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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 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.

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Jam Session 

Q - What was holding you back at the start?
A - I guess it depends on when I consider myself starting because I consider myself a recording engineer at age 11 when I had two tape recorders. Really the only thing I guess was being in the proximity of fast growth. 

Q- What was some of the best advice you got early on?
A - Back in Asheville, there was a mentor I had named Eddie Swan. I remember him saying, "If it sounds good, it is good." And I thought, man that's about as bottom line as you can get. 

Q- Share with us a recording tip, hack, or secret sauce.
A - There's several things I cover on YouTube videos, but there's a few I can think of instantly. One thing I noticed that happened to me is that what you mix last, you mix loudest. So now I teach my guys to mix backwards and make what's last be the most important thing. So in Nashville, usually you want to make the lead vocal last. That puts everything in the right perspective and it makes you achieve a good balance on a mix really quick. 

Q - Share a favorite software tool for the studio

A - Melodyne is unbelieveable because it can make a person sound better then the best mic, the best pre, compressor. If they’re flat then it’s just a really good recording of a flat singer

Q - Share with us a tip for the business side of the recording studio

A -  I listen to a guy named Michael Hyatt, he’s a great resource for leaders. If you have a recording studio and you are at the helm of helping people with their projects then you are a leader.