Zack Ohren: Producer Psychology, Surviving Band Politics, and Mixing the New Machine Head

Eyal Levi (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, and now your host, AAL Levy. 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 Levy urm audio, and let me just let you know that we love seeing ourselves tagged in these posts.

(00:00:55):

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 host and a tag. Now let's get on with it. Hello everybody. Welcome to the URM podcast. My guest today has been on before. His name is Zach Orin and his previous episode, I believe is from 2017 or 16, and it's a really good one. There's some unique stuff on there. I recommend you all check it out. Anyway, Zach is a producer, engineer, mixer and mastering engineer working out of Shark Bite Studios in Oakland, and I would call him a seasoned veteran at this point. He's known for his work with a band such as Machine Head, Fallujah, suffocation, and a ton of others. I give you Zach Orin. Alright, Zach Orin, welcome back to the URM Podcast. Nice

Zack Ohren (00:02:06):

To be talking with you again. Likewise. So you've been running a lot. Oh yeah. Yeah. I've definitely been running a lot. It's been my quarantine thing. In fact, we're on fairly early today, and so I made sure to go in and get my six miles in this morning real early for me. Really.

Eyal Levi (00:02:24):

Did you used to be an exercise person pre quarantine?

Zack Ohren (00:02:30):

Well, so the running thing is, it's something I've been doing on and off for a good decade, but I didn't really take it to the level I've taken it until April. April 1st. Literally the 1st of April, something switched in my head and I just decided, Hey, I'm going to just start doing this more. And then two miles became, three became five, five became eight, eight became 12, 12 becomes 14, and it becomes, right now it's more a thing where I've been going every single day and I didn't think that was the healthy way to do it at first, but now I'm feeling it's the best way for me is to just reduce the mileage a little bit and go every single day feels really great. I've never felt better in my life just as far as psychologically, mostly because of it. It's the clarity that I like from it more than any of the other benefits, and I'm not getting hurt at all anymore, which is great.

Eyal Levi (00:03:26):

Yeah, that definitely helps. Honestly, I kind of have accepted that with the amount I exercise, I'm going to hurt myself here and there. Oh yeah. It just goes with the territory. If you want to exercise, you're going to fuck yourself up.

Zack Ohren (00:03:43):

Yeah,

Eyal Levi (00:03:44):

I've accepted it, but hopefully as little as possible, of course.

Zack Ohren (00:03:49):

Right, so that's what I'm saying. I was getting calf strains, I was getting blisters on my toes, but it was just a learning process of find the right socks to fix the blister problems.

Eyal Levi (00:04:03):

Thanks for that tip by the way.

Zack Ohren (00:04:05):

That's right. Remember that made a huge difference? Oh yeah. The socks are important and it's not just one pair, but specialized running socks that cost more than,

Eyal Levi (00:04:14):

Dude, I didn't even know that was a thing. And so I'm not running, but I am doing six mile walks with the thing way to vest and I was hurting myself after a while. So your suggestions made a massive difference. Better shoes, the anti blister socks, all that stuff. World of difference. Thank you.

Zack Ohren (00:04:34):

And honestly, that's a small part of it. I ran on and off, like I said, for a part of a decade, but all of a sudden here I am doing it at an almost competitive level out of nowhere at 39 years old, and it's in large part because I just learned how to not hurt myself going further and then your body, I've gotten stronger to the point where it expects this much running every day and it's not even weird and I'm not even getting generalized soreness from it anymore as long as I do all the stretching. I've also found compression sleeves on my calfs pretty much completely cured the calf strain issue. But yeah, like you said, what do you think switched

Eyal Levi (00:05:15):

In your head?

Zack Ohren (00:05:16):

Quarantine, to be honest, not having a schedule in the studio for months on end. So all my work being mixing and I had a lot of work, that's a part of it. That's a part of getting started. There was about three bands I was working on at May Reaping es Modia and some machine head stuff that I was listening to every day. The first couple of weeks I was getting started, I was just listening to my daily revision of the mix or whatever, and I love these headphones. I'm wearing these headphones right now for getting a consumer level playback of something. So it was really,

Eyal Levi (00:05:54):

What are they?

Zack Ohren (00:05:54):

Yeah, these are really, really great. These galaxy buds plus they're actually AKGs. I mean they're just wireless a KG in yours that aren't too shabby at all and they're a little tenured than wearing some nice over ear ones, but they're also what a lot of people are going to be listening on something like this or AirPods. So I like to keep that in mind, especially when I'm doing masters,

Eyal Levi (00:06:18):

So they're not like in your monitors or something like the Empire stuff.

Zack Ohren (00:06:22):

I was wearing those for years when I was running, I was wearing sure wired, fancy $500 in your monitor type things. And those sounded great in some ways, but when I got these actually honestly sounded considerably better. Plus they're wireless and the wireless headphone was another big thing that made the running so much more fun. They also just fit really well. I can not shake these even loose from my head yet. They come in and out really smooth. I'm not here to advertise for Samsung here, but they're great.

Eyal Levi (00:06:56):

I should consider that because right now I'm using these Bose quiet control headphones when I exercise and they pop out a lot. They break a lot.

Zack Ohren (00:07:05):

Right. And I mean that's the big thing when you're out running is you got to have something for your ears that's actually comfortable being in there for a real long time. And I mean, I don't have to explain this any further, but yeah, you'd be like, they need to be able to work for a long time in your ears. It's that simple.

Eyal Levi (00:07:23):

So you're in quarantine, you're mixing, you're listening to the same shit every day. How did that equal this super serious exercise habit? What's the link?

Zack Ohren (00:07:34):

The link is the time, I think because I've done this before where I started running more, but at some point you're going to get interrupted by, I'm going to go into the studio, need to be tracking for three days and I mean it eats up a good chunk of time in your day. If I'm running 13 miles, that's at least an hour and a half, two hours of just the running plus the stretching prep before plus cool down, stretching again, shower, all that stuff. It is a lot of stuff to deal with. It's a lot of time and I have to do it basically before noon or it's not going to happen. You have to do it while you're still got your morning energy or you're not likely to perform all that well. I don't know. That's just me personally, but still, I think that's something a lot of people find to be true. I don't know. I'm no expert on this whatsoever.

Eyal Levi (00:08:26):

No, maybe not an expert. I'm interested in learning more about people who are experiencing the same quarantine as everybody else, but who decided to do something like that during it?

Zack Ohren (00:08:40):

Well, I'm like that though. I'm always trying to improve something, whether it's something to do with mixing or if it's something to do with anything, I'm going to always be trying to improve. I can't rest on laurels, I can't just stay exactly what I'm doing and I'm mainly talking about audio here at this point or dealing with bands, but you've got to keep improving on everything you do or you're going to stagnate away.

Eyal Levi (00:09:04):

So when quarantine happened, did you get scared or bummed or did you just look at it like an immediate opportunity to be able to do things you might not have had the time to do?

Zack Ohren (00:09:17):

So I'd say I didn't immediately do this. I did it a few weeks in is when I started getting a grasp on what's happening, how long it's really going to be, and I mean even when I went into this

Eyal Levi (00:09:29):

In the grand scope, a couple of weeks is pretty immediate.

Zack Ohren (00:09:33):

A couple of weeks in it occurred to me, Hey, it's going to be this way probably until at least June. I should try to lose a few pounds. Easy way to do that would be to up my running start do that, but that quickly just, it escalated a lot differently this time than it has in other times when I've tried to get in shape and I'm not just running anymore, I'm doing weight and core work and some other stuff now that I'm feeling so high energy, hey, I mean you can probably hear it in my voice since I'm only an hour post run right now, I have just tons of energy from this and that's the number one benefit I found from it.

Eyal Levi (00:10:12):

Yeah, I think that when quarantine happened, see I had already been losing weight and exercising for a good while, a year and a half, but once quarantine happened, I just went nuts. I figured when else am I going to get this opportunity?

Zack Ohren (00:10:32):

That is really it. It's that it was like, well, I'm never going to have an opportunity like this to try to get my health under control of bear. Plus it's really, I immediately was reading about how important your immune system was for fighting COD, and I don't know if this is still the common thinking, but the common thinking is that eventually 60 ish percent of us are going to get this disease in the next year or so, one way or another. I mean, I don't know if that's still the idea here, but regardless my,

Eyal Levi (00:11:02):

I haven't heard any different.

Zack Ohren (00:11:04):

My impression is I'm going to, if not already have been exposed to this and I want my body, I'm pushing 40 here, I want my body to actually be able to handle it. That was how I felt about it. So that's maybe not how everybody thinks about things, but I was just immediately trying to prepare my body for getting it instead of just being completely in fear of imminent death or suffocation. I don't know any other way to put it.

Eyal Levi (00:11:36):

I had Matt Halburn from periphery on a couple months back and he's also gone hard with his physical health during this time.

Zack Ohren (00:11:46):

Great.

Eyal Levi (00:11:46):

And he was saying the same sort of thing. He's trying to strengthen his lungs a lot and then also his heart, he's gone hard with the idea of if I do get this, I want the best fighting chance possible.

Zack Ohren (00:12:03):

That's exactly what I'm saying. And same, it's a matter really also of, well, I mean that's the number one thing right there, but just even thinking back to yesterday, I'm not thinking the way I was when I started doing this. I'm thinking, how hard can I push myself? I'm going to push harder. Like yesterday I pushed and ran seven minute 15 second miles for the last three miles of my run. That's good. That's best I've ever done by far. That's more of my goal now than I was at first really training endurance, just distance. Now I'm trying to see about maybe actually getting a little faster.

Eyal Levi (00:12:43):

Dude, it's so important to evolve your goals. For instance, with my physical goals, originally it was just I need to lose weight

Speaker 3 (00:12:51):

Die. That was my first goal.

Eyal Levi (00:12:53):

I don't want to die under the age of 50, so that was the big motivator, but now that I'm within 30 40 pounds of goal and the light is at the end of the tunnel, I've been lifting for almost two years. My goals are totally different now. Now it's like, let's see just how fucking strong and big I can get. Let's just see how ridiculous my cardio abilities can get. Let's just see how far I can push this thing to be the exact opposite of what I was. And I think that if my goal was just simply finish losing weight, I'd be bored. When it was originally losing weight, there was such a tremendous amount that in and of itself was a major goal. Now that it's not a tremendous amount, I have to have a goal of the same type of stature and impact to motivate me, I think.

Zack Ohren (00:13:44):

Right, and yeah, that makes sense too. You got to change what's motivating you periodically throughout what you're doing.

Eyal Levi (00:13:52):

But I mean I actually have noticed a lot of musicians don't do this, which is I'm sure you've seen a lot of musicians past the age of 30. They're in a band that's been going for a while and they start to burn out and they don't know what to do because the band's going, they don't want to give it up. They're just

(00:14:10):

Kind of in an endless loop and I think it's because they haven't adjusted their goals. They're still operating as though they had the same goals that they had when they were 18 or something because when they were younger, just being in the band that toured some months of the year and let them afford a one bedroom apartment was fine. But then past a certain age they were still acting as though that was the goal when in reality they probably have moved past it. They want something else for their lives, but their action isn't really congruent with their efforts. And so I noticed that they start to burn out, they start to get bitter, they start to get depressed, and I really think that adjustment of your perspective and your goals is major part of it.

Zack Ohren (00:14:59):

They always say set your goals, but they never tell you the important part where you have to keep adjusting them. If I had just like you said, if I had gone off that kind of idea, I feel like I achieved most goals I set out to do in life when I was like 25. So you had got to at some point up the ante, change your goals.

Eyal Levi (00:15:20):

I actually think that this is one of the reasons not to get too morbid, but for why you hear about millionaires or super famous people killing themselves from depression. I think a lot of, I mean look, I understand that there's the actual disease of depression, the clinicals type, and since I've had it, I understand it and I'm not talking about that, but what I'm saying is when someone achieves everything they set out to achieve and they don't have something else to live for, life can start to get very empty and emptiness and lack of direction is breeding ground for depression,

Zack Ohren (00:16:06):

Right?

Eyal Levi (00:16:06):

A hundred percent. So I feel like they start to feel like what else is there left to do and then don't know what to do with themselves and if they already have a tendency towards depression and negative thoughts can spiral out of control

Zack Ohren (00:16:25):

And so I can't agree with you more on that. Having things that you're striving for, having things to live for, it's always a really good thing. And it's also probably part of this whole thing with me is that my goals are interesting. I've always been in generally happy person overall, my life has flown by. I feel like I can't believe I'm nearing 40 and I'd like to keep feeling young a long time if possible. I look at these guys that are in their sixties, sometimes seventies that are still out running every day and walking around find and feeling good and it's a really easy connection for me to make with these cardio types as opposed to all sorts of other kinds of workouts. You go get jacked and put on a hundred pounds of muscle or something, you got to maintain that and it's terrible on your joints. And you see those guys when they're in their even late forties and they're all just stiff as a rock, I want to be pushing longevity.

Eyal Levi (00:17:27):

So when I say I'm trying to get as big as possible, I'm not saying that,

Zack Ohren (00:17:32):

Oh, I didn't think you were

Eyal Levi (00:17:33):

Just for clarity, I feel like past 40, if someone looks really good and has a lot of vitality to them, it's due to choices. When you're under 40 and especially under 30, I'm not going to say you can do whatever you want and get away with it, but the tolerance for what you can handle lifestyle wise is much greater. You can recover a lot faster and so

Zack Ohren (00:18:02):

There's

Eyal Levi (00:18:03):

No great feet to having energy or looking good when you're under 30 or even under 35, but when you start to get past 40, it's still possible to look incredible and feel incredible, but if you are, it's because you are putting in the effort for it.

Zack Ohren (00:18:20):

Right. I mean that's just a huge point right there because what I don't understand about me, I've always looked younger than I am and I've always felt younger than I am.

Eyal Levi (00:18:32):

Yeah, you look 30.

Zack Ohren (00:18:33):

Well thanks. I think it's also just that I'm small. I'm a very small person. I'm barely five foot four and I've always been mistaken for younger than I am, but I would like that to continue and I'd like to feel like it too because I don't feel near 40 at all and certainly not right now and I don't have a lot of mileage on me either. I spent a long time in my twenties doing absolutely no exercise. I don't think I really first got into any sort of exercise until I was like 29. I spent this whole period of my life just resting and engineering audio, often working with bands, months on the end and no breaks, just going crazy hard all the time and this is much healthier. This is much better. I'm having a lot more fun right now than I was when I was doing that, that's for sure.

Eyal Levi (00:19:32):

I would almost say that doing that puts more mileage on you

Zack Ohren (00:19:36):

Maybe, but my joints for example, everybody's

Eyal Levi (00:19:39):

Like people

Zack Ohren (00:19:40):

Are saying, how are your knees not giving out? I'm, I don't feel like I know this is when an athlete would be retiring and I'm sure if I was doing this at 25, I'd be pushing much higher speeds and I'd be doing better. I know that. I know that I'm not anywhere near the peak of what I could have done, but I also just don't care. It's not like I'm trying out for some team or something. This is a hundred percent personal thing,

Eyal Levi (00:20:08):

The peak of what you could do now.

Zack Ohren (00:20:11):

And as long as I'm not putting myself or in pain or causing injury, it's working out great.

Eyal Levi (00:20:18):

What are you doing lifting wise?

Zack Ohren (00:20:20):

Barely anything. Just some basic stuff, but I mean my bare minimum I do is right after the runs. I'm trying to get in two minutes of planking because that's really more of my concern. And that's another thing, I used to have horrible back problems. That was another thing that would prevent me from doing too much exercises. I threw out my back lick on 10 different occasions and now that I've actually built up strength in it and running does that too, running daily I'm doing is built up all sorts of strength in my back and core that I didn't expect and I'm so much stronger in that way now, so whatever.

Eyal Levi (00:20:57):

Is that the only thing that you tweaked your exercise habits? Did you tweak diet at all, sleep, anything like that? Yes,

Zack Ohren (00:21:04):

Quite a bit. The diet quite a bit. I mean, but that was how,

Eyal Levi (00:21:07):

So

Zack Ohren (00:21:08):

That's what's funny. It's just like a combination. I always just started eating better around that time and technically I guess I started by intermittent fasting. By that I mean I wasn't eating breakfast anymore and I was just eating after the runs and kind of eating inside an eight hour window and I didn't give that up entirely. I was originally trying to actually stick to this 16 eight thing when I was caring about losing weight. I'm not trying to lose weight anymore though, so I'm not doing that, but I still don't eat breakfast. I think that was a great adjustment for the running because just having food in your stomach is highly overrated for exercise and having it for recovery is underrated.

Eyal Levi (00:21:51):

I think having food in your stomach might be good for weightlifting,

Zack Ohren (00:21:55):

Certainly

Eyal Levi (00:21:57):

If it's been an hour and a half or something, but for cardio, fuck that.

Zack Ohren (00:22:02):

Yeah, and I never tried that before, so that was definitely a brand new tweak to what I was doing.

Eyal Levi (00:22:08):

When you say you started eating healthier, what did you do?

Zack Ohren (00:22:11):

I'm going to have to keep that vague. I don't really know what to say to that. But eating less, honestly. Just eating a bit less carbs, more protein, fair enough. And not eating as much junky snack stuff late at night, not eating just silly breakfasts,

Eyal Levi (00:22:27):

Just being smarter about it. Yeah.

Zack Ohren (00:22:29):

Yeah, I mean I've known how to take care of my diet before and also just drinking less. I had been drinking a lot at the beginning of quarantine than I just kind of reared that back quite a bit. And then when I was really going hard at this back in April and May and actually attempting to lose weight, I was just not drinking on weekdays. Also to try to keep some kind of north malice towards the lockdown and the fact that Tuesday felt like Sunday.

Eyal Levi (00:22:56):

Yeah. So I mean I saw you in November when you came to the summit. You didn't look like you had any weight to lose, so

Zack Ohren (00:23:03):

No, not

Eyal Levi (00:23:03):

Really. When you say lose weight, how much did you go for?

Zack Ohren (00:23:07):

I went for, I mean I was pushing into almost overweight status and I've lost 25 pounds. I'm at what I would considered the lowest I should be at, but I feel great right here because being light on your feet is highly underrated, just highly underrated thing. And also

Eyal Levi (00:23:28):

I didn't realize you had 25 pounds to lose.

Zack Ohren (00:23:31):

I knew I did. I knew I did. Probably had body fat up near close closing in on 20% and now it's down around 11 or 12%. So it's great. Wow, that's

Eyal Levi (00:23:43):

Phenomenal. Congrats.

Zack Ohren (00:23:45):

And that's why I'm saying at this point that's not really the goal and that's why I'm adding in a little more weight training and I'd like to, I'm sure you can't lose weight without losing some muscle with it. So I'm trying to get back some, especially upper body strength. My legs look ripped as can be, but I dunno,

Eyal Levi (00:24:05):

I don't have anything else to say on that, I guess. Alright, it's a topic I'm interested in and

Zack Ohren (00:24:11):

Oh no, for sure.

Eyal Levi (00:24:12):

Lots of people who listen are too because as you know, the studio lifestyle is super sedentary

Zack Ohren (00:24:19):

And

Eyal Levi (00:24:20):

To, I feel like you have to make it a point to make healthy choices if you're going to do this because the job itself does not allow for that. There's nothing in the job built in that will help you be healthier. And in fact, if you just go along with the flow of the job, you'll become very unhealthy. That's the natural progression of things as an engineer

Zack Ohren (00:24:48):

And I would agree with that to the most extent, unless you're someone that does a great job, self-motivated yourself, if you're do that, then you do have the options to set your own schedule to some extent and all that kind of stuff. So that helps. But otherwise, like you said, it's a big pitfall some people could fall into really quickly and really easily.

Eyal Levi (00:25:10):

Yeah, I'm finding that there's a whole lot of URM people who really take this seriously or who are wanting to take it seriously. Yes, absolutely.

Zack Ohren (00:25:21):

I think it's a good idea overall to be highly conscious of it just because of, like you said, the career and how sedentary you can end up being. It's not, but that goes for anybody working at a computer all day.

Eyal Levi (00:25:34):

Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. I think that the mental benefits, like you said before, the clarity really, really helps.

Speaker 3 (00:25:43):

Oh yeah.

Eyal Levi (00:25:43):

So another thing is I think that working in music or audio,

(00:25:48):

And I'm sure this is true in other industries too, but this is the one I know, so I'm going to speak about this one. There's a lot of stress involved and there's a lot of people managing involved, expectation managing, ego managing, there's all kinds of fires that come up at the last minute, just all kinds of pressures. There's also some scumbags you got to deal with. There's all kinds of things that will, if you're not careful, make you a less happy, more reactive, bitter kind of person I think. And it's just kind of a natural thing that happens just because maybe even if that's not who you are, just having to be in those situations over and over and over and over for years, it can slowly help your character personality devolve. And so I think making choices to do things that help you be clear and feel better will help you approach those situations in a much more constructive way, thereby staving off that whole burned out bitter thing that happens.

Zack Ohren (00:26:59):

I mean could, let's go at this for a second here,

Eyal Levi (00:27:03):

Go.

Zack Ohren (00:27:03):

I know what this podcast, this is for the URM people and this is something that doesn't seem to register with some people I talk to even at the summit that this job is completely, I mean 80% of it as far as staying in this industry and making a real career out of this is being able to roll with things and deal with all the insanity of this industry. It's not going to get a paycheck like a normal little job. This isn't something to go into if you can't completely adapt and self-manage and stay on top of this stuff. So people are always asking me like, Hey, how do you set this compressor one way, this thing or other? How has this helped your career? How can you do this? How do I be successful with this? And what they don't realize is just like 80% of the job is dealing with people that are mostly crazy people because they're all musicians and musicians are inherently crazy.

(00:27:59):

And at least half my job is psychologist. I've got to manage totally these tons and tons of people and sometimes get pushed into insane situations, insane deadlines, insane things. And like you said, you need to be able to have clarity, you need to know what matters and what doesn't. And there's also just the whole being able to say, fuck it, not my problem kind of thing. And be able to do that without just having an overwhelming stress of, Ooh, is everybody going to like me? And those kinds of feelings or is my mix and just going for it and being creative, you cannot be creative. It's a creative job to mix a record and you cannot be that creative if you're thinking about the 800 different worries of yours instead of just going at it and making what you want to make. And I mean that's shown itself many times to me over the years where I've had some big clients and they gave me probably too much feedback and then I'll work with a band for the weekend, some local band, and we, we'll record three songs and they'll come out just so much better than the group that had paid me $20,000 to do this multiple month production because there's so much less back and forth.

(00:29:25):

And the band over the weekend just trusted me to do my thing and there was no, and so I'd say a large part of this, what I'm getting at here is part of this whole thing is being able to block out all that noise and actually do the good job on the big project project because you have the ability to just not let the stress get to you because if stress is getting to you, you're going to probably do worse.

Eyal Levi (00:29:51):

And to your point about the audio being or the music being 20% of the job, I feel like

(00:29:58):

Your skills in that are kind of assumed if you're getting hired or you're in the conversation, you being good at that. That's just like if you're not, you're not even going to be in the conversation. So that part of it is just the underlying assumption. If you're being considered or talked about, people think you can do that part of it. So if you couldn't do that part of it, none of the other stuff would even exist for you. You wouldn't have the opportunity to be reactive or to get bitter or to have to manage these scenarios. So yeah, obviously learn how to set a compressor, but that's not the part that's going to keep you in the game. That's only the part that's going to allow you to even be in the game in the first place.

Zack Ohren (00:30:49):

That's completely what I'm getting at is that that's a question that I often think about sometimes when someone's, if you hired me at this point, I haven't advertised in 20 years for anything in any way, shape or form. Surprised not putting ads on something, nothing pisses me off more in the world when I somehow end up with a client. It's not into how I make things sound and I just wonder how did this happen? And almost always the answer is, this band had been fighting over who to work with on the album and the person who didn't get their way is going to be pissy about it one way or another. And being older and realizing that's almost always the case when it comes to something like that, I just ignore it. I just completely tune it out now. Meaning if they're getting all crappy and they're like, well, I don't like everything kind of comments that make no sense, that don't jive with how things are going, I've learned to just realize what's going on there.

(00:31:56):

And it's almost always that at this point. So like you said, it's like if someone's working with me, they already had a conversation at some point probably with their band or if they're solo with their friends about who should I work with? And it really helps to not be working with just random people. You solicited somewhere else and I mean that's a luxury of having done some records, but it's not something you can do when you start out. But once you do, it's really good to have people working with you that how you do things.

Eyal Levi (00:32:27):

I know that scenario actually it took me some years to get comfortable with it. I think maturity helps a lot. You can look at that scenario where you realize, wait a second, there are some people in the band who didn't want to come to me and there are some who did and now I'm dealing with the backlash or I'm dealing with the result of that. It's not personal.

Zack Ohren (00:32:48):

Exactly.

Eyal Levi (00:32:49):

I think when you're younger it's easier to take that shit a lot personally.

Zack Ohren (00:32:52):

Sometimes it is personal. It's even more important to block that out. Like I don't care. Fair enough. I don't care. What I care is that people though the audience is going to hear it, I care way more about what they hear, what they think because they're going to hear it. Whereas if this band, if I angered some guy in some band, then maybe that band won't come back to me or maybe they will, but once they get the reaction from the record, you never know. But the important thing is to not ever let that influence what I'm going to do too much, have my own standards that I'm living up to. Not always what the group's telling me because groups they should know, they don't know what they're doing oftentimes.

Eyal Levi (00:33:37):

So the question then is where do you draw the line? Because obviously you know that scenario where bands sometimes feel like certain producers don't care about their vision

Zack Ohren (00:33:49):

And I care a lot about that stuff. Yeah,

Eyal Levi (00:33:51):

I don't think that's what you mean.

Zack Ohren (00:33:53):

No,

Eyal Levi (00:33:53):

It's not. But what I'm wondering is where's the line between shutting out what people are saying versus making sure you're still in line with the client's vision?

Zack Ohren (00:34:04):

Well, first off, I'm never saying shut out what they're saying. I'm saying make sure to see through it with the goggles that are showing me the bigger picture. If it's one person that's always saying something, but it's a whole band kind of thing, you could be working with a group and everybody just one by one will tell you, Hey, I want to hear the guitars louder of the mix. And the bass will say, I want to hear the bass louder of the mix. And then the drum's like, I need to hear more snare. At some point you got to just tell everybody, yep, I did all that and hand it back to them and they'll all be happy and you know what I'm saying? And I'm not saying I do exactly that, but that's the sort of thing where you got to really watch out and try to make sure the whole, the band's got to be on the same page first because if the band tells me their thoughts and their vision on this thing and then we come around to it and I'm doing it, it's going to work out.

(00:34:57):

It always works out. Everybody's always happy. I just did a project with a band called Gamma Bomb. They're a really cool band from Ireland. I guess I described them as kind of power mely, I don't know what to describe them as, but they're a metal band and that project was kind of crazy. It had a hard deadline and I was supposed to get it a month before that deadline, which was already a pretty short period to work with on a full length of that magnitude. I had to do amps and everything. It was a pretty full project take that. It got condensed to like 10 days because they had trouble finishing the vocals, they had trouble finishing all the guitar solos, all this stuff. But we talked though, I was talking with the band extensively. We had a Zoom call for half an hour just to go over what they wanted and all the information I gathered in that I made sure to really think about, they didn't want too much gain on the guitar tone.

(00:35:53):

They wanted more of cranked Marshall tone. They talked about what they liked. I asked what recordings of mine made you want to work with me. And they were pretty specific about things like they loved the war bringer record I had just done so I thought to myself, okay, so let's use this all as a reference. And by the time I was sending them the mix, we had to have it the very first mix, one kind of thing. They had to basically give me whatever notes they had and then it had to go off to the label. It was that simple. And we knew this going in and I was kind of really worried about that because usually you'll have a little more of a back and forth period with a band. But because they had given me such concise and clear vision of it, all I had to do was sit down and execute that for a week without too much input from them at all. And they were thrilled with the record. I'm thrilled with the record, everybody's happy with the record and they only had 10 little targeted spot notes. I was like, so you guys don't want, there was no balance issue whatsoever, meaning you guys don't want any more guitar any. I was like, no, we're extremely happy, period. We're all thrilled with this. There was a couple parts, they wanted a vocal up or down and there was a couple little solo adjustments and then bang mastered off to label getting released.

Eyal Levi (00:37:17):

Man, that shit would always scare me when the band had very few notes.

Zack Ohren (00:37:23):

It'd

Eyal Levi (00:37:23):

Be like, what are you going to discover six months from now that you hate about this?

Zack Ohren (00:37:28):

Well, what made me happy about that situation is it wasn't just that they had zero notes. It was their notes were that they loved everything.

Eyal Levi (00:37:35):

That's great.

Zack Ohren (00:37:36):

That's another thing I think not enough groups even think about is you got to give engineers positive feedback too. Tell them what's sounding good to you so they don't screw that up in whatever they're going to do next.

Eyal Levi (00:37:47):

Yeah, because engineers will go down neurotic rabbit holes

Zack Ohren (00:37:51):

Or I'll assume if you didn't say anything about it, if you're not like, damn, this guitar tone's killer, I'm going to be like, okay, well they must not be thrilled with the guitar tone or someone might think that is all I'm saying.

Eyal Levi (00:38:02):

Yeah, man, an artist having a vision is such a great thing, but what do you do when they don't or when they're not clear about it?

Zack Ohren (00:38:12):

I would argue most don't and they're mostly not clear and

Eyal Levi (00:38:16):

Yeah, so how do you approach that?

Zack Ohren (00:38:18):

Honestly, a place where I excel, then it's my vision, then I'm going to do my thing. My assumption will be they've heard the some odd thousands recordings I've done and are to some extent happy with them and then I'm going to go do my thing and if I hear stuff, I am going to not hesitate to just do something wild. Those are sometimes the best. Sometimes my favorite projects to work with are with some super talented 16-year-old kids or something that come into the studio and just go do my thing with them and they trust the younger artist is I find the more trust they have in just let the producer do what they say is going to work. They don't tell me what kind of mic they want to sing into. They don't have an amp preference. They've never even played most the two amps I have sitting around. So they don't have all these preconceived notions and preconceived notions are the worst is all I'm going to say about that. I completely agree. Even when it comes to me or something like that, I am very careful not to get stuck in some way just because it used to be the way I felt about things.

Eyal Levi (00:39:28):

Well, I mean it's a natural thing to do to have preconceived notions that I don't think that you can be human without having them. They're actually, they evolved as a survival mechanism, so you learn to recognize patterns and then when you see a pattern or something that looks familiar, you just default to that. And so in modern day we still do that even when our survival isn't at stake. But this just reminds me, I see that there's a Kemper back there. Oh yeah. When the Keer first came out, I got one in 2013, I got one of the pre-release models. I've had it forever.

Zack Ohren (00:40:11):

I said, I forgot we were on video.

Eyal Levi (00:40:13):

Yeah, yeah, we're on video. So I'm not making an argument right now about what's better. I don't give a fuck what's better. I think great tones are great tones and doesn't matter, but

Zack Ohren (00:40:24):

When

Eyal Levi (00:40:24):

That first came out, wanted to use it on certain records and the guitar players would give tons of resistance. They wanted to use their amp and I would run these abs between the model and that and I'd be like, guess which ones which? They almost always guessed it wrong, and that's how we ended up using it a lot more was when I would take steps to bust through their preconceived notions.

Zack Ohren (00:40:55):

Right. That's a really good point too because even I don't love that Kemper by the means and the ways in which I use it would probably shock and horrify people, meaning the fashion, the crazy elaborate steps. I go to use it sometimes there's things about it that I like better than two bas and that's when I will use it and there's no other time I use it, meaning if I want something only I can do with that Kemper, such as, for example, you can make guitar tones tighter than even a solid state like Randall with that thing if you need to. And you could do it with the exact same guitar tone you had before by a method. I think you've described it before as rehabbing, but that technology gets better and better and better. So off, I mean there's times where I will just think of an example.

(00:41:47):

Examples work best to explain this, so I'll take something like the inanimate existence is most recent record. The record was tracked amped on an angle Fireball, 100 mesa cab. There were a few parts though where I felt like the palm mutes on the occasional super chuggy breakdown parts, they didn't have the impact. It's a little too mushy, a little too compressed coming out through the original. So you take that, I use some profile that's just crazy tight from Andy snip throw the through there, use that. I don't love the cab tone from that. I feel like the cap tone from that sounds digital sounds a bit fake, but you take that and you do the, what do you call it? Not comparison, but I guess comparison EQ stuff, matching EQ stuff, match

Eyal Levi (00:42:42):

Eq. Yeah.

Zack Ohren (00:42:42):

And you just match EQ that to the original cabinet and I can just put those two parts and it's completely seamless on the record as to where those little spots are where I suddenly added extra chug tightness, I de regained the guitar is essentially a good bit on a few parts. That's what I love doing with it. Occasionally I'll have to just, sometimes it's really the best sound period for a record some, it's definitely the best sound I can use with a lot of records of bands that don't have the greatest guitarist straight up. If the guitar player picks too light, especially for metal or something, if the guy isn't, that experience doesn't have the best right hand, it's so much more forgiving than something like my Randall Thrasher or something where you get just a little bit off on that. It's going to sound weak by comparison.

(00:43:38):

So I don't know. That's my point. I used to just completely throw out the idea of using Kemper for anything but demoing and I've not felt that way for a long time. And it's not just Kemper, I mean I actually prefer using this neural DSP stuff among other stuff. There's a lot of good plugin based AMP software these days that's just really turning a corner and getting to the point where it's usable in a mix and I don't think it's a compromise. The one thing I don't want to do is compromise in some way or another that dark glass plugin for example, just the very first original dark glass neural plugin that plugin's a better base tone than like 85% of amps I can set up and mic up.

Eyal Levi (00:44:23):

Yes, I agree.

Zack Ohren (00:44:25):

And there's no reason, especially if I'm using a real nice DI to begin with, there's no reason other than me trying to make it feel fancier to the band, which is something I avoid getting caught up in client appeasement. I'm not going to get caught up in that anymore. It's just not a thing I'm going to indulge. I don't need to indulge some silly thing where van's like, well we want all tube tone to this. I mean I'm not going to lie to them either. I'm just going to say, Hey, give this a shock. It has its upsides and I do weird hybrids of things all the time too where I'll use, I have a plugin of a rat pedal. I like much more than the actual rat pedal, so if I have a chance to reamp, I'm going to use that. I'm not going to use the actual rat pedal. It's just way easier to work with, especially on a base tone or something.

Eyal Levi (00:45:18):

I like your attitude of just best tool for the job doesn't matter,

Zack Ohren (00:45:23):

You know how you get passed up, the way you get passed up by the young 18-year-old kids I was 20 years ago. It's just assuming every new technology or new thing is inherently bad and not as good and that your old school, I'm doing everything to tape. I only listen to Vinyl Way is correct and better and every single engineer I know that's like that finds their careers tapering off pretty quickly as they get older and everybody else isn't afraid to use autotune when they want to or something. You just can't fear technology.

Eyal Levi (00:46:05):

There's a whole generation of kids now who grew up in the era where all the music they listened to was made with this technology and so it's not new to them, it just is what it is to them. And so if you're not in line with where things have evolved to your pool of potential clients is going to be way smaller and it's going to keep on getting smaller because as time goes, people are going to use the old ways less and less and less and less. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with tape or vinyl or any of those things. They're great for what they're great for. Hardware is great for what it's great for, but like you said, you kind of got to realize that clients from this era come from this era and this era has a certain set of tools that are part of it and that's other is to it.

Zack Ohren (00:47:04):

That's a two-way thing. I mean even working with younger groups, they'll not realize necessarily that a lot of stuff can be way better with the old school thing. And I mean there's a lot of situations like that too where of course some guy wants to use the exact opposite. That's the thing, you just can't get stuck in one thing or the other one way or the other. There's only a few things in audio engineering that are absolutes. Getting the best analog digital converters is an absolute, the better is better. There's very few things like that though. There's almost, everything is just subjective. I don't use, almost all the tuning I do is the default tuning stuff in Cubase for example. I find it the most manipulatable, the most easy to use. It does everything I want it to do. Some people will say, well, dyne sounds a little better. And I'll say, this works really well though, really is anybody really going to listen to my mix and say, oh, well I noticed some anti-aliasing.

Eyal Levi (00:48:09):

Alright, use the cubase tuner. Fuck his mixes.

Zack Ohren (00:48:12):

Yeah, I mean that's kind of what I'm getting at is that the idea that something is better is a horrible way to look at EQs in compressors and gear in general. One of my favorite amps to record ever is a Randall RRG 100 and I believe you can buy one for about 99 bucks.

Eyal Levi (00:48:30):

Yeah, I think you're right, man. I remember when I first was getting to know Joey Sturgis, my partner in this whole thing, he was this dude that was kind of like that guy that kind of did that pod farm all in the box thing that

Zack Ohren (00:48:51):

Oh yeah,

Eyal Levi (00:48:51):

You remember the perception about him. So I didn't know if he was a good engineer or not a good engineer or what. I was just kind of getting to know him and I remember he came to my place when I did a bootcamp, but I used to do these URM bootcamps, these in-person bootcamps and I had him at one in 2014 and I watched him EQ some stuff with Q 10, the plugin that

(00:49:21):

People talk shit about all the time, dude. And it was unbelievable. It was unbelievable. He's so good at eq, he's one of the best people I've ever seen at EQing something. He was able to create some sounds out of things with that plugin in a way that I had never and haven't seen since except for when he does it. And it was just like, man, and this is the plugin that everyone talks shit about. Everyone I know who's proper and awesome doesn't use this and here's this dude just fucking making incredible sounding stuff with this. It just goes to show tools are tools. That's it.

Zack Ohren (00:50:04):

Tools are definitely tools. I mean it's crazy to think, I used to use a ton of just in the software cubase EQ on things. I realize now that that EQ is just laden with all sorts of distortion and I'm not talking about the current iteration of it. I'm talking about from Cubase SX two or whatever from 2002 and I was doing it continuously and I probably had to even because of just CPU constraints at that point. And it's funny, I sometimes hear that. I was like, well, it's not really much different than what analog EQs do though. They'll always have some sort of distortion and ringing and bad things supposedly, but the records came out sounding pretty good. I mean, I'm not worried about that stuff at all. I think one funny thing I do is I use a plugin that hasn't been supported since like 2008 on a system that's been long extinct and I literally have to use an older computer at this point. I might find some way around this soon, but I use this thing called the TCE Power Core. Have you ever heard of a TCE Power Core tce Electronic Power Core

Eyal Levi (00:51:17):

Dude, I used to have one. Yeah,

Zack Ohren (00:51:18):

It's similar to the UAD. It's just like one of those computers within your computer to run plugins. It's totally worthless now. I mean in the sense that I don't need the CPU saving hit, which was the original reason to buy it.

Eyal Levi (00:51:31):

Boy, it helped back then though.

Zack Ohren (00:51:33):

Well, the thing is it's still helping me quite a bit right now because we spent a grand on a plugin after we demoed it way back then called MD three now it's now part of this thing called TC Electronic System 6,000, which is their fancy, it's actually like an outboard mastering console type thing. And they also made an MD five, which I've tried that's only in system 6,000. I'm naming some stuff that I'm guessing a lot of people on this podcast has never heard of, but

Eyal Levi (00:52:03):

I think you're right. But I bet you there's a whole contingent of people who are like, oh yeah, I used to have that.

Zack Ohren (00:52:07):

So MD three, I've never used anything close to as good as far as two things. It does as the best multi-band compressor I've ever used and as the best soft clipper I've ever used outside of that is horrific to work with. It's a problematic plugin in many ways at this point, since it's a 32 bit plugin, I have to be running it in a wrapper and it's also running off of PCI board, which there's no PCI express version of. So I have to have a computer that has a PCI slot or some sort of way to deal with that, which I mean there's a few ways you could deal with that, but you get the point of the complexity I'm talking about that I'm going through just to keep that because I need it in the computer. A to open anything old of mine and also because it's still the best thing and I don't know anybody who's used it in a decade at least, but I think it's helped me a ton. That new at me record that just came out, I don't know if I'm saying their name right, but A-H-T-M-E. I had it on that and I tried making a version without it.

Eyal Levi (00:53:11):

Ah, me.

Zack Ohren (00:53:12):

Yeah, I don't know. I tried making a version without it and I try because I'm always interested in trying different new ideas. No, it's the key ingredient in the whole thing and it's been the key ingredient in a lot of the good records I've done, and I don't really understand how it has no hype, no nothing. That's funny to me,

Eyal Levi (00:53:33):

Man. I think that there's certain tools that will become staples that even if you do have an open mind towards new things, there's some stuff that just works the end. It just works.

Zack Ohren (00:53:47):

Working is kind of the most important thing to me.

Eyal Levi (00:53:49):

Does

Zack Ohren (00:53:50):

Your plugin work? Yeah, it helps. That might sound really dumb to someone that's not an audio engineer and probably makes perfect sense to everybody who is, because for example, I love Trigger too. I don't think it's the most accurate thing. I don't think it's this or that, but it has everything automatable that I need. Automatable everything works really easy and well within and quickly and that's really all I need when it comes to something like that. So I've never even considered switching to something else.

Eyal Levi (00:54:20):

I think that lots of times one of the pitfalls that rabbit holes that engineers, and I think guitar players do this too, that they fall into is trying to one up things that don't need to be one upped gear wise just for the sake of one upping it, when in reality it's not going to make any difference, especially if you found something that already works great for you. And I'm not saying don't try to evolve, but also recognize when something does exactly what it's supposed to do and there's no reason to fix what's not broken.

Zack Ohren (00:54:59):

Well, that's exactly what I am saying right now. Not everything needs replacement. I still don't know of a better lead guitar amp than my unnamed white Marshall Clone amp I have and my Marshall Greenback cab and I use it so much. It's been on hundreds of records and I have a Kemper profile of it that's pretty flawless and I'm probably using one of those two things when I'm doing lead guitars when it comes down to it. And I love that sound and I love using it. I've tried tweaking it and it's almost always a mistake to try anything else. I love it that much. Until that breaks, I'm not even going to replace the tubes on it.

Eyal Levi (00:55:44):

Fair enough. Again, if it works and it gets exactly what you're looking for, why fuck with it?

Zack Ohren (00:55:51):

I mean, fucking with things is the number one thing I see people do too much. They're always tweaking, screwing with perfectly great techniques and things that were working for them to try to unnecessarily upgrade. The word upgrade comes up too much

Eyal Levi (00:56:08):

And me and Andrew Wade, were talking about this once, feel like sometimes people will fuck with things to a degree where they feel like they made it better just because they put in more time, but in reality they didn't make it better. They just made it different. And what was the point if it was fine already?

Zack Ohren (00:56:33):

Yeah, those are two very distinct different things and making that distinction's very important because better and different can be easily mistaken, better and louder. Get easily mistaken in audio. I got to say too. They sure do. Which is once I've really, really, really got technical about doing that. Anytime I compared something, I refuse to send a band to different guitar tones in a mix until I've gone done a full run. My little meter that scans the whole song tells me the average RMS and the average DR rating. If they're not spot on, I tweak it until they are and then I send it to them and just

Eyal Levi (00:57:14):

So they don't fool themselves.

Zack Ohren (00:57:15):

Right. So they don't pick the one that's louder. Especially when it comes to guitar rhythm tone or bass tone. Bass tone, actually even more. So everybody's going to pick the louder bass tone. Everybody is, they're going to pick the one that they hear more so you put them even half a decibel off. You're asking band to make these decisions on something. Sometimes you got to make sure they're making the decision. They're not just going to go to human nature and do what everybody would do, which just pick the louder one

Eyal Levi (00:57:45):

Man. That's such a profound realization about sending people mixes to critique,

Zack Ohren (00:57:51):

Right? Got to be so careful with that stuff.

Eyal Levi (00:57:53):

You can be a trained audio engineer and still trick yourself, so of course someone who's not is going to fall prey to that.

Zack Ohren (00:58:01):

It's a completely endemic thing. Everybody will do it. There's nobody no exception and I've seen, like you just said, super experienced people just fall into the same pitfall and I just refuse to even do it now and I waste a lot of time sometimes like remaking mixes over and over just to make sure I have that set correctly before I send it. You might think a guitar tone is way better, but it might be eating up tons of low end that especially come time. If this ends up getting mastered louder or something, it's going to get even worse of a problem. It's one of those things, you got to be careful just that we're talking about the right thing. You got to be talking about tone when you're talking about tone, not talking about what's louder.

Eyal Levi (00:58:52):

Yeah. How did your workflow evolve to where you realized this and it was so impactful to you that you decided to go through all this effort? Was it like a light bulb moment or is it something that slowly evolved? Evolved

Zack Ohren (00:59:06):

Over time? For sure because I mean I always tried to do it and then I started realizing, well if you don't really commit to that, meaning you got to actually do it, you can't just kind of do it. You got to really do it and do it perfect or else you're not doing it. That's the problem with that whole comparison is that you send a group a comparison. If it's off even a little, they're going to probably pick the one that's louder. I'm always impressed when a group doesn't pick the louder master, for example, that shows me that they're actually listening to things as they should be, not just pressing a button, comparing back and forth and just picking what sounded bigger. Absolutely. And I've really enjoyed, by the way, the fact that groups are more and more open to that kind of thing too, where they don't, groups are less and less asking for me to make things loud and blown up and I'm glad because I'm always trying to go that direction and then everybody's like, well, can we go a little louder? It's like, okay, sure, but I don't want to,

Eyal Levi (01:00:16):

I do think that the volume wars are pretty much over from what I understand, which is a beautiful thing.

Zack Ohren (01:00:22):

We say that, but I want that to be true and is so far from true because let's be real, nothing's really going out, especially in rock or heavy metal that's like quieter than minus eight RMS. That's what people are doing.

Eyal Levi (01:00:37):

Alright. Yeah. Okay, so look, compared to the old days, I think you're absolutely right. That's what I would say. If you compare it to the old days, yes, shit is a lot louder now. However, dude, lots of mixers who are doing great work who master their own stuff or whatnot that I've spoken to are no longer really worrying about it, at least not compared to how they were 10 years ago.

Zack Ohren (01:01:04):

Certainly not how they were compared to 10 years ago. And also there's a huge difference here. I think it was, there was definitely a time when I was putting out stuff that was just crazy loud and sometimes I come back and I hear that and I wonder if I accidentally stumbled into learning how to engineer when I was younger. I know this is going to, what do you mean get weird and high concept here, but

Eyal Levi (01:01:29):

That's okay.

Zack Ohren (01:01:30):

I was always about, nobody ever told me there was a volume war. Nobody said anything. Just when I was like 16, 17 years old, I was like, I'm going to figure out how to make my masters louder than everybody else's and it's going to make everything better. And doing that really taught me just about space and fitting everything into its little hole to make things as loud as they could be and by doing that I was also learning not to overlap frequencies too much. I was learning all sorts of things just by the fact that I was trying to put out stuff that if you could listen to some of the things that I've mastered, even not that long ago, they're crazy loud often like minus six RMS, dr three or something. I don't like that that happened, but some of them are still really good.

(01:02:22):

I don't hate some of the, I remember I heard just the other day I heard the volumes record that I mastered and I loved it. I loved the master. I was like, maybe I should do some of this weird insane stuff even though I don't really necessarily, the one thing I would probably change is just take that final maximization down a tiny bit, but the way I was creating all this space was really cool by sculpting as much as I could in the mixes and if I remember correctly, that's like a stem master type project where it wasn't just a simple two track master. I did special things with the drums and bass to sculpt it all to get it as loud and huge as it was.

Eyal Levi (01:03:05):

I don't think that everybody knew there was a volume war going on,

Zack Ohren (01:03:08):

But

Eyal Levi (01:03:08):

The thing that people did know without knowing that they knew was that the human brain thinks louder is better. And so I can totally see how a 16-year-old kid wanting to be competitive regardless of knowing about the volume wars would just want to push as hard as possible because they themselves would probably sit there and listen to stuff and think that louder is better.

Zack Ohren (01:03:33):

And I mean I did think RA was better and I lived that so hard for a solid decade. I'd say between 2000 and 2010 roughly. I think some of the jobs I even got were because in large part my stuff was able to be louder than other stuff in part because I was doing techniques that other studios weren't doing. I was using drum triggering on some stuff that was weird in the late nineties to be doing that. And by doing that you can absolutely, absolutely lets you drive that master comp louder and all sorts of things. If you can crank the snare to this insanity volume without getting weird high hat bleed, then you smash everything with whatever weird clipping techniques I was doing back then, it can sound really aggressive and really good and that's why I want, that's something I've been exploring recently. I'm like, I got to get a little bit back to this a bit. It is a bread and butter thing to really get like that because I've been so much all about getting really great natural tones on everything that I can forget the big picture, that it's not just loud when you put in one cd, is it louder than the previous one? It's like perceivable volume so to speak kind of stuff. I really got to refocus on still a thing. It's still a thing people care about I think.

Speaker 3 (01:05:05):

Yeah,

Zack Ohren (01:05:07):

The new reaping as Modia records going to really push it.

Eyal Levi (01:05:10):

I don't necessarily think that just because there's a loudness war that means that all loudness is bad. Yeah, sometimes it's the right move.

Zack Ohren (01:05:18):

I mean I'm working with mostly heavy metal here. It's probably usually the right move and I forget that sometimes. So enamored with the idea of making something sound like slayer south of heaven or something with massive amounts of dynamic range that I forget, I should also do what I'm good at and that's definitely what I'm good at is making tight huge sounds. I don't know some of the records people have liked that have done recently have been pretty loud. I remember that that Zenith passage record I did is crazy loud and I think compromise is nothing, meaning I wouldn't make that record any less quiet. Part of what's making that so aggressive and work so well and kind of fills in the gaps where other things I wish I had done a lot more dynamic. There's some records I wish I could try to open up, but there's going to be so many ancient plugins that won't load and drum libraries that won't load. But I mean I would love to reprint price of existence by all shall parish, for example. I would love to just reprint that and just take the gain down two decibels just to hear a record I hear I'm like, God, there's just straight distortion on this that doesn't need to be there for any reason other than someone not turning a dial slightly as far. So that's where I regret.

Eyal Levi (01:06:41):

I will say that I feel like I have a couple regrets about things that I made too dynamic

Zack Ohren (01:06:49):

Or push

Eyal Levi (01:06:50):

For them to be too dynamic. So the last doth record, I was super obsessed with it being as natural and dynamic as possible and I think it sounds great. So I do think it sounds great, but at the same time I wonder, wouldn't it probably still sound great if maybe there was a little bit more of a sample presence on the drums and it was a little bit louder and I think the answer is yes, actually I've gone too purist at times and regretted it and then at the same time the other direction and not enjoyed it either. So I definitely think there's a balance and I don't think that it's kind of back to the gear thing or whatever. I don't think there's any one thing that works all of the time or is the right solution all of the time for every single scenario, every single scenario is unique and has this sweet spot or this range it wants to be in. I think

Zack Ohren (01:07:49):

It also always comes back to the one thing which is to listen and that's what I've gotten so much better about recently. I'm really pleased with all the mixes I've done this year and I think a large part of why is just that I've listened to them much more and that's the thing I'm going to take out of this whole COVID-19 thing. Is that What do you mean? Yeah, I mean it quite literally I'm listening and I'm listening for what I want to hear different and I'll listen and revise and I will let it take me wherever it wants to take me. I'm not getting constrained by just trying to get through some process. I'm not afraid to just do some wild totally not what I expected to do thing. How's that different than before though? I'd say it's different from before because I was not, like you said, I was trying to achieve a goal like, oh, I want to make this sound as natural as possible.

(01:08:40):

Oh, I want to make this going into it. The preconceived notion of how this should be and the answer is it should be what sounds the best. When I listen carefully and don't just listen on one occasion your ears are dead. I try to say this a lot to people, but you're done for the day, in my opinion, about a half an hour into loud listening of something and you do need to do loud listening and that's the other thing. Some people are like, well then just listen out like 70 decibels all day. I'm like, okay, nobody's listening to heavy metal at 70 decibels. That doesn't make sense. We're going to have an issue. If you do it that way in a whole different way, you're going to get everything's sound. That's a good way to start over compressing everything is to start doing things that way.

Eyal Levi (01:09:32):

Interesting you say that. I do think that there's something to be said for mixing quietly. However, every great mixer I know that mixes quietly does not mix quietly all the time and that's the big thing. They definitely turn that shit up is at strategic times.

Zack Ohren (01:09:49):

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I'm doing most of the mixing quietly at home and I'm doing most of the loud listening on the in-ears on runs or for a few minutes when I'm in here and once I'm done doing that, I know that I'm toast for hours. That's what I'm saying. I don't get fooled into think, oh, my ears feel fine. No, you've kind of blown out some frequencies that they will return to you but they're not going to return instantly. Well, and I'm not talking crazy loud here, I'm just saying you've got to crank it a little bit at times. Lots of times, frankly, that's a thing you can get way too obsessed with longevity when instead you should be actually listening to it how people are going to listen to it.

Eyal Levi (01:10:38):

Well, when metal man, if the energy's not right, then nothing is right and it's hard to really understand the energy, and I mean this in a technical and an emotional way, it's hard to understand the energy if you don't feel it and you can't really feel it quietly. You can do problem solving

Zack Ohren (01:11:03):

When

Eyal Levi (01:11:03):

You're listening quietly. You can do a lot of technical work, but the big picture of how it does it feel like fucking ground shattering metal, you need some volume for that for sure.

Zack Ohren (01:11:15):

Yeah, and I also think it's the best way to avoid over compression making too loudness war masters is to listen loud sometimes because that's when things will sound better with that. In fact, I don't know what mastering limiter people use, but the one I use has the unity gain monitoring thing and I don't feel I was taking enough advantage of that beforehand. Nowadays I set that where it sounds the best and that's it. That's going to be don't, I'm not going to push it a little further or back it off or anything. If I'm putting it where it sounds the best, turn it off. That's where, turn off the little unity game thing. That's as loud as I'm going to make that mix and sometimes that ends up being super loud and I don't have a problem with that, but I'm not going to, that's the way to avoid the volume war thing in my opinion, is to use that unity gain monitoring and to explain that a little better in case someone doesn't get that that's listening. It's a thing where you can turn up the gain on the mastering limiter and it'll keep the volume constant, but be applying more and more of the actual limit or whatever process

Eyal Levi (01:12:28):

So you can actually hear the changes it's making.

Zack Ohren (01:12:30):

Exactly. And then while you're doing that, you should be listening pretty damn loud in my opinion because that's where you would hear, am I losing impact from the snare? Do I need to lose impact from the snare? Do I need to get a little less drums in this mix and a little more guitar? I mean, that's not the best way to do that overall, but I'm saying at the final stage, that's a great idea in my opinion.

Eyal Levi (01:12:56):

I completely agree with you. Hey everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast and 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.

(01:13:49):

And these are guys like TLA Will Putney, Jenz Boren, Dan Lancaster to I Mattson, Andrew Wade, and many, many more. You'll also get Access Tom 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 multitracks 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 game 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. 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 U RM Academy to find out more. Let's switch gears. I have a question for you about Colin Richardson. You worked with him on the machine head project, right?

Zack Ohren (01:15:13):

Yeah, the one, the two songs we just put out. And that was also, that's a thing where going back to the thing we were just talking about that had to happen fast, meaning interesting because he's not known for working fast. Well, we were working, I mean there was a whole team. There's also Chris Clancy did a lot of the work on that end off in Europe. So he was working with Chris and Chris and him put together what they put together quickly and then we had a lot of back and forth, but I'm saying it had to happen on a pretty, it was consuming me 24 hours a day when it was happening. So it was a big deal, a big what to do because we really wanted to get the songs out quickly. So that's all I'm saying.

Eyal Levi (01:16:00):

So I've had the honor of getting to work or be around him a few times and the thing that struck me is how fucking meticulous that guy is and how high his standards are. It's kind of insane. For instance, when the trivium in Waves, drums were recorded at my house, he spent three weeks finding a position and a sound for the bass drum three weeks, but at the end of those three weeks, it sounded incredible, incredible. He's just one of the most meticulous people I've ever met. Did you feel that when you were working with him?

Zack Ohren (01:16:44):

I felt nothing in large part because keep in mind we're in the middle of a global pandemic, so we still haven't met other than through some emails,

Eyal Levi (01:16:53):

But

Zack Ohren (01:16:53):

I mean, yes in the terms that the work was done so meticulously and also done so well, that whole experience was the best probably. I mean I've had a couple good ones and a couple bad ones, but that was probably the best experience I've had with sending out something I'd been working on for a long time. We had a working mix of both those songs that was over two years old, meaning I had been messing around with the mix of those for two years and it was completely falling out of control. We're also tracking in the middle of it and I'm tracking the day we're sending stuff over there. There's good reason for division of labor here with that project. I guess what I'm getting at. And it was really great to get back a first mix from them and have it be 90% there and super happy with it. And that's a pretty rare thing when it comes to those kind of projects. So I was pretty impressed with how well organized and how good things came out. And like you said, especially drums, they just had a really great handle on how to get those drums tones were actually pretty tricky to work with for sure.

Eyal Levi (01:18:03):

I feel like sometimes when sending stuff to an outside mixer or mastering engineer, you get it back and it's a bummer.

Zack Ohren (01:18:11):

Yeah, I mean it can be

Eyal Levi (01:18:13):

Not always, obviously it can be a bummer, but when you get someone on that level who really gets it, it's like it elevates the work you did and

Zack Ohren (01:18:22):

Oh, certainly

Eyal Levi (01:18:23):

To me it's like a magical thing to get to hear it through that great person's perspective.

Zack Ohren (01:18:30):

And the mastering thing is even a better example. I've had a lot more stuff where I've had it mastered outside and finding people that you like working with that and that get your stuff. And I've done 10 mastering projects now with this guy, Justin Chatter, and I've done some mastering projects with Ted Jensen and a few others where I'm always pleased now with them, and that hasn't always been the case in the past when I've done outside mastering, I've always gotten something back and been like, well, aspects of this are better, but what happened to the low end? What happened to this? I don't even like this better than mine. And I do a law mastering work myself too, so I'm going to be a very discerning person when it comes to this stuff. So it's really nerve wracking and especially in that case of those two machine head tracks, it's like not only did we get those mixed pretty quickly, but we also then we had to make some pretty quick moves and quick comments and quick stuff to get the mastering right with Ted. And it's so great to be working with Ted because Ted's arguably the best hard rock mastering engineer in the world or something along those lines.

Eyal Levi (01:19:40):

Yeah, I would say that's about accurate

Zack Ohren (01:19:43):

And so it's really helpful. We did have some stuff to go back and forth with him about, but it was easy to do because he got it, he heard what we're hearing. The first master we got back from him, I was like, oh my God, this sounds great. Rob hears and he's like, this sounds great, but the vocals are quieter, and I listened to it again. I'm like, oh, he's right. The vocals are quieter and that's potentially problematic for a song that's very vocal driven. So we actually just supplied them with mixes with a little more vocal in them, gave a couple of different levels. It was like Ted, try these different things there. It was problem solved and then something else got better in the process with one of the songs where Ted found a different piece of gear he used and we ended up really happy with those masters with how they came out. That's a 24 hour period. We're talking here from first Master to final though, and we went back and forth five times.

Eyal Levi (01:20:35):

What was it about that machine head project that had to be turned around so fast and what was the interaction with Colin, what you produced it and then you sent it to them to mix and they had to turn it around fast, you had to give revisions fast and am I understanding correctly?

Zack Ohren (01:20:53):

No, that's it. I mean we wanted it turned around fast just because we wanted the song out quickly. It was because one of the songs was specifically about the George Floyd incident and the one that has Jesse from Switch engage on it. I mean, we got Jesse's vocals the day after I sent it over to Colin and Chris, so that was quick. Putting that whole thing together was pretty see of our pants quick and also kind of tricky to do because of lockdown. We're doing everything by proxy. Even me and Rob are barely seeing each other in person. Rob actually, I set up a setup so Rob can track himself at least to do vocals over mixes. He can't adjust anything, but he can track himself and he is put together a couple of things that way. Luckily because of that, and I'm trying not to go into the studio whenever possible and when I do, it's kind of annoying.

(01:21:51):

I had to do an actual recording project with the band. We were near the end of it when quarantine hit and it's a pain being in the studio all day masked and trying to have any kind of safety seems it, especially when a band is the most wild card group of people you can imagine to be around. So it's tricky and I haven't done it since and I am trying to figure out how we're going to actually somehow reopen in an official way, but I'm not sure that's really going to happen. I may just have to stick to one-on-one things for the time being depending on how things go, but I am going to start tracking drums for a few records and it's going to be just simply me. The drummer may be a guitarist coming in kind of situations, but as far as just having a whole band of this dude, it just can't happen right now.

Eyal Levi (01:22:47):

No shit. When I see pictures of that stuff going on, I'm like, man, you guys are really trusting each other on this.

Zack Ohren (01:22:54):

And in my case, I mean, I don't own my studio I work at which I love. I think we actually covered this last podcast, but part of that is I wouldn't do it at my own place even, but it's not my own place and we don't really have a working legally safe among other things, protocol in effect at that studio that could be viable. It's not just this recording studio either. There's like 50 rehearsal studio rooms

(01:23:24):

And the bathrooms are shared and there's a shared lounge between the five recording studios. I'm at the original big recording studio there, but as of now, there's so much sharing happening and they're installing new, he's spent a bunch of my units installed new ventilation that will make it so that previously all the error was circulating room to room there. That struck him as just a huge problem if he's going to reopen the rehearsal facility ever anytime in the near future. So he decided to invest in that. Whether or not that fixes the problem, who knows, but I'm hoping we get some stuff rolling starting this month as far as actually being able to go in there. But I am missing it less and less in some ways because I've been steadily, I'm swamped with work, I'm stressed right now, podcasting in the middle of the day because I've just got 10 mixes I'm in the middle of working on that's That's a good problem to have. It is a good problem to have, and I am shocked how much work has actually increased, if anything recently it hasn't gone down at all. It's been going up. It's just all mixing now, and I do enjoy doing the mixing and the mastering stuff, arguably more than going in and tracking bands in person. I miss it to some extent, but I've been shifting my balance over the years more and more that direction anyway,

Eyal Levi (01:24:48):

So this is just accelerating what you were already doing.

Zack Ohren (01:24:51):

I mean, significantly, but it's not the end of the world and I'm not going to get antsy about it. And certainly there's groups that want to be recorded with me and I feel bad for stringing them along, but I'm not actually stringing them along. I'm just telling them what I know and what I know keeps changing. The idea originally is, oh, we should be able to reopen in May. Oh, we should be able to reopen in June. Oh, maybe in August. And now at this point it's like, well, maybe next year it's probably just going to be this way until there's a vaccine or everybody's dead. I don't really know what to say. No, the city literally isn't going to legally allow a non-essential business, and I'm in a pretty big area. I'm in the San Francisco Bay area. We've had pretty big outbreaks of this, and it's just not viable to open a studio up for tracking and yeah, I know also, like you said, I know people just giving it the fuck it attitude and just running their studios and some people are out of house studios, but at the same time, I know I've seen plenty of just in studio footage and I'm like, what's going on?

(01:25:59):

I mean, I say it the same way. I look at some big house party with a bunch of friends at it and I'm like, what are you guys doing? What is going on here? This is why we are where we are. This is why we're a joke of a country, but hey, I don't want to get way off topic into that, but there's a reason we're still in the shit problematic situation right now, and it's a hundred percent because of people not being responsible about it.

Eyal Levi (01:26:27):

So because you're doing a bunch of mixing work and there's a lot more of it, does that mean that a lot more people are tracking themselves?

Zack Ohren (01:26:35):

It does. I mean, that's the thing, and I've always tried to help people through that too a little bit, and I've been getting a lot more requests just for information from me. People just trying to get my help with making sure I know a lot. I know several people I've known for years and years, and they're all of a sudden setting up their own little home studio. I've got to imagine that interfaces and just basic recording software is selling hotcakes right now. People are all setting up their first little recording corner in their rooms because they,

Eyal Levi (01:27:12):

Well, I can tell you that URM has grown.

Zack Ohren (01:27:14):

I would be shocked if it hadn't grown.

Eyal Levi (01:27:17):

It's grown.

Zack Ohren (01:27:17):

You should call it a wrap if you weren't growing during this because you're made for this. And I agree, it's not, I mean, this isn't forever. There's no scenario where this is lasting the rest of our lives or something, but there is a lot to be said for the silver linings in this whole pandemic, and I've had a lot of them. I'm not even sure it's been a negative for my life in general. There's been some really crappy things about it, and especially around the beginning of it. It really messed up a lot of things for me and my wife, just like she had a huge trip planned literally the week that lockdown happened, and it was to a really cool thing that she's never going to get to do now, and she also had a new job lined up, and then in my case, I was in the middle of recording the Black Map record. We were mid guitar tracking and we had this elaborate guitar thing, million pedals out, and it's just stayed sitting there for four months. I'd literally cleaned it up three weeks ago. Finally, we went in and wrapped that all up

Speaker 3 (01:28:22):

Because

Zack Ohren (01:28:23):

That's how Ghost towns the studio became. It's not like anybody else. It's not my studio, but nobody else was there for any point and still hasn't been there since March 13th. Whenever Rudy Gobert came down with Coronavirus is pretty much when the pandemic became pretty real in America. It's at least my little demarcation point.

Eyal Levi (01:28:44):

So as far as the remote tracking goes, one thing I've heard people say is that they're happy to be getting all this mix work, but they're having to do a lot more coaching to musicians and the results vary. Some musicians do a great job, but in some ways there's a lot more crap to fix.

Zack Ohren (01:29:07):

Okay, well,

Eyal Levi (01:29:08):

How do you feel about that?

Zack Ohren (01:29:09):

Yeah, I'm going to throw my industry under the bus sometimes. Some of the best, all of the, in fact, I'm going to go even further. All of the best prepped, most organized projects I've ever been sent to me have been, not from professional engineers, but from a hobbyist who really cared, really went to the attention to detail, to label things and make sure everything was sent to me properly and in order and how they want it

Eyal Levi (01:29:36):

Because they're not too good to do it.

Zack Ohren (01:29:38):

That's right. That's the really part of it. And also that they got to pay me a good bit of money and they don't want me wasting time on that. And I also tell bands way in the three months before we're doing a mixed stage when they're just asking me for quotes and things, I'll say, tell you right now I'm charging basically for the time I spend working on this. You can decrease that quite a bit by having it decently organized and not having major problems left this and this. Make sure everything's in sync, make sure this, there's ways to do this. It's not that hard. Doesn't matter what dog you're using, but you can get this to work. I'll once again, use that gamma bomb record as a reference. I think that was the most well organized mixed session I was ever sent, and they're not a pro engineer in any way, shape or form, but they put a cubase session for the whole album together for me. Everything was labeled perfect. It was RA in sequence. It was RA there. They even had put some groups together, they had

Eyal Levi (01:30:41):

That's awesome.

Zack Ohren (01:30:42):

Had the levels in the panning, so I knew where they wanted things panned. I knew where they wanted some effect and it was a great start point and I've had other great start points and I've been pretty lucky with stuff sent to me, but like you said, yeah, I'm also dealing with people that, and I can't get upset at them about this, but they're going to make pretty big mistakes on the engineering end of how to track their guitar DI's at home and

Eyal Levi (01:31:10):

Yeah, because they don't know.

Zack Ohren (01:31:12):

I've been dealing with that for a long time. I would say bands, especially in the technical death metal kind of side of things have been going that direction for some time where they'll track themselves at home much more. It's a thing, and I don't mind it really at all. I love working with a lot of those projects. They're going to be better a lot of the time because the band didn't feel any constraint that they're paying me hourly for studio time. Instead, they're just focused. Maybe they spent months on one riff and then there's the people that makes no sense for it. All the lazy types that are just going to one, take it anyway and I'll get sent some terrible takes and I've had to deal with a few drum tracks recently that my thought process was there's no way I would've been in the room tracking a drummer this good. It's a good drummer, and they would be okay with that take that they just did right there. Now I'm going to have to really do some work to fix this, that kind of thing. That's where it sucks not being in the room with them,

Eyal Levi (01:32:19):

Man. Some people need a producer,

Zack Ohren (01:32:21):

Right? Some people do it, some people absolutely don't, and I'd say it's a 50 50 proposition.

Eyal Levi (01:32:27):

Yeah, I agree. What actually matters in my opinion is knowing that about yourself. The self-awareness is what matters in this situation, not whether you do or don't need a producer,

Zack Ohren (01:32:37):

Right? Completely. Not everybody, it's just some people are going to work really well when they're just given a ton of time on their own and that's why so far I've been really happy with a lot of these records from quarantine because I'm guessing a lot of the stuff I'm getting right now is from people that have had nothing to do for a long time and they've been upset about a lot of stuff. They got all sorts of inspiration and they just start pouring it out and some really good records coming together because of it. In other cases, it's just is just stuff that was pre-planned this way,

Eyal Levi (01:33:16):

Then they just had to do it anyways, I think. Right,

Zack Ohren (01:33:18):

Exactly.

Eyal Levi (01:33:19):

Yeah. If they want to get it done, this is what they have to do.

Zack Ohren (01:33:23):

That band I was talking about Black Map, that was probably the biggest challenge. That's a record with the band that I was totally working in the capacity as a producer with them. I was very much part of Guitar Decisions. I was part of all sorts of things. Luckily, we had already tracked all drums and bass and we were halfway through guitar and we had done half of the vocals too, but we had to break off and not do everything together, and they tracked the rest of the guitars at a studio that was willing to open up and track them, and then I had to do some one-on-one sessions with the vocalist to finish the record. He knew, and I think it was really smart of them to just recognize At first there was talk of, oh, we'll just loan you an Noman and you can just go, you have a nice setup at home.

(01:34:11):

He did really great demos of the record. It was one of the better demoed records I had worked on, and that's more of a pop hard rock type record too, and he just month after we said, oh, you're just going to track the rest at home. It was like, no, actually I need to be there with you, and that was really smart decision on his part, even though it was a pain to get something scheduled, pain to figure out how to do it. I'm glad we did it because the record's done, it's complete mastered, everything's done now, and I certainly don't regret the fact that they ended up having to be at multiple studios and all the things because I think it really helped in the long run how much the record got delayed. It was supposed to be done in March, ended up done in July, but because of that, I think it came out really great.

Eyal Levi (01:34:57):

I've heard some engineers kind of resent having to deal with self recorded tracks, but man, like you said, good luck with that. Yeah, yeah. It's been going in this direction anyways, and exactly. Good luck with that because this is the future. I mean, there will always be room for production in the studio with a producer, but there's also going to be more and more that can just do it on their own and they're going to do it on their own. There's no way out.

Zack Ohren (01:35:27):

Yeah, exactly. That's a baffling opinion to me, even because I can't imagine a situation where I would ever feel that way. I don't know. It's just a strange way to feel about that whole thing where you would have some sort of resent towards something that was self-produced, or even more so people that are fearful that being a audio engineer producer is just going to be a fading like career as a whole, and I don't see that as all,

Eyal Levi (01:35:55):

Dude. It's not going anywhere.

Zack Ohren (01:35:57):

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. I think the best comparison is saying it's like being a chef will someday be not a job. All that information's on the internet. You can learn to make a really fancy thing on some YouTube video these days. That's not the point. It's an art form. It's like saying it's such a dumb argument. I can't even really devil's advocate it, but it doesn't make any sense. Just like there's still going to be head chefs at fancier restaurants. There's still going to be producers of music and engineers and mastering engineers and all these things there, and we're not replaceable with technology. We're actually the best at using the technology.

Eyal Levi (01:36:40):

Yeah, exactly.

Zack Ohren (01:36:40):

You're not going to master everything on Lander for the rest of your life and get the best results.

Eyal Levi (01:36:46):

No, it is very, very true. I've heard a lot of people get scared about that. They get scared about things like URM existing. They're just scared in general, and my opinion is you have nothing to be scared of because all that happens with this becoming more popular is that more people know about different producers, more people are in the game, more people are trying to do it, and if anything, more people trying means more people realizing how good they aren't at it and needing your skills if you actually are good at it.

Zack Ohren (01:37:22):

Right. I mean, that's the thing. Also, I've been hearing the same thing said for a very long time, that exact line you're talking about here, and my answer would be, don't be a coward at all your life. First off, everybody's been saying that forever. It's never been true. We're not like car manufacturers are something where we're getting replaced with robots, which is, I would argue one of the single biggest issues facing humanity right now is automation and the industrial revolution we're going through, but that's a whole other conversation. This is art. This is an art job. In the end. I'm just someone creating art, and that's where the idea of being replaced should not be something you're scared of, especially if you have any confidence in what you're doing, so I hate that opinion. I am, I agree violently against the idea that you should be worried about being replaced, whereas what you need to do is be good at what you do

Eyal Levi (01:38:29):

And make the right relationships and keep those relationships.

Zack Ohren (01:38:33):

Sure. Absolutely.

Eyal Levi (01:38:34):

Yeah. Yeah. Alright, man. I think this is a good place to end the episode. I want to thank you for coming on and hanging out and talking to me for sure. It's been a pleasure as always. Yeah.

Zack Ohren (01:38:48):

We got more philosophical in this episode as we were more historical the first time. I want to say

Eyal Levi (01:38:55):

That's the way to go, in my opinion.

Zack Ohren (01:38:56):

It was really great being on again.

Eyal Levi (01:38:58):

Yeah, so if anyone's listening, you want to learn more about Zach's history, we got into some pretty good detail. There's some super interesting stuff in the first episode, especially the video game stuff we talked about.

Zack Ohren (01:39:10):

What's wild about that episode is that was my first time meeting Joel, and we did that, and what people listening to that episode won't know is that then we were immediately thrust into working together on multiple projects a month later, which was a complete 1000% coincidence.

Eyal Levi (01:39:28):

I see. I didn't realize that. I thought that you guys knew each other.

Zack Ohren (01:39:32):

No, had no prior knowledge of each other. One of you, it was either you or him, I assume, or even Joey, I don't know. Used to be when I was on, it was called the Joey Sturgis podcast, but I remember that I then a couple weeks later got contacted by Machine Head about doing their new record, and then I talked to him. He told me that, Hey, we did our last mix with this guy, Joel. We're going to have him working on the production of this stuff, and you'll be the producers slash tracking engineer here. This is how this is going to be. We're going to try it with this other band first. I was like, oh, do you mean Joel s sec? And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that guy. I was like, okay, that's random, but okay, cool. Great.

Eyal Levi (01:40:19):

Interesting. See, that's the part I didn't realize it was so soon thereafter.

Zack Ohren (01:40:25):

It was immediately, I mean, it might've been the next week, I can't remember.

Eyal Levi (01:40:30):

It was pretty quick,

Zack Ohren (01:40:31):

But now of course Joel had already worked with him, but I hadn't worked with him since 2010, so it was a total random out of nowhere thing.

Eyal Levi (01:40:39):

Small world.

Zack Ohren (01:40:40):

Yeah, it is. That's the thing people don't realize about the audio engineering world is when I was at that URM summit, for example, I'm like, half the engineers I know of are here. There's not that many, especially in hard rock and heavy metal, which is seemingly a big thing among your circle. It is the thing in our circle. Oh, have you declared that the thing is it always been that

Eyal Levi (01:41:04):

World's best online school for rock and metal producers?

Zack Ohren (01:41:06):

Okay, well, there you go. Okay.

Eyal Levi (01:41:08):

Yeah. We're staking the claim in this. Yeah,

Zack Ohren (01:41:11):

Yeah. You're not trying to produce trap is what you're saying necessarily.

Eyal Levi (01:41:16):

No, I mean, we might do some things here and there in other genres, but rocket metals, it's our world.

Zack Ohren (01:41:22):

I got you. Anyway. Yeah, that's my point. So I was like, I see half the people in the world.

Eyal Levi (01:41:25):

I mean, you know how it is, it's your world too.

Zack Ohren (01:41:28):

Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah. I ignore the outside world for the most part, so it's a pretty small group of engineers that I actually know of.

Eyal Levi (01:41:36):

Yeah, dude. Rocket Metal has served me very, very well in my life. I'm loyal to it.

Zack Ohren (01:41:42):

Yeah, same here.

Eyal Levi (01:41:43):

Alright, man. Well, thank you for your time. Thank

Zack Ohren (01:41:45):

You. I'll talk to you again sometime soon.

Eyal Levi (01:41:47):

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 Levy 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.