PHIL PLUSKOTA: Surviving a studio scam, secrets to massive guitar tones, and how to network online

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. My guest today is named Phil Pluskota, and he's a musician, engineer, mixer and producer from Florida who started as a guitar player, but he became known as the dude to go to for gigantic and punishing guitar tones. He's basically a amping king and a pretty good mixer too, and an awesome dude. He has worked with a whole host of acts such as Avio Thyroid is Murder, and a ton more. Really, really awesome dude. This episode has been a long time coming. I present you Phil Pluskota. Phil Pluskota. Welcome to the URM podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:02:06):

What is up Eyal?

Speaker 1 (00:02:08):

Just quarantine life, and today we're getting tornadoes added onto that, so that'll be really cool.

Speaker 2 (00:02:14):

Yeah, we know about all the weather stuff living in Florida.

Speaker 1 (00:02:18):

Yeah, I do. So I'm prepared. It's going to be a bunch of long track tornadoes. It's supposed to be an outbreak across the entire southeast, so I'm ready Florida got me ready for that.

Speaker 2 (00:02:28):

Oh, yeah, for sure. Hurricanes around here. Get everybody ready for that.

Speaker 1 (00:02:31):

It's not just hurricanes, man. It's the 3:00 PM storms from hell that hit between March and October.

Speaker 2 (00:02:38):

Oh, yeah. Those things come in crazy. All of a sudden. It'll be fine, and then it's just like a typhoon outside.

Speaker 1 (00:02:43):

Yeah. Do you shut your studio down?

Speaker 2 (00:02:45):

Yeah, every single time. As soon as I start hearing cracks of lightning, I'm like, all right, I got to turn everything off.

Speaker 1 (00:02:49):

So when I lived there, I had an app called Lightning App, and it would tell me, I would choose a radius basically, and as soon as a lightning strike was detected, I would put it to 50 miles, and the moment that lightning started coming down, it would also tell me which direction it was going in. If it was coming towards me, I'd wait till it was 10 miles and then unplug everything

Speaker 2 (00:03:16):

I need to get that app, because I just listen. I just, no, you

Speaker 1 (00:03:19):

Need the app.

Speaker 2 (00:03:19):

As soon as I hear crack, I'm like, oh, all right. It's really close.

Speaker 1 (00:03:22):

So I know you're not in Orlando, but Orlando is the lightning strike capital of the entire United States. 19,000 on average per year cloud to ground. Okay. You're not that far.

Speaker 2 (00:03:36):

No, I'm not that far. I'm only like three hours away from there, but we get some pretty intense lightning over in the Fort Myers, Cape Coral area.

Speaker 1 (00:03:41):

I know, that's what I'm saying. You should get this app.

Speaker 2 (00:03:43):

Yeah, you'll have to send me a link to that after we're done with this.

Speaker 1 (00:03:46):

I've got two. I've got one that's an aviation radar. I'm crazy about this kind of stuff, but

Speaker 2 (00:03:52):

Hey, man, you don't want your stuff to get fried. We have thousands and thousands of dollars worth of stuff. One lightning strike can take everything out.

Speaker 1 (00:03:57):

It's happened.

Speaker 2 (00:03:58):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:03:59):

That's why it happened to me in 2005, so I know the realities of it. It's not fun. It happened during a session

Speaker 2 (00:04:06):

That's even worse.

Speaker 1 (00:04:07):

Yeah. Well, the good thing about it was, so I was working on two bands at the time. One was with me and the other one I was mixing. The one that was with me, they were there, and so they understood, and I told them, look, we'll just start from scratch once I get some gear. It was all destroyed. We didn't have cloud recording backups in that day.

Speaker 2 (00:04:31):

Right.

Speaker 1 (00:04:31):

And it was that one point in the day when all my drives were hooked up for backups.

Speaker 2 (00:04:37):

Oh

Speaker 1 (00:04:37):

God.

Speaker 2 (00:04:38):

Yeah. It always happens that way. As soon as you're ready to do something, all hell has to break loose.

Speaker 1 (00:04:43):

Dude. Perfect timing. So yeah, the one band that was there, they understood, I rerecorded them for free. We were all the way up to the guitar tracking stage, so we just started over. Other band was mixing. They thought I was making an excuse and they fired me.

Speaker 2 (00:04:59):

Yeah. I've had some experiences like that before

Speaker 1 (00:05:01):

Where they think you're lying about an excuse or you think somebody else is lying about an excuse or both

Speaker 2 (00:05:08):

Lying about an excuse. But it was never me that was making the excuses. But I've been there before with that type of situation

Speaker 1 (00:05:15):

Where something real happened to you.

Speaker 2 (00:05:16):

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:05:17):

And nobody believed

Speaker 2 (00:05:18):

You. Exactly.

Speaker 1 (00:05:19):

I mean, hey, my studio got struck by lightning and everything blew up. Your album's gone.

Speaker 2 (00:05:24):

That was like my old studio before I'm in the spot I'm in now. Our a water heater actually exploded and flooded our entire studio. How deep? It was a good, probably foot and a half of water, thankfully. Oh, shit. I had all of my important stuff way off the ground. I've always used some sort of amp stand for my amps, and then always had all of my rack gear and high racks, so I never really had much on the floor. I think I lost maybe a couple pedals in one sub

Speaker 1 (00:05:50):

Man, you are lucky. Yeah, I know people like when hurricane, I think it was Sandy, which the one that hit New York,

Speaker 2 (00:05:58):

I think that was Sandy.

Speaker 1 (00:05:59):

I think it was Sandy who had studios and basements or whatever.

Speaker 2 (00:06:03):

Oh, shit. I bet their stuff got fucking wrecked.

Speaker 1 (00:06:06):

Yes, they got wrecked, man. I had once in Florida where a toilet exploded. Thankfully. Not the sewage part, the water part.

Speaker 3 (00:06:15):

Okay.

Speaker 1 (00:06:17):

Yeah. So thank God for that. That would be a whole different story if that had happened. But it flooded. You had been to my house.

Speaker 2 (00:06:25):

Yes.

Speaker 1 (00:06:25):

So you know where that guest bathroom was right next to the control room?

Speaker 2 (00:06:30):

Yeah, it was at that one.

Speaker 1 (00:06:31):

That one? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:06:32):

Oh, man.

Speaker 1 (00:06:32):

So it flooded the control room and flooded all the way to the entrance and part of the drum room.

Speaker 2 (00:06:38):

Wow.

Speaker 1 (00:06:39):

About an inch.

Speaker 2 (00:06:40):

Yeah. I know how close everything was to that bathroom.

Speaker 1 (00:06:44):

Yeah. But yeah, dude, it kind of sucked. It was about an inch of water, not a foot and a half. A foot and a half would've been deadly. That would've gotten to my battery backups.

Speaker 2 (00:06:55):

Yeah. Thankfully, the spot that I was in, all the wall outlets were super high up on the walls. Whoever had built that place out, I don't know why they had the anticipated, the ocean rising, I guess, because all the power outlets were super high up on the walls, which I'd never seen before. So I was very lucky on that as well, because nothing touched any of my power in that room.

Speaker 1 (00:07:16):

That is a very fortunate situation.

Speaker 2 (00:07:19):

I seem to have good luck when it comes to catastrophic things happening to me.

Speaker 1 (00:07:24):

Knock on fake wood. Yeah, knock on fake wood. But you've had other people give you excuses like that where you didn't believe them?

Speaker 2 (00:07:33):

Oh, yeah. I've had guys

Speaker 1 (00:07:34):

Where, yeah, I never believe anybody.

Speaker 2 (00:07:36):

No, no. Especially if it's something silly. If I've sent stuff out for editing and it's taken more than three to four days to get tracks back, I'm like, come on. I know you are doing other things. I can obviously see that you're posting a lot on Facebook looking for more work, so I know you're not that busy,

Speaker 1 (00:07:52):

Man. One of the funniest things was, so I had this band from Australia come in. Again, we're talking about ancient history. I haven't recorded in a long time, but band from Australia came in. They needed help with their songs. There was a dude from a famous band that lived nearby, I'm not going to say which band. He was an ex-member that helped this band write a lot of their songs and a very talented guy, but he's not in the band anymore because he's fucking crazy and completely unreliable.

Speaker 2 (00:08:22):

That sounds familiar.

Speaker 1 (00:08:24):

Nobody told me that. This is a big, big band, by the way. So he's really, really good. We hired him to help finish out the songs, thought it was going to be awesome. He was going to come to my place and spend two days or three days working on their songs. He just didn't show up. I get a text 45 minutes late, which is like, bro, 102 fever, sorry. Later on that day on Instagram, I see a picture of him at the park with his dog throwing a Frisbee.

Speaker 2 (00:08:55):

Nice fever, bro.

Speaker 1 (00:08:57):

Nice fever, dude. Yeah. I feel like I'm an asshole, but I generally don't believe people. So that's why when the lightning hit me and they fired me, I kind of just understood. I was like, yeah, you don't believe me. You think I'm making this up. And honestly, I would too.

Speaker 2 (00:09:15):

Yeah, no, just from past experiences of dealing with older partners and stuff like that with the studio, I'm just so used to people being full of shit that I almost always think people are full of shit when they have excuses. So I barely ever have an excuse for anything. I'm always trying to be super on top of everything I do.

Speaker 1 (00:09:32):

I'm going to admit something terrible. So when somebody gives me an excuse that's bad, there's part of me that's like, wow, I hope that's not true, but what is it? Because I don't want something bad to happen to them. But then at the same time, I don't want them to be lying to me. Which do you prefer? For the bad thing to have actually happened to them or for nothing bad to have happened to them, but them just be liars. It's like a moral dilemma. I don't know how to feel about it.

Speaker 2 (00:10:05):

It really is. If it did happen, you're like, holy shit, this guy just went through hell. But if he's lying, then you're like, what kind of dude is going to lie about this particular subject?

Speaker 1 (00:10:15):

Yeah. Guilty. I know that when I went to Berkeley, my grandmother must have died about six different times when I had to hand in certain assignments.

Speaker 2 (00:10:26):

Basically, you turned into the re animator while you're at Berkeley,

Speaker 1 (00:10:28):

Basically. I mean, at least it wasn't with the same professor.

Speaker 2 (00:10:32):

Well, that's good.

Speaker 1 (00:10:33):

But my grandmother did die six times, so I just felt like nobody was going to question that one.

Speaker 2 (00:10:40):

No, no, no. Whenever you say a death happened in the family, that's pretty serious. No one's ever going to really question that. I've never used a death as an excuse for anything. The only time I've ever had an actual legitimate excuse for not doing work was two months ago when I got super, super sick. But even still, I still tried to do my best to work and get stuff done.

Speaker 1 (00:10:58):

That's good. I actually did use the death excuse for real once the person didn't believe me. So when my grandmother was actually tying, she was from Mexico. I was in Mexico for several weeks at the end there, and I had a client who was, she was an asshole. This client was a serious asshole with real mental problems. She wanted to know why I wasn't responding to her texts about stupid ideas she had for her shitty black metal project. I was like, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to ignore you or whatever. I'm in Mexico right now. My grandmother is a few days away from death. I'm kind of dealing with family stuff, but I'll get back to you when I can. And her response was like, I am so sick of people making excuses about my music, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, okay, block the end.

Speaker 2 (00:11:53):

No, with past experience I've had with other people making excuses was when I had my old partner, him say, our monitors blew up, or our computer blew up, or our interface burnt out, stuff like that. And then bands would hit me up and be like, Hey, did your guys' stuff blow up? I'm like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 (00:12:10):

Oh, your old partner would say that to people, right?

Speaker 2 (00:12:13):

Yeah. He would literally say that to people.

Speaker 1 (00:12:14):

Can we talk about that for a second? We don't need to drop names.

Speaker 2 (00:12:18):

Yeah, we won't drop names, but yeah, we can definitely talk about that.

Speaker 1 (00:12:20):

Okay. I want to talk about that because I think that your situation is very relatable to lots of our listeners. I think that you're somebody that our listeners should pay attention to because you have managed to make a career for yourself and recording in a very realistic way, which I think is very, very cool. And you've had some trials and tribulations along the way, just like all of us. But the thing is that most people I know, if they had gone through what you went through, that would've been it. They would've gone back to the real world. They wouldn't be here five years later. This was about five years ago, right? Or more.

Speaker 2 (00:13:00):

Yeah, exactly. It's been about five years since I split off and it's been doing my own thing since.

Speaker 1 (00:13:04):

Yeah, I remember that you were going through that around the time that I left Florida and started URM.

Speaker 2 (00:13:09):

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It was a huge shithole nightmare for me during that time. The

Speaker 1 (00:13:14):

Reason I'm bringing this up is I think that a lot of people who are wanting to get into the studio world, and I know this because they tell me oftentimes they will not have much money. So they'll have a quote unquote partner who has more money or something but doesn't really know what they're doing. Or they'll have somebody else that they're doing it with even they might not have a lot more money, but they have enough to where pooled resources, they can have a studio together. And it's not the most ideal situation, but it's better than nothing. So often first step into getting out of the bedroom basically is having a partner who is the first person available.

Speaker 2 (00:14:00):

Yeah, exactly. And that's pretty much how it went with me was I had known this guy for a while beforehand because he used to mix my band's stuff,

(00:14:10):

And he'd also had a pretty reputable name for himself. Started already with working on the original white chapel demos and all that stuff. So he just hit me up one day and was like, Hey, do you want to put a studio together? And I was like, well, I don't really know what I'm doing, but yeah, sure, that'd be cool. Why did he hit you up? He hit me up because I'd been talking to him a little bit. I had gotten a small little recording rig just to start doing demos and stuff for my band. He saw that I had bought some pretty decent stuff, and he had just come back from out of town from moving out of Florida, and he didn't have anything anymore. So he saw that I was super, super interested in recording and basically the whole thing was if we start a studio together, I can learn off of him. And that was basically the whole premise of us starting the studio

Speaker 1 (00:14:54):

Together. He brings the skills. You bring the gear.

Speaker 2 (00:14:56):

Exactly.

Speaker 1 (00:14:57):

So yeah, that's exactly the kind of scenario I'm talking about. Somebody has something that the other person,

Speaker 2 (00:15:03):

Yeah, he was the name. I was the money at that time.

Speaker 1 (00:15:05):

Okay. What's interesting here though, is typically the one with the name is the one that's not the flake in these scenarios. Usually it's the money guy that's the fuck up.

Speaker 2 (00:15:15):

Exactly. And this was the complete opposite of that.

Speaker 1 (00:15:18):

Yeah. I remember I was talking to a URM student who was getting a money guy about a year ago. Something about it was raising red flags to him, and that's why he wanted to talk to me about it. The dude had zero production experience other than Reaper, and he wrote some beats. This other guy had been recording for five or six years, and the money guy wanted to get this contract where since he's putting in all the money, everything that the recording guy did was owned by him.

Speaker 2 (00:16:00):

Oh my God.

Speaker 1 (00:16:01):

Kind of weird.

Speaker 2 (00:16:02):

Yeah, that's definitely something I would never want to see in a contract.

Speaker 1 (00:16:06):

So instantly shady.

Speaker 2 (00:16:08):

Yeah, that's super shady.

Speaker 1 (00:16:09):

I got the impression that what this money guy was going to do was he was going to try to exploit this other guy who had the skills going to try to exploit him and bring some credibility to himself, and then own everything and take credit.

Speaker 2 (00:16:25):

I've seen those situations happen before to some other engineer friends of mine.

Speaker 1 (00:16:29):

I know people who have been accused of that too, where it's not true, but I have seen it happen. So I told the guy to think real hard about whether or not he wants to be involved in that. So play out what I like to do when I'm getting involved with people, which I should have done in the past, but I didn't. And it's this big dilemma or big debate I have with myself, which is some scenarios I've been in that have gone south actually enabled me to move forward, even though I knew getting in that they were going to be kind of shady and had the potential to fall apart. I didn't listen to reason because I thought that the benefit would outweigh even if it did fall apart, and then when it did fall apart, the benefit did outweigh it. But I never went in blind, but I wonder if I could have saved myself a lot of pain by listening to myself and those red flags

Speaker 2 (00:17:23):

Most of the time. Your gut is never wrong. I know every time I had a bad gut feeling about what I was going through with my old partner, I was a hundred percent correct every time. But because I was such good friends with him and I didn't want to believe that he was as shady as he was, that I just kept doing it anyway.

Speaker 1 (00:17:39):

What kind of stuff?

Speaker 2 (00:17:40):

Oh man. Even when we're working on projects together, he would be at our studio the entire day. I was still working my day job that still have, so I'd be working all day and I would come home to pick up the slack of wherever he left off from tracking a band. I'd get there and nothing had been done, and he would come up with some excuse that he wasn't in the zone. He wasn't feeling it today.

Speaker 1 (00:18:02):

Was the band sitting around the whole time?

Speaker 2 (00:18:05):

Yes. Yeah. Basically they were waiting for me to get back so I could start working with them because I was the only one getting anything done.

Speaker 1 (00:18:12):

Oh man. I've seen that situation before. I've seen that situation with really established producers who got lazy. I'm not going to name who, you probably know them, but I can think of Juan who used to have a huge career one day. He said to me, I don't need to work hard because I've made it. That's like the worst attitude

Speaker 2 (00:18:31):

In the world to have.

Speaker 1 (00:18:31):

Yeah, that right there is famous last words

Speaker 2 (00:18:35):

For sure.

Speaker 1 (00:18:36):

I don't need to work hard because I already made it. What ended up happening was he would fuck around all day and his assistant would then end up tracking all the vans. Years went by. Guess who ended up with all the bands?

Speaker 2 (00:18:49):

The assistant.

Speaker 1 (00:18:50):

Of course. That's how it works.

Speaker 2 (00:18:53):

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (00:18:53):

So, alright, so the bands were work, were sitting around all day waiting for you to get back. Was it like you're at work, you're expecting them to be at a certain point and you to walk in and basically take the ball the rest of the way to the touchdown, but you get there and nothing has happened?

Speaker 2 (00:19:12):

Yeah, literally we'd be at the same point where we're at the night before when I was finished doing stuff.

Speaker 1 (00:19:18):

What was the vibe when you would walk in on that?

Speaker 2 (00:19:21):

The vibe was the band was just like, we don't know what the fuck is going on. We just want to record our shit and get this done and over with. Because when you have 12 to 14 hours in a day to do stuff with bands, they're expecting to at least get four to six hours worth of work done in that day. And I just get back and the bands would be looking at me like, dude, we haven't even seen this guy all day. What's going on? I'm like, dude, I don't know. I've been at work. Where are we at? And they're like, well, we left off last night. And I'm like, oh, so you guys literally did nothing all day? They're like, yeah, well, we didn't want to bother him. He said he wasn't in the mood. I was like, oh, alright. No problem. Well, let's just get to work then.

Speaker 1 (00:20:00):

I am in the mood basically. Would they be pissed? Would it be walking into a bad vibe and then you need to reset the vibe? Or would they just be thankful that you got there and

Speaker 2 (00:20:12):

Oh no. They were super pissed every single

Speaker 1 (00:20:13):

Time. Yeah, I can imagine.

Speaker 2 (00:20:14):

Yeah. So basically I'd be going into a hostile work environment instantly, but then after an hour of working with 'em and tracking their stuff and joking around with them, then the vibe would go back to normal. But it was literally an everyday thing where I'd have to basically massage the band into being happy again.

Speaker 1 (00:20:31):

I think that that is actually one of the most important skills you can develop as an engineer is how to deal with people, especially when they're stressing.

Speaker 2 (00:20:43):

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. If you don't deal well with stressed out people and you get instantly stressed out when someone else is stressed out, it's just going to make for a really terrible experience for both of you.

Speaker 1 (00:20:53):

Yeah, it's going to add fuel to that fire for sure.

Speaker 2 (00:20:56):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:20:56):

So how would you go about setting their mindset at ease?

Speaker 2 (00:21:01):

Basically, I would just try to figure out things that they liked just from small conversations with them and just distract their mind from the fact that they'd been sitting around for the last eight to 10 hours doing nothing. So I would just talk about topics that I knew that they would like to talk about outside of recording their album.

Speaker 1 (00:21:18):

Makes sense. And then what's interesting to me, I'm thinking about fights with an X or something, thinking of something heated, right? Something that involves emotions. I'm not the kind of person that gets mad very easily, so I'm trying to think of what is a scenario where things could spiral because of emotional factors. So fights with an X. One thing that I always noticed though is if there was a fight, the number one way to fix it is just talk like human beings. And even if you talk about the problem, eventually you're going to start going in circles and you'll both get bored and start talking about something else and 20 minutes later it's like the fight never even happened.

Speaker 2 (00:22:04):

Exactly.

Speaker 1 (00:22:05):

That's actually how I would deal with stressed out bands too.

Speaker 2 (00:22:08):

It just works out really, really well. And then also, I always had video game systems and stuff like that set up for 'em, so keep 'em busy whenever they had nothing to do. So time would go by a little bit quicker and they can just distract themselves because Call of Duty and sports games completely negate most bands thought process. It's

Speaker 1 (00:22:25):

Kind of crazy, isn't

Speaker 2 (00:22:26):

It? As soon as they start playing deathmatch and they get super into it, hours will go by and they don't even know what's going on. Man, I wish I could still play video games. Same for whatever reason, after I started getting super involved in audio, I just don't have the patience to sit down and play video games for hours and hours on end.

Speaker 1 (00:22:45):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:22:45):

Because all I think about is what I could be doing productive.

Speaker 1 (00:22:48):

Same here. So I used to love them when I was a teenager, sometimes I would stay up all night playing a game, then go to school, then come back and keep playing and stay up all night. I loved them for a long time, but then kind of around the time that the band started getting label interest, some switch flipped to where I just couldn't sit there and do it because my mind kept on flooding with, well, there's 17 things that are really important that you need to do. What are you doing? Who cares about the headshot?

Speaker 2 (00:23:24):

Yeah, exactly. All I would think about is like, oh shit. As soon as I sit down and play a video game, I'm like, oh, I got to get a mixer vision off to a band. So I'll play video games later and then later never comes, and I just keep working.

Speaker 1 (00:23:36):

Yeah, I feel your pain. So what other kind of stuff happened with this partner? It's a pretty detailed story.

Speaker 2 (00:23:43):

Yeah. Oh man. Besides all the things with excuses, during making records and stuff like that, we would always take projects on ourselves if we weren't tracking, if we were tracking a band, we'd usually do that as a team. I would track edit, reamp, he would mix, but then we would have our own mixing projects we would take on. So I never knew what he was working on outside of what we would take on together. So this is about towards the end of when we split off. All of a sudden out of nowhere, I started getting emails and messages from bands who were super, super pissed off at my old partner and huge detailed list about all the things he was making excuses about. They wanted their records, they'd paid him extra money to do extra work and stuff. He said he needed extra gear to get stuff done. And on top of that, he was buying and selling gear that he technically didn't have to other engineers.

Speaker 1 (00:24:38):

Hold on, let me make sure I understand. So number one, he was charging extra money for extra services, basically convincing the bands that in order to get done, they needed to do stuff that was not originally anticipated and so needed more money. And sometimes he would say, I need a piece of gear to be able to finish this project.

Speaker 2 (00:25:05):

So he would barter with gear with them, so they would buy him gear and send it to him as well as if he needed a certain plugin for something, they would buy him a plugin for it, even if he didn't actually need it. He was just making excuses for not getting work done. But yeah, so these bands were waiting months and months and months for their stuff.

Speaker 1 (00:25:24):

So they'd buy him a compressor, but then he wouldn't do the work.

Speaker 2 (00:25:28):

Exactly. So he would ghost out on 'em for weeks and weeks on end. Like say, oh, sorry, I'm going through some stuff right now. Or some of our gear isn't working properly. My grandmother died for the fifth time. Exactly. Excuses that would happen all the time. So eventually the bands got so pissed off about how long it's been taken, they would message me, they knew I was working with them, and one of them

Speaker 1 (00:25:52):

Me we're talking months here. Right?

Speaker 2 (00:25:54):

Months, three to six months between bands sending him stuff and not getting anything back.

Speaker 1 (00:26:00):

Dude, that's so fucked up.

Speaker 2 (00:26:02):

But because the bands that we'd worked with prior to that, they didn't really give him too much shit because he had the name. Got it. But after three to six months, bands are going to get a little pissy if they haven't gotten at least a couple mixes back by then.

Speaker 1 (00:26:18):

There's only so long that you can do that. It doesn't matter who you are.

Speaker 2 (00:26:21):

Exactly.

Speaker 1 (00:26:22):

You're going to get a little bit of leeway if you've got a name, but not six months.

Speaker 2 (00:26:27):

No. So after I started getting emails from bands about them being pissed off and stuff like that, I was trying to get him to do the work. I was like, dude, listen, it's not just your reputation that you're fucking up by not doing this with these bands. It's mine as well because I'm associated with you.

Speaker 4 (00:26:45):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:26:46):

So in trying to do that, honestly, me talking to him and getting pissed off and trying to make him work more actually made it worse. And he was doing way less. But what happened in the background of all of that was him borrowing gear that he was going to buy from other engineers, ghosting them, and then the gear that he was getting from bands, he would post up on eBay and Craigslist ads and whatnot, sell them to people, take their money and not send them anything.

Speaker 1 (00:27:18):

And what would happen with the gear that he was borrowing from people? Would he sell that too?

Speaker 2 (00:27:23):

Yeah, he would eventually sell that stuff for money as well, man. And the weird part about all of it was he wasn't on drugs either.

Speaker 1 (00:27:29):

I had a drummer in my band, not any of the bands that are known, but I had a drummer in my band once who I lent him a microphone and a compressor. He said he needed it for something, and then a month later I was like, can I have my 58 and my 36 30 back please? And he is like, oh, sorry, dude. I hawked it. What? I couldn't believe he was being serious. Blew my mind.

Speaker 2 (00:28:02):

Yeah. You're like, wait, you sold my stuff and weren't even going to tell me about it until I hit you up to get it back.

Speaker 1 (00:28:08):

You're in a band with me. Yeah. We've been practicing three times a week this entire month. If you needed money, why didn't you just ask to borrow some

Speaker 2 (00:28:17):

Money? Yeah, asking to borrow money is a lot cooler than borrowing gear from somebody and selling it behind their back.

Speaker 1 (00:28:24):

Yeah, dude, that is so, so this is why when you have a bad gut feeling about somebody, you really should try to figure out why you've got that gut feeling because their behavior will reflect on you. I'm sure you had to do tons of damage control to not have it completely fuck you up.

Speaker 2 (00:28:46):

Yeah. It literally derailed my entire career at that point. Not only did it become a public thing, because a lot of the bands threw 'em under the bus, but

Speaker 1 (00:28:55):

I remember that.

Speaker 2 (00:28:56):

Yep. A bunch of bands threw 'em under the bus. A bunch of engineers that we know threw 'em under the bus, and it turned into a giant fucking ordeal,

Speaker 1 (00:29:04):

Man. I remember a bunch of engineers posting screenshots of the guy's profile being like, do not do business with this guy. He will take six months and your money and not give you mixes. He will sell your gear. Do not ever lend him gear. It was one of those things, it spread like wildfire

Speaker 2 (00:29:28):

And you can imagine my shock when all of a sudden I'm getting hit up by all these bands and these engineers and all this stuff is getting dropped online and I have no idea what's going on. Because me and him just didn't talk about any of that stuff. I didn't know any of that was going on. So as soon as I start seeing my name being tagged and stuff with him, because of my association with him, I was like, holy shit, what is going on? I felt like the entire world was falling out from under my feet.

Speaker 1 (00:29:54):

Well, I mean in some ways it was because all you've got in this game is your reputation.

Speaker 2 (00:30:00):

Exactly. Once that's gone, your career is basically done.

Speaker 1 (00:30:03):

The thing is, I know we don't talk all the time or whatever, but we've known each other a really long time now, like six or seven years, and I haven't heard anybody say a single bad word about you. So I guess that means that you did a good job of salvaging the situation.

Speaker 2 (00:30:21):

Yeah, for

Speaker 1 (00:30:22):

Sure. I haven't heard anyone talk shit about you.

Speaker 2 (00:30:24):

Yeah, because the biggest negative that came out of it, besides the whole falling out thing with my partner and then the studio name pretty much getting ruined for the next year, year and a half, was I literally paid everyone back out of my own pocket that he owed money to. Oh man. I didn't need to do that, but I felt like I had to just because Fair enough. I felt bad about all of it, and I was like, listen, these people are out of money that they put their trust in somebody for, and since I'm associated with the guy, I feel semi responsible because if it wasn't for me buying the stuff that we have and giving him the space and the gear to be able to do his job, this probably wouldn't have happened, at least not with me involved. It might've happened regardless if he was doing stuff on his own, but I felt responsible enough to pay these people back and give people back their

Speaker 1 (00:31:16):

Gear. I totally back that. Yeah, you didn't have to. Have you ever read Extreme Ownership by any chance? The book by Jocko Willing?

Speaker 2 (00:31:24):

No, I have not.

Speaker 1 (00:31:25):

I recommend it for anybody trying to have a career in anything. It's a great book. I was familiar with this concept before the book, but he's a super popular podcaster author now, and I just wanted to throw out a book suggestion. It covers this sort of scenario, but I think that that was the best possible move because you basically, what you're saying by doing that is I'm owning it even though it's not my fault that that person is shady. It was in my house, my business, this happened under my roof, and I can't allow that sort of shit to happen with my name attached to it. That's good leadership and that's good stuff. People will remember that.

Speaker 2 (00:32:13):

Yeah, exactly. And that's basically how I was able to not only salvage my own career, but eventually I was able to start using the studio name again because it didn't have as much of a negative weight attached to it. It did a year and a half before all that.

Speaker 1 (00:32:29):

I didn't know that you did that, but that's really, really cool.

Speaker 2 (00:32:32):

Usually I don't like to talk about all that stuff just because it sucked ass, but I try to always do my best for people no matter what.

Speaker 1 (00:32:42):

Okay. So whenever people do good things and then post about it, sometimes I think it's warranted, but I'm always suspicious of people who are trying to make other people think that they're a good person. The good guy badge. I'm so good. Look at me, look at what I did. I always feel like there's an ulterior motive there, and I think that people can sniff that out. So I think not trying to bring attention to that kind of stuff is the right move, but in the context of a podcast where we're talking tensioners who are trying to get their careers off the ground, it is good information I think.

Speaker 2 (00:33:20):

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (00:33:20):

This kind of scenario, I guarantee you has happened to lots of people listening.

Speaker 2 (00:33:25):

Yeah, it is definitely not something that anyone wants to make public about their career and whatnot, but at the same time, I'm kind of glad that it happened. It gave me more drive to do this by myself and not have to rely on anyone else for my career to be what it's,

Speaker 1 (00:33:45):

Yeah, absolutely. So the cliche about lessons learned and silver linings, but I mean that shit is true no matter what bad thing happens to you, the way that you frame it. I mean, look, if you get hit by a bus, that sucks.

Speaker 3 (00:34:02):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:34:02):

Alright, so I'm not talking about that kind of stuff, but in the path of your career, there are things that are outside of your control that will happen to you. Yeah. I do believe that 99% of bad things that happen to us are our own fault, but there is a certain percentage of things that are not our fault and they happen to us. And it's just because we live in a world that has other people in it and has nature in it and shit happens sometimes, and how we deal with it and how we frame it will determine how our future turns out. I think that it's entirely possible that if you had not done that damage control and pay those people back, that you could be forever associated with that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (00:34:50):

Yeah, absolutely. And now it's at the point where I haven't had a single person mention my old partner at all in the last maybe three, four years

Speaker 1 (00:35:01):

Except for me.

Speaker 2 (00:35:02):

But when it comes to clients, a lot of people knew me from working with him. So now everyone just knows me for what I do. Like the bands that I've worked with, the amping stuff that I do and whatnot. I've completely veered off from what people used to know me as, and now they just know me as Phil from Sonic Assault. They don't know me as the dude who used to work for a dude at Sonic Assault.

Speaker 1 (00:35:29):

Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about the stuff you do in a minute, but I have a couple more things I want to explore about this. So during time period that year and a half of damage control, I bet you were super stressed out or in a pretty weird state of mind because it probably seemed like your future was very threatened.

Speaker 2 (00:35:53):

Oh, for sure. Literally in that timeframe, after we'd split up and I stopped using the studio name and started working under a different name, I had maybe one to two projects in that entire year and a half. I wasn't getting amping work. I wasn't getting mixing work pretty much. Everyone was not even paying attention to anything I was doing at the time

Speaker 1 (00:36:13):

After doing it pretty consistently. Right?

Speaker 2 (00:36:17):

Yeah, it was pretty much, it took about a year for me to start actually getting consistent work again, but there was a nice 12 month period after that whole online thing happened where everything was thrown out there and was made public where literally I was getting zero hits for work. And even people I was hitting up, they would be kind of interested, but then they would know about what happened and have a weird feeling about it because they didn't know whether or not to trust me or not and fair enough. Right, exactly. Because when you are able to read what happened, even though a few of the bands actually name dropped me saying that I had nothing to do with anything, still you read that you see the studio name and you're like, oh, well this guy was associated with this guy, so he might be the same way as well.

Speaker 1 (00:37:04):

Yeah. That's why I'm saying if you had not paid everyone back, the story would end with what you just said, and he's associated with that guy. He might be like that guy, even though there's no proof that you are like that. You know how it is

(00:37:21):

In our society if someone gets accused of something terrible, even if it comes out that they didn't do it, that clings to them for a long, long time. So if you were to end the story at, he did fucked up things, but I didn't do it the end, you're leaving it open for people to associate you with that. However you finish the story off by paying everything back, therefore proving that you're not like that, and that you got fucked just as bad as everyone else did. This was happening in secret behind your back, and you did what was necessary to do right by people and make sure that nobody was fucked over. And that's a completely different story actually, that works in your favor almost. In some ways. You could look at that as a blessing because you got the chance to prove what kind of person you actually are.

Speaker 2 (00:38:15):

Yeah, absolutely. And then it was also great too because our engineer peers that I was close to at the time and friends with, they all had my back because they already knew me as a person and knew the things that I was doing and wasn't doing. So it was nice having our community that had my back during that time as well.

Speaker 1 (00:38:35):

I can tell you that I never thought a bad thing about you. I was talking to Will Putney, I was in lots of contact with Will back then. He never had a bad thing to say about you. So I can confirm that our little circle of friends from that time period never bought into it

Speaker 2 (00:38:53):

For sure. And then I actually became better friends with Will after that whole situation happened as well.

Speaker 1 (00:38:59):

That's what I'm saying. The way you handle that kind of situation, no matter what bad happens to you in life, the way you handle it, the way that you go about the recovery says a lot about your character to people.

Speaker 2 (00:39:13):

Oh, for sure.

Speaker 1 (00:39:14):

And people will remember that for sure. I'm not surprised one bit. Well, I'm glad you got through that. Let's talk about your amping.

Speaker 2 (00:39:22):

Okay.

Speaker 1 (00:39:22):

You're known as a guitar tone king. I know people like your mixes and stuff, but I think that the thing that you're most known for, and I think you also advertise this the most market it not actually advertise, but the thing that you put out there the most is your amping work and your guitar tone work, and that's what people know you as is a guitar tone dude.

Speaker 2 (00:39:45):

Yeah. Yeah, I definitely, I've definitely become the Reamp guy over the last few years. Everyone knew me as a tone guy back in the sneak forum days. I was doing a lot of amping work for other engineers back then, but since Facebook has become such a great place to show what you're working on and things that you can do, basically I just post up amp shots and amping videos all the time.

Speaker 1 (00:40:07):

So what drew you to that? What's the deal there? Because it's interesting, I know a lot of guitar players who are more interested in playing, but there's a select few group of people that I know that were more turned on by the way it sounded than the actual playing part. Would you consider yourself in that category?

Speaker 2 (00:40:30):

I'm kind of both. I really love playing guitar and I like being proficient at my instrument, but at the same time, I like to know what combinations of amps and cabs, pickups, and whatnot make for certain sounds. Even when I first started playing guitar, I would listen to a record and I was paying more attention to how it sounded than the riffs themselves because how it sounded is what drew me in.

Speaker 1 (00:40:53):

How did you start experimenting with tone? Where did that begin for you?

Speaker 2 (00:40:57):

It started literally when I first started playing guitar, I would read Guitar World Magazine, and when they started putting in illustrations of guitar players in their rigs, I would literally look at everything that they were using, like pedals, amp chains, what kind of guitars they were using, what kind of pickups they were using, listening to their records so I can see if maybe any of that stuff was on those records and just buying random pedals and just experimenting with how they sounded together.

Speaker 1 (00:41:23):

So basically you got obsessed with it?

Speaker 2 (00:41:25):

Yeah, I got obsessed really, really early. I was obsessed with tone. Probably within the first year or two I was playing guitar.

Speaker 1 (00:41:32):

I think everyone who's going to get good at something creative, really anything but something creative or in the recording world or if you want to be a guitar virtual, whatever it is, there's going to have to be a time period long before money or career enters the equation where you're just obsessed and you can't skip that stage if you don't go through that stage. It's almost like I don't think you'll ever be able to truly develop your own identity or real hireable skills. People want people who are good enough at something that they could only have gotten there by just going nuts with it for a certain period of time.

Speaker 2 (00:42:15):

Yeah, exactly. And then once YouTube became such a big thing and bands were putting up in studio videos of them recording their records, I'd always pause it on whatever sections, amps and cabinets would pop up so I could see what they were using while recording and then also seeing what kind of microphones they were using, what kind of cabinets they were using, and trying to experiment with that stuff on my own. So that's where my collector side came in, where I started buying multiple amps, multiple cabinets, and just trying things out and seeing what I liked.

Speaker 1 (00:42:49):

Did you ever have a big time mentor or did you basically figure this shit out on your own?

Speaker 2 (00:42:55):

I figured it out completely on my own.

Speaker 1 (00:42:57):

I think that that's really awesome. It just goes to show that, and this is pre URM too.

Speaker 2 (00:43:04):

Yeah. This is when my only place to get information was literally the sneak form. That was it.

Speaker 1 (00:43:10):

And you still figure it out. It just goes to show that if someone is not getting better, there's two options. One, they just don't have the talent for it, which could be the case. But the thing is, I feel like even if someone has below average talent, if they put in above average work, they can still get decent. Maybe they'll never be like Mark Lewis with their guitar tones, like a guitar tone, God, but they can at least get competent. So if you have some talent, even medium average talent, if you work your ass off, you can get really good at this, but you have to really want it. And it's just proof to me that you can do it by getting obsessed. There's all the tools out there. So even if it's just YouTube videos where you're pausing it on one frame where it shows the amp settings. There you go.

Speaker 2 (00:44:11):

Yeah. Yeah, because I've always looked up to mark for guitar tones as well. That's why I have cinder blocks underneath my cabinets. I stole that from him eight, nine years ago when I saw a picture of his cab room with cinder blocks underneath his cabinets, and I hit him up and was like, Hey, what's up with the cinder blocks? He's like, oh, I use that to decouple the cabinets to make 'em tighter and make the low end a lot tighter. And I was like, oh, that's a very good idea. I'm going to use that.

Speaker 1 (00:44:36):

Yeah, that's where I got that one too.

Speaker 2 (00:44:38):

Yeah, it's like the best thing ever. Like $2 cinder blocks make all the world a difference with guitar cabinets.

Speaker 1 (00:44:45):

So you basically looked into any resource you could. How did you experiment though?

Speaker 2 (00:44:53):

I experimented by working a lot to the point of where I was basically broke all the time trying to find deals on guitar amps and cabinets so I can sit

Speaker 1 (00:45:02):

There. Oh, so you worked working at a day job to save money and then buy gear?

Speaker 2 (00:45:07):

Exactly. Basically, the studio was making me enough to pay most of my bills, and then I had my day job to pay the rest of the bills, but also have extra money to buy gear. I never came from money or anything like that. Everything I own, I literally bought with cash that I made from either the studio or from my day job.

Speaker 1 (00:45:26):

That's admirable. I got to say something. There's a misconception out there that people who come from money have an advantage in the music game. That's not true at all. It's not true. As a matter of fact, I'm super fortunate that my dad's fame happened once. I was already almost an adult. So I grew up in the lean years, which kind of shaped me. I know a lot of people who grew up with super successful parents who are just useless, man. I had a best friend at one point in time who his parents had way more money than mine ever did. These people were rich as fuck, and they sent him to Berkeley and they would always buy him these beautiful PRSs and Les Paul customs and everything you could ever want.

Speaker 3 (00:46:18):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:46:19):

The dude was fucking useless. He actually failed out of Berkeley, not dropped out, just failed. Failed. How the fuck do you fail out of Berkeley? He had every advantage, and I know, dude, I know several people like that who had every superficial advantage you can imagine, and just turned out to be nothing. And then I know lots of people who are killing it at music who came from really shitty backgrounds or normal backgrounds, but just not money. And that formed their drive and they saw music as the way to escape that sort of life for themselves.

Speaker 2 (00:47:03):

How I got into music was because I came from a household with a single mom, no dad, no money. We're always broke. So I literally used music as an escape to get away from all the things that I was going through in my childhood from bullying and whatnot. So I got a huge appreciation from music at a young age just because it was my escape from everything.

Speaker 1 (00:47:26):

And I'm sure that that instilled work ethic in you to the idea of not wanting to end up like that.

Speaker 2 (00:47:33):

Yeah, because at the time, my mom was working three jobs. My grandfather, who's now almost 80 years old, he was still working a full-time job, and I was around those two my entire life. So I saw nothing but hardworking individuals while growing up.

Speaker 1 (00:47:48):

Man, if you grow up with a silver spoon, you're not going to appreciate what it takes because if you were born in a time where your parents are already successful, then you missed out on the whole period of time where they,

Speaker 2 (00:48:06):

Yeah, you missed out on the grind.

Speaker 1 (00:48:08):

You missed out on the grind. So you just kind of assume that this is the way the world works,

Speaker 2 (00:48:12):

And that's the biggest false reality ever. You have to work so hard for everything.

Speaker 1 (00:48:18):

Yeah, totally. I think even people who have a celebrity parents are going to have a hard time. And I know if people listening might be like, yeah, well Michael Douglas and Kirk Douglas, or

Speaker 2 (00:48:31):

Like Martin Sheen and Charlie Sheen, those type of situations,

Speaker 1 (00:48:35):

But those are the exception. How many,

Speaker 2 (00:48:38):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:48:39):

Rich and famous people have kids that never do shit a lot. Most, yeah. Yeah. Those family dynasties are the rarest or the rare thing. I think that it's a false reality to think that that's normal. And I think that the only reason that people think that that's normal is because they don't see the useless kids of these celebrities don't get any press, so you're not even aware that they exist. So if all you're aware of are these, I just call them dynasties, then you're going to think that that's the way the world works when it's not.

Speaker 2 (00:49:16):

No, not even opinion.

Speaker 1 (00:49:18):

So all that said, obviously you worked your ass off, but we're talking about gear and you know that everybody says that it's in the hands. In your opinion, what percentage is the hands and what percentage is the gear?

Speaker 2 (00:49:32):

The hands is definitely a huge part of it because from amping, as many records as I've amped, I've heard a lot of different sounding hands, and you can literally have the best signal in the world, but if your hands don't sound good, it doesn't matter what rig you put it through, it's not going to sound good. So your hand tone means a lot, but with different options, all the different amps and cabinets, I, I usually can work around that by finding a pairing that works well for whatever the DI is that I get. So you're not going to be able to just plug into a 51 50 every single time and it's going to work.

Speaker 1 (00:50:08):

Yeah. So I'm sure there's some cases where it's just not salvageable.

Speaker 2 (00:50:14):

Yeah, no. There's been times where I've gotten DI's where it's just like, yo, this isn't going to work at all. But over the years, I've come up with ways to deal with bad DI's or ones that are just clipped the hell in back. So I'm able to usually get pretty good results no matter what I'm sent. But sometimes I just get stuff sent to me that I can't get a good tone out of it regardless.

Speaker 1 (00:50:35):

What do you do in that case?

Speaker 2 (00:50:36):

Usually if it's unworkable, I'll literally hit the engineer up or the band that sent it to me. Listen guys, I tried to get something with this but it's not working. I'll ask them what guitar they used, what signal chain they used, and try to figure out what might've gone wrong and either have them retrack it or just try to get the best result I can with what I was sent. If they can't do that, but most of the time I'll hit them up and tell them like, Hey, this isn't good. What are you guys using so we can try to get this to be better.

Speaker 1 (00:51:03):

I feel that that could go either way. I mean, I think that's the right way to approach it, but I feel like there's sometimes some people who might say, it's not our fault, it's your fault. Fucking mix it or make the guitar tone. There's no way that it could possibly be on our end. But I also think that once you have enough of a reputation for being really good at something like you are for guitar tone, if you say, what I sent was unworkable, there's a higher possibility, higher chance that they'll believe you.

Speaker 2 (00:51:33):

Yeah. No, I really have zero issues with bands or other engineers. Whenever I say anything negative about tracks I was sent, usually they're really, really cool about it and we usually get it worked out and if we don't get it worked out, usually I can figure out a way to get the results that will make them happy.

Speaker 1 (00:51:50):

Got it. Does it ever involve you playing it?

Speaker 2 (00:51:53):

No, I've never replayed anything for anyone.

Speaker 1 (00:51:57):

Damn son.

Speaker 2 (00:51:58):

Yeah, there's been times where I've wanted to, but I just have this certain mentality where it's like I shouldn't have to replay it for people. If I have to, I will. I try to keep everyone honest with themselves as much as possible. So yeah, at one point you do have to retrack things yourself sometimes, but at the same time, I want whoever's playing this to do it the best they can, so I know that it's them and they know that it's them.

Speaker 1 (00:52:25):

Yeah, okay. Fair enough. I've retraced some things just because I don't know, I couldn't deal with it. So what are some of the fucked up situations? You're saying sometimes you get deis that are clipped to hell and back?

Speaker 2 (00:52:37):

Yeah, sometimes I'll get 'em and it literally looks like someone ran 'em through a brick wall limiter and all it is is noise. And thankfully through high game guitar sounds, normally you don't really hear any of that, but through de normalizing and then also transient shaping, you can sometimes get around that, but for clean guitars, it never works out. Or my favorite is whenever I get super bad edited DI's with pops and clicks all over the place.

Speaker 1 (00:53:03):

Do you just manually remove them?

Speaker 2 (00:53:05):

Yeah, I'll just go through and I'll cut and cross fade where all the pops and clicks are at and try to smooth it out the best I can.

Speaker 1 (00:53:12):

How much time do you normally put in to fixing DI's?

Speaker 2 (00:53:17):

If it's super, super bad, I won't put a ton of time into it depending on how much I charge for it. But if it's something that the band really, really is passionate about, I'll just hit 'em up and be like, Hey, there's a lot of pops and clicks in this and I can fix it, but it's going to cost a little extra money. And if they're cool with that, then I'll go through and I'll be really thorough and get everything done.

Speaker 1 (00:53:36):

Makes sense. Are they generally cool with that?

Speaker 2 (00:53:39):

Yeah, normally they're very cool with it. I already think that my rates are pretty reasonable as is. So usually if I say I need to charge a little extra to do extra work, they're usually really fine with it.

Speaker 1 (00:53:50):

What are some of the other typical problems that you encounter

Speaker 2 (00:53:54):

Besides clipping and bad editing? Those are probably the biggest two, but whenever people send me wave files that have the tempo embedded in them, when they send those acid files, that's always a pain in the ass. And I'm not sure why that happens from time to time, but sometimes I'll get stuff in where it's like they send me a tempo map and the Tempo Map is all over the place, but the guitar tracks themselves have 95 BPM embed it in the track itself.

Speaker 1 (00:54:19):

Interesting.

Speaker 2 (00:54:20):

Yeah, it's really, really dumb. It's something that happens with Reaper all the time, whenever I get files from Reaper fucking Reaper. So what I always do when that happens is I'll just open up an empty session, put in the tempo that's baked into those tracks, and then I'll just as regular waves without all that shit in it. That's a workaround for that. What about tuning issues? Tuning issues? Thankfully a lot of bands are really decent about tuning, but there are times where I will get stuff that's super out of tune and most of the time I'll just tell 'em to retrack it because usually I'm busy with mixing and whatnot, so I don't have time to just go through and just start retuning things with the autotune or meloy.

Speaker 1 (00:54:59):

The fact that you can do that though with Meloy is pretty breakthrough, even though it's been around for a long time now. It still blows my

Speaker 2 (00:55:08):

Mind. Yeah, it's definitely a very invaluable tool, especially if you have bands. I have a lot of open rung out chords. That's when you hear tuning issues instantly, and if both guitars in the bass are slightly out of tune from one another, it basically makes you want to kill yourself as soon as you hear that.

Speaker 1 (00:55:26):

So do you do any tuning at all, even the bass? Maybe.

Speaker 2 (00:55:30):

Sometimes I will, but very rarely I have to. Usually stuff's pretty in tune, which is surprising. I expect to get tuning issues all the time, but all the bands that send me stuff, usually it's pretty decent.

Speaker 1 (00:55:42):

Do you think Evert Tune has changed the game?

Speaker 2 (00:55:45):

Oh, for sure. It's cut down tracking times for everybody. There is a little bit of tone sacrifice that you get with Evert Tune, with sustain and a little bit of the body of the instrument, but in a mix you're not really going to hear that, so it doesn't really matter. But the tuning stability is

Speaker 1 (00:56:00):

Awesome, man. I just remember old tuning nightmare sessions where you're spending all day trying to record two chords because you can't get them in tune.

Speaker 2 (00:56:11):

Yeah, I've had times where I've just had the guitar player hold out the chord and I'll literally be tuning it while they're strumming it out just to make sure that it's in tune for literally two seconds of apart.

Speaker 1 (00:56:21):

Okay. So what do you think is the most important factor in a great heavy guitar tone?

Speaker 2 (00:56:27):

Besides finding the right saturation? I think a lot of people are too scared of either over regaining the signal or under gaining it, but finding the right saturation as well as the right midrange movement. Those are my two most important things that I look for in a good guitar tone, how the mid range holds everything together and how it moves in the mix itself.

Speaker 1 (00:56:47):

So let's talk about the saturation. Do you typically find that you find the right saturation in stages? The way that, I guess that's kind of at this point, the traditional way of dialing a heavy tone, just plugging right in isn't the traditional way anymore. It's done in stages, but is that typically how you do it or what's your thought process on finding the right saturation? Where does it begin and how do you, I realize there's no one size fits all, but if there's a general thought process, what would that be?

Speaker 2 (00:57:23):

It's really just because since I do a lot of my tone finding while I'm amping, it's all about how I'm hitting the amp from my amp in box first. Sometimes I'll plug directly into an amp with just my ramp signal going into the amp just to see how it's hitting the amp by itself before I even introduce a boost or anything. So once I figure out what the AMP is giving me with just the signal into it is when I'll decide what type of boost I want to use and how much of it I want to use. Depending on if I want something super aggressive, something that's just going to add a little bit of extra gain, or if something that's just going to cut a lot of the low end, if it's a really tubby di, I just find what boost I have that cuts a lot of low end in spots that I want it. So it's just experimenting really just figuring out what sounds best for whatever's running through the amp, but that's how I kind of find it.

Speaker 1 (00:58:18):

So you're not picking the boost in a preconceived notion sort of way. You're listening to what you're given and then intentionally picking the pedal that will create the result you're after?

Speaker 2 (00:58:34):

Exactly. I can pretty much, since I've used every single one of my boost pedals hundreds and hundreds of times, I kind of have an idea of what each one of them does through each one of my amps. So once I hear what the guitar is doing with just the amp itself, that's how I go about picking which boost I want to try out to get the result that I want.

Speaker 1 (00:58:53):

I think one of the biggest mistakes that engineers fall into is preconceived notions when it comes to gear. Like, this band sounds like this, so I'm just going to get the 51 50, the rectal cab and the tube screamer, and it should work. And sure, it

Speaker 2 (00:59:09):

Might work 90% of the time it will work, but it might not be the right thing for how your hands sound or how your guitar sounds.

Speaker 1 (00:59:17):

Yeah. Okay. So you're making these decisions based on the material that's presented to you. I hope that people listening pick that up as the biggest wisdom here because, so I think there's pros and cons to every technological advancement, and I think the internet is fantastic for learning and promoting and stuff, but at the same time, it has helped propel this idea that you can just grab a setting from somebody and that it's just going to work. No,

Speaker 2 (00:59:50):

Presets are cool, but they're cool as a starting place just to kind of hear it and then go from there. Relying on presets, it never works. It's all mixed

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):

Dependent. Yeah. I mean, look, there's obviously some times where you pull up an effects plugin and put it on and it's just perfect, or there's a preset in some plugin that you made or that just works perfectly for some scenario, but that's just as specific as if you were to dial it yourself, in my opinion. It's not that it's random, it's just rare. So while it might happen, it's definitely not going to work every single time. There's no way.

Speaker 2 (01:00:34):

No, and that's also when people ask me if I use templates or anything like that, I'm like, no. I literally start from zero every single time. I just want to vibe with what I'm listening to and get a feeling for it. And then once I get a feeling for it, then I just start working on it from there. Even routing. Even routing. Wow. Yeah, because sometimes certain things that I have set up permanently, certain compressors I use and whatnot, sometimes they don't work for what I'm going for, so I literally will go through and just try stuff out until I get the feel that I'm looking for.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):

But even your cubase session, there's no buses, nothing. It's like, nope, literally zero.

Speaker 2 (01:01:11):

Literally zero. I remake all of my buses and stuff every single time.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):

Impressive.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):

It just works better for me. It keeps me excited about it, and I don't feel like I'm just doing the same thing over and over again.

Speaker 1 (01:01:23):

You got to be quick though to have that not be a waste of your time, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I pretty much have a very limited way of how I do things, so I do the whole less is more approach, so it doesn't really take me very long to get a good foundation going when I do start

Speaker 1 (01:01:39):

Mixing. Well, I've always thought that a few of the right moves is better than a lot of the wrong moves. Oh, for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):

Yeah. That's why I tell a lot of younger engineers who hit me up or want to talk to me about mixing, I tell 'em all the time to stop obsessing over individual sound. It's cool to obsess over 'em whenever you're first learning, but when you start mixing and you start obsessing, it gets to be a negative extremely fast. You start isolating one thing and by the time you know it, nothing works together.

Speaker 1 (01:02:11):

How do you balance that though with obsessing over guitar tone? Because okay, guitar tone I know can be a rabbit hole, and it can be one of these things where you get the right tone in the first five to 10 minutes, but then you keep going for five hours, your ears are shot and it's gone. And I've even worked with other people who are great at guitar tone and they do this too. They'll dial it and it'll be awesome, and then they'll just keep going and fucking ruin it. And it happens also with heat queuing. Start notching guitars and you'll find the two frequencies that really suck, but then you'll hear two more that are kind of annoying. Before it, it's neutered. But then at the same time, in order to really understand this stuff, you do have to be obsessed to some degree. So where's the line?

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):

There's healthy obsession and then there's unhealthy obsession with guitar tones. You can get into an unhealthy obsession area pretty quick once you start adding in more mics or you're starting to tweak a little too much. I've gotten to the point where I like to pre-mix stuff and I'll use amp sims as placeholder tones just so I have kind of a foundation of something that kind of moves cool with the di, and I'll mix around that. And then once I get to a point where I like what I'm hearing out of my mix, I'll bypass those amp sims and then I'll start doing guitar tones.

Speaker 1 (01:03:36):

Do the amp sims ever stay? Are you ever like, wow, that actually turned out better than anything I could have gotten with the amps?

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):

No.

Speaker 1 (01:03:44):

Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:03:45):

Every single time I always end up amping with real amps, even on leads and cleans.

Speaker 1 (01:03:49):

So two things I find interesting. So the template thing, I think that templates, the word template is not the best word because there's such a broad spectrum of what it could mean. For instance, I had a mixing template I used, but all it was was that I had some buses that then routed to stems and mastered and unmastered and then vocals up, vocals down. I got it from Andrew Wade. It's so that you could print everything at the same time. And I didn't want to set that up every single time, a lot of time spent to build that, but because I was the dude who was often bouncing out stems for people back when I was in Florida, sometimes it would take an entire day, the old method, like an entire day wasted bouncing stems when with Andrew Wade's method, you could do the whole track in five minutes. So that was a template that I started using religiously. John Douglas started using it religiously too, but it didn't involve pre-mix mixing or anything. It just involved that basic routing. Now I know other people who, when you say template, it is a fucking template. There is EQ settings, there's everything, and then they just swap out track presets. Now, I'm not talking about bad engineers here. I know some really great engineers who do this,

(01:05:24):

So I don't think that it's a judgment pro or con. I think it's obviously whatever works for you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):

Exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:05:32):

Because Billy Decker, the country guy, he is phenomenal.

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):

Yeah, that dude's awesome,

Speaker 1 (01:05:38):

Dude. Yeah, his mixes are fucking incredible and he works off of a template system. He can go from scratch just as well as anybody, but he's got a template that he's been developing for 15 years and it's great. And I know Forrester Seve, who is known as an analog hardware kind of guy, actually at the URM summit, his whole speech this past year was about track presets and how he has 10 of them per track, so for 10 different scenarios, and so he will mix and match them as a starting point only, right? It's not mix and match and then you're good to go, but it's just a workflow thing. And then I know people who start from scratch every single time, and I find that one's not better than the other.

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):

No, it's just whatever you're comfortable with, however you makes you work more efficiently for yourself.

Speaker 1 (01:06:35):

Well, what you said is it keeps you excited. I think that's the key actually, is whatever keeps your head in the game. So for me, setting up a template every single time took my head out of the game. I dreaded it. The template that I used helped me stay in the game till I left the game, but while I was in the game, it helped me keep my head in the game. But obviously you're a different human being, so whatever works for you is what's best.

Speaker 2 (01:07:04):

And I personally just like doing it from scratch, just it makes me feel like I'm not going through the motion. I feel like I actually get more creative working from scratch. I never try to do things the same way. I always like to experiment. So doing it from scratch has always given me the opportunity to try things out that normally I probably wouldn't have tried out if I was doing things very similar every single time.

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):

Man, we've had some people nail the mix who are like that. Like Carl Bound for instance. Are you familiar with him?

Speaker 2 (01:07:33):

The name sounds familiar, but I'm not sure if I know him or not.

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):

He is one of Colin Richardson's proteges.

Speaker 2 (01:07:39):

Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:07:40):

He's every bit as good as Colin. He's fucking incredible.

Speaker 2 (01:07:45):

If you're going to work with Colin, you got to be pretty damn good.

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):

Yeah, exactly. If you get to the point where Colin lets you mix with him,

Speaker 2 (01:07:53):

Yeah, you know you're doing a hell of a job.

Speaker 1 (01:07:55):

Yeah, exactly. I can tell you from experience, Colin is the most meticulous mixer I've ever seen in my entire life. Oh, hearing stories from other bands about Colin is some of the best stuff ever. Dude. When he mixed the doth record, that shit blew my mind. I had never seen anybody put in that kind of detail, and the guy was known for taking a long time, always going over budget and taking forever, but it was not because he was fucking around or anything. The thing is, the man does not move forward until what he's working on sounds the best it can possibly sound. And unlike a lot of other people, sometimes when people obsess over something, they'll start to ruin it. He's got this special ability to not do that. So when he's sitting there working on something, it's getting better and better and better and better, and he's got this vision and he knows that he can get it 50% better and he just keeps on going and going, but he doesn't do that spiral out of control thing.

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):

I've

Speaker 1 (01:09:07):

Never really seen anybody besides him really, really be able to obsess that hard without ruining things.

Speaker 2 (01:09:16):

Yeah, because usually when you end up obsessing like that, you do end up negatively affecting whatever you're working on, but Colin is just a freaking monster. Anyway,

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):

Dude, when he recorded the trivium drums at my house, it took them three weeks just to decide on a bass drum spot in the room and miking.

Speaker 2 (01:09:35):

That does not surprise me one bit, but that bass drum sounded incredible. Oh, I bet it did. Oh

Speaker 1 (01:09:41):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:09:42):

That was like him with string changes, he'll make people change strings like after a couple takes.

Speaker 1 (01:09:47):

Yeah, I don't blame them. I back it. If you can get away with it, I back it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:52):

If you can do it, go for it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:55):

As a guitar tone freak, what are your thoughts on string changes?

Speaker 2 (01:09:58):

Oh, I'm all about it. As soon as I start hearing the high end of the strings dull out, those suckers are coming off and new ones are getting put on.

Speaker 1 (01:10:06):

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 OPEC shuga, bring me the Horizon. Gaira asking Alexandria Machine Head and Papa Roach among many, many others over 60 at this point. Then at the end of the month, the producer who mixed it comes on and does a live streaming walkthrough of exactly how they mix the song on the album and takes your questions live on air.

(01:10:58):

And these are guys like TLA Will Putney, Jens Borin, Dan Lancaster to I Matson, Andrew Wade, and many, many more. You'll also get access to Mix Lab, which is our collection of dozens of bite-sized mixing tutorials that cover all the basics as well as Portfolio Builder, which is a library of pro quality multi-tracks cleared for use in your portfolio. So your career will never again be held back by the quality of your source material. And for those of you who really want to step up their game, we have another membership tier called URM Enhance, which includes everything I already told you about, and access to our massive library of fast tracks, which are deep, super detailed courses on intermediate and advanced topics like gain, staging, mastering low end and so forth. It's over 500 hours of content. And man, let me tell you, this stuff is just insanely detailed and enhanced.

(01:11:52):

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. So we put out a guitar course with Andrew Wade about a year and a half ago called Ultimate Guitar Production, and one of the sections was all about the little things that make a big difference when you add them up, like the pick size, the pick material, the string gauges, the string types, how often you change them, like the length of the cable, all those things that where one of them alone might not make or break you.

(01:12:47):

When you start adding them all together, they make up a huge part of the tone. And I remember in our group, we always have a private group for these courses. When we were on the string change on the pick in the string change chapter, a lot of people would get really uppity I guess, about the string change thing because they think that it's just a privileged thing. You're privileged to be able to do that. I can't afford it. And I understand, but that doesn't change the reality. The reality is that strings die depends on how hard you hit them, depends on the pH of the player, but they die. They do oftentimes a lot faster than you would like them to,

Speaker 2 (01:13:39):

Especially depending on the strings that you get as well. A lot of the newer strings I've noticed that lasts a little longer, but it just depends. NY xls, those have become my new favorite string just because they last a little bit longer than the old Drio xls. But at the same time, as soon as you start hearing them dull out a little bit, it's time to change 'em no matter what.

Speaker 1 (01:14:01):

Yeah. So my criteria was always, there comes a point where the guitar and Evert tune will get in the way of this, but there comes a point where it's just really, if it was tuning fine, everything was fine, but then just can't really tune it very well without spending 15 minutes. That is hint number one. And hint number two is like you said, something's different with the high end. So I would always recording at di, but I would always keep referencing back to the beginning of the song.

Speaker 2 (01:14:36):

Yeah, that's the best place to do it. Especially with fresh strings, you can instantly hear the difference between fresh and the strings needing to be changed. You can literally ab with the band and be like, listen, this is what we started with, this is where we're at now. Obviously if you can't hear the change, I'm sorry, but we need to change the strings.

Speaker 1 (01:14:52):

How often on average

Speaker 2 (01:14:53):

When I was still tracking bands, we would change strings maybe three times per song.

Speaker 1 (01:14:59):

Damn. Okay, so you did a lot or are we talking about rhythms?

Speaker 2 (01:15:03):

Yeah, rhythms. We'd always change two to three times per song.

Speaker 1 (01:15:07):

That's awesome. So what I would do is I would always order extra low strings.

Speaker 2 (01:15:12):

Those are the ones that are going to die first.

Speaker 1 (01:15:16):

So basically I would buy two packs per song and then four of the lowest string per song. So two extra of the lowest and one extra of the second to lowest strings. And so that would give me a total of four of the low string per song, and that tended to get me through with most bands.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):

Yeah, for sure. Because most metal bands are playing the first top three strings anyway. You don't have to change out the high strings.

Speaker 1 (01:15:47):

Did you get any resistance on that?

Speaker 2 (01:15:50):

No, because they loved me. I was working at my day job, which was a guitar store, so I was getting strings at cost, so they didn't care. But also what I was doing too was whenever we were tracking bands, I would actually add in strings heads and sticks into the budget. So when I would send them a quote of how much it would cost for us to track them and do everything from start to finish, I would add in string pricing heads and sticks. So whatever they paid us, I just took out of that and bought all the strings heads and sticks that we needed for the session.

Speaker 1 (01:16:24):

Would you itemize it in the invoice?

Speaker 2 (01:16:26):

No. Most of the time I just told 'em that I added it in there and they were usually cool with it, but I would always show 'em my receipt from when I bought the stuff so they would know that's where that money went.

Speaker 1 (01:16:35):

Okay. Yeah, so I would do that too. Also with the drum tech and stuff, I always wanted to have my drums professionally tuned. I would just add that into the quote and not really make it an option.

Speaker 2 (01:16:48):

No, exactly. As long as if they see the price and they agree to it, that's all that really matters. They're going to be appreciative of the fact that you even cared enough to make sure they string sticks and heads.

Speaker 1 (01:17:00):

Yeah, totally. Man. I've always told engineers that if the band is not willing to do it, you need to just do it. It take it out of the budget, just do it. Sometimes you'll record bands who they've been around the block and they know, and so then they just take care of it, which is nice. But oftentimes if you're recording with bands that are brand new or budget strapped, which is a lot of 'em, they're not going to know about that or think about that.

Speaker 2 (01:17:30):

No, exactly. Because whenever I was still tracking bands, I haven't tracked a band in a while. Literally my pre-prep for that is what tunings are all the songs in? What string gauges do you guys like to use? What picks do you guys like to use? And then what are your guitars and what pickups are in? Just so I'd have an idea of what they were coming in with.

Speaker 1 (01:17:50):

So on the subject of picks, have you ever experienced that lots of guitar players tend to pick a pick that is not optimal for how they play or what they're playing

Speaker 2 (01:18:02):

All the time?

Speaker 1 (01:18:03):

How do you get around that? That was the other topic in that group I was telling you about. People would get heated about because they'd be like, I've been using this pick for 15 years, like blah, blah, blah. You can't tell me what pick to use. And it's like, well buddy, I'm not telling you what to do. Just telling you that different picks sound different and they all have advantages and disadvantages. True. Depending on what you're playing. For instance, if you're playing rummy shit, ultra heavy picks that are a block of wood might not be as good as a medium pick, for instance.

Speaker 2 (01:18:36):

Yeah. Because basically what I have always done, even when I first started out is I have a big giant cup of tons and tons of different picks from sizes to material to brands, and I'll just dump that thing out and we'll just go through and try picks out and see what sounds best and what feels best. So I always try to find a nice balance between what they're comfortable with, but also what sounds good for what they're doing.

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):

Yeah. My approach too was if something sounded great but they weren't comfortable with it, I would be like, okay, take 45 minutes and practice. I'll see you in 45.

Speaker 2 (01:19:13):

That's a good thing too, because once you get used to it, you're comfortable with it, but anything, you put something new in your hand, you're not going to be comfortable with it right away.

Speaker 1 (01:19:21):

And if you make them track right then and there when they're uncomfortable, they're going to resent you for it. They're not going to be playing their best. They're going to think it's an awkward experience. And while at the same time, if you're take 45 minutes and you charge by the hour, they might not be stoked on that either. However, I believe that when they hear the difference, I've never had anybody hear that, well, I don't charge by the hour, but never did. Me neither. Yeah. I mean, maybe I did at the very, very beginning, but I had never had anybody who I told them to do the work to get comfortable. I'll see you in 45 minutes or an hour. I'm going to my room, text me when you're ready. I've never there sometimes a little weird about it thinking I was just trying to get out of doing work. But then once they got comfortable with it and they heard the difference, I would track a clip with the pick that they were originally using and then make them practice with the pick I wanted them to use for about 45 minutes. Then we would track that and I'd a B it and it would be obvious, and then they would never argue again about that from that point forward.

Speaker 2 (01:20:34):

Yeah. I used to do the same exact thing. Even when they would come in and with their guitars and their guitars didn't sound very good or they weren't set up good, I always would get my guitars set up and in the tuning that they were coming to recording so we can AB stuff and they would always give me shit about them using my guitar because they didn't like how it felt compared to their guitar, but most of the time my stuff sounded better than theirs. So I would just leave them to play on my stuff for a little bit, and once they felt like they were comfortable with it, then we'd just get to work

Speaker 1 (01:21:04):

Even if it takes two hours, whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:21:08):

Usually what I'd like to do with bands anyway is the first day is literally just me getting the vibe off of them, having them show me their stuff and we figure out what gear we're going to be using guitars and stuff like that, just so everyone can get comfortable and in a buddy buddy type situation on the first day.

Speaker 1 (01:21:29):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:21:30):

Totally. Before we even start doing anything else.

Speaker 1 (01:21:32):

I think that's really smart, man. Even if you're on a small budget with short session or something like week or two weeks or something, I consider those short.

Speaker 2 (01:21:41):

You definitely got to take at least one of those days to just vibe with the band.

Speaker 1 (01:21:46):

Especially important if you don't have much time because every decision you make is going to have that much more pressure behind it because you don't have extra time. So to take that time to really hone in on what the best tools are for the job is super valuable.

Speaker 2 (01:22:05):

And then not only that, on top of finding out what the right tools are, just getting into the head space of the band and seeing where they're all at, the more they can trust you right off the bat, the better it's going to go. Whenever you're making quick decisions and they don't question it, they just say, alright, let's try it, and then we just go for it. Instead of fighting with somebody for an hour over one part that you think could be played different or something that you want to change arrangement wise,

Speaker 1 (01:22:29):

How did you go about establishing trust? That is a huge, huge thing. It's also something that people write to me about all the time that they have trouble with. They have trouble getting bands to accept their ideas. They want to help them improve something, but the band won't listen. And in my opinion, I'm always thinking They don't trust you. What's going on?

Speaker 2 (01:22:51):

Yeah. The way I go about it is I treat them, they're my friends. I don't treat 'em like they're a client. I don't treat 'em like they're a paycheck. I literally talk to them. I if I was talking to a friend and they know by my body language and also by the way I'm talking to 'em that I truly care about their stuff and I'm coming from a place of care, not coming from a place of I'm the guy recording your shit. You need to listen to me.

Speaker 1 (01:23:14):

My aware or the highway.

Speaker 2 (01:23:15):

Yeah, exactly. So it's always, they know I'm coming from a good place. They know that I'm there to get the best out of them.

Speaker 1 (01:23:21):

How do you establish that though? I mean, yeah, so you talk to them like a normal human being.

Speaker 2 (01:23:27):

Literally the first time they ever meet me in person high fives, hug it out, I'll make them dinner or we'll go out and hang out somewhere and just vibe off of each other just to get them to know my personality in person. I think I do a pretty good job of showing my personality through texts as well, but I always try to vibe out with them as much as possible and show them like, Hey, I'm really excited to work with you guys and if I have a really good understanding of their music and them as a band, that makes them trust me almost instantly because they know that I'm actually into what they're doing.

Speaker 1 (01:24:03):

One thing that I've noticed that establishes trust really quick is to show a musical result. Rather than talk about it. You could sit there arguing about an idea for a long time, and since you are not another person, you're only you by using words to describe a musical idea, you guys could mean you could be using the same words yet mean two completely different things. So when you say, man, I want this to sound like dark and heavy, their idea of dark and heavy could be completely different. Absolutely. You might be thinking dark and heavy in a way that totally compliments the song. They could be thinking dark and heavy as something that has nothing stylistically to do yet you're using the same words so you can sit there and argue about that sort of thing for a long time. Whereas if you just find a way to show them, then it's either, do you like this or do you not like this? But no time wasted. And if you can do that enough times to where obviously you're not going to win them over every time, but

Speaker 2 (01:25:08):

No, not every time.

Speaker 1 (01:25:09):

If you can do that enough times to where the ideas are good, and then also when they don't like your ideas, you're totally cool about it, that's key. You just let it go. I think that that'll help people open up to you a lot more. They're going to realize that you're not trying to hurt them or their song. You're not trying to take over. If they're not into it, you're not going to be a bitch about it, but sometimes you have really good ideas, so it's worth listening.

Speaker 2 (01:25:37):

Yeah, exactly. So if you can instantly show them what you're talking about and they can hear it, that usually makes for them being cool with it, especially when you a b it, and it's obviously better, but like you said, sometimes the ideas don't work out and you just got to move on from that and just keep getting work done.

Speaker 1 (01:25:54):

Just let it go.

Speaker 2 (01:25:55):

Yeah, exactly. The thing is also is later on, after you guys are finished with it, if you still think that idea might be good, you can always bring it back up later.

Speaker 1 (01:26:04):

Yeah, totally. This is a skill that I picked up from my band years. I wrote 90% of the music in my band. I always wrote far more than what we ever used. I always say that 65% of everything I wrote or 70% got trashed, and so I was just used to ideas not making it to the finish line, and that's fine. So it kind of conditioned me for bands not accepting my ideas, and it's totally cool with it,

Speaker 2 (01:26:34):

Which I've definitely had that experience in all the bands that I've been in prior to recording

Speaker 1 (01:26:38):

What that you did a lot of writing and a lot of stuff didn't make it.

Speaker 2 (01:26:42):

Exactly. I would do almost all the writing for all my bands, and basically they would cherry pick the stuff that they felt comfortable playing

Speaker 1 (01:26:49):

And that's fine.

Speaker 2 (01:26:50):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:26:50):

I mean, whatever works for a band. What I found was funny is when I'd be in bands with people who didn't write very often, maybe they'd write a song or two per year as opposed to me writing 20 to 30 per year. They would get super precious about those songs or those riffs because it's kind of like if you have a lot to choose from, then every single option means a little bit less than if you have very few things to choose from. Every one of those means a lot more to you. So one of my big conflicts in the bands I've been in was the clash between people who write all the time versus people who don't write all the time. The people who don't write all the time happen to not be as good at writing as the ones who do Right. All the time, but they're way more precious about their ideas. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's the only ideas they've got.

Speaker 2 (01:27:42):

So if you tell them something that they've been working on for the last year and it's all they got is not good, they get really, really butt hurt over it.

Speaker 1 (01:27:49):

Yes. It's a very real scenario. But then on the other hand, if you accept their ideas and their second rate, then you're hurting your own band. However, on the other hand, if you don't accept their ideas, you're hurting morale and you're hurting your own band.

Speaker 2 (01:28:04):

Yeah. It's definitely a chess match. Whenever you're in a band or if you're recording a band, it's always a chess match. You got to make the best moves that's going to make everyone comfortable to where you all can get to the finish line, but not lose the game.

Speaker 1 (01:28:16):

Yeah. It is hard. I think that's why you see so many bands that have stood the test of time who are basically dictatorships.

Speaker 3 (01:28:25):

Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:28:25):

But the thing is that dictator better be a fucking motherfucking badass like Dave Mustain back in the day or something.

Speaker 2 (01:28:34):

Yeah, I was about to say, Dave Mustain is the golden example of a dictator of a band.

Speaker 1 (01:28:39):

I think that people now who weren't of age when Mega Death were at their prime may not understand that. They just know them as like a classic rock band with that eccentric singer, but at their prime, that band was fucking deadly. Dude. They were one of the best bands in the world. Yeah, the Rust in Peace days, holy shit. They were better than everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:29:06):

Yeah. It's funny too, because Dave McCain's main goal has always been to just be better than Metallica.

Speaker 1 (01:29:12):

Yeah. Well, it's interesting. Hatred and jealousy, they're very strong motivating factors in life.

Speaker 2 (01:29:19):

I tell you what, some really good mega death records came out of that

Speaker 1 (01:29:22):

Or just, it's not even hatred and jealousy. I mean, there's that too. And I know because they talked about it in that fucking movie.

Speaker 2 (01:29:30):

Best worst movie ever,

Speaker 1 (01:29:32):

Man. Well, if you ever wondered, so I don't think Metallica sucked. I think they just started to get old, but if in that time period they did kind of suck, if you ever wondered why you just watched that movie and

Speaker 2 (01:29:46):

Yeah, and you understand instantly,

Speaker 1 (01:29:47):

You understand. Exactly. Man, I saw that we're talking about some kind of monster. I saw that in the theater and was just, it was shocking that psychiatrist paying him $40,000 a month to come in and tell them what lyrics to use, remember when he came with lyrics?

Speaker 2 (01:30:09):

Yeah. That was insane. I'm watching it. I remember watching it, and this is when I was still a teenager, and I'm like, this is the biggest metal band in the world, and they have a psychiatrist telling them how to do their thing. Yeah. It was insane. It

Speaker 1 (01:30:22):

Was actually insane. I could not believe I was seeing

Speaker 2 (01:30:25):

That. How did the biggest metal band in the world turn into a bunch of housewives

Speaker 1 (01:30:29):

Who were getting lyrics? Sounded at them by a psychiatrist. What?

Speaker 2 (01:30:33):

Yeah. That's like the worst person you want giving you lyric advice. Man,

Speaker 1 (01:30:37):

I remember I had a shrink once before. We were called doth. We were called Dirt Nap back in 1999 or something. We had to change the name. There were five other Dirt Naps trademark issues. Okay. Doth is a way better name. It is. But at the time, dirt Napp worked with what was cool, like Slipknot Dirt Nap, Slipknot iss really, really cool. Now, we were never nearly as cool as them, but it kind of fit with the types of band names of that time period. But I was telling him that we needed to change it, and he suggested something not so negative. How about Earth Movers? I was like, what? I could tell that he had thought about it and wanted to be cool. I felt so uncomfortable,

Speaker 2 (01:31:26):

Like, dude, you just put me in a really weird situation, man.

Speaker 1 (01:31:30):

Yeah. This old dude who's supposed to be helping me is giving me band name suggestions that are earth movers. What it was in this moment, AO found out he was in the Twilight Zone. Dude, it made me so uncomfortable. Shrinks are not supposed to get personal. You're not supposed to know anything about them or how they feel about anything. They're playing a very specific role, and he broke that by giving me his own personal opinion on a band name. He basically volunteered that he had been thinking about it on his own time and that it totally fucked everything up.

Speaker 2 (01:32:10):

What the fuck? It's like, come on, man. This is not what we're paying you for.

Speaker 1 (01:32:15):

Yeah. Earth Movers worst name ever. Imagine

Speaker 2 (01:32:18):

Earth Movers. The Hinders God, dude, earth movers. What a terrible name. I know he must've been watching the Discovery Channel or something and thought of you.

Speaker 1 (01:32:27):

Well, he wanted it to be like, so dirt nap means dead. Right. So he was worried that I was into shit that was too dark, I guess, and I haven't been cured of that yet, but I think that he was trying to get me to take a more positive spin on things. I guess he didn't really understand that metal is just music. Cannibal corps aren't actually mulling women.

Speaker 2 (01:33:01):

Exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:33:02):

It's just metal. That's all it is. That's part of the art form is the dark imagery and all that shit. Very few people actually take that seriously.

Speaker 2 (01:33:13):

Unless you're an early nineties black metal band, then you take it very seriously.

Speaker 1 (01:33:17):

Yes. Unless you're an early nineties black metal band. Some people in the hardcore scene take it pretty seriously too. The most violent shows I've ever been to have been when we toured with hardcore bands. But anyways, with that Metallica movie, the stuff that I expected to see was them busting at the seams, Dave Mustain crying, all that stuff. What I didn't expect to see was a psychiatrist charging $40,000 a month trying to become a member of the band. That's when I was like, all right, these guys are in rough shape. Holy shit. Yeah. They're in super rough shape. Yeah. One of my favorite parts was when James just disappeared.

Speaker 2 (01:34:02):

Yeah. He was just

Speaker 1 (01:34:03):

Like, fuck this. I'm out. I'm in Russia snowmobiling for months on end. Right. He just like, yeah. He just bailed. Didn't call. Nobody, didn't tell no one where he

Speaker 2 (01:34:12):

Went. He was gone.

Speaker 1 (01:34:14):

Yeah. Nobody knew where he was. He was in Russia snowmobiling for months. A pure boss move. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:34:20):

He was like, you know what? You guys can figure this shit out. I'm out of here.

Speaker 1 (01:34:23):

I thought that was incredible. You can only do that if you're James Hetfield or

Speaker 2 (01:34:28):

Yeah, Hetfield definitely seems like the coolest dude out of that entire band.

Speaker 1 (01:34:31):

Yeah. And badass too.

Speaker 2 (01:34:34):

Yeah, he's a badass dude.

Speaker 1 (01:34:35):

Yeah. I think maybe, probably, I don't want to say the best rhythm player of all time. We've got some incredible players now, like John Brown from monuments and stuff, but for the time period. For the time, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:34:48):

He was the best rhythm player for the time

Speaker 1 (01:34:50):

Period, and dude, master Puppets is still, I don't want to say impossible,

Speaker 2 (01:34:54):

Even if you're a seasoned player, it is hard.

Speaker 1 (01:34:57):

Yeah. Down picking that entire song to play that song from start to finish, the seven minute version and down pick your whole way through it. That's a serious feat on guitar.

Speaker 2 (01:35:09):

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:35:10):

Yeah. Okay, so back to recording. You were saying that Amp Sims never work for you. I think that's interesting. First of all, I'm not surprised, but I think it's interesting. I do think that they've come a long, long way.

Speaker 2 (01:35:25):

Oh, they sure have.

Speaker 1 (01:35:26):

Yeah. There was a time period where I could never imagine them working, but the Kemper kind of, I consider that a sim, even though it's hardware.

Speaker 2 (01:35:36):

Yeah. It really is, because every single profile is literally just a single snapshot of one tone. You don't have the amp, you just have one sound.

Speaker 1 (01:35:46):

It's ones and zeros. So that changed my mind on Sims. I used to be an Amps only guy, even though I had a pod for writing. I used to be an Amps only in the studio guy, and then when Soff and I profiled all those amps and we got the Kempers and ab, sometimes it just sounded better than the amp. It just did. At least in some scenarios, not always.

Speaker 2 (01:36:12):

Yeah. Sometimes it changes the tone just a bit to where it does actually sound a little bit more of what you want it to sound like as a process tone without having to actually process anything.

Speaker 1 (01:36:22):

Yeah, that's exactly it. So the key here is that you're not trying to get the exact tone as you do through the amp. You're getting a different tone, so you're profiling it, and then typically when you start adding its own onboard pedals and shit that it has inside of it, sometimes you could create something better.

Speaker 2 (01:36:47):

Sometimes you can come up with something that's completely different than what you're going for, but it just works.

Speaker 1 (01:36:51):

Yeah. So that said, and the fact that Amp Sims have kind of turned the corner and they're a lot better than they used to be, what is it about them that doesn't work for you in a final sense, and would you ever be open to it?

Speaker 2 (01:37:07):

Oh yeah. Yeah. If I didn't have any of my amps or I didn't have the space or the place to be able to re-amp stuff and use real amps, I'd have zero issue using Amp Sims for mixes. But it's one of those things where I just get a wider tone and I can get what I'm looking for way quicker with real Amps than I can with Sims for whatever reason. I just work better with analog amps than I do with Sims.

Speaker 1 (01:37:34):

I think that kind of back to what we were saying about templates and stuff, what matters is what works for you. Whatever the scenario is that makes you do your best work, that's what you should do.

Speaker 2 (01:37:46):

Yeah. Because at the end of the day, everything is tools, and as long as it sounds good and it's what you're going for, that's all that matters.

Speaker 1 (01:37:54):

So you wouldn't be against it. If there was a scenario where you had your amim placeholder tone, and then you went and tried the real ones, and for whatever reason the Amim tone was better, you'd be cool with that.

Speaker 2 (01:38:09):

Absolutely. Especially with the newer stuff, the neural DSP plugins and then the SEL tones ones. Those two in particular are as close as anyone has ever gotten to the feel of a real amp. You play those and it feels like a real amp, which is extremely important. If it just feels like, I agree, a static digital thing that's not moving very much. It's like, I don't like that, but all these newer amp sims are just killing it. I have no problem telling people to buy neural DSP Amp sims just because they sound sick and they feel how they're supposed to.

Speaker 1 (01:38:49):

I do believe that the STL and the neural amp sims are the best on the market that I've heard a hundred percent tone Forge. Jason Richardson is also really good. Not just saying that because of my partner, that one is really good for low tuned guitars, but really at the end of the day, it's just whatever works.

Speaker 2 (01:39:10):

But all I know is whenever I plug into any of my amps and have them cranked up in the room, it makes me happy and it sounds good under mic. So I'm excited about it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:18):

Fair enough. So do you have a perma set up with your cabs?

Speaker 2 (01:39:22):

I don't have any permanent setups. Actually. If I'm working on a record that I don't have all the songs for, I'll keep the mic set up, but most of the time I will literally break all my mics down and start from scratch on tones for different people.

Speaker 1 (01:39:34):

That's interesting because the way that we used to do it was that you saw Mark's cabinet room.

Speaker 3 (01:39:43):

Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:39:43):

We would all use that. I would use that. Jason would use that. Mark would use that, but the rule was you don't go in there.

Speaker 2 (01:39:50):

Yeah. Everything's placed where it's placed, don't touch anything.

Speaker 1 (01:39:52):

Yeah. There was even caution tape.

Speaker 2 (01:39:54):

I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:55):

Yeah. I mean, and there were several options.

Speaker 2 (01:39:58):

Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. Because even with my wall, I have eight cabinets and I have 20 plus amps. Jesus dude, and you start from scratch every

Speaker 1 (01:40:06):

Time.

Speaker 2 (01:40:06):

Every time. Just because my ears sometimes hear different things depending on what day it is. So where my placeholder mic setup would usually be, sometimes that doesn't sound good to me and I'll just put it somewhere else or use a different speaker or switch over to a different cabinet.

Speaker 1 (01:40:21):

Do you by any chance have the robot?

Speaker 2 (01:40:23):

No, I don't. Which is surprising because I'd be the prime candidate for someone that should have that.

Speaker 1 (01:40:28):

Yeah, I figured you would've had it.

Speaker 2 (01:40:30):

Nope. I literally sit in front of my cabinet with the amp at an okay volume to where it's opened up and I just sit there with a mic and just move it around until it sounds good.

Speaker 1 (01:40:38):

So headphones

Speaker 2 (01:40:39):

On. Headphones on.

Speaker 1 (01:40:40):

Okay. Can we talk a bit about your process of dialing tones and the setup part of it? Because, so we talked about you run the DI through the amp head and you see what got, but in order to get there, you have to choose an amp pad and a cab. So that initial choice, where does that come

Speaker 2 (01:41:01):

From? That comes from depending on the material. If I hear, because usually what I like is if I'm doing just a ramping job, not something that I'm mixing, usually I'll have them send me a pre-mixed drum and bass track. If I'm not doing bass, you kind of get an idea of what they're going for mix wise. So once I hear their mix, I can kind of figure out what type of mid range that needs or what type of low end it needs. Most of the time, I'll definitely try the 51 50 first, just because 90% of the time that's what people want. But sometimes I'll just be like, all right, this needs dual rectifier mid range, or this needs that bite of my bogner, so I'll try things out. And thankfully now my life is a lot easier. I just got some amp switchers that make this whole process a million times quicker for me. What kind? The KHE audio eight by four

Speaker 1 (01:41:53):

Switchers

Speaker 2 (01:41:54):

And I have two of 'em. And the new versions, you can actually daisy chain together. So I have a 16 by eight setup, so I can literally switch between 16 cabinets, not 16 cabinets, but 16 amps and eight cabinets at the same time.

Speaker 1 (01:42:08):

So it's all wired into the switcher.

Speaker 2 (01:42:10):

So I just take right out of my MW one right into the input of the switcher and I can literally just sit here and switch through my amps and figure out tone combinations on the fly.

Speaker 1 (01:42:20):

And

Speaker 2 (01:42:20):

Switch

Speaker 1 (01:42:20):

Cabinets too, you said?

Speaker 2 (01:42:22):

Yep. I can switch cabinets instantly. So if I want to go in between my two mesa cabinets, my traditional, my oversize, I can literally just sit here and switch between the two of 'em and figure out which one sounds better in the room for what I'm looking for.

Speaker 1 (01:42:35):

Beautiful. So you make the decision of the initial guess based on what you think it needs. And so then you run it through if you like, what you're hearing kind of then you'll decide on a pedal. At what point does the pedal come in or when do you decide to go to another head?

Speaker 2 (01:42:54):

Usually once I hit the head, if it doesn't sound the way I want it to in the mid range, then I'll switch to a different head. As soon as it sounds pretty good in the room to me is when I'll put a mic on the cab and start moving around that to see where I'm liking the overall sound. And once I'm there is when I'll figure out what overdrive I want to use. Got it. And I have a top four that I always go to. I either try out a precision drive first, an Abom electronics hellmouth my earthquake or Palisades and my proton audio dead horse deluxe. Those are the four that I always kind of gravitate towards first for trying things out. And if those don't work, I have 30 other overdrive that I can always try.

(01:43:39):

But the biggest trick that I do when dialing in tones is I'll pan the guitar to the left while I'm dialing in the tones because how it sounds in the center is not what matters me, how it sounds left and right for rhythm guitars is all that matters. If it sounds good left and right, I know I'm where I need to be. As soon as I'm dialing in the center, as soon as I pan 'em, I find shit that I don't like about the tones. That makes sense. I could have doubted. Yeah, because dialing in the tones while you have 'em panned, that's how it's going to be in the mix. So if it sounds good like that, that's how you should be doing it from the start.

Speaker 1 (01:44:13):

So the idea being that you're dialing it for what it's actually going to be?

Speaker 2 (01:44:19):

Exactly. I'm going for the finished sound. I try to get as close to mix ready as possible, so I play around with mic phase, I play around with placement and I just move stuff around until it locks into the mix.

Speaker 1 (01:44:34):

And that's before any processing.

Speaker 2 (01:44:37):

I barely do any processing on my guitars. The most I'll do is maybe a couple notches at maybe three K or 4K if it needs it. And then maybe a low pass and that's it. Most of the time I don't have to do any high passing or any extra processing. Most of the tones on most of the records I do are all raw.

Speaker 1 (01:44:52):

Got it. I believe that actually, I remember the no EQ challenge that we used to do, which was dialing in a tone that needed no eq.

Speaker 2 (01:45:02):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (01:45:02):

It's hard to do, but it's possible.

Speaker 2 (01:45:05):

Yeah. Because with my obsessive end, I've literally sat in front of all of my guitar cabs and with a single 57 in my hand and just ran guitar tracks through my setups, just finding all of the spots on my cabs that I like.

Speaker 1 (01:45:18):

Yeah, makes sense. So

Speaker 2 (01:45:20):

I know every single one of my cabs inside and out for what I look for in tones.

Speaker 1 (01:45:24):

What is your arsenal of cabs?

Speaker 2 (01:45:26):

Right now I have a Bogner Ecstasy four by 12 with V thirties Mesa oversized with V thirties, Mesa traditional with V thirties, my Omega two by 12, which has one of their newer OEM speakers in it that's made by eminence. That sounds super, super sick. Orange four by 12, a Zillow two by 12, and then I have an angle XXL pro cabinet, and then my Marshall 1960 cabinet.

Speaker 1 (01:45:51):

Nice. How long did it take to amass

Speaker 2 (01:45:53):

That collection? Basically my entire recording career, all the ants and cabinets I have and all the gear I have has been bought throughout the

Speaker 1 (01:46:01):

Years. Alright. What's your head collection?

Speaker 2 (01:46:03):

Head collection? Alright. I got my dual rectifier tremor verb two channel, my bogner ecstasy 51 50 block letter 51 52 A JSX, A triple X, a orange Jim root terror, a little 50 watt custom Frankenstein two that Tony Crank personally made for me. An original number 14 crank revolution. My angle Fireball 60, my JCM 822 10. My JCM 900 SLX, my JMP 2204, my PV V, TM one 20. I also have my Ameg V four, my Randall Satan 50, my 51 53, my Mark four. And then I have a Marshall 8,100 and a Sun beta lead. Jesus dude. I have a lot of amps

Speaker 1 (01:46:53):

That is quite the collection

Speaker 2 (01:46:55):

And they all do something that I like, so that's why I kept 'em all.

Speaker 1 (01:46:58):

It's just an impressive collection. I've gone to multimillion dollar studios that don't have collections like that,

Speaker 2 (01:47:05):

And I'm even like that with Mike Preamps. I like collecting mic preamps too. They all have a little bit of a different character to 'em whenever you're driving them hard, when you're getting guitar tones.

Speaker 1 (01:47:14):

Yeah. So basically, do you do any processing at all once it goes in the box?

Speaker 2 (01:47:20):

Once I reamp guitars, the only processing that I'll do on my mixes if it needs it is maybe a low pass. I'll cut at 14.5 K and up all that air frequency. I'll get rid of that. But other that, depending on the cabinet, I don't really need to do anything else. I don't do any compression or anything unless it's a super dense mix. Then I might throw the UAD LA three A on there and just kiss it just a little bit just to keep the chugs in line whenever it's super, super heavy palm mute stuff. But other than that, I don't do any processing.

Speaker 1 (01:47:54):

So it's like detail work.

Speaker 2 (01:47:56):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:47:56):

You're not doing notching or anything like that.

Speaker 2 (01:47:59):

If I do, it's three K and 4K and that's it.

Speaker 1 (01:48:02):

Okay, awesome. This is impressive. It just goes to show if you put the work in on the source tone properly, you don't need to do too much after.

Speaker 2 (01:48:11):

Exactly. The more time you put into getting the tone right off the mics, the less time you have to do messing with it later.

Speaker 1 (01:48:17):

Yeah. Some of the best guitar tones I've ever heard in mixes, I've had the opportunity, as you know, to work with some pretty incredible people and then also hear lots of raw, they nail the mix. We've done like 70 nail the mixes now.

Speaker 3 (01:48:34):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:48:34):

Some of them are unbelievable guitar tones, like say the architects one, and what I've noticed is that typically I'd say nine out of 10 times the guitar tones are fucking deadly from the gecko raw. Like that architect's tone that Henrik Good did is just, it sounds ridiculous on the record, but when you hear the raws it sounds ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (01:48:59):

Yeah, and I've talked to Henrik a few times and we've just talked about guitar tones and the more time you just spend making sure the tone is right for what you're going for, the better it's going to be.

Speaker 4 (01:49:10):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:49:11):

That's why I like waiting until I'm like, I maybe 80% of where I want to be with a mix before I reamp just because I'm amping for that sound of the record, so the guitar tones are going to fit where I want 'em to fit.

Speaker 1 (01:49:22):

Yeah, makes sense. How did you develop your mid-range hearing? I think that that's a really, really hard thing for people to develop.

Speaker 2 (01:49:30):

Yeah. I'm not really sure how I developed it. It's just from years and years of just listening to mic placement and just going through everything. I'll go through an amp and I'll sweep the mid range of an amp just to figure out where the bloated spots are at and where it opens up, where it's not scooped but it's not bloated, and I do that with everything. Anytime I have an EQ or anything that I can sweep frequencies around, I'll just sit there with one band and I'll just sweep it back and forth just so I can hear the curve and how big the queue is on it and stuff like that, so I know where it's supposed to be and where it sits.

Speaker 1 (01:50:07):

So yeah, just put the time in basically.

Speaker 2 (01:50:10):

Exactly. It is just trial and error and just putting in the time.

Speaker 1 (01:50:13):

Okay. Let's change topics a little bit. You live in Tampa, right? Cape Coral. Where's Cape Coral?

Speaker 2 (01:50:19):

Cape Coral is like two hours southwest of Tampa.

Speaker 1 (01:50:23):

So kind of not the biggest market.

Speaker 2 (01:50:26):

No, there's literally no scene here.

Speaker 1 (01:50:29):

Okay. But you've done All right. Reason I'm bringing that up is because a lot of people who listen don't live in big markets and think they need to move to LA or something to make it work. They don't understand how to get a career going in their small ass town. Can we talk about that some?

Speaker 2 (01:50:49):

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:50:51):

You don't live in a big market.

Speaker 2 (01:50:53):

I literally live in a retirement city.

Speaker 1 (01:50:55):

So how did you make it happen? I guess what I'm getting at is how do people who live in Nowheresville get the word out? How did you do it?

Speaker 2 (01:51:06):

Just being persistent. I don't have a lapse in posting on social media. I try to be as involved in Facebook groups as I can, so I'll go into Facebook groups of genres that I specialize in and I'll just talk to people and tell 'em what I do and get to know them as people. And through doing that is when I started getting more and more work from outside of my area and from them being happy with the results of what I've done told their friends, and it's basically been word of mouth only for the last five years, and it's just literally from the time I wake up to the time I pass out, I literally will hit people up post about my studio and put up videos of amping jobs and stuff that I'm doing just to get people hearing what I'm doing and get them knowing about me more through seeing the wall of amps and stuff like that. But it's just being persistent more than anything and just getting yourself out there.

Speaker 1 (01:52:07):

But man, a lot of people are persistently annoying and they do those same things, but they piss people off. Like I said, I've never heard of you pissing people off.

Speaker 2 (01:52:17):

The reason why they piss people off is because they're impersonal about it. They're just treating it like a paycheck. They're hitting people up with the idea of making money off of the people that they're hitting up. I'm hitting people up because I'll listen to their bands and I'll see what they're posting about and I want to actually get to know these people as people. Maybe eventually we'll end up working together, but if not, I just want to be a part of the community more than anything.

Speaker 1 (01:52:42):

It's very interesting you're saying this. We put out a course called Career Builder, which is aimed at people who are trying to go from zero to quitting their job or at least making enough to where recording can be a secondary job or something. We discourage people from advertising. We discourage them from paying Facebook ads or print ads or any of that stuff, and the main thing that we encourage, aside from the audio part, of course, is to network properly, but in order to network properly, you really kind of just have to be a part of your community. I say that there's two different types of networking. Networking, and then I've always thought that open-ended is the best way to do it. Goal-oriented is when you're at NAM and some other fucker gives you some shitty business card and you can tell they're just trying to get something out of you. Goal oriented, open-ended is when you're just trying to make friends and be a part of your community regardless of where it's going to go. Knowing that basically you're just planting seeds.

Speaker 2 (01:53:51):

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:53:52):

Something might come out of it. It might take years. You're just an active positive part of the community that you're involved in, so in your case, because you don't live in a big market, you had to do it through Facebook groups and Facebook groups are great for that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:54:09):

Yeah, absolutely. Especially if you work with bands that the other members in those groups, so you do a record for a band that gets a lot of attention in these Facebook groups. As soon as they know who worked on it, they'll want to talk to you just because you worked on it. I love when people just randomly hit me up and ask me questions about things that I've worked on just because I like the conversation more than anything, but if they do want to work with me, awesome. If not, they just want to pick my brain about certain things. I have zero issues having conversations with people and becoming friends with them.

Speaker 1 (01:54:45):

That goes a really, really long way. So I think you're right that the reason people piss people off is because they're impersonal. I also find that with Facebook groups or online, if people feel like you're spamming them out, they turn off immediately. So one of the most important things to me is your etiquette, and if you're in a group, the purpose should be to engage other people and meaningful conversation. So helping them out with problems or just continuing an entertaining conversation but not spamming them with your shit.

Speaker 2 (01:55:21):

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:55:23):

Through that relationship you build. Then if it's a genuine relationship, people will become more curious about who you are, and that's when they might look at your profile and see some of the videos that you posted, which show the amp wall or whatever it is. Then they might take a greater interest, but it comes from being a positive part of the community in the first place and just trying to help people out.

Speaker 2 (01:55:48):

Exactly. And if you come off like an annoying asshole right off the bat, most people are just going to either block you or they're going to be like, yo, I don't want to ever work with this guy. Annoying

Speaker 1 (01:55:57):

A know it all.

Speaker 2 (01:55:58):

Those are the worst. When people are like that, it's like, dude, just be chill. People want you to be chill.

Speaker 1 (01:56:03):

There's a difference between helping people with a problem and being a know-it-all. We call them the option C guys, so oftentimes people will ask, should I do this or that?

Speaker 2 (01:56:16):

Yeah, and they'll tell you the complete opposite.

Speaker 1 (01:56:19):

Yeah. They'll give you some option that has nothing to do with your life or your question. Don't be the option C guy. I'm trying to decide between pro tools and cubase,

Speaker 2 (01:56:32):

Bro, get Reaper.

Speaker 1 (01:56:33):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:56:33):

Exactly. Pro tools and Cubase sucks. Be a Reaper, bro.

Speaker 1 (01:56:37):

Yeah, that's exactly it right there.

Speaker 2 (01:56:39):

It's the most annoying thing ever. That was like a couple days ago I posted about buying a new Mac and I literally put, at the very end of it, buying a PC is not an option on Mac only, and I got at least five or six comments. Were like, well, why not a PC man? Why don't you like PCs? It's like, well, I don't like them because I'm used to working on a Mac and my entire workflow is on the Apple ecosystem, so I can't just get a PC and say Fuck Mac. So that's why.

Speaker 1 (01:57:10):

Yeah. What people don't understand is when they do things like that, people are watching oftentimes people who could be a colleague or someone who would hire you in the future, whether it's a band or some producer who might hire you to do some work for them or whatever people are watching online, and so the way that you behave yourself, it carries a lot of weight, I've noticed.

Speaker 2 (01:57:38):

Oh, for sure. And then also everyone has to remember the internet does not forget ever.

Speaker 1 (01:57:43):

No.

Speaker 2 (01:57:44):

You might think that people forgot, but I bet you deep down in their recesses of some people's cell phones, they have screenshots of almost everything you've probably ever said in your life. I'm sure we would

Speaker 1 (01:57:53):

All get in trouble for some things,

Speaker 2 (01:57:56):

So don't be an asshole on the internet. Just be chill.

Speaker 1 (01:57:59):

Yeah, absolutely. Now, what about in person networking? How does that work for you?

Speaker 2 (01:58:04):

Yeah, whenever I go out to shows, I'll go to Tampa in Orlando, and if I go to shows where I want to see certain bands, I'll make sure I get there early so I can see the openers, see the local bands that are playing, opening these bigger shows, and if the bands are sick, I'll approach them and be like, Hey, you guys are awesome, and I'll just introduce myself to 'em. I don't come up to 'em like I'm going to offer them my mixing work and stuff like that. I literally just walk up to 'em and start talking to 'em like a regular dude would if I was just going to a show to check out bands, and if they're good, I'll go up to 'em and just talk to 'em and introduce myself, and most of the time around, at least in Florida, most of those bands already know who I am. They're just excited. I even approached them to say, Hey,

Speaker 1 (01:58:48):

You're not going up to try to close a sale or anything. You're just going up to meet them.

Speaker 2 (01:58:52):

Exactly. Just go up, meet 'em, say What's up. Hi, I'm Phil. You guys had an awesome set. I really like what you guys are doing, and then basically just natural conversation from there.

Speaker 1 (01:59:01):

How often does that result in work?

Speaker 2 (01:59:03):

Not very often, but most of the time they'll remember me and if they are still in that particular band later on down the road, I have gotten work from those bands, but most of the time if they've broken up, they'll have a new project and I'll get hit up sometimes for that. But most of my work literally is from word of mouth and Facebook.

Speaker 1 (01:59:23):

I know quite a few people who have created careers that way. I also know a whole lot more people who haven't been able to crack the code, and I really, really, really, really, really, really, really do think what kind of person people perceive you as is kind of the number one factor here. Obviously, your work aside,

Speaker 2 (01:59:47):

Your work needs to speak for itself, but you also have to be personable and approachable. If people don't think you're approachable or they don't get a good vibe off of you, it doesn't matter how good your work is, they probably are going to be a little suspect of working with you.

Speaker 1 (02:00:00):

Absolutely, man. And I've had some people who hit me up literally every single day with a link uninvited, and then I know that they'll hit up everyone I know with the link. We'll talk about it.

Speaker 3 (02:00:14):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (02:00:15):

It'll just be a copy paste, and then there's been a couple times where I've tried to help them out and be like, yo, this is not the way to do it, and then they'll get mad just trying to tell them that there's a better way to do it, and then they'll get mad and I'm trying to lord something over them or not take the time to listen. I'm actually trying to help them get people to listen to their stuff by saying, this is not how it's done. This is going to achieve the opposite of what you want, so change your approach.

Speaker 2 (02:00:51):

Yeah, definitely change your approach because on Facebook, whenever I get inundated with tons and tons of friend requests, I'll literally take time out of my day and go through them one by one. If someone's in a band, I'll listen to their band before I even accept their friend requests or even say what's up to them. So I already have an idea that this band is good and I think they're sick, and I just want to add this guy in a sick band, and I'm going to tell him his band is sick.

Speaker 1 (02:01:19):

I was just talking to Mick Gordon. I don't know if you heard that episode. If you haven't, it's really, really good.

Speaker 2 (02:01:25):

Yeah, I need to listen to it. I love Mick Gordon. That guy's fucking awesome.

Speaker 1 (02:01:28):

Yeah. Have you heard the first episode I did with him?

Speaker 2 (02:01:31):

Yeah. The first one I definitely checked out.

Speaker 1 (02:01:33):

That was one of my favorite ones ever. This new one that we put out last week is also one of my favorites ever. He's just a brilliant human being, but one of the things that he does, and actually I realize that I do this too, I've done it for a long time. We talked about this, is he will send people that he doesn't know, but that he's impressed by whether it's a company that made a plugin that has really helped his workflow or a musician or whoever, and just send them a really nice note thanking them for the work they did. No strings attached. I was thinking about it. I hit Jason Richardson up yesterday and was like, dude, you are a freak, and I'm not trying to get anything out of him. I just wanted him to know. He posted some video yesterday of him playing along with Jordan Rues. It is nuts. It is nutty.

Speaker 2 (02:02:29):

Oh, I bet it is, because Jordan Rudi is a fucking crazy keyboard player.

Speaker 1 (02:02:32):

Yeah, so basically Jordan Rudi did this online jam with a drummer and an acoustic guitarist, which is this crazy ass thing, and then Jason took it and learned it by ear and just played it along with them and posted that, and it's fucking nuts if you guys want to see it. Today is Sunday, April 12th, so he probably posted it on April 11th. I'm going to Instagram right now to point out which video it is. It's worth checking out. So anyways, just look up April 11th. Anyways, I find that hitting people up and just saying something nice, as long as you're being genuine, you're listening to these bands before you talk to the people, even so if you know that they're sick before you even talk to 'em, you've got something to talk about that is something that they care about.

Speaker 2 (02:03:25):

Exactly. Especially if they already know who you are and you're hitting them up, it means even more to them that you even took the time to check their stuff out. But I just love listening to new music and finding new things, so if someone adds me and they're in a dope band, I'm just excited. The fact that I've found a new band to listen to regardless of if I'm going to hit 'em up, or even if we ever worked together or not, just discovering new music and making new friends is awesome, so I'm always going about it as genuine as possible. If I hit you up, that means that I wanted to talk to you and I literally think your band is sick. I'm not blowing smoke.

Speaker 1 (02:04:02):

I think that that comes through. I think it really does come through. I would say that if people are trying to do this online and they're not getting results, they find that they're getting ignored a lot, not getting anywhere with it. Consider the approach. Consider how you must be coming off to people. Sometimes it's hard to know really, because you can't see yourself from the outside, but the one thing that you can gauge is are people responding?

Speaker 2 (02:04:31):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (02:04:32):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:04:33):

Well, that's like when people randomly hit me up and the only thing they say is, Hey, with a question mark, or, Hey, can I ask you a question? With no context of what they're hitting me up for. Whenever that happens, I'm like, maybe you should. If you want to hit me up and you've never talked to me before, give me a little bit more than just that, and then maybe I'll be more enthusiastic about talking to you instead of just being like, Hey, what do you want?

Speaker 1 (02:04:58):

Those always make me a little nervous because

Speaker 2 (02:05:01):

You don't know what you're getting

Speaker 1 (02:05:01):

Yourself into. You don't know what you're getting yourself into. I get hit up by all kinds of people, so yeah, if you want me to respond, just come out and ask the question.

Speaker 2 (02:05:11):

Exactly.

Speaker 1 (02:05:12):

Yeah. Don't make me wonder because man, there are some people who will hit you up.

Speaker 2 (02:05:17):

Don't give me anxiety, bro.

Speaker 1 (02:05:19):

Yeah. It's a mistake to respond because they're going to lead you down a path that's just not good.

Speaker 2 (02:05:24):

Oh, my favorite thing though is every now and again, I'll get somebody who hits me up with that and then they just bombard me with conspiracy theory. Oh, that's good shit. Oh, man. I love reading that, and I'm like, oh, really? That's interesting,

Speaker 1 (02:05:37):

Man. I can't think of a bigger turnoff. When a new person starts sending me that stuff, I immediately check out.

Speaker 2 (02:05:44):

Oh, for sure. I entertain it for a little bit just to see where it's going, and then once it gets too weird, I'm like, okay, I hope you have a good night and good luck on your conspiracies. I hope they work out.

Speaker 1 (02:05:54):

What I've noticed is that when I start making organic friends with people, sometimes it can take up to five years or something before we work together, if ever.

Speaker 2 (02:06:05):

Yeah. It's been like that with a lot of people that I've gotten to know where I'm friends with them, and we've never worked together when I wish we had worked together, but a lot of guys do have their go-to dudes already, so if someone I know has a go-to guy, especially someone I'm friends with, I don't even step on toes if they want to work with me. They know have known me long enough to know what I do and what I'm capable of, so if they're not interested, then I'm not going to push it. Honestly, there's plenty of work out there for everybody.

Speaker 1 (02:06:34):

I think that it's very important to understand that. I think it's hard for people sometimes to be cool with that because they so badly want work, but that starts to border on desperation, and desperation pushes people away.

Speaker 2 (02:06:51):

It does. As soon as you start coming off desperate or treating someone like they're a paycheck, if they feel like all you're hitting them up for is to make money off of them, they do not want to work with you just because it makes them feel gross.

Speaker 1 (02:07:04):

Yeah. That's something very interesting about the music industry where even though people are trying to make money, authenticity is currency. You have to come off as authentic. You have to be authentic, and I have noticed that when people have ulterior motives, serious ones, they get sniffed out. I mean, this is the whole reason that, well, not the whole reason, but one of the main reasons for why people have managers is just to put a filter between them and people trying to get something out of them, and so most managers are professional nos sayers because they're just conditioned to the fact that most people hitting them up are just trying to extract something from them, and so they kind of have to develop an ability to be able to tell who's genuine and who's not, and so they're like drug dogs looking for authenticity basically.

Speaker 2 (02:08:01):

For sure, and you can immediately tell when someone's hitting you up whether or not they actually are hitting you up because they want to talk to you or because it's literally business only.

Speaker 1 (02:08:10):

Yeah. It's so funny, man. When I get internship requests, which I still do, it's really interesting to me. I haven't recorded since 2014, and I'll get people wanting to come be my intern in the studio now, and it's like, I know because of the fact that you're sending this email, I know you would make a terrible intern. Obviously not paying attention to who you're writing to. I've always thought that when you approach somebody, you should know who you're approaching. Same way that you'll listen to these bands before you talk to the person. You know who they are. You know what they do. I think that that's such an important thing. If someone is approaching me for work and they don't even know that I haven't done it in six years, how are they going to be able to pay attention in the studio to the details of the job?

Speaker 2 (02:09:03):

Yeah, exactly. Well, even when random band guys hit me up and they're like, yo, dude, you have a really sick wall of amps. Do you record or something? I'm like, you really didn't look up anything on me before you hit me up. You literally just saw amps and said, yo, I got to hit this guy up. He's got amps.

Speaker 1 (02:09:19):

It's very, very lazy. The other thing that doesn't work is when people hit me up wanting a hookup, like a job, but all they will talk about is themselves. It'll be like three paragraphs that are like, me, me, me, me. I want this and I want that, and I'm awesome because of this, and I want this and I want that. Can you give me a job? Job doing what? Anything, bro, I'll shine. Okay. It's like, all right, cool. You've given me a lot to think about. I appreciate it. It happens a lot. Do you get hit up with intern requests?

Speaker 2 (02:09:55):

Not a lot, but I do get hit up with intern requests and I always turn 'em down. Honestly, I can do pretty much everything on my own, so I don't really need an assistant or an intern of any kind. I have zero problem talking shop with people, so if they want to talk about recording, I'm all about it, but ever since my whole situation with my old partner, I've been pretty much like lone wolf status ever since.

Speaker 1 (02:10:17):

Do you ever see a scenario where you might take somebody?

Speaker 2 (02:10:21):

I think if I ever got to the point where I had enough incoming work to where I couldn't do it all on my own, then I probably would definitely entertain it. Got it. Between amping jobs and mixing jobs, I don't really have any need for an intern or anything. I have a few editing guys that I send stuff out to whenever I need editing work done just to take things off my plate.

Speaker 1 (02:10:41):

So you do get some help?

Speaker 2 (02:10:43):

Yeah. The only thing that I do is I send out some editing work. Other than that, everything else I do in house,

Speaker 1 (02:10:48):

Man, I've thought this is one of the reasons that I think that recording schools are a fucking rip off the brick and mortar ones. One of my big missions with URM is to help people do this for real and also to get them to not waste $80,000 on something that's not going to help them. One of the main things I've noticed is that people who go to normal recording schools typically don't come out knowing how to edit, which is crazy because that is the most,

Speaker 2 (02:11:20):

That's the biggest commodity in audio is editing. If you find someone who rules at editing, keep them forever and keep hiring them.

Speaker 1 (02:11:29):

Absolutely. If you are cool enough to hang out with and you can edit, even if you're not cool to hang out with and you can edit, you're probably going to get a lot of work,

Speaker 2 (02:11:39):

Especially if you're really good and your turnaround times are excellent.

Speaker 1 (02:11:42):

Yeah, for sure. It blows my mind that people coming out with audio degrees aren't expert editors and vocals and drums and aren't expert DA operators.

Speaker 2 (02:11:54):

Yeah. Honestly, that's the biggest task that most guys have outside of making good source recordings is editing it and making it perfect.

Speaker 1 (02:12:03):

Yeah, totally. And then also knowing how to operate the daw. It's second nature or something.

Speaker 2 (02:12:09):

Yeah. It should basically be muscle memory. You should know how to do everything on a DAW that you're comfortable working in.

Speaker 1 (02:12:15):

Yeah, exactly. So what I noticed with these recording schools is people will take the Pro Tools 1 0 1 or the certifications, but all they'll know are what the menus do, so they'll know a hundred percent of the menu options, but they won't know the five to 10% of the program that you need to be really proficient with in order to get the job done. So it's one of my missions to create a generation of engineers who actually know this stuff and aren't in tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt hampering them, but there you go. You're just kind of proving my point. You don't take interns, but the one thing that you do hire out for are edits.

Speaker 2 (02:12:58):

Yep. Editors are the most sought after commodity for audio guys ever. If you're good at it, you're going to get hired and you're going to get hired a lot, especially if you do really good work.

Speaker 1 (02:13:09):

Yeah. How did you discover your editors

Speaker 2 (02:13:11):

Through other engineers? I'd hit them up and be like, Hey, who do you guys hire out for edits? And then of course, being on the URM job board, I would look up people who are offering editing jobs and hit them up and try 'em out just to see how they would do. If I don't need something edited, but I have something I can send somebody to see if they're good or not, I have no problem paying 35 to 50 bucks just to potentially find my next editing guy.

Speaker 1 (02:13:36):

That's awesome. So what's the criteria you're looking for? So you said quick turnaround, that's number one.

Speaker 2 (02:13:42):

Quick turnaround is definitely one of the biggest ones, but the main one is making things sound natural. Still for my own personal tastes in my way of mixing and production, I like things to still feel natural, but be tight. I don't want things to be machine gun type, so if someone can edit stuff to where it's tight but still has movement, I'm excited about that,

Speaker 1 (02:14:06):

Which takes someone understanding music, I think.

Speaker 2 (02:14:10):

Exactly. Someone who can vibe out with it and get the feel of the music. If it's moving still, this person really takes their craft seriously.

Speaker 1 (02:14:17):

What's key here though is that not every producer will ask for that, so an editor, a good editor needs to be able to do exactly what the producer wants. Some producers I know want the drums to be a hundred percent perfect, and then they let the guitars and the bass be imperfect. I know people who are all across the spectrum as far as what they want out of those drums, and when they hire an editor, they expect the editor to do it exactly the way that they want it. And so the best editors I know can morph between styles, basically from what you said, where it's tight, but natural sounding to where it's a hundred percent robotic, for instance,

Speaker 2 (02:15:03):

Because depending on the genre and the style of band, sometimes the a hundred percent robotic is what's needed, but if you have a guy who can tell when that's needed, when it's not needed, that is invaluable. You need that guy on your team.

Speaker 1 (02:15:17):

And what kind of turnaround time to you do you think is fast?

Speaker 2 (02:15:21):

It depends on how many songs I send them. If they're able to get me back a song every day, just like one, because most of the time it's just drum edits for me, because usually I'll edit all my own guitars and bass, but for drum and vocal edits, if I can get a song back in a day or even two songs back in the day, that's beautiful for me, but if they tell me they have a lot of work already and that it might take a couple days, I always work around that so I can still get stuff done while I wait on them.

Speaker 1 (02:15:48):

So as long as they're upfront about it.

Speaker 2 (02:15:50):

Yeah. Communication is everything. If you're talking to anybody, you're outsourcing work to, you have to be a hundred percent one to one with each other on your communication. You have to know what they're doing. They have to know what you're doing so everyone knows when you need your stuff back and be realistic with one another.

Speaker 1 (02:16:06):

Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with you.

Speaker 2 (02:16:09):

If someone tells me, Hey, I can get this back to you tonight, and then I don't hear from 'em two days, I'm going to be really pissed off and probably never hire them again.

Speaker 1 (02:16:16):

Yeah, man. Setting expectations, it's important in both directions, like both when you're hiring somebody, it's important to set the expectations in that they know exactly what's expected, but then the person getting hired needs to also set expectations that are realistic. So if you can't do it in one night, don't say you can.

Speaker 2 (02:16:37):

Exactly. If you're upfront about it and you let them know exactly what your work schedule is like, most people are going to be really cool about that as long as they know. If you tell someone, Hey, I'm going to get you this on this date, and then you don't deliver, and also you're not open about the fact that you're not going to be able to deliver on time that irritates people, and you'll probably get a bad rap from them that they'll tell their other friends like, Hey, this guy said he was going to do this for me, and he completely dropped the ball, especially if you do it multiple times.

Speaker 1 (02:17:06):

So I've worked with John Douglas a ton, and he would always do that, not drop the ball. He would always let me know if he was overloaded and things would just take longer. Always. I was never left waiting for something.

Speaker 2 (02:17:22):

No, because as long as the communication is there, everything goes smoothly. You know what to expect.

Speaker 1 (02:17:27):

Yeah, exactly. I have definitely had people make promises and then totally just ghost and then send this stuff to me a week later and then wonder why I'm not hiring them anymore.

Speaker 2 (02:17:41):

Yeah, exactly. It's like, well, I do good work for you. It's like, yeah, but you kind of dropped the ball on me and I kind of needed this stuff when I said I needed it not a week or two weeks after the fact.

Speaker 1 (02:17:51):

Yeah. That's the kind of stuff that I wish people came out of recording schools with, but where did you learn this stuff? Just made sense to you or just,

Speaker 2 (02:18:01):

Yeah, it just made sense to me, and then just from trial and error, fucking stuff up and making stuff suck, made me learn what not to do.

Speaker 1 (02:18:09):

Yeah, makes sense.

Speaker 2 (02:18:10):

So just from doing it, real world experience is how I learned everything just by jumping in the deep end, and I've been doing it every single day for the last 10 years.

Speaker 1 (02:18:18):

I think that's the best way to do it.

Speaker 2 (02:18:20):

Yeah, because when you go to recording school, all you're leaving with is knowledge on recording. You're leaving with zero real world knowledge. You have no idea what you're going to be getting yourself into if you get thrown in the deep end of a real recording studio coming out of a school.

Speaker 1 (02:18:33):

Yeah. I think that a great engineer, whether it's mixing or producing or whatever, is a professional problem solver. That's a big, big part of it. Aside from the creative vision and all that stuff, the problem solving aspect is major, and I'm not so sure that you can really simulate that. So even with URM students, man, I always tell them that if all they're doing is URM, they're fucking up. They got to be trying to do this in real life or else it's not going to help.

Speaker 2 (02:19:06):

Real world experience is where you're going to get all of your learning from. That's how you're going to grow, is just by taking on projects, things not going the way they're supposed to, and learning why those didn't go the way they were supposed to and how to make it better next time.

Speaker 1 (02:19:19):

And then if you find techniques online or through another engineer, then you can incorporate those. You can see how to improve the way you work, but if you don't have a real world context against which to try that stuff, you're basically just doing it for entertainment purposes, in my opinion. Which is fine if that's what you want,

Speaker 2 (02:19:40):

But the best thing to do is just to stay open-minded. If you hear somebody talk about a certain technique or a certain product they use or anything like that, demo it. Try it, see how it works in your workflow. If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you, but you don't have to try it just because somebody else does it and it's successful for them. If it's not successful for you, just keep trying things until you find things that work for you.

Speaker 1 (02:20:02):

Completely agree. Well, Phil, I think this is a good place to stop it. It's been awesome talking to you and catching up with you. Thank you for coming on.

Speaker 2 (02:20:11):

Oh, no problem, man. It's been a long time coming.

Speaker 1 (02:20:13):

Yeah, for sure. Well, thank you.

Speaker 2 (02:20:15):

No problem.

Speaker 1 (02:20:16):

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.