Andrew Scheps at the University of Oxford - "What Comes Out Of The Speakers".

Hi, I'm going to try not to use the microphone just because Marty is pretty self-conscious unamplified and it's not strange at all that I was sitting in the corner that whole time while you came in, that wasn't good, so when I first talked to Dan about Coming here I thought, well, originally we were talking about doing workshops, making mixes, such easy things, sitting in front of a computer, saying here's a compress or

what

ever and then we decided, well, it'll be more of a talk. I thought, cool, I'll just talk. about compressors, that's easy and then I thought, well, no, I'm going to Oxford.

I need to challenge myself, so

what

I've decided to do tonight is talk about the things that I think about, which aren't necessarily the things I do and this. It's not a moment where you know, do as I say, not as I do, these are just the things that come into my head when I think, is it mixed well enough, is it done? What's the point of all that? So I have done it. I haven't given this particular talk in public, so I'll have to look at my notes a little and I may stumble a little, but I hope to get into the weeds and then we'll have quality control where you can ask about compressors. and that's going to be easy compared to everything else, so first of all, I like to watch this and listen to that playlist.

I'm a lucky, lucky man, that's it, he's crazy, so that's me and I'm here, and that's today and what I wanted to talk about wasn't the mechanics of mixing or making a record or writing this. I think there are quite a few songwriters you know, rather than people who just mix, which is why I think these concepts are so relevant and unique. One of the interesting things about what's been happening in the music industry lately is that it's been decimated by downloads and now streaming and there's no money for anyone, there's still a small portion that's chasing money and you know that The pop market exists and it is huge.

You know, especially in other Asian parts of the world, the pop market is huge and makes a ton of money, but for everyone else it's become a little bit more art-focused, unless it's commerce, because commerce is very uncertain and I think in a lot of ways, that's really cool because probably for the last 50 years the record business was just printing money so it was all about printing money and how can you do that? There were always artists inside and some of them would be successful. in some not, but now you're at a point where every artist can release their product to the world, it's not just the ones that get some money from a record label and go to a studio, every laptop is a studio.

Every room is a live room and you can make a record anywhere in the world and put it out the next day, whether it's on YouTube where you go through a distributor and it's on all the digital media where people can listen to it, so I think it's a good time to remember the thousands of years of music that existed before recording existed, so songwriting could be a job and some of them are very high paying jobs. Many court composers. There are a lot of buildings around here that probably had a composer attached to them or came about there, but the idea of ​​music as an art and for the definition of art, I mean, I've heard some people define it as something that you don't need to do to survive and If you do So that's art and that makes some sense, but there are a lot of things that I don't need to do to survive that I wouldn't call art and we don't have to talk about it in this room, but I think my definition of art as someone who trying to help other people create art and going out into the world is something you do and present to another person to try to provoke an emotional response.

That is art. It can be a positive answer. A negative answer. it can be a protest sign it can be a song it can be a sculpture it can be a concept and I'm going to be very pretentious later in the talk and we'll talk a little more about the concept, but I love the idea of ​​music as art because even if you go for commerce you have to go for art because I've been working on a lot of records where someone makes a decision based on what they think would be popular or what would be most similar. this other record, but if that record is not popular, what you are left with is a compromised work of art because you have made decisions based on the commercial aspect, which may or may not work, I mean how many people on MTV Cribs before they canceled the series not many, so the idea of ​​making music for its own sake and a record is a work of art that contains music that is also art, so it's meta art or something ridiculous like that, but the idea of ​​making records also as art , so when you see making records that way, I'm going to use my remote now, so the only thing that matters when you're making a record I'm going to talk specifically about making records because that's what I do, the only thing that matters is what

comes

out of it. the

speakers

, that's it, there's no argument you can make that would make me add anything to that list, it's what you get when you listen to the record, that's the art and that's the art.

When approaching the listener, the listener reacts however they are going to react and each listener reacts differently because otherwise there would only be one popular band, everyone has different tastes, but that is the idea of ​​what

comes

out of the

speakers

now, Why is it so important? Well, I'll take you on a little tour of my life, but first let's talk about recording in general. To be fair, these graphics are all from yesterday, so I've stolen graphics from all over the internet and most of them aren't that terrible. well and completely inappropriate, but let's talk about the difference between sound and recording, so let's see if we really can, it's dead.

Oh, stay okay, so that's the sound, we're fine with that, it's actually water coming out of someone's skull, but let's say this is something that makes sound in a room and that's not far from how chaotic and crazy it is. is a sound wave in a room - it interacts with everything that happens with convection in this room because of the heat hitting the walls and floors and bouncing back and you. I'm getting my voice from about 25 surfaces if you're sitting in the back of the room, so this is the idea of ​​sound in a room and this is when you record what someone is doing, now it can be a person singing, it can be a piano.

It can be a guitar amp, it can be anything, but you make a sound wave correctly and then to make a record of that sound wave, are we still working? So you record it and traditionally there are two different ways to record it, analog or digital. It's supposed to be analog on top, digital on bottom, I think that's pretty clear, so the idea is to make a representation that you can store and then play back later. That's the idea of ​​recording, recording, it's just a delay, that's all. You do it by taking a microphone or something that has this incredibly flimsy sheet on it and you make it like an eardrum and you stick it in the air and you put it in the path of that total chaos that is the sound wave so that it moves in the same way that two sound waves move and it creates a voltage, well it creates a voltage which is what microphones do and then you record it in some weird analog format converting it into magnetic fields or something or you digitize it by putting it through an A converter to D which we're not going to talk about tonight, in lesson eight of this series is when we talk about A to D converters, so the idea is that you take this total chaos in the room and you can do it.

You don't grab it, you can't see it, you can't do anything except listen to it, capture it and store it, and once stored, you can manipulate it properly, you can EQ it, you can compress it, you can play it backwards, you can upload it. you can turn it down, you can do a million different things to transform that sound while it's in one of the shapes on the right, well, eventually you take your transformation part, play it through a really wonky looking speaker and it goes back out into the room . So now imagine that all that water enters that person's head, but only through his eardrums.

I didn't find a better graph for that, but the real point of this is that that's total chaos once it comes out of the speaker. I no longer have any control over it, it will make its way through the air, whether it's from an earphone to the eardrum, so it only travels an inch or two or whether it comes out of my mouth, well, we're talking about recording, so record this. it comes out of a public address system that will never happen in the back of a stadium, whatever it is, it comes out again and it becomes chaos and then someone's ears get in the way and then they hear it and then they have a reaction so that's recording in a nutshell, the idea, although that's very important, we'll come back to this later, is that you have no control over it once it comes out of the speaker, you have maximum control over it before it comes out of the speaker , so while we're working on it and manipulating it, it's up to you to make it what you want to come out of the speaker to elicit the response.

Now the point of this is the audio, come on, you can do it, no, I'll do it. use the space bar because it's easier, so let's look at a little list of things that don't come out of the speakers and what I want to do is group this throughout my career and how this when I was an enthusiastic enthusiast of things that they did when I was kid, you press a button and something else happens and that was amazing and that manifested itself in doing lighting and sound for a band in high school and then I saw the recording studio for the first time and okay, that's what I did.

I needed to do and at that time there were two universities in the states that had four year degree programs and my parents said they were getting one term degree so I could choose between Berkeley and Boston and the University of Miami in Miami so I decided to go to University of Miami now while you are in college, since any of you who are in college or teaching at the University know that you are surrounded by people who do exactly what you do, they do it in different ways, but you know the lingo, they know the tools and It's the only thing you talk about 24/7 and sometimes you come home and bore your parents with it, but that's it, you're in this little world and while You are a student, at least to me, You are creating art for lack of a more general word for what I did while I was in art school.

It's a bit of an exaggeration, but you're doing a ton of things that are really just for your peers' consumption, right? all over the world, unless you're really lucky or you're recording the choir here, they make two albums a year, something like that, you make little pieces that you play in recitals for other people who do what you do and, if you're lucky, you write a piece that plays things like that, so there's all these things that you think about and talk about and talk to each other and then yeah, but these are the things I used to talk about except the pants things that Call it pants, but that's different here, so I didn't want to.

Always wear pants when you match well. I guess if you're in a kilt you could do it anyway, but the point is I remember hundreds of conversations I've had. I made a piece in the electronic music lab or recorded a band and I wanted to play it for someone, whether it was someone else at school or my parents or my brother, who is a very harsh critic and would start with at least five of these things. By the way, the way I compressed these drums, it's amazing and I used a phaser on the bass and the chorus and it's a little bit, it's not so much more because I didn't have the best microphones to use and they were set up in a strange way. way and the drummer wasn't that good and then you pressed play and first of all you let people down so it's a terrible way to do it you just want to say this is going to be great but also as soon as you press play that's all erased and it doesn't matter, it doesn't help to know that the drummer was terrible, they're going to hear that the drummer is terrible, that will appear as soon as you press play, so there's no point in talking about this stuff, but you do it, then you leave the

university

and you enter the world where now your work is made public, you hope, the general public and I was incredibly lucky to be doing small jobs on big projects, so I'm doing stuff for Michael Jackson and Metallica, this is heading to many, many people and the phrase I always use about this when you start making excuses and there's another set of excuses is: start right away so you can't? going to everyone's house who buys the record and explaining to them why it sucks is not an option so you have to look at these things and then fix them and get over them and get past the point where they even matter and I had a very, very bad time. .

This, when I started mixing more, I used to always send an email with every mix and I had some of these things in here like, hey man, I'm really sorry about the way the chorus sounds, but it just wasn't happening and I don't know. . why and maybe it's you or maybe it's me but I can't really tell and again you're setting yourself up for failure but no one cares they don't care they press play and they like it or they don't and that's a It's something really very important and very, verydifficult to maintain while working. Now I write long emails with all this stuff and then I delete them all and say the mix is ​​in the server sounds. great and you hit send and sometimes they agree many times they don't or it's somewhere in between but it doesn't matter because is what they were going to think anyway it has nothing to do with me saying I forgot to wear pants when you mix this up I mean it just doesn't matter besides if you're at a point where you forget to wear pants there's all kinds of other problems that come with that, so looking back on my career, I should have realized this much sooner because one of the first things I did was go on tour with Michael Jackson, which led me to working in the studio with him, so we were in South America and there was a big crowd.

This is now traditionally thought to be a photo of Michael singing. The crowd went crazy where we were in, I think in Brazil, and does anyone here remember the song in black or white? Does anyone remember the video on MTV in heavy rotation, so there's this whole little scene before the song starts, kind of like Back to the Future, but basically there's a little bit? boy in his room with a guitar and a speaker the size of a house and he plays the opening chord and the song starts well the Michael Jackson concert things explode when he plays that guitar there are pyrotechnics everywhere and Michael comes jumping from a trampoline to through the pyro and somehow it always manages to land right on the downbeat of the song and the song starts now.

I was on tour because I was handling playback and there was a live band and they played, but there was a lot of other stuff going on and this show. jumped through the pyrotechnics, went on stage and absolutely nothing happened, nothing came out of the speakers, it was crickets and tumbleweeds in a stadium with 40,000 people and I could have said sorry Michael, so four months and it really got to me and I know I have air conditioning and the button is stuck so when we start instead of starting and no one cares it's actually him saying what the hell is going on not really but there you go but I didn't take that lesson in Serious.

I was still emailing about the pants and the bass and you edited the drums years and years after this, whereas this is the definitive version and any live concert is that version. You can't, you can't explain a bad concert if your mix isn't like that. It's not great, you can keep working on it, so that's the joy of writing music or working on recording music. You can continue until you think it's time to do it. Okay, now we'll get to the slightly pretentious part of, but if I'm not there yet, I don't know if we could have done it, so I just wanted to take this concept of what's coming out of the speakers and zoom out and make it more of a form or an angle of composition and more like an overall art. angle and it is that I used to read articles.

I don't know why I don't read articles anymore, but I used to read articles where there was a lot of discussion in the literature about the author's intent versus the reader's experience and there are a lot of people arguing that. The author's intent didn't matter at all and that made me so angry. What are you kidding? They have spent months or years writing this book. They have crafted every little word. How can it not matter what they were trying to say? For years I've gone all in with this argument, it doesn't matter what they were trying to say, all that matters is what you think they said because that's all you get now.

I love reading interviews with authors about what they were like. I try to say it because I always feel like an idiot and I didn't get the point, but if I read the book, all I get is the equivalent of what came out of the speakers, that's all, unless there's a 26 page trailer let him walk you through all the important points, that's all you get and that's really important and for songwriters it is too and just a couple of little examples of this there was a documentary about Elliott Carter when he turned one hundred or not.

Do it, so it must have been his hundredth birth. There is a PBS documentary that is the equivalent of the only good television station in the US and there was a part of it hosted by Pierre Boulez and they were talking about the dynamics. written in the score were these the dynamics that the instrumentalist should try to get out of his instrument or were these dynamics that the audience was supposed to hear because there are things written in odd ranges of an instrument, so on the bass flute they should have ended blowing because it is written triple Forte, but in reality it would only come out in mezzo Forte or they need to lower the rest of the orchestra so that the bass flute can be the loudest thing in the room and this is a conversation you need to have.

Otherwise your piece will be ruined. What comes out of the speakers, which is what comes out of the players, is not what you intended. There's also a great interview with John Adams on an American Masters show, another PBS show where he talks about how he watches other people direct their work and he's always invited, you know, it's always the premiere in this country, so he'll go, but he's not directing and he was talking about how much he hates being somewhere where the director found this little internal current line and brought it in. He said that John didn't know what he had written and said that he hated it because it completely changed the piece, so since there is a piece, I'm only going to perform the first two movements because we don't have a lot of it. of time, but there is one piece that is the ultimate expression of getting all that out of the way, so I'm going to put the score up here and follow it as we go.

I cut it a little on the second movement. In short, when I first heard about this, this is John Cage's four minutes and 33 seconds, it's based on three movements for any instrument and when I first heard about this, when you hear it, you think, well, it's a kidding, it's not composition, but apparently John Cage. he was just obsessed with silence, the idea of ​​silence and how to use it in music, and one of the things he did was visit an anechoic chamber, which is a chamber that has absolutely no acoustics of its own, and he went in expecting to finally hear silence and if Have you ever been in even a quiet room, you know that's not what you hear, you listen to your own nervous system and the blood pumping in your ears and you realized that there was absolutely nothing that was silent and then, what?

What happened? The piece premiered and premiered at I don't remember what music festival it was at, but it was an outdoor venue, so the venue had three walls and it's somewhere in the woods and it was a full four minutes in 33 seconds by David Seated Tudor. on the piano and opening and closing the lid twice and the first 30 seconds everyone was thinking God was going to be an idiot and then the next 30 seconds they were probably thinking the government and apparently the people were leaving, but the idea was about two minutes then if you gave it yourself you would experience whatever your experience of the room was and the piece had no influence on you, so now not only have you gotten rid of the speakers, the performer, the director, everything, you've even gotten rid of of the composer.

And now this is in some ways pure art because the listener's experience is all there is, there's nothing else there, so that's the ultimate end of what I'm talking about, man, that was pretentious, so I just want to talk of another thing. Before we get to the last resort, the only thing that music, movies and television have, to some extent as art forms that other physical arts like paintings and sculptures don't, is the idea that reproduction is actually necessary. Actually, I should have had the jack plug and the white speaker on this slide, but when you play something, it matters what speakers you play it on, it matters what room you are in, it matters how lewd it is to the listeners, but that goes with everything, but there is all kinds of factors that just go into reproducing your artwork that changed and I was trying to think of an example in art and I couldn't really think of one until I remembered that I'm a big fan. from an umbilical point of view a very abstract painter and his later paintings are just big red swirls and that's it and I got a catalog raisonné.

I stated that something good about his final works on every page his red swirls and I'm a big fan and Even I thought this was crazy, this book was very expensive and it's just red swirls and the books about these big beautiful prints and really I didn't think much about it because I'm still a fan and would go see it everywhere. I was able to and there was one time I was in the Tate Modern with my wife and in their permanent collection they had quite a few Twombly and they had a gallery room which is probably in about the front third of this room with a door so you can walk through.

On this door and on the walls there are three of these paintings and they are huge and I laughed out loud when I saw them, they created an incredible emotional response. I mean, I'm feeling it right now, just thinking about being in the room with these. three giant red swirls and that's it and that John Cage piece was actually inspired by Mark Rothko's white canvas paintings this idea of ​​size and scale and we're actually going to go see a Damien Hirst exhibition where there's a statue three stories high. The idea of ​​walking into the room with that is amazing and that's very difficult for people who work with music, so I think we actually have the opposite side of this where we can't do something that's just massive because then someone's going to hear. on your iPhone, so you really have to create art that can transcend the playback system and transcend the speaker that it comes out of, so that what comes out of the speakers is always the same and always reaches the same thing to the listener and I know that I have been I mean, I'm known for my punchy mixes.

I'm also known for my incredibly loud mixes, but those incredibly loud mixes on laptop speakers are still aggressive and energetic, and I think that's something I've always strived for. to achieve is to have the important thing that I don't depend on the medium of reproduction because that's like trusting a performer to perform your piece and I'm sure John Cage would have been horrified that the timing was totally wrong. I was really paying attention, I was sitting there thinking, oh my god, I'm such an idiot, so anyway, getting back to this playback idea, in just a few minutes we'll get to the questions, one of the things I said before, do you think that What's really important and this is where this idea can really expand beyond the arts and into your life in general is that these recordings are the things that you can manipulate, you have control over them, you decide when they start and end, but as soon as you press play with other people in In the Room you completely lose control and they go out into the world and that's all they do.

Now I have some very graphic demonstrations of how this can be applied to the rest of your life, so here are two people, all right, these are people. in the world and we'll label them very cleverly, that's the one talking, get it, okay, this is nonsense, but it's also, at least to me, it's profound in a way that's not mind-blowing, but it's something that that you have to think continually. over and over again as a person we all have internal dialogues in our heads and it can be all kinds of things good, bad, indifferent and whatever so you're thinking bad thoughts and that's how good my charts are.

I don't know how to make something like a thought bubble, so just pretend it has rounded edges. The speaker thinks the audience is having these horrible thoughts. If they then let those thoughts leave the speaker, the audience becomes sad. It's not good, especially if it's your wife or your kids or your co-workers or your students or your teacher that's not the way to go, the best way to go is to have stormy thoughts and talk happily, this happens all the time. time you're on your way to a meeting, you got an email about that meeting and my gosh, you don't understand what I want to do and you come up to me like, hey, how are you?

That's great and I actually got your email and no. I'm really sure about this and then the audience is happy and you can force them to have your way but if you don't you leave a legacy of storm but if you do this it leads to love and all you need is love so , anyway, reality. is that that's a way to think about your own legacy, whether as an artist or as a songwriter, as a mixer, as a sculptor or as a father, like anything, only what really comes out is what reaches the world where you can't. control it more, what matters and it's all anyone will remember and if you're lucky you control it to keep the things you want in and only the things that come out come out, so end of pretense, let's have questions about pads.

You say that? That's it, that's all I have to say about that easy, yeah, and think about getting over it, and now they're in it and they're back then, just learning how to do it andthen how can we like meat this time? That's it, I imagine trying America must be over, yeah, I think I think, although the core of what you're saying is to start with a no is a myth, but there's nothing that sounds good. I mean, from an audiophile perspective, there are people who will. You only hear Steely Dan on The Yellow Jackets, but musically you're stuck with that because that's what it sounds like that way.

There are songs on the early Stones albums where they use the cassette demo because it never felt so good, so it's important that it sounds appropriate. It's not important that it sounds good, I was just listening while making a playlist for this podcast I made and they wanted a playlist and we talked about the Dead Kennedys and then I was digging through fresh fruit looking for rotten vegetables. I'm not going to say the name of the song that I chose because it's not for hallowed halls like these, but it sounds terrible, it's horrible, but it's very exciting and I think. with a band like Metallica, I mean, if you look at what Rick Rubin did on the album he produced, he tried to get their writing back to the way they used to write, where it was about the riffs and these are seven-minute songs and half. with sections and I wasn't trying to be concise and write a four minute song, but I think as a mixer I always try to make things sound good, but the cool thing is when you get to the chorus it gets big and it gets heavy and it explodes and it's broad and it's more exciting, you can't settle for something you think sounds good and you can't force a band to not sound like they want to sound.

Now, the end of your question, where? you said the band comes in and once you decide to tune this and you said I'm the one who decides what to side chain or not and then one of the things that I love and I actually wanted to talk about it in here I've gone from using a ton of gear to just one laptop and the joy of that is that no one comes. I just send out mixes for people to just listen to, but before they would walk into this room full of gear that was on the screen before and say, Hey, what are you using on bass?

Oh man, I that compressor and that was it, they hated the base and you had to change it and that's just perception and that can affect every part of the creativity. The process is to write a chorus a certain way because you think you have to try to make more money, so I think for mixing I always try to mix what they give me. I'm trying to understand why you gave me this. I mix and I'm trying to make it work and every once in a while I have to say there's something wrong and I'm going to fix it, not my mix sucks because the song sucks, but hey, that first chorus was twice as long as it should be that I cut it and I did a little reintroduction and I think this is better and you kind of follow that path in the arrangement, but overall I'm trying to make the really exciting version of what they gave me and sonically.

If that can sound good too, that's great, but anyway it's not my mission at all, that's why I don't have any engineering Grammys and maybe never, yes, but they are on fire, yes, although there are times when it is So. so grating that you can't really pay attention to the music, so it swings, you know it really does and it's about finding that balance and deciding what you can use and what you can, how to get out of it what you need, so I . I'm going to let them decide who can ask questions because otherwise I'll get in trouble.

I do not do it. I was 100% on the computer until I quit and now I'm 100% on the computer. and whether I'm using analog gear emulations or not, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, that transition was very difficult for me and caused a lot of angst, it's like my power is in the analog gear, you know. That's why I'm good and that's on that second list of things that don't come out of the speakers, the equipment doesn't come out of the speakers, so I had to get over myself and realize that I either had the talent to be. well no matter what the tools were and obviously you know saying it's a bit disingenuous you need a set of tools that are at a certain level otherwise you just can't do certain things but there isn't a single plugin.

I can't work without it, there's not a single piece of equipment that I can't work without and I think if I ever get to the point where I feel like I can't work without it, I'm going to have to change and I've done that. In fact, in the last month I stopped using a compressor on my mixes that I've been using for the last 15 years, both analog and on the computer, and finally changed the way it was set up so that it was a little bit quieter when I listened to it and of course nothing sounds better than louder, like no I don't need that compressor and I actually managed to put it down and it took me forever but I don't think there's any way to mix it.

The process is completely irrelevant as long as you're recording the process may be relevant only in terms of how it affects the performers. There are sessions that are great to do on tape because you are making people make decisions. Do you like that guitar solo or would you? I like to record it over it, not make a playlist, it'll be gone forever even if the new solo sucks and then we'll have to make another one so you make these decisions along the way and I think creatively some musicians really thrive on that or some musicians need it, but analog versus digital like a gear cutting process, I don't know, I don't know right now, it's not really that that's not a concept that makes any sense to me, I just try to make them super noisy. and it's exciting how many people in the room don't know what he's talking about.

I just want to know because unfortunately rear bus has become something I'm known for. It's a stereo parallel compressor that I use. while I'm mixing and everything in the mix except the drums usually goes to that stereo compressor and is mixed down so everything still goes to the mix bus, there's nothing in the way I mix that all the tracks go to the bus mix and then they also go to many, many, many other places the way you would think to use the reverb czar delays, but it turns out it's distortion and compression and then all of that gets mixed back together, so the Uncompressed version of everything does it. to the mix and then mixed with a lot of overcompressed mixed versions, so the rear bus is just the stereo compressor for a lot of things, but it's a parallel one, look, it's easy to talk about equipment, they hate me, um, there are some engineers mastering guys just don't like what I do, but there are others who take what I give them and are very happy with it because they don't have to do anything, so it all comes down to... just musical tastes.

I mean, because most successful mastering engineers have something to do and they're pretty consistent with what they do, so basically they have a mix chain, they have compressors on the EQ, they like to run everything when it comes to a Really quiet uncompressed mix. They can do that and then they bring out the character that they like to put in mixes and I just remember - exactly what was going on when I had a conversation with someone who said it makes it too loud. I need calmer versions. I said good. but if I take that compressor off it'll feel completely different and he actually said to me on the phone I hate the way you compress your mixes like, oh sure okay, which is fine, but then I shouldn't let him master my mixes, someone I should do it more. be mastering, so it's problematic, my mixes have been getting quieter and quieter lately and I think getting rid of those compressors helped a lot, but it's not like that, I mean, it's never loud because I think, oh, the mix feels great , now I'm going to make it loud, that's how the mix is ​​built and I'm always fighting against it and I hate how loud they are, I really do.

I have three different spots on my roster. I can make it quieter and am constantly striving to do so. it's getting quieter, but it still feels the same and there are people who will say: well, when you listen to the mix, you can turn it up fine, that's true, but that's only if you're on something where you can turn it up if you're going to listen through from your phone or through your laptop speakers, it's not going to be as loud and it better sound huge coming out of something small and I haven't figured out a way to do it without making the mix sound loud because that's what makes it . do that, it gives you the appearance of driving speakers and driving the air in a room in this clipped waveform.

Oh yeah, the MBA engineers don't like me, but I only find the ones I can work with because they like the way I do it. Things will tell me when something is wrong and I really believe them because others just tell me everything is wrong. Yeah, you've got Catherine Brooks showing up right now, it's some, it's, it seems, it's a. locker room every studio is a locker room. I mean, traditionally it was worse, I think, than now because you always went to a studio and there was always money, which meant everyone was drunk all the time, no one acts right when you're drunk.

The re filter turns off properly, everything comes out of the speakers when you're drunk, so I think that's part of it being a very unfriendly place for, and even for, men who had sensitivities. You know, you had to be a brother to get it. This happens in a lot of sessions, but I think I also think this happens in every industry, where if you walk into a room and you're there for anything, even slightly technical, and there's a man and a woman in the room, they're all supposed to. that the man is the one who does the work and the woman is his assistant or hangs out or whatever, she is not the one who is there to do the technical part, so immediately when you are a woman you have an obstacle that you have to overcome. where any man can sit in the back of the room and be a disaster at his job, but no one questions why he has to mess up in the first place to get fired, while a woman has to prove herself to just stay in the room. room and it's not good, but I think it's also the reason why Sylvia Massey makes a lot of art, she makes books, she makes a guerrilla recording that has become a thing and she loves to do it, but you also make a name for yourself by shooting a piano with a shotgun, that's something that people say "oh right, Sylvia", and she's really cool because Katherine Marx has her thing there, unfortunately as a woman, I think you have to have something to stick with, you have to to have something that makes people think, oh right, that's exactly why the words there because it gets challenged as soon as it appears so I don't have an answer on how to fix it.

I mean, society is getting a little better now that you can accuse people of sexually abusing you. Suddenly, out of nowhere, but it's difficult. I should have stopped talking two sentences ago. No, just record it. I mean, he's such a good bassist with all these people. It's what comes out of the speakers. And for them, it's what comes out. Their fingers are what they play and how they play it, so to record them just get out of the way. I try to make it as transparent as possible. My microphone setup is very simple. Recording Chili Peppers is one of the easiest things to do.

In the world you have natural sounding microphones in a decent sounding room and it's the Chili Peppers. I mean for me one of the most defining things about them is Chad's hi-hat. I can see Chad playing anything a mile away within a measure. because their hi-hat does that weird swimming thing that no one else does, those are the chili peppers, the flea bass, they're the Chili Peppers and, surprisingly, they've managed to go through three guitarists because I'm not counting the little dot in the middle that They've all been a part of the Chili Peppers and Hillel, John and Josh are very individual guitarists, but within the context of the band they sound like the Chili Peppers, so it's just about getting out of the way and making sure they feel comfortable. and happy and they're listening to what they're already doing coming back to them, get away from it, that's all you can do.

One of the great things about mixing in the box. I'm aiming for a laptop even though the laptop I use. a little bigger because otherwise it wouldn't be as cool for you, it's a hundred percent instant recovery of everything, so I don't mix one song at a time, when I have a record to mix, I go through and do all the boring stuff first. I set up the sessions like a color code, put the tracks in the right order, import my template, work on the drums to make it work if it's a band with drums and then I mix the whole album and do it in alphabetical order because that's easy , that's the folder, so I open a song and work on it as long as I know what to do and as soon as I feel like I don't know what to do or I know what I have to do but I'm just not ready for it, like I have to deal with something that will take a long time and be problematic.

I just close it and open the next one and I'll cycle through it from time to time. I'll loop starting at the bottom of the alphabet because otherwise you spend too much time at the top of the folder and then I'm always surprised how far along the mixes are because atopen them you are immediately fresh. you listen and you just react to what you're hearing I'm reacting to what's coming out of the speakers and nothing more because I don't remember what I did right before I closed it because when you're mixing on a console you sit there and have those moments during the day where the ones you're not being productive so you just repeat the mix and it just plays and you check your email or you go to lunch and you come back, but you still remember everything you did when you close it and open the next song immediately, that erases everything and when you listen to it you just listen to where you are and say, oh right, I need to do this so I never take notes on anything, I'm just always being guided by what I hear and this way, instead of having something like when you mix on a console, if you think about it you usually get two times where you go back to that new mix, one would be after dinner because lunch is never enough time and you're not far enough along and one would be the next morning if you're lucky enough to let it print the next morning and then start the next mix before lunch so you're not alone, that's all if I'm mixing a record now.

I have maybe seven or eight times where I opened that song and listened to it as if someone else had mixed it up to this point and it's brilliant and it makes me get out of my own head. I just didn't pay attention to all those lists of stupid things I had on the board. It's really about not keeping track of what you've done to a certain extent and just reacting to where you are and the only way to do it. It's either going to sleep for a long time or working on something else, so work on something else if you can.

Well when I mixed on my Neve console it had buttons for each speaker, there was a left button and a right button if you put them on. they were both in the middle, if you wanted somewhere else you had to switch to a pan circuit which would lower the level and as it got quieter I convinced myself it didn't sound that good either. I turned it up again and like no, it's not the same, so I mixed a lot of panning from left to right as soon as I went to Pro Tools, I put things anywhere because those pan circuits are always active and if you put it there , it stays there unlike an old Neve. where you put it in there and it kind of wanders around a little bit at different frequencies and goes to different places, so I use panning a lot to make the arrangement work if you have three plucked guitars in a chorus or a bridge or something like that. play with the panorama so that two of them work together as one or to spread the three applications, you hear all three.

I do that constantly. I don't have a preconceived notion of what it should be. I like the kick drum, the snare, the bass. voice in the middle as a general rule, but that doesn't always happen, but for the most part it happens, then like other things, they are wide. I love using plugins that broaden the stereo spectrum, like what's the name of the isotope, it just turns off the ozone. stereo image generator ozone image generator I think it's free get it it's amazing you just get poor it fills up either by the amount of one thing or by one stereo thing so I love using space effects but I think that really those kind of spatial things are for building your arrangement so that things work together, but then it's things like delays, reverbs and EQs, if you turn something off it sounds like it's coming from further away, so use that to try to go from front to back that's where you make a mix that's really good if you're really spread out here that's great but it's also really hard to listen to after a while but if you can spread out like that what it does is it allows the listener to concentrate on the really important things the first four or five times. and then you start to dive in because you start to get to know the things that are there from the beginning and you start to hear the weird little piano fill and the guitar reverb that's in front of the guitar and all the really cool things that you did It's a mixer that no one cares about. but if they love the song, they'll go in there and find it, so I try to use it from front to back.

I just made this up. I've never said this out loud before, so it could be true, but I think the front. back is where you really build something that will be a mix that will really stand the test of time rather than just spreading out there from left to right. I have to write that on every mix I've ever made, every single one I've made. I mean, sitting here listening before it's like, I'm lucky and those mixes suck, yeah, everything, there's always something, but it doesn't matter, you know, that's the version of that song and if the artist was happy with it, then there you have it. and there are some mixes where you do things because the artist wants them and they don't necessarily end up where you want them to.

There are some mixes you make that you're absolutely thrilled with when you finish them and then you listen to them a week later, you know? or a month later, the nice thing is that sometimes years later, when you haven't heard it, you can really appreciate it because you've forgotten all the little things and you hear the big picture, like 99 problems is one of those mixes that you like. wow, that's really cool, that's good on Danny California, I think it's a denial that there are little things there, they still bother me, but they will always bother you, but it has to be that way if you're not a perfectionist, you're not an artist and There's a great saying that no album is finished, they're just abandoned and it's true, there's nothing to say that any artistic decision is right, therefore you're never done making decisions, you're never done working on anything. you just have to stop otherwise you'll be someone who never puts out the one record you've been making your whole life so yeah actually when I do it I do these seminars in France and I mix them with masters seminars and there's a lot There are people who are very talented, but they spend months mixing their own stuff.

The best advice I can give you is to start mixing that again from scratch and spend three hours because you know it inside out, you know where everything is. a three-hour mix, leave it for a week, come back and tweak it and you'll probably end up in five hours total because you just create your own, you know, no, I mean, yeah, that's actually a really good question because of course, would you do it. I think at some point I'll give up because otherwise how could I send a mix? But I do it. I'm getting to the point where in the short term I don't know what else I would do and it's not that I won't do it.

I don't know what else I could do to improve it. I no longer hear anything that needs to be fixed. I get to the course and it continues, it's exciting. I get goosebumps on the bridge because I got the reverb balance on the vocal. Well, all that kind of stuff and I get to the point where I don't know what I would do to it and that's when I have to send it. Sometimes it's done and sometimes I get comments from the artists like: Hello, did you do it? I want to do this and it's something that's crazy that I was so used to that I didn't listen to it anymore, but it's so much faster to have someone else hear that and then fix it, you know?

And that's the other thing about mixing on the computer. I'm not short on time to make withdrawals and make changes, no matter when it comes, I get an email, I can log in, make changes and I hear it fresh and it might be an hour later. three weeks later doesn't matter, but I'm getting to the point where I have no reservations about shipping the mix precisely for the reasons I said before: you can't fill an email with all that stuff to explain why you're shipping the mix now, so you have to get to the point where you think it's done or as done as you can make it without input.

I mean, I could talk a lot about it, but I won't, but the only thing I would say is You have to mix for the way people are going to listen, but you don't mix in mono because the iPhone speakers are mono because you're already in the point where the iPhone speakers are. You can also buy an AM transmitter and mix through it. you need to know what's going on, you can't create a mix where if you don't hear everything below 40 Hertz it falls apart, so you have to be smart and the mixes have to translate the EQ and even the panning into mono. a technique that I never understood and I never came to terms with it and it never worked for me for other people it works very very well I don't rule it out and if it is something that works for you you should continue doing it myself personally No, it doesn't help, yes, yes you're producing, I mean, the most important thing is the songs, there's nothing that matters more than that and then the second most important thing is the performance of the songs and the most important thing about that is the voice, if there is a voice, like that that you have to do it right and my favorite part of making records is pre-production because you're sitting in a room playing ProTools like a human being like, hey, let's make those two bars longer, hey, why not? you play a drum fill like that, ooh, the kick drum pattern on the chorus should line up with the bass and I love that, but you have to switch hats a lot, like you're producing an engineer, which is usually the case because you never there is money I'll do engineering for the first three or four hours and get sounds on everything and then I turn it off completely and if I'm lucky enough to have an assistant say please let me know if something breaks because I won't notice at the time.

I'm only listening as a producer because I can't do both at the same time and then when you start mixing it's very important to stop producing because otherwise you're mixing and the chorus doesn't happen and you're like, hey, let's put another guitar in there. no, you already decided that the arrangement was right, there has to be a way to make it work and if there isn't, you will exhaust all options trying to make it work and then you will come back and say well, I guess it will be better. Put a guitar in here, so I think it's very important to compartmentalize the jobs that you do, especially because if you're a songwriter you're going to do every job well, you're going to write it, you're going to perform it, you're going to mix it throughout pre-production.

You fix it yourself, it's brutal and I think that if you try to do it all at once and solve the production problems by writing or mixing the problems by recording you will never finish, it's impossible. I'm not that good at it, but it's the return to the fresh mix, I mean, I come, I know I'm a horrible, very picky consumer, I hate everything, so I know, so I have to make myself like it, whereas Rick Rubin is the end consumer. share tastes with millions of people and that is why people buy the albums that he produces, but you are always making the album that you want to hear with the exception that it is not your album, it is the artist's album and you have to make the album that the artist wants to make and hopefully you make that version align with how you want it to be, but you are subordinate to the artist, but as a pure producer you are the consumer, so you have to make your decisions based on you as the consumer everything time. time, a lot, just, there were logistical reasons for moving and not having a big room to set up my speakers, things like that, so I started working and wearing headphones thinking well, when I get on speakers, I'll do the same thing.

Heavy work and as I've gotten more and more used to them, I do less and less, I see less and less media to do on speakers, the best thing about this and any recording teacher will hate me for this because they'll say: You need to mix on speakers and you do especially when you're learning, but the best thing about headphones is that when you're using your studio, you don't have to worry about the fact that you're in a rectangular room that has horrible acoustics. When you wear it, it's the room and it's the speakers too, so if you can find headphones where you can actually hear what's going on and not create problems for yourself, it's amazing, it's brilliant and it frees you up to work absolutely anywhere and be confident. what you're doing instead of second-guessing, which as soon as you get too comfortable with a pair of speakers in a room, that all changes and you question everything you do because you're not sure you're listening Okay, cheap headphones, just buy another pair.

Leave them on for an hour and a half and you'll be fine, so yeah, I'm a fan of headphones, but it's hard, oh, we have to go eat.