Episode 5
Show Notes:
Live With Matt Rad - Episode 5
June 23, 2020
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 5
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Jon:
The moment you say “fix it in the mix” you need to double down and get the part correct cause you probably won’t be able to do it later.
Q: How do you get a young artist to keep the motivation for doing multiple takes:
Take breaks.
Tell them “this is the place to experiment. Let’s try a bunch of different things.” Get across the point where the recording studio is the place to try a lot of different things.
The best Producers and A+Rs do it by showing it. They set up the space to naturally encourage that. Setting up instruments or fun things around them. Again, take breaks.
“Write drunk, edit sober.” As ethos for doing multiple takes.
Jon would remix the same song every day from scratch as practice if he didn’t have any work to do. Even if it’d already been released.
It’s rare that Jon has to tear it all down and start a mix again, but when he does he removes the first mix entirely so that he cannot refer back to it.
Jon is 34 years old. He still gets nervous every time he sends a mix. He has resolved to not be nervous like this by the time he’s 35.
Jon loves tubes because they bring out the fundamental in everything.
Jon is constantly thinking about getting faster. Good monitoring will get you there. A good mix buss and A/D will help if you’re going out of the box.
Most music doesn’t sound done to Jon when he receives it.
He thinks 60s Turkish psych he listens to is done perfectly, and there’s nothing he would change. That’s why he likes it. Part of this is because it’s outside what he does, so who is he to say.
Jon has an ability to take someone’s intention and magnify it the slightest bit.
He thinks his personality is sculpted and learned enough to understand people’s intentions.
The trick of ego is to put it aside when it’s not useful, but it’s useful to give you the drive to think that you can do something.
Jon:
Be yourself on the first pass, rebuild it your way because they’re hiring you for you.
The first pass is yours. Do your thing. That’s your first foot forward.
If they wanted Max Martin’s thing they would have hired him. He’s always going to beat you at being him.
“You’re not going to find your voice until you sound like a lot of people.” - Neil Gaiman.
At what point do you go from being hired for something you need to learn to do, versus they’re paying me to do my thing, so I need to do that.
Jon only wants to exist as honest and transparent. That is his intention.
When you get notes from artists or A+R don’t do them directly, interpret them and their intention and do what you believe needs to be done. That is a skill to develop. Think about ways to achieve what they think may be missing without going in the wrong direction.
As a mixer or producer, or writer you’re being hired by an AnR because you will increase the probability that a song will be success.
The bright synths on Khalid’s ‘Talk’ were filtered down pretty low to 12k-15k.
The amount of power on PMC speakers is very authentic and lets you hear it because there’s so much power going to the tweeter. That’s their power, according to Jon.
Try gluing busses together with saturation, instead of with compressors.
Jon may have nudged the hi-hats back slightly on ‘Talk’ to give it that groove.
Be careful when flipping phase on stacked stuff like snares. It may change the character too much and undermine the producer’s intention.
Jon uses transient shapers as makeup after saturating. He usually uses the quickest and most precise setting on the Izotope plugins.
Spiff is tight for multi-band transients, but Jon gets skeptical of multi-band stuff because of potential phase issues.
