Andrew Scheps 1 hour video! Recording drums & guitars to mixing tips, production..

hello this is the record production calm interview with me Russell Katya and I'm drew Shep's with the legend himself well so you're in the UK now yeah in the UK um well living here now my beautiful wife who's actually sitting behind the camera is English we met 26 years ago 27 almost I was living in London late 80s early 90s and then we can married this whole time being going back and forth visiting family and things and just spending more and more time here and 25 years in LA was enough and we just decided that now was the time we've been talking about it forever and so just finally happened excellent and you've got some of your gear in Mono Valley yeah well basically for years I'd been mixing on this Neve console and before that on other people's console ceilings so I'd assembled a pretty kind of ridiculous studio in LA that was basically just for me to mix and then over the last four years I've transitioned to mixing 100% inside the computer and Pro Tools which I love but it meant that I had all of this gear that was sitting and so I had the idea years ago actually the first time I walked into this room I said we should put my Neve in here sort of half joking but half serious because it's such an amazing tracking room and to have a desk to go with it so that was always an idea so this is the one from pod yes yes West yes which is OK bunker pod UK right okay so is the on studio gone is it is it yes I mean the studio I mean it was just it was basically a converted garage at my house and so somebody's actually renting that space and using it as a studio but all of the gear got put in into a container and sent over and a very cold day in February it all showed up and we unboxed it and here it is so it's it's kind of an amazing opportunity because I had all of this gear which is for recording I mean you can make the argument about not using gear to mix and I think I make the argument for myself pretty well but you absolutely need it to record I mean you have microphones and they've got to get them into the computer and the better gear you have on the front end the better it's gonna sound and so now all of the gear that I amassed that I was using for mixing but was really built for recording is back doing that so yet it's perfect actually really excited about it at this stage in your career is it easier or more difficult to have that family life and how do you avoid doing too much work well I mean now it's actually a piece of cake because the kids are out of the house and they're adults and off doing you know adult things so our son lives in Oakland our daughter lives in Los Angeles so it's just down to the two of us now which is great and the way I avoid doing too much work is I don't get hired a whole lot sometimes so no it is it is it comes in waves I mean I there was a period of about three months last year where I basically wasn't working but what's good about those times is that you know you've got a million friends and bands we're doing music that you like but they have no money and so you make them wait and then all of a sudden you can do all those projects very quickly or spend time with my modular synth or just go to the pub or whatever it is and then it'll be full-on for three months you know where everything that's supposed to happen one right after another all happens at the same time so it yet goes in waves but the family side of it is I've worked at home basically for the last 20 years and I think that's the only way we really got through it yeah well cuz I mean I'm sure Debby remembers hundreds of times where I would call from the studio and say yeah I'm almost done and then you know sometimes I wouldn't even get home that night and I had called it dinner so that's just studio time is elastic and when the studios at home you can actually just stop for a second go eat dinner say hi to people whatever and then go back to work do you think a lot of people are taking that approach now we've spoken to quite a few producers who were decentralizing and having their own yes I mean I think probably more often than not that comes from the just that you can you know and you can save money I mean most budgets are all in budgets now there are very few budgets that say yes and we'll pay for the studio it's there's this much money to make a record how much do you want to keep so it's why Studios like Mountain Valley have to really have a special place in the record making process and every once in a while there'll be a band that will come in for six to eight weeks and make the whole record but most bands now will go to a place like this to record drums things that they can't accommodate at home and then they'll scurry off back to the rooms they've built to finish overdubs and mix and I do the same thing and it's just the technology is enabling that and for mixing as well I mean I needed a pretty big room and a lot of power and things to be able to mix on a console now I need a laptop and a pair of speakers and that's kind of it and so it's much easier to do that at home then to be able to have your family life be better because of that well that's a great added bonus but I think if most of the people who do what I do were honest they moved home for economic reasons and got the family bonus you know so easy if you've got a space yeah I do I mean I've got I've got a place I can work it's not really built out yet I mean my plan is to build a room and of course the big part of that plan is that the room is large enough to accommodate a full-size snooker table so that's that's the big plan but at the moment I just have a set up with my speakers that I can work in and then if I need to work with a client like all I can come here or there are a bunch of smaller studios right near me or so I you know a place I can just bring my speakers if I need to meet with people but I've had people come over depends how well I know them you know if their people have known for a while they can just come over and like all right you know but it works and it's fine but it's not swish these babies travel with you well no these babies live here I'm actually I own four pairs are on at this point because they're they're not that expensive we're talking obviously they're not that expensive but they stopped making them 30 years ago or something like that so if you blow them up you can get them reek owned but you can't replace the drivers and you can't really do much with the crossovers so I just buy them whenever I see them for sale and then leave them scattered yeah so you mentioned that you occasionally have periods of time where nothing's going on are you still doing 10 quake yeah yeah anything interesting happening well I mean really at this point own quake I mean i-i've still AM the North American label for a few bands that I've worked with and things like that so there's some smaller almost more kind of distribution things but I've got one artists on the label low roar which I'm very very involved in I mean I'm practically in the band on the records yeah producing and playing a lot of instruments and working with Ryan really closely and then I've been his label since the beginning I mean I basically formed the label to put out his first record I've been thinking about it for years and then did it for that so that's the focus of the label is the one artist and we're actually hoping he'll attract a slightly larger label just to get some more support but I mean we've just had a placement in a video game trailer that has gone nuts so we almost charted as it we just missed it but yes so I still do that but it's very much about just the one okay yes so would you describe yourself as a mixer or mixer producer or or anything what would I don't know I mean I used to describe myself as the audio janitor but I think I've graduated a little bit from that now I mean at the moment 90% of my work is mixing right it's just I think it's a combination of two things one is that's just what happened which I'm absolutely fine with and the other thing is that I've probably steered myself towards it because it's so much more flexible any other part of the recording process you have to be in a room on a given day with people and I can mix anywhere at any time and I don't have to schedule so when all of those projects happen at the same time now especially now that I'm in the box I can say yes to absolutely everything and then I just won't sleep for a while but it's fine and I actually enjoy working on multiple projects at the same time because of just staying fresh in the perspective of switching back and forth I love producing I love being in a room with a band that's my favorite probably pre-production is my favorite production is a dynamic human interaction and engineering is secondary are you still in mind yes I think that that's very much pertaining to sort of the what goes on during the day while you're producing and recording a band and if if you are an engineer first and a producer second then you're not making the rendered you have to be a hundred percent present to produce to be listening to the song and the performance and gauging that the band needs lunch rather than kick drums sounds great you know so that's definitely what that's about I mean that's nothing to do with any other part of the process but yeah when I'm producing I'm invariably also engineering but I will spend the first hour and a half of the first day engineering and that's pretty much it and then I'm relying on everyone else who's in the room to tell me by the way the leftover had hasn't been working for an hour and I didn't know how to tell you that well tell me immediately you know so I really stopped paying attention to it and that's with that yeah excellently worded quote yeah so in terms of you makes work and so on you've got management's haven't you yes bringing in the work or they just it's the I've been with Frank McDonough in States now for twelve maybe a bit longer and now I also have management based in the UK le Giles and Kerry Ridley who it's complicated anyway I have multiple managers now but basically every once in a while they get approached by somebody who says I've got this project and who do you have that's good for it and those are the gigs that will come from them because they've got long-term relationships with A&R and managers and things like that but the very first thing Frank said to me when I spoke to him is I don't get you work don't be under the illusion that once you have a manager it's solved you just sit around and you know take phone calls and cash your checks and it's definitely still me getting work and it's all very organic and word-of-mouth and every once in a while someone will show up because they heard something I did but usually it's just because you met somebody and they enjoyed hanging out with you and so let's use that guy and it's very much kind of just being the name on the tip of somebody's tongue as they go into a meeting or whatever it's very very random and so stuff does come from my managers but it's very much just this slow burn of the career yeah I'm tracking I don't know if because what you've said in interviews before about not really necessarily having any given techniques that you you repeat all the time and so I suppose that's a different one that I can't actually ask you what's your favorite this technique or that technique well what was the last technique well I think it's it's probably disingenuous for me to say that I do I mean I certainly don't do things differently every time I have a mixed template I use for mixes I have go-to microphones I use for because I know they'll work but it's for me it's just having like a massive tool set that I'm very familiar with available immediately so that I can move quickly because I don't want my experimentation to get in the way of the fact that the first take of this song is going to be the magic so I need to slam up a ton of microphones be able to push up faders say yep that's definitely gonna work and if it doesn't work I know it's a problem with the instruments or the room or the player or the arrangement not that I've decided to try something I read about in a magazine and it's not working yeah so I do use quite a bit of the same stuff all the time because I know it works and then just sort of based on what I hear then that informs everything else I did when I would you know go out into the weeds from there so you can ask me what my favorite thing is something specific but yeah I mean we probably would want to talk about guitar and vocals so what local chains what's your go-to it's I mean really really standard stuff microphone wise it's very hard to say because every vocalist is different I've had great luck with in sm7 you know some of the best singers in the world using a $300 microphone because that's what works on their voice see 12s are great I mean you know I could any really expensive microphone is probably great I also love the mojave m200 which is about thousand dollars large diaphragm condenser the top end on that microphone is insane but again it just depends on the singer I mean that mic can sound way too bright on people but if you have like low roar records it's a perfect match for Ryan's voice he sings in falsetto quite a bit and it's just a very open top but once you're done with the microphone I have never not had success with a 1073 into an 1176 okay end of story that can be and if I don't have an 1176 I just won't use a compressor I'll just record uncompressed so unless I'm doing something super specific for vocals that's it that always yes yeah which is actually the peers there's now but not an original yeah yeah yeah it's yeah it's an original BCM 10-10-10 73's but then I've also got a rack so you can just pop them out of the desk and so that's the thing so the desk lives down here and then if I need a couple I come and steal them and then it's a b c m8 you know for whatever so you're coming out and doing overt obsessions yeah i mean if i need to that's exactly what i do i just steal some of my gear back is that your mix rig do you take you mix rig out well my mix rig is it's my laptop that you ad box and that's really it so yet fits in a backpack sounds good yeah well I guess drums then what's how do you because your when you your mixes quite often very tight in terms of ambient spaces you know there's because tasting do you approach miking the kit in that way kind of I mean I spent so many years tracking for Rick Rubin and people like that where it's very it's not higher pressure because of anything they're doing but you're in expensive sessions with experienced bands and you need to cover yourself and move quickly and have everything sound great so because of that I've gotten very used to multi miking almost to a fault I mean not thirty microphones but there could be 15 to 18 microphones and drum kits so close mics are big part of the drum sound for that reason but also because when I mix all of the ambience is actually coming from crushing the hell out of close mics and all the ambience within the kit comes up rather than distant room mics and things like that so I mean really standard kick inside and outside and if I had to pick something I suppose an AKG d112 inside a 47 FET outside just this idle just barely inside yeah because two reasons I'm I'm usually not recording things like Pantera where you need to have a very very clicky kick drum so I like to have more low-end in that inside mic and then that also keeps the inside and outside mic lined up so phase wise you're only an inch or so apart which at the low frequencies doesn't matter at all as opposed to being maybe a foot apart if you really stick that mic far inside then snare top if I can and sm7 because it's just slightly more directional and a little more high five than a fifty seven but it's that same thing on the bottom I really don't care just a microphone cuz I don't get their tone out of that it really is just for the snares a lot of people get great snare bottom sounds that are part of the snare sound I don't know know you can always gate later there's no point in doing it on the way in and plus I'm never compressing on the way in so there's usually no need to gate you know I'm not bringing up a bunch of noise lately I've been putting a side mic on the snare cuz I did it once and it was good kind of any condenser for 14:47 FET if you've got one actually but physically getting that and an SM seven in on a snare drum can be just on the side of the shell yeah yeah just basically pointing at the top hoop and maybe sort of half way above the hoop it's really random yeah it doesn't seem to matter sometimes I go out after a take about man that Rammstein great and all of the drum mics have drooped into places that I never would have put them and try and remember that like you know that might be a good place to put it Tom's for twenty ones you know really easy if you if I'm doing a quieter session actually more of a jazz thing if I remember to do it the Sony C 37's the two mics look kind of like salt shakers are amazing on Tom's but if you bashing they don't take the lift yeah and plus they might get hit what's the they're not bad yeah I mean and on Tom's if it's a rock thing I'm gonna cut them anyway when I'm mixing you know those tracks are not part of the drum sound they're the Tom sound cuz they need to be hype they need to have maybe a little bit of reverb whatever they're gonna get processed to be big Tom's so you're usually so close to the cymbals the Tom mics that you just need to get the Tom's to sound good and not worry about the rest of the kid for me yeah it was the crack with samples then every week if I have to put them in I will I'm I don't think I've well I mean I don't wanna say never but I've probably almost never fully replaced kicker snare with a sample but if I'm mixing and I need something I will absolutely put a sample in to reinforce sometimes it's just a trigger reverb but more than likely it's mixed in but it's it's always mixed in and it's just that okay I've got the snare sounding as good as I think I can get it based on the source material and it just feels short so okay I need something that's bright and long I put it in and kick drum if you don't my theory on everything is that first of all it only comes through the speakers and no one's looking at the screen the other thing is that so 99% of the people who will hear this interview know what we're talking about 99.9% of the people who listen to music have absolutely no idea what we're talking about and they don't care whether we use samples or not because they don't even know what it means so if I can make a record that's more fun to listen to by using samples I'm going to use samples I used to have kind of you know theories and ethics about things like that and it just it doesn't work I mean I was working with a singer amazing amazing singer who had done this incredible sort of ad-lib take over the last chorus of a song and it made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up every time you heard it until he dipped flat to the point where it was annoying and then that took you completely out of the song and this guy wanted to resync it because he said no you can't tune anything on the record you can't tune it so we did take after take after take and got something he was okay with and then I went back and tuned the first thing and let him listen to it and fortunately he was big enough to say okay you're right this is about what we're hearing not about whether or not you've tuned my vocal that other vocalists to say it has to be a complete take two thirds of the way through a take you lose concentration you start thinking about you know dinner and so you get a line that's not as good or just something physically happens you need to swallow and you haven't like I do right now and there okay so you know you're not always gonna get a perfect take so I've really tried to completely let go of anything to do with sort of what happens inside the studio has nothing to do with the point of what it is that you're doing should we take a brief swage out of talking about mics yeah to talk about ethics ethics because I'll have some you I'm guess I'm guessing that you were aware of the Visconti Adele spat very slightly yeah and I won't push you to say oh no no about that but you know obviously from what you've said tasteful use of tuning is is the way to go but when he's too much too much well if they're two things I'd say about that one is a sonic thing if you can hear it unless it's supposed to be the t-pain effect through the Cher effect from way back when then you've done too much but the real thing I think the the context that that conversation needs to happen in is I'm sure we're all old enough to remember Milli Vanilli right who won a Grammy for a record that it turns out they did not sing on now they would absolutely sing on their own record because the vocal tools are so good that they would have sparkling lead vocals no matter what they sounded like on the way in so that technology has gotten to the point where now the conversation has completely changed no one would ever start talking about the fact that did Paul AB do a really sing or is that the ghost vocal what's going on there it doesn't matter now you can make anybody's vocal sound good enough to put on a record given technology so it's moot you're making a record if that's the artist you're making a record with and it turns out they're a terrible singer then either you shouldn't be making that record or you should use every tool at your disposal to make the record as good as it can be you certainly don't want to leave somebody exposed as a bad singer when you're making a record so that's my basic overall theory on it is just we all have to get over ourselves and just make records that sound great in when whatever that means I don't even mean sound great but are great to listen to for people who like music if you had that thing where young singers are coming in and singing as if they're auto-tuned yeah it is weird it sounds like they got frets yeah yeah yeah and you know there were always singers who could do that who sounded that way but yeah now I think you'd learn you know you imitate things so as you learn to sing that so I guess that's a whole generation who've never you know who their pop music has always been yeah and yeah absolutely look if they can do that and be into you and it's less work for me since Hey well I suppose we should jump back to guitars then because I didn't want to miss that because your guitar sound amazing so well what do you play do you play guitar no no I from protal yeah I started on French horn then switch to trumpet this french run wasn't cool enough way back then but I play a tiny tiny bit of things like I Pro Tools and I have played all kinds of things on different I played bass harmonium b3 mostly keyboard based stuff I use my modular synth all over records sometimes but I am not at all a musician who would ever be in a room playing for people that would be very unfair to the people I'm playing with and for that would be horrible for everyone including me but I'm musically trained enough to understand what it is to play most instruments and things so I mean I think that's a really important trait in a producer certainly to understand when a guitar part is unbelievably difficult and possibly passed the talent of the person playing it to know like hey why don't we slow ProTools down a half step and retune you or capo or whatever you know find ways to get the performance you're trying to get by understanding what it is to perform it but no I don't play so but recording guitar yes they seem like a guitar apply nobody really understands well rock bands are my favorite things so it's just something I love but I'm very conservative in terms of recording guitars there are lots of people like Joe Parisi is a great example of somebody who knows every single amp ever built every pedal every built every pick he will choose the pick for the part and then when you move on to mic techniques he'll switch preamps based on the part because he knows how it will respond to that type of guitar tone I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing I take an sm57 and a 421 i duck take them together on one stand so that diaphragms are lined up and I stick it directly into the center of the cone right in the center which of course that's a dust cover that's not gone so I have no idea but to me that sounds like the amp sounds and that's all I'm trying to do is capture the tone that's coming out of the amp now every once in a while that won't sound right but then when I walk out into the room it sounds really good and then I'll start messing with either angling usually just backing up a foot or so say what I'm on right on the grill absolutely and because that's my starting point and ninety percent of the time it works and I think really it's having the two microphones gives you so much in phase low-end that it's big so that's the key to that and it's different from just EQ mean in a bunch of low area and the mid-range on those two microphones are so different that the blend of them gives you a really natural kind of coverage of the mid-range and so it sounds like the amp I see other people record guitars with Royer's and things and stuff and room mics and it sounds amazing but every time I try and do it it just doesn't sound right so I've been given up I guess there's not necessarily certainly with the way you mix there's not necessarily so much call for room sound no I mean unless it's a really special tone or it's by itself a lot or you know do something like that's very distinctive I'm just trying to make it sound like the amp and yeah there's no room in my mixes for anything you know those guitars need to be that big because they've got a barrel through there can't be this big because then they just get stepped on I'm should we talk about bass then yeah it's not a really simple one I mean take a D I always I use an evil twin that's my VI of choice because I own it and it sounds really good and then if the bass amp sounds good then I'll stick to microphones on it and again right in the center and they're usually tending speakers so you can't get two mics on one speaker so any two speakers and really it's about the mic stands that's how I choose the speakers whatever physically is easy go there okay and if it sounds bad try another speaker because there's usually eight of them so you've got lots of choice and obvious stuff 47 FET and then re twenty might be really good on the bass I do try and have one condenser in one dynamic just because the response is so different the condenser if you get lots of low-end out of it fantastic but what you're really gonna get out of that is the grit and the sort of tone and then then dynamic it's just a dynamic so you know hopefully more of the low-end but again those two microphones really in phase that's what gives you all the really good low end of the recording whereas one microphone just doesn't do it for some reason fathers yes done in this room I was gonna say yeah I spotted they were tapping the guitars with percussion mallet yes yeah I mean it it's the kind of thing where if if the band is well rehearsing arrangements are great and they're playing really well I could basically do nothing I'll sit in the room and just say that take was amazing let me try cutting this chorus and you know like that's it but then every once in a while light bulb goes on and there you go and on that record which was done in this room we had been trading I went and met with the band in Switzerland just like hung out with him for two days in their rehearsal room which was great and then we traded demos back and forth where they would send me a little rough mix from the rehearsal space I maybe do an edit send it back but we hadn't really done pre-production so the idea of making that record was every morning they would go out there no six people playing all including vocals they go out there play the song maybe play it twice then come in we'd start working on the arrangement and I would sort of be tweaking sounds as we did that and then by the end of that day that song was completely done including lead vocals so they would go away only needing to do background vocals on the whole record after three weeks so song a day actually two weeks did 12 songs in 12 days I think but there was one song where we were doing this sort of space eat intro and thought okay what would be cool a hammer Dawson would be cool well we don't have hammer dulcimer so we just got two mallets and had the guitar player sit exactly where he was sitting to record the acoustic guitar and just with his left hand fret all the chords and I just played the guitar and do two tracks of it put in some reverb and you know Bob's your uncle they say so it just I wanted to hear that sound and we just tried to figure out yeah yeah okay well we've talked about pre-production and recording mixing yes you're in the Box man no secret no no there's some people apparently still don't believe me but yeah what do you not use is something mixer Oh have you got RSR yet oh are you track ball guy um yeah yeah track ball no no I'm all right yeah I don't know why but I think I've just been using a track ball for so many years that my body's probably morph to accept it you wouldn't go for a control surface no you know what I used to I mean I had a Huey then I had a pro control before I could afford to be mixing on consoles all the time I was in the box whenever I couldn't afford it um and love those but first of all I want to be portable and I can't stick a pro controller on a backpack and the other thing is that I find them confusing now if I looked down I've gotten so used to a console where that fader is always the lead vocal and 24 it is in fact always the lead vocal so I can find it and on a control surface you can't always finding cuz things aren't always in the same place so I've gotten to the point where I now always use a one fader controller got a frontier designs alpha track and there's a shortcut in Pro Tools to make that whatever track you click on just beyond that fader and that's the way it works so if I need a fader I'm there and if not you can do what yes you the rides in I mean I used to love building a balance on the board a very visceral hands-on thing and I'm just gotten used to not doing that so I don't do it that way anymore it's worth the recall yeah yeah absolutely and even even you know the the process sort of dictates the way you work but I now enjoy building the balance in the bottoms with the trackball I've just gotten used to it and set things up with VCA so it's in big chunks okay if you find it just as fast yeah yeah in probably faster right okay and it's all parallel compression stuff you're doing you're the master of parallel I don't know about the master I think it's the masters as you know what and it's not like smashing a mix it's a different thing and yeah you know that's the obvious thing that we're not gonna talk about because you've talked about it so many times before in Death Magnetic but I'm you know the other stuff it's not like the transients are being chopped down that's the the whole idea me forgetting about what you put on the mix bus but the idea of parallel compression is you're blending a compressed thing in with the uncompressed original source so if it's a snare drum you never touch that transient as you blend in the compressor it brings up stuff you know and that stuff is different depending on the compressor and what you're compressing and all the rest of it so in theory you can leave all of your transients and bring the rms level up to meet them so the character of the transients doesn't change and that's the point the dynamic range is obviously going away and in some cases going away completely but it's the character of the transients that we're talking about it's not the level of them because who cares like that's so irrelevant because of the level of everything else is changing so it's all about the the dynamic range of the mix which obviously I destroy because that's what I do but it's just the sound of it I just love the sound of it the other thing is that I use shared parallel compression so I'm not I don't have a about parallel compressor for the kick and one for the snare and then one for the overheads and whatever I've got twenty parallel compressors and almost all of them are getting multiple things and sometimes it's things that make sense like oh this is for the drum kit except for the kick and snare okay fine but sometimes it's okay this is everything except the drums this is everything except the bass and the vocal the kick and the snare this end so and it's different on it yeah it's all well but no it's all post-fader sends at zero so it's always lifting up a copy of whatever's going to the mixed bus and shoving it into a compressor so it's eq'd it's compressed or if I am compressing it like whatever I'm doing on the inserts and then whatever the balance is of those things those things show up at the parallel compressor sounding exactly like they do in the mix bus so that's mostly you add two compressors everything well yeah well but everything I mean and though they get changed up who's gonna ask how do you choose which compresses to you because obviously it's random I mean there's some that have been in my template since I've had a template and they're in my template because it's what I used in I used hardware because they just work like a dbx 160 parallel on kick and snare works for me I love the way it sounds and I haven't gotten sick of it yet the other stuff you just get sick of it it's let our auto-tune is a really good example of this kind of thing where the first initial obvious benefit is who buckles in tune but there are artifacts that come with it and when auto-tune first came out I'm using autotune as an example only because it was basically the first one to be accepted but you hear it across the board with you know waves in tune or all of them basically Melodyne they're the sound of a tuned vocal became something that about six months after auto-tune came out everybody could hear and not just because people were overdoing it but you start to hear the artifacts and then as a listener you decide whether you like later you don't like it so with the parallel compression you get the wow factor of whoo everything's more exciting and sounds more energetic but then about six months later like oh god it's killing the symbols again they sound backwards or it's making the guitars sound a little hollow or and then you realize like oh well that's what that parallel compressor does any new one and then you just go through things until you find one and the what it sounds like when you blend the parallel back in has nothing to do with what it sounds like when you listen on its own so you can't choose it based on like oh I've read that lots of people use the PI compressor on bass it could be the worst parallel compressor on bass for me ever but if I put it on as an insert it would be cool so it's very random in a way which is good because it also makes it quick you just try a bunch and go that's cool too ok cool and then are you mixing into anything on the on the mix books yeah I mean there's definitely stuff in the mix bus most of its EQ actually a couple of sort of harmonic distortion things like at the moment I'm going through a Fairchild plug-in and I don't remember whether it's you ad or waves because I go back and forth but it's not compressing it's just because both of those model all the Transformers and all the harmless distortion so that's a taller thing so it's color EQ there's one compressor usually I like a Neve 33609 I've just used it because it's basically yep those guys in a box and no one's bothered to model those specifically so the 33609 is closest thing to it and then a limiter at the end to keep the red lights off and I change which one that is quite a bit so how'd you deal with labels asking Costanza so you just do it but they won't no no no look it stems the the thing about stems if they want stems because they want to be able to do their own version of the mix then I don't give it to them because that's if you don't like mix like let's finish the mix yeah and I will do revisions I'm senior record right now and there a couple of songs I'm well into the double digits on revisions and most of those regions are tiny tiny things but if you don't like it tell me let's make it right and that's the great thing about being in the box is it takes me longer to bounce off line not real time than it does to make the change and because I live in the country it takes me much longer to upload the mix than it did to make the revisions so I can be right in the middle of a mix get an email say great perfect time to take a break open up the song I got the email about make a change send it and now I'm back to mixing the thing I was mixing so that's a huge sea change from being on a desk so I don't mind that at all and I've forgotten the original question I've gone so far into the weeds yeah well I guess this brings us anyway yeah if they say what they need the stems for then I can give them stems that are appropriate to that stems for getting remixes done make perfect sense if you happen to get a song placed in a video game then they have a specific source for stems you absolutely need instrumentals and acapellas and things because if you get an ad placement and they want an instrumental up to a certain point it may not be as simple as an edit they might need to be able to have those separately to put the vocal leading into a section it didn't use to sing over whatever so I understand the need for them but the problem is is that the usage defines the stems and every usage needs a different set of stems so I print the most basic set possible to fulfill the requirements so I can get paid in show anyway do you watch a many of these compressors nope yeah yes the only time I sidechain anything is for a very specific thing like gah sidechain a gate off a vocal because I need the effects only to come up when the vocal is singing or compressed such and compressor on vocal effects to bring it down while I sing and may come up it's just a way for me to be lazy so I don't have to automate it always going to say cuz you don't like automation or don't like having to do yeah I mean I think it's not that I don't like having to do it it's just that ties you into things very early on once you put breakpoints on a track you can't change the balance quickly I mean you can if you put everything in trim and but I tend to avoid it as long as possible because it just makes my life easier because I'm not set on the vocal level until I'm almost ready to print the mix and that's the easiest way for me to change it project no no no I will I'd like to work on at least three songs at once and every once in a while I'll work on the entire record at the same time for a few reasons one is you get a good sense of the whole project which you know you can get a sense listening to rough mixes but it's good to sort of keep that perspective all the time another thing is I get bored and I want to work on another song or I get stuck and I went to another song so now I can so yeah but sometimes it's across multiple records at the same time and as soon as I don't know what to do next I close it and move on to the next song and it's what's good about it is it lets you get all of the boring stuff out of the way first of all you can prep all 12 songs for a record over a couple of days and get the drums kind of in place and color-code and routing and all the stuff that is not creative and not fun do it all at once have a couple of terrible days and that's it for the project and it also means that I'm always fresh and I'm usually surprised at how far I got in a Sun I'll think I've really barely started this one open it up and it's almost done and it's this great way I mean anything that you do that's creative you sort of fall into a trance a bit and you don't you think like you've done nothing but you've done 500 tiny things over the last hour and a half and to not even realize it you get to the end of that hour and a half and think oh I've no idea what to do close it and then when you come back the next day or later that day you're a genius you know so I love that part or bring the bring the listener in the yeah yeah the problem is now actually because I work on so many things at the same time and I'm not sort of set up room she doesn't get to listen to everything she's listened to every single mix before it went out because it was my you know my reality check either just because it changes how you hear it makes you zoom out you get that adrenaline rush as you hit yeah play I mean also she would just she's the perfect consumer because she doesn't say like kick traumas a little too much of 30 just the verse is messy yeah she's always always right it's never for the reason she thinks like as soon as she gets technical then we're in the weeds but when I listen to why she's saying that she's right and it's a great thing and I don't get that as much now because I'm printing stuff kind of all over the place it's not like okay it's on the console now it has to come off but I get that perspective by having not listen to the song in two days and opening it up and you kind of seen where I'm at what are you using them um I actually use a bunch sparingly um if I need a reverb that you're gonna hear invariably it's d-verb because it's so grainy that you hear it easily in a really dense mix and it's great for infinite reverb effects and things like that except that the chorus on it makes it go flat which is bad but then I just use all kinds of stuff I love all the modeling reverb I love all t verb love the ways one's really good and then some of the specific modeled reverbs I really like the UAD EMT stuff is great but usually if I'm looking for a reverb altiverb is great because it just sort of does anything but gives you a lot of the same controls you would have on a regular reverb um when I'm listening to your mixes am i you mentioned before that a lot of the ambience was crushed off you know yeah it's not the same for all the instruments or you know they're dry they're really driving the vocal will get stuff but you would never know chol sounds dry but if I took everything off it it would sound dry and thin and small yeah so it's all stuff just to make it bigger and whether it's a reverb or a short delay your shifting or whatever but like guitars and keyboards almost never put anything on Rosi got stuff on them already yeah yeah I don't know I mean every once in a while like the thing that I will mess with lately and I have no idea like what time it is but I'll mess with the release time on the parallel compressor that's getting most of the mix because that will sort of set how much you're going between pumping or the thing is just a slab or it's a little more open or like that's where that release time is really useful for me but no I don't I don't know how to do that stuff do some delays Oxus well the the reverb returns or whatever did I go through parallel compression a very part no I mean usually those will if they're on the vocals they might go back through the same vocal parallel stuff but usually not because the parallel vocal is what's being sent to them yeah so I just need reverb on that I don't need to compress that yeah well we've been talking for years about doing something because they did all their signature series with Krystal Valjean Tony Maserati and and mani and all the rest of them so we talked about doing one but of course my the stuff that I do is all parallel so it was really difficult like well how do we do this do we make you do lots of sends in your session and now you can use my plug-in or whatever so the first thing we ended up doing was a model of the Neve 10 73 so I've talked ad nauseam about that it was great I mean they did the modeling and the advances in analog modeling really good like the stuff really starts to feel like the hardware now it doesn't just sound like it it feels like and it feels like it because it sounds more like it it's not voodoo I mean yes math and the analog stuff isn't voodoo either it's physics and the people who think it's voodoo just don't I mean I don't know exactly what's going on inside all these boxes but it's not voodoo so that was great and we've actually waves and I were working on something right now which I'm hoping it's gonna be out very soon which actually does use some of the parallel mess but as an insert so we do all the parallel stuff for you and it's it's actually really cool because normally if you set up 20 parallel chains and you're gonna use them shared you're not gonna individually set that up six times in a session I mean you'd have five thousand tracks so you wouldn't be able to do it but when you encapsulate it all in a plugin then all of a sudden you kind of can do it so you can do this ridiculously complicated routing for individual instruments over and over and over and over so that's great I mean the thing I love about waves is that they are not afraid to take chances and they're also there all over the place I mean they're Pro Audio like studio audio division is one small part of what they do they're huge in live sound they're huge a networked audio now with all the digi grid stuff but they're also they're probably bigger in consumer audio so they are pros the Kickstarter haven't they for the absolutely well but they've been in it already i mean i think i think it's delve they are the DSP inside of every single dell laptop now so they're their audio processing is being driven by what people really want to hear and then every once in a while that comes back like NX grew out of things that were being done in the consumer realm and then it comes back into the pro audio realm so they're they're really into experimenting and your headphone mixer occasionally then yes yeah more than anything jiggery-pokery no nope I used some Sony headphones that I've had for a long time so I know what they sound like it's 75 o6s I think this is the really bright yeah ones I mean I had him because in the studio they're great cuz a drummer can hear the click track over the cymbals without having to make it so loud that it bleeds into the decay of every single drum hit kind of thing so I just owned six or seven pairs of them and that I started using them from me and it turns out they're just there's sort of a good match with the tannoy because they're very bright and they're but they're not bright in an unnatural way they're bright because they're actually pretty flat there isn't some crazy mid-range boost that makes them sound dark yeah but once I know what a mix sounds like I mean I've heard the drums loud I've got the vocal booming and like it's all working the changes are small and it's about the way the mix feels it's not like I have to crank it up to hear whether that tambourine is right I need to just hear the mix so I can do that in headphones as easily as I can on speakers so it's not it's not a choice like oh I love to make some headphones it's just sometimes that's way more convenient yeah yeah do you think that's the way producers are gonna head in not just producers but makes engineers as well you know that a bigger division between the tracking and I'm taking mix process more into the box well it doesn't have to be anything I mean look if I could afford to still mix on the desk I probably wouldn't have pushed myself to move back into the box but I mean then I owned the thing it's not like I had to go booked a studio for a bunch of money it was here at home but I couldn't afford the time I couldn't afford to be mixing one song at a time it was killing me I was turning down projects and then you try to explain to people okay we're mixing this song and when it's done it's done and then they call you back two weeks later because they want the hi-hat louder so then I'm starting to do these crazy things where I have the mix in the original session with a hi-hat track and make sure it's in phase and push it up a little and that's not mixing that's like forensic audio and that's not fun so but also I really for me the technology sounds as good or better than mixing on analog gear and the only or better part would be for me that it's a hundred percent repeatable so it does sound the same everything time I opened it up which it does not on this debt there were times I'd be mixing something for Rick and he would say did you print this in the afternoon because we had a thing at my house or they would do something with the grid in Los Angeles and the power would switch and for about an hour every once in a while the power would dip and so of course everything just sounds worse because all the voltage rails are struggling and it's pulling more current out of the wall so I don't have any of that anymore which I love so it's a hundred percent repeatable and it sounds great now there are other people who swear that for them they need either a semi nip or fully analog mixing and absolutely I mean you know there's no I'm not saying I'm right I'm just saying for me I'm really really happy that it works because it's how I actually would like to be working but I wouldn't be doing it if it didn't sound good to me yeah yes he has a beard it's not how it started beard thing no no I didn't have a beard so I don't know if it's the hair thing but no I you have an ask questions it started because early on I was the geek who knew how to do stuff and then it's like what got me a lot of work so from sink LaVere days and then Pro Tools days and things like that so I first got called to work with him to like tune vocals on something or do some editing and I was busy on something else so I didn't do it and so over a couple of years I had friends who were engineering for him I would get a call every once in a while and it never worked out and then it finally worked out on a Saul Williams record of all things to come and they had done a lot of the record on the main PC 60 and they'd had printed it to analog tape and now they were mixing they wanted to relock up the NBC 16 of course it was drifting this was back in the days when things drifted and so I came in sort of on a technical side to do it and then Rick always has so much stuff going on that I also then immediately started doing two remixes of wu-tang clan songs with different people sorry track vocals with system down and man recorded chad smith playing drums on a tom morello remix and like all this stuff just happened in the space of two days and then with rick if you're a guy who can get stuff done then he calls you back because he likes to have stuff get done ya know what what from his style of production have you taken the biggest thing is to always be listening to the song in the performance I mean that's it that's all he ever does is listen to music and his ability to never lose perspective is his talent he's always listening like it's the first time he's ever heard it which is that's insane you know so that for me is is absolutely the biggest thing the you know how he does stuff er what he chooses to do is almost completely irrelevant it's the ability to first of all not take yourself too seriously in terms of what you're doing and second of all to always just be listening to what's coming out of the speakers and assess it as objectively as you can see you know we're presented with this image that he flips in and out of sessions and obviously that would keep perspective is that is that I mean you know they're they're a million stories and I'm sure 99% of them are apocryphal but it's it's the idea of if if he's going to be the producer and the overall guy for making sure this record is awesome it doesn't actually serve the band for him to be there while the guitar player is trying to come up with a part for the pre-chorus because he will react to the very initial performance of it and if it's not quite there yet it's not good yeah so why does he need to be there to tell you it's not good I mean if you don't know it's not good then you've got much more serious problems so it makes sense for him not to be there while you're figuring stuff out and then he will assess it and tell you what he thinks about it and he's not gonna say that's no good it's gone he'll say I don't think that's working and here's why and you know either suggest and I'll or it's saying do we need it at all or whatever but he will produce the record and that's for him what production is there are other producers who have very very hands-on in terms of choosing to pick helping the guy play the part right I mean Joe breezy would absolutely never not be there for a guitar overdubs because that's what he's doing as a producer but that's just not what Rick's doing what do you sit I'm I'm there all the time but there are times when I wish I could go for a sandwich you know because I know that there's nothing I can add yeah and it's hard work and there's there's nothing worse than being in a room where something's gonna be really really difficult and you can't help but you have to be part of it I mean that's not I don't think I've ever had a budget where I could have an engineer now I've been incredibly lucky with people who are supposedly assistants who are amazing engineers who are working at the studios I've been trying like during the 5s record had a lot of really great help on that record so I get help while I'm doing it but I am the engineer I mean I have to be there and it's probably part of why I've continued to record so simply I don't get caught up in that stuff because I just I love to just keep things moving I love working fast yeah an even if like you mentioned before you're more concentrating on on the process rather than the specifics you mentioned a Red Hot Chili Peppers guitar solo in in one of you right which one was it and why was it so distorted you mentioned oh well yeah that was that whole process was basically who's on by the way I don't remember which song it was but I was brought in pretty late in the album yeah - basically John Frusciante was doing a lot of overdubs and his background vocals and anthony was doing his lead vocals and they were doing all that in one place then for logistical reasons Anthony needs to go sing elsewhere so all of a sudden they needed a second engineer so the guy who'd been recording went with Anthony and I was brought in to work with John who had never met I was huge Chili Peppers fan for years and years so this was I mean this was big I'd been working for it for a while so I kind of knew that it was gonna be possible but I hadn't done it yet so I went in and thought that this was just like a setup get-acquainted day to find out where everything was I show up the other engineer says all right I gotta go there the lyric sheets there's the hard drive and John will be up in like 20 minutes okay and John walked into the room walked past me into the room where we recorded and was like okay let's go like what are you talking what are we doing so we did some background vocals on a song trying to desperately to catch up and get a handle on what's going on and then he said okay I got to do a guitar solo there's one microphone that's set up for vocals like okay so I just took the vocal mic and stuck it in front of the guitar amp and ran back into the other room and said okay so let me get a level and you know knowing it's not gonna be as loud as a vocal I turned the 1073 down some clicks yeah hit record it was a square wave and that's what's on the record yeah I mean look it was a very fuzzy time to begin with but I mean I had to say to John who I didn't really know very well like hey man look I didn't have a chance to get level and it's actually really distort and he came in listened to so no it's great so yeah how did that lead on to just organically I mean really what happened was the entire story is Rick because he can love shootouts of stuff having multiple people do things and then just listening blind tests and saying that's the best thing for this so when it came time to mix I was involved in the record I recorded all of Anthony's vocals with him on that record but then when it came time to mix they did a mix shootout and I lost I came in second I think so the guy who once started mixing and it was a it's a very involved project for lots of reasons but also because it was done completely on analog tape so by the time we were mixing it's two tape machines so everything takes forever you're not looking at a screen you can't make fixes you can't cut the Tom's you're manually doing lots of stuff you would normally do very quickly which is you know just part of the process and mixing was going slowly just because it was not for any particular reason just a million reasons added up so they decided like well look we really need to get moving on this and they had really liked one of the mixes I had done in the test mix shootout thing so they said okay well Andrew can do I think it was one of the quieter songs like well let's start Andrew off on on quieter stuff so I started doing the quieter stuff and then we kind of ran out of quiet stuff like alright well let's do one of these and so then ended up just mixing half the record so yeah yeah and it was it was I mean I had rented this half no yes I rented this half of this console plus a different first half cuz it was before I owned a console right and put it in my studios I rented tape machines rented a console and mixed it all in there so doing a full analog mix in your own studio with like the couch there wasn't room in the room for it also the sofa was like up on its end against the wall I mean it was a total mess in there but it was amazing good like you say you know the listener has no idea and they would think it's cool like how many pictures of the pristine studio they want to see the mess you know they want to see this room with all the faders up and guitars everywhere you know that's what's fun cuz they want to feel like they're spending time with the artists if they care at all about the recording process that's what they want they want to know that someone drove a tractor into a swimming pool like that's what's cool they don't want to know what picky used you know that's a fair point why I've got a load of clients written down here and I won't push you to ask you which was your favorite but I guess we should mention Black Sabbath sure so in the area yeah so what were there any challenges because it was 13 yes I don't know not really I mean it was it was a very simply recorded record I mean there was some songs that had a lot of overdubs in certain sections of the songs and ins but in general it was drums bass the live guitar and one more guitar and then there would be parts layered on top four things and then the vocals generally was a double vocal that's it the challenge was just the fear of failure I mean you know it's one thing to mix a band that's doing a record that's like Black Sabbath and they want to sound like Black Sabbath it's quite another thing to push up the faders and there's Geezer and dirt so I mean that was insane and there's no getting around like you could screw this up you could make this not sound like a Black Sabbath record and also at the very beginning of the mix process saying hey let's have a phone call about mixing and usually he's fine with email like you don't always have to talk to him so that's always where he's got a concept you know he wants to make sure that you get what he's talking about he said look I really want you to go back and listen to the first two records especially the first one because that's the idea I was gonna say it's you know in the first one it was done very very fast as fast as you can make a record bate well okay twice as fast as you can make a record because one day would be the fastest you could do but it's that's not the point though if you listen to that record now if I had made if I had send anybody a mix it sounded anything like that record I probably that would have been the last thing that I did because you couldn't do it it's not it's not the biggest sounding record when you crank it up it sounds amazing and it's got all the power but it's because of the songs and the performance it's not because the drums sound like people want rock drums to sound like now they don't so it was very much just the idea of the band and that's what had come across and that in the macro sense was making sure that even when we did have the overdubs you never lost sight of the main guitars but in the micro sense it's that you had to hear Tony picking you couldn't just hear a part you had because he's such a distinctive guitar player and geezer is a bass player those two guys don't sound like anybody else but if you overdo it they'll start to sound like other people or there start to sound like someone trying to sound like them so it was about in some ways doing as little as possible but while still achieving the it sounds like a record part oh well you know from everything from all of that sort of rock history and then you've done people like Adele 21 way different do you think this is sort of do you aim to manage your output to be commensurate with expectations of the the audience or do you just mix how you feel yeah well I mean the end of my last answer is the perfect setup for that question I mean cuz it really I'm always trying to do the least amount possible not just because I'm lazy but partly because of that now I mean I want to have it feel like it already felt before I got it because that's when the artists decided it was time to mix but it's got to sound like a record so Adele was the exact same approach as 99 problems was exactly the same approach as Black Sabbath there is anything it's that when you get to the chorus of the song unless for some reason chorus is supposed to be less exciting than the rest of the song it feels more excitable and when you get to the end of the song you actually want to hear it again that's it that's my goal and so it turns out that I'm able to use a lot of the same like specific plugins or outboard or depending on how is mixing it doesn't really matter that I can achieve that using a lot of the same techniques and tools and stuff but I don't care if it wasn't working that way I mean even before I was mixing in the box there were certain projects that I would because it just made sense I didn't make sense to spread this out in the console who's gonna destroy what was holding it together in the first place so I'm absolutely about trying to just take what the rough mix is and make that record-sized and that's it okay you're not one of those guys who adds extra parts when things come in no I mean I will if I think it needs it every but it's like the mallet guitar and the father's records sometimes you hear something and it's like the song will never be complete until I do this and it's usually pretty simple stuff things like v3 in the course like this course needs that texture to bolster it up and it's not a lead part it's pad art you know that kind of thing but there was a song I mixed where I first of all sent an email and said like hey I think I'm missing some tracks and sent him a screenshot of the sessions I didn't want to be too specific in case I was wrong and it turned out like no no you have everything like well okay how come there's no bass it seems like a really obvious place to play bass on this particular song like it doesn't work and so I played bass in the verse and send it to him and said hey I thought it could use and that's an extreme version of it but I do that all the time but usually it's not adding a part from scratch it will be making something out of something I've already got whether it's just like making new harmony vocals with Melodyne that sound crazy and distorted and put them in the back or whether it's infinite reverb stuff that I chopped up and tuned to be like a keyboard pad but I've made it from the vocals or you know I try to use the source material that is there mostly because I'm not a great player of anything and it's difficult to play so that's what I'll do but I'm not just looking to do that it's only that I hear I hear it like well when I push up the next fader that should be there but I've run out of faders just so many to talk about really and do one word well I was no no Michael Jackson yeah you were talking yeah I came on to the project as the sync live ear programmer guy because I just been on the road with him taking care of the same clouds and they wanted to use him on the record so I can went to set them up I'm supposed to be there for three days I was there for a year and a half yeah but I did a lot of synth programming a lot of engineering helped out on a lot of the mixes yeah it did kind of everything and do you think that was a career-defining job oh yeah well I mean look other than a few really stray Assisting things or whatever just kind of the first record that I really worked on wrong way through so it's pretty good way to start yeah there's so many more but I think that's a good place to to end because right because you can't really beat thank you you've got something out of it and we'll build apart from mono valley oh yeah before we go before we go what are you working on at the minute what am i talk about what's next it's hard to say really because I never know obviously some well some people like go blabbing really early uh and loose lips sink ships Andra well okay so at the moment I'm mixing a rock record and a kind of world music record really ridiculously cool acoustic groove things what else am i doing more of another rock band a little more to the pop side the other ones more to the punk side and and I'm mixing a live concert DVD which is awesome actually well I think I can talk about that one you say it's the the the post pop depression show the Iggy Pop show for elaborate haul which they filmed which is just ridiculous it's amazing so not exist I'm not really too much ability to tidy things up if they need it no and it's you don't I love it because you mix like a friend house guy but you have multiple chances you know yeah it's great excellent cool thanks very much all right thank you absolutely fantastic sometimes he waves at me and goes new file new file Easter anything that we missed this that's I mean there's obviously stuff that we make I mean we talk about the studio which is really important to me at the moment

Channel: Record Production

Views: 159,440

Keywords: recordproduction.com, recording, production, music recording, record production, music production, Andre Scheps, Russell Cottier, interview, Monnow Valley, Neve, Black Sabbath, Rick Rubin, Adele, Michael Jackson, mix, mixing, mix engineer, mixer, techniques, studio, Andrew Scheps, remix, recording drums, Andrew Sheps, guitar recording

Id: ZbimHK_wZ3M

Length: 73min 46sec (4426 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2018