LANCE PRENC: Getting Insanely Loud Mixes, Editing Drums Backward, and Why Self-Promotion Is a Weakness

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, and now your host, Eyal Levi. Welcome to the URM podcast. Thank you so much for being here. It's crazy to think that we're now on our fifth year, but it's true, and it's only because of you, the listeners, and if you'd like to see us stick around for another five years, there are a few simple things that you can do that would really, really help us out and I would be endlessly appreciative. Number one, share our episodes with your friends. If you get something out of these episodes, I'm sure they will too. So please share us with your friends. Number two, post our episodes on your Facebook and Instagram and tag me and our guests too. My Instagram is at al 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 is Lance Prince, who is an Australian mixer producer who just makes the most devastatingly heavy mixes that you've heard in a long, long time. I love the fact too that he's a URM student. He's been to nail the mix since 2016. I mean, he was already working professionally, but I love seeing members of the community just fucking killing it. If you haven't heard Lance's work, you really should check it out, most notably with Alpha Wolf and Polaris. Anyways, I introduce you, Lance Prince. Well, Lance Prince, welcome to the URM Podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:02:04):

Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Speaker 1 (00:02:06):

My pleasure. It's kind of cool, man. Always dig it when people that I know from within the community are kicking ass. The community really, really love your work right now, and I know that you've won stuff with us before.

Speaker 2 (00:02:21):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:02:22):

I actually went and checked it out. Your work's killer, man. Thank

Speaker 2 (00:02:25):

You. Thank you. I've been at it for a bit, so it's nice to finally get out there more than the Australian circuit, I suppose. It's pretty close knit here. There's not too much going on. There's not too many bands, so it's nice to get their music out there and likewise for myself.

Speaker 1 (00:02:42):

How long have you been at it? Just out of curiosity, I'm always curious how long it takes before people's name starts to really become in the conversation.

Speaker 2 (00:02:52):

Well, I thought about it the other day and I think I've been doing recording for close to five years. Not professionally for five years, but doing it for five years, professionally, maybe about three years. But I first started touring front of House sound, so that's how I met all the bands in Australia and eventually got to work with most of the bands in Australia. And yeah, it just went from there. I started not doing recording with these bands first. I started mixing them at gigs and tours and all that.

Speaker 1 (00:03:27):

How long did you do that for?

Speaker 2 (00:03:29):

That is like six years now I think. So that extended further than the recording.

Speaker 1 (00:03:34):

So six years plus five,

Speaker 2 (00:03:37):

Six total for live, five for recording, I'd say I think so. About a decade. It's been a while. Yeah. Yeah, I suppose

Speaker 1 (00:03:47):

That I think is good to note that it's been at least a decade, just so that people listening understand that even in situations where you're first hearing about somebody, if you're hearing about them, it's because there's a backstory there. The backstory, when people actually get good is usually five to 10 years.

Speaker 2 (00:04:08):

Yeah, I mean, it's 10 years from my study. I went to tafe, which I don't know, it's like uni, but it's a downgrade. It's like a B grade version of uni over here. I dunno what the equivalent would be in America, but as soon as I started tafe, we had a work experience component that was like 40 hours or something for the year, and I freaked. I was like, oh, how the hell am I going to get that? That's a long time. And I ended up just emailing people. I emailed some dudes who did sound at local shows in the area and they got me on straight away. So I pretty much, without knowing anything about Live sound, started working in it like that. Yep,

Speaker 1 (00:04:51):

Yep. So you're a Sparkman personality.

Speaker 2 (00:04:53):

It just happened and they didn't like it as much as I did. I just kept pursuing it and got good at doing it and yeah, ended up getting hired jobs and doing it professionally.

Speaker 1 (00:05:06):

How long would you say it took before the bands were calling you? I'm talking for live.

Speaker 2 (00:05:12):

Yeah, I reckon maybe a year, a year and a bit. It's also dependent on where the bands were at in their careers. A lot of the bands I was growing up with them, they were getting better. They were on their first releases and stuff like that. They were getting better as I was getting better and we just all go up together. So I wouldn't have say a international band or a big band come through who were headlining the show and be like, oh, we're going to take you out. It was always the openers or early bands in the shows that would have me on and get me to do sound.

Speaker 1 (00:05:53):

What was your MO for climbing? Was it just do as good of a job as possible, be as cool to hang out with as possible?

Speaker 2 (00:06:02):

Yeah, pretty much. There wasn't much competition in that tier of live sound, to be honest. There was maybe one or two other guys and they were old as shit, and they hurt your ears a lot too, so I didn't have that going for me. I was pretty subtle on high-end boosting of kick drums in terrible club venues, so I didn't tear anyone's head off. But yeah, there was like this gap in the local scene where no one could mix these bands well, and I just filled that completely. There was no one to step up to do it.

Speaker 1 (00:06:40):

Okay, so how did that start to develop into bigger bands?

Speaker 2 (00:06:45):

Well, the bands just got bigger as we all went on.

Speaker 1 (00:06:48):

Okay, so they actually stuck with you?

Speaker 2 (00:06:50):

Yeah, no, most of them, yeah, loyalty.

Speaker 1 (00:06:52):

Wow. Imagine that

Speaker 2 (00:06:55):

Polaris is a big one. I toured with them five years ago maybe, and toured with them as they kept on getting bigger and better and then record their album. It just goes up like that. Same with Alpha Wolf actually did some shows with I's Murder a couple of years ago, done shows with Make Them Suffer. Those were just word of mouth gigs. But yeah, it definitely was like a buildup. You start with them and you go up with them and it just develops from there.

Speaker 1 (00:07:25):

So usually when Sound guys transition to recording, they're really bad at it, not in general. So I know some of you listening are going to get mad that I said that. I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about everyone else, but you guys listening right now. No, but in general, I would just notice that when Live Sound guys have done it for a while and then move over to recording

Speaker 2 (00:07:53):

Doesn't work.

Speaker 1 (00:07:55):

No, it doesn't work. I think maybe they're not cool with the speed at which recording goes, maybe it's too slow. Maybe they blew out their high end. That's a strong possibility.

Speaker 2 (00:08:09):

It definitely happens. It's definitely,

Speaker 1 (00:08:10):

Oh yeah, I'm not trying to be a dick. I mean, that's one of the hazards of the job. So question is how did you learn?

Speaker 2 (00:08:19):

Well, I originally wanted to just do recording. I did it in high school just for myself and then went to study in recording, which taught me next to nothing as everyone's experience with uni or TAFE is with recording and audio. So I would just do it at home by myself, recording myself, writing my own songs and shit like that. And I didn't have that known too early. I made sure I got good at that before I let people know that that was something that I did and that's why I held off a few years. I did more live sound and then eventually got into recording and it just took a couple of smaller bands and stuff like that. And then that just started happening as well because the work I was doing was good enough and I had bands who needed it to be done, so it just went up like that. I was always doing it. I never was just live, just recording. It was always the plan to do recording at some point. It's just not, people don't back you at the start starting out. No one knows what you can do. No one knows if you are good at doing anything. So you sort of have to put in the work and hours yourself and prove that.

Speaker 1 (00:09:37):

Yeah, absolutely. And it's probably better to wait. I've always, I think that there's a point in time where people need to try and get as much work as possible, but at the same time

Speaker 2 (00:09:53):

They need to step back equally.

Speaker 1 (00:09:55):

Yeah, yeah, exactly. If they put themselves out there before they're ready, that can definitely poison the well very, very quickly. They

Speaker 2 (00:10:05):

Just don't get better. It just stays the same. There's no goal in mind if you do it straight away and try to make money off it straight away. It's just like it's not genuine. And I feel like everything that's not genuine never gets to its full potential anyway.

Speaker 1 (00:10:24):

Well, with a recording careers, the genuine part comes in that with the way that artists find producers is always super organic. They hear their work, they like their work, they hear their work again, they like their work, they hear their work again, they like their work, and then suddenly they notice that they like this dude because he's done all the records they listened to or a bunch of records they listened to, and then they try to get in touch with that person. And that's basically how it works. There's one variation that includes people talking to other people also who did you work with? But then still, even if they talk to other people, they still go and listen and then decide if they like it or not. That's basically it. Whenever people try to advertise themselves or push too hard, I don't think it really, really works unless you want really shitty clients and you're okay with that.

Speaker 2 (00:11:22):

Yeah, I feel like the whole promotion side of this, it's such a fine line and the whole reason I don't do it is I've seen other people do it and it's a sign of weakness almost. It's a sign of, ah, I'm not busy,

Speaker 1 (00:11:36):

Dude. Have you seen any good producers doing it? And I don't mean if they put out a software pack or I don't mean like their IR pack or it's not the same or they nail the mix or whatever. I mean, have you ever seen a really badass mixer or producer promoting themselves advertising their services ever? Because I haven't.

Speaker 2 (00:12:02):

Or like, oh, 50% off mixers this week or something. It's like, dude, that's not it. Imagine

Speaker 1 (00:12:08):

Will Putney doing that.

Speaker 2 (00:12:09):

He'd get blown up. I remember he did a post years ago. It would never happen though. It would never happen. He did some posts years ago saying, I'll mix unsigned Band single for free or some shit. And I just thought that on Facebook and it's just like, oh yeah, comments were going nuts.

Speaker 1 (00:12:28):

That was probably just a moody he was in.

Speaker 2 (00:12:30):

Oh yeah, that's a different thing. But the same thing would happen if someone huge did that and all those people, you wouldn't be stoked to work on their music unfortunately for them.

Speaker 1 (00:12:42):

Yeah, I think that when you work to the level of someone like Will or Jens Boren or any of those guys, why would they want to take 20 steps backwards?

Speaker 2 (00:12:55):

Yeah, no, I feel like everyone knows what you mean. It's just not a thing in this scene to be doing that. It doesn't happen.

Speaker 1 (00:13:05):

No, it doesn't. And now that's not to say that people aren't cool to work with. Really, really talented undiscovered talent. That happens all the time, but still, I don't think I've ever seen a big producer actually really promoting their services. And it's an interesting topic for me because this is something that we talk about all the time and when we tell people not to advertise on Facebook, don't do any of that shit. There's some other podcasts that tell you to do all that kind of stuff, and we stand vehemently against that shit. It doesn't work. And so we've had people hit us up and be like, yeah, but you guys are doing, we see your Facebook ads all the time. It's like, yeah, we're not selling production.

Speaker 2 (00:13:51):

It's a different thing.

Speaker 1 (00:13:52):

This is a company with products. It's not the same thing

Speaker 2 (00:13:57):

For everyone. The hustle eventually stops in getting clients. There's a point where it just becomes steady. You don't have to fight to get work. The hustle doesn't stop. The hustle changes. It's not trying to put yourself out there and work on everything you possibly can. It's like, oh, these people trust you and they'll work with you and you'll just repeat that for the next two or three years as their record cycles go through.

Speaker 1 (00:14:23):

Yeah. Well, the hustle I think is to get as good as possible and to make the best records possible. And then also I think there comes a hustle in it's, it's hard to explain the amount of work involved in doing this is the hustle in and of itself. I think that in the earlier days, it's hard to do as much work as you need to do. As you do a little bit later on, the workload gets a lot crazier. The more successful you become, the crazier the workload gets with recording and production in my experience. And I think that that's where the hustle really, really goes. And I don't really think though that it goes towards what people consider to be traditional hustle, which is bothering people all the time.

Speaker 2 (00:15:17):

Yeah, it's definitely different. You need to put in the work, and I feel like as you get further in your career, you are more well-equipped to take on as much work as gets thrown at you. If I got busy years ago, I probably wouldn't be able to handle it

Speaker 1 (00:15:35):

Too much or

Speaker 2 (00:15:35):

Something. But now it's just like, yeah, you just grind it out and it'll be fine,

Speaker 1 (00:15:39):

Man. I remember very early on when I was recording, I overbooked myself because I wasn't good with scheduling and got myself way in over my head, which is part of what taught me to have a more efficient system of doing things. I learned the hard way how to not do stuff by taking on work you're not ready for, which is is actually really tempting to do if it is coming to you. It's tempting to do.

Speaker 2 (00:16:09):

I think I learned that pretty quickly with the touring side of things because I couldn't physically be at home to do the work. I couldn't physically track a band or anything, so straight away I didn't get myself into a weird position or an awkward position where I would be unreliable or push stuff back. I would just push the work onto someone else I trusted.

Speaker 1 (00:16:31):

That makes

Speaker 2 (00:16:31):

Sense. I would always mix. Mixing is fine. I can do that all the hours of the day any day. But tracking and producing, I can't do it when I'm physically not home.

Speaker 1 (00:16:41):

See, for me, it was just overestimating how much work something would take. Thinking it would take way less time than it actually took, and then things would overlap, but that actually is one of the inspirations for why A URM. We push workflow so much. It's just seen personally what happens when your workflow isn't there. And so yeah, I think like you just said, further on in your career you are, you're going to be better equipped anyways to take on more work, and I think there's a number of reasons for it. Your workflow has been optimized over years and years and years. You're way more efficient and then you probably have help. Probably most people have help. Do you have help?

Speaker 2 (00:17:25):

I've got a good friend Scotty Simpson plays guitar and Alpha Wolf,

Speaker 1 (00:17:29):

Fucking Scotty. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (00:17:31):

Yeah, I couldn't tell you how many projects I've pushed his way to track. It's plenty, but we are literally the same in what we do. He tracks the way I track. I track the way he tracks, so it is no bearing on me to give him work. I know it's going to come back the way I want it.

Speaker 1 (00:17:49):

That's super important. How did you realize that he was going to be capable of doing stuff on a level that you would be okay with?

Speaker 2 (00:17:58):

He was as hungry as I was when I first met him. He had recently joined Alpha Alpha Wolf back when they were a very small band and he wrote a new song for them and we tracked it together with a friend of mine. He was in the know, he studied at the same school that I studied at, so we learned things from there the same way. But yeah, no, he was literally just hungry to do it, which is something that I really liked because I was the same maybe a year before. He was the exact same kind of dude, just hungry to do audio and that was a massive thing for me, like work ethic and being reliable and getting shit done on time. I think I got a lot of projects in my start of the career just because the other people who are recording would take one to three months to mix a song or something stupid like that, and I was like, why? It just doesn't

Speaker 1 (00:18:56):

One to three months to mix a song.

Speaker 2 (00:18:59):

I don't understand. I don't understand how that happens, but I swear I got a lot of work based on those things. Obviously the stuff I was doing was of quality, but I got my foot in by being reliable.

Speaker 1 (00:19:15):

I can't believe that in recent time period people still do that. It still take that long.

Speaker 2 (00:19:20):

It just doesn't take that long.

Speaker 1 (00:19:22):

No, it doesn't take that long. I think it's interesting. It's really, really easy to spot people who have that drive and they're actually pretty rare man. I think not just in Australia. They're rare everywhere. They're just a rare breed defined.

Speaker 2 (00:19:37):

I'd agree. I've had it. Even Scotty say to me when I'm going to get someone else to help me out with stuff that I'm doing, whether it be editing or session prep or anything like that, and I just say I don't know anyone. I haven't seen anyone that's screaming to me, this is the dude and I would know that straight away, but it just hasn't happened yet and it is because they're a dime a dozen for sure.

Speaker 1 (00:20:05):

So it's funny, I know I've said this before, but a lot of people think that getting into recording or audio or whatever is tough because there's a lot of competition and super saturated, but I don't think that's true at all. I think it's tough because it's really hard to get good and it's hard to have the right kind of personality that bands are going to connect with and trust. That's the hard part. But there really isn't much competition because most people are fucking flakes, and so that's what you're competing against. So if you're going for an internship, if you're going to try to assist a bigger producer, more important than even worrying about what anyone else is doing, the most important thing is being as reliable and badass as possible because if you are, you're going to immediately stand out. Most of the battle is done if you're just reliable just because so many people are fucking unreliable in music and audio.

Speaker 2 (00:21:08):

I mean, you even pay people to do a job and they still fuck around or fuck it up. Even in where I'm at now, I've paid people to do shit and it's shoddy work and you're just like, oh fuck. Really? That's where we're at.

Speaker 1 (00:21:24):

That's where we're at.

Speaker 2 (00:21:26):

And stuff like editing and shit like that breakfast work, I hate it myself and I don't envy the man that loves it, but no one loves it, so I understand. Fucking it up to a degree.

Speaker 1 (00:21:39):

No, actually I think John Douglas loves it.

Speaker 2 (00:21:43):

That is true. I remember watching his videos years ago and he's still doing the same shit,

Speaker 1 (00:21:48):

Just

Speaker 2 (00:21:48):

Nerdy as

Speaker 1 (00:21:49):

Except better and for bigger and bigger producers. He's mixing and producing his own stuff too, and that's getting better and better also. But he loves the editing part. He finds his zen in it or something. He doesn't consider it something that he'd like to stop doing at some point. He actually legitimately okay, so I see it the same way as I see a guitar luthier. Back when I used to play guitar, I was not into setting guitars up at all. It was like, there's someone else who can do this and who's into doing this. More importantly, there's someone, there's these types of players called Lu Ayers who they actually give a shit about how this thing is built. This is what they actually care about. I could never imagine caring about this, but thank god, God bless them. I'm glad they exist and that's how I feel. That's how feel about people like John. It's a great thing that there's some people out there who actually find pleasure in doing things like editing. Once you find them, fucking hang onto them, they're super rare.

Speaker 2 (00:23:07):

I mean, even in his videos, the shit he knows about pro tools that the normal person doesn't know is just godly.

Speaker 1 (00:23:14):

He loves it.

Speaker 2 (00:23:15):

You just get schooled straight away. I thought I knew a bit. I was like, oh yeah, I'm pretty good at Pro Tools and then watch a video of his. I'm like, you can do that. That's a thing far out and it saves minutes. Every little key command or whatever that I never knew existed is just off the chat.

Speaker 1 (00:23:36):

It's really, really impressive. I mean, that kind of is his passion, I think. I mean, he loves the artistic side of it too. He's a great guitar player, great musician, but I think that the technical side of it is not a chore where I think for a lot of people, the technical side of it is a means to an end. It's like you got to do it. You have to get some level of proficiency with, I know that I'm saying some level, it's funny because probably what me and you consider to be a decent level of proficiency to the average URM student would seem super fast, super efficient, badass. But yeah, you need some level of skill with this. But I've always thought that at some point, if it's not you to become the edit master, if it drives you crazy, find someone that it doesn't drive crazy.

Speaker 2 (00:24:32):

Yeah, it's hard to do though. As we've said. I think I'll always edit my own drums. I don't think I could pay anyone to pay as much attention as I do to certain things about the drums when I record them. The way I edit, the way I comp and all that is just, it's not like something I've seen before. So I don't feel I should ever resign that side of what I do, and that personally kind of sucks. I don't want to edit drums, but I know that it's so important to me when I get recordings of something and I hear a bad drum edit, it just fucking X marks a spot. I hate it.

Speaker 1 (00:25:17):

What about it is not teachable?

Speaker 2 (00:25:19):

I do it backwards.

Speaker 1 (00:25:21):

What?

Speaker 2 (00:25:22):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:25:23):

Have you seen Tenet?

Speaker 2 (00:25:24):

No. No. I need to watch it though, but I've been told I shouldn't watch it until it's in cinemas in Australia.

Speaker 1 (00:25:30):

It's not in cinemas in Australia.

Speaker 2 (00:25:32):

Cinemas I think will probably open up in the next week.

Speaker 1 (00:25:35):

I can't believe I said cinemas. You fucking Australians have me talking funny.

Speaker 2 (00:25:40):

What

Speaker 1 (00:25:40):

Do you call it? Movie theaters?

Speaker 2 (00:25:42):

Ah, same shit.

Speaker 1 (00:25:43):

No, I know. I'm just kidding. Oh yeah, you should definitely wait. You should definitely see it in the theater. But you just said moving backwards, you go backwards. I was like, interesting,

Speaker 2 (00:25:53):

Because

Speaker 1 (00:25:54):

I just watched it a couple nights ago. It's fucking insane. One of the most insane things I've ever seen on a screen. I couldn't believe what I was watching. People have some critique about it, about the audio mix and yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:26:06):

I've heard that.

Speaker 1 (00:26:07):

Yeah, I hate to be that dude, but they're right. It was rough. But that aside, you just get over that what you're seeing is a magical feat of movie making genius. It's unbelievable. I can't believe he fucking figure that out. It's not CGI.

Speaker 2 (00:26:33):

It changed your life by the sounds.

Speaker 1 (00:26:35):

Oh, dude. I just love it when people do extraordinary things that push the boundaries. That's with anything. Anything. Whether it's trying to send people to Mars or just finding a way to make movies more than they were before. I just love when people push the boundaries. But that said, so you edit backwards. What's that all about?

Speaker 2 (00:26:57):

So say you record a passage, you've got the drummer, whatever, you record eight bars and then you repeatedly do that until the whole song's finished. You could go through and cross fade and consolidate that audio, but at the timing of which they played, each clip is going to differ to the timing of the next clip.

Speaker 1 (00:27:20):

You mean the subtle feel?

Speaker 2 (00:27:23):

Yeah. Yeah. Like where the cross fade would be. My clip to my left is not played the same as the clip to my right timing wise usually. So I never cross fade and consolidate everything, but that also is messy. So say if I were to start at the start of the song, beat Detective one part, cut it up, quantize it and all that, when I go to the next part, I might've stuffed something up. I don't have a perception of time from the start to the end, but if I do it from the end of the song going backwards, cut a piece, quantize it, cut a piece, quantize it, I'm not messing up anything that's in front of it, but if I do it at the start of the song, I can mess up stuff that's in front of it. Obviously there's things you can do to check it.

Speaker 1 (00:28:11):

Hold on one question though. If you start at the end and you start moving backwards, sure you're not messing up stuff that comes before it, but once every time that you move back a section, you potentially mess up the section you just worked on. So by the time you get to the beginning, you could mess up everything past it.

Speaker 2 (00:28:31):

Well, no, because it's cut into chunks. I've never consolidated it, so it's all just cut up audio. You know what I mean? But I felt that doing it from the start is also always so tedious because it just feels like there's this never ending goal to get to the end of the song. But if I start at the end of the song, I can just sort of get in this automated workflow and go backwards. I dunno why it feels better that way. I've tried it from the style of the song. It just feels wack with the way I do things.

Speaker 1 (00:28:58):

Well, you know what? I've done that sort of thing, not necessarily with editing, but with, there's different times where starting at the end has made sense for me, so I don't think that it's unheard of. For instance, I like the idea of people mixing the first chorus first and making it as big as humanly possible so that you can work backwards from there. Making the rest of the song smaller so that if you make the first chorus, the biggest thing on earth, where are you going to go from there? Same with writing and arranging. Oftentimes it's good to do the most intense part. That's usually towards the end first so that you can have the stripped down versions earlier as opposed to blowing your load in the first 30 seconds of the song and then you have two and a half minutes to just,

Speaker 2 (00:29:52):

You can't design the rest. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:29:53):

Yeah. The refractory period is too short. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:29:57):

It's like getting the hard stuff done first, but I haven't seen anyone else edit drums in that way. I

Speaker 1 (00:30:04):

Haven't either.

Speaker 2 (00:30:05):

In terms of comping clips together, I can find the perfect hits that are so close to each other in time that it's almost seamless. And doing it backwards also means I check every cross faded part because the drummer might be hitting a symbol change to the wrong symbol. And if you're doing it from the start, you don't necessarily hear that because you're just flowing on. The playhead will just keep going, but because my playhead is technically not keeping going because I've already done that shit, I have to go back and listen and listen and listen. It might be slow, but it works.

Speaker 1 (00:30:43):

At first, I thought you were going to say you listened to it backwards.

Speaker 2 (00:30:46):

No, God.

Speaker 1 (00:30:49):

How did you come to the conclusion that works better for you? Do you remember?

Speaker 2 (00:30:54):

Well, I tried all the, there's plenty of YouTube videos on it. I learned how to air the drums when I did TAFE and all that shit, and everyone's method was just beat detective everything and then tap to transient the rest. And it just like whenever you beat detective anything, you do the cut and then you do the quant. It just puts shit everywhere. It never works. You need to go in and do it by hand always. And I think I just developed it from there. I wish I could tell you,

Speaker 1 (00:31:31):

I think you have, first of all, I think it's cool you found a way that works for you and go with it. Because I think a lot of times one of the things that hold people back, especially nowadays, nowadays, that there's so much information out there on how to do things, and I know I'm part of the problem with this, but there's so much information that a lot of people who are trying to learn forget that. Especially with the URM stuff. When you're watching somebody fucking awesome show you how to do something, they're showing you what works for them. It's

Speaker 2 (00:32:06):

Not the be all end all. There's another way.

Speaker 1 (00:32:09):

Yeah, especially with now the mix. We're not trying to ever say that this is the way to do things. This is one person's method for dealing with this situation, but I think a lot of people don't think about that. No matter how many times I say it, they don't take that in. And so they'll see that there's certain things that lots of people do, and so they'll start to think that there's some sort of a rule, and even if it doesn't work for them in their experience, they'll just push and push and push to do things a certain way because they feel like it's a rule. Or they'll have experiences where they're working on something and they know something's wrong. There's two options. And because they've seen on videos option A being used more often, even though option B sounds better, and they know in their gut, they know option B sounds better, they'll go with A because they'll feel like they're doing something wrong. So instead of trusting what they're hearing, they're going by a feeling of I'm doing it wrong, which every great producer that I know has successfully broken themselves of that and gone with the option B or figuring out a way of doing things that makes the most sense for them. You have to,

Speaker 2 (00:33:24):

It's like a set of tools and you choose when to use 'em. You don't just follow this rule book guideline to a T just because you think it works and hope it works. It doesn't necessarily work.

Speaker 1 (00:33:35):

No, it worked for that person that time on that song.

Speaker 2 (00:33:38):

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Speaker 1 (00:33:39):

Yeah. And I guarantee you that if you were to drop in on that person six months later on a different project,

Speaker 2 (00:33:47):

Probably doing stuff differently,

Speaker 1 (00:33:48):

Maybe some of the stuff would be the same, but I guarantee you that there would be at least 20% of things that they do that are completely different that don't apply to the old session. And so it's interesting to me though that I know that you learned at some point through URM, you've been in the community and stuff, so like you said, you've watched videos online, so you have taught yourself through that same method or medium that so many people do nowadays. How have you stopped yourself from going down that road? You know what I'm talking about from this is the right way to do things. I saw it in videos. Is it not even a question in your mind?

Speaker 2 (00:34:36):

I sort of developed most of my editing skills before I had joined URM. I mean, I joined when it was purely pretty much just mixing. So I definitely did it with mixing tricks more than anything. Not necessarily editing,

Speaker 1 (00:34:53):

I mean with anything. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:34:55):

Yeah. Well, I think I joined when Nolie did his and one when they saw that. Yeah, they started to adopt his mix bucks and shit like that. What else did he do? I think his parallel compression was kind of cool as well from memory.

Speaker 1 (00:35:13):

Gating trick.

Speaker 2 (00:35:14):

Yeah, exactly. Sorry, that for sure. And that was definitely for me, one of the things I thought that you had to do, but honestly, it sounds kind of dreadful to a degree if you are not going to use samples to enhance that highend sustain that you lost by doing tricks like that. It's the same with B'S trick, the phase thing and all that shit. I mean, it's the same with any harsh gating trick. It definitely does take away from the final sound. Yes, it works.

Speaker 1 (00:35:42):

It works. It's meant to solve a specific problem and it's meant to get you out of a situation. And I think that also it's a crafty way of doing things, right? So it's one of those bows, very crafty. And so I think that him showing that trick, same with Nali showing that trick. These are clever dudes and they figured out a clever way to do something that solves a problem. That's pretty common. But I don't think they would ever say that you have to do this every single time, and this is the rule.

Speaker 2 (00:36:18):

I definitely let some snare drums suffer using both of those tricks. And before I was definitely more purist about real sounds and would use those tricks to death and just hope that they worked. And yes, they did work, but listening back to my old work, I can hear those things straight away. The artifacts that those tricks create don't sound like anything you would hear when you hit a drum, like the whole splat sort of vibe and shit like that. It just, it's not a nice thing to hear. But yes, you get rid of all this bleed,

Speaker 1 (00:36:56):

So you got to compensate.

Speaker 2 (00:36:57):

Well, yeah, you just can't do it as hard as you thought you could.

Speaker 1 (00:37:01):

That's actually an interesting point. You can't do it as hard as you thought you could. I've noticed too, when people are watching things online or they're reading about what certain gear does, usually things are actually a lot more subtle in real life than they appear to be or the use of certain gear. For instance, the amount that a preamp colors the tone of something or the amount of sonic distortion you get with an API, it's really, it's minimal, but the way people talk about it online, people who have never used it or people who have used it, but their ears are fucking amazing. The way they talk about this stuff is that it makes a night and day difference. And so then a bunch of people who have never used it get it in their head that this stuff is going to make this sonic night and day difference, and they attach way too much importance to it. And same with these tricks. They think that it's about going hard with these tricks. Like this trick is going to solve this problem when reality, it's kind of a blend, and in the end of the day, it's a blend of a bunch of, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of this, little bit of that, a little bit of this. Tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak.

Speaker 2 (00:38:18):

I think with those drum tricks in particular, in both those situations that URM students were taught, those tricks, no's one and Bose one is that both those songs aren't mastered to death. They've got dynamic, but when I did it myself, my shit's loud as fuck. I just clip shit out of stuff and

Speaker 1 (00:38:42):

Yeah, your stuff is fucking banging.

Speaker 2 (00:38:47):

That was my whole goal, just to make it loud and obnoxious. But for that exact reason, things like that don't work. You end up hearing the bleed anyway just because you are just ruining stuff as it goes along the chain.

Speaker 1 (00:39:04):

So would you say that with your stuff, it's more about keeping it from exploding basically?

Speaker 2 (00:39:11):

Yeah. For me, gating with top end and stuff like that is keeping it from letting you hear the bleed When you hear it and you hear that come through or whatever, I don't want that because you will hone in on that. Once you've heard that you can't unhear it. There's some albums that I listen to now with headphones on, and I'll just be over analyzing it and then I'll listen to the snare drum and you could hear the symbols decay over the bar after each snare hit. I'm just like, I don't want to hear that. That's really fucking annoying. And now that I've heard that I can't unhear it and it ruins the album for me.

Speaker 1 (00:39:54):

I used to hear that all the time on, yeah, Tom, suddenly there's a blast of high end and not coming off of the drum head or something. It was symbols bleeding in and suddenly there's this blast of high end and the symbols sound different, the overhead sound different. That always used to bother the living shit out of me. I haven't heard it so much anymore. I think people have figured out how to deal with it IE samples, but yeah, they used to bother the shit out of me.

Speaker 2 (00:40:29):

It's definitely a thing like knowing how hard to do it, because if you do those gating tricks so hard and you master so hard, although they get rid of bleed, they also accentuate the bleed that is there for that super quick 10 milliseconds, one millisecond or whatever, and it's just an extremely HiFi piercing sound. So if you don't do that and just have the bleed subdued to a degree, you'll never know that that bleeds there because it doesn't catch your attention. It's just lower down. You would never know. It sounds like an overhead or shitty room sound of a symbol or something.

Speaker 1 (00:41:05):

One thing that I think that is often not thought about is that sometimes when you solve one problem, you're creating another one.

Speaker 2 (00:41:13):

Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (00:41:13):

Yeah. I've noticed that a lot actually. People will go so hard with certain techniques that, yeah, the guitars will sound wider, but now you've got a whole other host of problems. The phase is completely fucked up in the mix.

Speaker 2 (00:41:31):

That's why mid side EQ is bad.

Speaker 1 (00:41:35):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:41:36):

Shit like that. I had a phase of using that for a while on guitars, and I would get fab filter ProQ three or two, whichever one. I would actually go down to the volume knob. There's another slider on it, which is mid and side, and I would literally just grab that and turn, say the sides up, a DB or two or something like that. And yes, it made it wider, but in a solo guitar section or something, you could actually hear this weird phasing thing in the center of your image, and it actually sort of made you sick. It was very odd if you bounced out that guitar stem and soloed it with that mid site eq, you get this really uneasy feeling. It's almost like seasickness if you overanalyze it, and it's very, very odd. And yeah, I definitely let my lesson with that to never touch that shit again.

Speaker 1 (00:42:33):

I think that people who do use it well are generally really good mastering engineers who

Speaker 2 (00:42:38):

It needs to be at the end of everything, sprinkle it. You can't do it before. I feel like it sums in a weird way if you do it before mastering or the mix bus or whatever for whatever reason. I dunno the science behind it, but I don't either. I know not to do it.

Speaker 1 (00:42:55):

Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of techniques that are like, that could have very disastrous results, but that if you know how and when to use them and the right amounts is just fine. But that right there is the trick actually, is knowing how and when and the right amounts

Speaker 2 (00:43:13):

And yeah, you'll make mistakes and you'll learn. That's a part of it.

Speaker 1 (00:43:19):

I think that it's really important too, to know exactly what you're going for. And so I think a lot of times I see this now in the mix students that it seems to me like a lot of them don't know what they're going for. There'll be a song that's supposed to be organic and they'll try to make it sound like humanity's last breath because that's the last session they watched or something, and they don't have a clear picture of what they think they're going for. They're just using techniques. And one of the things that everyone who's ever done now, the mix or who I've been around who's any good has is they know exactly what they're going for. And you just said you want to make stuff loud and obnoxious, and that's kind of what your stuff sounds like.

Speaker 2 (00:44:04):

I think it describes it perfectly. Yeah. I think loud and obnoxious is what lost me, the win on the competition that I did. I mean, what was it last year? I think the Will Putney Knock Loose one. I came second and listening to my mix verse the winner, mine was just louder and way more push. I don't think people like that just as much.

Speaker 1 (00:44:31):

Well, maybe on something that they were already used to hearing.

Speaker 2 (00:44:36):

Yeah, yeah. It's definitely a perception thing for sure. It doesn't work all the time, but it's also based around what you've listened to before. You've heard that and what you've listened to after that as well.

Speaker 1 (00:44:49):

And if you're familiar with the song and already experienced it a certain way,

Speaker 2 (00:44:54):

It's a syndrome pre dispersed.

Speaker 1 (00:44:56):

Obviously, they don't feel that way when they hear your mixes and your work. They love the loud and obnoxious thing.

Speaker 2 (00:45:03):

There's no point of reference. You're only hearing that in the one way that you've heard it. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:45:08):

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:45:09):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:45:09):

That's actually why I think it's not so good for people to try and deconstruct every single piece of art that ever comes out, whether it's a movie or a mix or whatever. I was thinking about this. Everyone's got a critique of, you see a Will Putney mix and it's great, but maybe a little different than what people are expecting. And you see comments and it's like, wow, I wonder what your mix would've sounded like. Or you see a great movie director puts out a movie and all the wannabe filmmakers have

Speaker 2 (00:45:43):

Something to say.

Speaker 1 (00:45:44):

Yeah. They find every little flaw in it as opposed to just letting it exist is what it is. Because even if, say that the person went and solved all those flaws, flaws, that person the commenter wanted them to solve, and then they went and they solved all the flaws or flaws that another commenter wanted them to solve, and then so and so forth, who's to say that it would sound better? There's no way to know, because all you have is the one version, and it is what it is.

Speaker 2 (00:46:17):

I think that's also a reason that I never do any mix the same. When I do a mix, the samples that I use, the guitar turns that I use, I completely abandoned after I've finished that. I'm not reusing any of that shit. I don't want it to be compared to a more popular release I've done or something like that. I feel like that's pretty important for longevity in an audio career. If you hear someone do the same shit every time, it's just like, yes, the band will know exactly what they're getting, but you're also not trying hard either. Just dropping it into a template and going for it. I hate that. I'm really not about that.

Speaker 1 (00:47:03):

Well, that dates people, especially in the heavy music scene where stuff already kind of sounds similar. It's that much more important to find a way to stand out and to give everything as much of an identity is possible.

Speaker 2 (00:47:19):

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (00:47:20):

Yeah. I feel like especially in this kind of music, doing the same thing over and over and over, it might work for a little while if what you're doing becomes trendy, but it's not going to be trendy forever. Nothing ever is, and then the moment that that trend shifts, you're going to be old news. And I've seen that happen lots of times.

Speaker 2 (00:47:40):

I see that happen with bands. I get hit up, I'll get hit up by a band from wherever say, and I'll be like, oh, we want you to mix our song or record. We really liked this work you did with X Band. You're like, yeah, cool. Alright, let's do it. Send them the mix, and then they come back with, oh, we want the drums like that band, and we want the guitars like that band. It's like, okay, you like the image of the band and how they're perceived on social media rather than the image of your band and how it's perceived on social media. You want to copy that band cool and successful, and you think that's going to make you cool and successful. It's like, nah, dude, you got that wrong and you got me wrong. That's just not going to happen. It's not going to work like that in mixing. As soon as I hear the same kick and sneer sample to a T with a guitar tone the same as this band, it's just like, oh, I don't like that mix to begin with. The mix could be good. I don't like it. It's the exact same with songs. If they rip off sections of parts and stuff like that, it's an instant write off. It's just like, no, can't do it.

Speaker 1 (00:48:50):

How do you deal with it when a band wants you to do that? Do you just turn them down or, because at the end of the day everybody says this is the service industry, it is their record. How do you deal with that?

Speaker 2 (00:49:04):

Luckily, those bands are usually singles, so it's not a big deal if it doesn't go. Okay. I had one recently actually that they sent me the demo. I checked it out, I was on board. I was like, yeah, that's cool. And then when I started mixing it, I soon realized that the song had at least a minute worth of ripoff of a song that I mixed for another popular band. I was like, oh shit. All right. I'll just try and make it sound a bit different. Not try and step on toes or anything and send them the mix. And as soon as I sent it, they're like, oh, we want it like that band, the exact band that they ripped off for me. I just don't give in. That's not why I do this. I don't do this so people can just get something from me. I want to design stuff. I want to make it new for them, fresh for them, and bands should want that too for themselves. And if they don't, they're already doing it for the wrong reasons. It's just you might tour with this band one day that you're trying to rip off and how's that going to go? That's going to be really fucking weird.

Speaker 1 (00:50:16):

They're going to think you're a joke.

Speaker 2 (00:50:17):

You're going to get YouTube comments that are going to call you out on it, and it just doesn't go well. And when that happens, the conversation sort of fizzles out. They might go somewhere else or something like that, and that's absolutely fine. That's fine with me. And it's fine that they did that because they came to me with the wrong idea thinking I would just give away this thing that I've designed for this other band just because they paid me money. It's like, no, it doesn't work like that. I take pride in the work that I do, and I'm not just going to give it away.

Speaker 1 (00:50:52):

Every mix you see as a unique situation,

Speaker 2 (00:50:57):

It has to be, I mean, no one, two things are recorded the same way,

Speaker 1 (00:51:02):

And

Speaker 2 (00:51:03):

They can't be the same, just not. So why should that not apply with everything else?

Speaker 1 (00:51:09):

It comes down to what your morals are about it. Because I feel like sometimes when bands rip something off, they legitimately think that they're going to get away with it, but then other times it's just hero worship. It's not crafty. They just haven't developed their own sound yet, and so they don't totally understand the ramifications of everything that you just said. They haven't thought that far. So it's like, dude, I've been in situations with some bands that are actually very successful where they're like, okay, I want this riff from this Slipknot song, and we're going to have a chorus like, dude, there's this one band. I'm not going to name them, obviously, but they're doing very, very well, and literally every single part of every song is lifted strategically from other artists. But I don't think that everyone's like that. I think some people just copy because they haven't developed their own sound yet, and so they're worshiping this other band. That other band has what they want and

Speaker 2 (00:52:17):

That's what they want. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:52:19):

That's what they want.

Speaker 2 (00:52:20):

But there has to be some thought put into it ethically for the people You're going to get to work on it.

Speaker 1 (00:52:27):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:52:29):

Why would I give a shit about your ripoff song? Oh,

Speaker 1 (00:52:33):

You shouldn't. Versus

Speaker 2 (00:52:34):

The original. That's right. I shouldn't. And with the bands that I work with, and at this period of time, image and aesthetic and all that sort of stuff is almost more important than the music to a lot of people. The music videos are really fucking cool. The riffs are pretty easy, bit catchy. The lyrics are about good content, so it's very easy for people to rip off these things. It's not hard music to write, and it's also just as easy to copy it and get away with it and put a little different spin on it, but it's never as successful as that original band. It never works. It's not genuine. Again, what I said ages ago, if it's not genuine, it's not going to happen.

Speaker 1 (00:53:24):

Yeah. I guess that original band though, man, they're super rare. I feel like if that's what you're counting on being all you work with, then that's, well, kudos to you for keeping it real, but that seems like a harder road, at least at the beginning.

Speaker 2 (00:53:47):

Well, yeah, bands can be similar. I'm not going to say I'm not going to work on similar bands to one another, but it's just

Speaker 1 (00:53:56):

You mean straight rips.

Speaker 2 (00:53:57):

Straight rips, and people do it, man. They got the guts to do it, and they've got the guts to reach out, and I mean, think that you may not notice or hope that you don't care. But yeah, my relationship with the bands that I do good work for, I hope that I do good work for everyone in my opinion. But the most popular bands that I have, the relationships I have with them mean much more than X amount of money for this band that's trying to rip off this other band. I just,

Speaker 1 (00:54:30):

Yeah. And artists want to feel like when you're working on their record, they're single, whatever. You're crafting something specifically for them.

Speaker 2 (00:54:43):

Yeah. I feel like I have for just about every band that I work with in a more producer role with, it doesn't sound like any other band that I've done previously. Each time it progresses into a different thing, despite the music might be similar with Alpha Wolf. I've done a few records with them. None of their albums sound the same. It's all drastically different, still heavy as fuck. Sweet. That's fine. It's working. So why do I need to change that?

Speaker 1 (00:55:15):

No, I wouldn't. Yeah. Where are most people contacting you in order to book you? Are they from Australia or are you coming in from all over the place?

Speaker 2 (00:55:32):

Over the past year or so, I've started to get a lot of overseas work from Asian countries and few Europe and stuff like that, and I just get hit up on Instagram or whatever. I don't publicly put out an email or anything like that because I don't want every man and his dog hitting me up about their song because,

Speaker 1 (00:55:51):

Hey, my dog's got good taste, dude.

Speaker 2 (00:55:54):

Mine too. But because the bands that I work with, their image is so

Speaker 1 (00:56:00):

She's actually got better musical judgment than a lot of people I know. Sorry, but go on,

Speaker 2 (00:56:07):

Learn from you. I don't want everyone hitting me up because the image of the bands that I work with is so easy to replicate and do badly. So if I had everyone have access to contact me right at my email or whatever, it'd just be a disaster. There'd be so much stuff that I wouldn't want to work on, and then you have to turn down people that get so awkward.

Speaker 1 (00:56:29):

So you don't want to even get into the situation to have to say no. You just don't.

Speaker 2 (00:56:35):

I feel like everyone wouldn't want to get in that situation. It's not a good one to be in.

Speaker 1 (00:56:41):

I think that everyone who has experienced some demand for their work and has a certain type of client that they want to work with feels that way. But I think that not everyone knows who they want to work with. If you could think of an ideal scenario working with a band, just like what's the picture of the ideal client to you? I know every band's different, but there's got to be something that you're looking for. Maybe it would be something like, yeah, I would prefer to only work with bands that can play the song all the way through with no click or something. There's got to be something that you're drawn to. I'm just curious what that is.

Speaker 2 (00:57:28):

I guess just good heavy music with no gimmicks. I know that's a hard thing to come by, I suppose, but I'm happy to work on the right thing. That's another good thing about touring. I don't have to slog mixing as hard as another person because I've got this other thing that I can do. It's fine to turn down projects that I'm not going to necessarily be on board with. It's not going to break my bank. But yeah, I just don't find too many bands that hit up people the real deal. It's sad to say, but that's just heavy music at the moment. That's

Speaker 1 (00:58:11):

Music. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:58:13):

Probably just music.

Speaker 1 (00:58:15):

So you want to work with artists that are the real deal, basically. End of story.

Speaker 2 (00:58:18):

There's a lot of people who aren't the real deal. That's the fact of it.

Speaker 1 (00:58:22):

Yeah. It's interesting though, because like we said earlier, you can only do that once you're ready. If you're to hustle your way into getting a band that's real deal and you're not ready and you fuck it up, that's going to do way worse things for you than not having done it at all.

Speaker 2 (00:58:41):

Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's why you need to be patient.

Speaker 1 (00:58:44):

Yeah. I actually think patience is one of the most important things you can develop just for multiple different reasons. I mean, working with bands can be frustrating. Obviously. The pace of recording can be very, very slow. Editing takes a long time. I mean, even if you're fast at this stuff, it's time consuming.

Speaker 2 (00:59:04):

Your heart needs to be in it.

Speaker 1 (00:59:05):

Yeah, your heart needs to be in it. You need to be patient. But then on top of that, on the grander scale, you need to be prepared for something to take a decade to really develop

Speaker 2 (00:59:15):

A relationship or whatever that might be. It's not going to happen overnight.

Speaker 1 (00:59:19):

So how do you know the Alpha Wolf guys.

Speaker 2 (00:59:22):

I hung out with a housemate of Sabian and he's a guitar player. I just hung out with this dude and just became friends with him. Alpha Wolf were actually a crazy band in the early days. They would literally take any show and just give their all at every show and that paid off. They're nationally recognized now they're recognized worldwide. Get good tours, do good shit, and they slogged it. I don't think that can be stated enough If you don't know about Alpha Wolf, they were around for a long time for sure, and they were just playing every gig and I eventually mixed all their shows. No matter what expense it costed, they would get me to do it because they knew it made a difference. Say I mix them at a show and they're the opener band and then the next band just uses the in-house tech. It's going to be a world of difference usually. I haven't seen that many in-house techs. Kill it. I went to Japan once every in-house tech in Japan. Fucking crazy. I did not need to be there. They are so good. Yeah, so I just did shows with them, did all their tours and then just started recording them and we've just built up from there. We've progressed equally with what we do. They've gotten to a bigger band. I've done got better at mixing through them

Speaker 1 (01:00:55):

An organic relationship.

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):

Yeah. Same with Polaris. That was organic as well. I think I actually saw them at a local show and I was mixing some of the openers and they were just going to use the in-house guy and it was their headline show. There was maybe a hundred people there. It was sold out, this little small ass room. I hit them up, I was like, oh, do you want me to mix you guys? And like, oh, we don't have any money. I was like, oh, I'll just take some merch or something. And then they gave me a hat and they're like, first EP on a cd and that's started the relationship up until now. It's that easy just putting your foot out there. They want what you got. That's it. Done.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):

A hat and an ep.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):

Yeah, the hat was dreadful. It was like a flat cap. Fucking a green band on it. It said Polaris on the front. Oh, there was no way I was wearing that. I think I put it in the boot of my car in the fucking,

Speaker 1 (01:01:54):

That's funny

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):

Compartment. That's pretty funny. Never looked at it again.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):

Funny. I believe that at the beginning you need to do whatever you can to secure the right clients really to secure anything. You just have to find a way to say yes at the beginning. And I see a lot of people putting out advice that you should never, ever work for free or never devalue yourself, blah blah blah, all that kind of stuff. And so I see a lot of beginners arguing those points and they argue them very articulately and intelligently about perception and value and all this stuff. And they're right except they're wrong because what they're forgetting is that you have no value until the market decides you have value. And so you don't determine your own value

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):

And you, you're also thinking about yourself too much,

Speaker 1 (01:02:57):

Being greedy.

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):

Think about what that band is doing. In my scenario, Polaris at that show, they had driven 12 hours from Sydney in their shitty van, Rick's parents van still going to this day and they still travel in at some time. They traveled 12 hours to play to a hundred kids in Melbourne. What money do they have to give to me when they don't even know me? Nothing. Why would they, even if they did, they shouldn't. And putting your foot out there like that, it had no bearing on me. I just had to work for half an hour, which is easy. I was there already. So if I didn't do that, I wouldn't have done half the shit I've done today.

Speaker 1 (01:03:43):

Yeah, well see, when I think that a lot of these gurus say this kind of shit or they're multi-platinum mixers, I think a lot of 'em have been so successful for so long that they're not in touch anymore with what it means to build from. If they've been millionaires for 25 years, I mean good for them, but maybe they don't remember or understand what it's like on the ground anymore

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):

And it's constantly changing. Today might be not like yesterday in the music scene it happened so rapidly and especially now with COVID, what the fuck's going to happen? It's not going to be the same as it was before.

Speaker 1 (01:04:30):

No.

Speaker 2 (01:04:30):

There might not be money to throw around or anything. There might not be fucking tours for ages. I mean, I know for a fact America's not going to have tours,

Speaker 1 (01:04:40):

Will not.

Speaker 2 (01:04:40):

Australia should be back in six months.

Speaker 1 (01:04:42):

Six months.

Speaker 2 (01:04:44):

Who knows what trying to be successful, the music is going to be like in the next two years. So you're just going to try. You're just got to do shit.

Speaker 1 (01:04:52):

You got to try. But I think that the thing that isn't going to change that never changes is that you have to find a way to put yourself out there no matter what. And you need to build relationships no matter what. And if you're asking for money for this arbitrary value that you don't have before anybody agrees that you're worth anything or that your work's worth anything, then you're basically shooting down opportunities before they can even happen.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):

Yeah, you won't even know that you had the opportunity.

Speaker 1 (01:05:27):

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Obviously there's a point where you can't let yourself get taken advantage of or anything

Speaker 2 (01:05:36):

That comes after

Speaker 1 (01:05:37):

That comes later

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):

That doesn't come at the beginning. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):

Yeah. You have to get the work in the first place in order for anyone to be able to take advantage of you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:44):

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:05:45):

So I've got some questions here from listeners that I'd like to ask you. People were stoked that you were coming on. So one person's question and I think that this is a really good question from flip Uba, why you didn't answer me Lance, answer me. I'm just kidding. Don't answer that. I actually responded and said How about a question I'll actually ask? So I figured, you know what, I'll actually ask this question but I'm not being serious. Alright, so Connor Haynes says, do you apply a lot of the same thought processes of mixing to the studio as live sound gigs or is it a pretty different approach for you?

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):

It's pretty different approach and this loops back on what we were talking about before about live dudes who go to the studio and do bad at the studio. I have gone to shows, watched in-house dudes mix or people hired to mix and things that people do live can get very weird. Like stuff that you would boost compression attack and release times, ratios and all that shit. There's no tested environment for all that stuff. People are just doing it on the fly. So it gets very odd, but I can guarantee that if some of these live dudes took their ideas of live sound to the studio, they would realize that they're doing things very oddly and very weirdly. It just doesn't work. I think I remember seeing someone boost three K in, I think it was a kick drum or something by 12 db. I was like, what the fuck is that? That just doesn't sound good in any scenario. I don't care who you are. That does not sound good in any scenario and gating and stuff like that. Not being able to hear stuff in a controlled environment and knowing what it's doing can be so detrimental. So I have to approach both quite differently.

Speaker 1 (01:07:49):

Yeah, live environment there's going to be improvisation and just winging it to some degree.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):

And I think it also depends on how you tune the PA as well, what songs you pick to tune it to or whatever. A 60 V movement on a graphic EQ can drastically change the sound of something in such a big way. I think the biggest thing for me live with tuning a system is getting 2.2 kilohertz way out of there in a venue that's super loud, that frequency somehow masks what you are hearing in a crazy way. Say if you had that there, it's all unclear, everything's super loud, it all hurts. As soon as you duck that frequency by 60 B or more, all of a sudden this width just appears in your live mix and it doesn't hurt anymore. You can push all these other things up and stuff like that, but a lot of people don't realize that. And this happens with all other frequency ranges as well, so you can actually ruin your mix before you've even started based on what's being put out to you. It's the same thing of mixing in a room that's not flat mixing in a room that doesn't have sonar works or something like that. Shit's just weird.

Speaker 1 (01:09:14):

Got it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:14):

And it'll never not be weird. It's like hissing frequencies in a guitar or symbols. As soon as you get rid of those things, it is so clear the audio just improves a hundred percent.

Speaker 1 (01:09:28):

You just have to know what to do.

Speaker 2 (01:09:29):

That's right. But that is the point. People will not know what to do in the studio if they just follow what they've done live because it's just whack and the same way the other way around. I can't do studio stuff to some live things for sure. It'll just be weird. It'll be uncontrolled or just too exaggerated.

Speaker 1 (01:09:48):

Alright, question from Steven Ho. How do you make everything so dynamic and almost pumping yet controlled? Some had a great statement saying your mix is pumped in a musical way and I couldn't agree more. Just curious how you go about getting that kind of aggression, your mix of slam. Cheers.

Speaker 2 (01:10:08):

Thank you. I would say it's in the tracking stage to get mixes like that. If your stuff's not edited tight, if guitars exist before and beyond a beat too much, it can just pump compresses in a very unflattering way. If you say a guitar note came in a 32nd note or a 16th note too early by accident or just loose editing, it ducks the compressor before a kick drum hits it or something like that. If all those things are in unison, it's musical, it makes sense, but you wouldn't know it unless you edited tight enough to get that. And a lot of parallel compression too, for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:10:56):

Parallel compression, that's one of those things that if you know how to use it, it's fucking awesome. If you just hear about using it or see it on nail the mix and try to overdo it, it's not so awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):

Traditionally everyone thinks that parallel compression is just a drum thing, but you can literally use it on everything and it'll have some desired effect. I've done it on guitars with great success. I mean the whole mix bus of mine always has parallel compression. As soon as you start exploring that, you get extra musicality out of pumping with tight editing and parallel compression.

Speaker 1 (01:11:33):

All right, let's see here. Metta, Nora, when do you choose an ams? Im over the real thing.

Speaker 2 (01:11:37):

Good. If they're not good, not going to. If the time hasn't been spent to put in the work to get up to standard DI's, then anything I do in the reamp stage is not going to help that sound. It's not going to be good to start with. And sometimes bands are picky as well. Say you do a reamp, you send them the mix and they want a drastic tone change, possibly you are way off or they just want something different. But you're usually able to tell who those bands are in your early discussions as well. If they have an opinion about stuff, which is fine. That's cool. Guitar's, guitar amps is sick, but sometimes it doesn't work. Always work. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (01:12:24):

Totally. Alright, Matt Livingstone wire, quad sick.

Speaker 2 (01:12:30):

I feel like he already knows.

Speaker 1 (01:12:32):

Yeah, right.

Speaker 2 (01:12:34):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:34):

Okay. Serious question though, Josh Boss says, can you go into detail about the series of clippers that you use on your master bus?

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):

Yes, I can. So there's about four of them and they clip in series like say if you had one clipper doing a heap of heavy lifting, say that clipper clip by 10 db, you would audibly hear that clipping because it's so much, it's just overloading that. It's like if you look at the threshold, say in pro L two or something like that, if you're pushing that nine DB or so, there's no recovery in the meter. You actually physically see the transients never recover from that. But if you clip in stages, the dynamics are still preserved to a degree as it goes down. I mean sometimes you go too hard and you can hear it, but sometimes that's cool anyway. That's the way you get shit loud. Everyone ever is clipped and limited too much. But yeah, definitely clippers in series, doing a little bit with each one helps a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:13:40):

I think that that's something people have a real hard time with is learning to do a little bit at a time when it comes to dynamics processing,

Speaker 2 (01:13:51):

Especially clippers because they're looked at as detrimental tools. They do something but they also add distortion and we're taught to not want that unless it's a creative thing. But clipping is such a powerful tool if used in a smart way. I mean without the clippers on my mix, it sounds stupid. You would never end up there if you didn't have the clippers on. You would never end up with a mix like that. And that's also a thing I think that people should experiment with as well. There's the traditional mixing into a mix bus and they're mastering, then there's mixing into your master chain that mixing into master chain mix. You've sorted out all the flaws of getting a mastering engineer to master your stuff. You don't have to go back and do mixed revisions and stuff like that because you're already hearing it in its final form. Say you sent your overly dynamic mix that you didn't ever put compression on or whatever to a mastering engineer and they mastered it. Stuff like league guitar levels, vocals and stuff like that are going to be way different

Speaker 1 (01:15:00):

To

Speaker 2 (01:15:00):

The mix that you did and that is why you need to experiment with that stuff. I don't think I'll ever get anyone else to master my music based on that alone. That's just this whole extra stage of confusion for the artist as well.

Speaker 1 (01:15:13):

Well I mean if it's part of your finished product, then it's part of your finished product.

Speaker 2 (01:15:19):

If it's part of your sound, it needs to stay like that for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:15:23):

Yeah, if

Speaker 2 (01:15:23):

You've designed it that way.

Speaker 1 (01:15:25):

I mean that's kind of how Andy sne has always done stuff. There's quite a few people who almost never get outside mastering engineers and then there's some people who swear by it. So I don't think there's a right or wrong. I think it just comes down to how you design your mixes. That's

Speaker 2 (01:15:42):

Right. It definitely depends on how you work for sure. And they're two different things. They're two different ways of mixing. You won't get one or the other by trying the opposite.

Speaker 1 (01:15:54):

Yeah, absolutely. Alright, Kyle Lumley says, when you were working on the Grave Mine album, how long did you spend getting the drum sound right? The drums on that record sound fantastic.

Speaker 2 (01:16:06):

Thank you. In the recording stage, I don't know, recording drums, especially in Australia where people typically don't have their own studios like myself, I don't have my own studio to record drums. At least you are working on someone's time, so you're not really thinking about the drum sounds too much while recording. So I'd say most of my drum sounds come from in the mixing stage, adding samples and stuff like that. I mean when you're on someone's dollar, you just don't have the flexibility to design the drum sound during recording. So most of that is recording super clean sounds and then adding creative samples on top. Although I do think Grave Mind was a kind of a uncontrolled snare and I used a lot of the realness of it. You can hear it in the tracks whenever a rim shot is hit, it sort of blows up and gets really funny, like the tone and stuff and that's cool. I like that. So maybe that's more, less samples and more real, but as far as a conscious effort to design that in the studio, not so much.

Speaker 1 (01:17:17):

All right. Tyler Tidwell was wondering what was the signal chain for the guitars in the new Alpha Wolf record? They're huge.

Speaker 2 (01:17:26):

We use my 51 52 through a mess of four by 12 and I borrowed a Diesel Herbert of Josh from North Lane and put that through some random Fry it cab, which honestly didn't sound that sick. And then I just a

Speaker 1 (01:17:43):

Random white cab

Speaker 2 (01:17:45):

Fry it like VHT.

Speaker 1 (01:17:47):

Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):

Yeah, they're discontinued, I believe. And it looks super old and cruddy familiar and it definitely super old and

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):

I know what VHT is, but I'm not familiar with that.

Speaker 2 (01:17:57):

I think they were the brand before VHT were a thing and I think I had 50 sevens, four, two ones and some condenser on the cabs and I just summed them all together and it just popped out as one track. So 51 50 in Diesel Herbert.

Speaker 1 (01:18:11):

Great. Alright. Duncan Domino says what kind and size of Kick was used on or was sample or was used on Dealer's Track Grotesque? I've never heard a kick that was just so angry before.

Speaker 2 (01:18:24):

I think I used some samples that I took in a studio here called Pony Music and it was a Pearl reference kick drum and the mics were 91 a D six and a U 47 on the outside. But I flipped the D six phase out, so it made the kick drum hollow and a really sloppy high end. And when you over compress a phased out kick drum, it sort of brings the phase back in and you just get this really weird sounding kick sound that's just not normal. And that's the deal of sort of sound. It's sort of got all this hollowness in the low mid range, it just doesn't exist. It's just subs and highs. But a weird flipped out high

Speaker 1 (01:19:12):

Question, and this is from Mike Skinner and he says you made the switch to Logic. Why?

Speaker 2 (01:19:19):

Because Pro Tools is ridiculously expensive. I was working in Pro Tools Ultimate for a year, making use of my 256 audio tracks, but then I would make mixes that had more than that and I couldn't mix in the session and I paid a hundred US dollars a month for that. So that just didn't make sense. It was holding me back and I wanted to go to Mac anyway. I felt like Windows computers had too much flexibility in their tweak ability. I would always have driver issues or some shit like that. So Mac Macs was stable. And what program would be the most stable on a Mac Logic because they make it and it can do all the shit the pro tools can do. The editing's not as easy, but mixing was fine. If anything, it was better for me because the automation is so fast.

Speaker 1 (01:20:05):

Got it. Well, Lance, I think this is a good spot to end the episode. I want to thank you for talking to me. It's actually so late at night for you

Speaker 2 (01:20:15):

At 2:10 AM

Speaker 1 (01:20:16):

Yeah, man. I appreciate you taking the time to talk.

Speaker 2 (01:20:20):

No, thank you for having me on.

Speaker 1 (01:20:21):

Yeah, it's been a pleasure, man. 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 ai 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.