Episode 8
Show Notes
Live With Matt Rad #8
July 14, 2020
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 8
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Giving Constructive Feedback:
How to give constructive feedback. Especially to friends: Be honest and tell them what you think. Get comfortable saying things that are difficult. Never say “This is no good” or “this sucks”.
Matt:
If you’re the sort of person who can give honest critical feedback. You will be in that person’s life as the rare person they know that can give that to them and they will put you in a different category than other people. If you’re the person who gives honest, critical feedback with love that’s invaluable to creative people.
Jon:
Jon has a hard time criticizing unless he has a solution. That’s his first rule. The first rule is always start with the positive. Don’t start ripping on a song right away.
Jon points out all of the things that make the person sound unique to themselves. He tires to pick out the things that he’s never heard before. He loves hearing people’s weird stuff. Jon loves to turn that stuff up in a mix. Don’t let people hide their greatness/weirdness. Criticize towards that. Only criticize what can be helped and resolved.
Validation can be done with “complimentary” language. Sometimes it will sound condescending.
Jon gets hit up regularly for feedback, and can’t respond to everyone because he wants to do it all at a high level.
Specs On Computers:
Something fast and powerful so that you don’t have fan noise on at all time. Get something that works and invest in it. Worthy of investment. It’s equally important as monitoring. You can’t have your computer freezing or needing a restart when a client is present.
Density In A Mix:
It’s a combination of everything: arrangement, filtering, compression, saturation.
This is the thing that really good mix engineers know how to deal with.
Make sure your arrangement is dense enough and placed in the right way and doesn’t rely on a limiter. People rely too much on compression and when you take that limiter off it all goes to shit.
Jon recreates the density using exciters.
He rarely puts exciters on subgroups.
Arranging:
Filtering is a very important part of the arrangement. Even more so than EQ. Probably the most important EQ.
You don’t need 12k+ on the guitars unless you’re doing hi-fi Steely Dan stuff. Does your snare really need to crack at 7-8k when you’re vocal is sitting there?
Jon rarely does more than filtering on some sounds.
There’s a LPF filter on every sound in his sessions.
Raise the pitch of hi-hats so that you don’t have to add high end and get it out of the way of the vocal.
Sometimes he’ll put a heavy saturation like a cassette deck on a hi-hat to drastically change the vibe.
To get clarity, it is better to heavily filter stuff out of the way of the elements that you want. It actually gives the fundamental of that sound more room to sound.
Jon cannot remember the last time that he solo’ed one element to work on, unless it was to get a click out or something. He 100% never EQ’s alone or solos to EQ. Tony taught Jon that he solo’ed for too long. Or that the vocal is muted for too long.
The Importance of Vocals:
Music creators habitually undervalue the vocal. It is THE most important thing. It is 99% of the time the thing that people are going to remember, aside from the groove.
The hierarchy for production is:
1. Vocal
2. Groove
3. Everything else.
Our brains can only hear three things at a time anyways, so focus on what counts.
A “vocal-up” note means that something in the arrangement needs to come down. When you get that note it means you need to assess “why” they’re saying that. When people ask Jon for this his response is always to say “Let’s get it right”, then they stop asking because they don’t really need It anymore.
Mute the drums mix: Try this. Mix everything without the drums. Once you drop the drums back in and say “Wait, where’d the vocal go?” That’s when you know you’ve boosted too much high end in your snare and hi hats. It’s so inspiring to mute the drums and hear all the weird shit that is being covered up by it.
Jon starts the mix process in all the time so that he can hear the song, THEN he will start muting things.
Maximum Impact In Low End Without Distorting:
Lower your volume and give yourself the headroom. Create that true voltage.
This makes it hard to recreate people’s clipping, distorted, sound.
Jon likes clipping but it needs to happen in the right way. Giving yourself the headroom is the only way.
Think of low, mid, and high bands. Lower everything by 6dB to give yourself headroom. Once you do this bring the low band and the high band up by 3dB to give yourself that “smiley face” EQ curve in a natural way. Try that and see where it takes you.
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Jon leaves zero work for the mastering engineer to do.
Jon’s only iron law of mixing is that Kick, snare, vocals, and bass go in the middle. Everything else is up in the air and can differ from mix to mix.
Tom Norris is one of Jon’s favorite mix engineers. Tom is incredible. He makes loud feel dynamic, though Jon also thinks he mixes too loud.
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Jon and Matt take a lot of breaks: 30 min on and then however long off that they need. Go really hard for short periods. Intensely focused stuff and then breaking. Jon is 45 on and 15 off.
Jon’s loft is 150’ long from end to end.
Jon doesn’t car test mixes. Matt does for every single thing.
