. All I ask in return is a share post and a tag. Now let's get on with it. Hello everybody. Welcome to the URM podcast. I am so stoked about this episode. I love all our guests. I love getting to talk to people at any stage of their career from any walk of life as you all know. But sometimes I get to talk to one of my own heroes and it just kind of blows my mind honestly that I'm in a position to do that.

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And I'm thankful for all of you that have been listening over the years who have allowed it to get to this point. Thank you. My guest today is Eric Valentine. I'm assuming you know who he is and what he's done, but just in case you don't, I'm going to give you a little intro on him. He's a record producer, musician, business owner, content creator. He started off drumming in his own band called T Ride back in the nineties and eventually ended up self-producing their album, but then he went on to work with a ton of your favorite bands as well as your moms, your brothers, and your sisters, and your dad's favorite bands, including Smashmouth Good, Charlotte, Queens of the Stone Age, maroon five, taking back Sunday, and way more than we have time to call out. In addition to his legendary career as a producer and engineer, he also started a very well-known studio called Barefoot Recording, and he started a gear company that makes some incredibly high-end and unique outboard gear called Undertone Audio, and he makes a lot of content on his YouTube, which can be found by searching making records with Eric Valentine.

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Very simple. Let's get to it. I present you Eric Valentine. Eric Valentine, welcome to the URM podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:03:21):

Well, thank

Speaker 1 (00:03:21):

You for having me. It is an honor to have you. It's good to be here. Let's just get right into it. I know you don't have a crazy amount of time. I consider you a Renaissance man and you're someone that's into gear on an electrical engineering level, like actually making it. You call yourself an astronomer, you build rockets with your kids scuba dive, you're doing all kinds of stuff that requires scientific thinking and understanding of math. And however you've said that despite all the changes to the way that things work in the studio over the years, that especially as related to the role of what a producer is, you said that the most important thing in your opinion still is it for an upcoming producer, is to nail that songwriting element that a producer brings that Phil Spector pioneered, and then also you called your channel making records, not mixing and not making gear, but making records, which is art. So I'm just wondering because it's rare to have someone that understands both the science side and the art side of this. In your mind, where does the technical and the artistic meet?

Speaker 2 (00:04:39):

Yeah, that's always been a really interesting part of all of this for me, and it satisfies both sides of my brain. I called it making records because I feel like it captures everything that goes into the record making process instead of saying, producing with Eric Valentine or engineering or mixing or whatever, because I've done all of those things and typically when given the option to do all of them on the records that I work on, then there's the whole technical side of getting into the gear and everything and it's all a part of it. It's all a part of creating a record for people to listen to. And so the whole thing has been completely fascinating to me. And when I got into the equipment side of it, there was really a certain point when you have these moments where you talk to different technical folks and they'll start expounding on what's important or not important about a piece of equipment, either an equalizer or a preamp or something.

(00:05:38):

It's all about the transformers or if you don't have these particular polypropylene caps, then your single sound terrible or all this kind of ridiculous declarations. And I really wanted to just explore that for myself. And to me, everything has to equate to how it feels ultimately. And those were the questions that I was trying to answer. Do the different dialectics in a capacitor actually make the music feel different when I listen to it? And that's what I really set out to explore and try and answer for myself. And so it's an incredible marriage of the emotional creative side and the real technical mathematics side and bringing those two together to see how the formulas actually translate into how something makes you feel when it comes out of the speakers. And it was an incredible journey to take and try to actually make those connections. For myself, honestly, I'm still on it. I've just finished, almost done rewiring my whole studio in Topanga. I have a new thing that I want to try to see how it makes the music feel. It's endless for me.

Speaker 1 (00:06:47):

Are you able to say what the new thing is?

Speaker 2 (00:06:49):

Sure. Yeah. I don't care.

Speaker 1 (00:06:50):

Alright. What is the new thing?

Speaker 2 (00:06:51):

This was kind of the revelation that I had was that a lot of people will talk about the API sound or the Neve sound or whatever old vintage wonderful, lovely thing that we love the sound of. And I think people have the misconception of that even if they get, let's say you get an original amazing pristine Neve 10 73 that everybody loves and it's the incredible thing and you plug something into that expecting it to sound like an album done on a Neve console. You're not even close to what a Neve console does because the way consoles are designed, and at this point I've gone through the process of designing a console. The undertone consoles are the same thing is that people will come up with a particular amplifier design and in the case of the APIs, it's the 25 50 op-amp in knees. They have these old BA 180 threes that have those cool two N 30 55 transistors in 'em, the really old style transistors. I may be getting some of this wrong. I'm sure people will let me know if I do, but

Speaker 1 (00:07:54):

We'll find out. We'll be

Speaker 2 (00:07:57):

Notified. Yeah, they don't let anything slip, but I think I'm getting some of this right. And so in the case of the Neve stuff, Rupert Neve was obsessed with transformers. He loved transformers. And so the 10 73, it has an input transformer, an output transformer, people have celebrated them. There's these cornhill ones and marinara ones, and I think people don't really recognize is that the 10 73 has an input and output transformer and this amplifier block design, the earlier stuff that it's a class A amplifier design than in the console that I had. So in the nineties I had an 80 series Neve console. It had 32 10 80 ones in it. And so then you have a switching module. Well, that switching module has the same input and output transformer in it and that same amplifier block, but it's just configured to be line input only. And then there's a bunch of summing buses and each one of those summing buses loses gain and you have to make up the gain with an amplifier.

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And so they would have these 1272 amplifiers and people would pull those out of consoles and reconfigure 'em to be mic preamps. And so you could have yourself just a standalone Neve mic preamp. So it's the same thing that's in the 10 73. And so by the time their signal comes out of the Neve console and goes to a tape machine, which a lot of people ignore as well, you've gone through essentially 3 10 70 threes. And then let's say you mix on that console, so it comes back off of your tape machine goes into a channel input, you set it to line input, it goes through those same two transformers again in the 10 73, then the switching module, then a bus output. So you've gone through 6, 10 70 threes by the time you've gone through a Neve console, and that's where the sound comes from. And so that's essentially what I'm doing.

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I built myself a little passive summing mixer, which a lot of older mixers are done that way. They'll just sum passively even the very early Neve consoles. Later on, they got into virtual ground summing, which is smarter and more efficient and performs better in a lot of ways. But if you don't have that many channels, passive summing works great. And so I built a passive summing mixer and mine is a multi-stage passive summing mixer. That's the thing that I don't think anybody ever figured out with passive summing mixers. It's like when you use a console, it's not just a stereo mix bus. Almost everybody's going to have a subm mix for their drums and different ways to sort of group things together, which all come together into a final mix bus. And so my passive summing mixer has a section of inputs that are for the drums, a section of inputs that are for the drums with all of the other musical elements added into it.

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And then that all gets summed into another stage where it's just the music which will get a little compression on it. And then I have a vocal bus which also gets summed on its own. And so there's four levels of summing that happens and each one of those stages has to have an amplifier on it to make up the gain. And so when you go through my little summing mixer, and in this case just as an experiment, I had a bunch of these old Langevin Am 16 amplifier blocks left over from a langevin console I bought 15 years ago. And so I got a ton of these things, and so I'm using those to make up all the game from all these stages. And so when you go through my little summing mixer, if you start with the drums, the drums will have gone through 4:00 AM sixteens by the time it comes out the other end.

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So on the way in, I'm going to replicate a similar path. And so you really get the multiplicity of all of the character of these incredible musical old sounding devices, and I'm really trying to accurately capture the sound of an old sixties recording setup, and that's the era, the late sixties is when these am sixteens were around, it really makes sense. I mean, maybe today I'll actually be able to power it up and really experiment with it. My initial tests were really good where it's like as soon as you put something through this, it has a sound to it that's so immediate comes out of the speaker and it's like, okay, this sounds like something, and it sounds wildly different than just coming directly out of the computer. That's one of the things about these old recordings that I love so much is when you hear it, it's particularly in the high end, there's this sort of unifying character to the high frequencies that you hear in the S of the vocals, the symbols on the drums, on the attack of the acoustic guitar, on the percussion. It all has this total unifying quality to it that's very musical and allows you to have a lot of presence in the mix without it being harsh at all because these things are all sort of smoothing it out and converting transience into overtones and all of this stuff that's going on that makes that vintage stuff sound so beautiful.

Speaker 1 (00:12:35):

That's a fascinating experiment. Yeah. I want to key in on something that you mentioned in addition to all the different stages in those old consoles that many people would tweak stuff within them. So are you saying that essentially each one of those classic consoles kind of is a semi customized beast?

Speaker 2 (00:13:00):

I think I was using the word configure, and what that means is that typically what people do on a console and the APIs and needs are a good example. They create an op amp, an operational amplifier, which is just this basic amplifier design that can be configured to serve different purposes. So if you're going to use that amplifier as a mic preamp, you would configure it a particular way. If you're going to use it as just a balanced line input, you configure it a different way, but it's the same basic amplifier

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And the same goes if it's using to make up gain on a summing bus, and you can externally configure them to do that. The AM sixteens are the same way when you look at the manual for it. This is the way people thought about things back then. It has all these instructions on how to strap the input and output transformers differently and how to pad or load them differently in order to get the gain structure that you need out of the preamp because the AM 16 in particular is especially unflexible, it just has one gain. That amplifier is just like 55 DB of gain and everything has to be configured externally, so you have to pad a bit at the front or you can strap it for 150 ohm output instead of 600 ohms, and then you can drop the level a little bit, drop at 60 B on the output. And so there's things that you can do that will get it more in the range that you need depending on what the purpose is externally on the preamp. So that's what I'm talking about. So it is actually stock to the original thing, but the original intention was for those things to be configured for a specific application in the console.

Speaker 1 (00:14:31):

Makes perfect sense.

Speaker 2 (00:14:32):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:14:32):

Would you say curiosity, when into your production career did this curiosity about how these sounds are created come from?

Speaker 2 (00:14:42):

I've always been drawn to nostalgic sounds, it's sounds that have this sort of timeless quality to 'em. My big influence in life has always been Led Zeppelin, and those recordings are just unbelievably magical. I agree. They're surreal to me. They live in a world that doesn't exist anywhere except in the universe of Led Zeppelin.

Speaker 1 (00:15:04):

I feel that way about all that stuff, man, dark side of the moon, the Beatles stuff, all that stuff in that era, just there's something about it.

Speaker 2 (00:15:13):

It's a quality that I think has a significant emotional impact. When you can really capture the nostalgia of those sounds and it comes out of the speakers, it really affects people a particular way. You immediately have the sense of, this sounds like something I've heard before, and there's been a lot of psychological testing that's been done that familiarity equates to preference. When human beings are presented with something, the people that do testing for radio have done exhaustive psychological testing on this stuff, and so they want people when they first hear something, they want people to think that they've heard it before because it feels like preference when they're hearing. It's like, oh, I think I know

Speaker 1 (00:15:58):

This. I know songwriters who use that knowledge when writing with idea of making a song already sound familiar to the listener upon hearing it the first time.

Speaker 2 (00:16:11):

Yeah, for sure. It is obviously very applicable when you're writing the song. I think it's also applicable technically when you are designing the sound of a recording. I think that it can be as powerful in that context.

Speaker 1 (00:16:24):

That's very powerful knowledge about how the human mind takes in this art we call music and connects with it. But where's the line, I guess, between using that knowledge to create something new but nostalgic versus something that's just derivative, I guess?

Speaker 2 (00:16:44):

Sure, yeah. I mean, whenever you're referencing something or trying to incorporate something that has a nostalgic quality, it's unavoidably going to be derivative. And my thing, at least what I've tried to do is to bring something new to that world that either didn't exist then or wouldn't have been considered or thought of then and always try to bring something new to it. It's cool to be able to recreate something that's great. I'll do it just to sort of entertain myself. I do rerecord of stuff all the time just to see how close I can get to something, but I would never do that with an artist that I'm working with because music needs to move forward. It needs to evolve, and to just do an exact duplication of something in the past does not make sense to me. Drawing on influences I think is very healthy, and I don't think it makes sense to try and create totally in a vacuum. Everybody's influenced by other things from the past, from the present, and it's important to be, being totally in a vacuum I think is very odd. You can be very, very out of touch if you do that.

Speaker 1 (00:17:49):

I think it's interesting that you say that you basically do it as an experiment slash exercise. Yeah. I hear a lot of modern producers talk about experimentation, but I don't hear them talk much about doing exercises like soundalike recordings. But what's interesting to me about that is that's actually something that's been done in music exercises, especially in orchestration. For instance, there would be exercises in orchestration classes in the 18 hundreds and still to this day where the whole idea is to orchestrate in the style of or orchestrate using just this particular portion of the orchestra, but exercises like that. And same in visual art. I mean, I did a professional artist for a long time and when she was going through school, these types of exercises were a big part of skill building, but at no point was it ever considered the actual art, I guess.

Speaker 2 (00:18:58):

Yeah, it's an exercise in expanding your own palette and sort of having more tools in your tool belt. This approach was how I started mostly self-taught.

Speaker 1 (00:19:09):

Oh, I would've never guessed. That's awesome.

Speaker 2 (00:19:12):

Devouring whatever information was floating around at the time, which was considerably less than there is now with the internet. What I used to do with my little studio in Northern California was I had a band going, I had this band T ride and we were trying to develop our sound and songs and get signed and put out a record and all that stuff. And so while that was going on, there would be a few days a week that we would set aside where we'd work on our own music and then there would be a few days a week that we set aside for having outside clients come in that I would record just to make money and pay bills. And on the days that we set aside for ourselves, if we had a particular song to work on, that's great. If we didn't, I would experiment. And it was so important. It was the most important era of my whole experience learning how to make records because I was free to do whatever. If I wanted to spend an entire fucking day just trying to get the coolest kick drum sound in I've ever got in my life, I could do that. And you never get that opportunity when there's five band members

(00:20:16):

Twiddling their thumbs with their arms crossed, ready to start their project. You can't do that in the moment and the creative environment when you're actually in the room with a band getting ready to actually try and create something, there's energy in the room that has momentum to it, and you have to really be sensitive to that. That energy can really die. The momentum can really die. If I spend way too much time fucking around trying every single mic in the room on the kick drum and everybody's just dying of boredom while I of jerk off trying to chase a kick drum sound, but if I do it on my own time and I come up with a combination, oh man, if I put this mic all the way in the other side of the room in the corner, I get this incredible thing. And I got there because I tried 50 other things leading up to that. When the band shows up, it takes me five minutes to set that up and I already know what I'm going to get from it. And so you have that shit ready to go. Absolutely. And

Speaker 1 (00:21:13):

What's cool too is that you said that you were doing it not in the off time because you're still working, but when you wouldn't have something to work on that actually when I was getting good at guitar, but also trying to be a songwriter for my band back 20 years ago or something. One of the things I guess I come from the metal world and classical world, and one of the things that people would always say is that the dudes who write are never good players and the dudes who are the best players can't write. And there's some truth to it, but the way that I got around that was, I can think of a whole lot of exceptions

Speaker 2 (00:21:55):

To that.

Speaker 1 (00:21:55):

Yeah, exactly. Maybe

Speaker 2 (00:21:57):

There is something to that, but man, I know a lot of people that break that rule

Speaker 1 (00:22:03):

Exactly the way that I did it was if I feel like writing a song, if it's coming to me, that's the priority, but then the rest of the time when there's no juice, that's when you practice and that way get it all done. And I feel like it's a similar approach that way you get both the work done that you need to get done, and then you also expand your skills at the same time.

Speaker 2 (00:22:28):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:22:28):

Yeah, man. Okay, so on the momentum topic of keeping a session going, I think you can really tell can't you, when the momentum is starting to die, it's almost like you can just feel the vibe in the room start to

Speaker 2 (00:22:44):

Shift. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:22:45):

Is that something that comes naturally for you, like the understanding people's emotions side of being a producer,

Speaker 2 (00:22:53):

I suppose? So the psychological side, I think it's extremely important. I've always been very tuned into that aspect of it. And navigating people I think is much more complicated than navigating equipment or technical stuff because human beings are so unbelievably complex, and when you dive into a creative endeavor with other people, the personalities and the emotions and everything get extremely complicated, especially with whole bands when there's lots of people that are involved creatively and different people are pulling in different directions and you're sort of in the position of being a referee for a lot of that stuff and knowing how to navigate that stuff I think is probably more important than getting a great kick drum sound.

Speaker 1 (00:23:41):

How did you learn that? You said you were self-taught. Where did that come from?

Speaker 2 (00:23:46):

Well, I think part of my development comes from my parents. My father was an aerospace engineer, so that was definitely, I'm not surprised. He had all kinds of amazing technical stuff. He would bring home these whole panels of test equipment that were being built at the places where he worked, and my brother and I would put together pretend spaceships and stuff, and he used to take me to all these amazing locations where I'd see incredible stuff when I was growing up. I certainly, that was the beginning of my interest in the technical side for sure. And then my mother was a family counselor, and so I was basically, boom, there you go, in counseling my entire

Speaker 1 (00:24:28):

Life. That's very interesting. Yeah, not an enormous mystery there. No, not at all. That makes sense.

Speaker 2 (00:24:37):

And I don't know if this is really accurate or not, but my mother has always said about me that she thought I was uniquely balanced between and left brain function, and so I don't know if that's really true or not or whatever. It's just something a mom says, or at least my mom would say.

Speaker 1 (00:24:54):

I was about to say, usually moms say, no, honey, you're really good at guitar.

Speaker 2 (00:24:58):

Right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:25:00):

I haven't really heard of too many moms saying that.

Speaker 2 (00:25:04):

Yeah, well, if your mom studied organic chemistry and psychology, then I suppose they would, but if that's actually true, then that may be part of it. But for me, the process, I never really thought about it specifically that much, but for me, I've always had this goal, which was finishing a song or a record or whatever it was that the task was laid out to be, and getting everybody to cross that finish line was always what I was focused on, and whether it was solving a technical issue or just getting people to agree to do it, were all just things that needed to get done to get over the goal line. And early on, I started to recognize how important it was to really be able to finesse people in the right direction to try and get everybody to work together to finish a goal.

(00:25:56):

And it's amazing how quickly things fall apart when people are at odds with each other and are not working together to actually help each other succeed at something when there's somebody that's trying to sort of undermine somebody else or there's sort of a power struggle within the band and people are being dismissive or whatever. It can unravel so fast and getting everybody on the same page was so glaringly essential early on in the process and early on I just had bands shown up that were paying by the hour, 20 bucks an hour or whatever it was. You get me in the studio and the whole thing and I'm just here to help you guys get stuff done. And it very often got very complicated with people having different strong opinions and stuff, and I'd have to try and figure out how to make it get done.

(00:26:45):

And that was one of the things that was always really important to me, and I think got recognized with some of the people that hire me, whether it's the bands themselves or people within the record industry, a and r people or whatever, that I'm a finisher and that has a lot of value. Absolutely. Being able to actually get it over the goal line regardless of what is going on along the way, there'd be maybe somebody that's almost OD'ed in the control room and people that are fighting each other and having contractual conflicts and all kinds of stuff. But at the end of the day, for me, it was always like, this is just stuff that I have to figure out to get this done and get to that goal. That's always what my eye was on was just trying to figure out how to get there.

Speaker 1 (00:27:34):

Man, I think that when a label hires a producer, they don't want to know about any of that shit to what you said about the od, because I've experienced those types of scenarios when I was producing with bands just being dangerous, dangerous and stupid, and and shooting up just all kinds. I don't need to tell you exactly what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 (00:28:04):

Yeah, it

Speaker 1 (00:28:04):

Happens. I learned the hard way that I should never ever bring it up to the powers that be all that matters is that it gets done, and my job is to make sure they survive and it gets done. And I actually know certain people who were or are because they're still alive, very talented guys but who weren't finishers, whose careers basically stalled out really hard. They couldn't do that part of getting everyone on the same page long enough to really get projects done on time, and so they would just start taking longer and longer and longer and never really get done. However, maybe when they did get done like six months too late, they sounded phenomenal and no one gave a shit. So finishing I think is everything you're saying that you didn't really think about this stuff too much though. So that tells me that you've got a high emotional intelligence that it comes to you naturally to understand how people are feeling,

Speaker 2 (00:29:12):

I suppose. So I feel like I am reasonably sensitive to that stuff. My ex-girlfriend would say that I'm definitely not. I've been told that too by exes who actually asked that I get tested to see if I had Asperger's at one point.

Speaker 1 (00:29:31):

Wow, me too. Really? Yes. That's incredible. Well, there's a word I'm not allowed to use anymore in 2020 that starts with an R, but then I was emotionally R and that I should see if I have Asperger's.

Speaker 2 (00:29:46):

Yeah, if you're in the spectrum.

Speaker 1 (00:29:48):

And what she didn't understand was I didn't have any problem feeling or understanding emotions. I just didn't want to tell her how I was feeling about her. I kind of hated her and I didn't want to hurt her. If I told her the truth, it would hurt her. I did break up with her, but I was holding back for her sake. That's what she didn't understand.

Speaker 2 (00:30:08):

Yeah. Well, that's one side of it. And in my case, and for her judgment of me was not entirely inaccurate. I think to her, I really did have Asperger's, and I think that was totally fair to say because it wasn't as much that I didn't want to hurt her. I didn't feel safe being honest with her because her reactions were so explosive.

Speaker 1 (00:30:32):

Well, yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:30:33):

Why would I ever want to invite that any, so anytime I was being honest, I would be punished for

Speaker 1 (00:30:40):

It, man.

Speaker 2 (00:30:41):

And it's something that I really, really learned in life along the way with that experience. And ultimately when we broke up, because I actually did go in and get tested to see if I had Asperger, I was like, sure, let's do this. And at least the person that we worked with said that I don't, but that was something that was so incredible that I learned that's important in every aspect of life, whether you're making a record or in a relationship or whatever, is to invite the truth. And I behave in a way in my travels through my life where I invite the truth from people, and sometimes people have to say things to you that are not super comfortable to hear, but those are exactly the things I want to hear because they're the things that will make a difference

Speaker 1 (00:31:25):

Absolutely. In my

Speaker 2 (00:31:26):

Relationship with them. So when people come to me with something that's potentially uncomfortable to hear, I say, thank you so much for being honest with me about this. I'm so grateful that you let me know. Now we can figure this out. Instead of being like, oh, and defensive and Oh yeah, well, you're a jerk, and if you do that, you'll never hear the truth again. You'll live your life not in reality.

Speaker 1 (00:31:48):

Yeah, man, you're making me think of stories from my own life. There was a person that I used to work with that I started one of my most successful projects. I'm not going to say which one because I don't want people to know who he is, but

Speaker 2 (00:32:06):

Sure, yeah, the person doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 (00:32:08):

Yeah, it doesn't matter. I'm not here to talk shit, but he's a paranoid schizophrenic, diagnosed, and he used to also tell me I was emotionally stunted and all that stuff, but what he didn't understand was if you did so much as critique something, the reaction would be so severe that it was scary. I was afraid of getting hit or something or just that I was going to get screamed at for two hours straight, so I would keep it inside. It was very sensitive to how he was going to react to those things. I don't see how you can actually be emotionally, let's call it ignorant to other people and make it through the music landscape because musicians, artists, even managers, everybody, there's so much emotion. There's so much drama with all this, and not everybody's an egomaniac, but there's still, this is personal stuff.

Speaker 2 (00:33:08):

It's a very intimate experience because people are expressing very intimate things about their own lives, their beliefs, their experiences. It's very intimate, so there's a lot of passion and a lot of emotion in that, and so things can get very explosive or complicated or whatever very quickly. It's just the reality of it.

Speaker 1 (00:33:30):

That said, not looking for a one size fits all answer here or 10 tips for building a rapport, nothing like that. But just out of curiosity, how would you at least mentally approach getting everybody on the same page or getting that trust from the artists so that they could share those intimate feelings with you that are necessary for great art to happen?

Speaker 2 (00:33:57):

Yeah, there's a few things that are really, really important with this. I've talked about 'em before on my YouTube channel and other interviews and stuff. It cannot be overstated how important these have been in my travels, and I think how valuable they are when you're really trying to deal with the psychological part of it, trust is extremely important. When you're working with a band, you're stepping into their creative universe and they're asking you to help them make creative choices about their music and what they're saying, their perspective on life and the world and everything. I try to show up educated to actually really comment on that stuff for a band. And so I would go through a process of just getting to know the band at the beginning of the process and create opportunities for us to all hang out and talk about music and listen to records.

(00:34:47):

I want to know what all your favorite albums are. I want to know what albums you hate. I want to know everything about what you love and hate about music and even your perspectives on life and what's important about being a human being and what works in a relationship or not or whatever. All of these things are super important because they're all end up being embedded in what's being expressed through music. And so I create opportunities to do that before even getting in the studio. And so I'll hang out with a band for a day or two or three or whatever, and a lot of very fruitful things came from that when I would spend time with bands, because at this point, a lot of times when I get hired, it's an R person or a manager or somebody who says, oh, so-and-so would be good for you.

(00:35:30):

They did this record or whatever. And you can find yourself in the situation where it's like, hi, nice to meet you. Let's start making a record now or writing songs and we don't even fucking know each other. I would create the opportunity to get to know people myself. I'd take the initiative to do that, and it makes a huge difference because once you're in the studio and it's like, okay, do we like this kind of a part or do we like that part? Do we want to use this guitar? Do we want to use a Strat or Les Paul or do we like this lyric or that lyric? And I'm being asked to weigh in on all of these decisions that are going to be either really good, such and such music, or shitty such and such music. Just insert the name of whatever artist I've worked with, good Charlotte or Queens of the Stone Age or Nickel Creek or whatever.

(00:36:15):

I have to know what good Nickel Creek music is and what shitty Nickel Creek music is so I can actually contribute to those decisions in a way that's going to help them navigate to something that's really, really an extraordinary addition to their legacy as a band and musicians. And so I really take the time to educate myself about it, and I think bands really appreciate that. And so by the time you actually hit the ground running and you're actually making those choices, they know I've taken the time to really know what they're about, and so it's much easier for them to invite me into it. So I think that's really, really important. And the other thing that's really important is how you address anything that may not be working or is not good enough in your opinion. I mean, at the end of the day, I'm being hired specifically to police those things. If I show up and say, everything's great, then what the fuck am I doing there? They can just come up with ideas, and if there's nobody there to tell 'em that they're good or not, then they'll just use 'em all. It's so important to know how to address what's not working because that's all of the value of why I'm there. If I can't be honest about those things in a way that's going to move things forward, then I'm just shitty at my job.

Speaker 1 (00:37:31):

Does that get harder when you're dealing with more famous artists just because they're getting guests all the time by everybody around them and you have to be the person who's says no, it's got to be better. Is it more challenging, I guess the further up the ladder they are?

Speaker 2 (00:37:53):

I think there can be some pitfalls there because people can end up living in a bubble. They always just want to hear about how great they are. But what I've found is even with people that live in that bubble, if you approach them in the right way where you address things in a positive way, ultimately they're really grateful for it. And they end up trusting me more than other people that they've worked with who just told them yes all the time because at the end of the day, they really do want to hear the truth,

(00:38:22):

But they just have to hear it the right way. And what nobody wants to hear is this part isn't working or I don't like that lyric. That's a dumb lyric. This solo sucks. Or the verse isn't right. You never talk about it in terms of what's not working or what's bad or shitty. Nobody ever wants to hear that it's the worst way to start fixing something. And so you always frame it in a positive context. If I don't think a part's working, I always start with, I think there's an opportunity here. We could do something that'd be really cool on this verse. That's what you say. And people are like, oh, cool. Let's try it. And you never address the part of this verse sucks. Just skip that part. I may be thinking it, but I'm never going to fucking say it to their face. Who wants to hear that? That's the worst way to start that process,

Speaker 1 (00:39:16):

And they'll remember that too. So saying something like that verse sucks depending on who you're saying that to. That could be planting a seed which could turn into something that poisons lots of different aspects of the session. I think because we're dealing with emotional creatures.

Speaker 2 (00:39:36):

Yeah, for sure. I don't know how much effort somebody put into one of these ideas. They may have worked on it for days and days and they may be very attached to the effort that they put into something and it may be difficult for them to let go of. And so I always approach everything framed in a positive context. It's always framed in the context of like, let's try and make something better. Let's try and try something that'll be exciting and interesting. There's an opportunity here. Let's go for this. And then you keep that energy up and moving forward.

Speaker 1 (00:40:09):

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

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Members also get access to one-on-ones, which are basically office hour sessions with us and Mix Rescue, which is where we open up one of your mixes and fix it up and talk you through exactly what we're doing at every step. So if any of that sounds interesting to you, if you're ready to level up your mixing skills in your audio career, head over to URM Academy to find out more back to what you said about saving the experimentation for before the session so that the artist doesn't feel like you're saying they're wasting their time. How does that work when you then have artists that are so different like Queen of Soni to Good Charlotte are so different, there have to be some experimentation? Well, queen of Stoney is a super specific kind of vision,

Speaker 2 (00:42:48):

And ironically, I went directly from the Queen of Don age record to the Good Charlotte first album I did. So

Speaker 1 (00:42:56):

I was wondering, and there couldn't be more different,

Speaker 2 (00:42:58):

An aesthetic shock going from one to the other. Yeah. I mean, well, that's part of the process to me is getting my brain in the mindset of that particular artist. And so with Queens of the Stone Age, I had some mutual friends there between Blag and Nick Olivieri who were in the dwarves I worked with a lot. And there's a guy, Trevor that worked at my studio that worked with Queens, and so there's a lot of mutual friends and I knew about the band and before I got together with work with them, I really, really listened to the two records they already had out and put a lot of effort into really understanding what it would be. And ultimately talked with Josh a lot before we started about what the vision was, and that's a band where Josh shows up with a vision, that dude has a vision for his band and his sound for sure, and I'm more there to help him execute it than try to create a vision for his band.

(00:43:52):

It's just that kind of a project. There's other ones where I'm doing it all. I'm coming up with the vision, I'll play the parts, I'll help write song like everything. But Queens of the Stone Age, Josh, he has a very complete vision for his band. And so we talked a lot about what the approach was going to be for that record, and so he would describe what he wanted to hear, and I would figure out how I would approach micing things and what spaces to put things in and all of that kind of stuff to try and capture the vision.

Speaker 1 (00:44:22):

Our second podcast episode ever, we called it Musical Translator, and it was all about that the real job of a producer is to be able to take that what the artist is telling you and translate it, understand that vision somehow that they're telling you either through talking about it or some demo and translate that into a sound that is what they actually want to hear.

Speaker 2 (00:44:46):

Yeah, yeah. That's really the job at the end of the day, being a producer is making sure that that connection happens. And then when I shifted gears to Good Charlotte, that one, they were inviting me more to try and help guide a direction sonically for that band. They were fans of the Third Eye Blind record that I'd done. They like that approach, and the vision really came together for that project. After spending time with them, I flew out to Maryland where they lived at the time and just hung out with 'em for a couple of days. We drove around and listened to music and very important things happened in that time that I spent with them when I've told this story before, but it really illustrates this process of really learning what the band is about. We were driving around in their car and they had a CD changer and they had a bunch of stuff that was sort of predictable. They were listening to Rancid and a bunch of other sort of punk pop bands and stuff, but then a CD came on, it was the soundtrack to the movie Edward Scissor Hands.

Speaker 1 (00:45:42):

Oh yeah, that's a great soundtrack.

Speaker 2 (00:45:44):

It's an amazing soundtrack. Danny Elman's, brilliant man. It was incredible. And it came on and I was like, wait, isn't this Edward Scissor hands? They're like, yeah. And I was like, do you guys listen to this driving around their car? Yeah, we love this soundtrack. We love this thing. And that's a huge, huge part of what they love in music. And that moment alone informed so much about how we approached their record. So ultimately I ended up writing a whole album intro, which is me just totally emulating Danny Elfman, and that sort of transitions into this super punk rock thing that's the beginning of the record. And then ultimately the whole album has this cinematic scope to it that punk rock bands, as far as I know, just hadn't done before that record. That was kind of the first one that was like that. Maybe there's other ones like that. I wasn't aware of it, but

Speaker 1 (00:46:41):

I don't know of any When they came out with that and kind of had that dark Tim Birdish kind of vibe, if you want to call it that, it was totally unique in the pop punk scene. Usually pop punk is associated with pizza and skateboarding and stuff,

Speaker 2 (00:46:58):

Right? And punk rock came from this place of being this very sort of raw stripped down thing,

(00:47:04):

Which is great, and I love that about punk rock and any musical genre. It grows and evolves and changes and breaks off into different sort of sub genres and stuff. And this was a point where Good Charlotte wanted to break off and do something that would help define them as a band. And so we went in this direction of doing, I think some people sort of questioned this sort of authentic punk ness of a band like Good Charlotte, but they're certainly drawing on those influences, and we were trying to take their punk rock influences to a new place that was this cinematic, epic sonic experience instead of just a bunch of guys thrashing it out in a garage, let's take it to a new place. So that's what we did, and that was totally informed by that visit with that band. I don't think that would've happened if I hadn't done that.

Speaker 1 (00:47:56):

I have a question about the Queens of the Stone Age record.

Speaker 2 (00:47:59):

Sure.

Speaker 1 (00:47:59):

Speaking of vision, because talking about vision got me thinking, so I understand. So with Josh, you're translating his vision, right? Yeah. But then you have another Titan in there too, Dave Grohl, that's another visionary. How do you balance that when you're dealing with more than one person who is such a heavyweight, a musician, such a heavyweight visionary? How do you manage to get that across the finish line or even get everyone on the same

Speaker 2 (00:48:34):

Page? I see what you're saying about Dave, but he, in that context, I think he was really ready for a break from being that visionary leader of the Foo Fighters and was so relieved to be able to just show up and play drums. He was just delighted to just do that, and it was all he was there to do. So he loved his role, he loved that role. I think at that time, it was just the perfect thing for him. There's a lot of responsibility that goes along with being the leader of a band. My wife is having to deal with it all the time today. We got up and she's like, oh my God, there's so many people waiting for questions from me right now. And it's about everything. It's about merchandise and approving pictures and touring questions and on and on and on and on.

(00:49:24):

It's a lot. It's a lot. And I think there's a point in everybody's life where they just need a little bit of a break from it, and it's totally relentless. It's insane. And so for Dave Grove, that experience for him was a break, the unrelenting responsibilities that he has as the visionary leader of the Foo Fighters, and he carries so much weight in that project. I think even as much, he's a wonderfully generous, inviting guy, and he invites contribution from everybody around him. But still at the end of the day, the reality is he's really, from what I've experienced with him, he's writing it and he ends up playing a lot of it, and he'll invite other people to play and have other people involved and other people to contribute as much as is working. But ultimately, he carries so much with that

Speaker 1 (00:50:11):

Band. He strikes me as someone that's a really good dude, but still just a

Speaker 2 (00:50:17):

Heavyweight. He's a wonderful person. He brings incredible energy. He's one of those guys that is just relentlessly positive and upbeat and energetic in the room. One of those things, people will add up in different ways in the room when you're playing music together, and they each bring their own individual energy and it all adds up in a different way. And Dave's energy in the room when we were basically tracking live, it was Dave, Nick, and Josh playing live to put down the foundation of the songs on that record. His energy and momentum and excitement to play music and play drums is so infectious in the room. It was incredible. And originally, Dave was only supposed to play on three songs on that record, and we did those songs first. And so then the drummer in the band, gene Troutman, who's an awesome drummer and had been touring with Queens and stuff, had to step in to try and record the rest of the songs.

(00:51:13):

And it didn't work. Like not having Dave's energy in the room was such a gigantic shift. And it wasn't even that Gene couldn't play the parts. He certainly could play the parts, but the psychological dynamic between Gene and Josh and Nick as opposed to Dave and Josh and Nick was so wildly different where that thing of Dave being a musical titan of his own, even though he was really there as a hired gun just to play drums, he just would not take shit from anybody. There were moments where it's like, even if he just had to get up and pee and Josh would start to try and give him shit, come on, man, we're just starting to get into this. And then Nick would invariably chime in with his cackle and Dave didn't give a fuck. He would still just get up and walk out the door, and he would do this thing where all you'd see is the back of his head and his hand held up next to his head flipping the bird, and he would just walk out the door and say, Nirvana bitch. And he's right. And he's right, motherfucker. He played Nirvana. He gets to fucking go to the bathroom whenever the fuck he wants. He earned that one too bad.

Speaker 1 (00:52:28):

Speaking of those uncomfortable conversations, that sounds like a very uncomfortable conversation. If he is only supposed to do three songs and then the drummer in the band, the field just isn't the same. How do you have a conversation like that without blowing the band up?

Speaker 2 (00:52:47):

Yeah, well, they're very tough. They're very difficult. Josh and I discussed it at a certain point. We were both sort of feeling the reality that like, wow, this is just not the same. That the energy with Dave playing drums is incredible and we're all missing it. And ultimately, Josh was the one that had the conversation with Gene. They have a longer relationship than I did at that time, so he's the one that told him, and I don't know how that conversation went.

Speaker 1 (00:53:13):

Okay, so as the band leader, he took it upon himself?

Speaker 2 (00:53:16):

He did. I would've certainly done it if he asked me to, but Josh, he is a band leader. It would've been a little weird based on Josh's personality and the way he runs his band. I think it would've been weird for him even for me to have that conversation with Gene. I just met him and they knew each other for a long time. And Josh is definitely a leader type guy. He's a very type A dude. I think he was comfortable having that conversation. I don't know how it went, but Jean did not continue playing with the band after that.

Speaker 1 (00:53:49):

I mean, I can imagine that being a pretty crushing blow. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:53:55):

I've had that conversation with drummers in other bands, and it sucks. It's not a good experience. It's a total bummer to have to tell somebody that it's not working out. It's devastating

Speaker 1 (00:54:08):

In my experience. I've had it a lot with drummers, but then when doing metal records, always with rhythm guitar, if there's two guitar players in the band, yeah, there's always one dude who's just better.

Speaker 2 (00:54:23):

Yep. That's so funny. Yeah. I haven't done as many metal records as you, but I did a few. And it's so funny because that exact thing comes up and in Metallica, there's always this thing where it's like, James Hetfield is just going to play all of the rhythm guitar. Nobody else. There's no other human being on the planet that can play fucking rhythm guitar like that dude, he's a circus freak of fucking No, he's a God. Yeah, your characterization is probably better. Yeah, we'll that,

Speaker 1 (00:54:52):

I mean, he, he's a rhythm God for sure.

Speaker 2 (00:54:56):

It's insane. Dude practiced a bunch of that shit early on. That battery is my favorite fucking, how the fuck do you really get that tight and that clean man? He's incredible.

Speaker 1 (00:55:12):

I don't know. He's incredible. Because also all the down picking and right hand stuff, it's like exercise that if you don't stay on it, you lose it really fast too. It goes away. It is a very perishable skill. So I heard that he sits there, I don't know if this is true, but every day he would sit there and just down pick for an hour on the two lowest strings with a metronome before doing anything else. So he made it like an exercise routine, basically.

Speaker 2 (00:55:43):

Yeah. I don't doubt it. I mean, his skills were completely off the charts. Totally unmatched. Just imagine being Kirk Hammett and I actually recorded with Kirk Hammett right in the moment when he was joining that band.

Speaker 1 (00:55:57):

Interesting.

Speaker 2 (00:55:58):

Yeah. He came in to play guitar with this Bay Area band called Blind Illusion, and he was just coming in to do some guitar over dubs, and he was like, man, it looks like I'm going to be playing with Metallica. And he was playing me some of the stuff at the time, the stuff that he was going to have to learn and shit. And I think this was just after Master Puppets came out. Kirk, obviously he's a great guitar player, but there's no human being that'll ever play rhythm guitar like that. That's just not happening. And I think he probably knew that.

Speaker 1 (00:56:29):

The thing that I wonder is when you have a situation that's that huge, I mean insane, huge. Does someone just say it works in part because of this other person's ability to do something. So the James Hetfield rhythm sound is a staple. I've noticed that that issue with smaller bands is way more uncomfortable. Obviously I'm not talking, I don't have experience recording bands that size, but I can tell you that that conversation between two guitar players is way easier with bands who have put out records and have some success because they already know the score and this is their job now and they want it to continue, and they just know this is how it goes. This guy does rhythms. I don't do rhythms, but I feel like with the baby bands, that's when it's really tough. They just don't know. They don't know how it's done yet. So

Speaker 2 (00:57:35):

Yeah, everybody is still trying to justify their contribution to the band. They're still trying to figure out what their value is within that band, and so that carries a little bit of insecurity with it because everybody's still trying to prove themselves within the context of the band. So it is tougher in that context once it's established and there's stuff out there and it's like, this works. It's like just let the guy that does that do that, and you can do what you're good at and everybody's going to be happy.

Speaker 1 (00:58:09):

Totally. So look, I know we're running out of time here and I want to be respectful of that. We have a few questions from our listeners, actually a ton of questions from our listeners, so I'm not going to ask you to answer them all or anything, but is it cool if we do a few?

Speaker 2 (00:58:24):

Sure, of course. Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 1 (00:58:26):

Cool. People, were very, very stoked that you came on, as was I. So from John Mayo. Cool. Dear Father Valentine, I would like to thank you for always caring about whatever you work on. Your passion and integrity is part of what drove me into engineering. And seeing you now talking about records you've worked on and your enthusiasm about the love of making music that makes someone feel something is contagious and inspiring. Thank you. My question for you, being a very driven, motivated individual, striving to get the sound right, so it serves the song is just in your nature, like many of us and working with great musicians helps that inspiration and drive. I am curious if you have a story of working with another assistant engineer, mixer, producer, editor, et cetera, that helped you find another part of your creativity just from watching them work, which inspired you to take it to get another level that you weren't expecting. I appreciate your contribution to the audio community and time. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:59:31):

Cool. Yeah, that's a good question. And like I said earlier, I don't think anybody does or should create in a vacuum. And when I'm around other people, I invite other people to contribute because a certain point, particularly once I got in this sort of cycle of just going from one record to the next, my opportunities to take time to experiment diminished. And so I would always invite other people to suggest things or do stuff to just bring something new to the equation. And a really, really good example is Jaqui King. I was lucky enough, we were just hiring a studio at the time, a studio called Toast in San Francisco when I was working on the third Eye line record, and Jaqui King came with the studio toast as an assistant engineer. What that, if you can imagine that, that, well, it was 1996, so it was a very, very long time ago.

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):

Was he big then yet?

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):

No.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):

Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:00:32):

Yeah, he was sort of splitting his time between mixing live for bands and working in the studio. Certainly the people that frequent and Toast knew how incredibly talented he was.

Speaker 1 (01:00:43):

Okay, so it's not Jakira as we know him now? No, early.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):

Yeah, this is early before he really had, I think his first real breakthrough was with Tom Waites. So I mean, he was in a relative sense, unknown as an engineer and producer and mixer, but wildly overqualified as an assistant engineer. That became apparent to me within hours of being around him. We were just setting up for the session and I had the things that I knew that I wanted to try, but he worked in this studio and he knew the room and just in the little bit of talking to him about it, I could tell this guy knows what he's doing. And so I started to invite his contributions and I told him things like, I need a cool bass sound. We're using an SVT. We're going to put in this isolation booth. I know what I would put on there. I want to hear what you would use, so just mic up an SVT the way you would do it.

(01:01:36):

And he ended up using a small diaphragm condenser mic, not something I would normally choose to do. It sounded great. And so our relationship continued and he became a person that I really turned to bring really cool engineering ideas. And one of the things I loved about his approach back then that you could hear even as he moved on into other records was his use of the room. He was really, really good at capturing the sound of the room that the instrument was placed in. After the third eye blind thing, I brought him in to assist on some smash mouth stuff, and then ultimately I worked on this record for a band called Citizen King, and I didn't have to start the project when they wanted to start it. I just wasn't available yet. I was still finishing up other things. I told them, I know this guy.

(01:02:28):

He gets incredible sounds and I want him to start this record with you guys. You guys just record a bunch of stuff and then we'll all get together and finish it off together. They agreed to do it, and they loved Jaqui and he did an amazing job and he captured a bunch of incredible stuff that I probably wouldn't have approached that way. He contributed a lot of really cool stuff. One of the very specific things I've mentioned before, I'll say it again, was he had picked up this miking technique from a guy named David Bianco, and I even heard through my YouTube channel that David Bianco got it from yet another person who chimed in comments was like, I actually showed that to David Bianco, so it's got a long sort of progeny, but it came through David Bianco to Jaqui, and then Jaqui showed it to me, which is this thing of miking the batter side of the kick drum with a U 87 in cardio underneath the snare with the mic actually facing the batter head of the kick drum.

(01:03:25):

And after he showed that to me, it's like I'm putting this on every drum kit I ever record after this from this time forward. It was just so good. And it wasn't until more recently where I'm more obsessed with recording drums with one microphone. I haven't been doing it lately, but that was a huge, huge part of me miking up a drum set. I just love the sound of it, this really cool knocky attack on the kick drum and then this nice detail to the bottom side of the snare drum. You get this cool rasp on the snare drums. So yeah, definitely there's people that I've been around that were there to even just be assistants or whatever that have totally influenced and informed how I approach things. It's great having people, and now I really enjoy having people that are young and hungry that approach things way different than I do, and mostly it's in how they approach things in the computer. Just young people approach using a computer so differently than people that started making records on a console and a tape machine. It's very difficult for me to think about things radically differently than that. And so even the way I set up a session in Pro Tools is still kind of the same as the way I would set up an analog console, but when I see young kids set up a session, it's like, holy crap, what is all of this?

Speaker 1 (01:04:46):

Man, I'm really happy to hear you say this, by the way, because I don't know, I'm not surprised that you're saying it, but I'm really happy to hear you saying it because that is how kids are learning. I mean, some kids are learning the traditional way, but that is how a lot of tomorrow's producers are going to come up for sure. It's great that someone such as yourself embraces it because a lot of people are very negative about it

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):

Since I really grew up with the attitude of like, there's no right way to do this. There are so many different ways to approach anything that you're doing. All that matters is that it sounds good, and I don't really care how you get there or what you use to get there. I mean, if you get there with entirely all plugins, but it feels amazing coming out of the speakers, that's fucking awesome.

(01:05:40):

Right now, I'm dicking around with stringing together in series a bunch of late sixties preamps to get there, and it's a totally different approach, but it doesn't matter as long as it feels incredible when it comes out of the speakers, and I don't care nun's more valid or justified than the other, and that's what I love. I carry with me either the benefit or the encumbrance of my traditional engineering experience and young people, they don't get that benefit of knowing those traditional engineering skills or they're actually not encumbered by them, and they can approach things in a totally new and different way that may actually ultimately be better for what they're trying to achieve. So

Speaker 1 (01:06:25):

Absolutely,

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):

Yeah, there's no rules. It just has to sound good. That's the only rule. There's one rule, it has to sound good.

Speaker 1 (01:06:31):

That's the golden rule,

Speaker 2 (01:06:34):

Which is, by the way, very, very subjective.

Speaker 1 (01:06:38):

Yeah, for sure. So question from Dom Simpson on the album Midnight that you did with Grace,

(01:06:45):

Many of the songs would've been really easy to turn into unquote overproduced pop tunes, but you really seem to take onboard her previous music, which is quite different than the music on midnight, and create a sound stage that presented the songs in a way that wouldn't alienate her audience while still making them big, big. For example, in a live tonight, the drum sound is simultaneously natural but big where it'll be quite easy to mix that song, very sample processing heavy in order to get that big sound. How do you make those important choices on what direction to take with the production when working with an artist whose music is at the time new to you? I guess you kind of answered that before a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:07:34):

Yeah, and that project, there was a whole journey that happened that resulted in where the record ended up, and ultimately where it ended up was this thing of trying to bridge that gap. Grace with the Nocturnals had done a bunch of cool records that have this really cool, nostalgic, classic rock sound to them on the line, the beast, the beat. She definitely started to expand beyond that a little bit, and with any artist, as soon as you start sort of straying a bit from where you came from, there's some people that invite the exploration, and there's some of her fans that through her travels have always been like, you should just stay with what you did before. But Midnight was that moment for her where she was like, I'm just tired of trying to make records sound like Neil Young. I would love to do something different. I've done that. I know how to do that. It's great. Neil Young's great. That's awesome. Can we do something else now? So

(01:08:39):

There was a lot of stuff going on in the band dynamic that was very, very complicated. But going into it, I was really totally happy to make a Neil Young record. I mean, I listened to her stuff and I was like, cool. I love Neil Young. Let's go down that road. And I imagined, I pictured the process being they'll have a bunch of songs, we'll do some pre-production, we'll go and record it really quick. It's a great live band, and we'll make a cool sounding record and that'll be great. And boy is that not how that went, and not even remotely. And so we ended up in this place where we were trying to bridge that gap between what was going on in some versions of popular music at that time and that nostalgic sound and try and bring it all together on one record. It's really challenging, and I really put a lot of care and patience into the choice of the treatment of every single sound and every single choice that was being made and what those sounds represented, what ones were more modern sounding, what were more nostalgic sounding, and trying to strike that balance so it would achieve both of those goals. Very, very difficult to do. I'm very pleased to hear there's, at least I know now there's one person out there that got that and appreciates it because a lot of people,

Speaker 1 (01:10:00):

I mean, I think fans, I don't know, man, fans can be very narcissistic, I think. Sure, yeah. In their expectations of an artist.

Speaker 2 (01:10:10):

Yeah. Everybody goes through that

Speaker 1 (01:10:12):

Full circle. Back to the beginning of the conversation when you were talking about these experiments and exercises you would do on your own time, when you got into a situation like Grace's record, is that where you draw on that huge backlog of things that work in certain ways? It is. Or was there new experimentation to be done?

Speaker 2 (01:10:35):

Very little new experimentation going on a project like that. You got a bunch of people in the room. We did do some pre-production, but pre-production, again is not as much about getting sounds. It's more about figuring out parts and songs and stuff, so, so when it's time to get a guitar sound, it's like, okay, I know when I plug in my Vox Cambridge to this speaker and I put this particular buyer M1 60 on it, it's going to sound rad. And so we're just going to do that right now. And so I'm not sitting there experimenting with a bunch of different stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:11:07):

That's great. Yeah. So it pays off. That's a case in point of

Speaker 2 (01:11:11):

How

Speaker 1 (01:11:12):

That method pays off.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):

Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff on that record where there's things I had done before where I'd had the time to try every microphone in front of an instrument. We actually used a harpsichord

Speaker 1 (01:11:24):

Oh, nice.

Speaker 2 (01:11:24):

On the song Delirious, and I knew that I had this particular ribbon mic, this R-C-A-K-U three A that just was perfect. They had the right edginess for it. And so I just knew, let's just put the KU three A on the harp score, and here we go. Bam. So yeah, that's the benefit of having done those experiments at other times. And right now I'm rewiring my studio in time where in a time where I'm not going to be, actually, I don't have people waiting for mixes or stuff, and I'll be able to do experimentation and play with it and make sure that it's going to be a thing that's going to get the results that I want. So once I'm in that circumstance of like, okay, now it's time to generate a mix for somebody, I'll be able to do that quickly. I know that the setup is ready to go, and I'm not like, I wonder what it would sound like if I replaced all the mic preamps with am sixteens on my summing mixer and wasting my time doing that when I should actually be mixing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:19):

Okay. Two more questions then I will let you go. Stacy Meyer, just wondering, hey, or saying, Hey, Eric, major fan of your productions and your dedication to the project's vision. My question, do you have any specific ways in which you manage your time to keep a production as fluid as possible? I've seen your previous videos on your YouTube channel, which everyone should check out by the way, and we'll put the link in the show notes. But anyways, I've seen your previous videos on your YouTube channel, and they're very detailed in the production realm. And by the way, let me say, your videos are great.

Speaker 2 (01:12:55):

Oh, cool. Thank you. Yeah, they've

Speaker 1 (01:12:56):

Been super fun to do. So question was, do you have any ways which you manage your time to keep a production as flu as

Speaker 2 (01:13:02):

Possible? Okay, cool. Yeah, I think there's some really useful stuff there. And I settled on a particular approach that I thought was efficient and kept the momentum going on a project. I have the benefit of owning my own studio, and so that affords some luxuries that may not be available for everybody, but there may be ways to incorporate this into a workflow for anybody. So I would do pre-production in the space where we ultimately do the recording and doing it there. The upside is that I can be sort of dialing in sounds while we're also working on songs. And so each day we would probably work through two or three songs. And the goal is by the end of working on a song, it's like we have the arrangement, everybody knows what parts they're going to be playing, maybe there's some lyrics and stuff to flesh out later, but we got the basic framework of what the song is.

(01:13:54):

And so the band would show up maybe at noon or something each day, and we would do eight to 10 hours of that each day. Before that, I would show up early, maybe at 10:00 AM and I'd have a little laundry list of things that I wanted to change with the recording setup. And so I'd be experimenting with the recording setup as we're doing that. And so there'd be a week of working on songs, and the beginning of each day it's like, eh, let's try this different mic on the snare drummer. Let's try this thing here or whatever. And we'd make little adjustments. So by the time we're done, we, the pre-production, we're also totally dialed in with all of our sounds and we can start recording for real. And so we're also like, everybody's comfortable in their place, they're comfortable in the environment, their headphones are dialed in, everything's super dialed in.

(01:14:42):

And so now it's like, okay, man, let's do this for real. Here we go. We're actually doing keeper takes on these songs. And I also do the pre-production almost a little bit more like a performance, because I always feel like bands get so much better at playing songs once they've performed them for a period of time in front of audiences. And so what I would do, it's true, is the beginning of the day would be working through some new songs, and then the last thing we do is a review where we do it like a live show set and it's like, okay, we're going to play through all of the songs that we have preproduced up to this point at the end of the day, just to keep them fresh for everybody. And so that's the pre-production part of it. And then when we're tracking basics, I always try to have as many people playing at the same time as is manageable.

(01:15:30):

And so as long as everybody can play good enough to generate some version of a capable performance, then let's have 'em play. And my studio was flexible enough to be able to accommodate that. You take a big bite and you get a very immediate, nearly complete picture of what you're capturing. I think that's one of the benefits of having multiple people play. That saves a lot of time. So you get through that process. I usually give the band a break because by the time they've done pre-production and all the basic trackings, that's probably three weeks solid of just being in that room and intensely working on recording and tracking and whatever. And so I give them a break. So they'll get a week off in that first month, and I spend a week just comping and making sub mixes of things and all that stuff. So I'm set up where once it's time to do overdubs, I've already got a great sounding drum mix going, and this process varies depending on whether I'm working on tape machines or in the computer. But at the end of the day, you're just trying to come up with a cool drum mix. So when you open the session or put on the reels, you immediately can just hit play. You hear amazing drum mix, the basic stuff that they recorded is all in its place

(01:16:45):

And you're ready to go. So you have that really great perspective to start building on or that reliable perspective so you know what you're building on. And so then you do overdubs. And this is the thing I've talked about before, I think, I don't know if everybody else has figured this out, I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. So important. So once you get into the overdub phase, you break the day into two halves, or really probably two and one third where the first part of the day is tracking instruments. And so you can do guitar over dubs, keyboards, percussion, whatever, fucking bullshit. You can pull up a song, jump around record stuff. It sort of depends on the flexibility of your setup. I have it at my place where I can have station set up where I can have guitar stuff ready to go. I can have bass stuff ready to go. I can have percussion, piano, keyboards, whatever, ready to go, and we can jump around. You can pull up a song and just do all the stuff on that song. It also can be cool to do assembly line style, where once you're set up with guitar, just jump to every song, do guitar. So either way, you do probably the first six hours of the day doing that.

(01:17:51):

After that, every day, do some vocals at the end of the day, whatever you fleshed out on, sing vocals on that song. Because the mistake that I think a lot of people make, they do a bunch of overdubs and then they get to the end. The only thing left to do is vocals. And the reality is is singers cannot sing 10 hours a day. It's physically impossible. You'll fucking destroy their voice trying to make 'em do it, and they feel shitty about themselves because their voice is giving out and all of that horrible stuff. Singers should sing one to two hours a day. That's it. If you're really going for it, like balls to the wall singing, you cannot sing more than two hours a day. You'll just burn out their voice.

Speaker 1 (01:18:32):

And that way you can give them days off too.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):

Yeah, totally. With that process, after maybe a month of that, everything gets finished at the same time you've been working on the vocals as you go, you've been working on overdubs as you go, and by the end of that month, everything's done. And the singer isn't stuck feeling like he has inadequate endurance to be able to finish the vocals on the record, everybody else was like, oh, man, I played guitar for eight hours straight. What's your problem? It's just a different thing.

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):

It's such an unfair way to treat what's arguably the most important thing.

Speaker 2 (01:19:06):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (01:19:07):

Absolutely. It's such an illogical way to do things. Last question from Alex pto. Eric, could you go into a little bit of detail about the tube trap construction in the barefoot A room?

Speaker 2 (01:19:20):

Okay, sure. Yeah. I ended up building tube traps myself. This was another little adventure that I went on. There's a company called A SC that makes tube traps, and they make great ones. They look beautiful and function wonderfully. They're just incredibly expensive, and I don't like spending that much money. And I went on this adventure of creating what they call an attack wall. It's a way of treating a control room where you essentially decouple your listening position from the room acoustics, the modes of the room, and you do that by surrounding yourself with these tube traps, so you need a fucking shit ton of them. And so I decided to just build them myself. And so they're relatively easy to build. And what I did was I got this, it's stiff fiberglass that's used as pipe insulation, and it comes in a variety of diameters and wall thicknesses, and the stuff that I used was probably two inches thick for stuff that was 10 to 12 inches in diameter.

(01:20:23):

And I made some really, really big ones that would reach down in the very low frequencies that I put in the front corners of the control room. So they're like 18 or 20 inches in diameter, and the walls are like three inches thick, and so they come in three foot sections, and so I would just glue them together with construction adhesive to get the height that I needed for them. So a lot of 'em were only six feet tall, but there were ones that, my control room was a compression ceiling, so the very, very front where the speakers are is much taller. It's like 12 feet tall, so I put three of them together and have the thing go all the way from the floor to the ceiling. And so just use, yeah, construction adhesive, I guess, what is it? Liquid nails put a be to that around the edge and then just stack 'em up and they glue together. You're supposed to cap off the ends, and so I just used quarter inch plywood and just cut a circle in the quarter inch plywood. I was able to get Home Depot to cut them for me. They just had this circular scribe saw that did it super easy. I didn't have a tool that would make it easy to do that. Doing that with a jigsaw would be a pain in the ass.

Speaker 1 (01:21:27):

Sounds like it.

Speaker 2 (01:21:28):

Yeah, and so then you don't necessarily have to put the cap on the bottom sitting on the floor. It's capped by the floor, so that's half as many of those things that you have to cut and pay for. I'm always into efficiency, man. I'm trying to do things as cheap and efficient as possible as long as they work. And then the fiberglass is kind of nasty, as we all know. It's kind of itchy, horrible shit, and so I found fabric at a fabric store that was very stretchy. It was some sort of stretchy polyester type fabric. I apologize. I don't remember exactly what that was. Any fabric that you find that's stretchy and all you have to do is just cut it into a tube shape that is smaller than the diameter of the tube that you're covering by a couple of inches. It's stretchy enough that it will stretch over it. It's just like putting a sock on your foot and it holds itself in place because it's stretchy and it holds onto to the fiberglass material and the excess at the ends. You just tuck inside the tube, put the little wooden cap on there, and you got yourself a tube trap and they work. Amazing. It was a revelation for the acoustics in my control room.

Speaker 1 (01:22:35):

Thank you. That was very detailed. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:37):

Yep. That should get you there. All you got to do is find the pipe insulation. If you search around, you'll find it. I forget the name of the company. It's like Johnson Manville or something. That makes it, it's not the kind of thing that you can buy at Home Depot, so you have to find a supplier for that specific product. Once you do, you can order it and they'll ship it to you or whatever. You can find it. If you're persistent, you'll find it

Speaker 1 (01:22:58):

Real quick. I just wanted to tell you that my friend Sam Pura says hello, and I have something he told me I can quote him on, but we were talking about some undertone audio gear. He was talking about the MPEQ, which for anyone listening is a preamp and eq, and this is what he had to say about it, which I asked him if I could share with you, so I was like, I bet Eric would like to hear this. He says, it's the most brilliant design for an eq, and the preamp is everything I love about a Neve and an EMI and an API all put together. It's simply my favorite piece of gear. I use it on everything, and it always sounds amazing. It's my first choice every single time. It never bloats out, never sounds harsh, has an incredible saturation and glossy sheen. There you go. So Sam loves it.

Speaker 2 (01:23:51):

Okay, awesome. I love Sam. I mixed a record that he produced and I had a great time doing it. He's an amazingly talented guy and it's very kind words from him, and he's making very good use of them. I'm glad they're in his hands. He makes 'em sound so good.

Speaker 1 (01:24:08):

Yeah, he's an audio enthusiast to the core.

Speaker 2 (01:24:13):

Yeah. Yeah. He's got that passion and all of that amazing enthusiasm for it. He's wonderful.

Speaker 1 (01:24:19):

Absolutely. Well, Eric, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. It's been great talking to you, and thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:24:29):

Thank you so much for inviting me to come on. It is a really, really cool resource that you've created, and I'm so happy to be able to contribute whatever I can to it and be a part of it. It's a really cool thing.

Speaker 1 (01:24:39):

Thank you very much. Okay, then another URM podcast episode in the bag. Please remember to share our episodes with your friends, as well as post them to your Facebook, Instagram, or any social media you use. Please tag me at al Levi URM audio, and of course, please tag my guests as well. Till next time, happy mixing. You've been listening to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. To ask us questions, make suggestions and interact, visit URM Academy and press the podcast link today.