Episode 4
Show Notes
Live With Matt Rad #4
June 16, 2020
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 4
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Recording Vocals:
When recording vocals; vibe, room, and the singer’s headphone mix are all very important
Matt:
If you are making music in any aspect today, you should be able to do every step of the process: writing, performing, recording, producing, mixing, mastering. You don’t have to be the best. Just know how.
Anyone who wants to get better at making their vocals sound good: Do it a lot and try a lot of stuff. Be a sound designer. The singer should be a sound designer too.
Jon:
He puts the vocal through some outboard tubes, filtered 100Hz and did some transient shaping on the top. That’s it. You don’t have to do a lot of everything on the vocals. You just need to do the right thing.
Your Contributions And Getting Credit On a Song:
You are what you are hired and asked to do.
The most successful people Matt knows always do a bit more than they are asked.
Credit is different than compensation. Jon is mostly not credited on his mixes on Spotify, Tidal, etc. Jon mixed 12 songs on a 22 song record and got no credits posted online.
Make a Spotify playlist of all tracks that you’ve done. Flex that way so that everyone knows what you’ve worked on.
Discogs and Allmusic are supposed to get metadata from record labels for their database.
Headroom In a Mix/Loudness:
First thing Jon does is turn down the rough mix 6dB. Give yourself headroom and turn the kick up. All of the sudden the kick is hitting harder than the rough mix. He builds up from the kick drum.
If you’re pulling 6dB down from a limiter you are revealing all of the problems that came from relying on the limiter for vibe or feel. Limiters over-determine feel most of the times in a rough mix.
Jon doesn’t have the talent to memorize an entire rough mix like Jaycen Joshua does. He references the rough mix as he’s working.
Overly dense high-mid-distorted mixes drive Jon crazy.
3.5k screaming at you in a ballad is too intrusive.
Never go below -2 on a limiter threshold. -4 max. That would be +2 or +4 on a Pro-L2.
Jon mixed 384 songs last year and had only 2 that were rejected. They were on the same album. The Lauv album. He mixed 12 and got 10 approved.
Jon refuses to mix 2-track instrumentals to vocal. He hasn’t had to do it for several years now. The last time he did it was on the Summer Walker album ‘Last Days of Summer’.
Q: What level does Jon shoot for with the streaming platforms?
Jon normally shoots for -10 LUFS. It’s enough loudness density to compete and sound loud to a team of people who need to approve it before it gets there and it doesn’t lose transients.
For a really loud final chorus he’ll sometimes go -9 LUFS.
Mastered for iTunes is -1 and Spotify turns it down -2 peak. If clients want to contest your loudness you need to convince them to trust the people that they’re hiring and what they know.
