Category Archives for "podcast"

My guest today is Matt Boudreau, a producer, recording, mixing, and mastering engineer from San Francisco. Matt is also the host of a fantastic podcast that you should be listening to called, Working Class Audio where he interviews many top studio professionals.

His 34 year career path started out in New Mexico before moving to San Francisco in the 80s as a drummer in the bands The Sextants and Seven Day Diary, where he was first introduced to making records with great producer/engineers like Larry Hirsch, Joe Chicarelli and Gil Norton sparking his interest in recording.

In 1994 Matt began his journey to the "other side of the glass" when it came time to trade in his drum sticks for faders. And since then he has worked with a great number of artists in the studio including: Steve Earl, Brett Dennen, Matchbox 20, Shawn Colvin, the BoDeans, The Shins, Death Cab for Cutie, Tori Amos, Florence + The Machine, World Party, Thomas Dolby, The Jayhawks, Ziggy Marley, The Samples, Joan Osborne, Civil Wars, Sarah Bareilles, and George Thorogood to name just some of the credits. Wow!

And on his podcast Working Class Audio you can find all sorts of great episodes with stellar guests like: Dave Fridmann, Niko Bolas, Al Schmitt, Brian McTear, Jim Scott, Larry Crane, F Reid Shippen, Eric Valentine, Kim Rosen, Warren Huart, Joe Barresi, Michael Beinhorn, Sylvia Massey, and Vance Powell. And those are just some of the past guests.

Though we’ve only just met, I am psyched to have my “brother from another podcast” on the show today.

Working Class Audio

I think when you’re mentally present and you’re not distracted by the outside forces of money or personal strife or relationship strife. When you have control over the outside things that are very important, I think it allows you to relax in the studio and pay close attention to what’s in front of you rather than being like, oh god as soon as I get done with this session I have to go and make a credit card payment so they don’t ding my credit report. It’s small weird details like that I think that can play people and they don’t really think about it too much because it’s just a part of their day to day life. Something on the outside, some external force that is creeping into your mind as you're doing the session, I think it manifests itself through you and can affect the people in your session because you behave in a particular way. When you remove those things or have those things in check, you can be relaxed, you can be yourself, and you can get out of your own way and let things happen naturally. When that happens, I think that people get the best of you ,and you help bring out the best in others and it just becomes a reciprocal thing where everybody kind of builds up a teamwork kind of fashion that allows us to make great records

Are there Typical Routines that Allow you to get in the Mindset?

On a day to day level long ago I learned to keep a calendar. I’m kind of a late bloomer and for some of these things I think details like that. Details like that didn’t creep up into my life until I realized I had to get my shit together, so keeping a calendar and knowing what’s going on in your life, keeping your finances in order so you don’t stress about that and those are the bigger picture things. On the small detail level before a session I always think through and have conversations with the artists and say okay what is it that you’re trying to achieve? I will go through the instrumentation on paper and layout a potential mic setup just so I am mentally in the space where I get all the technical done beforehand, then when I get into the studio I have a game plan so that we can just play.

What makes a Great Mix?

The great mix is in the ear of the beholder I think because let's face it you play a mix that you think is great that you did for any other engineer, of course they are going to say, “Oh yeah, that’s cool.” Of course they aren’t going to say, “Yeah, I would have done it differently.” So if you take that element out of it and quit trying to mix for other engineers and you just mix for emotion and for what the artists wants, I think that that’s a good start. Too many times, as many of us have done, I’ve focused on the wrong things. You think oh I’m going to do this because all the other engineers are going to like this, well that’s the wrong position to be mixing from.

Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A - There’s technical advice and there’s career advice. I used to work out of this guy’s studio, and old friend Buddy Salmen in San Francisco. I used to bring bands there and record. I remember in my early days there Buddy stand by me and would making these hand gestures telling me about how I should make my mix super deep and super wide.

Q - Q- Share with us a recording tip, hack, or secret sauce.
A- I think for me concentrate on your monitoring set-up. I think that is key. I think that wherever you’re mixing, make sure your monitoring environment is dialed in. These guys I came across, the Sonar Works people, they make a room analyzing plugin combo that allows you to take a room and find out what the strengths and weakness are from an EQ perspective and it creates an inverse EQ curve that’s applied to the back end of your mix to take those anomalies out of your mix that you might be adding to your mix based on a funky room

Q -Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- I’m not a giant audio file person, but I do own a pono player. I was one of the early kickstarter people, I got a Willie Nelson signature pono player. I love bringing that in and make it so that depending on the type of music that we’re doing and the type of band I’m working with, I like it when they show up and I’ve set the mood with some music. Most of the time with rock records and americana records, you can’t go wrong with some old Stones, ya know? People come in and you’ve got that playing and you’ve got things set up and the lights are done the right way and you’ve got the room laid out, people walk in and go, “All right! Let’s go!” They get excited.

Q -Share a favorite software tool for the studio
A- One thing I really rely on in a session is Google Docs, the spreadsheet section. I’ll set up the session in a spreadsheet as far as instruments and what it's miced with, the outboard gear, all of those details and then I pull it up on my phone. So the google spreadsheet along with my phone at a session, especially when it’s just me doing all the setup becomes an indispensable tool.

My guest today is David Kalmusky, a Producer / Guitarist / Engineer / and Mixer. In 2012 David helped design and build Addiction Sound Studios in Nashville TN, along with Engineer / Studio Designer Chris Huston (whose credits include Led Zeppelin and The Who) and studio owner Jonathan Cain of Journey, Bad English, and The Babys. At Addiction Sound David and Jonathan host their shared tracking room, and individual production and mix rooms.

David is deeply involved in the local audio community, hosting Recording Academy, NAAM, and local manufacturer events. And has regularly appeared on top 10 Billboard charts, spanning several genres, including credits on 2 Billboard #1’s. David is also an expert with Pro Tools having worked with the Avid platform since its beginning. So we will dig into some great questions about that too.

His multi platinum, Grammy nominated work, includes Journey, Justin Bieber, Emerson Drive, The Fray, Shawn Mendes, Vince Gill, and John Oates, to name just a few of the hundreds of artists with which David has recorded and toured.

I have known David for years and owe a great deal of my own professional network to the connections that David has helped me create.

I got to do something cool which was co-produce with John Oates, from Hall and Oates, Christmas single with the Time Jumpers. So I got to record a Western swing with an 80s pop singer doing something really cool. It was in the month of July, 100 degrees out, and we had every room full, triple fiddles in here, Vince Gill and Paul Franklin, just every room filled.

I’m working constantly with very young people who haven’t necessarily gotten their break yet. In this town I’ve gotten to work with a young Lennon and Maisy and a very young Hunter Hayes long before he was signed, so I continue to have several people in my life like that as well. That’s the stuff I’m most excited about, the stuff that no one has heard yet and I hope that people do get to hear it. I love getting into a room with an artist who’s just found themselves and getting to make that debut record and get through that process. I think I’m valuable as a mentor and as a producer and an engineer. I don’t always get to do the record either, but anything goes, Nashville is not competitive that way. I don’t mope around going, “Well I developed material with that artist and when they got signed the label put them with another producer,” that’s life. You just stay in the game, keep your head down, and make a lot music.

Working with Jonathan Cain - Recording Journey

The John Cain story is a tremendously long one, but I’ll try to condense it into the fact that I was actually working with his daughter. We were recording vocals together and she had worked with a lot of different people and we just hit it off. He loved the vocal sound we were getting so he decided to come into the studio and check it out. Immediately we had a Bearsville connection, he recorded his first solo record in Bearsville and I explained my father’s history. We were both gearheads and talked about the mic selection for his daughter and why I chose the one I did etc, and he was like, “Man do you want to record the vocals for the Journey Eclipse record?” Kevin Shirley had gotten very, very busy and had basically asked them to record some vocals on their own, so it was just the perfect timing and the perfect Nashville environment and of course I said yes! Eventually became friends with Neal Schon and Arnel Pineda and they came to Nashville and we recorded the vocals in my little studio. The whole time I was looking for a place, John was selling his home in California so we became great friends and would talk about well maybe we should build a studio together. John is not just a rich rockstar that just spends money and has everybody do stuff for him, we would sit around and audition pre-amps together and listen to gear. He’s one of us man, he really is. He is enamoured by engineering and acoustics and the room and we built an echo chamber together. We really became such tremendous friends through making that Journey record together. I ended up taking over recording overdubs, mixing the record, and supervising the mastering of it all with Kevin Shirley’s blessing. Fast forward years later the band flew me to Tokyo and I produced Journey live at Budokan, I did four solo Neal Schon records, three or four solo projects with Jonathan. It sounds like it happened overnight, but it didn’t.

                                            Journey - Eclipse Album

Addiction Sound Studio

I found a property in Berry Hill and called John up and said, “I found a little cottage maybe we could split it.” He said no, I sold my house and studio in California, if we’re doing to do it, let's build our dream studio. We wanted an echo chamber but knew there was no room in the blueprints of this building. One day I was out back and saw the Bobcat tractor start to dig up to pour concrete and they were digging pretty deep, so I sent John a text saying “underground echochamber, speak now or forever hold your peace,” and sure enough the phone rings and he’s like, “Let’s do it!!” So we rebuilt a replica of Abbey Roads Studios echochamber. It’s totally sealed off, it has a manhole, a sewer grate lid. Eventually we want to get a submarine hatch for it.

Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A - The best advice I received is probably what we touched on a little bit.. don’t use all your gear or all your plugins. The other best advice I got was from my dad and that was to stop and listen. Use your ears, not your gear.

Q - Q- Share with us a recording tip, hack, or secret sauce.
A- Have fun and play with some weird, cool, cheap devices. Explore some weird, realtime analog things. You can get a little handheld recorder, bounce a track to it, then put it back into ProTools and line it up as close as you can with all the analog drift that doesn’t allow it to line up and use it as a double, it’s cool! Play with plugins, make your own presets. Don’t use stock reverbs, use them as a starting place and create your own sound. The coolest trick you could ever do is be unique.

Q -Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- My favorite cheap piece of gear I’ve used on every vocal I’ve put out for the past decade the $100 Orban 526A D-esser. It’s my favorite D-esser, it’s very natural and has one knob. You can generally rely on the commonality of choices and wisdom from studios. You see a lot of 1176’s and LA2A’s and they have their place for a reason.

Q -Share a favorite software tool for the studio
A- When it comes to plugins, it’s such an exciting time for audio to have the capability of doing things with look-ahead compression that is impossible to do in the analog world without actually really elaborately delaying tracks for side chain pre-emphasis. Nevertheless some tools that are in the box that are amazing for me is dynamic spectrum mapper, it’s like having a 40,000 multi-band dynamic EQ. For matching vocals and taking the bite out of a vocal, it will take it out of those moments but leave it completely untouched otherwise. The Fab Filter ProQ EQ is one of the greatest surgical and musical EQ’s like all in one thing. I put it across my two mix, it’s always on my two bus and I love it.

My guest today is Larry Crane, editor and founder of Tape Op Magazine (started in 1996). He is also owner of Portland’s Jackpot! Recording Studio (since 1997).

Larry is a freelance producer/engineer who’s worked nationwide, and is also the archivist for the Estate of Elliott Smith. His career has taken him down many paths working as a record label owner, radio station music director, DJ, record distributor in sales, freelance music journalist, book editor, and bass player playing in bands since 1984, including Elephant Factory, Vomit Launch and the Sunbirds.

He's spoken on and moderated panels about recording for TapeOpCon, SXSW, NXNW, NARAS, AES, and CMJ. And has worked with many artists including Sleater-Kinney, The Decemberists, Jenny Lewis, M. Ward, Go-Betweens, Elliott Smith, Stephen Malkmus, Quasi, David J, She & Him, Richmond Fontaine, and more.

I remember back in 1996 when my mentor Brad Jones (also a guest on the podcast in episode 34) came back from making a record out on the west coast and handed me a small xeroxed folded “zine” that he said some kid was making out of his bedroom in Portland.

It was full of interviews from the alternative side of recording, and shared the perspective of the record producer underdog. It was aptly named “TapeOp” which was traditionally the first role of a new engineer in the big old school studios. But in 1996 a Tape Op represented those of us with a four track making our own records on cassette tapes and home studios. It was the coolest thing I had seen in recording culture back then, and has never let me down in 20 years.

TapeOp Started as a "Zine"

I think people have a hard time understanding if they were raised where the internet was always around why you would xerox, staple, and mail something to people. But for people to connect back then about esoteric topics like recording at home or small recording studio stuff, that was the way you had to do it otherwise you just had no voice. When the magazine started I was doing the magazine layouts on cardboard. Using glue sticks, paper, printing things out and gluing them in place. 

How Did You Record Miss Misery by Elliott Smith?

The best thing was to get out of the way. He was this personal who had very strong musical arrangements kind of finished in his head, you just had to facilitate and get really straightforward sounds. I miced the kick, snare, overheads, done. We didn’t have very many mics for that record. I think the overhead mics are audio technica 37R’s, the kick drum an RE20, the snare was a 57. It was simple! 16 track 2in, a Mackie Console, and a Langevin c3a for the vocal. There’s a piano and we used Pro37s (small diaphragm condenser). Those are great mics $130 a piece. They don’t have a shrill top end so they record well. The thing that was amazing is when you track stuff like that and push the faders up it sounded great because the arrangements were so concise.

Lynda.com - Online Courses

This has been really cool. For years I’ve done workshops at my studio and I had happened to be in a meeting with David Franz who runs the lynda.com part of that. It was a meeting for TapeOp and I said I’d love to do something like that because I was thinking of doing some of my little bits as videos. The great thing about doing Lynda is that it’s for a school so when people watch them you get royalties. I can do concise comprehensive courses have them them up there! For the initial start they sent a 4 person crew up with a producer and a couple cameras and it was just awesome they take and edit it and finish all the stuff for it. The platform Linda is great. It’s $25 a month and you can watch every video that’s on there.

Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A - Probably to do TapeOp and go interview all these people making good records. The magazine started because I had been writing for a couple of different magazines and a local weekly and everything went defunct right about the same time. I wanted to keep doing interviews and things like that and I thought if I was going to do a music magazine they all have the same format. So I thought about doing a small zene and threw that idea at friends and they all liked it.

Q - Q- Share with us a recording tip, hack, or secret sauce.
A-I’d say just cutting things. Arranging, cutting things out, cutting frequencies out, just don’t put as much into the final mix as you think it needs.

Q -Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A-The Tama Rhythm watch is a metronome that you can tap along and figure out a bpm of something. The great thing about it is even if you’re working in ProTools, using your own metronome you can start and stop and do stuff in the middle of a song. I love having the independent metronome.

Q -Share a favorite software tool for the studio
A-Isotope RX5. I think it’s pretty amazing and once you get comfortable using it you can match room ambiences and things like that. You can reduce reverb on a track, all kinds of stuff.

My guest today is Carl Tatz, principal of the recording studio design firm Carl Tatz Design LLC. Carl has been designing award-winning studios for over a decade, driven by his acclaimed and ever-evolving Phantom Focus™ System monitor tuning protocol. (PFS for short). The Phantom Focus System is a complete monitor design protocol that optimizes the listening experience to include the speakers, the room, and the engineer into a finely tuned focal point that allows the sounds to float transparently around the speakers.

Carl’s designs extend from the modest, but breath-taking, high performance home screening room on one end of the spectrum, to the full blown home theatre palace on the other end. His designs always deliver stunningly accurate monitor systems whether for home mix studios or complete studio designs for larger studios. His promise is to always “wow” his clients regardless of the size of their project.

Some of the services Carl offers are Acoustic Design, Home Screening Rooms, Recording Studios Monitor Systems, Discrete 5.1 Listening Rooms, Room Analysis, Tuning Sound Isolation, and now ergonomic furniture design for the studio with the CTD eChair

Carl Tatz Design has been recognized professionally by the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association (CEDIA), Audio Engineering Society (AES), National Academy Of Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS), and Carl was the Former Vice-President Nashville Association Of Professional Recording Services (NAPRS).

I have heard Carl’s Phantom Focus Designed control rooms and they are something that has to be experienced to truly believed. Listening to a Carl’s PFS monitors = mind blown!

My experience was like listening to the music radiate from a wall of granite 20 feet tall. Heavy, solid, sculpted and gigantic!

PhantomFocus System™

Up until now the PhantomFocus System is a protocol. The hardware includes a pair of subwoofers, the PhantomFocus stands made by SoundAnchors, and a digital processor (most of the time I use an Ashley engine). That’s all involved; the rest is just elbow grease! It’s a two-today process for my assistant and I. The first day is setting the speakers up, we laser them in with a four-laser system to get the angle correct and position them correctly in the room. There’s a lot of pre-work that’s done prior to us showing up. If it’s a studio we haven’t designed we need to know what’s going on in that room. I need dimensions and all sorts of details so when we so up there’s not going to be any surprises.

The first day is what I call the rhythm section. We set up the monitors in the correct position relative to the modes in the room. I call it the rhythm section because if you don’t have that you’re just polishing a turd, you can’t EQ it. That’s one of my things about these self tuning boxes out now. I recommend them, they are better than nothing, but some of them will account for the speakers not being set up correctly. The physical setup of the speaker is so critical. So once that’s done, the next day I come in with speakers, subwoofers, and the approcessor and play with crossovers, slopes, and EQ and get it to lock into the PhantomFocus pocket. Once it’s there, it’s like BOOM.

Are there simple tricks to do to with a speaker to begin to get an understanding of what the possibilities are if they were to do a PhantomFocus System?

This is something I teach in my lectures! I would direct people to go to my website, go to the library and click on Acoustic Tools. There are two things there: a software program that calculates the room modes and there’s a chart called the Null-Positioning Ensemble. Those two things are extremely valuable; it’s what we use in the PhantomFocus System. One is the active software and the other one is an example that shows you where the listener and the speaker should be. The Null-Positioning ensemble is very easy to understand chart of how you should set up your monitors. It’s important that people understand that it’s not just a general idea of what you should do when you set up your speakers; it’s an exact idea.

Favorite Tips & Secrets

If you have a pair of monitors on a stand in back of a console even on a meter bridge at ear level, your monitors are going to roll of drastically at approximately 125 hz, then it will come up somewhere where the actual low end of the speaker is like 40-50hz so you’ll have this huge grand canyon of missing information. Don’t think it’s not happening with your speakers. It happens all the time. The reason why people have such a hard time with their low end is because they don’t have that information there. So you get your kick and bass to sound how you want, and with that grand canyon of missing information there you push up the bass and get your speakers to really kick. Then you take it out to the car and you have WAY too much low end. Everybody goes through that. The tweeters need to be ear height, roughly 48 inches sitting in a chair. It makes a huge difference.

“Monitors typically sound better sideways then they do upright” - Carl Tatz

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What is Imaging?

When you’re sitting in the sweet spot, it’s so intense that the speakers seem to go away. I’ve had people tell me not only does the vocal seem like it’s floating right there like there’s a center speaker, I can easily tell where it is whether it’s an upfront vocal or behind; you can really find the pocket. The other thing that happens is all your sources sound drastically different, they never sound like the speakers they sound like the recording. You can hear a difference from one bass to the other bass. Its that revealing.

What are Room Modes?

It’s based on the round trip speed of sound and it only applies to low frequencies. So it’s the time it takes to go from the back wall to the front wall and back again. It’s hard to explain, but in the modes you’re going to have dips and peaks. The dips, otherwise known as nulls, are deadly. You don’t want your speakers or your ears to be in the null. Check out the mode calculator.

Carl Tatz Auralex

It’s a good example of what we do. Check out the DreamRoom and that’s pretty close to what you can do by yourself. It’s painted walls with columns and panels. You can buy the kit and put it up yourself. It’s a rigid fiberglass product; the columns are reflective on one side, absorbent on the other. When you set them up on the wall that way it creates what we call the acoustic lens. It’s great! It gives you reflection, diffusion, and absorption on the sidewalls.

eChair

The designer is a former racecar driver. When he retired, he had broken every bone in his body and decided he was going to design the greatest task chair ever, and he did! The chair works and leans with you, it puts you in a position where you can work all day and not be fatigued. It’s not the kind of chair you want to sit down and relax in. But when you’re working in front of a console, it makes you sit upright. Your posture will benefit. It’s so good it actually comes with the PhantomFocus System now.

New PhantomFocus Monitors

I have my own speakers! It has been and still is an evolution. The PhantomFocus can work with anyone’s speakers, but it was a no brainer for me to come out with my own speaker. In order for me to do it, it had to be better than anything else out there and it is. The subwoofer is a pistonic low frequency emitter. It’s built into a quarter inch aircraft aluminum case. It has a direct drive unit that controls the bass and increases the energy. I think these things weigh 85lbs a piece. The speakers themselves have a very expensive scandinavian scan speak tweeter and morell drivers. It’s loosely based on the Dynaudio M1 speaker, which had always been my favorite.

“You don’t tune a room you tune the monitors” - Carl Tatz

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Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A - You’re worth what you charge. Once you have some skills and are pretty good at it, what you charge people will perceive that's what you’re worth.

Q - Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- PhantomFocus System

Q -Share a favorite software tool for the studio
A- I think again the room mode calculator and the null positioning ensemble.

My guest today is Steve Walsh, an award winning songwriter, engineer, and executive producer of BANG Europe. Steve has been writing and recording for over three decades and has scored music for countless commercials, film, and TV receiving awards from Lions, Clios, AICP, D&AD and even a Czech, Anděl award.

A Berklee College of Music graduate, Steve was born in Boston and has lived in NYC, Nashville and now, Prague, Czechoslovakia with his family, where Steve says he is reminded daily that speaking Czech is infinitely more difficult than making a living as a musician.

He continues to play guitar, record, and tour with his own band. And his latest album, "Daily Specials", was released on the acclaimed Czech label, Animal Music.

When back in NYC he regularly performs with The Brooklyn Boogaloo Blowout along with Grammy-nominated bassist/ composer, Viktor Krauss.

Steve’s song and production credits include creating the #1 song in Denmark, a "Top 10" in the UK, and a "Top 20” in the US. And more recently his song, “Stars In My Eyes” was released on legendary singer, Judy Collins’ 2015 all-star duet release, Strangers Again.

Production/ writing / engineering credits include, Erasure, One Republic, Fil Eisler, O`Shea, Anna K featuring REEF and Spotify’s SxSW concert series.

I think mixing is a little different. Once you get to the mixing stage, if you’re together in the room and there’s a common vision for what you’re trying to do and people are relatively self aware of what the actual goal is, maybe there are better odds of it being a good experience.

I think the real trick we’re all faced with is how do you make something sound like a record? The truth is this starts at the beginning of the production process, you need to figure out what the scope of the project is going to be and how to best get there in order to make it sound and have the experience feel you want it to feel. The truth is mixing starts at the very first meeting between a producer and the artist and slowly focusing the whole process. It’s trying to make it feel just on the edge of being a little out of reach, but not pushing too far where someone starts to become stressed

Making Records in Prague

Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A -I was really lucky to study with an amazing jazz improvisation teacher in New England, Charlie Banacos. Charlie used to say, “It can either take ten minutes or ten years.” And I think what he meant by that is it’s up to you. If you want to learn about something do the work and get involved, don’t wait.

Q - Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- Moving to another country changes a lot of stuff. I always love having old guitars. I have a great old 68 Paisley Telecaster. The biggest game changer in the last 6 months..in all our control rooms we having standing desks. So basically I got those isoacoustic stands they are making, and then I saw these in a guitar center in Alabama. Just being able to stand and be moving has been great for me.

Q -Share a favorite software tool for the studio
A- Learn the tools you have. The best software tools are less is more and knowing what you’re using and getting the most out of it.

My guest today is James Waddell, a producer, engineer, sound designer, and mixer. He is the owner of Lyricanvas a studio in Nashville TN offering music production and mixing to clients from all over.

Some of the artists that James has worked with are Aretha Franklin, John Oats, Indie Arie, Bobby Jones, Kloud 9, and Molly Moody.

And James music has appeared on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Die Hard 2, Frasier, and Dr Phil.

Some things I know about James: He is an expert on Native Instrument Maschine, records his drums with nothing but Shure SM57s, and rides to the studio on a bad ass Harley Davidson

Do You Miss Old School Midi?

Native Instruments has changed my life. I think I jumped on that bandwagon with complete because being a keyboard player you’re always looking for more sounds, so I moved into it there. Then Maschine came out and I bought one of the first mark one’s and tinkered with it on the 1.X software and that was great. When they bumped up to 2.X it just really added life to it. As with everything else I still have sync issues occasionally. The thing about Native Instrument Maschine is that you can use it in so many ways. When I’m editing or replacing sounds I just use Maschine. If I need to add loops I use machine because I can pull it up as a plugin in ProTools create whatever beat I want and drag and drop it as a loop, drag and drop it as individual sounds, & I can drag and drop it as midi data all in an instant.

What is Maschine?

Essentially I guess Maschine the actual hardware device is nothing more than a midi controller with pads and knobs. The software side of it would be comparable to what a DAW does without maybe the audio side of recording tracks because you don’t record tracks as audio. But as far as recording midi or samples you can still use plugins within Maschine. So all of my UAD plugs that I use to mix in ProTools also will pull up as individual plugs in Maschine on tracks. The other thing is it’s been my VST bridge. You can’t use VST instruments in ProTools, so I’ll pull up Maschine and then pull the VST plugin up in Maschine and now I have that VST plugin in ProTools. There’s always ways around.

Native Instrument Maschine

What is Mixing All About?

Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A -  I worked with a producer, Sanchez Harley, who’s an amazing producer. He once told me, “James, if you don’t have a heartbeat.. you’re dying, and if you’re not breathing..you’re dying. It’s the same way with a track. Every track needs a heartbeat and every track needs to breathe.” Now whether that’s muting tracks as an engineer when you’re mixing to give it space to breathe. A lot of times especially with the technology we have now, back on the day we only had 24 tracks and now we are unlimited with those things so people will throw the kitchen sink in. You might get a track that has 6 kick drums and 4 snares, but at the end of the day you pick the things that are important and that you need to create that space and openness. If the client needs something you bring it and try to fit it back it, carve a space for it. All these tracks don’t need to be here just because they were recorded.

Q - Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- My favorite right now is the Neve 1073pre. Those sound really good.

Q -How important is it to have a trackball when you’re working and what is it?

A -The trackball is a mouse type device that has multiple buttons on it that you can program to do various operations. I’ll create different sets for zooming in and selecting and deleting all at once. But when that’s gone I have to think where everything is. Check out the Kensington turbo mouse.

My guest today is Steve Marcantonio, a Grammy winning producer, recording engineer, and teacher from Nashville TN. He is also a member of NARAS, a Leadership Music alumnus, and winner of the ACM Engineer of the year award.

Steve Marcantonio started his career at the Record Plant Studios in New York City in 1978.

While at the Record Plant he worked with such artists as The J. Geils Band, Aerosmith, Kiss, Heart, Graham Parker, The Blues Bros and John Lennon.

One remarkable and heart breaking story is that Steve spent 8 days in the studio in December of 1980 with John and Yoko. After they left on the night of the 8th John was killed. Quite a shock for a 21 year old who just started in the business 2 years prior.

Steve’s credentials include Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Reba, George Strait, Alabama, Restless Heart and Deana Carter. And In recent years Steve has done records with Brantley Gilbert, Thomas Rhett, Band Perry, Taylor Swift, Hank Jr, Steven Tyler and Cheap Trick.

And though he didn’t include it in his bio I know Steve is also dead serious about cooking real Italian food!

Keep Your Promises

Roy Cicala hired me off the street. I didn’t know anything, so he wanted to teach me his way. I learned a lot of valuable lessons from him. One of which is when you’re booking time with someone you have to keep your promise that you’ll work with them, even if you get booked by someone else who’s a much bigger name. You don’t go by the name, you go by the booking. I was actually involved in a project with the Blues Brothers. I worked on the soundtrack of the Blue’s Brothers movie. It went on for about 6-7 months. I don’t think there was a budget because we spent a heck of a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of other things. Along the way I got to learn about a very valuable piece of equipment back then it was called the BTX. It was this white little console that held two tape machines together. Well in September of that year Jonny and Yoko were working on Double Fantasy and they booked the studio and they wanted me because I knew how to use the BTX. I thought for sure that the producer of the Blues Brothers having worked with me for 5-6 months would have said oh sure. He said, “No, I need you here with me.” At the time John Belushi was very famous, the Blues Brother’s movie was going to be huge, but I’m thinking to myself man I have the chance to work with John Lennon. I didn't make any fuss, and as it turns out I missed that chance, but I got my chance late afterwards. You can’t get too bent out of shape with names, you have to keep to whoever it is you’re working with.

John Lennon at the Record Plant

Gretchen Peters

I would say my number one highlight besides working with John Lennon is I got to record a song with Gretchen Peters. She’s probably one of the most amazing artists I’ve ever worked with. Great singer, great songwriter, she doesn’t write with anyone except for Brian Adams. She had a song she wrote called, “When You Are Old,” and it’s about getting old and tired and grey. My mom had been getting old and she was into music and said, “I want bridge over troubled waters to be played at my funeral.” I gave her this song and she said, “That’s the one I want played.” So sure enough in the funeral home, we played that song and there was not a dry eye in there. That’s one of my major accomplishments besides the grammy. Having that song played for my mom that I recorded was incredible.

                    Gretchen Peters - When You Are Old

Running a Great Recording Session

Obviously you have to pick the right mics to go with whatever instruments you’re using. In order to get a good mix you have to have good sounding tracks. You’d be amazed at some of the stuff I have to mix, I’m not sure where the producer was when they were recording it. In order to get a good sound, you have to have a good sound on the floor whatever instrument you’re recording. Is it in tune? Are the heads changed on the drums? Are they in tune? Does the drummer hit the drums with the right velocity to get a good sound? These are all elements that you’re dealing with as a engineer. I have go-to mics for certain things, but I’m not opposed to trying new things. I have to keep up with the times. I realized in order to stay current I have to try these things. And I love it, I think it’s great!

Secret for Mixing Great Vocals

Country and pop vocals tend to be louder than rock records. What I use mostly in ProTools is RVox, it kind of evens out the vocal. A lot of times too I’ll mult the vocal into where there’s different EQ or compression on it and I’ll use it in different spots in the chorus or verse. And also most female vocalists have an EQ point somewhere around 1k-2k that really hurts your ears during specific spots and a multiband compressor can take care of that or you can just scoop out that EQ. As far as recording vocals, my favorite go to vocal mic is an SM7. It has everything you need. There’s no real, real lows or sparkling highs and the artist can get right up on it. The best thing about it..it’s cheap. When a vocalist says big, most of the time it means a lot of reverb. I tend to use delay most all the time on anything instead of reverb just to give it that width. On a vocal the delay has to be used differently in the verses than the choruses. Instead of sending it to a delay, I duplicate the vocal and I put the plugin right on the vocal. So instead of having the send go up and down, I’ll just clip gain the vocal up or down. I think you have better control over an effect

Tips for Stereo Bussing

When I first started, we never put anything on a stereo bus. These days I start with my slate mix rack which has the meter on it so that I can see, and then I use the virtual console, then depending on the song I go to API or Neve. You can strap the virtual console on groups like all the drums and you can just affect it with just one plugin so they all see the same thing. I don’t use individual faders these days, I’ll bus all of my drums to a master subgroup and on those busses I put my virtual console and I also use a compressor. Sometimes The SSL compressor but lately I’ve been using the Slate virtual bus compressor. When you put a plugin on in protools at first you should always bypass in and out to make sure you’re just not hearing it louder because whenever you hear something louder you instantly think it sounds better, so you should always set your unity gain on a plugin. Having said that with virtual bus compressor its louder because its compressing and limiting and what have you. The last thing I put in the chain in a tape machine.

Q - Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- Drums are my favorite thing to record. I think a lot of people hire me because they love my drum sounds. When I’m recording a room sound, the UREI 1178 is my go-to. I hit the bottom button and the top button and I just slam it. I get it to where it’s blended in a little bit, but I love having heavy duty compression on my drums. Another thing I’ll do is take a mic, the Buyer 160 or any other kind of ribbon mic or maybe even a 57 and I’ll put it right above the kick drum facing the toms and the snare and just compress the snot out of that too. It really adds a nice effect to the overall drum sound so those are my go-to things in recording.

My guest today is Roger Alan Nichols, a producer, recording engineer, rock musician, and songwriter from Nashville TN.

He is owner of Bell Tone Recording in Berry Hill where he produces great sounding rock. In fact when I recorded my record Skadoosh which includes the track "American Winter" on the Mix Master Bundle I turned to Roger for guitar tones, borrowing the Bogner, and Bassman guitar amp heads for my sound.

Roger started out in Nashville with his band Dreaming In English as an artist and later moved to production and engineering after Pro Tools made it possible for him to create professional home studio. He has since moved to this beautiful commercial location at BelTone Recording and records with many country and rock artists.

Some of the Rockstars that Roger has written for, performed with, produced, or recorded are Paramore, Mix Master Mandy, Seal, Ryan Humbert, Robben Ford, The Mean Tambourines, The Campaign 1984, Tyler Bryant, and Steven Tyler

Touring Professionally Early

With technology providing opportunities for people to record and to write and to create art, the thing that is always in the back of my head is just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. That I think is one of the biggest obstacles right now with music. The fact that technology has allowed us to create really great sounding stuff with no filter. Now from an artist's standpoint, I love that, that’s the way it should be. The way the business is now the gatekeepers are gone and everyone applaudes that. But the bad news is is the gatekeepers are gone. So there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s really mediocre. A lot of stuff that is put out that should be developed better.

The way records are made now is we send files around. I’ll get a track and record a guitar part and I’ll send it off to someone else and then they’ll add something and whenever they start to mix it, whoever mixes it you end up carving the hell out of it EQ wise to make it work in the context of the mix. The way records used to be made is the band would set up in a room, decisions were made about placement of amps and mics and so forth. Then the snapshot was taken. If you solo’d the guitar or something, it might sound really shitty by itself, but in context it would sound amazing. So it was about the complete photograph as opposed to the individual in the photograph

Being A Producer 

As a producer one of the easiest failures to make is to not listen to the artist. I think that is a common mistake especially if you have artistic visions or perspectives. It’s easy to go "Well really what you need is this." I have learned the hard way that is not a good thing to do. You want to be good at what you do, and you want to be able to contribute to the vision, and a lot of times you just stay out of the way and help facilitate the vision. It’s not about contributing to the vision from an artistic voice, but it's creating an environment for the artist to find out what their voice is.

Q - What was holding you back at the start?
A - How things were done. When I was learning how to play, I’d put the needle on the record, listen, play, needle on the record, listen, play, etc. There was no YouTube demonstration of how to play the chord voicing or how to connect these devices with this. You had to find the local hot shot at the music store and ask him how it’s done or sit and observe. There’s something to be said about being able to hear a song and go, “I know what those voicings are, I know what those chord changes are,” because your ear is developed to that point.

Q - Share a favorite hardware tool for the studio
A- I used to take a polaroid camera and I would take snapshots of everything: mic placements, EQ settings, etc. Then I would have a notebook and give it to the drummer to sketch out his kit and mark the size of his drums and what heads he was using and where mics were placed and keep track of lyrics. It was basically a journal of the record. For me, that was a way of keeping track of the process.