Andrew Scheps Unplugged: Decoding the Mix

just gonna down and g go like that and I'm gonna go like that what do you think how's that shot the first time I've got a Grammy nominated engineer being able is this thing on Jus welcome back to having a gas the podcast that talks to the Great and the good of the creative Industries today I'm talking to Andrew sheps one of my favorite recurring guests he's a recurring guest now because this is the third time we get into the new Grammy nominated album the blue hour Andrew's process is a lot about that as there always is and some discussion about the future of the industry an AI so stick around before we get started with the discussion with Andrew I just wanted to give a shout out to the people at aore who have provided this wonderful home for us to record this episode in aure doio offer bookable stays in remote locations designed for Creative productivity it's for Creative professionals to finish that project they've been avoiding so you can book them all over the UK so that's assure doio more details in the description below we're back with Andrew sheps but IRL this time it's a great privilege to finally have you in the room thanks for having me to confirm that you're as tall as I expected uh we're in this tiny Cottage in Fr provided by the great people at aore and um you we were just talking off camera your hot off the back of Grammy nomination this is true me this is true it's very exciting this is uh a nomination for best engineered record classical which is not something I thought I would ever even be close to I think I've mixed three or four classical records in my entire career uh but this one is for the blue hour which is Sheron Nova uh the singer is amazing a far cry is the String orchestra and then there's some sound design um five female composers and the text is from a poem it's what was 40 pieces we just looked it up 40 separate pieces they all sound kind of different and I am shocked that I got a nomination along with all the other Engineers it's not just me um but yes really really proud of that record and amazed that it's been um you know recognized in that way it's great it did sound cool we so vote for me is that so this is to the Grammy board the voting board watching habit a gas um yeah well this is uh it's it's the entire voting membership so it's thousands and thousands of people right is it like so in the same way that if you're in the academy you vote for the Academy Awards yeah exactly with the Grammys one thing I've always noticed is it's just huge it's a huge ceremony there's about 400 categories and about 100 of televised or something like that oh no not even I mean the actual broad the TV broadcast I think they give away 10 or 12 at most album of the years but all day before that in a smaller Hall they're giving out all the other Awards and it used to be almost like a really big meeting room so it's kind of weird but now it's in a it's actually in a theater with pitch seats maybe it's pitch I don't even remember but it's nominated for best reg album for a z Marley record that mixed and so we go to the pre-show because that's going to be one of the things and because of parking we got there I don't know 25 minutes late and i' missed it really yeah and it's just done and that's it yeah so I mean I don't know what order they do them in but it's because there's so many categories and a lot of them are genre specific yeah and the people who are in that genre are so excited that in a lot of ways I enjoy that pre-show and then there's a nominee reception the night before which is just amazing CU it's people from all over the world and categories you didn't even know were there but they're all super interesting and everybody's really happy yeah so it's great well I did yeah I remember seeing you said there something from every genre and it can get really esoteric like in for example Jazz I think there's like best solo and like best performance best arrangement or something like that but um but it that it does sound like the dream like you say the for beyond the 10 categories which are the center of the media attention everything else is presumably people who are more or less living the dream they've kind of got to that Apex and you can feel energy yeah yeah absolutely I mean in some of the the smaller categories it ends up being a lot about name recognition and so you don't know how much people are really scouring the stuff that came out but they're also good about like I can't vote in every category I think you can vote in all the main categories and then you can pick five of the genre specific ones which is good cuz it keeps people in their Lane and you know you're only going to vote for stuff you know about yeah of course which is good yeah um but so back to the record we were just listening to a bit of it there and um you know you said that you didn't expect to be getting any attention for classical and I can kind of see why because everything where your name comes up is generally with like band generally um certainly on the mix of the Masters which going to give a big shout out to just because that was more or less gas music it was like our training gram for how to mix and it's been an amazing resource for like $30 a month you get like University level education in mixing and um your uh I think it's like a 90 minute tutorial uh where you mix a song from scratch but again you know it's live band setup why or how is classical different when you're working on it um partly it's not different at all in terms of what I'm trying to get out of it feeling wise but then the mechanics of it are very different um I mix very dry usually very little Reverb delays and very short things to kind of push things back as it to push them out of the way of other transients yeah yeah sort of to create a little bit of depth you know front back depth as opposed to just left right so you're just creating the impression of the speed of sound it's going to take a bit long yeah I mean you just put a little Ambience around something and it sounds further away or you filter and it sounds further away and things like that so um but on this record and you know plenty of other records like more the quieter the record the more important the space is that things are in because you really hear the space it's not taken up with symbols and things like that and sometimes that wants to be really really dry but if it's bone dry it's kind of weird to listen to so you have to find spaces that no one would notice were there until you took them out whereas this record the reverbs became a huge part of the way I mixed records when I started the record I spent a couple of days just building a new template so using a lot of the template I already had especially for the vocals because I've mixed sher's voice uh many times Y and it was going to be a little bit different because this is a very classical approach and a lot of the stuff I've mixed for her hasn't been but I knew that the strings needed to change rooms a lot because musically it's not all over the place but it changes quite a bit there's some very very traditional pieces one of which goes into a bit of the brandenberg and chero oh right and then goes back out into the more experimental stuff um and some of it is crazy some of it is very very quiet there's a lot of picado a lot of effects and so I just decided really early on when I heard demos and things like that that I wanted the reverbs to be a part of the mix because otherwise first of all you're not really paying attention if you just put the same reverbs on that whole record because the techniques are so different as you go but it would also be boring they're 40 pieces it's over an hour I don't remember how long it is but it's long and you don't want people to get comfortable you want them to really listen to each piece because you're going around five different composers there's just a lot going on and I felt like by changing the spaces like the one with the Brandenburg the reverbs shift completely as you go into the brandenberg it becomes much more of a chamber orchestra and then it becomes much liver with longer reverbs as you come out of it and um and then they're weird delay effects there's one that goes through speaker phone so I just felt like for me I wanted to keep it really interesting so when the loud stuff is loud I want it to be super exciting and I want the quiet stuff to make you want to fry and that's exactly like every record I've ever mixed but on this one the tools were different yeah it reminds me of a uh uh someone you recommended to us John pno yes he was talking about the mix being part of like the performance almost or you've got to really it's not your performance you got to understand what the music's trying to do but I tell me if I'm wrong about this I get this impression that one of the boundaries between amateur and professional is that amateur which is what I consider myself to be you're just trying to kind of set levels get things right but then basically leave it alone whereas what you just described as a lot of comp my it sounds like a lot of complex automation to get like movement to get the record to change ambiances yeah it's not necessarily complex automation though because on a lot of stuff I do it's just mute automation to go to different effects in different sections or something like that but it's the balance of the effects that's really important because you don't want to necessarily notice that they're changing because that'll take you out of the performance right but you want to it's almost just giving the listener nudges to say check this out check this out o this is exciting this is quiet this is in a big space this is right in your face and that is all to enhance what you think the emotional point is to the way it was done and sometimes it's very static through a song Sometimes it changes a lot um yeah it's very different but yeah I don't know if it's an amateur Pro thing cuz I've heard really young mixers who just have that thing and they get what's going on yeah um and it's not always complicated like Al Schmidt probably arguably one of the best Engineers ever in the history of engineering ever unbelievably simple mixes but his balance of Reverb and then his level balance are just perfect Ry van gelder same thing those BL note records he did 50s and 60s are just incredible and sonically is not changing a whole lot I mean obviously the recording they're amazing at that as well but the mixes are very very simple but what that means is the tiniest change and it's not as good yes but with Al I've been able to be in the room while he's working quite a few times and it's just these tiny tiny things and all of a sudden it just slams into 3D yeah and it's incredible and he's done and it takes him keep hitting the microphone um and it takes minutes just going to down and go like that and I'm going to go like that what do you think has that in shot all right we'll see how that goes it's good to have the first time I've got a Grammy nominated engineer being able is this thing on adjusting like it's sounds like so a few things to pick up on there but it sounds like I was incorrect about the difference between amateur and pro is that amateur is fixed and pro is dynamic it's more that Pro is you're sensing the intention of the music and trying to push it further into that Ruben Coen said the same thing about mastering he's like you're trying to get so the if the intention of the music has been well captured by the mix and enhance then the master is supposed to just add that extra bit of connecting to the audience and like a good director you kind of mentioned this a good director on film gets you without you knowing it to direct your eyes towards stuff you're doing that but it's like you're focusing the oral attention yeah and I'm not bothered about the stuff that you were implying an amateur would go for where you sort of have some checklists that you go through and make sure that stuff is right yeah and I don't care cuz it's right until it's wrong yes so as soon as it bugs me it's wrong and I got to do something about it and a lot of that's traditional stuff but the entire point of the mix is emotional MH so I mean you know the I probably said this last time that my sort of internal definition of mixing is you're solving emotional problems with technical tools cuz that's all you've got it's easy to say oh I'm going to make it so exciting well how are you going to do that it might just be level it might be EQ it might be effects it might be panning I mean it could be a million different things but it's what's appropriate to that song at that moment and that element that's within the song and that's going to be different every time you have a template so you've got you know stuff that works more than once but then you've got to build bespoke stuff and you know it's wrong because it just doesn't feel the way you want it to feel yes and um you are um also bringing into play the idea you know you said it it's technical which gives the false impression that it can be taught by uh it can be taught by a kind of mathematical process you know you always want to not as simple as you always want to be hitting a certain level but your snare should always be in the center or whatever something like that um but um it sounds like there's a membrane you kind of pass through when you get to a certain level which is you are not at all being prescriptive you are you know the techniques well enough that you can forget about thinking about the techniques and you're Guided by emotion and trying to react instinctively and impulsively yeah I mean I actually think that education is a great way to start because the whole point is you need to know your tools well enough that you don't think about them like you just said if as soon as you start thinking about the tool you're using you've lost the perspective on whatever it was you were trying to do yeah and that is the hardest thing about mixing and the most important is to stay creative the entire time you're mixing because as soon as you go down a little rabbit hole you're going to need to take a break once you start thinking too much well it's not even thinking it's well I mean it is thinking but it's thinking in a different way it's the thinking practically it's the okay I think it's going to work if I do some EQ on this like I really start poking out these frequencies and then you're like who should I use a dynamic e q or whatever and unless you make that decision quickly it's going to be very hard to hear if you're actually accomplishing what the point was in the first place until you get away from it and go back yeah there is everyone everyone talks about this in the creative sphere the kind of the decay of uh excitement for a creative impulse you you have to be able to kind of reach for it quickly and test it so that if the like you said the longer you spend thinking about it you're kind of losing sight of that inspiration you know yeah I think it's a loss of perspective more than anything else you need to be always trying to listen as a listener not somebody who knows what's going on right so if the snare is bugging you and it's taking a really long time to sort it out fine you know you sort it out as you can for that moment but so many times I've done that spent a lot of time on one particular thing and then I come back the next day and hear it like well T that's still bugging me it's bugging me for different reasons but it's still bugging me so the it's about being able to consistently identify the problem and know when you fixed it and you have to have infinite perspective for that which nobody has yeah that's a good point I think um as in the infite perspective is is a really useful way of phrasing it um on the personal level I think mixing is something that it's never going to be my wheelhouse because of I think attention like I as in you know um I'm uh one of the ADHD cohorts and it's very very difficult to stay on something for a long time but kind of what you were saying there is you don't want to stay on one thing for too long but it's more that um in the middle of solving one problem you feel yourself trying to go off and solve another one and then you go like I'm trying to do this now actually the low end from something else is getting away let's go fix that and wa now something else is bugging me I do that all the time okay all right so how do you manage that that scatter brain I don't I just assume that if something was bugging me before it will bug me again later okay it's not like something's going to get lost like oh I forgot to do this everything that needs doing raises its hand and says I still suck yeah and then the other thing is that if you spend too much time cataloging what you don't like you might be wasting time on stuff that it'll turn out doesn't matter so I think in a way being a magpie is actually not a bad thing because you're drawn to the stuff that's bugging you the most and when you keep sorting that out other things become less important and kind of be whatever they are whereas if you really spend time on that thing then it would almost become too important and then you probably featured a little bit more but you've lost the song because you forgot about the thing that you wanted to go deal with you know it's just a matter of always trying to focus on the big picture which means the thing that's distracting you is probably more important than the thing you're working on and if it isn't you will come back to the thing you just ditch right so that's like a case of trusting your attention trusting what's pulling you towards it yeah and the the thing you have to do on every single mix if you're going to work that way is to not kid yourself that you're done you've got to come in fresh you hit play you get all the way to the end and all you want to do is listen again because there's nothing you want to change that's the signal and then you send it out and you know you get a million notes back it's not like it's the perfect mix but it's as soon as there's something that bugs you well then you're not done mixing so you mix some more and you wait until a fresh listen can go by and you're great yeah how do you I want to get back to the um I'm so sorry I forgot it the blue what's the record the blue hour the blue hour I keep wanting to say the Blue Nile because uh because that's a band yeah of course and our founder is obsessed with the Blue Nile um so we'll come back to that in a minute but one thing that I find eternally distracting and I don't know if this is just me I'm I'm hoping that some in the audience will find this useful is how to switch off the visual cortex so I I watched your mix of the Masters and for example you're in um I I I will find the tutorial I'm talking about and link to it because I should remember the name of the band um on the guitars you know you dial in a Cramer pie because it gives it some nice mid-range saturation but I noticed whenever you were doing stuff like that you would kind of not be looking and just trying to only listen and go yeah that's right that's yeah I've kind of got this open mouth thing having the videos is terrible you don't like being you know listening face whatever um yeah I think it's also I keep things kind of small and my screen is pretty high resolution and it's a little far away so like what would I be looking at right you're trying to make it more difficult to obsessive it well no I'm not trying to make it more difficult my eyes are making it more difficult but it's it's more that when I need find something I want that big checkerboard of audio and it's all color code and it's really easy to find things again not to fall out of the creative flow of I mean to fix that where is it um but there's just there's not much to look at like if you put that pie plugin on and you just or it's it's actually the hls I think the Helio CQ yeah where you just switch it in and you get a little bump at that frequency um you switch it in like what are you going to look at they're what four knobs yeah I think so yeah there's nothing to look at and I think the other thing is that when you are looking at stuff it doesn't matter like there are people who will get scared when they realize they just added plus 12 at some frequency but that means there was really almost nothing there but you want to hear it so maybe you need a second EQ yeah to get plus 30 I mean who knows it doesn't matter unless it sounds bad so that's the visual thing I think can can get in trouble with and for performances when you're recording the visual is definitely not something you want to look at because and that's I never show grid lines right ever I will sometimes work on the grid and I will push drums to the grid like whatever if that's what's appropriate but don't give yourself a visual reason to do stuff now when you say you'll never show grid lines you mean like you will never be okay there's the perfect quantized Tempo and I need to be trying to push the performance into it or yeah just in Protools there's a button to show Grid or not and will extend grid lines across the audio so you can see it and that is oh I mean it's off because it just makes the screen look messy to me but it's good that it's off because I will never say oh well look at that that's early like if you take the the funky drummer sample which is on five million records and put it against a grid it's everywhere the John bonum snares late every single time and that's what makes it heavy yeah so yeah I mean and you can quantize that stuff I mean Rick biato has done videos where he quantizes zein drums and it makes big difference and I don't think those records would be as good but it's not like it's horrendous on the grid but it's not the way people play and like Joe bzy is a really good friend of mine one of the things he loves about tape is you can't see the Down Beat and what he thinks make the makes the downbeat bigger is things happening at different times yeah because it's got this huge rolling impact as opposed to just a bit yes yes that happens in some Zeppelin records where yeah like you say big down beat and you can hear that Jimmy is slightly ahead of John Paul Jones and like you say it gives it this slightly bloated transi like yeah but and some people hate that you know and for them they would fix it and that's that's fine too but it's yeah don't just like with everything don't give yourself a reason to go after something which isn't to do with what you just heard yeah that's all yes like yes so decluttering the visual cortex uh as you as you said you know if you're having a grid gives you the impression that there's a rule you're not following turning that off will just release you of that anxiety even if it's slick subconscious yeah I I mean I think if your visuals are are messing you up you just need to go take a break cuz you're just not listening yeah that's all and if you're someone who needs to close your eyes to listen do it there's a plugin that Massie plugins did called listen which just opens up a window the size of your screen and it's blank uh a friend of mine Chris Shaw wrote one uh that does the same thing but it has an oblique strategy in the middle oh right Bri youo c yeah so yeah whatever you need to do to hitting it again whatever you need to do to make sure you're listening is whatever you need to do yeah and as soon as you're not just take a break because it's exhausting to beat your head against something yeah and the break could be work on another song it doesn't matter but get away from the thing you're working on yeah yep it's like I think the Temptation uh uh comes from when you know you are like a lot of people are learning out in the wild without a mentor and so you see something for example you see a piece of advice like uh the further away something is the shorter the transient time is or the closer it is the longer the transient is and so then you know you can spend time kind of like looking at the number on like the r compressor or the 76 doesn't me being like right so I wanted to feel close so I should go for 30 that sounds like the right and then you're not listening you see I've never even heard heard that right okay there you does that work uh probably not cuz I'm I'm going to try that at home so that brings me on something by the way so we got some questions from Team back at gas music and we're going to go to some comments as well at some point I just forgot to I handed my phone over to Chris I'm going to ask for that back in a second but um so as I said Aaron my sort of the senior mixer at gas music um one of the big things that was useful for him was learning from your template and mix with the Masters and there were two big moments for Aon they said pushed him forward into the realm of from amateur to sounding and feeling more professional and so the two big uh breakthroughs for Aon one was from Sha Everett and that was to do with focusing on each frequency area so you know sub up to 100 and then you know so we'll talk about that in a minute but with you and your template it was thinking not in terms of disparate tracks but groups kind of simplifying the amount of information you're trying to think about do you do a lot of processing at the group level uh so you get your drums I know you've said something like this when you were first on having a gas that you know you'll try and get all the drums behaving as if it's one thing yeah you know yeah and I mean drums are just such a weird thing and nothing else is like them but so I will process kick doesn't matter how many tracks that is snare doesn't matter Toms and then all the rest of the stuff meets up with the kick sare Toms and that all goes to a stereo ax if I'm mixing in Stereo um that's the drums and then that is what sends to most of the parallel stuff I've got and I'll EQ the kit but I EQ or compress individual elements as well again that's just like oh kit sounds too dry let me find a room mic and smash it up and bring it up a little bit now it's got too much Syler let me CU that let me get rid of the transients on it oh now it's sort of making its own Reverb or whatever um but like I don't think I would ever process all of the guitars together on a rock track because some are going to be distorted some will be clean some will be counter Melodies but I will take all the Rhythm guitars and put them in into a stereo Ox right and part of it is just cuz I'm lazy like if they're going to get kind of the same thing anyway why would I do it individually on four tracks yeah that's just super boring and I've got a macro with soundflow I hit a button name the folder I want them to go into puts them in the folder color codes the thing routes it and then I can just pop an EQ on it and get on my way so that that that quick route to the actual decision you want to make yeah I want to take all the Rhythm guitars and make the mid-range poke app great hit a button Rhythm guitars wait a second EQ find the frequency push it up done yeah and so so so not everything gets treated at the group level but the big thing um and this will lead into AR's question one of the big breakthroughs uh on yours is it break through plural um is no okay I will take uh I'm gonna say I'm gonna say no because breakthrough is one word yeah let's go with that all right uh any Gramma pedants list that's like times out yeah yeah it was always I was from a a grammar pedantry family and so they would like have weird discussions about well it's it's surgeon's general not Surgeon General well it's attorney's General so it would be surgeon's General but I still can't get my head okay anyway moving on back to the mix bus mix's bus um that was a big breakthrough was there's a lot of pro a lot of processing going on at the mixbus level and you know you describe it as the sound of your console I've heard other people describe that as not necessarily referring to your process but when we just described it abstractly you know we have a a pretty dense mix bu that is very much influencing the sound there's you know a kind of a left right compressor in you know 50% wet there's a bit of stereo widening it around 10K and all of this stuff and someone would say that someone said to us that's kind of cheating you know you're doing a lot of the mixing right at the top of the mix who says it's cheating it's probably someone who believes that there's a rule a correct way um yeah I don't I don't even know what that means yeah of course does it sound good at the end yeah if the mix is is good then it doesn't matter how you got there it's not like you don't have to struggle yeah there's some mixes like one of the My Brightest Diamond songs that's the band that sharonova the vocalist on classical record has um I work on things alphabetically when I start a record because that's just what I do I like to work on the entire record I open up the first song I don't know how long I worked on it because I didn't remember even the next day but when I got back around to that song the second time it was done mhm everything else needed tons more work I was just sort of prepping the rest of the stuff but that song was done when you could tell because nothing annoyed you so let's say I did all of the processing on the individual tracks but still it only took me an hour and a half right is that cheating yeah it's like the result is the same does it matter which road you went out together yeah I don't I mean CU then then templates are cheating because that has processing in them and but I don't think anybody who mixes a lot doesn't have things that are tools that they use that are more complicated than a plug-in yeah I mean my templates got some pretty straight ahead stuff and then some really complicated stuff that I spent a long time to build for something found out they were useful for other things so I need to build that from scratch every time yeah I just yeah I don't I don't agree with that at all and I think that it's like if you want more top and bottom so that the mid is up to you on that mix well great I've got a happy face EQ on my mix bus and that way the mid-range is the thing that I'm constantly making decisions about and I'm super specific all over the mix on that but there aren't that many things with low end yeah I get rid of the low end that's in the way off of things just because I hear it as being in the way and now I got more low end like it's fine I you know the difference between boosting something at 30 HZ or 40 HZ it either sounds good at 30 or it sounds good at like yeah I don't I really don't see it that way at all and I don't I mean at the moment I don't have any Dynamics processing but I think I've got three or four different things that EQ I mean sure I could probably put all that in one EQ but that's just not the way it evolved and then I see them as layers of Sonic something and I don't necessarily even really think about them as eqs they're color to the mix yeah and not because they're you know pretending to be vintage eqs or something like it's not that it's a character that youve some of the curves are complicated some of them are really straight ahead and it's just like I'm not really sure about this and so I turn on one of the other ones and it either is like oh great that's the thing or that's totally wrong I now need to go figure out why it's totally wrong MH but yeah I don't I don't see being prepared to mix and staying creative as cheating I would really argue strongly that that's kind of the opposite of what it is I think um the the the idea when we were discussing this with someone uh who who was resisting the idea of mixbus processing um was suggesting that that that treating the entire stereo mix at the end of the chain is yeah some kind of uh lazy behavior when we were saying it because we were subordinate to this person's expertise so obviously there was a bit of a power Dynamic going on but he saying I it sounded like the implication of his suggestion could only be that in order to achieve a big cohesive glued sound you always have to do that just by work working on each Channel and you can never do anything at the stereo buus level I I mean look it if if that person does great mixes or just likes their own mixes mixing that that way then absolutely um but yeah to have a to have a concept of what you should be doing technically to do a mix yeah it's just it doesn't make any sense to me yeah it's whatever is the best path for the song to feel the way you want it to feel and then in that case I mean does that person refuse to get their mixes mastered yeah because that's exactly what that isus processing so and if you have a great relationship with a mastering engineer then maybe that is exactly the way to go but I want to hear what it's going to be from the beginning yes and you're kind of pushing it into that membrane yeah and then and it's not like I'm slamming into lots of compressors cuz literally there's no compression on the mix bus there's a limiter at the very end on most mixes it's just catching transients because they've never been compressed on the way there so you have to do it and even my parallel compression is very quiet lately I'm not using that that's just where you are at the moment yeah and that could change you know but yeah I there nothing is cheating absolutely nothing is cheating because you don't get a prize for the most complicated mix you don't get a prize for the most simple mix a Schmid's mixes are ridiculously simple and they're some of the best ones ever he has mixbus processing when he worked he had a um three band compressor and uh some EQ so like is that a problem he's one of the best engineers in the history of engineering so yeah I just it's not that I disagree and think well no it's not cheating cuz that's cheating I just think there's no such thing as cheating yes period yeah it's like it sounds more like what you were describing off Mike when we were uh at the beginning saying this uh people who are at the top of an industry let's say or or the the bigger they are you you said something like the more relaxing they are to work with or relaxed they are to work with not always but generally that's the rule and there's a sort of a there's a layer beneath or you know the how do you how do I put this the further you go towards the top the more likely you are to assume that anyone above you is kind of hacking or cheating or doing something yeah I mean that's a really different a different um context for it but yeah it's just I mean when you're starting out it's hard to know what to do to make something feel the way you want it to feel I've been mixing for a really long time so I can just talk about that because generally I can beat my head against it until it starts to happen or have to say that's not going to happen with what's here so now I need to find a different way to make this compelling not give up yeah I mean in the phrase I always use is the only thing that matters is what comes out of the speakers that is the answer to every single question about mixing I mean I could just say that yeah to every question you ask because Loop that the process only matters while you're doing the process nobody else gets to see your process no one knows what it is unless you're like me and you do interviews constantly about it but yet it's irrelevant it's completely irrelevant if you're lucky 99.99999% of the people who hear something you work on have absolutely no idea what it is you even do of course they hit play they like it or they don't like it and the more people you can get to like it the better yeah so yeah I mean that's it it's not you know I'm not like making a counterargument I just don't understand the argument yeah okay that makes sense uh and so to drill even further into a question that can be answered with just whatever comes out the speakers is the right answer um back at gas some of the team wanted to know what's on the mix bus at the moment because when you were doing the mix of the master stuff there was a little bit of Dynamics going on there was a bit of compression with the Shadow Hills uh what's happening right now I don't think Shadow Hills probably was the 336 M9 oh right I'm probably WR about that I was a fair child but again that might just be for yeah no that was that one was for tone um and that came off the mix bus because and I do this every once in a while like I find something like oh it just always makes stuff sound better and then after a few months I say okay what's happening with the level here and I level match it and then I really assess it and like nope got to go like all it's doing is turning the mixup yeah that's what I was getting out of that fair child um but yeah there was never any compression on that it was just running through uh and then I think the 33609 was probably still on there that has a really specific sound and I just got sick of the sound and I miss some of the things it did but yeah just couldn't deal with it anymore so right now there's an EQ then there's another EQ that has a little bit of stereo widening then there's another EQ all really different things and the EQ and the stereo widening one is just a tiny little high shelf but that one does some low-end stuff sometimes uh and then I'm sure I talked about this before I've got a Reverb that's 15 % wet that is in a way kind of doing the job that the compressor used to do by gluing you know people love the word glue so we'll use the word glue yeah it glues things by smearing the stereo spread and it just mushes stuff together in a good way yeah uh and then a limiter that's it that is you know mentioned gluing there and it is a kind of it's a colloquial uh metaphor that's really caught on um and there's very likely to be no layman in this audience but there any that are I guess it's describing the really subjective feeling of something feeling like lots of different elements to feeling like it's all been like shrink wrapped or surround well I just that it all goes together because I think like if you go listen to the Steely Dan records that everybody you know holds up as some of the best sounding records ever made and I wouldn't argue that at all it's super super clean every element is in its own space and everything there's a huge amount of definition but it never occurs to you that things are scking out so it's it's just the idea of everything living in a place that makes you listen to the song because they're glued together but it doesn't I think people start to get really specific about it that it has to be Dynamics processing or it has to be well usually just Dynamics processing could be harmonic Distortion it could just be that your balance is insanely good yeah it could be anything um a subjective feeling yeah I mean and again like there there are a lot of sort of high-fi terms and I'm not quite sure what they mean you know when they talk about sound staging and things and I'm really not I don't know what that means so I can't speak to it necessarily but for me it's just about the Sonic World it lives in and the balance that makes you live there and not get distracted by something that's happening Sonic yeah make sure you're not like listening to a to a mix yeah the worst thing that's ever happened is I did this one song with a guy um and every time I played it to anybody we got to the end they like man that snare sounds great like well okay cuz I was really struggling with snare drums at that point like I had a couple of years of the snare just always sounded like crap yeah but like okay that's not what you want people to say you want you want them listening to the song not this element of it yeah um and so counterintuitively to push against the point you were just making there why was it you were struggling with it for a couple of years I think and I've learned this lesson a million times in my career and I'm still learning it I think it's because I decided beforehand what the snare was going to sound like and I couldn't get it there instead of the snare has a job to do driving part of the rhythmic element that is the drums and there are a thousand different snare sounds that will do that yeah and you know you could get 20 or 30 different sounds on the same song that would do it but the ideal one in your head is most likely only going to work on a very small percentage of the songs that you work on so it's just stopping having sort of preconceptions of what stuff should be and it's something and I've seriously only just kind of gotten this concept straight in my head and I'm still not always living by it but whatever you pull up first is going to sonically inform everything else that you do on that mix the mix in terms of how it feels that's something I get a checklist of in my head when I listen to the rough listen to the rough and like oh can't wait to do this so that's going to be amazing and sometimes you don't do those things and sometimes you do but I'm never thinking like when I bring up the kick drum I have the way the kick is going to sound it's like bring up the drums and like oo this could be a really thuy kick and yes it needs to be a pointy kick or whatever I need to make sure I can hear the little roughs on the snare in between the big hits and so that's the important part and again it's just you know the only thing that matters is what comes out of the speakers but yeah when you're really bummed out that the snare drum you're recording or mixing doesn't sound like Steely Dan for in then you're struggling when you really not accept defeat with the way the snare sounds but accept the world that snare is in and make it great and make it work optimize that record as opposed to thinking something a bad habit we fell into a lot gas was saying like things like that snare is wrong that kick is wrong if you're using samples that could absolutely be the case just you know go through some others but it's the especially on a live drum kit it's how much transient is there how much Decay is there how long is the snare and how bright is it yeah those are the three things well and then you could say how much body like 200 you know lower mids those are the four characteristics of a snare drum yeah right how hard does it hit how bright is it how much body does it have and how long does it last yeah does it kind of take you to the next kick drum or does it hit and stop or whatever but those are Concepts they're not sounds yeah other than bright and you know body but again that's going to be different because it'll depend on what the kick is doing it'll depend on what the guitars are doing and and again it's all in context you know oh that snare sounds great now you put in the guitars they eat up all the mid-range and now your snare signs dark great another 16b at top end brilliant fun um you mentioned if working with samples it can be the case that you can swap it out do you do much work with sampled anything sampled drums particularly almost none I do kick reinforcement more than anything else and every once in a while a snare and if Toms are a problem like the recording is either not great or sometimes they're no Tom mics or sometimes there's so much symbol in the toms that you really can't chop them because you really hear the symbols come in yeah so in that case I might reinforce with samples there because I want the Tom to be a big deal and they're not being a big deal and that's the only way to do it but that's I do it just because there's no other way to get it to work the way I want it to work so for Kick Drum it's sometimes it's just easier to add low end with a sample or add point with a sample but then with my channel strip I've done with waves we just did an update and one of the reasons I wanted to do it is we put in these super resonant filters so you can use the highpass filter on 18 DB per octave with a bunch resonance and it basically will ring at Whatever frequency you put it in so you can tune the fundamental of the kick drum to where it feels good in the song Oh So if you're using that way a high pass with a resident Notch and trying to get that to like 30 yeah so you tune that to 30 50 anywhere in there it's going to sound like that's where the drum was tuned right okay if that's a problem yeah let's go into that this is the Omni Channel 2 this is your new product with waves yes I mean it's an update to Omni channel it's not brand new but we added some stuff stuff yeah okay so it's do you think of it as a like a sequel oh it's more that when we built the first one it was about the every track tools I wanted all the different colors of EQ in one EQ I wanted all the different types of compression I liked in one thing I wanted the harmonic Distortion and most importantly I wanted all of that stuff in one window I was sick of putting the same three or four plugins on almost everything that I needed to process and then having the different window windows and flipping between them and it just sucks so part of it was just logistical simplification absolutely so that's what I wanted and I drew up the spec for it and I talked to people at waves about it and they were really into it and so we built it and that's what it was It was supposed to be my Swiss army knife of not overly colored stuff but not clean and not with just one character cuz that was the other problem is most of the channel strips then were either very very clean or they were NE or SSL or API because that's what they were supposed to be whereas I like some mid-range EQ on NE and API so they're both kind of in there and then it was all tweaked from there so that's what that was then however many years later it's more years than I think it's something like almost 10 years or something stupid well the omn shell has been out for best part of a decade yeah I'm old um so then there was like stupid stuff that I do a lot and I thought well just by adding a couple of knobs for the UI if we can get the DSP for this stuff we could do this so the new stuff is there's a new compressor mode which is soft which is more like rvox than the three models that were're in there so it's a very soft knee um and it's just a style of compression we didn't have but then there's a fourth uh harmonic Distortion mode which destroys things absolutely destroys things and it's not not really like a lot of the destruction stuff you can find elsewhere because the other ones will get really really bright as you go whereas this one actually gets darker as you go yeah and then with the filters we put in 18 DB per acave which you don't have to have resonant you can just use them as steeper filters but they have adjustable resonance and they get crazy when you use the resonance so you can create the bottom end of a kick drum just by dialing in the high pass and then with a low pass quite often I will use the crazy Distortion and get it super crunchy but it has no top end so then I'll use the low pass with a bunch of resonance and dial where I want the top end to come back because it gets this big peak so just short of whistling you know just wide enough where you don't really hear a frequency and that will add top end back onto the destroyed thing just made a resonance to just give a little bit of a uh yeah I mean if you think about synth filters as you make them more resonant they start to whistle and they whistle at the frequency because it gets so narrow so keep it just wide enough that it sounds more like EQ not like a speciic than a res Peak and then yeah it just adds top end back in but it doesn't really manufacture it in that case because it's just you're using that as an EQ mhm whereas on the low end you're manufacturing it that frequency may or may not even be in the kick drum recing so it can actually put in frequencies that aren't there cuz it's ringing right okay yeah so it's not it's not anywhere near that frequency will set off the ringing right okay I'm excited to try that out now is it available as part of the wave subscription if you have Omni Channel you have Omni Channel 2 it's just the next update pushed it out and there's a two few extra knobs so you designed it to be that you can rearrange the series as well and and what goes into what in the right way but it's interesting when you're talking about harmonic Distortion you know saturation that is always always one of the things that has bugged me again with with the impatience is most of them you dial in and it just becomes like extremely bright and very harsh and was part of your intention with this to give some kind of saturation that doesn't immediately offend and can well I mean unless you're cranking the knob all the way up I don't even think you should necessarily really notice it it's I mean the way I describe it and maybe this is technically wrong but I think it makes sense is if you're going to EQ something and it's recorded very very clean you basically have the fundamental and the harmonics and that's it when you start adding harmonic Distortion you're creating more stuff in the harmonics of that thing so EQ becomes more noticeable which means it's easier to just EQ and then you can pull the thing down and that mid-range will pop out through a track whereas without it you end up having to be really specific about the EQ and it's going to change more as you change chords or notes or whatever so so it just gives you more raw material to then shape with compressors or so you're not looking at the Distortion as we distort and then leave it it's like it's giving you just more it's just stuff to work with I mean look it's what everybody loves about analog is that you get harmonic Distortion for free you start pushing any level through an analog circuit you get Distortion and it sounds really good and you wouldn't say oo that's Distortion I mean clipping is Distortion Like okay now we're squaring the thing off but it's just a subtle thing that makes it sound bigger yeah so that's what it's supposed to be well it's interesting there's a quote that did the rounds on Instagram recently um you know there's always some there's always some strain of thought that catches fire and goes around like uh mimetically and the recent one was it's always Brian you know it seems uh some quote about the imperfections of the the technology beor era will eventually become the character and uh you're talking about uh Distortion tapes saturation obviously we know there's a lot of that to be used out there and but I saw a real Vindication of this idea when I was talking to Jeff Ellis he said I've been talking to the guys at I want to say isotope but don't quote me on that uh about trying to model the clipping of Protools versus Ableton versus qas they'll have a slightly different clipping sound and so at some point we're going to get nostalgic for the digital Distortion yeah so yep I mean yes that's all there is to say about that it's you know Point well made it's as when the first digital stuff came out lots of Engineers like oh my God thank God and the I mean the story it's not even a story but the thing I always reference is and anyone who used to do lots of sessions on tape will remember this now they may not remember it in the same way that I do you got the machine on input you get the drummer in you spend an hour getting drum sounds like man this sounds great let me record some we'll get the drummer in to check it out you record some you roll back you put the machine in Repro hit play cuz your transients are messed up and tones change a little bit but now it's like tapes the Holy Grail yeah what's great about mixing for me in the box is that I pick and choose who gets messed up and who doesn't so certain things can get through completely clean and other things can crank up harmonic Distortion and there you go and now it gets I don't even think of it as character I just it's just more stuff to work with I really do see it that way character is when you really start pushing I'll stop right there you you didn't think I was going to stop there I didn't it didn't look like it's a hard stop but there it was no I saw that I mean to be honest a thread of what you've been saying recently uh in the last few minutes you know you're you're trying not to hear it but to get the information um we were watching Dave pensu and Jason Joshua as well um I get the impression that Dave's like you know this beloved kind of uh patriarch of the mixing world like you know um a very gentle character I'm going to try and get him on the podcast but he's so busy um Jason Joshua was saying like almost all the moves got to be like uh you know it's not not a hard rule but you're not trying to make uh each Mix Move really big You're Building small things on top of each other does that ring true for you yeah for the most part I mean like that's the rule of live live sound something can be really messed up but just move it slowly okay because otherwise everyone's like what the hell just happened instead of like wow that's too loud and then they forget about it because it's sinking down and and all is well again um yeah you do not want the mix to distract The Listener period and big moves usually do that unless they are something that's like wow but this to do with a song yeah you know one snare hit that's got way more Reverb than all the rest of them or spring reverb I mean that's dub but it's always in service of The Listener cuz it's cool not because check me out I put a bunch of Reverb on that yeah of course and spring reverb as well has you know he said dub it's got this kind of delay is feel doesn't it because of this vibrating but um should we just briefly talk about because I I did say I was going to get back to it you were talking about sculpting and designing the reverbs for the blue blue hour hour I was gonna say river that time the blue hour sculpting the reverbs for the blue hour um because there's it sounded like there's a lot to go into there and then we're going to go to some questions or comments from the broader World which is going to be exciting but yeah talk to me about the process of Designing these reverbs because you said you're not really a Reverb yeah I don't every time I put Reverb on something it bothers me like it just sounds weird and unnatural and whatever and one of the things I learned from Al Schmidt is to blend reverbs when you put two reverbs on something doesn't even matter what they are they tend to fill in the holes for each other something and it feels a little more natural and it could be a plate in the chamber or a hall like it doesn't seem to matter that much so when I was going to start mixing the record I thought well I've got to have a pallet of Reus I can't be building this for every queue because there're 40 of them I want to have a starting point so I decided I'm going to have six okay so I started one um was mechanics Hall which is one of the best concert huls in the world people love that hul and there are models of it in a couple of different reverbs I think I either used aliv verb or seventh heaven I don't remember one of them mechanics Hall great sounds great on strings fantastic um and the other five uh one of them is uh like the sp26 room so an even tied room one of them I built like two weird ones one of them I think I was using the gigahertz um is it Mega verb I hope so um but the gigahertz Reverb which is really cool and also can get very very strange uh definitely had another Alti verb which I would just load stuff until I found something if I needed to build something else uh and I don't remember what the others were but I spent time doing this and then the very first thing I would do is after doing tons of grouping and routing because some of those pieces there are five recordings of the string orchestra because like okay we want to get the harmonic separate on this one the base pits are such a big deal want to get that separate and but we recorded all the mics every time because you want the room you don't just want closed mics so there could be you know 80 to 100 tracks of Orchestra so everything is Group by section and group by pass and then they VCA so I just have pass one and if I need to dive into it I open the folder and then sections and then within that I've got individual mics what do you refer to by pass by the way um so just it's not takes because we would use them all it's sort it's layers got it so You' have one layer that is basically them playing the piece but we would have dropped out a couple of things to then record separately as an overdub and then uh there's a lot of sort of murmuring and group singing that's the orchestra which when they perform live they just do it while they're playing oh right but we wanted that separate because I was going to treat it separately and things so it was basically overdubs to the main string thing um and then the first thing I would do would be to just try and find a space that made sense for that piece yeah and then with sher's vocal it was is that going to live in the same space is it a different space is she going to be floating above is she within it does she have crazy effects that no one else has and and every piece was different so usually what would happen is some semblance of the more normal reverbs would give me a starting point yeah which would then be automated throughout the piece that's like normally I would never do that turn stuff on turn stuff off but was really automating the Reverb returns to change character and especially to change lane so when you're layering three reverbs one of them is going to be the shortest one and you can bring down the two longer ones and it doesn't really distract you but you end up with less room on stuff um and so that would be the first thing and then if I needed something else either the two weirder ones would be perfect or I'd have to build something for that thing and it became such a thing that the entire album ends with a minute of Reverb and I kind of wanted it to go longer but it made sense to and I actually had to dial back the Reverb time to make it die out it would have gone on for you know 10 minutes you more than one Reverb that's 60 seconds in Decay or there was there was one in particular yeah that um exists but I it's I made an IR of an IR so I could stretch it so because the IRS will always stretch longer than they are so turn it all the way up then do an IR of that turn that one all the way up then do an IR of that yeah and that became this long one because there was a it's a super long one it's actually the one that they there was a Mark Ronson like music production thing that was on Apple TV and at one point he goes in with the alter verb guys and they take an IR of this fuel storage tank that's underground that's just gigantic but when I just tried that it was amazing but the frequencies were dying out and like I don't know it just didn't do what I wanted it to do so then I came up with this concept of just stretching it and it becomes more unnatural and it starts to ring more because it's just a really weird Reverb yeah but yeah it just became such a character and in some ways that's to me one of the most emotional things that happens like there's very very specific small things that are just rip your heart out with either the lyrics or the writing but then to end at this spot where you've just been left in that world cuz otherwise the album just ends like oh great what am I going to listen to next and but you need a moment to just process but this is the yeah this is the you know the sensory deprivation tank while you decompress from having listened to the record so and I'm overthinking it probably most people don't react to it as viscerally as I do but yeah so that's my Reverb project as as the one as the one making it though yeah you have to think about it a lot more than the audience is going to uh of course but it sounds like the way you described just a stretching an Impulse response and then getting an Impulse response of that of that impulse response and I I understand that way you say I to shorten it um first of all how do you actually take an IR of an IR like what's the BR technical way of doing well the same way you take an IR of anything there's uh alter verb gives you a frequency sweep thing you play it through the thing and then it processes and it gives you an IR it's all happening in the Box you're not having a microphone and record no no no no no no this is all a plugin that I'm taking an IR of and then loading that impulse response into the same plugin yeah cranking that one up taking another ir and then using that impulse response as the Reverb right it's it's it reminded me of um uh John Hopkins are you aware of John Hopkins I've mentioned that artist before so it's a electronic interesting electronic artist signs to Domino records and um he uh makes I guess like very very dense High attention to detail um for once a bet phrase kind of you know intelligent dance music so it's kind of uh more it's not like more accessible a effects to him but I'm just getting belabored I'm getting too bugged down describing it now the point is well Square Pusher with four on the floor kick there you go yeah all we'll say that yeah but there are some there is I mean listen go listen to the kick in open eye signal that's a one for the audience um what he said uh he was doing someone did a Q&A and it's like you know how are you getting these weird sounds out of ablon he's like well I'm taking artifacts are like problems and mistakes and then I'm boosting those and I'm getting more artifacts out of that I'm boosting that So eventually you've got like this third generation of digital kind of weirdness it's all that's kind of what you're doing with the IR thing it's like you're by the third generation of impulse response you've got something that's not a natural sound but it's yeah it becomes it becomes low and yeah I mean that's what's great about the digital stuff when you start stretching or using fewer bits is it gets messy in a way that analog stuff doesn't cuz analog it's continuous it's speed a light and it does stuff like you can pitch it down just pitches down you pitch down the digital stuff you start getting alias in and as you rip things apart you get new noises within it like it almost sounds like they're ghosts in there because stuff is you know digitally flipping between values and so yeah you can get some great effects but that's serious Rabbit Hole time like that's going to be I'm going to spend 2 and 1 half hours on this thing that's going to be half a second long and I'm only going to use at once so you got to well when you're on the clock especially you got to be careful how you're using that time well yeah I mean I think that's more for composers like I don't normally do that every once in a while there will be something that I will chase and Chase and Chase like if you're going to catch something in a delay so like the last syllable of the last word before the bridge and you catch that in a delay and then you're changing the delay time to make it go up and down and pitch and feedback and all that stuff I could easily take an hour automating that easily just till it feels exactly right because when that's done wrong it's really dist not wrong but if it's not the way I want to hear it I find it really really distracting song would be better without it yeah when I get it right as far as I'm concerned if you take it out that part of the song is now not nearly as compelling MH so yeah things like that are definitely worth chasing but yeah as a mixer normally you got to be careful so you don't end up doing super like creative wacky stuff well I mean it depends what your relationship is with the artist too I sometimes that's what you're supposed to do that's not mixing that's when you're sort of produc popping back into production for a second yeah yeah like Sean ever is definitely one of those like does loads of crazy stuff that's very much his Vibe that's the brand he's built yeah and that's why people work with him yeah and what came out of that no I can't remember so I'm just getting go to the question let's move on some of these come from the uh the gas team um so my iPhone updated last night and now it's giving me this uh what's new in uh in notes so fantastic um we've already covered what was on the mix bur that was from Aaron um Aaron also would like to know uh what is the parallel processing that you're doing with vocals right now let's talk about blue hour um that's the same as it's been for years and years and years so there's a parallel ptech la2 ptech chain which there a thousand videos on the internet where I talk about what that is it's B basically crank up a bunch of 88k compress the hell out of it take out the 8K add some low end uh and you've taken out all the low end of the preq and then you just blend that in and it ends up being this kind of slab of mid-range that is parallel instead of it just being the entire vocal and so it just really evens out the vocal but as with all parallel compression you've still got the uncompressed vocal so that's first then there's still this concept of the rear bus which is everything except drums it's like an extra mix bus that you blend in yeah um and there's a stereo voal Crush which is La um 1176 all buttons in just very spitty and it's like an aggression or a presence yeah but like I said earlier that stuff is much much quieter than it used to be on my mixes so for a while all of that parallel stuff I would send to it at zero because that's the quickest way to get stuff to it so it's a copy of what's going to the mix bus goes to the parallel compressors those compressors had some level that i' set over time and then they just sat there that's what came into the mix bus then few years ago there was a mix and it was like it's it's too much of the parallel thing and I added a VCA that controls the returns of all of the parallel stuff and so that was at zero in my template and then I would turn it down a little bit and whatever then I noticed it was ending up at - 12 or below -7 a lot of the time so now it's actually all the way down in my template and I only bring it in if I remember and a lot of times I don't even like it so strangely there's very little parallel processing on my mixes now and some would say that all that parallel processing is cheating so now I'm having to do it without it right so and so how much uh so if you got let's imagine you got a visual here you got like dry signal and all this parallel signal in right with it how much you know there's probably no fixed rule but how much processing are you doing on each you know each item in the dry signal you know do you do a lot of work on the kick drums a lot of work on the snare or yeah it just depends yeah it it really depends I mean yeah I work on Kick and snare because they're usually really important on a rock track work on Rhythm guitars vocal obviously Bas I mean but I kind of work on everything but it's always getting the core of the song great and now okay there're all these tracks I'm not really hearing so what are they right should I tuck them in or do I make them a feature for a second and yeah then go through the role once the basic song is being the song then I can see what everything else does and every once in a while I discover something like oh that should be important and I have to kind of rework that's where I'd started it's really interesting because that reminds me of what Jason Joshua's process was on on one of on one of his tutorials which is to say that for the first I think 30 minutes a lot of what he was doing was just turning stuff off he like this isn't the most important thing in the song this isn't this isn't this what's in his language what sells the song is like is this massive kick this 808 these finger snaps and maybe a pad he's like I'm going to get those to be like absolutely like not only satisfying but also loudness was a big thing I need to get that so that here's my rough mix it's that it sounds like it's this loud and now here's just the kick the bass and the pads and it sounds this loud is that is that analogous to what you're saying like it's kind of me I do it differently because I'll start with nothing and I'll bring stuff in and then like oh okay I don't think I need that and I'll take that back out and not that I'm not going to put it in later because I always try and mix what I'm giv every once in a while something will be in the way and distracting and I'll take it out and see if people notice but usually everything is in by the end of the mix but yeah I'm always trying to find the core and then everything else kind of is you know ancillary it's yeah I mean it might be really important but it won't affect the groove okay for instance it won't affect how the course feels but it makes the course way more interesting MH that's fine but it's the transition to the chorus is let's say adding parallel compression on the drums and effects on the vocals and big Rhythm guitars coming in like okay that's what happens with the chorus now I've got 15 arpeggiating guitars how am I going to deal with that should I make a stereo thing that's panning should I just find an arrangement you know yeah oh as in should you just find a place for them or yeah yeah yeah but all that stuff is secondary to this kind of spine of the song yeah yeah without the spine the rest of it just doesn't matter okay yeah cuz it wouldn't be a stand up to Bel labor a metaphor yeah so vocal parallels um this may this may be a bit of an extra question which is word have not used for a decade uh when did you last use outboard gear um you mean for mixing the Ziggy Marley record so that's that's when I was coming off of the console yeah and I still used some Hardware inserts on that record just because I did um yeah so when was that that's a long time ago yes it's all in the box now yeah I mean it has been forever and for for almost all people it is anyway like now it's very it's more it's rare that you find someone who's console oriented now yeah I mean and if that's what gets you excited and makes you creative I'm not I have nothing against it but I you know there are people who don't believe that I mix in the Box yeah yeah but look cin who's arguably one of the best mixers ever especially for pop stuff he's the king he's been in the Box his entire career as as far as I know yeah I don't think he's ever used outboard gear it's yeah so there's no there's no discussion to be had if you want to use it you can use it yeah if you don't want don't use it yeah yeah I mean the main thing that people can't believe about you is headphones isn't it I know we've talked about that a lot so you know I won't go you on that one but but yeah first people were like how can you mix on headphones how can this be possible and the answer is as with a lot of your stuff if it works it works yeah if it works it works and I I think that the the argument for it espe especially for people who are starting out is most likely you can't afford great speakers and you're certainly not going to be in a really well treated room acoustically yeah so put your studio on your head that will never change yeah it's all about translation I mean that's all it is is that when you think it sounds good it sounds good everywhere and by sounds good I mean feels good and works and you know whatever if that's speakers or headphones or whatever and like right this very moment I'm trying to do the transition from the Sony which give me problems sometimes I'm so used to them I know them really well R 25 years something like that yeah well my entire career I mean that's what I've had for headphone in when I'm recording and you know it's I've just been using them endlessly but there's some issues like there's a big dip at 400 htz that's pretty wide and so it's hard to hear what's going on down there and I hate doing something and then realizing like oh great now I got to Reed deal with this fundamental thing so I've been using some Odyssey headphones and I'm kind of going back and forth between some of the models and it's taken me a huge amount of time to even get to the point where I wanted to have them at home because I listened to him at trade shows this guy Chris barens who works for him has been amazing I keep going up to him at trade like Hey man can I can I listen to some stuff like for a really long time and like yeah no problem no problem and so I think that will happen because the only thing I want is to be able to work on the headphones and not then have created problems I have to deal with on something else right so you're hoping for like relative flatness although flatten headphones can sound bright yeah I don't even know if it's flat I just don't want there to be you want no issues yeah so so we'll hope for that that 400 htz uh dip to to go away this is um a question from our uh managing director and it's less about sound um which is probably a blessed relief at the stage which is you work with a lot of artists you work with some of the best in the world now often you're not working directly with them you know I know you've been in a room with jum for Shante and people like that but you're not always sometimes it's just coming into you despite that of the people you've worked with who would be in a super group you know who would you like to see perform together maybe something you've never thought about um I mean Audio Slave was that super group I mean not that there's anything wrong with Zach but that was like when I heard that was happening I was desperate to work on and to be able to actually work on that was incredible um yeah I don't know I mean I as you say I've been really really really lucky um and I don't know I don't know because it's like things like the Chili Peppers whether John or Josh or H back in the day or Jack or Chad they're just such a unit that they can collaborate really really well and that would be amazing but um you know there they definitely the sum is greater than the parts yeah of course um so I don't know I'll think about it while you ask me something else and if I come back to something I I mean you know I I think about like singers there's so many of them like Chris Cornell sing on anything y Chester Bennington just ridiculously great um I mean and while we're talking about ones who've died um Ryan kazia who's in the band low Roar which has been a gigantic part of my career probably by far the most important thing I've done yeah for a million reasons and you know Tom York who has not died thank goodness yeah so I mean those four and Anthony Kus those five are completely different from each other and would be would change any project that they're on but any one of them singing on anything would be great Sharon NOA I mean it's I've been so lucky to work with so many amazing vocalists and then you could take that to any instrument you want so I'm sure they're just combinations of them that have never occurred to me but would be great yeah but it would be some form of music that they don't do now it would be a different thing yeah which should be hard to imagine and whatever people come up with spontaneously you know is unknowable beforehand yeah you are right about the Chili Peppers being a real unit and as we sold him in Glasgow this summer and um halfway through the set my friend I was there with Chris he was like this is very Stadium Arcadium heavy set like unexpectedly and one gets the sense that there are such a stage in a career in that career now that kind of before they go out they go right what we going to do tonight uh these ones we've not done that one for a while yeah Anthony does a set list right completely Anthony if you follow their Instagram you'll see these handwritten ones that they photoshopped into some very funny pictures he just does that every night right and you know there's some stuff like give it away is almost always one place and um I can't remember what's always first but you know there things that they do to bring in the show I haven't seen this tour but I'm assuming a lot of those are still in place but yeah it's just what he feels like singing and the thing that's amazing is he gets the flow of the set right every night and it's different every night he designs like a narrative for it yeah and I don't know if it's intuitive or what but I mean they will stick in like there was one show I was at where they played skinny sweaty man in a green suit which if you don't know it go listen to it it's very short um you know where the hell that come from but it was perfect and amongst the rest of it and so they don't have them I don't know which big label have them at the moment they don't have like some anr going well you know the fans really want to hear oh God no they're they're at a point where they just do exactly what they want and it's working for everybody yeah they're kind of like I feel like they've graduated to my generation is like the Rolling Stone just his un Unstoppable entity who will just go on now and but also world class musicianship yeah yeah I mean they're all ridiculous they're all just absolutely insane at their instruments but in a completely musical way yeah yeah it's that that is what's particularly rare about the about the Chili Peppers because they're kind of this unusual hybrid of they seem to be middle finger to the system don't give a but really care about getting it right and getting the music right oh yeah yeah the music is is Paramount all the time so have you actually been have you tracked sessions with anyone other than John fante or yeah I worked on U all the records that Josh klinghofer did right in between yeah yeah how did he compare by the way what was the energy like how was it different I mean it's it's hard to say really they're just different people but Josh had played on a bunch of John frante solo stuff had toured on The Stadium Arcadium tour as the fifth musician guar I he was in their world years and he was in the for 10 years like itn't feel like 10 years because it went quickly for some reason but yeah I he's great and we we get along really really well and we had a lot of fun doing stuff but I got along really well with JN too so yeah they're just they're different but they're both very much in the Chili Peppers I to be able to go from hell to John to other stuff in between to John to Josh back to John and no one says like well that didn't really sound like a Chili Peppers record yeah obviously Anthony being in front helps but they switch drummers still sounds like the Chili Peppers y you know we're just happy to let the river kind of flow where it's going yeah I mean Anthony and flee are the only two that have been there the whole time and I mean two out of four it's still pretty good yeah um but I think what it speaks to is how long the tenures are for the people that are there and I think you know if John hadn't wanted to come back to the band I would imagine Josh would still be there you know it's not like they wanted to get rid of Josh it's that JN as far as I know and I don't really know anything Jon showed back up and they had so much history with JN it was like oh okay and they're not going to have two guitar players yeah so you know I feel bad for Josh in that situation but it's it's somewhat understandable in a way but it's not like they stopped being the Chili Peppers no while was in but there may have been a degree to which I mean I can't I don't think I've read any of his statements about it but there may have been a degree to which Josh was like you know this was always potentially going to happen yeah I mean and when John left he was like there was no talk of like oh I need some time off from it he like I'm doing something else now yeah yeah so nobody knew he was going to be coming back or whatever and then you know stuff happens yeah and um well I mean obviously we mentioned the Rolling Stones a minute ago they've got their own very like real version of that they now there's no you're not going to get Charlie Watts back now you are with Steve Jordan and that's great to keep it in the family so to speak Steve Jordan you know he produced Keith Rich solo records great drum and all that stuff but but yes it's I suppose the blessing with the Chili Peppers is they still have everyone still here and can you know this this Dynamic movement is possible so that's good um so let's see one more from the team and then we go over to YouTube for some of the comments um this was just what I picked up you said in another video uh you were talking about basically your taste and you said and and and taste is mysterious you might not be able to say why but you said I don't like I don't like happy I don't like light I don't like major stuff is that like what why is that or do you not know why I don't know it's just it's an aesthetic thing like I like difficult dark dissonant sad angry like those are the things I respond to and it's why and I might as well just say in in an interview which will get me in huge trouble I don't like the Beach Boys I appreciate it I don't want to listen to it I would rather hear God Only Knows in someone else's mouth like it doesn't it's such an amazing song yes and the lyric is incredible and and that's not one of their happiest songs and I just don't I don't enjoy listening to that style of arrangement and things it's amazing and I don't want to listen to it it's interesting jokes to position with the Beach Boys because you have the AU of Brian Wilson who is obviously going to be some you know rever to the level of some great composers um very unfortunately like tormented man you know I've seen a documentary about him and I I wouldn't wish to trade places with Brighton Wilson despite all that genius all that Brilliance you know um but it's weird to contrast that kind of that Brilliance with a really kind of the salesman preppy kind of like selling California tourism kind of look you know yeah it's obviously it's just the way he was hearing stuff you know and it it comes out of a very long tradition of production that was that I mean it's not like they made it up but they took that brought it to the pop World in a different way and added some psychedelia to it like you know it's an amazing amalgamation of stuff that nobody else did and to the point where you know it scared the out of the Beatles and they had to go make Sergeant Pepper yeah because they heard Pet Sounds yeah but even Pet Sounds I bought the box set and I just yeah so it's like the genre doesn't matter to me but the setting because I'm not a lyric person like I appreciate lyrics a lot when I pay attention but if the musical setting isn't something I like then the lyrics aren't going to help me and other people are totally different you know they just listen to the story and the setting doesn't really matter as much but for me the musical setting has to be something that I respond to or else the whole thing has just lost on me I think it's probably quite common as well because my experience is that fewer people try and craft outstanding lyrics than try and craft outstanding music a lot of the time the lyrics are there so they have something to sing but you know a morisy or a Kate Bush you know or an Alex Turner they're quite rare they're like poets who set their words to music you know well I mean think about singer songwriter like go just another singer songwriter you have to be a songwriter a poet someone who can advertise yourself and you have to be good at playing an instrument and be okay performing in front of people that's a very tough combination to find Let it co absolutely insane yeah you know and then you get someone like Nick Drake Who had most of that and some of it better than anybody but was not comfortable you know being in front of people and so yeah to have all of those talents that's crazy to EXP respect all of that yeah yeah and um I suppose like um someone like KT cabain is kind of the epitome of that person but had a band for the kind of you know security of that because um you mentioned being uncomfortable on stage you know I've heard that Tom Petty was similar in that way and Co Cain was definitely similar in that way and I get the impression there are some artists who if they could would rather not have the whole spectacle and show I think it's in some of those cases though it's not even it's not necessarily being in front of people it's the fame like with with Tom York I mean very famously he just didn't like the fame and I think the being in front of people is great especially in a small club and people are into it and you have this connection it's the the and look I get the teeniest bit of this at trade shows yeah where people think they know you because I've done 5,000 videos and they come up to me and just start a conversation and it's it's incredible and I feel feeling ridiculously lucky that people care what I have to say about anything otherwise I wouldn't be in this room but at the same time it can be really uncomfortable because they're talking to you as if you know them yes and you're trying to do all the stuff that your brain's just processing you're like I'm trying to figure you out but they're talking to you with this complete familiarity and at the same time they're probably you know they've been thinking about when they see me and so there's this kind of preconceived scenario in their head which is what's playing out and maybe I make people nervous as well like I don't know I don't know what it is but it can be it can be great or it can be really uncomfortable but also it's like sometimes it's like someone comes up and they don't even know what to say and that's you know whatever that's fine I mean believe me I get like that around people as well but I want to make sure like oh make it comfortable for them because this is a big deal to them so you know always shake the hand take the picture like whatever try and answer a question but I can't imagine that all the time I mean I get it what seven days a year yeah as and them like that's it 365 like that would be really really really difficult to deal with I would imagine and I'm not pretending like my version of it is anything like what's going on but you've had a kind of a taste of what it's like to have strangers up to you with some level of familiarity yeah and some people though are like that's the thing they're great at like Taylor Swift she was famous before she was famous she'd already and I'm making this up I don't know her I don't know anything about her but it seems as though this was what was always going to happen and you can talk about you know being a poet or not and okay maybe her lyrics are very direct and simple in a way but she speaks to way more people than than a lot of poets yeah so yeah yeah yeah I mean her fan base is particularly like they feel like it's not that they know her it's like that she's part of their life vice versa I mean they'll pay concert ticket prices to go see a movie yeah yeah and they'll pay $500 for the concert yeah you know like a lot a lot of people I knew this year more than I expected said I had to raid my bank account to go see Taylor Swift yeah and then they want merch how do you command that kind of loyalty what is it they feel like they she's absolutely amazing so yeah you know Michael Jackson didn't have the same feeling of like it was the opposite it's like he so alien that people went insane if they were I if they if he was in the room you know in 2009 we went to see when I was 16 all of a Twist on the west end and Rowan Atkinson was Fagan and that was the big draw and um before the show started big line of security starts coming in every starts clapping like what's going on and the veil is pulled back and it's Michael Jackson and the whole room just went insane and turned upside down and people were trying to fight their way to him and it was the opposite it was like the lack of understanding of this character turned him into this phenomenon yeah you know but also the insane professionalism that they devote to their show you know their Show Business craft but yes they command like absolute sort of religious fur um and I think Taylor Swift's maybe the only one on that level right now well I mean think you could argue Beyonce as well I mean Frank Ocean when he had that record out to a point um I I was in the front Frank Ocean concert in Victoria Park in London and it was there was a sense of religiosity to it because he spent the first five minutes just walking around the stage not even singing and wherever he went to the crowd would just kind of go a bit mad yeah yeah so they they're definitely yeah there's a group of people who are like that I mean the chili peppers are like that at the moment they thr out multiple nights at stadiums wherever they go and people are going nuts for it it must be insane because you know there's always a regression to the mean right no matter how extraordinary your life gets there's an initial novelty and eventually that becomes normal and what would it be like to find 880,000 people every night normal you know yeah I don't know I mean I was actually on a on a Michael Jackson tour way back when I did the dangerous tour and when we were playing Wembley the entire stage was covered so you didn't really feel like you were going outside there was this gigantic tarp over the stage and we never knew when they were going to open doors so like you come back from catering you had to go check something and if the doors weren't open you just walk across the stage if they were open you go around the back and a few times I didn't realize the doors are open and you walk out and there 60,000 people because the other 20,000 are still coming in who go crazy and you're like you didn't even know they were there and so for those people to show up for you must just be I mean You' got to like it a little bit or you just start doing the shows but um yeah it's it's unfathomable yeah and like you said there's the the the Tom Yorks of this world uh would clearly like a life like you know any one of us have where you just walk around anonymously though he seems to have completely come to terms with it now yeah I suppose after 30 years you know it was was that have you seen the documentary from the Okay computer talk oh yeah that's that's how you know meeting people is easy and that's where he's very much not comfortable with it yet yeah but not quite at you know the level of like sort of Kirt Cain um I just probably should stop making that reference because it sounds a little bit uh doc let me go some YouTube comments here um from the first video you know the the reason that we that that this is the third time we've been on how GES uh not only because you give great conversation you're willing to talk and just you know can talk um uh you know you can go into these rabbit holes uh it's also because we got a lot of response from when we made cut Downs of your stuff and we're like wow there's actually like hundreds of thousands of views here this is this is unexpected which is why we're fabulously wealthy of course yeah that's why you know this is this is a madeup set where actually Pinewood Studios and there's like 12,000 people there um so basically I just wanted to go down some of the top comments and um they're not really questions as such um but uh you know interestingly you know like you said it's not a practical thing but it's a creative thing but like one of the top on here is like I love Andrew because he is so practical about mixing and that's a sign off like 67 people have liked that well but like I said it's an emotional thing but you have to use tools for it so you need strategies yeah there's another good one here says I love this guy I noticed him and other Masters don't stress meticulously gain staging every track I intuitively knew this was an overboard YouTube hype it's necessary when you have an issue but a complete waste of time if you're constantly looking and applying it in my opinion yeah I mean the gain staging thing is something I never understood in analog super important because every piece of gear has a maximum level it can put out and as you approach it it will clip and do all kinds of things all digital processing now is floating point so if you know what that means it can be as loud as you want if it isn't something that has a threshold obviously Dynamics compressing Dynamics processing you got to know what level's going in but you'll see it slamming if you're going in too hot like I I think that needs to be something that's intuitive you just hear like oh I'm smashing something somewhere and then you find out where it's too loud and you deal with it but the I don't think there is anything that will inherently get you a better mix by gain staging but maybe I'm wrong I just I'm not even quite sure what the process would be so I don't want to say it's a myth but I don't I don't get it yeah and that was I mean that that was the thing you know we we put particularly clickbait FY thumbnail on that one with your face saying I never gain stage and that provoked yeah well and that'll provoke another storm won't it well I mean you send something your AI recently and you were like and I'm going to be wrong about this at the end of it because you just can't it's such a everything's such a moving Target you can't make predictions at the moment yeah um so um well actually why don't we because we literally only got five minutes left this is flowing by why don't we just spend a minute on that not predicting the future but where the industry is at at the moment you know so well here's something interesting so last week or the week before was the audio developers conference which is mostly people who write code that does audio stuff so a lot of people from plug-in companies and researchers and just ridiculously smart people yeah and for some reason I go as well because I've written a little bit of software but nothing like on the scale of what these people are doing uh and it's amazing this is the second year I've gone it's absolutely incredible and even though I don't get the nuts and bolts of of what they're talking about I learn a huge amount so two things I learned this year so um we'll go to the easy one first so I had a a thing on the third day in the morning which was uh build as an open dialogue between mixers and developers say what do people actually need because I noticed the year before there was no perspective of the end user it was very much about technologies that were available and what people were going to build but it wasn't I mean you know and obviously all of the companies that make stuff have feedback but there didn't seem to be a huge emphasis on Wow we've heard from a lot of people that they really need this tool they're going after stuff and I heard a couple people say like yeah and then the artists will use it in ways we never thought of and like well why don't you try and think about those first and see what happens so anyway so I did this thing and I'd ask lots of people I knew to say look what plug that doesn't exist do you want nobody had anything so then I thought all right I'm going to do an experiment so 24 hours before the talk and I haven't looked at this since so it's probably there thousands of responses now um on gearspace and then on two different subreddits I posted the exact same question so in 24 hours I'm talking to a bunch of audio developers what plugin do you want that doesn't exist and there were lots of people who responded and some of them were super funny like I want a plugin that makes me a better engineer like but there were very few that were like actual I would like a plugin that does this most of the ones where someone said something specific there was immediately response from someone else like oh man check this out yeah so the real problem is marketing people don't know what's out there so basically we have all the tools we need we need people to be really creative like write the song we've never heard come up with a workflow because it's not necessarily going to be some audio processing thing that's never happened before it's going to be the way it's presented the way you want to do it that's why freak Show Industries is one of my favorite plug-in companies in the entire universe just freak Show Industries plugins go there I'm warning you now I'm not telling you what I'm warning you about but I'm warning you okay so then the other thing is that everybody was talking about AI close deep learning machine learning neural networks huge huge topic and what I got out of it is that there is this thought that AI will take over something like this this class of job will never exist again this won't happen again but what it really is is it's making better cogs that are inside of those machines it will still take people just writing code to do the front end and the back end but there will be bits in the middle that are better at doing something and can actually make some decisions based on the input in real time as opposed to having a preset that's like hey if you're putting drums into this thing start here yeah guitars start here it's like o something transient I'm going to do that but then everything on either side of it so it's part of processes it's not the entire process that is getting replaced and the huge issue I think is going to be uh ownership of the training sets you have to train these things yeah so the thing that it makes is what everybody is focused on right now like AI generated music etc etc yeah like who owns the music I don't care who owns that music who already owned the music that they trained the thing with so that it now generated this music and how do you tell what they trained it on so there was the famous case of someone making a track using Drake's voice now I went on YouTube was like how do you that that guy was there yeah yeah I went to an hourlong presentation where he talked about that company and it's hilarious you basically just give it a phrase and it does a Drake song now the music I asked about this the music is all original they've written themselves a library of music it is only the Deep fake voice and the lyrics that are Ai and it's hilarious but okay so that's a greeting card thing you're not putting on a record yeah that is the Drake thing now still Drake should be making money MH but it's like how do you tell for example so I I just went AI how to make AI clone voice five videos tell you how to do it five different ways and it's easy it's like as long as you can get a sample of someone talking or whatever for about 60 to 90 seconds you'll be able to do it it's like how do you know which bit of data they used to make the Drake voice and who owns that and is it an interview or is it actually a record that's going to be so hard to like scrutinize it's going to be impossible and I've talked to a couple lawyers about it and there will never be laws governing it it will be um case law so someone will sue somebody there will be a decision made that will now be the basis of the next decision that's made it's going to be well all law in the UK there's no Constitution it is all based on previous decisions most of contradict each other that's exactly what this AI legal thing is going to be wow so like yeah okay I'm not legally trained enough to be able to weigh in on that but all I can say is to prove how easy this thing is you're going to hear me wrapping this up in the voice of Andrew ships and we're going to take it from a recording that we own so fantastic but it's still my voice so I own it but I'll make sure that Andrew is saying that in my voice I didn't sign okay but it's been really good as usual and 90 minutes went far too fast uh far too quickly so um Andrew thanks for coming I know you live here in the UK so it's actually you know you not have to fly over from California so it's uh no but I do have to charge my car before I drive back you have to charge your car and here you are in the British Countryside so I don't know how you're going to interestingly according to the internet mhm there are some highspeed Chargers very very close to here okay we're not telling you what here is but uh go on ash. to find the amazing array of homes that you can book this is one of them um Andrew thanks for coming it's been great thanks for having me really fun

Channel: Having a GAS™ with...

Views: 54,084

Keywords: andrew scheps, andrew scheps podcast, andrew scheps interview, andrew scheps having a gas, andrew scheps mixing, andrew scheps mix bus, andrew scheps the blue hour, the blue hour, having a gas, music podcast, mixing, audio mixing, audio production, waves plugins, scheps omni channel, scheps 1073, scheps omni channel 2, andrew scheps ai, scheps omni channel 2 vocals, andrew scheps grammys, scheps, mix engineer, andrew scheps headphones, andrew scheps tutorial, waves audio

Id: yY6-iSavai0

Length: 101min 30sec (6090 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2024