Andrew Scheps: Mixing Philosophy, Interpreting Mix Notes, and Working with Superstars

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 needs no introduction, but I'm going to give him one anyways. Andrew Scheps is a multi-time Grammy winning audio engineer, mixer, producer and label owner. You know him for his work with Michael Jackson, red Hot Chili Peppers, black Sabbath, Metallica, Jay-Z, Adele Man, the lists just go on. I introduce you, Andrew Scheps. Andrew Scheps, welcome to the URM podcast. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. So just out of curiosity, are you getting sick of answering questions about being in the box and digital and analog and

Speaker 2 (00:02:04):

No, I think the only thing I ever get sick of is when the questions are framed in this analog is obviously better way taking that as a given and that you just spend your life chasing that if you do something else. But no, I don't mind. I mean, it's not a big deal to me that I did it, but it's a big deal to other people, so I'm fine to talk about it.

Speaker 1 (00:02:28):

That's what I find interesting about it is because it's been a while since you said that, like 2013.

Speaker 2 (00:02:36):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so it's eight

Speaker 1 (00:02:39):

Years. What's weird to me is about people who care about that kind of thing. It reminds me a lot of when the pod came out for guitar, which is 21 years ago now, people were acting like that thing was new for at least 10 years. It's interesting to me that people will keep bringing something up that you announced eight years ago as if it's some new thing or something crazy that is now a very regular thing

Speaker 2 (00:03:05):

And as if I'm the only one.

Speaker 1 (00:03:06):

It's weird.

Speaker 2 (00:03:08):

Most people are mixing in the box and some of them would say it's only because they don't own some gear, but it's working out. And I was in the box before I had a console, what I did.

Speaker 1 (00:03:19):

What do you think it is that gets people so all about it? And so I guess almost like picking teams.

Speaker 2 (00:03:25):

Yeah, I don't know. I think that there is, and it's easy to get negative about it. I don't feel negative in the way I see the way other people talk about it. I think that there are people I really respect who feel as though they cannot work without some analog stuff because they're not getting what they want to hear. And that's fine. I've got no problem with people doing things in a different way than I do. I don't pretend like what I'm doing is the best way. It's just what works for me. And if you want to start talking specifics, then there's always a technical reason for what's going on. And I think that's the thing. That's the only thing that bugs me is when people talk about it like it's magic. Like a Fairchild is full of unicorn shit. It's not. It's full of tubes and transformers and wire and it sounds amazing.

(00:04:22):

Fairchilds sound amazing. They also all sound totally different because they're all sort of broken in some way. It's like with any optical compressor like an LA two A, the optical units on those things are specked to be good for like 10, 15 years. They're all 40 years old. So they're all so far out of speck that people don't even know what a proper LA two A is supposed to sound like because then when you model one, you model the coolest sounding one and the coolest one is out of, and the point is it's all knowable and maybe there's some things that happen in the analog domain that people haven't gotten replicated in the digital domain. But so what, there are also a million things I can do in the digital domain that are absolutely impossible in the analog domain.

Speaker 1 (00:05:08):

And also who says that they could even duplicate it in the analog domain and

Speaker 2 (00:05:12):

Why? Who says you need to duplicate anything?

Speaker 1 (00:05:14):

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:05:15):

I think my point is that what ends up happening is people talk about specific tools as if that's why things sound good or bad is what tools you're using. And while I was making the transition off the console into the box, there were projects where I actually ended up turning it down when I realized that they were only coming to me because they wanted it all going through the console and that wall of outboard gear. But it's not how I was working anymore. It just didn't make sense for me to take a gig to work in a way that I wasn't working.

Speaker 1 (00:05:49):

I have pretty good proof that the tools aren't what makes the sound and it's from doing nail the mix for five years. Now, if it was possible to replicate somebody's mix just based on what they were doing, it would've happened already with our nail the Mix students because there's a faction of them that every single month they will screenshot every single thing that someone is doing. And since we're giving 'em the tracks, they're applying those settings exactly to the tracks hoping that it'll sound exactly like somebody's mix. And it never ever comes close, ever. Same settings. They think the same everything except for the one important thing which is the person's brain. So the one thing that's missing in the equation,

Speaker 2 (00:06:41):

How you hear is such a filter and people don't necessarily get that. And this is from the analog days too. I mean, I know people who assisted really big name successful engineers for years. They'd work with them, they'd be their guy, they would go to all of the sessions, so they'd watch these people record everything, every kind of instrument and every situation. And they had recall notes for all of this stuff. And I know a couple people who would get gigs as the engineer and they would start off with the recall notes. And it was the ones who realized within 20 minutes that, oh wow, that's not going to work at all. Who would then be okay. But the ones who would say, man, but that's how the other guy did it, it's got to work. That's when you fail because there's nothing that has to work ever. And it's all about what you're hearing and reacting to it. And obviously the source now in your case, you're talking about giving the exact same source and it comes out different

Speaker 1 (00:07:38):

And

Speaker 2 (00:07:38):

That really, really proves the point. But to take it into the more generalized step of like, man, what se using on his mix bus, everybody is so wanting to know what SE uses on the mixed bus and they don't believe that he mixes in the box even though he has been forever for absolute ever. And the answer is probably just about nothing on his mixed bus. And it's just that dude hears stuff in a way that other people don't.

Speaker 1 (00:08:05):

The magic at unicorns are in his head.

Speaker 2 (00:08:07):

Yeah, absolutely. Yes. My head is completely full of unicorn shoes.

Speaker 1 (00:08:11):

There's

Speaker 2 (00:08:12):

No question.

Speaker 1 (00:08:13):

I'll give you my impression and I want to know what yours is. I get the impression sometimes that when people who are really far along in the craft or the art, whatever you want to call it, talk about some of these things in interviews or online, they're talking about it from the perspective of someone who hears the craziest level of nuance and detail. And so when they're talking about two pieces of gear that make a huge difference to them, that last point, 5% makes a huge world of difference because they're competing with someone like Seban, the level they're at, like high powered race car, trying to get an extra 0.1% power out of it or whatever, makes a huge, huge difference when the stakes are that high. But to somebody who's still learning and whose ears are not that developed, they might read about the difference between two converters for instance, and think that it's going to be this massive, massive thing and trick themselves into thinking that it matters a hell of a lot more than it does when in reality maybe they've got 50% down, they've got another 50% to go. They're not even close to worrying about that last half a percent.

Speaker 2 (00:09:27):

I think that it takes time to be able to hear the subtle stuff is definitely true. But I think the dangerous part is when you read something like that and then that's now your excuse for why you don't like your mix, it's because you don't have those converters, you don't have that plugin, you don't have that compressor, whatever it is. And that's the really dangerous part because most of the classic albums that you like from the seventies and before were made with almost nothing, absolutely nothing. And it's nothing too lust after. I mean they're made in great rooms, but the point is it's great players with great songs playing great instruments and you can stick a 57 in there. I mean Susan Rogers tells an amazing story about the drums on Darlene Nikki where one of the power supplies for the console was just broken. There was no negative voltage in the console.

(00:10:24):

So everything is half wave form completely distorted, completely broken, but you make it work. And I think the thing you learn is to react to what you're hearing and realize that that's where the song is going to come from and that's where the music is going to happen. And you can make anything work with anything. And it's also why I think the more for recording engineers, the more experience you get, the less you're doing on the way in because instead of hearing a kick drum and you've got this idea in your head about what a kick drum has to sound like, you hear the kick drum as it is and immediately sort of see how you can build the rest of the kid around it and how that's going to work with the rest of the song and it's all going to be cool as opposed to, man, I got the kick drum right. But everything else around it is totally wrong for that kick drum. And that's the thing that takes time. And I think as people get more experienced in it, you just start to use less and less because you're actually listening to what's there and seeing how it's all going to work later on.

Speaker 1 (00:11:22):

Do you think that part of it has to do with your ability to listen to what's there, or do you think it's more of a decision to actually stop paying attention to bullshit and focus on what matters?

Speaker 2 (00:11:35):

Well, it is both. It's both because I think you also have to broaden your view of what is going to work as a kick drum sound, for instance. The kick is a really important thing, especially in rock tracks. And you feel as though if you study certain bands like Metallica that kick drum for all the bizarre stuff they've done with snare drums over the years, that kick drum has not changed iconic or bizarre. And so I think that that can become like, oh man, I want the kick to be like that. But without having a drummer who plays like that and songs that work with that kind of thing, it may not work. And so that is definitely something you have to learn to do. But that's more of a mental exercise that will happen naturally over time. But you can probably speed up the process if you just force yourself to not change some things and make other things work about it.

(00:12:35):

And what's great is that now you can get raw material and try this with mixing. So having to do it while recording with a band in a studio, especially if they're paying money, that's brutal. But to be able to sit at home with raw material and say, you know what? I'm not going to even EQ the kick drum and I'm going to build up these drums and see what I can make work, taking some of the kick from the overheads and using a room mic and then now I'm going to bring the close mic up just to get that little bit that's missing from the other mic or whatever. Just giving yourself an exercise in a way to build the drum sound and then you can expand that to the whole mix, start the mix with the guitars and now make everything fit around it. Never ever solo the drums,

Speaker 1 (00:13:20):

Man. One thing we do that's been effective, and the reason I started issuing these challenges was because we would give people these tracks that are immaculate, they're amazing, and then they would just overcook the shit out of 'em because they watched the mix last month where someone was super heavy handed on something that needed a heavy handed approach, and for some reason they decided that's what you do every time. And then you give them something that already sounds like 5% away from a finished mix just in the tracks and they're still going nuts. So we'd issue a challenge like the no plugin challenge, see what you can do with this with no plugins, just faders and panning. It's amazing what people can pull off when they just start focusing on the most important things.

Speaker 2 (00:14:07):

Well, because you're forcing them to listen and that's all it is. You shouldn't do anything in any mix unless it's to fix something that you're hearing that you don't like. That's it. That's the only reason to do anything ever. You don't do something because you're supposed to do it and you don't do something because of the way it looks on the screen or what a meter tells you. You do it because don't like the way it sounds. And then it could be anything. I don't like the way the vocals sounding right now. You could attack that with effects. You could attack it with compression on the vocal or you could attack it by changing the guitars panning so that they're no longer near the vocal and now the vocal sounds totally different or whatever it is, but it's all based on you didn't like something about the vocal as opposed to now is the time when I put the channel strip plugin on every single track and check out the high pass filter and now I go back and check out the low pass filter and now I go back and check out the mid range.

(00:15:03):

It's not productive.

Speaker 1 (00:15:04):

Let's take that vocal example just to run with what you started with when say you hear a vocal and there's something about it you don't like at this point, I guess is it more like you hear the solution and you already know how to get there just because you've been doing it for so long or is it more as if there's something you don't like and there's four options or five options, we could try this, we could try this, we could try this. Let's see which one works and one of them is bound to work maybe, or is it more just materializing the solution?

Speaker 2 (00:15:39):

I mean, the thing about having the experience is like I've got a mixed template that's got a lot of stuff in it. So when something's not working, I've got some stock solutions. Two things like some parallel compressors. One of 'em is really aggressive. One, I've got a short delay, I've got a little micro pitch slap spreader thing. I've got a couple of different reverbs. So they're all of these things that could be used on a vocal and most likely some combination of them will be because they're the tools that I've built up over the last 10 years in the box. Some of those are leftover from mixing on the console, but I would still do some of these treatments in the box before it came out onto the desk. Some of it is just the familiarity. I think that's the part where you really just have to spend the time when you hear the vocal disappearing into the track.

(00:16:28):

I will know immediately whether that's going to be fixed by parallel compression or whether it's EQ or whether it's something else is stepping on the vocal because I've done it so much. But that's only three things that I mentioned there. And usually it's one of those three things. So even if you're starting out, you could just try those three things and see which one starts to make the vocal appear in the mix the way you want it to, and then you can go further down that road and tweak it and stuff like that. So I definitely have a library in my head and I definitely lean on the same things over and over and over because they are the things that fix common problems. And then I custom build stuff for every mix as well. But the sort of structural things definitely from experience, they're all just sitting there in my template waiting to get used and as you work, you just got to start building up your own library of that stuff.

Speaker 1 (00:17:21):

I think people have some big misconceptions about templates, much like they do with the whole digital analog stupid debate. I think a lot of people misunderstand the purpose of a template. I'm curious where your thoughts are on this, but I've always thought that the reason to have one is to eliminate lots of the repetitive stuff that you would have to do the same every single time that there's no reason. Yeah, it's not creative, it's just mechanical. Why redo that stuff? You're not giving an artist anything unique by redoing your routing every single time. That's not

Speaker 2 (00:18:00):

Keeps you from being creative. It keeps you from listening and there's nothing more mind numbing than doing that kind of stuff. So between a mixed template, and I use Sound Flow, which is an amazing program for scripting pro tools. So I've got scripts that do most of my session prep for me, I just select the drum tracks and hit a button. They're all the right color, they're routed to the right place, they're placed in a group that's assigned to a vca. Like all of that stuff that makes you want to kill yourself and you don't even feel like working on the mix when you're done with it, don't do it, automate it. Having it in your template is the same as automating it. So the inserts that go on the audio tracks in a mix, those are always from scratch because that can't be in my template because the audio tracks aren't in the template.

(00:18:45):

But more than enough effects, more than enough stuff on my mix bus, more than enough parallel things are in the template so I can pick and choose and they're named. They're easy to get to. I know what color they are, I know where they are, and it just makes me be able to be creative. And by being creative, I mean reacting to what I'm hearing because all the time you spend not reacting to what you're hearing is time spent not making it better. So I'm a huge fan of templates. You've got to build your own. It doesn't do you any good to start with my template. It's interesting to check out maybe, but it's not something that will help you because that's like working off the screenshots. You don't know why it is the way it is, so you need to build your own, but you should absolutely build your own immediately.

Speaker 1 (00:19:33):

It's interesting with the templates, one of the hardest things to try to get through people's head, it doesn't matter if you get somebody else's template, it might be interesting to look at how they do something. It might give you a little bit of insight, but it's not going to solve your problems for you and it's not going to get you through mixes.

Speaker 2 (00:19:53):

I mean what it's good for is to get an idea of how people think. Yes,

Speaker 1 (00:19:56):

I'm

Speaker 2 (00:19:56):

A huge Chad Blake fanboy and fortunately I know him, we're actually friends, but I've watched every single video that guy's ever done and I've screenshotted stuff just to see, can I apply this? Can I figure out what he's hearing? And 90% of it absolutely doesn't work for me at all, not at all. But the concepts and having that thing fail makes me now go in search of, okay, well what could I do that makes sense to my ears that might give me a little bit of the same feeling on whatever it is that I loved what Chad was doing. So it's just an education and how to think about mixing. So I think that's amazing. Now with stuff, what you're doing and then all the videos that people have put out is you get inside their heads a little bit and how they listen and that's what will really open up your mind to say, oh man, it never occurred to me to think about reverb that way, whatever. It's the big concepts and then it's easy to go build your own. And it's not this daunting thing of like, wow, I don't even know where to start.

Speaker 1 (00:21:03):

Well, first of all, I think it's really, really cool that you're still looking at educational content and I'm not surprised either. It's amazing to me how many people who are doing things for real, both on the musician side and the producer mixer side, the people who I find to be the most accomplished tend to still feel like they have the most to learn. It's interesting how that goes together. What I'm wondering is how much of what you have in your opinion, your skills, your career comes from mentorship and what you've learned from other people and how much is just within you?

Speaker 2 (00:21:43):

I mean, you could make the argument a hundred percent either way because it's all synthesizing things. So all of it has come from other people, but at the same time, with all the weird combined parallel compression stuff that I do, I just sat at home and made that up in a way. But obviously I was the 50000th person to use parallel compression. So I didn't make up the concept at all. But at the same time, I kind of developed things that sounded right to me from scratch. So it's a really weird combination of things. I mean, every once in a while someone says something and it's just boink and your head explodes. Great, that's amazing. But there are lots of times when in the shower I think about what would happen if I did that. And then I come and try it and most of the time it's total crap. And every once in a while it's like, oh, that's interesting. And then that sends me down a little rabbit hole and I kind of figure something out. And then sometimes it works on one mix. Sometimes it sticks around for a month and sometimes it's been in a template for 10 years. And so where do those things come from? They're all based on someone else's stuff. I mean, I haven't made anything up myself really.

Speaker 1 (00:22:57):

It's all based on stuff you've heard and synthesized over the course of decades and through a bunch of experience and trial and error.

Speaker 2 (00:23:07):

And the trial and error is really, really important because you have to understand how it's not how things sound. It's how the sound of things makes you feel, and that's really difficult to learn. And then it's how does that stuff in context work? You might have the best drum sound in the world and it absolutely does not work in the mix, and there's nothing more depressing than that, but no one gives a shit what the drums sound like on their own, not what they're going to listen to.

Speaker 1 (00:23:37):

Was there a point in your career where that dawned on you? Did you always get that?

Speaker 2 (00:23:43):

No, because I'm still figuring it out, but I think that it's been a long time. Well, that's not true. I still catch myself doing it every once in a while. I basically now don't do things because I feel I should don't do busy work anymore ever on mixes. And part of that was getting into the box because I could work on more than one mix at a time to be able to just close a mix as soon as I'm not feeling productive or I don't want to do what I need to do next, or whatever reason it is that I don't really want to work on that song anymore, I just close it immediately so I don't keep track of where I am in a mix and I don't remember what I did last. So that forces me to always just be listening and just reacting to what I hear. And sometimes I open something up and it surprises me how far along it is. Like, wow, I don't remember spending any time on this and maybe I didn't. Maybe it just didn't need to be messed with. Or maybe I spent tons of time on it and I've forgotten and that's okay. I'm fine to be senile about these sort of things. It really does keep me listening, which is obviously I keep saying it over and over, but it's the only important thing. What's

Speaker 1 (00:24:57):

Your definition of busy work on a mix?

Speaker 2 (00:25:00):

Cleaning up edits that are fine, high passing things that shouldn't be high passed,

Speaker 1 (00:25:06):

Just doing things that someone said you should do.

Speaker 2 (00:25:08):

Yeah, just doing anything that isn't based on what I'm hearing. What should you ever do in a mix that isn't because it makes the mix sound better to you? There's nothing, there's nothing you can come up with that. I would say, well, okay, session prep, you got to color code, you got to make, but that's so that you can work better. But when you're doing things that change the sound of things, it should only be because you want the sound changed. There's no other reason to do anything. And as much as this goes back to your first question about in the box and the huge discussions people get into about analog versus digital and blah, blah, blah, if you do a mix and you're lucky that someone other than you and the artist and all your parents hear it, they don't know what you use, they don't care what you use, they hit play and they hear what they hear and they make their own decision based on what they hear. And that's it. That's the only thing you need to know about mixing is it has to work when there's no context.

Speaker 1 (00:26:10):

Was it a surprise to you at some point when you realized that people besides yourself like your work?

Speaker 2 (00:26:19):

Yeah, it's still shocking to me.

Speaker 1 (00:26:21):

Still mind blowing.

Speaker 2 (00:26:22):

Yeah, it's still mind blowing. Every once in a while I do something and I think, oh my God, this is awesome. And usually those are the ones where I've done something totally different than what the artist wants and I get pages and notes or get fired or something like that. It really is that way. If I go too far down my own rabbit hole on something, that's usually when it all blows up in my face. But I think it's amazing. So yeah, I mean look, it's easy to be over humble too, so I'm very proud of a lot of the stuff I've managed to do and it's super cool to me that I get to work on some of the stuff I get to work on. I'm not going to pretend like it's nothing and all of that. I'm also not going to pretend like, oh, I think I really suck, but a lot of the time I do. A lot of the time I hit play on a mix I'm working on and I just think, man, why did they hire me and how long until I get fired? Because this is just terrible all day, every day. It's

Speaker 1 (00:27:16):

Interesting that feeling that what you're working on is terrible, is something that I think never leaves. You start with it at the beginning, and for most people it sticks through their entire careers and in multiple different types of careers. I think in most creative careers there's some element of these people don't understand that they hired the wrong person or why the hell am I here? There's an element of that even at the highest levels

Speaker 2 (00:27:49):

Because I mean, my feeling is that it's because first of all, with art, there's no right answer. You can't say, oh, I finally nailed it and nobody can argue with me. That can't ever happen. There's no right mix. But for me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, it's also that when I very first start working on a mix and I hear the song for the first time or the first couple of times in my head, I know how I want to feel. I know that I want this thing to just be insane and I want that to make me want to cry and this whatever it is, it's always in these vague emotional terms. And I wouldn't even put it into words, but you kind of know where you want this mix to end up and you always fall short. So if you haven't tained this absolute nirvana from the time you hit play to the end of the song, you failed. So there you go.

Speaker 1 (00:28:43):

So you're always dealing with that. Yeah, I guess the funny thing is though, since you don't inhabit other people's headspace, you have no way of knowing whether or not they're feeling that shortcoming either. And I think a lot of people almost talk themselves out of a job because they'll convince other people of a shortcoming they didn't even know was there. It's a bummer.

Speaker 2 (00:29:06):

I mean, and that's the other thing is that when you send a mix off, don't ever ever send anything in the email with the link other than, Hey, the mix is up, hope you like it, let me know it. Don't ever send an excuse about something. Don't ever send a thing that says like, well, the reason this is happening is because the recording was terrible. None of that matters. Don't send that. Those are your mixed notes to yourself, so fix 'em and then get your email to say, Hey, the mix is up and it,

Speaker 1 (00:29:38):

Has there ever been times where you send something and you're thinking to yourself, this part still isn't done, you don't write that, right, you send the email the way you said, but the vocals aren't quite there yet or something. Does it surprise you ever when you get back a note that calls it out or where they say it's perfect, good to go?

Speaker 2 (00:29:59):

Yeah, look, you're always because you don't know what other people are sensitive to. I'm sensitive to the things I'm sensitive to and that's it. So it's hard to say like, oh, well, and when other people listen to it, they're going to react exactly the way I do. I mean, my feeling when I'm not happy with something in a mix is always that I really wanted it to feel like this. And I feel like it's coming up a little bit short. It's not as breathtaking as it should be, not as exciting. The other thing is I also, I won't send it if I really feel like that. If there's a section that's not working at all, then I'm not done working on the mix. I have to keep going until I can fix that. And sometimes it's just you change your expectations, you make it do something else instead, but you can't send it if it's not working because it's not done. You can't just hope that they won't notice.

Speaker 1 (00:30:49):

Do you ever feel like artists will notice too much focus on things that don't matter? Where do you draw the line? Because heard some mixers say kind of like you just said, no one gives a shit about a drum sound if you're not feeling anything or you're not feeling the right things coming off the mix. So I've heard a lot of mixers talk about mixed notes and get kind of pissy about having to work on the snare when that's not what's going to sell the song. So where do you draw the line between mixed notes that matter versus just dumb bullshit that doesn't,

Speaker 2 (00:31:28):

There's no dumb bullshit. That doesn't matter because it matters to the artist and it's not my record. So unless

Speaker 1 (00:31:36):

I like that answer

Speaker 2 (00:31:37):

That the person is doing it just to be a dick, which has happened, I mean every once in a while you get people who are just like, man, we're going to make Andrew do some stuff for no reason. But 99% of the time it's because they don't like it. And you can easily say like, man, the drums really work well, but if the drummer hates the sound of the drum kit, it's their instrument and you've got to deal with that. And it's not okay to say, well, that's not going to sell any more records. What does that even mean? So as long as I'm sure that we're going forward and we're trying to achieve something, I will do mixed notes as long as there are notes.

Speaker 1 (00:32:17):

It's interesting, heard a lot of, and I've experienced this where musician doesn't like something and the engineer will try to convince them they should like it with words. They're not reacting to an intellectual concept. They're reacting to the way something sounds and how it makes them feel, and no amount of words is going to change the way they feel about it.

Speaker 2 (00:32:41):

And I think what I was talking about before with the very few instances where people are just taking the piss, it is because it's words and you can tell they, I mean, I've done mixes where back when I was using all the gear, people come in and say, oh man, what are you using on the base, the bass player? And if you tell them, they might say, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Somebody else mixed a record for us and they used that on my base and I hated it. And now they hate the base because of what's being used on it. Well, okay, that's words. I told them what I was using. So that kind of thing is ridiculous from any side. But if they're listening to the base and they don't like what it's doing, end of story, they don't like what it's doing, and it's your job to make them like it.

(00:33:30):

So you can certainly point out, wow, since we did this to the bass and now you're happy it's destroying the guitars, what do you want to do about that? I don't think these things can coexist. We're going to either have to really change these. That's your job is to hear it in context and figure out if those changes are going to affect other things. But look, the reality is two pages of mixed notes, unless they're just weird, vague concepts, if you're mixing in the box and that takes you more than half an hour to get through, then something's wrong. They're usually details and they're very easily taken care of, and all you got to do is just make sure that they're not destroying something else. And in terms of a strategy for doing that, whenever anybody says to turn something up or down, I do it with EQ or compression or parallel something.

(00:34:23):

If they say that they want more compression, I do it with volume. I never solve the problem the way they say, because then I'm not really listening. I don't want to get an email that says, add two db of 4K. And so I do that and I'm like, well, you told me to do it. That might be insane if I've got a lot of parallel processing. Adding two db of anything is adding eight db of it, and volume rides are magnified and things, so you've just got to make sure you fix the stuff in context. But man, you can crank through it. It's the two line emails that will take you hours because it's some big structural thing that's like, yeah, we love the mix, the choruses just aren't working yet. Like, okay, that's going to take some work. But generally, if you're organized, mixed notes don't take very long to get through.

Speaker 1 (00:35:14):

I think too, there's a level of interpretation that you have to get good at with mixed notes. For instance, I remember Jay Rustin posted something on Facebook, I believe it was, I'm paraphrasing, but he was talking about getting a mixed note that said, turn up the drums, turn up the guitars, turn up the vocals, turn up the synth when reality, it should have just said, turn down the base. And he worded it in a funny way, but illustrating the point that what they're actually asking for isn't what they actually want. Always.

Speaker 2 (00:35:47):

The key to it is you want to figure out why did they give you that mix note? And if I got something like that, I actually would not say that really they just wanted me to turn down the base. I would say the mix is not aggressive enough. They think everything's too quiet, so this mix is too tame, it's not right. And I would try to get some more detail or aggression or dry it up or something to actually change the feel of how loud this stuff was. And at the same time, okay, maybe the base is overpowering, and if I turn that down, now all of a sudden everything comes to life. Well, great. Then my job was really easy. That's taking it a math equation. If they say A, B, C, and D, what that means is E, so I'll just do E and I'm not going to listen. Why would they tell you to turn every fucking thing up? Because it all sounds too quiet and not necessarily just getting swamped by something else.

Speaker 1 (00:36:40):

Yeah, I do think you're right. I think though that at least my point is that there has to be some interpretation. Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:36:47):

That's why I won't do the comments specifically exactly the way they say. I'm always trying to figure out, well, if they say to turn something up, it means they want to hear it better. So how can I make this thing more audible in the mix and have a bigger role without destroying other stuff? And it could be turning it up is the way to go. I mean, there are times when I've just kind of lost track of a guitar part and wow, that thing is really quiet. I'm an idiot. Turn it up. But most of the time it's subtle stuff and there may be other ways to do it. So yes, it's absolutely deciding what you think they wanted and then just give 'em what they want. And you can be wrong.

Speaker 1 (00:37:22):

Yes, you definitely can be wrong. Do you think that in and of itself is a skill that you develop just as much as you develop the audio side of things, your human interpretation, communication skills also have to be developed?

Speaker 2 (00:37:39):

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I'm sure anybody who records will tell you that's 90% of the job is managing the session and the personalities getting sounds is that's a given. That's the easy part. Yeah. Even if it's the hard part, it's the easy part. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Managing people is what it's all about. Well,

Speaker 1 (00:38:00):

That's the assumed part. I feel like if you're even in the conversation, it's assumed you can do the audio part. That's what even gets you in the conversation in the first place. If you can't do the audio part, you're not even in consideration. So that's assumed. And with that out of the way, what really matters is can you work with these people?

Speaker 2 (00:38:21):

Yeah. Yeah. I, and it's interesting, everybody has a different take on it. Steve Albini would say, oh, I just document it. I'm not producing. I have no input on these records, but there's no way he's making 600 records in his career, a thousand records or whatever it is. Unless people absolutely want to be in the room with him making records and he doesn't want to hear it and he won't admit it. But there's definitely something about having Steve Albini in that room that is more than the fact that he has a great studio and knows where to put the microphones. There's

Speaker 1 (00:38:52):

Got to be,

Speaker 2 (00:38:53):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:38:55):

I appreciate what he says his thing is, but I also feel like in some ways it's just very humble.

Speaker 2 (00:39:03):

It could be. And look, I don't doubt that he believes, I mean, he thinks really long and hard about this stuff, so he absolutely believes what he believes. But the reality in terms of how other people experience it is they love making records with him. It's not like he's never had repeat clients. That's a pointer to something weird going on. He has tons of repeat clients and they just love making records with him.

Speaker 1 (00:39:25):

It might not even be something conscious he's doing. It could just be that his unique chemistry, brain chemistry vibe as a human just works for so many artists that they feel great around him and do great work.

Speaker 2 (00:39:41):

Absolutely. And look, you could say, well, look, let's take what Steve says at Take Him at his word, that he does absolutely nothing to influence the record whatsoever. Well, that empowers the artists to say, man, we are a hundred percent in control and we are going to realize our artistic vision with nobody fucking with us. And that's an amazingly strong position to put an artist into. So even if it is as simple as that, that's still huge.

Speaker 1 (00:40:10):

That's still doing something though. Part of what makes a great producer is knowing when to get the fuck out of the way, and it's a decision to get the fuck out of the way. I don't think that it's something that a type A personality, which I think all great producers, all great mixers are type A's. You have to be that way in order to be able to handle projects like that and personalities like that. So for someone who is a type to get out of the way that that's a choice, it's definitely a choice.

Speaker 2 (00:40:42):

And goes right back to the beginning of the discussion about handling people. It's knowing. You think about recording vocals with people. Some people, you get to the end of a take and if you say, well, let's do one less like shit now that's funny, and it relaxes them and you're like, oh, okay,

Speaker 1 (00:40:59):

Don't suck this time.

Speaker 2 (00:41:00):

Other people would not be able to take that. And you've got to just sit quietly or you've got to only be encouraging and you need to figure that out before you ever start recording vocals what this person is into. And that could change day to day, but that's so important. Much more important than your choice of vocal. Mike.

Speaker 1 (00:41:17):

How did you figure that out? Did you figure that out through missteps or was it something that somebody taught you observation or just this natural sense for people?

Speaker 2 (00:41:28):

I've always been somebody who's trying to, I mean, I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing. I like people to like me, and I don't think I modify my behavior into somebody. I'm not to make people like me, but I'm always aware of how people are reacting. No, it's good to be liked as soon as I start interacting. So that's just carried on into the studio. That's not necessarily a studio thing. I mean, the studio things you learn is when to shut up, what the chain of command is in a session and how to read that sort of stuff. And that is stuff generally, people mess up once and if they're lucky, whoever is brought them in on the session is cool enough to take 'em to the side and say, Hey, man, don't do that. And then you learn it because as soon as you think about it, it's obvious sort of thing. But the interpersonal and how to read people, that's just life stuff for me.

Speaker 1 (00:42:19):

I think one of the things that up and coming producers, musicians need to be real careful of in this day and age specifically is because you don't have to go to an external facility anymore to do everything because you can just develop everything in your bedroom in isolation. This is something unique to the past decade is you can do this without being around other people. I think that it's actually a big, big danger to people wanting to get into this line of work that they can develop all of the technical skills without any of the life and interpersonal skills, spend their twenties and late teens and maybe even early thirties in a cave, and then not know how to deal with people, not have a network established, not have any of those other things that you need in order to get the vehicle to go down the road. It's scary

Speaker 2 (00:43:16):

Even with people who've decided to go out and do things in a group. I talk at colleges and universities all the time, and you go in and you've got, I dunno, 50 production students, and there's some big common area at the school, and they're all on their laptops with headphones on, and they're not talking. They're not playing each other their stuff. And so I've tried to make it, whenever I do this with the production classes, I say, look, I want to do mixed reviews. Like we will listen to mixes and I'll tell you what I think. And sometimes it's technical stuff, sometimes it's arrangement stuff. But the real point of it is you get a group of students in the room and they all get to hear each other's stuff. And by the time they finish, every single group is collaborating. They're always people like, holy shit, I didn't know you were doing that kind of thing.

(00:44:02):

That's amazing. You want to play on my thing. And that collaboration is also a big part of learning to work with people and to read people, but also learning to make sure that you're not in a bubble to the point where you've decided everything you're working on is your record and you're going to make it exactly how you want, and you don't care what other people think because you shouldn't care what other people think as an artist necessarily. But if you're trying to make this your job, then obviously you've got to care what other people think. And you've got to start interacting with people and start understanding how other people react to your work and stuff like that early on. Because otherwise, if you do like what you're talking about and then all of a sudden a record comes out and there's a negative review, you're going to want to kill yourself because you're not used to anybody passing judgment on your work. And when it comes from afar and anonymously, it's always like, oh, it's really hurtful and horrible. So yeah, learning to read people, but also learning to just be in a room with people. It's really important. I just rambled about that, but it was a good ramble. There was a point in there somewhere.

Speaker 1 (00:45:07):

It was a good ramble. I enjoyed every bit of it. Speaking of negative feedback, it's a pretty known thing that the human brain is wired to focus on the negative feedback. I think that it's an evolutionary trait. We evolve to see threats. And so the way that that translates into negative feedback and taking that in reading comments for instance, is we can see a thousand great comments, whatever you see, the one bad one. And that lights our brain up. And I think it is a misplaced self-protection evolutionary trait where we see the threat and we zero in on the threat, but because we are wired that way, to take the one negative comment and blow it way out of proportion, like I said, it could be one out of a thousand and that one out of the thousand will ruin our day. How did you learn to deal with that?

Speaker 2 (00:46:00):

I don't. It still ruins my day. It absolutely does. I can replay in my mind every time I've screwed up in public since I was about four, I'm the poster child for that kind of stuff. But what I would say is that for bands and artists who are working with mixers and things where they're going to be comments just sent in an email, if you think think the mix sucks and you're sending mixed notes, it doesn't hurt you to at the top of the email say, Hey, man, this is sounding really, really cool. I know this looks like a lot, but here's the stuff we want to change. That is a totally different email to here's the stuff we want to change, because then it's all negative as opposed to, yeah, we feel like it's a crazy amount of stuff we want to do, but it's all details to make a good thing better, and that will change the way it works. So I'm a big fan of wording things carefully, and you don't have to treat everyone like they're a baby, but at the same time, there's no reason to not couch things in a positive way if you're actually feeling positive about the mix. There's no way I can know that. I mean, specifically, there was a band, I mixed a song and the notes that came back were these big overarching, the chorus isn't big enough, it feels small.

(00:47:25):

It was all stuff like that. And so I just said to my manager like, man, I don't think I'm the right person for this. Can you just send him an email saying like, Hey, really sorry to have wasted your time, but obviously you need somebody else. And their response was like, we love the mix. What's the problem? Well, if you had said that, then I would know that. But from the comments I got, it seemed to me that they absolutely hated it.

Speaker 1 (00:47:53):

I guess that's that interpretation thing coming into play.

Speaker 2 (00:47:57):

And some people don't need it. So I guess the people who don't need it don't think to put it in emails. Whereas I don't know that I've sent a negative email yet, and I've been emailing for a while now.

Speaker 1 (00:48:08):

This is something I've had to learn how to do, and I think I got it from my dad. My dad is the type who I remember he got himself into trouble with orchestras back when I was paying attention to, this was in the nineties. But I remember he got himself into trouble because at the end of a rehearsal, he would just say something like, Bravo clap, leave, or just point out flutes, louder, bar one 14, chorus, come in this whatever, bravo out. And the comments would be, he hates us. He thinks we suck. He said, Bravo. He said, Bravo. He doesn't think you suck. He wouldn't have said bravo if he thought you sucked, but they interpreted it that way.

Speaker 2 (00:48:56):

And it's not like you need to heap false praise on things. Like, look, when I'm listening to the student mixes at the end of the song, my first word is always awesome, or, oh, that's great. Oh really cool. Or something. And then everything else they get is negative because that's the whole point of me listening. And I may only give them five minutes per song, so I'm blasting through these things. But you don't want to just say, wow, that's shit. Okay, here's some ways to make it less like shit, just quit. And look, there's some things, most of the time actually this stuff has been really good, which is amazing over so many schools and whatever, it's incredible how creative people are being right now and how good they are at doing it. But every once in a while there's stuff that has real fundamental problems. But then even that, you can say, look, I can see kind of what you're going for, and if you get this right, it's going to be amazing, but your drums are so fucked up that no one will ever want to listen to this. And they will like, oh my God, you're right. And they want it to be amazing, and therefore they actually welcome what is really a hundred percent negative, but it's fine.

Speaker 1 (00:50:06):

Well, I imagine that you're saying if you're saying, I can see where you're going with this, and if you get it right, it'll be amazing. You're not bullshitting. If they did fix what was wrong with it, it could be

Speaker 2 (00:50:17):

Potential in just about anything. I mean, every once in a while I hear something and it's like, wow, I just never want to hear that again. Ever. It happens most of the time. It's like, wow, this could be cool if this happened. And if what needs to happen is absolutely everything, alright, but now, you know, got to do everything. Because right now it sucks, but it's going to be amazing if you get it right. It could take a few years. You might have to start over, whatever. But yeah, you don't want to tell people that their art is bad because it isn't. To them, it's the most important thing they've ever done in their lives at that moment. So you're wrong if you just say, wow, that sucks.

Speaker 1 (00:50:57):

And it's not just art. I think for instance, when dealing with my employees, for instance, we're making products, we're not making art, but that doesn't mean that they take it any less seriously. They put themselves into it. And we have some very complex projects that have a million details. And if I'm sending feedback that's got 50 different points on it of things that need to be changed, I need the person to know that they're doing a great job and that I'm not tearing them down that we're on the right path. We just need to fix this stuff, but we're good. We're good. You're doing great work. And I'm not saying that, I'm not that as bs, it's just I know that if all they got were these 50 points of feedback, they could, we're all creative people. They could create a scenario in their head where I hate their work, and if I hated their work, they would know. I don't want them to falsely come to that conclusion.

Speaker 2 (00:52:00):

No, look, it's a real skill to keep people up, but the corollary is you also need to make them realize that those 50 things have got to be right and they're not right and you can't skate through it. Absolutely. And they're going to have to work really hard. And there's a really high bar, but the point is you believe in them to reach that bar. So let's be amazing. Not pretty good.

Speaker 1 (00:52:24):

Yeah, absolutely. So are you a lone wolf or do you have people under you?

Speaker 2 (00:52:30):

No, I'm it. I've been working at home for 20 years and since going completely in the box, I've used to have some people who would prep stuff for me. But then the prep, since I've automated all the really boring parts of it, it's where I learn where everything is. It's how I learn the song and the arrangement and how things are recorded. So I need that time anyway. And then for a while I had people help print mixes, but it was just difficult to keep their rigs updated with mine. And also, I mean, on a side note with sound flow, I've actually started automating all my mixed printing. And so when that gets robust enough, that's just going to be amazing. But I love mentoring and I love teaching, and I actually teach quite a bit. I used to teach a class at UCLA, but my workflow for mixing doesn't allow me to do it. There's no way I could have someone else here while I'm mixing. It just wouldn't make any sense.

Speaker 1 (00:53:25):

So is sound flow similar to Quick Keys? Like a more evolved version

Speaker 2 (00:53:33):

In the way that the super Heavy Falcon is a paper airplane?

Speaker 1 (00:53:38):

Well, I mean Quick Keys, the guy died in thousand 12 or something. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:53:43):

Well, it's more that there are lots of really good macro programs out there, and Keyboard Maestro allows you to do lots of conditional branching and stuff like that. Sound flow on the face of it is just a scripting program, but it's got very deep hooks into pro tools. So it can tell you whether a track is an input or not. It can tell you what is assigned to insert three and then you can act on it. So you can do macros, which are sort of drag and drop versions, like big blocky things, and you can get a lot done there. And then if you're a super geek, you can actually write code within the sound flow platform to take advantage of all of these advanced functions, but actually let you do things. And so for a lot of the apps I've been writing, it has to be code a little bit too much going on to just make it drag and drop.

(00:54:36):

But there's also, there's this huge store where 90% of it's free. If you do some stuff you think is useful to people, you post it and then anybody can get your stuff. So when I first signed up for Sound Flow, I immediately had 300 scripts from other people. And I've, since I don't use all of those, but then it gave me ideas for like, oh, I'm going to do this. So it can be crazy stuff like printing different versions of mixes while I'm not in the room, or it can be really, really simple stuff. Like I've got some audio selected on the vocal track and I need to high pass it because there's a pop and I hit a button, it opens up click effects, it recalls the preset, that's the high pass filter. It closes clip effects, and I'm done. If you're depoing a vocal to do that manually 400 times makes you want to kill yourself again. But as you're scrolling through the vocal doing something else and you can just select the audio and hitting a button genius and you don't mind doing it and it's fun again.

Speaker 1 (00:55:31):

And over the course of a year, all those little things add up to a lot of family time.

Speaker 2 (00:55:37):

Huge. I can prep a 12 song record in a couple of hours now, and that used to be a day to a day and a half.

Speaker 1 (00:55:45):

That's amazing. I think especially in this type of line of work, really anything entrepreneurial where you're the guy, if you stop working, the checks stop coming. I mean, that's it have to,

Speaker 2 (00:55:58):

Almost none of us are getting paid by the hour anymore. It used to be you could charge by the day or whatever. Nobody, it's always all in, here's how much money there is. If you take two hours, you're making a lot. If you take 60 hours, you're not.

Speaker 1 (00:56:08):

Yeah, exactly. And there's also real life to have to balance in the equation. One of the hardest things about running your own thing that requires a lot of passion and dedication is your life can get completely out of balance and can totally wreck your personal life. And I think that these kinds of tools not only allow you to get more done in less time, which makes you more efficient, able to take on more work, make more money. That's awesome. It also gives you more time to be a human and deal with the important people in your life.

Speaker 2 (00:56:42):

Yeah, absolutely. And I would argue that while you're working, you stay more creative. So you actually do better work because you're not constantly having to stop and do a menial thing. You never stop.

Speaker 1 (00:56:55):

So how much time would you say goes into the scripting versus how much time does this save

Speaker 2 (00:57:02):

You? For me, I'm a big geek, so I've spent a huge amount of time during the pandemic coding, like a gigantic amount of time coding, but that's because I've decided to be really ambitious in some of the stuff I'm building because I want it. But then it's also for, I built an app that lets you rero the minutes and seconds counter in pro tools anywhere in the session because you send a mix out, it doesn't start at the beginning of the session, you get mixed notes and someone says, yeah, two minutes and 30 something seconds, this thing happens. But that's not two 30 something in your session, it's one hour, whatever. So you can rero it and you can locate based on an offset to your minutes and seconds. Counter Pro tools doesn't do that. So that took me a long time to code and it was really complicated, but it's also something I use all day every day. So in the moment it might take me a year to earn back that time that I spent, but that's okay because I never have to do it again.

Speaker 1 (00:58:04):

And you plan on spending a lot more than a year doing this?

Speaker 2 (00:58:07):

Yeah, I mean who knows? I might be done, but while people are still hiring me. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So the scripting, it can take some time, but it's also if you're the kind of person who likes this sort of thing, there's nothing more exciting than when you write a script and you hit a button and it actually does the thing that you never wanted to do yourself again.

Speaker 1 (00:58:27):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:58:28):

Best.

Speaker 1 (00:58:29):

And if you're not that kind of person, be thankful that there are those kinds of people in the world.

Speaker 2 (00:58:34):

You could easily sign up for sound flow and just exist on stuff other people have done. You don't have to spend any time doing it.

Speaker 1 (00:58:41):

Is coding something that you've always done?

Speaker 2 (00:58:44):

I've always wanted to and never did it. And I think that the motivation, because I saw what I could be able to do was so high that I just forced myself to learn. And also Christian who's the CEO of sound flow is amazing. When I started, there's a really active forum on the website and I started posting questions expecting like, oh, maybe in a week some other user will answer my question. I don't know what to do. And Christian was there within five minutes, like, oh, here's how you do it and here's example code and check this out and check that out. So I feel like I've gotten a graduate degree in computer science in the last year just by doing this stuff.

Speaker 1 (00:59:26):

So you just said something I want to key in on. You said if people are still hiring me and well, okay, I want to focus on that for a second because I think that there's an idea people have at the beginning that they're going to get to some level where their anxiety's gone about the future, where they're set. And I know that that's bs, but it's interesting to hear even if you're joking that that thought is still in your head after all this.

Speaker 2 (00:59:57):

I mean when I say it comes out a bit like a joke because people wouldn't believe that I could be thinking that, but I've had months long droughts in my career. I mean, I won a Grammy for the Adele record and didn't work for three and a half months.

Speaker 1 (01:00:12):

It says it all.

Speaker 2 (01:00:13):

I mean seriously, zero paying work for three and a half months. And some of it it's just schedules and stuff pushes and whatever. And I'm not going to pretend like it's as hard for me now as it was when I was starting out. Absolutely not. I am so fortunate and I'm in such a good position, and generally I can count on, there will be something, but sometimes there isn't much. And to be honest, during the pandemic, there are very few projects that have had something even close to what you would've said a normal budget is. And obviously the idea of what a normal budget is is shrinking by half every year anyway. But yeah, I don't think I'm done. I'm sure I will get work for at least the coming time period or whatever, but who knows, man, there are new people popping up all the time where Sean Everett is like a fucking meteor right now.

(01:01:08):

That guy's amazing. And he didn't come out of nowhere. He is been at it for quite a long time. He was engineering for Tony Berg for years and he's great, but now he's an absolute star and I'm sure that some of the records he's doing are some records that maybe I would've been considered to mix. So that work's gone away. There's versions of that where there are new people, there are other people, and the only thing I think that works in my favor is that my discography is so weird that no one can say like, oh, he's the guy who does that. And that's not a thing anymore. I'm lucky enough to have done a little bit of a lot of different stuff that I'm hoping I hang around, but what that also means is I'm never top of the list for somebody. It's never like, Hey, we're doing this thing. Oh man, Andrew's the guy who does that. Let's get him. I'm in the mix on lots of stuff to be possibly considered, but not necessarily first choice on most things.

Speaker 1 (01:02:05):

Do you have a preference? Because I could see there being pros and cons to both because we deal with a lot of metal guys at URM who are at the top of the metal world, but that's what they do. And with the metal world, some people can do other genres and do well across multiple genres, but I'd say 90 to 95% of the really awesome metal producers just do metal and even a specific type of metal. So they're the guy for that and they become the top of the list for that. They're not the top of the list for a reggae artist. They're the top of the list for black metal or for whatever. They're the death metal guy. They do great, but that's what they do. Whereas not necessarily being the guy for one thing and being spread across multiple genres and being in multiple conversations, I could see the prose to that as well, that there's more chances for work maybe. Yeah. Do you have a preference?

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):

Well, I love that I've been really broad because as a listener, I'm really broad. I think when you're young you tend to say, I like this kind of music and I don't like this kind of music. But as you get older and you listen wider and you start to, I don't know, you just listen to more and more stuff. At least for me, I've realized that the genre makes absolutely no difference. It's the emotional impact of what I'm listening to. I like sad things. I like angry things, I like dark things. I like dissonant things. That could be jazz, it could be classical, it could be metal, it could be whatever. They're super pop stuff. There probably isn't a whole lot. But even that, I'm not going to listen to it a lot, but I can absolutely appreciate the Billie Eilish record. It's amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:03:53):

It is pretty great.

Speaker 2 (01:03:54):

And that sort of thing goes across any genre. And then my actual listening of things I do think are great. Look, if I love the way I describe the emotions of that stuff, you would say like, man, you'd be good on a lot of the darker metal genres. But then I wouldn't be listening to Alan Johannes who put out one of the best records I've ever heard this year, or I guess it's last year now. His album Hum is fucking incredible, incredible. And if I was sticking to genres, I wouldn't be listening to it. I'm very happy to both listen and work across a spectrum.

Speaker 1 (01:04:30):

And do you see it as a, first of all, if it actually is the way that you say that, not top choice in any of the conversations, but just an option if that is the case. Do you see that as a con?

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):

Well, it would be, yeah. And I think it is true. I don't know to what extent it's true. This isn't like a black or white thing.

Speaker 1 (01:04:50):

That's why I said if,

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):

Yeah, I do think it is true. I don't think anyone says, man, Andrew's the best at this thing, whatever that is. But you can also find something in my discography for anybody from 99 problems to Black Sabbath and everything in the middle. There are classical records I've mixed. There are jazz records I've mixed. And so there's something you can find that's relevant to whatever it is that you do perhaps if you want to go hunting. But I don't know that I've got this kind of recognition of like, oh man, we want this thing. He's the guy. And I'm fine with that because I don't necessarily want to be somebody who has a stamp that they put on everything they do though. Some people say that they can hear my mixes a mile away. So obviously I do have more of a stamp than I think, but I always feel like I'm just mixing what's there and reacting to what I'm hearing and all that. So I would rather be like that. And I'm not going to pretend like I've had a really, really hard time, but I have had some weirdly timed droughts and many of them and lots of them for multiple months. So it's weird and I attribute it slightly to that maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:06:04):

Do you ever get a feeling in a drought like the fear that maybe it is over? Oh,

Speaker 2 (01:06:10):

Of course.

Speaker 1 (01:06:10):

Yeah, man, it's weird. I've always had that sort of feeling. And even with what we're doing, we just had an amazing year in 2020, and then my thoughts aren't, fuck yeah. Oh no, how the hell am I going to do this again or better? That's where my thoughts go.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):

I mean, that is always, it's a really weird thing to, and this is not in this context necessarily, but the idea that if a company isn't growing, they're dying. That's really weird to me. If you're a physical shop, there's a certain amount of shit you can sell, and if you sell that amount of shit, you're good. And that's not a bad business model to me. I don't need to be mixing more and more and more records every year or even necessarily charging more and more and more for the records I mix every year as you're coming up, there's obviously a trajectory,

Speaker 1 (01:07:04):

But you want your skills to keep developing. So I think the metrics are different. Your metrics are, well, obviously you have to be getting work, but even if there's X amount of work you can take per year, you can't take more because how could you, there's not time still. I think you have a metric, whether it's a hard metric, like an actual number, whatever, there's a certain skill that you're trying to grow, certain ability that you're always working at. So there is something you're trying to get more of

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):

To suck less. I mean, there's no question about that.

Speaker 1 (01:07:39):

So there you go. It's the same thing.

Speaker 2 (01:07:41):

Yeah, yeah. But it's never in terms of volume of work or anything like that, like me not having work, it makes me think like, wow, maybe people are going to be not hiring me anymore. But it doesn't make me think like, wow, I guess I'm just a really shitty mixer at the moment in my own head is where I can assess that. But also, and I think maybe more as a producer, but certainly as a mixer as well, sometimes you're just out of style because it's always your opinion and maybe nobody else likes what you like anymore. And that can happen. Rick Rubin's genius is he likes what other people like Garth Brooks, that guy at one point I had a very funny conversation with Don was who was working with him, and this is when he was going to make the, I can't remember what was his alter ego?

(01:08:31):

Chris Gaines? Yeah, Chris Gaines. So he wanted to make that record. It was really important to him creatively, but the sort of concept was like, dude, your fan base is so big that if you alienate all of them, there aren't enough people left in the world to make up another fan base that big. He'd actually gotten more than half the people in the world to buy his records, which wasn't strictly true. It was a lot of people, but you need to assess where you are in the rest of the world in terms of if your taste lines up with theirs. But that also isn't a reason to assess your own worth just based on what other people say about it. Because like we're saying before, there's no right answer. It's all unknowable. So you have to love what you're doing even though you're just doing it to other people's records as much as an artist needs to love the records they're making.

Speaker 1 (01:09:19):

So do you love what you're doing?

Speaker 2 (01:09:20):

I don't think I'm very good at it, but yeah, every once in a while I think, holy shit, I made that thing feel like that. Yeah, that's still super exciting to me.

Speaker 1 (01:09:28):

Is it one of those things where that one time once in a blue moon where you get that feeling makes all the times where you don't quite reach that height worth it?

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):

Yeah, I mean, and the other thing is like I said before, if you don't achieve what you feel you need to achieve, well you can't send the mix. So I always end up somewhere that I actually think works for the song. So it's not like, man failed again, let's send the mix and see what happens. Okay, makes sense. You do have to get to the point where you're more than happy for them to listen to it. And sometimes it's just like, I think this is as far as I can get. I've fixed all the obvious stuff and the song plays itself, and now I need their input because I really don't know how far this is supposed to go or something like that. It can be nebulous and weird, but it's never like, wow, I give up and have a listen to this. So

Speaker 1 (01:10:23):

Just out of curiosity, like you said, you've worked on a lot of different kind of stuff and everything ranging from Ade, Metallica, and those are some pretty high pressure artists. I think at least from the outside it sure seems that way, that kind of pressures, that's something that you had to learn how to deal with or do you think you're naturally suited for it? Because I think a lot of people would crack under the pressure even if the job is the same, it's just doing what you do. There's all this extra stuff that comes with mega stars that yet to be able to not collapse under the weight of,

Speaker 2 (01:11:05):

Fortunately most people when they get slightly successful, calm down. So someone starting out can be really difficult sometimes or whatever. But I don't know. Different people are different and there are definitely some people who are more, I don't even know what the words are, just more difficult to deal with. But in general, when you've had some sort of success, you're comfortable enough in your own skin that you're there to make a record, you are working. And so the work really is the same. And I think I've always had this weird ability to not freak out because I'm working with someone famous or someone I absolutely love. And I mean, I have super fanboy moments where I cannot believe I'm in the room with some of these people, but the interaction immediately becomes very natural human to human. And I think they appreciate that and that serves me well. Did

Speaker 1 (01:12:06):

It take a while to calm yourself down or were you always calm, like you said, with people who become successful, get calm? Is that something that you went through?

Speaker 2 (01:12:16):

Well, I mean, I would always be incredibly nervous going into a session. Is it all going to come apart at the seams? Am I going to get fired in all the usual stuff that you have going in? But I think I've just always been able to just not let that out because the thing is, it's like if you say something mean to somebody in the moment, you really wanted to say it right and it makes you feel better, but you think about, well, what's the situation going to be? What's the aftermath of me saying this if I actually say it? Have I just derailed the entire day, the entire project? Like everything. And this obviously goes outside of the studios, it's just interpersonal relationships. So I think I've always been very good and very fast at saying, wow, if I go through with what's about to come out of my mouth that's going to fuck things up, don't do it.

(01:13:15):

So it makes me swallow things and maybe that's not good, and maybe some of this should be let out and I'm probably need therapy. But the corollary to that is I also just treat people like normal people. I mean, really early on in my career I did a Michael Jackson tour and a Michael Jackson record, and we used to just hang out and it wasn't like I'm talking to him about, Hey man, what do you get up to outside of the studio and what's going on with this? But while we're in the studio, we're in there to make a record and he's super talented and a really funny guy, and we would just hang out and there was no sense of like, man, I got to treat this person differently. And some people want to be treated differently. So you do it and it's just obvious like, okay, I need to defer, don't make eye contact, but I can't even think of somebody I wasn't supposed to make eye contact with. That hasn't come up. So it's the ability to just have normal interactions with people. It normalizes the situation in the studio, and then they can be artists or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:14:16):

And I'm sure they really appreciate that too.

Speaker 2 (01:14:19):

I think so. And I think sometimes they don't even really notice it. Sometimes you can tell like, wow, that doesn't happen very often. But what it also lets you do is it's like having the lines at the beginning of the email that say, wow, man, this mix is fucking awesome, but here's what we got to do. It means that while recording background vocals with Michael, and this didn't happen often because he's fucking machine and an amazing singer, but you could say, Hey, let's do that one again. And there was no, why are we doing that one again? I think that was, and sometimes he'd say, Nope, that was great. Okay, cool. And sometimes you're just like, great Leo, let's do it again. So it lets you have that level of trust that you've got to have to be assessing someone's performance in a session. And if you're having a weird personal relationship with a person, how can you tell them like, wow, we need to do it again. Which then goes back to the do you tell them in a jokey way or a serious way or whatever, you got to read the room, but you're not even in a position to do it if you haven't set up for the moment in this studio. We are peers.

Speaker 1 (01:15:29):

That trust that you just mentioned I think is something that really gets in the way for people who are first starting. We get a lot of comments in the community or emails or questions to the podcast where people will say that, how do they get an artist to actually take their ideas seriously or to listen to them? And my thoughts are always, well, what's happening is with some degree of certainty, I could be wrong, but they don't trust you yet. That's what's going on. For whatever reason, it could be that you don't have enough of a track record. You could just be the convenient choice locally, but they didn't, if they had more money and could travel, they'd record with someone else. It could be any number of things. Maybe you vibe 'em out, who knows, but for whatever reason, they don't trust you and you need to figure out a way to establish that trust so that they will be open to hearing your idea. And that's all it is in my opinion. What do you think?

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):

Absolutely. And the best way to try and establish the trust is to be ridiculously competent and not talk about it.

Speaker 1 (01:16:40):

Fair enough. Just do it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:42):

Just do it. Yeah. You can't convince people to trust you. They've got to trust you because they trust you because of what you're doing.

Speaker 1 (01:16:49):

I mean, I'm sure that at this point in your career, people trust you because of your track record and your reputation, like who you are and what you bring to the table. So that's not an issue. But at the earlier points in your career, how did you go about establishing that? Because there had to be a point where people didn't know who you were and didn't trust you yet,

Speaker 2 (01:17:09):

Right? Well, and I made sure that I was ridiculously competent, that I knew the hell out of every piece of gear I was going to be using that day, that I knew what I would do in certain situations so that if they came up, you're always thinking ahead. It's like being a really good assistant, which that doesn't really happen in the world anymore, but that was always the sign of a great assistant is they were always doing the thing you were about to ask them to do because they're seeing what's going on and what's going to happen next. So it's trying to predict the future and things while reading people, but another thing that happens when you're young, when it doesn't even have to be young, but when you're starting with this, you're so excited about your ideas that you think every one of your ideas is amazing, and why wouldn't they want to do it?

(01:17:53):

And it's because you start out always wanting to make your record, just like a band making their first record is recording the songs they've had their entire lives to write up to that point, you working on that record, now you've got a chance to give out every idea that you've had in your entire life up to that point about what should happen during a guitar overdub or what that part should be like, or the background vocals or which percussion to use. And so it's really hard at the very beginning to realize that, hold on a second, wait, that's just my idea. But the way you have to do it, I don't even know how to get this into words, is you've got to in your own mind understand a hundred percent what the artist's context is and what it is they're trying to do. Because then any ideas that occur to you are in service of what they're trying to do, not some external thing.

(01:18:51):

Now it could be some idea they never would've thought of. That's absolutely crazy, will be absolute genius. Putting mariachi horns on a metal song could be the best thing ever. And then you end up being the Bronx. So mariachi and making a bunch of records that way, but having a really off the wall idea can be amazing, but it has to be within the context of, I think this would make what you are already trying to do work. And when you start off, it's hard to differentiate the ideas you're having that are serving their art and the ideas you're having just because you're having ideas.

Speaker 1 (01:19:27):

I was doing an episode with a Will Putney who is a phenomenal metal mixer producer, I think one of the best. And we're talking about how he got to where he got and what it takes to really do it well in his opinion and how he gets the trust of so many of these bands. And one of his answers, there's a lot to it, but was understanding where they fit in culturally and contextually. So exactly what they're trying to do and where it fits in as a whole to the genre because that actually matters. It matters in the metal world. And so understanding the culture and the context behind everything they're trying to do makes it to where he can make appropriate suggestions that really do make sense. And that's part of what helps the trust. I feel like that's kind of what you're saying.

Speaker 2 (01:20:24):

Yeah, exactly. But it's their context.

Speaker 1 (01:20:27):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:20:28):

Because otherwise system of a down and Gogo bordello don't exist because their context is nothing like any other bands that have ever existed on the planet. And so that's important. And yes, so absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:20:42):

One last thing and then I have some questions from the audience if you don't mind, but I want to talk about getting fired because that's something that crushes people when they're not used to it. I mean it always sucks, right? But I think that one of the things that you have to get used to in music is that you're going to get punched in the face a few times. It's going to happen. The world is going to knock you down, kick you in the stomach, and then you have to get up and just keep going. I don't know a single person who has a long career who hasn't had something fall apart, get fired or get dropped or get screwed, whatever. If you're around long enough, shit happens and you have to get through those. I call them the great filters. You have to get through those. How did you learn to deal with getting fired, for instance?

Speaker 2 (01:21:35):

I'm really bad at it. I mean, I think what I said before where I can remember every time I failed in public since I was four years old is not an exaggeration. I can relive all those moments and feel terrible about 'em right now for you. That's easy for me to do. I can too. I think the key is, look, it's always about what goes into the external world. Just like I was talking about, you think of something to say, but you've got to think about, well, what's the universe going to be like if I say that out loud? Is everything still going to be cool? So then you do the exact same thing when you get fired, it's like, well, okay, but in the course of my entire life, this is something that really, really sucks and I hate it, but what can I do about it?

(01:22:20):

And the answer usually is nothing. So therefore don't do anything about it. Just try and figure out why it happened. And if you really feel like it happened for reasons that have nothing to do with you, then you just try and get over it. And that's different how they can surmount these things. But the biggest thing is you've got to assess it and just say, was it me? And if it was me, obviously I've got something to learn here because this needs to not happen again. And the other thing is I probably more than half of the time when I'm not finishing a project, it's actually a relief if you think about it. You never want to be fired, but the situation must've been pretty bad. You don't really want to stay in that situation anyway. So as much as it could be that the money is really going to be sorely missed or something like that in the grand scheme of things, if it was miserable, then you're better off out anyway. So there's always a way to talk yourself into it not being quite as bad as it seems. I think.

Speaker 1 (01:23:24):

I mean it doesn't have to be as bad as it seems, but I think a lot of the times we make things as bad as we think they should be, but they don't have to be

Speaker 2 (01:23:34):

Just in terms of how humans work. Two things that are really important because I will spiral on negative things endlessly if allowed to. So two just quick tips is one is do some sort of mindfulness. It doesn't matter what it is, if it's just you sit there and you count as you breathe or you actually do meditation or whatever, that will just break the cycle. So if you're in a death spiral, do some sort of mindfulness and it makes your brain stop cycling on the thing and it only takes five, 10 minutes, realize that everything in your body is a two-way system. So when you're feeling really put upon and threatened, you curl up in a ball. The corollary to that is if you stand up straight, you can't actually feel threatened and scared. It's impossible. Physiologically, your body won't let you chemically stuff changes.

(01:24:31):

So if you're finding that you're really, really tense and you're clenching your jaw and your hands and you're all hunched over, sit up straight unclench and you will feel better. It's impossible not to. Now, it may not last very long, but that's okay. But you can actually do these weird physical feedback loop things to your own body just to get through the day. If something is making you feel horrible in a session or in life, whatever, but you've got to get through it, then little things like that can actually make you feel better in the moment and are a big deal. And the other thing is one of my favorite sayings, I think the first time I ever heard it was Tom del Getty talking about a record he was working on. I don't even remember what it was, but it was like the only way out is through. You can't sit there complaining and hope it's going to change it, but if you want to get out of it, finish what it is, get through it. So those three things will get you through pretty much anything.

Speaker 1 (01:25:28):

It's interesting what you said about the feedback loop and the mindfulness and it not lasting. I think where a lot of people get those things wrong is they're expecting it to be like a drug they take that lasts, but more than anything, it's about interrupting some pattern. And if you take those five, 10 minutes and interrupt that pattern, maybe the first time you do it, it won't last very long, maybe the second time. But if you get in the habit of doing that, you'll get in the habit of interrupting the patterns and forget about whatever you're stressing about and just go on with your day. That's what I've noticed happens when I do it is maybe it's not like taking a Xanax or something, which you feel it's more like it calms you down a little and it allows your brain to focus on something else and then you forget about it.

Speaker 2 (01:26:18):

It feels weird because if you're so used to always just obsessing and obsessing and obsessing to do something that's a bit alien to you and realize at the end of it, wow, I'm not obsessing, it's surreal to the point where you almost make yourself start obsessing again because like, man, this is unnatural. Got

Speaker 1 (01:26:35):

To go back to the default. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:26:37):

Exactly. And I'm not very good at it and there are lots of different ways you can do it. The idea of spending money to learn transcendental meditation bugs me. So I've never dealt with that one, but apparently that's amazing. But that's 20 minutes twice a day from what I've heard. So that's enough once you get good at it to kind of keep everything in perspective. But all it is is just a way to get your brain to shut the fuck up so you can reassess some things.

Speaker 1 (01:27:03):

Yes. Alright, I have a couple questions from listeners. They were very excited that you were coming on, by the way, from Omic. How do you know how much low end you need in a mix?

Speaker 2 (01:27:18):

I am a huge fan of low end. I love low end, but you just know from listening because too much low end will make a song feel heavy and it could be heavy in a really good way, in a just way. Or it could be like, man, this just feels slow and I'm not getting the fact that lots of things in it are double time or whatever it is. So I don't know how to answer that question other than I just react to it and it's like the song doesn't feel right and I then can zone in and say, well, I think it doesn't feel right because of the kick or the bass or whatever it is that's really messing up down there in the low end. But it's a feel thing, but it'll be about sort of tempo and the lightness. One of the mixed comments I'd get from Rick Rubin a lot when I was mixing form was it needs to be lighter on its feet, that sort of thing. And low end will be the thing that will keep it from doing that generally, but you've just got to learn to listen to the sort of rhythmic drive of the song and know how much low end it can take before you're destroying that, I suppose.

Speaker 1 (01:28:23):

Do you believe that part of being a mixer or producer is developing your tastes at the end of the day? That is kind of what you're getting hired for because I remember you said earlier that the genius of Rick Rubin is that his opinions of things line up with the public, so his tastes essentially. So do you think that maybe that's part of it, your tastes for low end have to just be developed a certain way,

Speaker 2 (01:28:49):

Like we talked about before, and I could answer every question this way and everyone would hate me, but it only matters how you feel when you listen to it coming out of the speakers and that's it. So how much low end I need is exactly the amount of low end that makes me feel the way I want to feel when I hear it. It's a really shitty no answer. It's the truth, but it is actually the truth. But the mechanism is that you react emotionally and then you fix things technologically. It's all about going back to the tools and am I going to compress distort eq, whatever. Those are the things you learn as you do it, but it is all about how you react emotionally when you hear it. It's funny,

Speaker 1 (01:29:29):

You made me think of something really, the answer to just about every question we ever get would make people hate us because the answer is it depends. I mean, that's the truth for just about every question and audio is it depends. And music, it depends. It really does. But you can't really give that answer.

Speaker 2 (01:29:49):

No. You got to help people figure out how to figure out that. It depends. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (01:29:53):

Exactly. So alright, question from Colton Madigan, which is, Hey Andrew, is it true that you used to put a mattress behind you while you were mixing on monitors as a room treatment?

Speaker 2 (01:30:05):

No, I've never actually done it, but I think I've suggested it many times for people asking about how do I set up a room to mix at home? And the reasoning for it is that everybody's got a mattress in a bedroom usually. Well not everybody, but it's just a great huge sound absorbing thing that you can put at an angle to break up a rectangular room. So I haven't done it because the way all the rooms I've had, they've always been at home, they've never been professionally acoustically designed or whatever, but they're always just set up as much like a living room as you could have. They're just dead. I just want to hear the speakers not koic chamber uncomfortable, but I don't want the sound of the room to have anything to do with my mixing.

Speaker 1 (01:30:49):

Not hear your heartbeat and the speakers. Just the speakers.

Speaker 2 (01:30:53):

Yeah, exactly. So that's the general thing. But yeah, whatever you can do to just break up the acoustics of your room will make the room sound better. So a bookshelf full of books, don't line up the spines, just push 'em randomly. Bookshelf full of records is great. They're all diffusers. They all make the room sound better and they all break up the standing waves.

Speaker 1 (01:31:15):

Awesome. Alright, Brad Olis says, hi Andrew. I've tried your rear bus technique on a few of my mixes to my ears. There's always a point where it makes the mix sound better. Not always the same amount every time, but it's there. So why shouldn't I always use this technique and should I set this up early and mix into it top down style or add it after getting my initial balance?

Speaker 2 (01:31:38):

It depends. No, I'm not saying that I have used it on every single mix I've done for the last 20 years, probably some version of it. I'm actually using less and less and less of it now to the point where there have been a couple of mixes recently where I haven't used it at all. So for people who don't know, it's just shared parallel compression. It's like an extra mixed bus, but the drums aren't in it and sometimes the bass isn't in it either, but it's everything else into a stereo compressor and then you blend that in. There's no reason to use it or not to use it at all. Some people hate it. The trade-off is you're reducing your dynamic range, which when you say that out loud now people say, oh my god, that's horrible. Don't reduce your dynamic range. Well bullshit. You need to reduce your dynamic range to fit the mix through a hole so you can print the mix.

(01:32:28):

That's just it. That's what record making is, is making perceived dynamic range, but actually having it not have 120 DB dynamic range because no one ever would be able to listen to your mixes. So anyway, you can reduce it by compressing it and that takes the loud stuff and turns it down and leaves the quiet stuff alone. Or you can parallel compress, which basically takes the quieter stuff and turns it up, but leaves the peak sounding natural. I personally react to that better. I like the natural uncompressed peaks of things to be there, especially on drums and vocals. It's more exciting to me and more natural. I connect with it better. But the more parallel stuff you bring in, the messier the mix will get and the less room there is around other things, like the instruments don't have their own space. You just have this wall, which can be exciting but can also be really dense and horrible.

(01:33:22):

So that's the trade-off between it. But I would say have it in from the very beginning, just like bus compression. Why would you mix to the point where you're happy and then completely change it? That's crazy to me. What's so great about working in the box and having a template is my console has a million pieces of gear in it that I can use or not use, but they're always there ready to be used so I can hear them immediately. So my mix is my, my mix from start to finish, not I get it to a certain point now I introduce something, then I introduce something else that would be crazy. I would just end up redoing everything.

Speaker 1 (01:34:00):

Kind of makes no sense, does it?

Speaker 2 (01:34:02):

Yeah. So I think almost I save a couple of things on my mix bus as they're like doggy treats for later. I know whenever I pop this EQ in, it's a curve that I almost always want and I know it's coming, but I'm going to work a little harder if I don't have it while I'm getting the general mix together. But when the mix is sort of halfway through and I'm feeling like, oh, I'm struggling, like, oh, I can put in the eq, that'll be great. And so I do that and yeah, that's great. And now I'm inspired to move a little bit further so you can save some things, but not things that are going to structurally change your mix. You absolutely need pretty much any dynamics processing at least there from the very beginning because otherwise everything's going to change when you put it in.

Speaker 1 (01:34:49):

Got it. Question for Mark McCarran. Hey Andrew, when mixing in the box, what techniques do you use to get such a warm and natural saturation in your mixes? Thanks for all the amazing work.

Speaker 2 (01:34:59):

Thank you. I saturate things. I mean, that's it. When I did my omnichannel channel strip with waves, I probably spent as much time on the little preamp, one knob three type saturation thing as I did on anything else listening to different levels of different harmonics. And the heavy one is a clipper and we spent forever doing that. And it's actually two clippers. It's a dual stage clipper. I couldn't get the knee of it right, didn't sound right to me until we used two clippers in a row. So I used that. I use the omnichannel almost all the time. Why would you build a channel strip that doesn't do almost everything you need? But I would say 80% of the time all I do is turn up that preamp knob and select one of the three types of saturation. So when you're mixing analog, you can't avoid that saturation. You just get it. Every single analog box in the world has some distortion, whether it's just a transformer, whatever it is, there's some harmonic distortion that happens in it. Whereas in the digital domain, you don't get it unless you ask for it, which is amazing. You've got control over it so you don't have to have it just because you want to compress something. But I have lots and lots of little bits of saturation all over the mix. Almost every track ends up with some.

Speaker 1 (01:36:20):

Got it. Question from John Silver when using waves L one or L two, why do you have dithering activated?

Speaker 2 (01:36:26):

Well, you don't, unless it's the very last thing on your mix period. And there's no reason to turn dither on unless you're about to go through a D to a. That's it. So when you do the math, if you're in pro tools, I think all of them now it's 56 bit float or something like that, maybe it's 64 bit float as you do the math, which means the precision is insane. If you dither, what dither is, is its rounding. It does it in a really bizarre way by inserting noise that's one half of a bit of the bit that you're trying to do. So it randomizes the way it rounds things off, but it basically is just rounding off the math. So don't ever have dither on unless it's the very last stage because what you're doing is you're rounding off numbers that you're then going to do more math with, so now you're less accurate. So don't put any dither on except the last limiter of your mix. And even that, if you're printing 32 bit float so that you can adjust the volume later on in mastering or whatever. And some mastering engineers will do that because you can recover the peaks. The whole waveform is there. If you turn dither on there, you've just destroyed that. And you might as well print 24 bit because it is dithering it down to a 24 bit file. So no dither unless you're printing to a fixed bit depth file. And it's the last thing

Speaker 1 (01:37:56):

Matt Grow is wondering how do you approach overcoming plateaus if or when they show up in your engineering journey? Do you have a systematic approach to breaking them?

Speaker 2 (01:38:06):

Not really. I mean, things change all the time. My template, I re-save it at least once a month, and so things are constantly moving and every once in a while the plateau will be something specific. If he means career wise, then I think it's like you do some visualization. Well, okay, my career kind of sucks right now. What is it I actually want to do? And think of something really specific and then go after that and not in some spiritual visualization way, just in a define your goals way and then go and achieve the goal. I want to mix. Okay, great, now you got to go find stuff to mix. I want to track more. Great. Now you got to go find some bands. It gives you action items you can do. In terms of the mixing thing, it would be very specific like, wow, I cannot get a drum sound anymore. Well, obviously I need to go back and completely redo my template for all my parallel drum stuff because none of it's working anymore. So that's a task and I do it. So I think with anything, it's really, it's defining a task that will most likely help change what's going on

Speaker 1 (01:39:15):

About visualizing things. I really do feel like ask the right questions, get the right answers. If you're in a spot that you don't know, you don't know how to get out of it, you're not asking the right questions. If you ask the right questions, you'll most likely figure out a solution.

Speaker 2 (01:39:32):

Yeah, or at least step one.

Speaker 1 (01:39:34):

Step one. Exactly. Yes, exactly. It gets you in motion. And I find that just getting going, really that mental exercise that you're suggesting, really, you don't have to do it the whole time really. It just is a momentum starter. And once you have the momentum, you're good.

Speaker 2 (01:39:51):

Look, I think anybody who's got kids has seen them. Or you'll remember when there was some big project you had to do for school and you froze and you just didn't do it. You never started because it looked like a big thing. And you can't do a big thing, but you can't. Nobody can do a big thing all at once. There's always step one. So yeah, define step one and do that. Alright,

Speaker 1 (01:40:15):

Question. And I'm sorry if I fuck this name up. Ka says I'll do a different question than most people here. Andrew, can you talk about the death magnetic mixing sessions? What was your approach on this?

Speaker 2 (01:40:31):

I mean it was in some ways no different from any other record. I'm just trying to make it the most exciting thing I've ever done. And that record was really aggressive. Yeah, there wasn't anything in particular about that. I mean, obviously when you're working with a band that's got a history, you have to be true to the history. So like the kick drum, like we mentioned before, that's got to be the Metallica kick drum. So in a way like, whoa, that's really easy. We've answered the question about the kick drum and everything else has got to work with that kick drum. Cool. So things like that are defined for you going in. So that's nothing really I had to do differently. You just have to be aware of it. And if this is a way to figure out, well, why did some of the things happen that people say happened and why is it so loud or whatever, that's not something I'm really going to talk about. My line is I won the loudness war, so now it's over. But there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes. What

Speaker 1 (01:41:28):

I think more than anything, people just love Metallica. So anything they can find out about working with Metallica is awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:41:35):

Most Metallica fans absolutely hate every single record since Ride The Lightning. I mean, that's it. They haven't done anything good since then. They hate it. But then by the time the next record comes out, they hate that record, but they love the other record. And Metallica, I mean, look from the outside you could say, oh, they've just been doing the same thing their whole career as they have not, they move. They've gone in a lot of journeys within what it is that they do. And I think that death magnetic, what Rick does as a producer a lot of times if he's working with an established band is to try to recapture whatever was super exciting about their early stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:42:14):

What was cool about death Magnetic, I thought.

Speaker 2 (01:42:16):

And that's exactly what was cool about it. So for me it was just trying to achieve the frenetic fucking rip your face off energy all the way through. When you've got a nine and a half minute song that never stops, it can never stop. You can never let your guard down and kind of like, oh, cool, we're at this section that can just play. Like, no, I got to get through there and I've got to hear everything Robert's doing on the bass. There are a couple of things he's doing that really support the guitars and bring those up. So the details on those mixes were very well looked after on everything they had to be.

Speaker 1 (01:42:57):

When you're working with an artist like that, I mean, is it the same as what you said with Michael Jackson when you're in the room, you're just in the room doing your job, you don't feel the weight of the Metallica machine?

Speaker 2 (01:43:08):

No. I mean obviously you do because it's like you're seeing people in real life that you have not seen in real life, but you've seen them a million times. So yeah, there's always that kind of sir reality is that the thing?

Speaker 1 (01:43:20):

I've never heard Sir Surreality, but I know what it means.

Speaker 2 (01:43:23):

I like it. You figure that's got to be a word.

Speaker 1 (01:43:26):

Let's see. No, it is. Is reality a word? The state of being incongruous or surreal? The reality of the crash scene dawned upon him only when he saw a holy figure in the smoke that which is surreal. A surreal, okay. Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:43:38):

So the surreality of being in the room with those guys is something you got to get used to. And I didn't track on that record, so I didn't have the three months or however long they spent recording to get used to it the way Greg Fiman did. But obviously he had that when he started recording the record. But while you're doing your job, you're just doing your job and they're giving you mixed notes. There's no difference. They're not saying, how could the kick drum be like that? Don't you know who I am? Dude? Why is the kick drum getting quieter in that breakdown? Like, oh, well, I thought the drum kit would come. No, no, no, no, no. It's supposed to stay just as strong as the rest of the song. Oh, okay, cool, great. Now I know that and I can go do that. And it's just, yeah, the job is different every time, but it's the same job.

Speaker 1 (01:44:23):

Makes sense. So John Silver says, what's the reason you started to mix exclusively on the Sony HDR seven five oh six headphones? Is there something you always listen for and are careful about? And also, are you calibrating the headphones to have a flat frequency response or do you know them really well to have everything translate in the way you picture it?

Speaker 2 (01:44:43):

Yeah, so I chose them because I owned them seriously. I've always liked them in the studio because they're bright, they're comfortable, they are over ear, but they're lightweight. So drummers can hear the click without having to crank it up so much. It's in the overheads, same piano players and vocalists. You don't have click bleed. It's easy for people to hear themselves. I hate speaker correction software. It just always sounds weird to me. So while it's really good now I've tried the sonar work stuff and yes, it made it a flat response, but I couldn't work it just not for you. Yeah, but it's purely a personal choice for me. The Sonys, I can hear sub on 'em, I can hear everything. But I started using them because I had them with me and I needed to work on some mixes and I had my laptop and a pair of headphones and there you go. I've just gotten used to them.

Speaker 1 (01:45:39):

Isn't it funny how really at the end of the day, all this expensive gear, all these crazy room treatments, all the crazy shit, but anyone who knows how to mix could just have a pair of headphones and a laptop and be perfectly fine.

Speaker 2 (01:45:56):

Yeah, and I think another thing is the corollary to that is even if you have an amazing set of speakers and things like that, since I've been coding for the last year, for the first time in my life, I've been sitting in front of a computer, but I can actually listen to music. I'm not working on someone else's music, which is a really weird thing for me, for everybody else on the planet that's like normal life. They have music on while they do their work. We've never done that, ever. So I've been listening to a lot of just Spotify just put it on, I'm not going to talk about MP threes versus whatever. I'm just like got some records on listen, like a listener writing code, and they're playing on the IMAX speakers. I'm not bothering to pump it through because I don't want to listen.

(01:46:38):

I just want to have it on. And it's like, oh, I can have a record on that. Someone told me I should check out, and if it grabs my ear, then I know, oh man, I got to go listen to this again later. But for now, just check it out. Anyway, the point is, every once in a while some stuff would come on. That would just sound amazing. And the iMac is not a great sounding computer. It's not terrible, but it's not like, wow, that's amazing. But things would come on Spotify that just sounded incredible. And then after it happened a few times, I thought, hold on a second. And I went and let me listen on my headphones, which I mix on all the time. Okay, now let me listen on my tan noise. Okay. Those things sound incredible everywhere. There were a couple of things that sounded amazing on the iMac and sounded bad everywhere else, but only a couple of times did that happen.

(01:47:24):

That's just some weird aberration. So anyway, the concept then becomes, if it's a great mix, it is great everywhere. It isn't just great on good speakers. It doesn't mean you've mixed four MP three or mixing four bad playback systems is the stupidest thing I could ever think of trying to do because you can't go to everybody's house. But now I will actually use my IMAX speakers as a place to check my mixes because sometimes you put it up there and that's not good. And I know for a fact if it's not good there, it's not a great mix because I've empirically checked that on other people's great mixes back in black will sound good anywhere. Sure

Speaker 1 (01:48:10):

Will. Okay. Last question. This is from JC Gillard. How do you keep a good gain staging with parallel processing? Do you use post or pre fader to send your signal to app parallel bus and why? Thank you. Big fan of your work.

Speaker 2 (01:48:24):

Thanks very much. The gain staging thing as like a checking numbers, I don't do that at all. Not even a tiny bit. Like the whole plugins are meant to work at certain levels is absolute ridiculous garbage. Unless it's a dynamics processor that has a threshold, then obviously it's meant to work with the audio versus the threshold level having something to do with each other, right? I mean, that's just the way it works. But when you're into floating point math, you can't clip an eq. It's impossible unless there's dither or some saturation or some modeling thing that is clipping. If you're just doing straight digital eq, it can't clip. You can always turn it down later. So anyway, that said, the way I set my sessions up is all of the sends to parallel processing are post fader with the fader at zero and following the main pan because I want an exact copy of what's going to my mix bus to go to the parallel bus, because otherwise you get into these really crazy things where it could be panned one way going to the parallel bus, but then you're just rearranging the guitars a little bit like, no man, let me try that acoustic on the other side, but it doesn't move.

(01:49:40):

It's kind of moved. But the parallel version is still on the left. So I always have them post fader following main pan. So whatever I do to the balance within the drum kit or the balance within the guitar mics or balance of guitars versus guitars, all of that then cascades down into all the parallel stuff. So if I turn down the guitar here, it's down in every single parallel process exactly like you would a reverb. 90% of the time. You don't want to turn the vocal down, but have the send to the reverb be exactly the same unless you're doing an effect where you end up with just reverb. Right. So that's the way I structure everything. Then I work in pro tools and the combination of VCAs and master faders as ways to either block turn up and down masses of source tracks, but keeping all the relative balance the same or being able to reach inside the mixer and do some of that gain structure stuff I was talking about. If the processing has made something crazy loud with a master fader, you actually reach inside the mixer and turn it back down before it goes off into the rest of the mixer. So a combination of ECAs and master faders is how I do it, but I do it, it's all by ear.

(01:50:53):

When you've used something like the rear bus, which for me it's just 2 11 76 s, I've been using that in hardware and now in software for 20 years. So I hear when it's too much or too little, but it's also set up with my template that's gotten tweaked and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked over the years that if the level hitting my mix bus is right, then the level hitting the rear bus is right, and all I'm doing is turning up and down the return to see how much of it I want. I'm never looking at it to see how much it's compressing, because since everything is post fader and following pan, everything follows everything. If I turn something up, it's louder everywhere. If I turn everything up or down, it's up or down everywhere, and everything interacts in that way, and there's always just this kind of sweet spot and the sweet spot's big. It's a couple of db. Either way, it's not like, oh my God, that's perfect. Don't touch it. It's just like, wow, I'm beating the shit out of something and I've got one VCA that turns down every single audio track in the session. Pull that down to db. Like, oh, okay. Cool. Now I'm good.

Speaker 1 (01:51:56):

Awesome. Well, Andrew, thank you very much for taking the time. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (01:52:03):

Excellent. Thanks so much for having me. This is great.

Speaker 1 (01:52:05):

Anytime. 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 a 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.