Producing Heavy Punk On Inexpensive Gear: Manny Nieto Interview & LA Studio Tour

[Music] hi everybody hope you're doing marvelously well i'm sitting here with the rather marvelous mr manny nieto how are you good to meet you warren well it's good it's the weird thing it's the not the first time we've met we've met a couple of times before but we've never seen a bunch of times yeah million uh dms i guess you've been really nice to hear my weird stories on how to do weird stuff with audio and you've been nice enough to share that with some of your friends so yeah and i make sure we always name check you no no thank you so much so that after this video because this is a studio tour obviously and an interview but after this one we're going to have a little uh tips and tricks one from you so stay tuned a couple of days later after this i don't know when i became manny though why did you become manny i have no idea when i was a kid it was manual and then somehow everybody was like hey manny and then i started writing my name manny i don't remember when you have a manuel that's what i'm supposed to be you're meant well then you're a manual i'm now a manny a story in my life that's unwritten about a producer is that i made about 300 records under the name francis miranda you did yeah no one knew who francis miranda was and it was because i didn't care and i was like it wasn't banana my nana was francis from ryan's my grandmother yeah and um so when i was at where rob's rob you did the thing rob that was my old studio yeah everybody would like when i would see bands they know like francis how you doing francis miranda so i thought it would be cool if someone was in like france or something like that and they opened up a record and they're like this record's awesome who's francis miranda and i just thought it was the coolest thing ever that it was my grandmother she had passed away and it was just me just you know paying homage to her and she let me be an artist i had so much i owed her so i did francis miranda and in my mind i was like god someone in europe will get it and they'll know and it was weird that you know what band called savages wonderful band when i was over in china working i got a video from one of my buddies and it was before they'd become big they're on a small label out of france and i wrote the label and i said oh my god i love your band i'm a producer i'm traveling through china i'd love to do in any way work with your band i wrote the owner some bands that i've done and one band was choke board which is a very famous uh french band for whatever reason they they also opened for nirvana that was kind of the claim of fame but there were also an amphibian reptile which is a super sick midwest label so i wrote him and i gave i submitted that label and he wrote me back he's like francis miranda i love your work and i was like wow the record i did went to france and the guy wrote me back and it was francis miranda but the only reason i changed it to manny was when i did a kim deal from the pixies has a band called the breeders steve albini was working on it and i felt like it was like teacher and the student kim said she came and did a demo with me and really loved it and then steve told kim well you should work with manny stuff sounds really good so kim ended up working with me and steve called me and goes do me a favor i know you love your grandmother and you love francis miranda but in your career of making records people have to find you i know you don't think you need this but call yourself manny and at least with kim's record the breeders go under your real name and i did and you know it was cool you know it was a moment where he said okay enough's enough like you know you're serious you got gear you're buying you're making records people got to find you so that was steve's advice to me so frances miranda we love you if you think about it we're like technically in east l.a and for most guys that grew up in la and as you know now the most expensive houses are going to be east l.a lincoln heights in that area they're becoming really expensive but at one time this whole area east la was kind of this the ground the stomping grounds of no man's land no one ever came over here even all the musicians and stuff that lived on the other side of the alley river you would never see them playing in hollywood i'm only lost lobos and man i can't think of any other bands that came really from east la that that really went on the other side of the la river and then obviously went on to greatness you know when i got this studio and technically i guess it's used to lay it's it's super cool this i know no one can tell but this is a studio but it's a studio within a building that has maybe 400 musicians at any time so it's a war zone downtown rehearsal yeah it's like why would you put a studio but they built four recording studios in this building and because of the pandemic everybody left town and the owner is a really sweet guy named mike and chris and they called me and they know i'm a producer and i just literally moved i was living in oahu for a year so when i came back to los angeles all my gear came in on a boat it was a pallet of like i was like 1500 pounds of gear i don't know what i'm gonna do and then the pandemic hit and i was like oh my god talk about luck of arriving in l.a and all your gears on a pallet and you have nowhere to put it i knew a guy that had a room here and my kid saw me in the hallway the owner or the manager he goes let me show you something and he bought me to this room which is i couldn't believe this was in downtown it's like uh you have a control room we have a glass wall and you have another tracking room and he goes there's only four of them in this building and like i don't know how many rooms 50 rooms that goes you can have it if you want it just move in oh my god i went to the shipping dock loaded in my gear and i'm like all right this is home for a while fantastic so this is where i've been for the pandemic like all musicians we've all suffered you know in the the sense of not only having like all industries shut down but our musician friends and our artist friends even comedians it's been a really crazy time so for me i pinch myself that i have a place to go every day and i've been lucky enough that this is got a three minute ride from my house so it's perfect spot and you can see downtown and you see trains and bums right out that window that's la isn't it it's yeah you only have to drive like five or ten minutes in any different direction you get totally different experiences yeah i mean it's crazy we have all the mexican food you want over there you got a little tokyo right there and it's la you know people think about this place and they think that movie stars and all these people walk around and it's like la's hardcore you know if you can survive in la or like new york city or chicago then you know you've you've earned your own i think even someone like you uh living here for a while you know like this is it this is home you know well you know i moved a block away from space line in 1996. i wasn't producing yet i'd uh i'd only did one record it was on an indie label my balance called distortion felix and i hadn't even done a record yet and i think in 97 i did a record with steve albini because i was on an indie label and we had a three record deal and my first record i i just you know i loved albini's records i'm not even thinking about producing that's how i got started i did a record with steve albini i went to chicago i got to experience what it was like to land in a studio he had a facility where you can live there and he lived there as well with his wife and he'd wake up and he'd be making coffee you wake up you have coffee and then like you go into this other room and there's like a tv and then you walk in another room and there's this huge studio it's like submerged into the ground and that was our first record so when when i was my second record actually so when we work with steve my bass players is a guy named juan aldoretti and i don't know if you know juan i know him as johnny but juan is is known for being the bass player of mars volta there's also uh there's a thing called pedal and effects which he has a show and it's also there's a lot of earthquaker stuff johnny was my baseball at the time super smart guy still is we had a budget for our second record which was twenty three thousand dollars and johnny and we just left chicago and he goes hey man cause steve had told us about how much it cost to build the studio and it was really interesting as stories he goes why don't you build a studio like steve and i said dude we can't build a city like steve yeah man ask the label if they'll give you the money tell them you're gonna make a studio and then we'll use the money we'll buy again we'll never have to record again i was like i go that's genius so i talked to the label and my angle was them i said hey instead of giving me twenty three thousand dollars what if you give me the same budget you gave me for albinis which was 11 000 and i'll buy a studio i'll buy gear and record on records so the label thank god said yes and then i realized i don't know anything about recording and i actually called steve and i told him what i had done and he just kind of laughed he called me rocker he goes oh rocker he goes all right well it goes why don't you come to chicago and i'll show you how to record and get you started so i just couldn't even believe i had that opportunity so i flew back to chicago i slept on i think it was studio a wasn't yet done yet and i was stuck on the floor or the couch for like watch him and i watched him record for like a week and he was he let me live there and just fly on the wall just shut up watch him don't ask stupid questions and see him do what he did and took notes and took pictures and uh so i came back to la and um his list was get anything left it was a 2 and 16 uh get anything like an amec board attack scorpion or an entertainer an attack scorpion i made tons of records that's my some of my first record obviously now those are my first records so i went online and i know most people wouldn't know this now but if you go on reverb you can find tape machines now for like you know four thousand three thousand two thousand even in la you go pick it up you can walk out with the 24 for about two grand you know like some kind of mci not a studer but something like that but in those days it was like a ferrari it was like 10 to 12 to 15 000 for a tape machine so i found the 216 for i want to say it was like seven grand then i bought a tax scorpion in the in the recycler for a thousand and then i went out and bought all the mics and then i found a building you know rob at the rock block with dave trumpfield rob rob that's my old room when that time that i had to buy gear and find a room i drove by that space and it was 500 bucks a month wow and i and i basically called the landlord and i leased that little area i loaded in all my gear and it was it was like i loaded into 2 and 16 mci was the 1972 it was a year uh tass scorpion and then at that time we didn't have um the the resources you have now like there was no even vintage king i was one of the first guys to use some stuff in binge king and they were still in alcarino and they worked out like a shoe box and it wasn't even nothing so there's no vintage king you got no sweet water the knowledge in finding things you just had to go craigslist or no friend so i put together mics that steve gave me on the list and and i'll tell anybody tell you what to get if you have no money and you want to make records the best microphone package you could get that will help you as an engineer i believe are buyer dynamics so i was lucky enough to get buyer 201s m88 160s wow and at that time there were still you know three four hundred dollars 500 maybe a buyer 160 with 600 you can put a drum pack together in a recording package pretty affordable so i did that and i had a buddy that came in with me in the studio he had his own mic so i got the mics i got the tape machine i got the tax scorpion i had i have no idea what i'm doing so for about two years after that steve would get those calls in the middle of the night oh hey manny how you doing i'm like steve don't hate me how do you mic up a stand-up bass you would laugh and you got to put the mic near the bridge and da da da and you know eventually those calls stopped but um yes steve was just you know he's not only is one of the greatest engineers i think you could ever watch and learn from but even to this day some of the approaches to his recording it's hard not to um pay respect to them and it's just badass the way he does stuff and not even because i know him i'm just saying like he he was the perfect guy and then you know of course there's some of my friends like robert carranza joe barisi joe breese is another guy that's um influenced me as far as you know him and robert they've been really cool to always be sharing of knowledge of recording and a funny story about joe which maybe he won't like this but joe's first gig ever recording was recording me on guitar garth richardson dino garth frost yeah garth guard yeah garth was a funny story eddie kramer was the first guy i ever met that was a producer and eddie kramer thought and i know he's crazy for thinking this but he thought i could have been the next hendrix so eddie kramer signed me to a year contract which i don't know what it was i'm just some 22 year old kid and he says i'm going take you in the studio i'm gonna get your band signed you're da da da da sinus to a year so while we waited in that year he had been working with garth richardson and garth would come see our band and garth says if eddie doesn't do anything with you guys in a year i'm going to take you guys in a recording studio and i'm we're kids so i have no idea what that means but we all like garth garth is such a badass you know even back then the day that eddie's contract ended and he i wish we would have done something with him but we didn't um karth called me and he's like hey man you guys are coming into sound city for like eight days and i'm hiring stan katiama i think it was the engineer and him stan katyama and not joe because no one knew who joe was but joe was one of those god dude early 90s mid 90s and but joe was definitely the top dog there already but we don't you know so garth brought us into sound city and at that time sound city's claim to fame was when you walked on the walls you would see fleetwood mac cheap trick nirvana and that's just enough to make you go oh my god you know and you know i think fleetwood mac used to sleep in this room and they slept up in the attic and there's all these stories about sound city and it was a blue collar studio i mean very nice yep they had carpet on the walls which are a no-no but they had brown carpet shack yeah i mean you lean on there you probably get a little like i don't know something just don't lean on the wall you know but um so guard took us in there so my first time oh i'll take that back rick parker do you know rick parker yeah rick very well yeah rick parker used to record my best miranda yeah he used to record my band years before i ever did anything and he is a another big influence of mine of guy that wonderful like he was building analog studios 10 years before i even touched the tape but forward now so guard took us into sound city at that time i think joe was like the top dog guy there and garth was told him hey we're going to do a record it's for free there's no money but you're gonna sit with these guys for eight days of course garth is the man so joe did it and i remember joe would be sitting there punching me in you know tune your guitar manny tune your guitar manny and like that's how i met joe the first time and it's so great that i i can call him a good friend years later now that i'm producing and he's he's a total legit guy i mean he just him like garth they both have had their own careers that have just done some of the greatest bands on earth you know but yeah also rick parker man when i built my studio i thought about rick park had already built like two studios by that time so i just grew this respect of like oh my god like this guy really did this like two times you know and i'm doing it one time where's this new one is it new one probably 10 years 15 but is he lost now i'm not sure where his new one was because he had the one on sunset underneath the coffee yeah is that the one where he did black rebel motorcycle okay and a funny story about the albini record is that when we came back to la i had to remix the song and i wanted to cut a new song and obviously couldn't fly back to chicago so rick parker actually cut a song and remixed the song off the albini record that was done on alias record the band's called distortion felix and the record was called i'm an athlete now my band is called the chavez sabine was with the same drummer but juan juan after that time moved on to mars volta so that's when that band stopped playing and um it's kind of a mishmash of stuff but like that's how i kind of got started in the recording rit parker totally i got to see a guy that really built stuff in this day and age it's really weird to say that i was all taped for maybe the first 13 14 years of my career and i never even had a computer screen up until maybe 2011 or 10. so i went through a lot of years of not like i mean there was a point where even bands were like oh we won't go to manny because he's all taped we want to do pro tools we want to fix everything and i just wasn't interested i was like i could not give one about what you want to do it i like my 2 and 16. i was cutting like do you still have it no i was cutting like back in black every day it was just the drums were huge like oh godly the only reason i changed off that is rules in they approached me and they said hey man we want you to come on we have some projects you got to be what year was that god it was before i went to china for two years so it had been like 2007-8 something like that so i ended up having to learn about pro tools and then in that process of working with them i think i became a better engineer and producer you know they say if you left something you should you know set it free i set my recording studio free so that's why rob came in i had another student lincoln heist and i basically dissolved it i put all my gear in storage and i wasn't married at that time and i told all my friends that i was going to go to china and i'm going to record bands in china and that's what i'm going to do which sounds absurd and crazy it does because no one because at that time no one no one really went to china well what made you want to go there well because of steve albini i went to his wedding and was in honolulu when i went to honolulu i ran into a punk band and then for for almost seven eight years i would fly into honolulu and record all the local punk and cool bands and a filipino guy who was half filipino in chinese told me that he'd gone to beijing and he saw one of the sickest noise bands he goes you would like these bands so i looked up a blogger because you can't find at that time you couldn't get any information on what was in beijing and i just came up with an idea i said you know what i'm tired of la i'm tired of bands i just barely learned how to do digital stuff and at the time i carried on my back in the 002 sm7 that same bae dmp and then i called sc microphones and sc microphones is a pretty legit company they do a lot of stuff with rupert neve i literally called them on the phone i said i have a microphone that said it's made in china do you have a factory in china and the guy was just like kind of shocked you say yeah i go oh my name is manny i produce these bands i'm gonna buy a one-way ticket in the china would you let me go to your factory and as a lender let me pick up your microphones and then i'll record all chinese bands with your microphones made in china and he agreed and he gave me i think suey was the owner of sc and i flew into shanghai one-way ticket i have like 900 bucks in my pocket a car picks me up takes me to this like it looks like a tank factory so he met me and he's like hey manny how you doing it's really super sweet and they said uh he took me around i did the tour of the sc factory show me how they make the microphones and at the end of the trip he says well pick anything you want so i got my backpack and of course i'm smiling because it was just to go into a mic factory and pick up all these mics especially back then you know so i did it i picked up um two ribbons uh they had these t2s that were like titanium i mean they're probably bulletproof they were just these six super heavy mics i think he ended up getting about six mics and sue or the sc was nice enough to give me a paper that when i get stopped by the police and because as as an artist at that time or even someone that's associated with music i wasn't really looked upon as being like you can't just travel around there saying you're an artist there's laws and they want to know why you're coming in the country because it was still very protective of who came in so i was lucky enough that i told them i was going to factories which i did and that i'd be picking up some of the merchandise which i did and i'd be testing some of the merchandise which i was so i traveled around china with this paper that i would show at all the uh i did it for two years so it was crazy i had 160 pounds of gear and i remember when i arrived in the china i had flown to taipei and they didn't like all my gear and i remember at the taipei and airport before i went into china i had to throw away about a thousand dollars of preamps and cables and stuff because they wouldn't let me take it into china so i mean i'm already like heartbroken going into the city you know but it was well worth it so how did you record did you just show up at people's apartments and no because by the time i arrived i'd already put out the word and everybody kind of i don't know how it worked out but in every city that i went to they already knew i was coming into the town so all the best noise bands and cool bands would write me and i would say well and i remember i went in like a dummy i flew into china like 900 bucks i already ran out of money like within a week of landing in shanghai and i would just tell the bands i go you buy me a ticket i'll land there give me a hotel room and i'll record you guys and a lot of them didn't have money so they would give me money enough to get a room and eat and the food was super cheap and i did that and i and i ended up recording some of the greatest noise bands that ever were in beijing and it's like no one knows about it because it was a small world there's a band called snap line which i love i still i think they still play boy climbing ropes was another band it just went and i just carried all my gear with me so i looked like an astronaut every day of my life and i felt like as a producer like when someone says like let's see your recording and they go how serious are you when you risk your life and you almost die every single day and you get food poisoning and you're almost killed and you're almost robbed and beat up and that's what you want to do for your life then i think you've your trial by fire has just happened and i was already 45 when i did this so i lived it and i did it and i gotta say you know i it was the most incredible experience to land in a city you don't speak the language you find the band and and the bands used to rehearse in cold war uh bunkers like so you would you'd go to a an apartment building you'd see like it almost looked like an elevator came up through the ground but it was just a booth and when you open up the booth you could see tank tracks that go down as far as you can see so then i would walk with the bands and i'd get down to this dark scary like hallways and like they say don't go that way and i'd hear like sounds and moans in the dark and i'm like okay we're not going that way and we'd go into these rooms that had uh air coming in from up above and each room had like a dj one guy had like a you know and i would unload all my gear set up all the scene mics and then i'd make a punk band my first recording was in an abandoned village and there was centipedes crawling all around the floor and there was one wire that came in with a jack for electricity and we plugged it in and i put up the mics and i made my first record and that's after i've already had 24 check tape machines done all this stuff and i got so much joy out of learning how to record again and i did that for when these records come out there there was only two labels one label is called maybe mars and i can't remember the other one maybe mars put out a few records that i had done with some other bands one one band was called chuyumon and then another band was called proximity butterfly and they were half chinese and half canadian and that record was in chengdu china on a on a lotus pond and it was like this house and i recorded in this house and it was unbelievable like i and but all these things are happening with no one else knowing so like i'm off the grid and then my my friends are like oh you're having a good time in china huh all right cool and they have no idea that i'm just like getting food poisoning two times a month um if you're gonna cross the street you don't look at the car because if you look at the car they see you and then go around you but if you don't look at the car you just walk so i had to learn how when the crowd would enter the street i would have to enter the street and not look at that guy that's going to run me over and then he doesn't run you over because he stopped but in china when i went there they just changed the law but everybody if you had money you could carry around ten thousand dollars equivalent if you ran someone over you would throw the money on them and they would say sorry about that that covers that would just happen and he would take off so there was kind of a lawlessness of i didn't know that and then these these audis would pull up and the guys were just jerks they'd always like and i'd like and i have all my gear on them like and i'm like you know saying f you guys man flipping like like what are you like what are you running like and these audi's would always try to run me over and finally i'd go these restaurants all the words audis and i'm like you know what i'm not going in there because those guys are jerks and then i talked to one of the band guys and i told him his face got all white it started buying out no and he goes no he go and he goes uh he says hey man you don't want to flip off the audis i'm like why go those are heads of government those are like the top generals of the chinese army and i was like oh smoke so after that point i'm like hi mr audi i'm gonna go around this way no no one ever messed with me when i went over there only one time the police definitely arrested me with all my gear and the lady took out all my gear the mics and she was talking in chinese i didn't i still don't own chinese but she was talking chinese about what that was and she was telling her her officer he looked like the captain like look at this stuff thing and i can hear only word i knew was something the same the same the same the same the same like he's a musician like you can't let him go i was going in from hong kong into mainland china and then the the captain comes to me and he looks at me and i'm like this is it they're gonna take all my gear i'm done and he's like where are you from i'm like i'm uh united states he goes where do you live it was in which state i said california and he looks to me and he looks at the other guy and he goes sing hotel california i was like on a dark desert highway cool wind in my head one smell i knew the song and he's like he starts laughing and the other guy's laughing goes get out of here and the lady was all mad like what are you doing he's like you know he knows hotel california he's from california let him go through and i got through the police station by singing hotel california and i was so positive my trip was gonna end i was like this is it that was one of the many times where i was like it's over now this is done and you know so i i persevered and i learned a lot about recording a lot about producing carrying your own gear around for two years makes you appreciate you know there was a time when i before i went to china if someone wanted something changed because i had this big studio that was like sound city and like listen to the bass where i didn't like something and he wanted me to change it whatever dude that's fine you know i do the talk of i know i know more this is the one but when i came back from china i kind of got rebooted where i remember this bass player there was a band called eastern conference champions they're a badass band i'm recording them and the bass player goes hey manny i don't really like that mic that you're using on the bass pick and i'm ready for the fight of no that's a d12 or re20 that's the end goes no it goes i don't like the way it looks you got anything else that looks better than that mic and i'm thinking to myself that's where you want to strangle the guy and you're like but i was just like no let's experience this i'm like okay i open up the box of mike's which one do you like which one looks the coolest too and he's like i like that one and i'm picking up this mic i'm like oh my god that's the worst mic ever you'd wanted a bass rig so i put it on the bass rig god and the sound of the bass was so badass and it cut to the mix and then for years it was a sennheiser 609 oh it was great but i never would have used it on the bass right but it had the mid-range with this guy it cut through so i still snuck in my re20 but then from that point i learned from just shutting up and experience the moment that the 609 became my favorite like just bring up the fader and you can hear the bass every time so you know i learned that's what i learned from china i learned about hearing listening experiencing it the artist is always right and that's a hard pill to swallow for a guy that never showed you how to record and you work with punk bands where you have to hold your ground and you and you it's like the old ways of making records where it was a battlefield and you're gonna do it your way and they're going to do it your way because they have no choice that sometimes work but then you end up you know like um phil spector you know i mean like you're just you know you're you're you're insane and every record sounds the same yeah well i tried to keep my sanity so i mean i think now as a producer after i've gone through all these things uh i've learned how like even the studio says a lot about kind of where i've been in my life i know if you look at it there's not really any outboard gear you know i got minimal things that are beautiful things i mean this uh from bryce this is serial number one oh wow and you're not going to believe this it comes with the foot switch that holds the compression so if you have a screamer and he's screaming and i don't want it to pump i hit the switch and it locks in the screen no matter how much he's screaming it's not going to move and then if i then i go over here in the variable and i'll turn it down and adjust it with fine tune it and that's the kind of thing that for me works wonderful for that for when i do bands that are crazy and you want to you know you're trying to capture a moment those things like that so i've surrounded myself with things that are going to be more instantaneous amazing and i love microphones and pram so when you watch your show and there's a lot of people that are learning how to record and even guys that know how to record like i've been recording a lot of years why is it a practicing physician and you're practicing law i think you should be like practicing producer because you're never going to get it i've of recently i know of a friend of mine that's a big producer totally lost a gig had to give the money back things are there's nothing there's no issues with the artist but even guys are like the guys you're gonna still you gotta learn to adapt to all situations and you have to learn that sometimes the artists and people want certain things it's hard to walk that fine line i've had some of my favorite producers make terrible records and some of them make wonderful records and when i was younger or at least in recording i never understood what was that factor oh that producer probably sucked you know or whatever and then now that i recorded bands and an artist will tell me something that i know is an artist and it hurts i realize that it's it's the same it's like the same we're all the same and and that's the point when you talk about on the other side of the glass when you can go beyond that and you get rid of the glass and you're with the artist that to me is is is worth more than even anything modern and when you talk about you know like modern technology i mean the fact that anybody now can go buy a laptop and you can get wonderful plug-ins you can do all the stuff makes me feel silly to have all this heavy gear around me but when i make rec is the way i make records then you would know consoles and microphones there's a certain level and happiness that you get out of this kind of stuff that i still don't feel like i can obtain out of just a laptop and so i mean you know i get a facility i get a room i get weird gear i got tons of little lamps and we're stuff speaking of that let's do let's look at all the weird gear and the tons of little lamps and stuff all right cool man first thing of course i saw was a jc55 which i'm just a huge fan of those amps this one is is interesting because these are italian jensens in them there's a it's a local muses store called sleeper music and ryan is the guy there so ryan is nice enough to kind of trick out everything i have so this echoplex for instance has a kit that's like 200 bucks you buy this kit and they refurbish it for you and ryan did that for me i gave him this it was a little bit banged up and he says i'm going to put some gents into tennis because then it's a little bit different than the stock rollins yeah so everything here has kind of been tweaked out a little bit for him and all these amps are like just unusual things that unamps that people would play you know just to make things sound interesting i mean those have got like what is it those eight inch yeah pair of eighteen super small super smart i mean the distortion is the worst best sounding distortion ever it's so bad but it's good you know when i was younger um i was into like randy rhodes so my mom would take me a guitar it's like the opposite of randy rose that's destroyed well i didn't know so i went to guitar center yeah and there's this guy with his hair and he looked like he was randy rhodes and i think at the time like roland probably shipped the ramps and said hey dude sell these amps to some kids yeah i walked in there and i'm like i want to sound like randy rose he's like i got the amp for you he gave me the jazz chorus and i remember i went home i was like this is not like randy rhodes it was pre-edge if i would have been in the edge later i would have done it so yeah is that the same amp no no this is a different one but um for years i played this yeah but then now i realize that for recording it's one of the most wicked clean amps you could ever get i would use this and something like um you know this is another i don't think this is a sleep ramp i think people know what these are but they're it's called a twin 12. now john for shantae a bunch of different guys use these and this is the cabinet that it comes with but i also run the 212 like with um jazz chorus also if the guitar player is playing i know you can't see it but i run the twin twelve into this leslie which is a real leslie offender leslie if someone doesn't know what a leslie is it's basically it used to be a speaker spinning but i think this one has an enclosure that spins around the speaker so um siri yvonne is famous for that but also led zeppelin when you hear those really cool spooky vocals uh there's a band called spirit in the room i just did and that's their stuff in there the record's coming out i think next year it's on phil from pantera's label out of louisiana but the vocals i ran him to this and blew the guy's mind like he didn't even know what that was and it was just running the vocals into the ep3 echoplex then i reamped them into the uh silver tone and then into the that and then i marked it up with a ribbon mic and a room mic and it was just like angels singing in a room so yeah you use amps kind of the way you use the plug-in but it's just air it's grit it's distortion and it's harmonics you know it's incredible these amps if i hit a high e you can hear a low e floating around the note which is all plexis amps if you get a plexi and it's a sideways transformer like the ones eddie would use or if you hear black sabbath a lot of times when you hear tonaomi play there's a little bit of a note that floats around there sometimes van halen would have that where you would do like i think panama would hit a note and you hear like a low end thing that phantoms it these old amps kind of do that you know i see you have a binaural head it was made in um like czechoslovakia or the czech republic or something like that when i bought it actually sounds really terrible i paid like i think it was like seven eight hundred bucks for it because i thought it looked so cool and it was that and it bragged about the real years and you know you can move them they're hey are you son of a well this thing doesn't sound good so i wish i could tell you that everything in my studio sounds good but i gotta be honest this is the worst binary if you see this online do not buy this one all right don't buy this one public service announcements yeah now that jordan amp there i don't know what it is but it just reminds me of like my first amp this one is interesting a buddy of mine just gave it to me because um i think it's a chinese knockoff of a japanese amp that was a knock off of an american am it's the weirdest thing but it also sounds absolutely incredible i kind of like the look and it just it's real if you look at inside it's really weird like it's just like that has the longest cable ever and then you can see the tubes inside oh wow no brand no name just it just sounds like like a jimmy page solo you know it just kind of cuts to the mix and it just does what it does you know i wonder if it sounds like uh what's the david said the op yeah if it was something that was like rock and roll right now yeah yeah this is another one that like i think it's another sleeper that the only reason i found out was this no this is a polytone polygon that's what i meant oh sorry yeah i said mighty mind but i meant a polytheistic yeah yeah that's a polytone it's a mini brood oh yeah and the reason that my hands are standing on and i remember these knots are kind of the reason these are so badass well they're so freaking loud no way they're loud but it sounds like john paul jones like i have an eight string hackstring bass yeah and what you do is you pull this up oh this one is that's right this is the one that doesn't pull so this is the the volume so if i want to make it loud you make it loud it's totally clean as soon as you add this the distortion blends within the volume channel and it makes the most coolest grit and dirt but only get the ones that have the red knobs some of them pull this one just turns but that's great i bought this one out of the paper because i just looked at the picture and i saw the little red knob and i said either whatever that's the one so i use this for um basically running with um if i have any overdubs i um i plug this into it which is uh a string hacks i miss the real 70s or 60s i've got i've got to play this yeah this one is pretty great instant uh peterson damn pizza [Music] so classic right [Music] instant music right [Music] oh yeah well you know those bases are paired well with people that if you looked at pictures of hendrix i think like manic uh like a lot of old hendrix records he would play that along with the track so you can hear sometimes that anything like brendan o'brien or other producers kind of their secret weapon like i'll use it like if a band has a simple riff i'll ask the bass player like after i'll surprise him i'm like he thinks he's done i'm like hey come in here for a second and i plug in my poly pillow and i'm like he's like what's that i'm like just don't worry about it just play what's your riff and if it either sounds great or it sucks yeah hopefully most time it sounds great and then i put that in the track and it's basically like adding a saxophone into your tracks this all mid-range it's all like nice and deep so you push that into the track and suddenly like that track just sounds so bumping i love the look of this fantastic but the interesting thing about this one whoever we finish this you can almost see it dripping yeah so but but i also love the way it sounded and i never wanted to mess with the integrity of this whoever did this did the worst job ever for refinishing a guitar but you know what it's my base look at that what is that it looks like i'd done it like what were you thinking like it's like you just gave it to your your kid this is an alamo which is um i think the black keys use these i didn't buy this because it was elmo when i when i was traveling through china and actually i was not in china i was in singapore the guy had two lmo amps and they just sounded incredible so when i came back to the states i was looking for one and then ryan the guy that i told you that did a sleeper music that did my echoplex and these he actually had this for a few hundred bucks and i and i didn't even hear it i said you know what it's got to sound good so i bought it and i don't know if you saw some of my videos where i'm ripping like van halen or something like that let's do this m it just sounds godly and it's just the coolest little amp it's amazing these little lamps are they came with movie projectors from the 50s or the 60s moviola or something like that and when you bought a projector inside the projector were these little lamps and they would read the sound off that or somehow has something to do with the sound and the reason i love these is that um there's a speaker on the top so you put like a buyer 160 on the top of that amp and i can only like if i plug in um like you know this is a ring modulator if i do like a ring modulator a robot pedal or one of my favorite pedals is the earthquaker tentacle if i put this on that little amp with a delay or run it in the echoplex it sounds like david bowie scary monsters it's the craziest lamp and there's so much there's so much low end in them it's a real shocker for you know guys that are a little bit high on how big the ramp is and how tall it is and then when i run that little amp on them they're kind of weird they're always just like whoa that sounds heavier than mine but you put that low in the mix i'm sure dude it's going loud but anyway so these two ones are the same ones except um this one has a tone control that one has a ton of i think it's just four inputs to two no difference but they sound the same this thing i'm not even i mean i love tascam but this is super important with all these lamps it's a little you know people use them for vocal screens you know i don't i put them on in front of the amps like that and i put whatever ribbon mics i have on them and it really kind of intimidates the sound and makes it you can put it on a hi-hat on a floor tom on toms when i'm recording i always have this because sometimes i do amps in here and it just makes it really personal it just makes you just don't hear anything else and those little screens are really great for that so all these little lamps kind of go hand in hand with me using that to just contain the sound and you can experiment with it you know sometimes i put that in the back because i like a lot of these amps are double back and if someone doesn't know a lot of producers that are really great engineers they would mic the front in the back and if you're watching you're like well this doesn't make any sense it doesn't because the back sounds kind of terrible sometimes but the back is low end and the front is top end so if you put a 57 here even if you have another 57 and put in the back or 421 you reverse the polarity on it and suddenly you have this low end that you're like holy smokes like so that's why you know that works good because sometimes they put that on the back of the amp because all you get is this tubby sound but in the blend of the front for all the attack the thickness sometimes you can make that amp stand out and i think even jimmy pace sometimes even used only the back of the amp so if you're doing a solo and it's just not working you flip the worst mic and it sounds the thickest and the weirdest and the strangest but you know sometimes that makes it sound cool you know so i don't know if there's any rules like i said practicing producer you're practicing i don't know dave jordan would always do the front and back yeah or little lamps big guitar sounds little amps i mean you can't go wrong i mean that's one of the things about if people are engineering and you're talking about plugins and computers and laptops luckily for me i didn't get the rub elbows with you know i didn't i didn't walk the hallways of a m or sunset sound or sound city kind of grew up not having even kpop magazine was the coolest thing you could read to find out what people were using and even though i knew garth even though i knew guys that were like the dudes a lot of things you had to just learn on your own and i think engineering is still a mystery i mean even if you know it all and you you're the best engineer in the world and you got the best mics in the world some guy will come in with a snare and you're like oh my god like and you cannot get him to not not use that snare he's gonna use that snare and it makes all your mic sound terrible that's when you have to remember what you did that time when the guy came in with the horrible snare and you mic the side of it instead of putting it on the top with a ding dong or the bottom with some kind of rattle like a jazz drummer you get a picture of the drum from the side and sometimes that helps you with that one guy that has that one snare that just makes you like he's got the little holes in it that was so the sound comes up to the top and it sounds like the worst marching snare ever but his band wants to sound like black sabbath so anyways yeah those are that's what engineering is is solve problem solving guitars so what tell me about this lyle here well that's one of those japanese copies and the only reason i bought the lyle this is a 60s area pro and i'm pretty positive these necks were made in the same factory right yeah maybe yeah and this is my guitar for the chavez savine which is a 60s area pro and it just sounds the heaviest guitar i've ever played in my life nice and this this is a pickup from a 1971 gibson sg and it's a mini humbucker and i put it in it so i basically got that mic which i saw it in the music store and i was like that's the same neck as mine and it's on an ugly guitar but i didn't care because these are the travis ravine guitars so i got this one i got that one there's a local um luthier grey coats he's a great guy works you know norms wear guitars he does the bass guitar of the day anyway so he also works on guitar so almost everything you have here has it's been great usually gets it and does weird requests for me the only one that's not is this one have you ever been to old style guitars no i haven't it's in silverlake and the guy is amazing and he gets these crazy guitars and does really weird things to him so i got this guitar which is a copy and you can probably see in the sunlight the repair on this but some guy had put a paul reed smith headstock on this guitar really yeah it was it was cut off there was like it was like right there it looked like a banjo but i saw the body i'm like oh my god and i played it and i'm like it's the sickest guitar so i had a glued neck yeah so i had old style guy extend the neck oh yeah i see and then i had him give me a longer throw and he moved the bridge down so now it has that when you play every note it's like you're hitting a piano that guitar smokes too but great coats did put the pickups in recently on that one it's sick right it's beautiful [Music] slinky right you like to tune your guitar slow don't you like that's the way my band is i just play it like that i'm not really competing with anything so i just tune in what makes it sound cool you know all the guitars except for this one are there's something weird with them this is another weird one and this is only weird because this one i do have standard but i had it so i wanted when when you have a a set bridge on anything like a les paul and you hit a note [Music] yeah here's that little yeah a little resonating that's why i put these on because when you're doing really pretty stuff it's just it's like hitting a piano with the sustainer key on it's not so dead so all the guitars i usually put this longest throw i possibly can it's just but these are the guitars that i play i mean if i gave someone else these guitars i don't know most guys have really cool guitars already but these are strictly just things that i like to use but this one in particular is a special guitar this guitar was made in the same era as eddie van halen's frankenstein guitar i grew up in armani in san gebo valley and when we were kids you would either go to doctor music in pasadena or pedrones in alhambra and if you weren't in that you would have to go to like to carl sandoval who did randy rose flying v or you did charvel who had a shop in glendora but all the guitars that those guys used were kits and there was a company i think you can still find them but it was called mighty might or boogie body and if you had i remember i had when i was a kid you would open up the the i think it was a mighty mic catalog and there you saw all of eddie van halen's guitars you're like holy smokes so charvel would have these kits and you'd go to a store and you'd pick out that body that neck and when eddie got his he didn't have a lot of money so he got the bee stocks which were something's wrong with them this guitar uh carlos carvasso from quiet riot was hanging out with my friend gus and he kind of took gus under his wing and say listen we're going to get your guitar so they went to charvel and it was at the era when alan holders was rehearsing in the same building so that tells you it was a long time ago that whole eddie van halen connection to ellen holdsworth that's why and they put this guitar together and this guitar sat under a buddy's bed for like 30 years and then when i found out that he had it because a few times i played it when i was younger i just tooth and nail i did whatever i can to get it the neck was almost broken off the strings had pull it off i took it to gray coats again and he put it together for me and it is just dynamite and i cannot tell you i mean i can and i i can only say that it's not even because it's the eddie van halen thing is that when you play it and you're running through an amp it just has this like thin upper frequencies in the upper end and then low end and the bottom and if you listen to van halen or any guys that shred it like that that little picking note when he's going fast with the phase 90 is just made even nicer with these old boogie bodies so yeah it's it's a it's a shredder guitar in some ways but when i have guys come in and they're doing some heavy rhythms or something that needs to sound super tight i always put this in their hands and they're just like what the hell is this and i'm like it's i think it's something special i mean even that bridge is so weird it has two you know it's not even a standard it was just a kit it was a boogie body bridge probably and then it's got two it's got two screws but it's also a trim yeah that's crazy and then there's no plate yeah and never had a plate on it just screws excuse me i mean who does that so you know that's so that guitar is it's special it's sentimental but also it's a badass it just you play it and you can really do almost anything you want for you know all and for all wide spreads and i think the neck's a little bit smaller so if you just easy and like that's why it shreds these are all the funky weird ones we got i mean i love it all i think that's but they're all like you know they're all just ones that i it makes all these guitars make me happy that's it so let's see some of that some mics and pedals you've got lurking around in here well what i have here now is kind of what i think are some of the best ones like this one are you familiar with the taco bray okay attackable octavia is i think people that are in the pedals would know it's one of the rarest petals but the tucker berry octavia was rare because stewie vaughn used it i think jetback used it they make a lot of them and i used to have a taco bray and i knew exactly what it was and the pot tycoon break only sounded good if you paired it up with a real rat and a real rat this is from the 80s and you'll know it'll be a good rat when it doesn't have the light in it and it looks pretty bad like this but this is my rat and if you pair it up with the tentacle into the rat oh my god you're talking jeff beck harmonix when you roll your volume off and it sounds i mean there's a lot of pedals that do octaves up but this is the only one that i've ever heard that to me sounds like a tucker bray and if you've never played attacker bay then you would not know but that's why i no matter what i do and it's still you know i can't get away from using that as a player too um micro synth is a it's a terrible pedal because it doesn't track well not people are used to pogs and stuff that do a lot of tracking but i use this a lot for my heavy sounds of my own band because i play as you can tell my guitars are strange and they're down tuned so when you do singular notes and basic melodic passes this is like a mini moog in your guitar rig but the root one you want to get is the one with the power cord if you find one that has a power cord even a base one that means it's from the 70s or early 80s the original ones and those ones sound the best so even but they did have some later ones that have an adapter with it that means the transformers inside maybe it's more noisy i don't know but if i buy these which i if i find them i do it's got to have the power cord and that's the best microsynth you can get you know so that's what i use for even heavy sound when i'm doing a heavy record and there's a a section that's like maybe an a e and a g i'll grab one of my heavy guitars tell the guitar player or the bass player just play this under it and then suddenly it sounds like you put a mini move under your bass or under the rhythm section oliver the guy that owns death by audio probably some of the most incredible crazy pedals as freaky as my guitars are as freaky as pedals are this one literally sounds like a robot and it's and you would say it's almost unusable but when i use it with my guitars that are down tuned that octave up that's it the really robot sounds suddenly becomes tame and it sounds like i'm running out of a ring modulator or something it's really cool this is a distortion that i use all the time that that technique that i think i'm going to show you on the kick drum it's kind of like it oscillates it's almost like it runs itself into itself and it gives like a feedback i think somehow inside this is a little bit of that magic or that black magic you know um i love echoplexes but this ibanez delay from the 80s is a digital delay that is the most incredible delay ever and whenever once again whenever i walk in a music store no one's gonna know it but when i buy it this to me is one of the best ones you can ever get and it sounds close to an echoplex because even though it's digital it sounds a little bit rolled off it's just not the bright you know like a boss is like kind of a high-end digital this one is just strictly just i put it on a low setting so it's like a rockabilly slapback and you can't you can barely hear it on your amp but when you're playing it just like ah that tone is great but it's literally the delay pedal on i use this a lot when guys are doing like melodic passes so even clean guitars i'll use this all the time this is a wonderful reverb units made by death body as well he makes all this stuff and is very boutique but um oliver is in this really sick band called a place to bury strangers and it's the one of the craziest bands when you see them live his reverbs and his fuzzes are like you know the guy from my blade of valentine he's known for doing that i gotta say i think oliver is crazier than that dude it sounds wicked but if you get a chance that band check him out but his pedals that he makes and i remember he was telling me about that he wanted to go on tour so he thought it'd be a good idea if he made like 10 pedals sold him out paid for the you know his trip to overseas and started making them so you're helping out like a kind of an entrepreneur you know love it um you can't go wrong with a phase 90. but this is not a real one it's a new one but i'll give you the tip of the day what's the tip of the day well years ago i used to i used to call me the pedal guy and in the early 90s i was the only guy that would travel around southern california and i'd buy vintage pedals and i'd sell them to uh stars yeah so i used to do stuff with bob bradshaw and bob bradshaw would say hey eddie van gaal needs a script a phase 90. so even though even though back in the day if this was old it's not any script face 90. if you i don't have another one here but it would be like you would have to know what it feels like if you have two phase 90 script logo and everybody says this is the old one the one that's lighter it's called a lightbox phase 90 that would be like uh jimmy page and eddie van halen so so if you had two phase knives and you weigh them and one's lighter than the other that would be more of the era of like the eddie van halen so when i would go searching for eddie van gaal and he wants one i would find the light box once give it to bob bradshaw eddie would say that's the one and then so the lightbox mxr phase 90 is the one that he would use and then so i used to do so that's how i learned a lot about guitar pedals because before the united states was hip to vintage pedals it was only the japanese because the japanese would an artist would come through temperature blackboard let's say he's coming through from the purple he'd come to town japanese guys take all the pictures of his rig hey take whatever you want they'd have this guitar magazines called young guitars or guitar guns or something like that you'd open them up there's eddie van halen's rig so in the states they would not let you do that you know the guy's playing detroit no no one takes a picture of my rigs i don't know for whatever reason so that's how i learned on all the rare pedals so if you want an eddie van gaal and eq go online and buy a boss ge10 which is the bigger boss has a power cord like the mxr i said and it has to have a gain knob and that's if you looked at eddie van hillen's old rigs you see two ep3s and then in front of it was a box tape that you can't see what it was that was a boss ge10 so that's the kind of thing how you would learn and i would learn about guitar tone this is a newer one but still sounds incredible so that would be considered a standard you can go to sweetwater and buy it it's a wonderful guitar single overhead just vocals i did some vocals with it it's incredible it's just a newer one you can get them right now online if you wanted to buy one totally classic this is a um classic as well but it's a little bit older it's an an older fet 47 beautiful for bass guitars i use it on kick drum i think ellie smith maybe even seen some vocals on it but incredible like the top end of this is nice so you can use it on not always bass instruments but if you hear like nirvana or sound gardener or something most times they had this on the bass guitar or if you went into a studio i did a session for dave sardi as well and when i went into the studio it was kind of like mandatory you got to get the 47 on the kick drum and it's just and if you want to know like let's say you're one of those guys you're like screw that that's a lot of money why am i gonna like that's just baloney i can get a 300 mic like who cares right i thought the same thing and then when i got this and i put it on a kick drum and it was like set it forget it and i listen back to it i'm like that's like back in black kick drum i was like jesus christ that's why you spend the money same with the 67 like for years i told you i had the buyer guy i was not the guy to go buy anything that was like this i think now that i've been recording for a lot of years the appreciation that now that i can hear the difference is different than if i would have bought this 10 years ago 10 years ago i would have been like this sucks who cares i'll sell it i'll buy a honda or something you know but when you get this now and you use a good mic like this it's it's priceless you know so these are uh power supplies for akg c12s a's now this is to me i'll make a claim this is probably one of the greatest microphones in the world um i got two ones in noralco it's insane that they're almost matched perfect even though they have different power supplies there's another one and they're brass capsules same uh branded different but they sound almost identical when you look at the waves and they go through two different power supplies so here's the noralco and then that's the akg beautiful but they um so then if you're into two mics and you want to go well hey man what does that one do more than the 67 i can only say that the 67 is kind of like a tiger and this is kind of like the titanic it just oh my god on drums it's the biggest sounds i've ever heard and i know i don't have a c12 the long body and maybe that gives you the same feeling but what i loved about these is i'm a fan of 414s and eb's and i just my heart when i see something like this and i put it on something and it sounds great i just go like that's that's the right there so i have two of those which are wonderful for overheads drums uh there's a picture of jim morrison singing in one and even freddie mercury i think used them for vocals here's another sleeper this used to be a standard in a lot of studios it's a 633a that's a mint condition yeah and i don't see one that looks that good and wow looks brand new the engineers of back in the day that was like the 57 you put that on the snare you put that on things now i learned learned about this mic because of ross robinson i don't know ross robinson he's a rad guy i think i'm friends with him on instagram and he's a badass but i did a session with a guy that was obsessed on everything that ross robinson used once again i learned from china don't say anything use whatever the guy wants to use so i had to use only the mics that ross robinson used don't know anything okay cool i'm gonna find out about some mics as soon as i did the guitars i was like what the hell is that mic and i go out there and it's this mic and then i had to go buy it and it's like you can get them for about three or four hundred dollars and they're going up louder now a lot of times they're broken but that with the 57 i can see why ross robinson loves those it it has a nice way to like just kind of get rid of that woof of a 57 and you just get the top end definition and that's why so every time i do guitars this is most likely going to be on it the other i wish i can say i'm cool enough to have found this myself but once again ross thank you ross robertson here is a beetle era it's called a 244 uh c uh d224 no i don't know this that is a dynamic oh it's a dynamic it looks like a condenser yep it has two elements in it one top end and one bottom end they're in the beetle era of you know probably abby road probably has a heck a lot of them they break easy but once again i had recorded that with using all of ross's mics and once again i'm mixing it i was like oh my god that hi-hat just sounds incredible what is that that doesn't sound like a 57 km 84 it doesn't sound like anything i know of and i go out there and i take a picture of it and i was like jesus and i look it up online it's like 700 bucks i'm like oh a dynamic for 700 bucks and i said yeah i went on ebay and i bought two of them and i gotta say man no regrets this what i didn't know is later on i found out on harvest moon by neil young this is the hi-hats and the overheads so when a cat like neil young is using him on his own record and i heard that even mick jagger's saying on some of these at live performances but whether no one used them my ears told me this mic is special so i got them and i've come to find out when i've used this paired with the 57 if you can imagine like if you're looking at a chart and let's say the 57 its fidelity ends like right here this mic goes from the 57 up so it doesn't get the low end of the 57 but it gets the articulation kind of like of the the alt tech and it's just fabulous because it's like adding an eq to every time you do a guitar so i have this a 57 and maybe a buyer 160 and then as i'm mixing it i'll just choose which one i want so instead of reaching for an eq i just pull up whatever fader gives the guitar a cool sound so those are sleepers i think but they're great um this is going to be terrible looking it looks totally ugly but it's an old 414 that's called the p48 now i loved ebs so this is the next one after an eb so when eb well it actually went akg c12s then when ebs and then after they made ebs they didn't want to have tubes anymore so they went solid state so they had the first db's which aren't tube and they had the p48 the p48 was before the bl with bulbs or buls i think and the thing is that this is really 48 phantom power i think the new ones can run off an uh nine volt battery like i think it's like the voltage is different so these ones have to run on 248 but uh there's a have you ever heard of heisman microphones i've heard the name but never used them he makes his own capsules and he makes uh kind of c12 capsules that would go into this mic and he makes his own he has a whole line of mic sound a buddy of mine had bought two uh brass capsules so i sent this to heisman and he was nice enough to put a brass capsule in there so it's the brass capsule 414 which have been equivalent to an eb 414 with the brass capsule now to the nets out there that are going to be like oh screw that because you know there's a thing about brass capsules and nylon capsules and the only difference was is that if you bought a let's say you get a let's say you go online and you find a c-12 with the brass capsule you bring it home and then you realize it's a nylon capsule it's not brass but that was factory they didn't actually care about the brass capsules so if you had a bad 414 and it went bad you sent it to akg they literally throw the caps on the trash put a nylon one in and that's why there's a lot of nylon capsule really vintage c12s and sometimes you get an eb with a nylon capsule i had an eb with an allen capsule and sent an incredible but but a guy like some of my producer friends they bought for five thousand dollars they got take one of these or something when they brought it home they didn't even hear it it just had a nylon capsule and they sent it back so you know snub your nose up or down you just have to experience it you know like with anything like in all these nice mics to people that don't know me i literally don't have a car my engine blew up so i'm i'm not like some fancy guy that's going to get my porsche this is blood sweat and tears for every mic but also know that after all the years of recording and producing i put a lot of my money back into microphones not into um you know the latest digital gear or even other systems that are now standards my system is literally something out of you know god i mean i'm running on i have an hd rig which you can get out of paper for 1500 bucks and as you can tell i'm stacked with like 40 channels and it cost me like i think these are 100 bucks a piece so that's the world i live in but then but they sound wonderful with old mics when i first went to albini studio and he showed me how to record he had these and these are these are um omni tube mics are you familiar with these i am absolutely gorgeous i have not seen one in the flesh for a long time yeah they're they're emulators now they go into this right here i mean even though you can probably plug it in there it would work has a long cable that you and then you put these on the floor the reason you put these on the floor it's an omni capsule and it just has a way of of it's even i think in the old days when they'd have like um like a theater or a play and they're recording it i think they used to place them on the floor anyways for whatever reason the myth of when you get them they go on the floor but considering how much these cost and if these break you can't replace them put them on the floor on your own risk if you're just someone stepping up how much does those cost um at the time i'm gonna say maybe they're i had these both for about 2 000 a piece but then they were they needed to be recapped so i had them recapped because there was issues with them so if you buy these there's a good chance they're not going to be working make sure if you buy one you know there's a guy that can fix them so we live in la there's five dudes right now you can call that fix a mic i'm lucky enough to have a few buddies that can do that so i had them all recapped these and it was interesting is that this one is balanced had a balanced transformer the other one didn't have a balanced transformer but when i used them on my first session i love them so much i didn't want the tech to do anything to them again so i just so i have one balance to one like who cares you know when you hear the drummers i'm recording who cares you know like so um but the albini thing is when i first recorded albinis in studio b he had these on the floor i didn't know one thing about recording except everybody in the band was like look at those mics on the floor they look like coke bottles and that's what they're called they're called coke bottles so it's called an m11 and i think the capsules are 21d and i think maybe the m11 is maybe the power supply i think maybe that's the m11 i'm not sure but if you look it up online you'll see m11 it's going to be broken so fix it but that's why i didn't buy him when albini gave me the list he said get one of these but then he warned me that if there's not working it's not really worth money and he has greg norman do you know greg norman there he's a guy that guy can fix anything so i mean electrical has a whole self-supporting system so when they get old mics of course they can rebuild they can rebuild tape machines i'm like some dude that i'm like some guy that can even i can't even change the oil in my car so you know but anyways um that's that's this is one of my favorite room mics so when i give you show you that recording the sound you hear that's a little bit big and like kind of thick around the edges left and right it sees microphones and there's no symbols in these you can beat the symbols as loud as you want and it's just like you hear the kick and the snare with this little bit of around it and they just don't pick up anything in that frequency so i do a lot of drummers that are just kind of scary dudes and they come in with rude symbols i'm like go ahead dude bash it go ahead got this new route that's the loudest symbol in the world yeah go ahead and play it and i put these on the floor and that's it but anyway so that's that's kind of um there's no really you know secret stash or anything that special these are all there's some special mics in there well yeah but i mean now but they're but they're ones that as an engineer you'll fall in love with them there's no like i mean like i said no one's gonna be like you're cool if you got the akg 244 and you're legit like i have no idea until i heard one and i was like oh jesus christ yeah i want to be legit i'm going to get one those guys are guys that like to get like ross does ross gets in the room brings in three racks and he's gonna record you with whatever you got and that's what you got and he prints the sounds that he records so there's no fisting it later like when the guy mixes it i don't think he mixes this stuff someone else does but when you get it it's already fully formed that's kind of like some of this my approach like the amps the sounds even some of the gear here like if you want to talk about gear that i have let's talk about the outboard yeah yeah so these all have a lot of meaning to me because in the world of preamps everybody knows that there are a plethora of options but if you want to get to the brass tacks neves apis and something that is really great with ribbon mics and basically i had a neotex c uh c3 console for a lot of years and even though albini had a neotech i didn't necessarily get one because albini got it the guy next door was going to get rid of it and i just got it so i didn't know at the time that scitec are neotex the guy made these just like it so i have one two three that's twelve channels these are about six to eight hundred dollars a piece and they're neotechs so i have basically 12 channels for like 2100 bucks and they're the most incredible drums toms kick drums ribbon guitars anything overheads something and and what they are they don't have any transformers in them so they will overload so you got to get a paddle so i have a bunch of pads that i stick on the front but when you put that on a kick drum or tom and you go and you're just like what the hell is that it's like the clearest they make your mics sound like your mics so i mean a lot of things of people running like i'm going to run it into this thing because it's gritty and dirty sometimes that ruins what the mic is and what it's supposed to do so when i use tom mics or whatever i'm using i'll i'll run maybe the toms into the scitex when all the overheads and the site text and i'll run those two mics into the cytex when i told you about api this is brent avril god rest his soul he passed away i think this last year or last year yeah he was if you know if you live in l.a you're there's brent abel's all over la i've been recording for a lot of years i'm not saying that i know it all but for me on a budget and getting the best quality the side techs are still god they're six to eight hundred dollars always and they stopped making them you can still find them and then the bren aprils may have gone up because of his passing but they're still affordable as well and this particular unit that only has one rack mount with one bread april avida satomi that's probably one of the best ones he ever made not because i have it because that design worked out well and avidas kind of said it was and then these three advetuses are kind of like naves so my drum said if if i'm using like i want a really heavy sound i'll run into the vitus and then i'll use the guitars with the apis and this one is an old bae but it's so old that it didn't even have a phantom switch in it but that's the one i traveled through china with next time like you see your favorite star and he's in a big studio and they've got like an ssl and eve and everybody's dancing around they're in a big studio you always know that there's only one fader up and it's like so all big studios it always comes down to one pram so if you have a good pram and you can only buy one buy either an api a neve or whatever one you really like and you can build your tracks up you don't need to get a whole console that's just kind of my opinion about that so i try to get things where i'm going to be using them one or two or three at a time and make sure you get a pair of ones that you're really confident and that work well with your mics see a nice pair of atc's yeah these are anybody that loves atc's realize these are the bottom of the line ones these are the ones that are passive they cost about i think you can get them on sweet water you can get like a pay three payments to get one that's what i did and but they but you need a power amp with them so the part that i'm running with this one is an old yamaha power amp and it works really well but they're rated at about 300 watts so you gotta you can't just get any power up you got to get one specifically that's going to make these sound good and they do not they do not work well under power so don't get a 250 watt power out for 300 watt speakers 150 aside get something that's healthy you know that can push these so these are i've only used ns10s for my whole career so my studio always had in his tents and i would hear a lot of people talk about how they don't like them you know they oh this is that but i gotta say when i did my first record the producer turned me on to this it's called a stuart reference power amp it's a hi-fi fidelity power amp when you hear this power amp which i have one under there which is powering my s10s you like tense and it's funny like i would go into next door and dave trumpfield would come in and be like dude you understand sound great and then like the next day he's got his zenith tens up and then a week later they're back down again but for years the fatigue of those pow amps i whatever people talk about that thing that they get from it i don't get it from them i'll play some but this paired with the stuart power amp is incredible and this one is actually one of the best ones the world reference 500. i think it's only like 110 watts of channel or something like that it's not a lot you can't you can't blow them but it's not cool so that's that's my audio section and then you'll never believe if if you don't have any of these iso acoustics under your speakers what you're missing is um a buddy of mine for christmas because i got your present for you i thought oh cool i don't know what i'm going to get and he brought stands over i was like oh it's like really like what am i going to do with stands he goes let me show you and he put down a um you know the meters for uh measuring decibels of how loud things are so on a stand just like this my speakers are sitting on the sand it was i think it was like 89 decibels of the sound that came out of the speakers all right and then he goes watch this and he put my speakers on these stands and it went down six to seven dbs which meant that my speakers were vibrating the table that vibrated the floor that was giving me extra dbs of sound coming off all my rig and when you put your speakers on the iso it focuses the low end my low end showed up in the middle again i was like what the hell is that and then also your room's not vibrating so when people talk about decoupling speakers and like is it a big deal i think it is because if you do a mix and you're like 90 dbs this is the it sounds the guitar sound exactly as heavy as i want you have to accept the fact that like seven eight maybe 10 dbs or just your room humming you know and that's not gonna translate in someone's car so you wanna get the best sound you can so my stereo image is important and one of the biggest things that i think is really cool is you're listening and listening thing this is you check that out have you ever seen one of those it's oh it's same with connections yeah he only made a few of these and this thing right here is one of the most amazing playbacks i've ever heard in my life so it's really simple play i have everything in the computer i go through killer mics and the killer preamps i really make sure my listening environment is perfect and i can know what i'm hearing obviously what you listen through is super important and i don't know what he put inside there but it's magic it just and i remember they discontinued it and if you can find one they did make a few but he didn't make a lot of them and so this i used to have a um a coleman i think was a mark iii and it was that's uh all and that's wonderful wonderful i have that at my house but this one i end up just falling in love with because it sounds really great with the um the atc so what i do is i mix on the ns10s i track on the ns10s when i feel like embellishing myself and seeing what it's going to sound like i'll listen to the atc's if i have a bass player come in and he wants to rip and he wants to play out loud i play the atc's not the ns10s when he leaves the room i put on the ns10s and listen to at a low volume and that's usually the best way and i'll play a really quick sample of it later and you'll hear it fantastic but that's that's all like stuff that i really after all the years have when your ears tell you that that's really exciting these are really wonderful these are mccurdy um meters um a lot of guys in nashville and a lot of guys in new york this is something that they all the mastering guys used to have it's kind of a it's a it's kind of a testing equipment because you can do all the stuff for tests it's like testing meters i wanted to look at meters even though you have digital and you can look at it i wanted to see what was coming out of my system and what and since these are testing and you can get these calibrated which i'm going to i have this one of the meters was a little strange i'm going to take it in and have it checked out i'll have it recalibrated again and then when i put it in it gives you the truest sense of where zero is six plus minus six minus eighteen so i do rely on you not only your ears but visual of what analog things do when you're listening to digital processing because when i'm working in pro tools if i have my fader there's a certain threshold that i know that if it goes louder i'm sorry if it goes louder than that it's gonna it's it's distorting even though some of the bands want that you're just gonna know that's why i even have those colemans over there but i haven't been using them uh when i got the mercury's they're just meters you just plug them in they're just giving you you're looking at a meter but sometimes when i'm running uh like an amp or something and i'm reamping it i just want to see what the meter is doing even if it's unbalanced or balanced and then this thing are you familiar with this no what is this you see what it says sound retrieval system okay that was made by howard hughes and it was made for the huge airplanes and and sound systems and in the 80s and the 90s i don't know if you remember do you remember your car used to have a little button that would be like sound retrieval button it would make your stereo system explode and sound bigger i mean the loudness control kind of yeah but this what it does it makes a it makes a model signal stereo with false reverbs and weird sounds and interesting and this meter is like a disco meter so you see your level come up and as you expand it it widens with your sterile image and chad blake is one of the first guys that i saw use one and it's but it's very particular i mean it's not like you don't put your mix into this but if you're doing a piano or something really weird or let's say a mono drum room or just say a mic up in front of your drum set it makes like a dry model signal turn into this kind of wild 3d imagery but it's very particular if you're mixing with it it's just like one of those things where like you've run out of choices you run it into this i i want to hear that yeah i've never seen it it's it's yeah but it's it's it's like i said it's uh it's usable and also unusable but if you do if you do weird bands it works out because sometimes that one guy that has that one like solo that you just know is just not sitting in the mix you can put this around it and then suddenly that guy sounds like a stud or the girl sounds like a beauty you know so is that now smart this is the it's a stereo but it only has one set of controls and i for you i think from day one i started recording i've always had an allen smart i've gotten a real ssl before and i didn't like it i got to see one i didn't like it and this is the c2 and i like it and for a lot of years i used to use the crush a lot now i don't use it at all but sonically they call it the radio compressor and i think if you go to like god any big studio sense of sound to east west they're going to have an ellen smart in there and there's a reason is because when you're mixing and you've got the mix where you think it sounds pretty badass and then you engage it into this you go holy smokes it just like hits sounds like the radio so i call it more of a radio compressor and it really is forgiving so if something's really jumping out in the mix and you want a solo to sound good but it feels too loud if you can run it into that it kind of tames certain things but it has a nice way to the only one the reason i like that it focuses the vocals it adds like a little bit of mid-range i don't know it doesn't sound clean it does something so the vocals kind of come up in a peak in the center of the mix which sounds wonderful when you use a c2 and also guitars and drums sound mean to it some guys use this as buses for the drums i've never liked it i like the um the api is the 2500 2500 yeah that's my favorite all-time compressor for drums so like you see i have two compressors this one is kind of my swiss army knife this one is for uh bass guitars and this is a bryce gonzalez highland dynamics and i use it on bass guitars use it on vocals use it on the a string 12 string um it's it's almost so loud it's a preamp too so it's kind of like you just plug it in and go a vocal or a bass guitar all right we're wrapping up here before we go matty's built mike you know they say what you do with your time during these crazy times i there's a very wonderful guy that has a studio in somewhere in europe called hobo rec oh yeah i know i i normally went on a video and i said how do you get yeah how do you make a ribbon mike i basically saw it and then i decided we've done a whole episode with him let's try and get it out the same week yeah so i so i was influenced and i wrote him i didn't know him and i said dude oh my god look at that that is the craziest looking mic ever it is the craziest looking mic ever that's the man i call it the canine the canine yeah i tell you what's inside it's a double ribbon like a buyer 160 yeah and it has toggle switches on top that cut each ribbon so you can turn on one and turn off the other depending on what you want and there is a factor in the low end and the high end with those so yeah i saw his video and then went crazy and literally so where's the actual this this is the capsules here yeah like it's it's hypercardioid right so it doesn't work on a fig it's not a figure eight okay as you can tell it only comes in in the front and that's it there's no back of the ribbon but the ribbon runs within this copper here that stops the ribbon but also it there's no it's there's sound absorption behind the ribbon so you cancel the rear of the ribbon but the trick about all these is everything that you do in front of the ribbon because and then also because i'm there's something wrong with me really join the club okay i'll tell you what if you go when you look at his ribbon that he makes the uh i would say most ribbons in the world are made with the corrugation wheel and the ribbon if someone doesn't know what a ribbon is it's not like no one knows what a ribbon is anyways but ribbon is basically a small piece of foil that's as delicate as gold leaf and the corrugated means like if you you know if i had if i cut off a piece of foil and i threw it at you it would just float to the ground but if i crumble it up on my hand and throw a ball and hit it with you the foil became rigid while the foils and that royer uses and ea they corrugate it so they compress the foil into a design that's the ribbon so all mics of the world have kind of a wave corrugation and what it is they go through two gears and as the foil goes through it it corrugates it and it makes it rigid and it also gives it that full wonderful sound me being the knucklehead that i am i wanted to make a mic like a buyer 160 knowing not knowing anything and then i find out that the buyer 160 ribbons are made by like three ladies and they're the only ones that can make them and they're handmade without you can't use gears and you gotta use your hands and corrugate each little tiny ribbon so so it's like someone's saying hey can you write your name and the head of a pin you know and you gotta write your full name in that and i was like being naive enough i'm like i can't make that it took me four months to be able to corrugate a ribbon that is in the style of a buyer 160 which uh which most ribbons so if this is the front of the mic all right look at that it looks just like a buy once actually i know i know it's awesome but this is the front of the mic so all ribbons of the world if you turn it sideways is figure eight you go this way and you go that way and the ribbon does this the buyer wants 160s work like a piston they go up and down so when i designed that ribbon me being a knucklehead not knowing that i had to design it so the ribbon moves this way not this way and that's the part of corrugating which became insane so i finally got the ribbon i've corrugated it i put two in there and i'm just testing it because all my friends are badass dudes and there's no way i cannot have a mic unless this sounds badass so i'm getting close and actually i'm going to start a ribbon my company you're the first one to hear it wow uh it's going to be called um the original gravity waves microphone company but i only wanted the original gravity waves microphone company because i wanted it to say o g m c i just want to say oc but anyways i have two buddies mondo lopez my bass player yeah he's helping with it um a guy named earl houston a wonderful super smart cat he's a producer engineer dimitri marmash in hawaii he's kind of pitching in so i've got these buddies that all have these influences like earl knows everything about transformers and all this stuff that i'm new to the game so i use all these influences of my buddies and we've all put something together that we're going to call it the gravity wave microphone company but but the reason i made this mic and it looks ugly this isn't because this is what i'm going to sell it's like anything you got to learn how it works first before you can do anything it's like building an amp you always build the one amp that yeah it's kind of weird but it's not a plexi well i want to learn how ribbons work so thanks to hoborek and their video i decided and now oh my god we can talk three hours about all the things with ribbon mics but the biggest thing is though the 160 design is not for everyone it's not one of those nice big mics that it's just it's a rigid has it's like a you ever use the bk5 the bk5 is one of my other favorite ribbons and there's something about a bk5 up on a guitar rig that sounds incredible but it's not a big blossomy ribbon that's my first ribbon i want to design so this engine or the motor or the transducer in this one was strictly made so i can learn how to make a ribbon the reason it's so big because it opens up like a mouth like a venus fly trap and i can see everything i've done inside and i probably change this out like three times a day and i re-ribbing it i think in my my instagram i showed you me re-ribbing it i can do in like two minutes now which used to take me two days before but i just want it so i can experiment where the ribbon sits is so crucial you know so and i have two ribbons like why and how with the first mic i put two ribbons in it and use a corrugation that no one does because it's too difficult that's me because i didn't know only respect to my friends that i have a lot of friends that have boutique companies and i can only have the highest respect like when you bryce this guy i mean he is like my hero like he literally had an idea about making a cool compressor that was kind of like the throwback to emi abbey road and he made something that was unique and that influence and that inspiration is me to make this that isn't competitive but it's something that as a producer i want to put on a guitar rig and be like oh god that sounds so good that's all so i'm not i've been the reason i'm doing the mic company is that i have some crazy ideas because i don't know what i'm doing that i'm gonna try to do with ribbons and i think that's the parts that's exciting but i gotta learn first how do you make a ribbon mic check out the video on youtube manny you rock my friend thank you sir thank you ever so much please leave a bunch of comments and questions below maybe i'll throw you under the bus and you can answer some of them i'll try my best you know and if you can give a thumbs up come on now yeah thumbs up be great we're enthusiasts have a marvelous time recording and mixing speak to all again soon [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 43,159

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio

Id: dJYtQyQIZzc

Length: 95min 28sec (5728 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021