Episode 27
Show Notes
Live with Matt Rad - Episode 27
Nov 17, 2020
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 25
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Jon feels very competitive. He wants to be one of the best mix engineers in the world.
You need to be listening to what your peers are doing
And you need to be healthily competitive.
Jon doesn’t mind losing. He’s a sore loser in the moment, but he gets over it quickly.
Jon wants all of his peers to win.
The artist has the smallest variance (gambling term).
If you’re an artist you’re really betting on yourself.
As a producer you’re working with a lot of artists, mixers even more, and mastering the most.
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Jon thinks the new Ariana Grande record is too lean. It has very little low-end.
It’s bizarre for the genre. An extremely bright mix by Serban.
Jon wants to have a lot of brightness but without harshness.
Why are we mixing for radio if radio is going to apply their own black-box compression to everyone’s mix?
Don’t think about mixing for radio, because radio is going to do it’s radio thing anyways.
The era of vocal-up mixes are mostly over.
TV mixes with no vocals are rare too.
The Rich Costey mixes for the 2nd and 3rd Muse records were pretty dark and un-hyped in the high end with a little bit of extended low end. But when they went to radio they sounded huge, likely because the radio was hyping the low/high end.
The sound of Bruce Swedien mixes is not one of compression. They’re taller and more open than anything else that’s coming out today in a lot of ways.
He’s the example of what Jon has been trying to talk about for this entire series.
He’s waiting for the new era of mixing where we can mix like Bruce, but with more density.
They are hard hitting dance records that will endure because they are so open and dynamic.
Bruce mixes the percussion elements way too loud, because he can in such a dynamic mix. You can’t do that if there is no headroom. It becomes straight energy, drive, and groove. That’s what’s missing in a lot of mixes today.
The Michael Jackson records are also not quantized perfectly, yet they’re tight and human-perfect. Understand the rhythmic/groove relationships. Try nudging sounds.
Matt learned this from Lovi. “It’s all nudge”.
If your hi-hats are hitting perfectly on the kick and snare then you don’t have groove.
Vaughn Oliver and Oli G are Matt’s favorite groove people. Matt calls Von the Splice king.
All the Bruce mixes benefit from having different groove relationships.
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Naval quote: It’s impossible to get really good at something unless you’re curious.
Matt got into producing because he wanted to figure out the process.
Jon wants to make hip hop sound like Nas’ Illmatic and RnB sound like Usher’s Confessions.
Confessions was the reference point for the Khalid’s Free Spirit record.
The Who is Jill Scott? record was the height of Serban’s mixing, in Jon’s eyes.
The high hats and the delicacy of the top-end.
Matt:
It was The Chronic and Doggystyle.
P-Funk melodies with huge low end added to it.
Matt was really into punk rock and hip hop.
Too Short. The sound of absurdly loud 808s that shake your trunk.
The Spymob drummer’s feel was amazing.
There’s a class of 90s-2000s rock engineer/mixer guys that make records that are coming back sonically with likes of Tame Impala.
Rich Costey
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The whole reason mixes are sounding so small is because people are misusing the limiter.
The reason Skrillex can do it is because he’s crafting the sounds individually instead of smashing them all into a single master limiter.
Loudness comes from arrangement. It should not come from a limiter.
Jon:
Clip your DAW for the vibe, then export it and bring the headroom back when you mix it in Pro Tools.
Q: Jon’s vocal EQ process for high-mids on the Kid Laroi record?
Jon used the Ozone 9 spectral shaper to give himself a handicap in the hi-mids.
He has this on the vocal buss in his mix template. Usually somewhere between 2k-6k.
The phase-coherency is perfect because it’s one band.
He’s usually not EQ’ing out that region. If he does it’s a dynamic move Just the spectral shaper to warm it up otherwise.
Unfairchild to warm up the sound with tubes. Sometimes Hazelrigg VLC-1 preamp EQ to smooth out the top if it’s a bad records.
Tight EQ moves with Pro-Q3
Faraday limiter to warm up the vocals with a Fairchild limiter sound.
The secret sauce at the end after all the surgical/reductive moves to round it out is the Spectre saturator to find the vocal presence band and make it pop. This is the final move he does.
Q: Vocal air?
Jon doesn’t know what that means. It can be any frequency. It changes. He tries to go with something warm to his ear.
He’ll use a Pultec-style EQ like the Ozone Vintage EQ
Spectre saturator in ‘warm’ mode for the smooth high-end sound.
