Episode 110 - Jon Castelli
Show Notes:
Live with Matt Rad - Episode 110
Mar 7, 2023
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 87
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Matt:
Every time you get notes it's a bit of a let down at first, but the majority of the times the note makes it better. The value of those notes
Jon:
I've been studying a lot of mixes that are coming out from great mixers lately and they all have a tension, like a teenage angst. The majority of records a lot of us are mixing are for teenagers. It's very dense and very tense.
I haven't yet how to figured out how to get that feel, but with a lot of low-end.
Skrillex’s Two New Records / Arranging
Matt:
I'm impressed how much loudness and clarity he's able to get on these records.
Jon:
As I listen on my rig I can hear where the sounds start and stop, and there is no overlap between them!
The sounds are heavily band-limited to the point where there's no extra information like rumble outside of those boundaries.
There is so much clarity when you do that and nothing is overlapping.
The mixes are at -6 LUFS and yet the sub is so freaking tight and low. Nothing is distorted. No pop mixer does that. I don't fully understand it.
It's all in the arrangement. If you want to sound like a Skrillex record you need to arrange your record and do the sound design in this way.
Matt:
Loudness is very much about arrangement and where things do in the frequency range. If you can make it where the entire frequency range is filled up but nothing is overlapping, then you have these Skrillex records.
Jon:
You can create dramatically different moments by being deliberate about how you move instruments into different registers and how you contrast them against each other in each section.
There is nothing hidden in a Skrillex record. Every sound is loud and proud and never obscured.
Many average pop records have the problem in which they'll layer up 8 sounds in the same register that are derived from the same MIDI sequence, and they all have the chord's root note in their voicing.
Not every chord needs to have the root note in it. That's what chord inversions are for. Sometimes the right move is to invert a chord so that the voicing gets out of the way of another element and isn't fighting to occupy the exact same space.
When he's filtering it's not just a clean filter, it's got a resonant peak that makes the characteristic element of the sound pop out more. That's how you get kicks to knock. You don't need 8k in a kick. You can LPF it at 2k but give it a peak at the cutoff. It focuses the sound.
Matt:
When you start layering too many of the same sounds you lose definition because they're masking each other or you're getting phase cancellation.
These two records of his make me inspired to make new records.
Much like Dick Fosbury innovating in the Olympic high jump, once you see that something else is possible, musically it inspires you to go out and do that thing for yourself that you would have never attempted.
Q: What’s up with your new monitors?
Jon:
I'm trying to return back to listening on a 2-way speaker for a bit of nostalgia. I've been trying out the ATC 20's and the PMC 6's. I think I'm going to lean on the PMC's.
