JOSH NEWELL: Life After Linkin Park, Surviving the Music Industry, and Pivoting to Broadcast

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 post and a tag. Now, let's get on with it. Hello everybody. Welcome to the URM podcast. My guest today is a really good friend of mine and a really good friend of the podcast. Think he, he's our first guest ever and I'm really, really happy to have him back. If you're not familiar with him, Josh Newell is a producer, engineer, mixer, and really all things audio related, and he's got a massive back catalog of clients.

(00:01:48):

He's always working on something incredible. From Lincoln Park to Avil Levine, to intranet to Cynic, Josh has been a part of some of the biggest records and catalog editions in the modern musical landscape. And in addition to his stellar history of work in audio on the music production side, Josh has also recently begun working with public broadcasting Titan, NPR, pushing his already formidable engineering knowledge and resume to new heights. He's an example of what it means to be a professional audio engineer, and I love that he makes it work. No matter what is happening in the world or in his life, he's a very inspiring person and a good friend. I introduce you, Josh Newell. Josh Newell. Welcome back to the URM Podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:02:38):

Hey, thanks for having me back.

Speaker 1 (00:02:40):

How are you?

Speaker 2 (00:02:41):

I'm pretty good. All things considered.

Speaker 1 (00:02:42):

I feel like I haven't talked to you in a while, has

Speaker 2 (00:02:44):

Been a minute, hasn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:02:45):

I feel like I haven't talked to you at all during COVID.

Speaker 2 (00:02:49):

Yeah, we haven't chatted at our usual rate in a while, now that you mention it.

Speaker 1 (00:02:54):

No. So I want to hear about what's been up. I know that you have the NPR gig and that probably kept you busy as hell in 2020.

Speaker 2 (00:03:04):

Oh, you say that Anything's been going on in the news lately. I mean, we will get into it because obviously my music career changed a little bit, man, last time we talked I think was, it's been about four years since we did this, so we had just finished recording that last Lincoln Park record. So I mean, we can get to that in a minute. But yeah, my kind of main gig right now is engineering for NPR, not a member station, but the whole national organization. They have a Los Angeles office, and I had been freelancing there for a bit since I think 2018. And then late 2019, they were like, Hey, we have a position, would this be of interest? And I was like, yeah, maybe I'll take this and try this. And it really, I got to be honest, it worked out great as far as having employment during a pandemic. We had to close our studio, the riot house I had going. I mean, we were reopen it, but yeah, it's kind of worked out really well as far as having a gig where I don't need to be around a ton of people.

Speaker 1 (00:03:59):

Being around a ton of people is super stressful,

Speaker 2 (00:04:02):

Very,

Speaker 1 (00:04:02):

It isn't for me now just because I've got antibodies, but I don't think that I would be able to do a job that required being around a lot of people if I didn't have some immunity.

Speaker 2 (00:04:13):

Not to burst your bubble, but that new variant that's out, there's some new versions of COVID now because it's mutated. And

Speaker 1 (00:04:22):

We

Speaker 2 (00:04:22):

Just did a report on this town of Brazil that had basically if herd immunity was going to work, this town was going to be the proof of it because it was so widespread originally, and now there's a new variant going through and people who've been sick are getting sick again.

Speaker 1 (00:04:33):

Awesome.

Speaker 2 (00:04:34):

So maybe just avoid Brazil even if you've got your antibodies.

Speaker 1 (00:04:37):

Yeah, well damn it. I was going to go there. I had a trip planned. That being the case isn't travel kind of restricted.

Speaker 2 (00:04:45):

They're not super strict about it. And I mean, they've said in LA if you leave Southern California right now, you're supposed to quarantine for 10 days before doing anything. So if you leave, man, I think even if I go to San Diego, I'd have to do it. Not that I'm going to San Diego, but yeah, they're supposed to be a 10 day quarantine just coming in and out of California at this point. Numbers are so high something at this point, they think one in three people in LA have had coronavirus.

Speaker 1 (00:05:07):

Wow, that's insanity. That has probably worked out for you Great in terms of having a ton to work on and also being able to separate from people.

Speaker 2 (00:05:19):

Yeah, it's been good. I mean, the company, I guess the thing with being a news organization and I mean we started covering it back when it was still just kind in China and popping up in December, and then they moved everybody to work from home and they were getting everybody to laptops and they were just like, oh, we're not sure how we're going to support everybody working at home. And NPRs main DAW actually isn't Pro Tools. It's something they've been kind of adding that's new, which has been another reason that's worked out for me because I know Pro Tools obviously, so we're not even sure how we're going to support Pro Tools. And I was like, well, my work from Home setup is an HD rig, so I'm good to go. I have all these coworkers like, oh, it's so miserable working from home. And I'm like, I've got a whole room with an ergonomic chair and speakers. This is great. I'm not commuting across LA every day now. This is wonderful.

Speaker 1 (00:06:02):

Do most of them just have weird little laptop setups?

Speaker 2 (00:06:06):

And I have one too. I have to work in their D as well. But yeah, I work with people that work for NPR for one of the guys who work there longer than I've been alive, so they're just like, why would I have a Home Pro tool set up if I'm here every day?

Speaker 1 (00:06:19):

Fair enough. So how did that come about?

Speaker 2 (00:06:21):

A friend of mine from recording school actually is, I was his teaching assistant at one point, is actually the head of audio technology at NPR. He's been there since 2000. So NPR has always kind been on my radar as a gig, if ever I ever got sick of music. I think it's about seven years ago now. I think it was after Hunting party wrapped up, he called me their thing, tiny Desk, the tiny Desk concerts. They do,

Speaker 1 (00:06:41):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:06:41):

So he called me and he was like, Hey, the engineer that's doing that's retiring, he's like, well, this would be of interest to you at all. I was like, oh, that's kind of a cool gig. And if you're not familiar with Tiny Desk, you can just YouTube it. They basically have everybody from Taylor Swift and run the Jewels to the Black Crows. They have a ton of people come in and basically perform at NPR. So he's like, oh, if would you be interested? So basically I interviewed for that job. I got really close to getting that job and ended up going to the guy that was kind of their fill in guy, which is understandable that at least put me on NPR R'S Radar. So that job's kind of been there over the years, but I was still, it was always like, Hey man, music's going really, really well. Should I ever get older, have a family decide I want to do music, maybe I'll call you. Fast forward to 2017, and I think it was actually about the last time we talked, I was taking about six months off. We just spent a year and a half straight making a Lincoln Park record, and I was like, I'm going to take six months off. We had my first only kid, my kid was born about two weeks after we finished that record. So I was like, I'm going to take

Speaker 1 (00:07:37):

First of one.

Speaker 2 (00:07:38):

Yeah, first of one, my first slash last kid. I was like, I'm going to take six months off. I want to be home. And I just wanted to be around and supportive. My father-in-law had passed away while I was doing that record. I just felt like I needed to be around. And on top of that, Lincoln had written so many songs during that album that they were like, Hey, we're going to come back into the fall and just start our next record, all family dudes. And they were like, we don't want a tour for a year and a half. And they were also adapting to the new music model. Hey, let's put out more content more frequently, not doing an album than tour for two years. So it was one of those things like, okay, great, 2017, I'll take six-ish months off. I'll work on some stuff, but I just want to be home. And then about six months after that record wrapped is when Chester passed away and Chester passing away, especially how we did turned into this whole, I want to reevaluate my life and reevaluate my career in the regards that I started caring more about my mental health.

Speaker 1 (00:08:30):

How so?

Speaker 2 (00:08:31):

I'm not going to say Chester and weren't buddies. He was somebody I've known those guys for long enough. It's kind of a coworker situation. I don't know everything. I don't know the details of his private life a ton. I probably know more than a lot of people just from being around, but

Speaker 1 (00:08:43):

But you knew each other a long time.

Speaker 2 (00:08:45):

Yeah. I think Ethan, other engineer kind of worded it like, oh man, there were weeks. I spent more time with that guy than I did my wife just by byproduct of working. So you take this guy that's really successful in this field. I think Chester had six kids. He's a lot of kids, and he really loved his kids. He used to talk about his kids a lot. It was kind of one of those things I knew depression didn't mean you're bummed out. Depression's a real mental disorder, your brain. It's

Speaker 1 (00:09:11):

An actual illness.

Speaker 2 (00:09:12):

Exactly. But I didn't know a ton about it, and so I started doing some looking into that.

Speaker 1 (00:09:18):

It's an illness with a body count too.

Speaker 2 (00:09:20):

Yeah, very much. And

(00:09:22):

I mean, it's not one of those things where I ever sat around and I don't think any of us sat around and kicked ourselves at how did we not see this coming? I think for a lot of people, I've worked with a lot of musicians who've had a lot of demons because a lot of musicians do. There's just something about that type. So I don't think for a lot of us that it was, oh, I could never picture Chester doing this in the scope of knowing him since 2002 or whatever. But it felt like odd timing for it. So it was one of those things where, oh, this guy that's successful in his field and doing what he loves and he has a family, and he felt overwhelmed. I mean, I've always had some anxiety issues and I was like, well, I just want to get this addressed, especially having a kid.

(00:09:59):

And then not to minimize Chester's death, but also when Chester passed away, that was my main source of employment. I worked with Lincoln Park for a long time. The shortest we've ever worked on an album was like six to nine months. So we're talking about a band that eats up a lot of bandwidth as far as employment goes for me. So I'm at a point now where I've just had a kid, which is stressful, and this person I know and care about has passed away, which is stressful. And then my main employment is gone. I think last time I think we were on I, I mentioned the fact that, man, this, I spend so much time with Lincoln that it really is hard to build relationships with a lot of

Speaker 1 (00:10:37):

Other people. Yeah, we did talk about that.

Speaker 2 (00:10:39):

I had to turn down, I think two records while doing Lincoln like, oh, when will you be done with this? And it's just like, I don't know, a year from

Speaker 1 (00:10:46):

Now, next year maybe.

Speaker 2 (00:10:47):

Yeah, there was kind of a lot of that, and I was just like, you know what? I'm going to go talk to somebody. I'm going to go see a therapist and make sure my head's in a good space. I think this industry, it's really easy to slip into a toxic lifestyle, I guess. It's stressful. You work a lot when you freelance. I've had gigs come and go. At one point I was working with Puff Daddy and it was the last minute gig that came up and it was supposed to be going a long time, and I didn't have anything. It was kind of good that it came through, and then they just decided they didn't want to pay me as much as they were supposed to. Meanwhile, they were upping my work and my hours and I was like, no, you guys got to keep paying me what you said. And they were like, all right, you're fired. And I was like, just four months of work, four months of work just goes away. You know what I mean? And I'm not saying that shit on Puff Daddy, things happen, but

Speaker 1 (00:11:29):

That's the music industry. Back when I started URM, there's multiple reasons for why I started. There's not ever just one reason for why you quit a career cold Turkey. But one of the things that really, really bothered me was the getting paid super late by labels and not being able to say anything about it. If you say something about it, they're just not going to work with you next time until you have a lot of leverage. But if you don't have leverage, they can pay you six months after the record is released. And if you rock the boat, they'll just go with somebody else. End of story.

Speaker 2 (00:12:06):

I actually have announced sending invoice right now from an artist I was mixing last time we talked, and that's actually a Christian Rock record, which is one of those ones you would think you would be honest about paying.

Speaker 1 (00:12:15):

They're always the craziest.

Speaker 2 (00:12:16):

Yeah, some I've heard, I've heard. But yeah, so just a lot of that piled up. I just kind of started reassessing some things. I actually just listened to your Josh Wilbur episode not too long ago, and him talking about working at studios was just reminding me of that. Oh yeah. I remember cleaning toilets and doing all that and being like, oh, you want to take a vacation and go see your family? I don't know. What if a gig comes through and it's three months, and then if you're not there for a week, you can't take it and you're going to lose out on three months of work and you never take vacations, you never shut off. You're always working, you're always hustling. You want to get ahead, which is good, but it can be toxic and the hours are weird and

Speaker 1 (00:12:53):

Sedentary lifestyle,

Speaker 2 (00:12:54):

Very much so. Yeah, I'm trying to burn off 20 years of sitting around. And also I started, I didn't have a drinking problem and I still drink alcohol, but it was one of those things like, oh man, it's midnight on a Tuesday. I've been at work for 12 hours. I just want to unwind. What do you do at midnight on a Tuesday? I have a friend that's a bartender. I'd go see her. It wasn't like I'd go get drunk, but go have a beer, see my friend unwind. You need that unwind. So it's just like I didn't have substance abuse problems, but the industry can lead to people having substance abuse problems.

Speaker 1 (00:13:24):

It can happen gradually, kind of like any unhealthy lifestyle choice. It doesn't seem too bad at the beginning, especially when you're younger, but certain work environments just promote bad behavior. I definitely think production is one of them. I think the music industry as a whole is pretty toxic. If you just let it play out the way it normally plays out without taking control of your own life, it can be pretty toxic. The touring lifestyle, the studio lifestyle, it can be pretty hazardous to your health, I think. And again, it's not something you might notice right away, but over time it definitely builds up.

Speaker 2 (00:14:06):

And I don't know if a lot of people realize this. It is a dream to get to a level where you're doing records at these multimillion dollar facilities and the track you're working on is going to Chris Lord algae or something like that. But when you're at that level, you are also, unless you're the producer, and even if you are the producer, you're kind of at, I don't want to say the whim of the artist, but to a degree, artists of that level have crazy schedules. And there's a lot of, I mean, I'll go back to that Puff Daddy gig. Puff Daddy has a whole lot of stuff going on that's not music, and that's really where he makes his money. So yeah, you're at the studio at noon, but he might not show up until 7:00 PM because there's all these other obligations that have been booked with him, and then you work with him and then you have to finish at four in the morning.

(00:14:51):

I mean, I think I'm just kind circling that this can be a toxic job. And all of this said, by the way, I haven't quit doing music, but it was more like I want to reassess my relationship with music. And especially having a kid too, I wanted to be around my friend Ethan that was doing Lincoln. His kid was a year and a half older than mine. So for him, there were days he would be frustrated because not about the job for any particular reason other than he was having a really good morning with his kid and he wanted to be around more, and he knew he was going to be at the studio till 1:00 AM.

Speaker 1 (00:15:19):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:15:20):

Trying to figure out a balance of all that, trying to figure out what I was going to do without Lincoln being around, because kind of around that point too, I had accepted the fact that, and it wasn't twisting my arm on this, but it was like, all right, Lincoln's always going to be my big client. It's going to be somewhat prohibitive for me working with a lot of other big artists just because I'm going to be with them so much. You just embrace it like, okay, I'm going to Lincoln Parks engineers, what is there to complain about?

Speaker 1 (00:15:41):

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:15:42):

We a beer for a year, and we had food budgets. I mean, we were eating nice sushi three days a week and like, oh, here's your Waves Mercury Bundle because you work with Lincoln and here's your UAD stuff. And hey, we want to be able to mix on your edit rig. Well, my edit rig is not fast enough. Well, here's an HDX card so that we can do that. I'm not complaining about my time with Lincoln Park. They were very generous.

Speaker 1 (00:16:03):

It's still a decision you make when you say yes to one thing. I think the more significant the yes is, the more significant the no is going to be to everything else or to lots of other things. And I just don't think that you can have, can't have a main gig without the other gigs becoming side gigs. It's just a decision you make.

Speaker 2 (00:16:24):

Exactly. I mean, it was a big part of why I've never opened my own studio in LA until we had Riot House. I was like, why would I do that? Out of every three years, two of them were spent in the other studio of Lincoln Park. Why would I open my own studio?

Speaker 1 (00:16:36):

Makes sense.

Speaker 2 (00:16:37):

This is all a very roundabout way of explaining how I got to NPR. Now I think about it. So basically what happened is I have now been thrust into, I don't want to say thrust into freelancing what I was already doing, but just that's gone away. So now I'm kind of, not so much cold calling, but people and like, Hey, Matt Squire haven't talked in a bit. What are you up to? Do you need some help? Or, Hey, Josh Wilber. I helped him with some, setting up some mixes and stuff. I know a lot of people do NRG, Hey, Jay Rustin, if there's anything you're not mixing, send it my way. You just start filling in the gaps. But at the same time, I also got thinking like, oh, there's got to be other stuff out there to do, especially having a family. There's probably cool audio jobs if you with benefits.

(00:17:18):

I don't know the guy well, but the guy that works at Red Bull Studios is their staff engineer or knowing people that do video games, or I have a friend with two Grammys who mixes commercials for a, B, C, and he's totally stoked on it because it gives him a bunch of time to go rock climbing. So it's like, all right, I'm going to start putting feelers out into these other things. So I started doing that. I have some friends at a post place, and I started mixing Netflix cartoons in Korean. It was just like, Hey, this is the overdub in Korean. Can you mix this and send it back at spec? Yeah, I can do that. Or I have a friend that, that artist Poppy, the

Speaker 1 (00:17:52):

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:17:53):

So at one point she was going to have a YouTube TV series, and I have a friend who's a producer, and he hired one of my friends who does post to mix it, and they're like, oh, do you want to do the Foleys? I started doing Foley sessions and it was just like, I want to learn all this other audio stuff I'm not used to doing on top of still doing music gigs. And then my friend at NPR in dc, obviously Chester passing away was kind of big news. So he was like, Hey, we have some engineering positions open in dc. Are you interested? And the first one popped up probably about the last time I talked to you, and I was like, man, I'm, I'm not going to try to interview for a job in DC while having a kid. I'm not moving cross country.

(00:18:28):

And then another one popped up a month later and he's like, dude, these never come up. And I was like, yeah, I still can't take that. I'm not going to move with a one month old. I was kind of doing my thing and then one day he calls, he's like, Hey, you know what? The West Coast office, we have a temp fill in person that covers when people go on vacation and whatnot. And he's like, I feel like we should just do better. He's like, this wasn't him throwing me a job. He's like, but let me put you in touch with the guy out there, the head manager. So he did. I went and met the manager.

Speaker 1 (00:18:53):

This guy really wanted you at NPR, didn't he?

Speaker 2 (00:18:56):

Well, I mean, by this point, he's head of the department too, so I think he kind of liked the idea of having engineers that he knows. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:19:01):

Makes sense. But

Speaker 2 (00:19:02):

Also we've been friends for 20 years, and I think he was trying to, he's like, Hey, I know you have a kid. I know what happened with Lincoln. So I take it back. A job did pop up at NPRA year when my kid was a year old. And I was like, all right, well, I'll at least interview. And so the interview with that company's gnarly. I did take an hour long audio proficiency test where it's just like everything from audio over ip, which I didn't know a lot about at the time, to conversion rates and specificities of DAW and then stereo micing techniques and collapsing things to mono. It was a pretty serious test. So I took that. I didn't get the job in dc, which I'm fine with. And then afterwards I did my interview with other managers there. My friend, my friend's, very professional.

(00:19:41):

He's like, I'm not going to be biased. So they were like, well, hey, LA office, the temp guy's not that great. Maybe you'd be a fit there. So I went and met the manager there, got in and just started temping and just did well hit it off with people, hit it off with staff. A new manager came in who really liked me, and they started assigning me more and more gigs. So I started doing fly dates, like, oh, hey, go to Seattle. And how I built this podcast is recording a live event, so go coordinate the audio set up and the recording of that. And it just kind of snowballed into this thing where they started giving me more and more work. They made me part-time, and then finally they're like, Hey, we're going to create a position for you. And then, yeah, so that's why I took it. So I basically ended up NPR initially started as like, oh, this is another thing in my freelancing wheelhouse that I'm trying to build of doing things other than music just to do things other than music.

Speaker 1 (00:20:32):

And

Speaker 2 (00:20:32):

Then it turned into a thing.

Speaker 1 (00:20:34):

So two things that I think are interesting here. Number one is that is another example of when I tell people that the market's not as saturated as you think it is because most people suck, and if you don't suck and you're pretty good, you're already going to stand out. It just makes me think that they already had that position filled, even if it was a temp position, they already had somebody. If that person hadn't sucked, there would've never been the chance for you to do a better job. But most people suck. And so if you're good at what you do, I think an audio or music or whatever creative, you probably have a pretty good chance of getting work just because most people don't have their shit together, aren't reliable.

Speaker 2 (00:21:15):

Yeah. Telling people to just say yes and do things generally is good advice, unless you're completely out of your league and then you're going to completely fuck up your future chances of doing something. I had never done broadcast ever, but I could go like, oh, I've mixed these children's cartoons to a broadcast spec. I've done this before. You kind of need to show, and this is an important thing for anybody, even if you're just trying to reach out for just freelancing with your favorite producer, you need to show that you have applicable skills. You can't just send out a blanket email or a blanket resume. And that was part of my goal with that whole, I'm going to work on a bunch of stuff that's not music was that I wanted to spread. I wanted to spread my chances out or finding something cool. I interviewed at Bungee Games at one point to do pro tools and music editing, and they sent me a video game cut screen and a bunch of music and sound effects, and they were like, we want you to build the score for this scene out of, here's some of the music and then here's sound effects and you need to mix it.

(00:22:14):

Well, I'm not a big video game guy, but it was like a space battle. Well, I love the shit out of Star Wars. I know what a space battle sounds like. So mixing the space battle and doing the cuts, I think John Williams would, you know what I mean? And it was one of those things like, oh, or even I went in with a company that interviewed with a company that does movie trailers. Strangely enough, I interviewed with a guy that I graduated college with who we had never met. We just same school, same year, but it was, oh, the big part of this gig is mixed prep bullshit. I know Mixed prep. They're just like, can you give an example of knowing mixed prep? I was like, well, yeah, I worked for Jay Baumgartner at this place for nine years, and part of your gig was setting up his mixes.

(00:22:52):

I know I've done this other thing where I mixed these cartoons to broadcast back. It was really good to start. And the thing with Bungee was they were like, oh, this is pretty good, but you don't have any game experience. But also, I'll be honest with a lot of people, and LA is one of these markets, and it's probably a lot of places, but there are a lot of bad audio engineers out there that claim they know what they're doing because they went to some quick program. And even if you can pull out a discography, I can, not to brag about it, you're still convincing a video game company that you've worked on. They're selling millions and millions of copies of video games at this point are probably the number one entertainment company, especially with movies being where they're at right now. They want proof that you can deliver on a deadline and that you're going to show up so that

Speaker 1 (00:23:33):

There's tens of millions of dollars on the line.

Speaker 2 (00:23:35):

Exactly. So that was part of me in what I was doing too, was just like, oh, I want to prove that companies can rely on me as well as specific examples.

Speaker 1 (00:23:43):

Exactly. My point though is most people suck and people know it. So if you can prove that you don't, you'll probably be okay.

Speaker 2 (00:23:51):

Exactly. So yeah, basically if people ask you to do things, don't say yes if you legitimately can't do it, but if you can get in there and do it well, I mean my whole career has kind of relied on this point of, I'm sure it goes for a lot of people, knowing people and then just being remembered as being reliable.

Speaker 1 (00:24:07):

Where did all these gigs come from? Was it all from contacts?

Speaker 2 (00:24:10):

Some of it was cold calling, like the bungee one I randomly found, but then I have a friend.

Speaker 1 (00:24:14):

Oh yeah, you said that. Where were you looking?

Speaker 2 (00:24:16):

I think I just started looking for audio jobs around Los Angeles. I just decided to start the company when I was doing the commercials for Netflix. That was through post house that one of my good friends, an old roommate, he used to work there, so I kind of knew some of the people there, but he put in a word for me, the Foley gigs and doing the thing for Poppy, my friend that was the producer, I mean, he is an old friend, but I also recorded his band a couple times, so he knew I didn't suck the bungee thing. That was kind of a cold call. But even then I reached out to a friend of mine whose husband does video game programming, and he was like, oh man, the head of hiring at Bungee is an old college friend of mine. Yeah, the hold on. NPR too. That was one of those ones I kind of knew somebody. So honestly, the movie trailer one was from the bass player for a perfect circle. I worked with his other band and he was like, Hey, I don't know if this is of interest, but some dude that I grew up with and used to play guitar with, they're looking for somebody at their trailer mixing house.

Speaker 1 (00:25:12):

Sounds like your network saved you.

Speaker 2 (00:25:13):

Yeah, it really did. And then that was without even having to go like, Hey guys, I'm really in trouble here. It was really nice. It was a lot of people reaching out like, Hey, are you okay with what happened to Chester? And then as a secondary, if you find yourself needing work, let us know. We'll be out.

Speaker 1 (00:25:31):

That's great. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:25:31):

No, it was really good.

Speaker 1 (00:25:33):

Pays to not be an asshole,

Speaker 2 (00:25:36):

Or at least if you're an asshole being an endearing one.

Speaker 1 (00:25:39):

Yeah, definitely. So did you find that the therapy helped you basically collect your thoughts so that you could get through what could have been an overwhelming time period as healthy as possible?

Speaker 2 (00:25:51):

Oh yeah, definitely. And I still talk to a therapist. I still think it's good.

Speaker 1 (00:25:55):

I think everybody should.

Speaker 2 (00:25:57):

Absolutely. I mean, if you're ever on the fence about it, and the guy I found was through a local organization that just takes graduate students, so you're talking to a graduate student, but they're under a licensed therapist, and my therapist had gotten his license and he's great. It really helped me prioritize. It just really helped me prioritize my own health and wellbeing and being a workaholic in check. And then I got to be honest with you, working for a news organization the last couple of years has been stressful, to say the least. So that's been good too

Speaker 1 (00:26:32):

For people listening in the future. It's January of 2021,

Speaker 2 (00:26:36):

Right, and I mean, we don't need to get into politics. Everybody doesn't have to agree with my take. And NPR is a very neutral radio station, but there was one day we were testing, there's machines that record all the broadcasts and then they auto loop them. So member stations across different time zones can pick up the show and then we can punch in if there are updates, like say there's breaking news at 9:00 AM Well by the time it's 9:00 AM on the west coast, it's noon in DC and there might be updates. So there's basically a device that records it, and then we can punch in and they're like, we're going to test it. And it happened to be the day the recordings of the kids being caged audio came out of this kids in cages and they're crying and they're just like, this is the day we need you to just constantly listen to everything on loops. You're just listening to little kids crying all day. And at the time I had a 2-year-old, I don't know, man. It would suck for everybody, but yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:27:27):

Unless you're a psychopath,

Speaker 2 (00:27:28):

It's basically a long story. It was good that I was still seeing a therapist dealing with this.

Speaker 1 (00:27:32):

It sounds to me like the news in and of itself, if it stresses out the public this much, it must really, really stress out the people working on it,

Speaker 2 (00:27:41):

And the company's been good about that. But it's weird. I really miss music and there are days I really miss music. And again, I haven't stopped doing music. I haven't done a bunch of cool shit lately. I just had a converge song I worked on came out.

Speaker 1 (00:27:52):

That's awesome.

Speaker 2 (00:27:53):

Yeah, Kurt blew me like, Hey, can you record Ben? He lives in LA now. Yeah, but the thing I like about working at NPR is if I'm doing something, when I got into music and I ended up at NRG, I was like, well, I want to work here because even if I wasn't the biggest fan of New metal when I started there, and you walk in and you're like, oh, shit, everything that's on rock radio right now has been done here. This is where I want to be. This is top tier rock music right now. This is where I want to work. I want to do top shelf work. And so for me working for NPR, it's like, oh, if I'm going to do broadcast right now, I want to do top shelf work where it's like you're doing a piece that's going on Morning Edition and then 20 million people are hearing it.

(00:28:36):

Or for me, it's cool. My parents can actually listen to my work now, but there was a day like, oh, here's the satellite phone. You're going to go to interview the ambassador from Iran, and you go and it's supposed to be going live, so you've got this little satellite box that you're dialing in and oh, well, he's running late. Alright, we're going to scramble and redo the show, finally get him on for an interview to get out of there. Like, oh, I wonder why he was late. It's like, oh, remember that day I ran, was it ran? I ran Rock bombed a military base.

Speaker 1 (00:29:06):

Yeah, back last January, I believe. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:29:09):

Yeah, exactly. I was waiting for him. He was talking to the president because that had happened and that's why he was running late to my meeting. And you're just like, oh my God, this is what these people are dealing with. It's stressful in a different way, but it's really cool because it's a challenge that it's a big deal. Don't f this up. I had to go to Robert Downey Jr's house and do an interview with him at his house and you're just like, okay, don't mess this up.

Speaker 1 (00:29:33):

What was that?

Speaker 2 (00:29:34):

Honestly, it was awesome. He had his own onsite, their whole compound. They had their own onsite tech guy to make sure that I had satellite signal or ethernet. He was really nice. He was the exact guy that you would think he would be, but it's still,

Speaker 1 (00:29:47):

It's a big deal.

Speaker 2 (00:29:48):

You meet celebrities, but that dude is a celebrity or Hey, here's Willem Defoe, here's Christopher Nolan's coming into NPR to talk about whatever. Here's Spike Lee coming in to talk about his first Oscar. Talk about black Klansmen. I like that. If I'm working in broadcast, I'm not at some, and this isn't to be dismissive of anyone that's doing it. I'm not at some local college station, a very legit company, and I think if I decided I wanted to do live sound, I wouldn't want to work at a local bar. I'd want to be at a national venue.

Speaker 1 (00:30:19):

So whatever it is you're doing, you want to make sure that it's legit.

Speaker 2 (00:30:22):

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (00:30:23):

Yeah, because I feel like that doesn't sound like a step down at all. Sounds like just a step.

Speaker 2 (00:30:30):

I mean, that's kind of how I view it. And yeah, like I said, I'm still doing music work and for the sake of where I'm at, I get to be a little pickier about it too. I can kind of pick what I want to do now instead of going, especially in the first year or two of Lincoln being gone, and I basically was having to rebuild a clientele base there because I had been gone for so long that you're not keeping up. So the kid and rent's expensive in la there was projects I was taking on that I really wouldn't want to do, and now I don't have to do that. I can take time off to do an intranet record or something like that if it's something I really want to work on. But yeah, I don't know. I just feel I'm in a good space. I don't know if I'm going to do broadcast forever, but for right now, it's really good and I've ended up feeling way more stoked on it than I thought I would.

Speaker 1 (00:31:12):

It's become really clear to me for a while now that a pathway to a comfortable and good living in audio doesn't have to come exclusively from working in music. And there's numerous ways to make it work with the right skillset, broad enough of a skillset. Do you feel like engineers that want to do the band thing, which there's nothing wrong with that, but do you think that overall they limit themselves from the possibilities?

Speaker 2 (00:31:43):

Yeah, I think they do. And I'll be honest, I did that to myself too. When I was in recording school. My recording school offered classes in post-production and other things, and I was like, I just want to do music, man. I don't care about this other stuff, which was a bad move when I started doing music in la I was taking a lot of stuff and the thing that worked well for me is I somehow ended up the hip hop guy at rg. I think it was because I interned with the guy, interned with my, I moved to LA was one of Death Rows engineers, so my NRG standards. They're like, oh, this is definitely our hip hop guy. So it was kind of cool at NRG to, I started realizing I liked that a lot and part of my initial enjoyment of engineering was getting to work on different things.

(00:32:25):

So I did start trying to look for a bunch of different types of music. Oh, this is a reggae thing. This is a jazz thing. Okay, great. I want to jump on that. I want to learn that. For me, the thing with I lurked the URM nail, the Mix Facebook group more than I comment, and this is not to deter anyone's goals, but I think people like Joey are, and you guys have mentioned this, Joey's an outlier. Joey having a career starting in a garage is not really the norm, although I don't know what the norm is in the industry anymore because the norm's different than when I started

Speaker 1 (00:32:54):

Starting in the middle of nowhere and getting famous producing fans and starting a whole scene. That's not normal.

Speaker 2 (00:33:00):

It's way more possible now than it was when I was in Tennessee in 1997 or whatever.

Speaker 1 (00:33:05):

But it's still not normal. There's nothing normal about it.

Speaker 2 (00:33:09):

So yeah, get good at something, get known for being good at something that's good, but don't be like, this is the only thing I'm going to do. I'm going to be honest. A lot of you guys, if you're just like, I'm only going to do Extreme Metal, that's awesome. But it is kind of limiting. There's only so much by way of budget with a lot of those bands. They're already guys out there like OV who everyone goes to him trying to crack into audio in general is a hard scene. And honestly, I think everybody's goal should really be if you can make a living, and this was kind of my goal when I really thought about it, was if you can make a living, I mean at the time doing music, but I'd extend it to you, if you make a living doing something in audio, you have made it the sheer number of people that I know that came to LA to make it in the music industry that didn't.

(00:33:58):

Eric Ron was an intern at NRG at one point. I mean, he's killing it, but we probably had 70, 80, probably a hundred plus interns in the years that I worked there and the number that have gone on to really do things. I mean, there's like Eric, my friend Kyle who engineers for Nine Inch Nails now, but I can literally count on one hand the number of interns I know that have really gone the distance. So as far as massive, massive careers, but there are a lot of people just doing other things. You just need to understand this is a really tough business you're trying to break into. Especially now. I mean, especially now with Coronavirus, don't make it harder on yourself. If you were driving a race car right now, don't spray paint the whole window black and then just put one little circle for you to see through while you're driving.

Speaker 1 (00:34:44):

Well, the thing is that a lot of people have the wrong goal, and I think their goal is to become a famous producer. The next Will Putney or something like that, when that's just statistically very unlikely. However, making a living, which is not as sexy, but just making a really good living as a musician or an engineer, while it's still difficult, it's not unrealistic. Lots of people do that, but it's the element of wanting to be a star that really fucks people up. I think they go for the wrong things.

Speaker 2 (00:35:18):

Yeah, agreed. For me, one of the things too is I realized the type of music that I really enjoy recording and doing is not going to be financially rewarding enough for me to live in Los Angeles and provide for my family the way I would want to because I just mixed an EP of Nine Minute Stoner Prague music, and I love that shit. I love the Melvins and stuff like that. You can't make a living being like the guy doing that stuff. You just realistically. But I get to do it when I can do it, and that makes me really, really happy. And then, I don't know, I feel like I'm in a good place with what I'm doing with music right now in relation to everything else. And the Chester passing away thing was probably, it's definitely up there in the list of turning points in my life slash career just by way of it completely changing my mindset about life in general and audio in general.

Speaker 1 (00:36:10):

It's a pretty major event.

Speaker 2 (00:36:12):

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a huge upheaval to lose somebody you care about and kind of lose, not your living. But

Speaker 1 (00:36:19):

What's interesting to me is a lot of people would've just stopped and gone back to the real world. I think it's interesting that all you did was figure out how to use your skills and your network to keep going rather than just quit though. What would you do if you just quit?

Speaker 2 (00:36:40):

Yeah, I have no clue. I have a bachelor's degree in recording. I really have never done, I've not done anything else other than I sold t-shirts at Hard Rock Cafe when I first moved to LA as a part-time job. That's the only other thing I've experienced in,

Speaker 1 (00:36:54):

So it had to be this.

Speaker 2 (00:36:55):

Yeah, it basically had to be this.

Speaker 1 (00:36:57):

That makes sense. I just think that everybody's going to go through something fucked at some point in time to varying degrees, but it's just kind of a fact of life that it's going to happen. The question usually to me is, what do you do after? Do you go to therapy and figure out how to pick up the pieces and use what you've already got or not? And I know a lot of people who would pick or not and just develop a drinking habit or go away, quit, quit on their dream or anything like that. I just think it's interesting that you were cool to redefine what it meant to be a professional audio engineer and you're still killing it.

Speaker 2 (00:37:36):

Yeah, no, I feel very fortunate that I landed on my feet. I got to be honest, that first year was rough. I mean, fortunately I'd worked so much leading up to it. But yeah, like I said, that first year I was just like, oh, I'm going to kind of take this six months off and I might mix some stuff, and I had some one-offs, even having a summer off. Lincoln does a bunch of live stuff and Ethan and I helped mix that and put it out. So I literally was like, well, I'm not going to look for something in 2017 because one, I want this time off. Two, I know there's summer work with Lincoln, that'll be fine that I'm going to do at home. And then three, we're going back to the studio. So I'm not going to try to build up some relationships and then just be like, Hey, I'm disappearing again for a year. So that year, I felt that year very much felt like getting caught with your pants down. But it was good. And they're like, alright, man, you got to get up and do something. There wasn't time to wallow because it was just like you already have burned through the six months grace period that you would've had otherwise. Yeah, it was good. It was good kind of forcing myself to get back out there and do different things.

Speaker 1 (00:38:31):

Did you just start calling people? Is that just what it is? One day you're just like, all right, I'm starting. You just start calling people.

Speaker 2 (00:38:37):

It was a little bit that, and I actually was about to start calling people around the time Chester had passed away. At that point, it had been about six months since we had finished the album. I was like, well, maybe I should find a few more things to fill in the gaps. And then I felt awkward trying to call people. It felt awkward trying to call people the first month after he passed away. You didn't want to be like, we had a lot of guest producers come through while doing Lincoln, like LP from Run the Jewels. We had been in touch with him, a whole ton of people, and you just feel weird like, Hey, if you ever need any help, this is totally not related to my friend passing away. But yeah, it was a little bit of both. I started calling and reaching out to people I knew at management companies and stuff. I don't have management, but I know some people that work at management companies. Fortunately for me, I had people that I know that started reaching out too. I've worked in LA now for 20 years. I know a lot of people. So there were people that just, Hey, man, are you okay if you need something, if you need work? So it's a little bit of both, and then it just turned scouring the internet for music editor needed or anything.

Speaker 1 (00:39:37):

So how did it lead back to the current NPR job? You had the temp job and then they just upgraded it to a permanent position.

Speaker 2 (00:39:46):

I had the temp job and then the manager, they changed managers around the same time that I really started working there. So the new manager just really liked me. I had zero connection to the guy. He wasn't the guy that hired me, but he was like, oh, you're good. One of the things that really worked out for me at NPR Wise was, like I said, there were a lot of people that had been working there for a long time, so they started cutting news on tape and all this stuff. So NPR has its own proprietary daw. Even if you know a da, you can't come in and work at NPR and be good at their daw. It's completely custom. It was one of the first das that did offline bounce. Somebody can be recording in an interview and you can on another computer, access that audio file and start mixing it while it's still recording. Crazy.

Speaker 1 (00:40:27):

It's built exactly for what they need it for, it sounds like.

Speaker 2 (00:40:30):

Yeah. Yeah. They need something where if there's a breaking story and around 10 seconds they could do it. So what worked for me was I was coming into an environment where the thing with working on das is even if you don't know a da, as long as you know your way around a dog, you can kind of get around in another one. I don't really know logic, but I've had gigs where I've had to use Logic and I can kind of figure out logic and all this said, everybody learn your dos. I'm as guilty as being like I'm only really good at one do. But I think if you're only going to be good at one, be good at Pro Tools, and you guys can argue about that in the comment threads all you want, but you have any interest in doing Post, you better know Pro Tools and every radio station, remember, station I've dealt with, or other podcast I've dealt with through NPR has been pro Tools, and I'll get to that in a second. But basically I could come in and I know digital audio work and I know digital editing really well. A lot of what I did with Lincoln was digital editing. So it was a really good skillset to come in with and then just know your signal flow and it'll get to you through a whole lot of gigs, and then also just know how to deal with difficult people.

(00:41:33):

So yeah, it turned into, I started picking up these things. I started picking the brains of people that were doing well at the company. One of the guys was like, Hey, you know what I found? If I asked for stuff, they would just give me stuff, volunteer yourself. So I started doing that and they started giving me more work, and then it got made into like, Hey, we're going to give you at least enough hours that you're kind of around every week. Instead of just being like, oh, you're on for two days and then you're gone for two weeks. You've made yourself valuable enough that we are going to at least create this part-time position for you. Because it got to a point where there were newscasters and producers were like, oh, we want to work with Josh. I started getting a gig recording the podcast every week, the in-house one.

(00:42:09):

And because we like Josh, we want to work with him. So yeah, that's kind of how it led up. Then the other thing for me was NPR started to bring in outside podcast producers who were using Pro Tools. Well, had a couple of people that are somewhat pro tools proficient, but if I'm allowed to brag on myself, I'm really pro tools proficient. And it was really good to be like, oh no, we have a guy that can talk you through, troubleshoot you through this on the phone. And that's really worked out in my favor. I just did a big podcast for them, this music podcast about hip hop and incarceration where it was a three month thing and hour plus long episodes, and they were crazy complicated, like 80 tracks, and it was just like, oh, we have Josh. He can do this. I've carved out my area of work there too, I guess.

Speaker 1 (00:42:51):

And that's very similar to getting hired in a music studio too.

Speaker 2 (00:42:55):

Make yourself valuable.

Speaker 1 (00:42:57):

Yeah, that's the same kind of stuff that moves you from intern to engineer. Sounds like what you did here, and just make yourself useful, make yourself valuable, make their lives easier and magic. Suddenly they want you there more

Speaker 2 (00:43:13):

And be confident about it and ask about these things. A friend of mine from NRG Days who I still talk to because his wife's my wife's best friend. I remember back in the day, he was our top runner, and then a session came through mixing, and it was just helping the owner mix like Jay. So yeah, Jay's doing big clients, but it's also Jay. We all know Jay. So that was the session they would really break you in on, and they were like, this guy's name's Dave. And they're like, Dave Jay's going to need somebody. Are you comfortable doing this? And Dave is a very hard worker, but he's also a really honest person. And he was just like, I don't know. I might have some shortcomings. And this seems like a big client. And they're like, all right, well, we're going to ask somebody else.

(00:43:49):

And they asked one of the other runners and he was like, yep, I'll do it. And he didn't know more than Dave. He didn't know less than Dave. He was just like, this isn't to insult Dave, but he was just smart enough to be like, yeah, I'm going to do that. And he did. And he got a six month leg up on Dave as far as assisting. And Dave was like, never again. I'm never again, he learned. He was like, I'm not going to publicly doubt myself on whether I can do this or not. He's like, that was a huge fuck up.

Speaker 1 (00:44:11):

I'm not going to talk myself out of a gig.

Speaker 2 (00:44:12):

Yeah, especially he was totally good enough to do it. Just

Speaker 1 (00:44:15):

Get in there and do it. It's interesting. How do you determine when you can do it and when you're out of your depth? Because earlier we were talking about not taking something on that's out of your depth so you don't make yourself look like shit and then never get hired. How do tell the difference?

Speaker 2 (00:44:30):

Right. Well, for me, I was navigating at NPR in the regards the thing that worked for me because I'm going with nbr R because it was the most obvious example of, Hey, I have not done broadcast and you guys have millions of listeners and I want to make sure I'm not fucking things up.

Speaker 1 (00:44:45):

For

Speaker 2 (00:44:45):

Me, that was a good job because at least it was. Like I said, they have a custom do that. There's no way you've ever used it before. They have a whole lot of stuff that there's no way you've ever used it before, so you can't be expected to know it.

Speaker 1 (00:44:54):

They know there's a learning curve,

Speaker 2 (00:44:56):

But I think the best way to prepare for stuff like that, or even actually I'm going to go back to NRG because I think it'd be a better example, especially since we're on a music podcast. So when I started working at NRG, I'd never used a eve console before. They had two old neves, but I knew signal flow so you can figure it out. And they had an SSL 9,000 J, I'd never used that, but I'd been on a 4,000 G. But what I did was figure out who's good at what and then just ask them. I found so many situations where if you ask somebody that really knows what they're doing, they're going to be happy to show you. The assistant was Jay's mix assistant. This is back when you print mixes to half inch and you'd be splicing in half inch tape and printing mixes through the SSL and then you would do a vocal five or 0.5 db up a one DB up, just go in and start volunteering to do that.

(00:45:41):

Hey, can I help you with that? Can I watch? And then it would work your way up to like, oh, we'll let you splice in. We'll let you splice tape. Now we know that you're not going to mess this up. Or the assistant would be like, man, I really have to go to the bathroom. Can you print this version with the Neves? I had a band at the time. I asked one of the assistants was like, Hey, will you record my band? Not, I was trying to get a free demo out of it, although that helped, but I'm going to help you do this because I want to learn from start to finish kind of how records get made here. The first time working a student has all these vintage neumanns and all these other crazy mics and pull texts and all this other stuff that you're just like, oh, I've always just read about this, but I don't really know how it works.

(00:46:20):

And same thing with the Neve. You learn, oh, where's the insert point? Is this pre or post eq? And the other thing with old Neves is they're all customized. So what you can do in those situations is find someone that knows it and then learn enough that you're kind of comfortable with it. And again, at the time, I mean you guys now are providing a service where people can do a lot of that. I would've loved it if I had access to John Douglas's like This is how you edit drums. But what I had was the guy that engineered for Jay Baumgartner literally explained to me and one of the other runners how to do it. We hand wrote up a sheet of paper while he was talking to us and then we photocopied it and handed it out to the other runners like, Hey, this is how Dan engineers drums or edits drums.

Speaker 1 (00:47:02):

I mean, that's how I learned to edit drums. I got sent to Morris Sound and Jim Morris sat there with me for a day and just showed me how to use Beat Detective and how to edit and I wrote everything down and that's how I learned. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:47:16):

I think I still have notebooks full of notes and this is how you do, I know I have a notebook. This is how we print mixes at NRG and this is the order you go through. And actually one of the first assisting not the owner of the studio gigs I did, it was like a live corn mix. Their engineers just mixing a song and we're on the 9,000 J and there's a weird thing with s SSL 9,000 js. You can kind of get your rough mix going and then you turn on the automation and sometimes it'll just zero. The faders, it doesn't see any automation.

Speaker 1 (00:47:41):

Is it just a quirk?

Speaker 2 (00:47:42):

Yeah. There's a thing on SSL ISS called a snapshot, so you can take a picture of where everything is. So just somebody told me religiously hit that snapshot button. If your project has 900 snapshots, just great, just write down which one's important. Snapshot 37 is the important one. So I do that. We turn on the automation to mix and the entire mix just zeroes out and this is my first real assisting thing. I was like, oh no. Oh, for six hours in. And the engineer turns and looks at me and he goes, he's like, I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to get a cup of coffee. I would really appreciate it if you could fix this. He's like, if you can't fix this, I'm not going to be this cool when I come back in. I was like, all right, I found the snapshot and pulled it back up. But that was one of those cases where it was like, oh, I really hope I know about as much about this as I think I do that I agreed to take it. But yeah, I think now a good way to learn that stuff is, I mean there's just the online resources. You guys, I've done stuff, how do I do this in isotope maybe? And you YouTube that stuff or LinkedIn. I'm not saying all, and this is definitely not me slamming you guys, but all online recording content is not valid.

Speaker 1 (00:48:48):

No, it definitely isn't.

Speaker 2 (00:48:49):

So be picky and choosy about it.

Speaker 1 (00:48:51):

No, it's not all created equal, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 (00:48:53):

Exactly. Learn that stuff via watching other people do it and then you kind of have to do it. You just can't watch a bunch of videos on how to do drum edits. You have to sit down and really do drum editing, find some shitty drummer and record it real basically like kick sna and some overheads and maybe a far room mic just so you get used to dealing with compensating for that reverb delay time and then just chop that. I mean, I used to do demo sessions and I would just edit the hell out of 'em to practice editing.

Speaker 1 (00:49:18):

See, that's where I think URM students go wrong the most is not taking that step of making it real world for them. The ones who do tend to be the ones who do real well with what we provide and then going on to have some sort of career, but the vast majority of the ones who actually say they're serious, most aren't serious. But out of the ones who do say they're serious, only a small amount go on to actually do anything. And I think that one of the biggest mistakes they're making is not applying that stuff to the real world. So trying to take in all the info rather than less info, but actually learning how to do the thing that they're learning about and then a little more info and learning how to actually do that thing and then a little more instead of that, they'll just binge a bunch of videos, think they know mixing or engineering and then really don't and never really get that much better or take a really long time to get a lot better. I think the actually doing it in real life part is crucial. You have to do that

Speaker 2 (00:50:24):

Very much so. I mean, I think we talked ad nauseum about, I've had some bad assistance, but I remember one time for whatever reason, Lincoln decided to let, let's the assistant try this. I think we were kind of trying to convince him, Hey, we're going to ask for a new assistant. We know you're comfortable with this guy, but he's not good. Well, let's put him in the hot seat and see how he does on relatively low stress. It wasn't like let's capture main vocal. It was like, let's get this keyboard over dub or something like this. And he just choked in the hot seat, which part of me was sympathetic about because being put in the hot seat is a little unnerving, but he was like, oh, I'm pro tool certified. It doesn't make you good at it. And he was just choking. He was underprepared and it was like, oh, you've kind of know what you're supposed to be doing, but you've not done this in a position where you have to make it work now.

(00:51:15):

And that's important. You need to know how to make it work now. I mean, the other thing that I guess kind of worked for me as far as situations on getting to as the assistant do more important things on sessions at the time, oh, at least you work at NRG. You obviously are at least good enough that they let you assist here, so that helps. And there's not really that equalizer anymore. You can be really good at mixing or editing or whatever you do out of your home. But I mean, I guess it's what I was saying when I was trying to work for all these other companies like, oh, I want to do this Netflix thing and have that on my resumes. You do kind of need to have some proof that you're reliable in a given situation and NRG would at least give you that leg up like, oh, he's made it through. The bullshit here is bullshitting as far as you've made it through cleaning toilets and fetching food orders. A lot of it's on you to know when you're good enough or not. And if I may critique some of the stuff I've seen on the message boards where it's a lot of like, oh, well I got this recording and it's this, and people are like, well, you tell them they have to rerecord it.

Speaker 1 (00:52:15):

I got this recording and it sucks. Situation.

Speaker 2 (00:52:18):

You know what? You should also by all means tell them to rerecord it If you are in a position where you can do that, but maybe afterwards sit down and try to make that recording sound good because I got news for you no matter what. You may make it to some amazing high echelon, but that doesn't mean you're ever going to be in the power position to make people rerecord things. I've had to build words for pop stars before on their doubles because we only had an hour and a half to do these vocals, got to get the leads and then she's got to go to her perfume launch or whatever, and you can make the argument like, oh, you singer, this should be important to you. But it's also like she's not this pop artist. She's actually a business. And you know what? Licensing her perfume line is as important as working on the new album legitimately. So just get in there and make this work and you're like, okay, that shit happens. It's

Speaker 1 (00:53:10):

An interesting thing because on the one hand, as a producer, you want to tell people to do something again if it's not good enough and maintain high standards. And there's definitely been times where pre melaine fixing guitars, you get sent some guitars on a mix that are so out of tune that there's nothing you can do about that now. You could maybe tune it a little with some artifacts and there's evert tune. There's no excuse for shit to be out of tune now, but there was literally nothing you could do. So it's either I'm going to mix this without a tune guitars and do my best, or I'm going to see if they're willing to retract the guitars and give me some Intune guitars. But either way it's getting done. May as well ask. But I think that a lot of people don't even try to see if something's salvageable. They like to make people do things again for some sort of a flex, some sort of a weird power play. It strokes their ego. I'm finally in a position like a real producer or a real mixer where I can tell these guys to do something. Again, in reality, you really don't want to be in that position. And then the other problem with that is if they did it wrong one time to say they're going to do it right the second time if you make them do it again.

Speaker 2 (00:54:29):

Oh, absolutely. I've made people redo things. I was mixing. I was like, oh, this is just going to be a consistent thing with you. We're just going to move forward. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:54:37):

This is what you're dealing with.

Speaker 2 (00:54:39):

But it also, I mean it behooves you to learn how to mix with stuff like that. This was something that was good about coming up in a big studio and working with a lot of different really talented engineers is you learn there's a whole lot of different approaches to get the end product. If you're doing metal, it doesn't have to be a ding wall for a good base. You don't have to use a 51 50 to get good heavy guitars. There's a lot of weird things you can do, but also, and again, I'm just focusing on this metal stuff. I know it's kind of a metal podcast. Metal production at this point is kind of pop production in a lot of regards.

Speaker 1 (00:55:10):

Yes,

Speaker 2 (00:55:11):

With the degree of perfection, the degree of virtual instruments, it's

Speaker 1 (00:55:14):

Like electronic music almost.

Speaker 2 (00:55:17):

And it's something that I've been kind of having to learn. I've been mixing this project where like, oh man, I'm going to have to replace all these drums, all these guitars are bad. I'm going to have to use the DI's through the neural DSP stuff. So for me, I'm learning how to do that. I got spoiled coming up in these nice studios with session musicians and shit where you're, you're just like, oh, I recorded Phil X, Chris Cheney and Kenny Arnov playing. Do you know how easy that is? As long as the mics are in phase and pointed at the sound source, it sounds pretty good.

Speaker 1 (00:55:45):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:55:46):

So I've been learning how to use virtual instruments personally, but if you're doing a lot of that, and I mean a lot of you are going to be doing that, a lot of, I don't say this to be dismissive like bedroom production, you're forced to do that, but learning to record real acoustic instruments is a whole nother thing and there's a whole lot of ways to do it, and it really is to your best interest to learn a whole lot of different ways to do it. Don't be in that mindset of I only put a 4 21 on a base amp this exact way. There's a lot of different ways to do it. So I guess this is really just getting left field on that whole, be prepared to know how to do things when presented with it. But this is, I guess just be open-minded to learning a whole lot of different ways to do things as well. Don't think that you've learned drum editing just because you have one good way of drum editing. Be perpetually on the lookout for more tips.

Speaker 1 (00:56:35):

Well, this kind of speaks to preset culture, preset and template culture. So there's a time and a place for both of those things. There's a time and a place for templates, like for instance, having your routing set your buses, that makes a lot of sense, saves time, especially if you're working on something that's very, very similar to something that you work on all the time. Presets, there's a time and place for when a certain preset on an effect or whatever just makes sense what it does, and that's what you want and you can recall it and that's great, but the problem with people who just rely on those and don't actually learn how to do it from scratch, get fucked. The moment that they get something to work on that doesn't work with that preset or that template, anything that's slightly off the beaten path is going to send them into a tailspin. They won't know what to do. And by slightly off the beaten path, I mean just a little bit different.

Speaker 2 (00:57:38):

Yeah, I mean, mixing isn't my primary. It's becoming more my primary source of work, but it wasn't my thing for a while. And have a starting template for sure. Don't act like you have to do it fresh from scratch, but if your template isn't working, don't be mad that the tracks aren't fitting your template. Just start adjusting what you're doing. I mean, it's audio engineering for God's sake. Use your ears and start making something work.

Speaker 1 (00:58:02):

Well, problem is I think that people really want things to be yes or no on or off and have a real hard time with nuance and gray areas. And audio is a giant gray area when figuring out what's going to work because like you said, there's a million different ways to do something and I bet a bunch of them will sound good, but the question is, does it sound right? And actually figuring that out can be really, really confusing for people. They don't trust themselves or their ears aren't that developed, and so their comfort zone becomes this template. It worked that time. Why can't it just work again, this preset, it's worked 10 times, it should work an 11th time. And I've actually seen some really good mixers and producers go down that path and then get stale. So it's not just students.

Speaker 2 (00:58:56):

And I guess the other weird thing about audio is it is to a degree, it's a subjective field too. What you think sounds good or might not be somebody else's cup of tea. Everybody has their different favorite mixers. I know me personally, I love people like Andy Wallace or Alan Molder or Jay Rustin where it's these, I really like those really, really natural sounding mixes. That's the personal aesthetic. I don't necessarily, I just want to clarify as I'm saying this. This is not me saying it's bad, but maybe the way Joey or Nolie mix up, that's not where I would personally go. That's not my natural inclination, but I think they're really good at what they do, and I think those are good mixes as well. And I'm only bringing all of this up as just saying that's not bad and it's not me talking shit.

(00:59:48):

I think they're really good at what they do. I just naturally maybe gravitate toward this different style, and that's a completely valid point to have in audio. It's no different than having opinion of like, oh, well I like country music. Oh, well, I like metal core or you know what I mean? I think that's what makes it complicated is because it is so subjective and I think part of, I know for me with mixing, part of me was trying to figure out what my mixing style was going to be. I really liked that any Wallace was just mean. I'm sure part of it's age too, but Andy Wallace was just like, and still is to me. He's a mixing. That's how I think mixes should sound. Nevermind drop. When I was 12 and I lived in a town of 1200 people in Tennessee, it was one of the first really heavy, hard rock things I heard besides Guns N Roses.

Speaker 1 (01:00:33):

Yeah, he's a God

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):

Like that Implants or Metallica's Black album. This is a good example. I listened to that the other day for the first time in a long time. I tried to play records for my kid and I was like, oh, we've never listened to the Black album. And just listening to it, I was like, holy shit. Realizing how much that had implanted in my brain is to, this is what things are supposed to sound like in a recording. And I think that's part of my inclination toward that more natural sound. And I think, so for me, the hard thing with mixing is, and basically this happens I think for everybody, is kind of figuring out how you take all the influences and what you like about different people and how you make that thing too When Kill Switching gauges, end of heartache came out, was it end of Heartache or is that the one with Alive or just breathing?

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):

I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:21):

The first Big Kill Switch record, the one before Howard Jones. I remember when that came out just because early mid two thousands that turned into, and I'm sure it's the same thing when the Black album came out that turned into the record that everybody was chasing

Speaker 1 (01:01:34):

Versus

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):

Everybody, and you can hear it in records from those times. You can hear everybody trying to figure out how to incorporate what they were. You could hear everyone going like, this is amazing how I'm going to incorporate this into my mixing style. And it was like the next five to 10 years were spent heavy metal mixing kind of moved in that direction and everyone had to figure out how to incorporate that and what they were doing. So I think that's an important thing in figuring out your templates and all your mixing stuff is figure out who your inspirations are, but figure out why that's your inspiration and then figure out how to fit that into what you realistically are doing as well.

Speaker 1 (01:02:07):

Hey everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast, then you should know that it's brought to you by URM Academy, URM Academy's mission is to create the next generation of audio professionals by giving them the inspiration and information to hone their craft and build a career doing what they love. You've probably heard me talk about Nail the Mix before, and if you're a member, you already know how amazing it is. The beginning of the month, nail the mix members, get the raw multitracks 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.

(01:02:58):

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

(01:03:52):

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 URM Academy to find out more, being that it's so subjective, do you think that in part mixers and producers get hired for their tastes and whatever that natural inclination that they have is just lucky or unlucky, just lucky that Nali and Joey are inclined in that way that they are?

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):

I think it's a little bit of both. I think mixers should get hired for their taste, and then I think artists should let them or just remember that that's why they've hired people for God's sake. Stop telling them about the sound on your demo. You've hired a professional and I've heard people like Jay complain about this, so it makes me feel a little better. I think somebody like Josh Wilbur would be a great example of this. Josh Wilbur works really, really hard. I've worked with Josh just a couple times. He's awesome. But I also think Josh has an amazing natural gift for what he's doing. Obviously that story he told where Andy Wallace is walking by like, oh man, you did this. This sounds really good. I mean, holy shit. So I think it's a combination. There's a lot of hard work, but there are people that have a natural inclination towards it. So I think you're doing both. You're hiring people for their expertise and for their taste.

Speaker 1 (01:05:22):

Yeah. And do you think that you can develop the taste part?

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):

I think so, yeah, but I think you need to be a conscious student of both. Alright, let's like playing instruments. I, I know you don't play guitar a whole lot anymore. I don't play bass a whole lot anymore. I think that I did and maybe you feel this way about playing your instrument. I think I did have a natural inclination for playing an instrument, but I met people that were way more naturally inclined.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):

Yes, that too.

Speaker 2 (01:05:48):

There's a bit of both and if you can hit a sweet spot, but as far as developing taste, I think the best thing you can do to develop taste is to try to listen to a wide assortment of music and recordings in general. One of my brothers, my youngest brother-in-law loves metal Core loves Death Core and he thinks it's hilarious that I love MSU because he thinks MSU is boring. And to me, I'm just like, I don't think you understand music. He's not like a musician. I'm like, I don't think you understand music enough to understand why you should appreciate Mge to the degree that you should. That last record where was like, oh, this is just all them actually playing are you listen to clockwork or something and the footwork, I don't have to explain sugar to you. I think with anything music related or creative related,

Speaker 1 (01:06:36):

Yeah, it's aliens music,

Speaker 2 (01:06:38):

You have to, this was definitely the case with me playing instruments. Even going back to learning clarinet in middle school, it's almost like you have to get good enough to a degree to understand how not good you are and what you need to learn. As an audio engineer, you get better and then your ear gets refined and you have this phase where you're just like, well, am I any good? Because now I'm listening to all these other things and picking up all this nuance that they're doing. And it's just because your ear is getting better, sore starting to become, it's becoming more discernible and you starting to develop taste. You're starting to hear things that you didn't hear before because you actually are getting better. And then by hearing more and more of the shortcomings, that makes you better as well because you're just able to get in on a more of a micro level.

Speaker 1 (01:07:24):

That only happens through doing natural inclination plus a ton of action. I actually think that people who maybe have a little less of a natural inclination towards something but take a ton of action can in lots of cases outpace people who have more natural inclination but take less action. However, you'll never beat someone that has both the highest natural inclination and the highest action taking. I consider Josh Wilbur to be one of those people like high action, high natural inclination. They're kind of an unstoppable force.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):

Yeah, absolutely. Josh is like that. Jay Rustin's like that. I mean even going back to people like Joe Ciarelli or Gig Garth, if you look back earlier in their career, they were just cranking records out and working. But yeah, I've known Jay and I have been friends for a long time. Jay has an amazing natural ear, but he also just, he worked his ass off. So it's a bit of both.

Speaker 1 (01:08:19):

Yeah, the hard work part almost always pays off unless you just have no talent and no social skills whatsoever, it almost always pays off. The natural talent part doesn't almost always pay off. Oftentimes it comes with laziness or weird entitlement issues and stuff that just gets in the way of doing work straight up just gets in the way of doing work. Though I will say I have met a few people, this is more with musicians than engineers. A few people who don't need to work that hard who are still better than everybody, but that's super rare. Have you ever met those types?

Speaker 2 (01:08:55):

Yeah, I would say that definitely happens more with musicians.

Speaker 1 (01:08:58):

Yeah, it's with musicians, it's not with producers or mixers, but I'm sure you've met that type

Speaker 2 (01:09:04):

And they're so frustrating from musician angle and I also know people that are amazing engineers and you're just like, oh, you have absolute shit people skills. No wonder your career never went anywhere.

Speaker 1 (01:09:13):

Yeah. Where do you think it's more acceptable to have people skills on the musician side or the engineer side?

Speaker 2 (01:09:20):

Musician side? The stars actually being in a band or being a hired musician because

Speaker 1 (01:09:23):

Either or.

Speaker 2 (01:09:24):

I think on the engineering side, personality actually might be a touch more important, but I would almost say that even varies from producing to mixing. I think as a client, even if you get something that you like but you have a bad taste about working with them, you'd be prone to going to work with somebody else. You'd be like, well, this is great, but working with that guy or gal sucked. It

Speaker 1 (01:09:46):

Was painful.

Speaker 2 (01:09:46):

There are other good people. We could probably find someone, right? Versus you find someone that you like working with and they do good work. Maybe they're not the next Josh Wilber, whatever, but they do really good work and you enjoy being around them and the creative process feels good. I think that's a lot of it, I think mean that's a ton of it. When musicians get attached to what, when musicians listen to something they worked on, I think you can't completely detach the experience of making it from them listening to it. That's intrinsically going to be tied into it. So from that angle,

Speaker 1 (01:10:19):

I know bands who made their most successful record with a producer and had a bad time and never went back, even though it was objectively their most successful record, it was a high point for them, but that's not enough. I've heard of this several times and I know lots of bands like this where they just won't go back regardless of how well it does or how good it sounds, which was real eyeopening for me when I realized that that was often the case. Actually, it's not that rare that bands won't go back if they have a bad time, regardless of what it sounds like. That's when I started to realize that actually this personality thing matters more than people may even realize. Yeah, it matters for getting gigs of course, because people need to be able to hang out with you, but it also matters past the gig if people are even going to come back. And in some ways that matters more than the audio because people come back if the audio is not as good, but you're awesome. They'll come back more often than if the audio's great, but you're a fucking dickhead.

Speaker 2 (01:11:27):

Yeah, I, and I guess that kind of goes back to making people redo things. Be careful the way you're wording that stuff. I actually started picking up on the personality thing in college because in recording school everybody had to do projects. You would have to find local bands to play on things. And then one of the things with college musicians is trying to find proficient musicians or people with nice equipment. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (01:11:47):

Good luck with that one. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:11:48):

I was a music minor at the time, so I was playing bass a lot. I could read music and I had some nice gear, so I started getting sessions on other people's projects because you get known around the recording department like, oh, that dude that's in your engineering class, he actually is a pretty good bass player too and has gear. You'd start getting that kind of work. And so really early on I was experiencing what it was like to be a musician on these sessions working with people, and there were people that were, and it made me really conscious of when I was working with bands. I want this to be fun for them. I want them to working with me. I want them to be communicative at the time. It was kind of at the time, and then just the equipment that was available in the studio, if you're playing bass, you're actually out there with the amps.

(01:12:27):

You'd be playing on something and then get done, and then you're just sitting there for three or four minutes and you can see everyone in the control room talking and no one's talking to you guys. Basic stuff like that, don't do that to people. From the guards of, it just taught me a lot about studio etiquette and then working with people. It's really important. And they're audio engineers are not always, I mean, it's kind of a different thing now because engineering, producing, mixing is all bleeding through more. But yeah, you got to have some people skills. It is really important. I was just saying from the NPR r stores that people are like, oh, we like working with him. Is he available? Oh, the temp, you want the temp? Sure. All of my coworkers, and this is not saying my coworkers are bad people, they'd also all been there forever. So I think there was a degree of comfort where I had a degree of enthusiasm, but it was, yeah, or even the linking gig was important to be a good hang. You're going to spend a year and a half with somebody in one room, you better be a good hang.

Speaker 1 (01:13:18):

Yeah, it doesn't work otherwise, man. I think that also because audio skills are not as rare as they used to be, so there was a time period where just having a studio was unbelievable in and of itself. The further back you go, the more amazing it is to just even have a studio or a place to record and being good at it already made you like a unicorn basically. So you could be a dick because where else would they go? And they probably spent so much money and were already so invested in it that it is what it is. They're not going to leave and there's very few options to go to besides you, but that's not the case anymore. People can do it themselves or they can go to any of the other 27 dudes and girls, and so it pays to be cool to hang out with.

Speaker 2 (01:14:13):

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, even without naming names, when we were doing that last Lincoln record, they were like, Hey, let's try to make this a pop record. So they were bringing in vocal coaches and vocal producers, and those guys and gals would come in and do this stuff and you could tell like, oh, this person is really, they're kind of getting this job. I mean, a lot of 'em were really good at getting performances like, oh, this person's really kind of getting this job. They're a good vibe. Because ultimately all the tracks would go through me and Ethan for cleanup and manipulation before going onto the mixer. And you could sit down and be like, oh man, there's some ugly edits in here. I mean, I retune some vocals for some very expensive professional pop people. And I guess I should add the caveat that Chester did have a hard voice to tune. Tuning rock vocals is a completely different thing from tuning pop vocals of that rasp. You have to know how to deal with it. It was just like, oh, these people are good in top tier for what they're doing, not necessarily from a technological standpoint, but from a people skills and the way the singer is feeling about the performance they're getting. That's why these people are being called in. So it's almost like that. I know Finn posted a bunch that meme of the guy standing in the corner at the party. These people don't even know

(01:15:27):

You could be that person. These people aren't even that good at autotune. It's like you could look at it from that angle or you could look at it from the angle of look at it like, okay, why is this person getting hired? Oh, they made the singer feel the vibe and feel special and have a really good experience, and that's why they love the performance. For example, that Lincoln Park song, one More Light, I don't dunno if you know that one, but it's kind of one that got latched onto, it was a song about someone passing away and them being missed. So in Chester's passing, it kind of became really synonymous with his death. And it's a really beautiful song, a fun fact about that song. I can't remember if it's too BPM faster than we recorded it at or if we pitched up half a step or if it's both.

(01:16:06):

But we basically took this entire lead off single for the record and adjusted the timing. And I can't remember if we adjusted the tempo or the pitch or both, but we had to do the whole thing. And now that I'm telling people this, if you listen, you can kind of hear it, but they were like, we are not going to re-record this performance because we love this performance so much. So from a technical standpoint, us engineers and the vocal producer were all like, ah, you can kind of hear the tambour in his voice is not his normal, it's not chipmunk. We definitely took our time and we're very careful and listened to everything while we stretched it, but the song still works and the reason it still works is because of the performance they got and the reason they got that performance was Chester was so comfortable with that vocal coach and she was bringing that out in him. So it was definitely one of those things, just the feeling he got from doing the performance with that person and just their vibe was what was really important. And it ultimately comes through over this, I guess you could call a technological shortcoming with the song.

Speaker 1 (01:17:03):

However, I wouldn't want to discount your role in it though, because part of what allowed him to be comfortable with that person, whether consciously or subconsciously, is having you and Ethan also as the safety net. They didn't have to hold some of those people to a super high technical standard because they already had you on the team. So they could bring in people that were just about the vibe, but if you guys weren't on the team and their vocal producer was not technically good, that might be a whole different situation.

Speaker 2 (01:17:35):

That's a valid point. And I guess it does speak to them as well that we were doing a project and they brought a couple albums ago and they brought Rick Rubin in to produces as we were working on it, and it's Rick, he could have very well been like, well, I want Andrew Sheps or whoever, and it was like, Hey, this is how we make things is we're comfortable with these people, so have a good vibe kids.

Speaker 1 (01:17:55):

That's exactly my point.

Speaker 2 (01:17:56):

I guess I honestly just never thought about it until you brought that up and now it seems painfully obvious.

Speaker 1 (01:18:00):

Well, that is kind why big bands have a producer and an engineer or two engineers is to make it a team and use everybody for what they're best at or what they're right for in that situation. But I just think smaller budgets obviously don't allow for that sort of thing. That's one of the beautiful things about big budgets is you can let people just focus on this is your job, just do that. Great. And this person, that's their job. They're going to do that great, and it's going to be beautiful. However, I do think that producers coming up shouldn't listen to this and say, I'm going to fuck around. I don't need to learn how to edit because this person that did this huge record doesn't know how you should still try to get as good as possible.

Speaker 2 (01:18:48):

Yeah. Again, outliers and I mean the lady, why am I blanking on Emily's last name right now? Willis, the lady that did the vocal coaching for one more light, she worked with Max Martin in telling that story. She was definitely not one of the ones that was a shortcoming. We had to retune. That was more one of those ones that was like, they trusted her performance and we had to, and then they were like, well, we trust you guys to take this up to BPM and not lose the vibe of everything. But also that person, she was doing Max Martin, so that lady knew her shit. But yeah, so I don't want everyone to think that all vocal coaches and vocal producers don't know what they're doing either. I worked with engineers when I was an assistant where, because NRG was a very early adopter of Pro Tools and then Pro Tools editing, because a lot of the stuff that came out of there you can kind of tell in hindsight.

(01:19:37):

So we would have engineers through all the time that maybe weren't that great, especially early on, that maybe weren't that great at Pro Tools editing, and you as an assistant would jump in and help just because they would go like, oh, you guys do a lot of that editing here? And you're like, yeah, do you mind helping? And they were phenomenal engineers. I guess that's the other thing. Just because you're a good editor doesn't mean you're a great engineer, just because Pro Tools, quick Keys doesn't mean you're a great engineer, honestly, just because you know how to make one type of music doesn't necessarily make you the greatest engineer either. There are guys out there like Joe Chiarelli who can just kill it across all kinds of genres. I mean, get good at things, but also kind of try to be, I guess a little jack of all trades guys as you're learning this stuff. Being a metal producer may not be the thing forever. I don't know. I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Try to be well-rounded.

Speaker 1 (01:20:24):

If you become a really awesome metal producer, top tier, you generally know how to do lots of different things too. That's the thing. These dudes that we talk about being the top tier, like Josh Wilbur, look how varied his career is. He's not just good at metal.

Speaker 2 (01:20:39):

I mean, dude worked with bus Rhymes, so yeah, Jay worked with some big pop guys and now he's one of the other big hard rock metal dudes, all those guys.

Speaker 1 (01:20:49):

That's kind of my point is every once in a while I'll meet someone that's all metal, only metal, nothing, and then they get really awesome, and it's just this very, very focused skillset. They're total outliers, man. And so one thing I think URM does that kind of poisons people's minds a little is makes people think that outliers are not outliers and are more the norm. And that's why I try to make a point of talking about it. Yeah, these are the people I have on the podcast. These are the people I have on Nail the mix and they're in the community, so it seems like there's more of 'em than there actually are in the wider population of engineers, but we're not featuring the wider population of engineers on Nail the mix or in the podcast, it's easy to think that that's normal, that their stories are normal, but those are the stories that we're featuring for a reason because noteworthy, but that's not even close to the norm. The norm is that people work really, really hard, become very well-rounded or super easy to hang out with, know how to do lots of different things, and then something works out that they can apply their skills to, and they go for it. Very, very few people just master some oddball style in the middle of nowhere and then take over. That's just doesn't happen very much

Speaker 2 (01:22:19):

For me. One of my big producer engineer idols is Brennan, and that guy done guy's done a ton of stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:22:26):

Yes, he has Chili

Speaker 2 (01:22:27):

Peppers. He did the Black Crows, then you listen to his Gaslight anthem or he's done AC dc, he's done Bruce Springsteen, but he's also done Mastodon. That guy's done a lot of stuff. I mean, shit, even Bob Rock did a Michael Bule album, you know what I mean?

(01:22:40):

Yeah. Those guys are great because there's a larger tap thing. They're not, I mean, Bob Rock could have spent the rest of his life just making records that sounded like Dr. Feel Good in the Black album. And I guess granted you agree, he did spend a lot of time making Metallica records, but Brandon O'Brien, perfect example. That dude worked on a ton of stuff for shit. Look at Andy Wallace's career. Andy Wallace did Nirvana, but he also did Jeff Buckley and then he did Slayer, but he's also, he also mixed run DMC's raising Hell, Andy Wallace is, well, we can talk about outliers, Andy Wallace, but Andy Wallace is a great example of that. Dude just has taste and engineering skill and can make it work for a whole lot of different types of music.

Speaker 1 (01:23:19):

Yeah. Question I have for you is we've spent all this time telling people to be well-rounded. Where do you factor in genres and styles that someone legitimately just doesn't like? Should they learn them anyways?

Speaker 2 (01:23:36):

I think it can't hurt, and that's a good question. That kind of came up in my whole rethinking what I wanted out of engineering. Before I worked at NRG, I worked at a studio called the Enterprise, and it's not really there anymore, but Enterprise was where Dave Ada was mixing, and this would've been early two thousands, like Ashanti and Nelly were in a lot Ja Rule. I was a lot of hip hop stuff like that. And I ended up kind basically, yeah, I don't think this is the fit for me. And I didn't have anything against mainstream hip hop. I was just like, I don't think I'd be happy doing this. And so it worked out for me. I went to NRG, but in kind of assessing what I wanted to do after Chester passed away, and this was part of also moving to broadcast too, and when I was discussing like, oh, now I can make the music, I really want to make it, it's not even always necessarily genre dependent for me.

(01:24:19):

It's more like the experience and the way they go about doing it. I've done pop stuff, I've done Avril and a lot of that, and I mean, part of me reassessing things was the guys I was doing those records with moved to Nashville and I wasn't quite ready to move back to Nashville yet. I picked up a last minute session at one point doing a song for Jesse J recording some demo stuff for her, and it went okay, but I realized, and I talked to some other people like, oh, I have a friend at Warner Brothers, and she was like, oh, I could get you in a lot of these pop sessions. And for me it was like, I don't know if I want pop and hip hop. And for me, it was like, I don't know that I want to do that one. It's not the most relatable style for me is a producer engineer.

(01:24:53):

I don't mind doing it. A lot of that for me was the hours involved was why I didn't want to do it. I'm pretty open to most genres of music. That was part of why I quit playing in bands and stuck with engineering as well around the time I was in that band in this moment. And they were like, oh, we're going to go on tour, and we had management and you could tell I was going to get signed. And I was like, yeah, you know what? I think I doing different types of music and I wanted to keep doing engineering, so I'm pretty open to that.

Speaker 1 (01:25:17):

That's just your personality.

Speaker 2 (01:25:18):

Yeah. Well, when I was younger, I was like, oh, I would never do country now. I would fucking love to work with David Cobb and make Chris Stapleton records all day. And that's one of those things I did get to do. I made Danny Ops second country record. I worked on that. For me, it's not even just entirely a genre thing. It's also, I guess knowing what working in those different genres entails. I don't necessarily doing super extreme metal all the time because I don't really necessarily the experience of doing super heavy fast guitars and that super intense, make sure everything's lined up and let's edit everything. I'm more of a like, fuck it, let's do it live. I like the experience of let's record a bunch of session musicians, or let's record something that way. So I think it is worth, if you don't relate to a genre, I think it's worth not trying to pursue it, if that makes sense.

(01:26:04):

I don't think I would ever try to do, say trap or mumble wrap because I don't really know anything about it and I don't relate to it. So while from a technical standpoint, I think I'd be fine with it. I don't think I would be the best fit. Creatively, I guess is more how I kind of view working on genres you do or you don't like. I'd be willing to work on genres and music that I don't necessarily listen to a lot of pop country. I would be fine working on a pop country session knowing how that music gets made, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (01:26:37):

So it's got to be almost within some sort of a reach of what you're cool with to some degree. I guess there's just some things that are so far outside of that that you just don't feel like you could do as good of a job. But I think part of that is because you have worked on so much stuff, you actually know what it's like to work in different genres, what it's like to work in genres that you're not comfortable in what it's like to work in genres, that you are comfortable in the nuance of different types of genres, and you have the experience to say, maybe I'm not the person for that. But I don't think that at the beginning of your career enough about yourself to know that yet. You might be surprised.

Speaker 2 (01:27:21):

Yeah, I mean, there were other reasons. I quit that hip hop studio at the time, and it turned out I ended up liking working on hip hop when I did, but I was working with people like nas, which was way more of interesting, way more of a working style for me. So I think overall a lot of it was just it'd be working in a kitchen, I guess. I don't particularly like Italian food very much. I don't dislike Italian food, but I'm lactose intolerance. I don't eat a lot of Italian food, a lot of dairy in it, but if I were a cook, I might enjoy making Italian food. You know what I mean? So that's kind of how I look at it, the music stuff. For me, a lot of it's just the process of how it's being made and what we're going to be doing is of more interest. To me.

Speaker 1 (01:28:04):

That makes sense.

Speaker 2 (01:28:05):

I mean, I fortunately worked at a big studio where you just assisted whoever came in, so you get kind of an exposure to a bunch of different kinds of music.

Speaker 1 (01:28:12):

The reason I bring this stuff up is just because on nail the mix, we have so many students who only want to do certain sessions because they like it and they won't do other ones because they don't like it. And I think that that's super, super limiting. And then you have people who do all of 'em, and they tend to get better. But I think when you're learning, you shouldn't turn down any opportunity to get better.

Speaker 2 (01:28:38):

I a hundred percent agree on that.

Speaker 1 (01:28:39):

Yeah. Your reason for not doing pop or hip hop at this point in time comes from having known what it's like to do those and deciding maybe you're not at that point in your life.

Speaker 2 (01:28:52):

Yeah, I mean, I'm also an early forties guy with a kid doing that last intranet record where we were hitting crunch time and I was working those crazy hours again. I was like, oh, I am too old for this. Oh, I need more than five hours of sleep a night for two weeks. So yeah, that's some of the figure in for me. But early on it was just like, yeah, I mean, I realized I've also, this is all following a statement of me being like, I was a hip hop studio, realized, didn't like it, but there were a lot of other factors including management and what forth. But yeah, early on, you want me to work on what? Yeah. Great. Put me in. I'll do it. We got jazz session. Great string session. Sure.

Speaker 1 (01:29:29):

You still seem to have that attitude to a degree, but it's very much focused. So at the beginning you were talking about how you wanted to learn things outside of the norm for you so that you could spread your chances out for getting good employment with something cool, started doing the Foley work, started doing the mixing those songs for Netflix, all that different kind of stuff. Sounds like you were still in that mode of taking opportunities, but rather than just being anything that came your way, it seems to me like it was very much focused in a certain direction. So still the idea of being open to what the universe gives you, but a specific portion of it, a focus portion, I don't think you would've said yes to just any death metal band that came your way.

Speaker 2 (01:30:18):

Right? Right. And some of that, I do get to operate from a point of privilege of having a little bit of a career on it. You can start being a little pickier. I mean, I hope he's not a listener, but I got sent something recently where the guy was like, oh, I'm interested in getting you to maybe mix this, and then co-producing it and listening to it. I was like, eh, I don't think this is what I want to co-produce. And just being honest with a guy like, Hey, I don't think I'm a fit for this. 15 years ago, I'd be like, yeah, I'll do this. Because back then, yeah, learn how to do everything. Learn how to work through all these problems that you're going to get presented with. It's going to make life easier for you in the future. You just record so many situations that you just learn to work your way through all that stuff.

(01:30:56):

You can read about problems, but some days when you're just like, alright, this is the cheap studio that you're working in and the drummer only has this, and the guitarist only has this, and the bass player only has this, and what am I going to do? Am I going to be like, well, this is not up to my standards. I quit, I'm out. Or am I going to go like, alright, I'm going to figure out the best way to make this. Okay, the bass player, fuck, he's got dead strings and there's nothing I can do about it. Well, how can I mic him? How can I structure the recording of this, where I can make that base work with everything else? If that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (01:31:30):

Yeah. So it's almost like a fundamental paradigm shift with how you approach the shitty sessions. If you look at them as practice for what might come down the road, rather than this really bad experience where nobody's prepared and you're having to slog through a bunch of bullshit with shitty musicians or a shitty studio, or shitty this or shitty that. Instead of looking at it like that, looking at it from the perspective, how can I make this as good as possible given the situation when there's not much pressure, there's not the same kind of pressure as being under the gun at NPR with a breaking news story or a Lincoln Park budget or having an hour and a half to do a pop focal. It's not even close to the same kind of pressure. But having figured out how to work your way through all those problems over the years leads you to a place where when those types of problems present themselves in a high pressure situation, you'll just know what to do or you'll be able to figure it out.

Speaker 2 (01:32:38):

Yeah, because the thing is, if you have come into this with this mindset of like, oh, I'm going to hit a level with engineering producing where I don't have to deal with bad musicians, or I don't have to deal with bullshit, I'm going to warn you guys, that shit never, never goes away. It never goes away. It just gets more expensive. Like, oh yeah, I'm working on this and yeah, this person's not very good. Whatever. Not a ton of people are going to hear this anyway. I don't have to worry about it too. Like, oh no, this is coming out and people are going to hear this and you're going to have to make it work. I've been there with drummers on a real studio, on a real session, on a real label, and they're like, yep, there's not a budget to hire a studio musician, or We're not doing that, and you're just like, alright.

(01:33:20):

The thing with takes is you always try to get a better take. You hit a point where you're not getting a better take. This guy's inconsistent enough that it's not happening and you have to go, alright, we're going to spend five hours on this. I hope I have what I need and we're going to move to the next one because we have a budget, we have a timeline, and you go into it with that knowledge. I think I can fix this because I have dealt with drummers that have no sense of time. They are ahead and behind within the same beat. I'm not pointing anyone in particular, but that shit never goes away. You'll forever deal with bass players that have open strings somewhere or drummers who hit inconsistently or have some weird setup that makes miking it a pain in the ass or all that stuff. It just never goes away. So look at, if you're dealing with a shitty situation now and it's frustrating, you try to find the positive like, okay, I'm learning how to deal with this

Speaker 1 (01:34:09):

Because as you go on, those situations continue. The only thing that changes is the pressure. Suddenly you're dealing with bad musicians in a shitty band, but there's pressure. That's not to say everybody's shitty. That's one of the things I noticed was I used to think that all the disorganization and unprofessionalism was just a local level thing, and then I passed the local level and the unprofessionalism and disorganization was even worse because there were more moving pieces and those same people who were disorganized at the local level were the people who eventually at a national level and they didn't learn how to get organized between being local and national. So they just brought their disorganization and chaos with them.

Speaker 2 (01:34:54):

They probably have management that stepped in to take care of that disorganization.

Speaker 1 (01:34:58):

Basically.

Speaker 2 (01:34:59):

One of the things that's a valid point to learn is just because a great songwriter doesn't mean they're a great musician. There can be people that are very rudimentary at their instruments, who write great songs, and that person is of equal. Lars Ulrich is a perfect example of this. Metallica would be fucking terrible without Lars. We all know Lars is not a good drummer, but he's the dude that helps James arrange the song that he's important and you're not going to make a Metallica record without Lars. Not that we're all, I hope this isn't preventing me from ever making a Metallica record, but because guys, I love you, but Lars is important. There's

Speaker 1 (01:35:35):

Crucial. Even

Speaker 2 (01:35:36):

You kind of learn that. Yeah, he's vital. I mean, he kind of was that band. It's like, take how great a rhythm guitarist James Hetfield is, and then maybe Lars is not the best drummer, but they made, I think, inarguably some of the greatest metal songs of all time. That's just a band that sold over a hundred million records, I'm sure, but he's in that band and it's never gotten better.

Speaker 1 (01:35:57):

So I really like your attitude. I really, really like your attitude because one thing I have noticed is when people get frustrated because they don't have a gig or someone else got a gig or some other band got signed, those kinds of the envy kind of feelings, the jealousy feelings that are just a part of life, but seems like they get amplified in creative fields because creative people create things and they create more drama along with all the art they're creating. They also create drama. What they do, they create. So I think that when people see somebody else getting something that they wish they had, a lot of times their first inclination is to justify to themselves, to make themselves feel better about it. They'll say, oh, that person's not as good. They must, they must have known somebody or they got lucky or must polish up those knee pads. That kind of stuff. Instead of wondering to yourself, well, the person that gave them the deal or hired them isn't fucking around. I wanted that gig too. So what? Between them hiring my competition versus me, they became a different person with different standards and no, there's a reason for why they hired your competition.

Speaker 2 (01:37:15):

I actually hit a point where I was like, oh man, the people that were becoming my competition on things, I'm so flattered that this is my competition. That Zach Sabbath record that came out, vertigo where they did the whole Black Sabbath record. I did a bunch of the engineering on that, and then I just saw recently Jay Rustin posting pictures of working with Zach Sabbath on whatever they're doing, and part of you is just like, oh man, I wish I was doing that, but at the same time I'm like, yeah, I can't wait to hear what Jay does with this. And I can think of multiple examples where this happens. Actually, I had one, there was an artist I was working with that I was supposed to be doing the mixes, and all of a sudden I wasn't hearing from him. And then do you know Chris Collier? I think he's a

Speaker 1 (01:37:50):

I know him. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:37:50):

He's on the nail the mix stuff. So I'm friends with Chris. Chris posted an Instagram story is like, oh, busy week this week, and he had a marker board with his mixes and one of 'em was the artist in the song I was supposed to be mixing, so I just hit him up. I was like, Hey, are you mixing that? And he was like, yeah. He's like, your tones sound great, by the way. I was like, thanks. Hey, I'm not saying this to weird you out, but did he mention anything about me mixing it? Because last I heard he was sending me that Chris was like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry I didn't swipe a gig from you. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not mad. I'm not mad at all. You're a great engineer. I'm glad that you're getting work. And it was kind this weird thing. I think Chris felt really guilty about it, and I was like, I mean, it's a sketchy move, but it's not a move on his part. So there's two reactions

Speaker 1 (01:38:29):

That just means he's a good guy.

Speaker 2 (01:38:31):

That's a little different, but yeah, Jay doing that, or I did a cynic record and then the next cynic record I was supposed to do, and Sean tore his Achilles heel two weeks before we're supposed to do it, so it got postponed and then they ended up getting this guy, Jason Donahue to do the record. Well, Jason and I are friends and Jason eventually told me he was doing it, but he felt weird about it and he's like, oh, I know you did the last one. And I was like, I mean, it's not that you're not bummed. I was bummed wasn't doing, who wouldn't want to work with Cynic? I was bummed that I wasn't getting to do it, but at the same time, I'm excited that my friend is doing it and I know he's a great engineer.

(01:39:05):

You kind of have to have that mindset and role with not taking things and not always taking things personally as well. I talked about, there was a band called Ages that I really liked and I had gotten hit up about doing a song with them while I was doing Lincoln and I couldn't do it. I was doing Lincoln and then so after Lincoln got done, I kind hit 'em up. I was like, Hey, if you guys have any songs, I'd love to. And they're like, oh, well, we're kind of talking to Joe Buri about doing an ep, and I was like, yeah, awesome. Cool. Fuck yeah, I would take Joe Buri have fun, and then fortunately for me, he was doing tools, so they called me back. But for me that was one of those like, oh, holy shit, am I competing with Joe Buri for a gig or Yeah, there was a helmet thing that came up that I was kind of up for, and they ended up going with Jay Baumgartner and it was like I could get bummed that I don't have this or I could be really flattered that I was being legitimately considered competition under the guy that I studied with.

(01:39:59):

Don't get me wrong, I've not always had this good of mindset about it. Therapy has helped, but because I'm a very hyper self-critical person and I was that person like, oh, I didn't get that. Fuck. Do I suck at my job?

Speaker 1 (01:40:10):

Well, it's better to think, do I suck at my job than to think that person sucks at their job. They don't deserve the gig.

Speaker 2 (01:40:17):

Yeah. I mean, I guess there's that too better

Speaker 1 (01:40:18):

To be like, what is it about me that didn't get me the job? I think that's better than fuck them. They don't deserve the job. They got it for some reason or being like, what is it about them that got them this?

Speaker 2 (01:40:30):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:40:31):

The thing is when you start asking that, sometimes you realize the scheduling just didn't work out. It was nothing personal. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:40:37):

It's also creative field people sometimes just, I know if I were in a band, I probably would want something else. I wouldn't want to work with the same producer every time. If I was given an opportunity, look at a band every time I die. I think every one of their records is a different producer. Why wouldn't it be? But then there are those other bands that are always going to go back to the same producer, how it works for

Speaker 1 (01:40:54):

'em. Yeah. Producers shouldn't take that shit personally though. I understand losing a gig or not getting a gig you thought you had or whatever, it stings a little, but at the same time, being able to have a good attitude is pretty crucial, I think, because you explain why it's so important when you're giving the Joe Barisi story, you being cool about it has a lot to do with them coming back to you. If you were a dick about that, they wouldn't have come back to you guaranteed. If they had told you they're talking to Joe Bari and you had reacted like a baby, some people do. I doubt that when he got busy with Toole, they would've come to you.

Speaker 2 (01:41:32):

There's a whole mindset that comes with freelancing and this is stuff I wish I had realized five years before I did because I can't profess to have always been this enlightened about it. Freelancing was very stressful for me, the instability of it for a long time, and it's something I realized later and it made things better. Figuring this stuff out, I started, it almost felt like, I dunno, it just shifts your mindset from this, oh fuck, I got to take all this crappy stuff to just make ends meet to being just realizing maybe focus more on when you get to do something really awesome. Yeah, maybe you will spend two months working on stuff that's unremarkable and you're not happy with it, but then something comes along and instead of being like, oh, why can't it be like this all the time? Just get excited about that. Get excited that I literally took it as a sign like, oh shit, I'm competing with Joe Buri and Jay Baumgartner for gigs. Okay, my career is on the up and up. Maybe I didn't get them, and maybe it does mean I don't have some work, but it also means like, shit, I'm being considered a legitimate, not that I didn't think I was legitimate, but I don't know. It just makes you feel like you're more legitimate. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (01:42:35):

Yeah. One thing I try to tell myself, and it works usually, which is why I've gotten good at being cool with opportunities, evaporating, is the idea that this is even in conversation means that something else like it is going to come around. It always does, so just the fact that conversations at this level are happening is what matters more so than this one actual gig that taking place because you aren't made or broken off of one gig, it's a cumulative thing and whatever momentum got you to the point of being considered for that gig, that momentum still exists.

Speaker 2 (01:43:13):

It is like you said, the Joe Bree thing by going like, oh, that's cool. That's awesome. I can't wait to hear it. Versus like, fuck you guys. I don't want to work with you Anyway. There's no positive side to that, and if you feel that way and you need to get it out, great. Just don't do it at the clients for God's sake.

Speaker 1 (01:43:25):

Yeah. That's what therapy's for.

Speaker 2 (01:43:27):

Exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:43:28):

Or going to the gym or something like that

Speaker 2 (01:43:32):

When we're allowed to do that again.

Speaker 1 (01:43:34):

Yeah. One day in 2022. Josh, it's been awesome talking to you. Well,

Speaker 2 (01:43:39):

Thank you for having me on. It's been a while, so it's really nice to be back and always good to talk to you.

Speaker 1 (01:43:44):

Pleasure, as always. Thank you. 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.