Episode 15
Show Notes
Live With Matt Rad - Episode 15
August 25, 2020
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 14
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Setting Up Your Room With Acoustics In Mind:
Unfuck Your Studio: They start by putting the speakers as close to the wall as possible to energize the room.
10’-11’ long rooms will give you trouble w the first bass reflection.
The Unfuck guys use a reference playlist. Have a set of recordings that you know very well. Have one with the brightest possible pop vocal, one for midrange transients, one for a low-range sweep (Speakerboxxx Intro)
Make yourself a reference playlist.
Use this to acquaint yourself with the acoustic properties of each new room.
Examples of song types to include in your reference playlist:
Brightest possible pop vocal
Midrange transients
Low end sweep
Partition - Has a big 808 sweep.
Deepest low end
Warmer/darker recording w/ great midrange
Super deep soundstage
PMC Speakers - The high end is magical. Very clean, clear.
If you’re going to be a professional mixer you’re going to need to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to invest in high end computers, monitoring, and converters.
Mixers: Need monitoring,
Producers: Need a nice vocal chain
Jon:
Spend all your money on monitors and your computer.
Your computer is #1. If you have to restart a computer in the middle of a session you are fucking up.
The best mixes that he does come when the producer makes the best sound choices up front.
The stacking of sounds through a better converter doesn’t add a bunch of unwanted distortion that you won’t notice until you layer multiple recordings.
Jon uses a Hilo converter and Lynx Aurora 16x16.
Apogee Rosetta is a waste of money. Not good.
Lynx integrates well with Pro Tools. No latency for inserts.
Decide for yourself whether you a starter, a beat maker or a finisher.
Q: What made Jon solidify as a mixer versus his other roles?
Jon loved the feeling when records came out.
When stuff comes out it’s so much more exciting.
People will hear them and give feedback more frequently cause they’re able to hear it.
As a producer so many things are speculative.
Jon left home and the only way his mom could justify him leaving home was if she heard his songs on the radio. It created tangibility.
Matt loves making sounds without intention. Just to explore.
That’s an important part of his emotional life. Since he was 10.
Figuring out who you are as a creative person is not an easy thing to do.
You need to know what makes you happy.
These are decisions that don’t get made early on for most people.
Jon has a lawyer, manager, and two assistants on his team.
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Q: How do you control harshness in a mix?
Jon likes to use Ozone Spectral Shaper for harshness.
He puts it on the Mix-buss.
2.5k-4.5k, maybe 2k-8k. Just warm it up with the character slider.
Jon EQs upper-mids a lot subtractively. There’s headroom to reduce a lot of that because of our Fletcher-Munson perception.
Soothe is very heavy-handed. Soothe 2 is much better figured out. Be careful because you can get rid of lots of transients and punchiness.
For Jon it is the density and lack of dynamics in the upper-mids or highs that makes something fatiguing. The high-end density makes it hard to listen to an entire pop album.
Jon is more concerned with the high end density and it’s lack of dynamics.
Stacking vocals with the exact same vocal chain and a 10k shelf is going to sound super dense and terrible.
If a whole lot of instruments are stacked with the same EQ boost it’s going to make that frequency range harsh.
Try to mix up vocal mics and your chain when tracking different parts to relieve this build-up
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Talk to an artists team about making a timely record vs. a timeless record. Make sure they understand that that’s what they want.
To Matt, the ultimate modern pop is Max Martin.
Teenage Dream vocal arrangement/performance is great for it’s timbre change through the voice.
Juno and Prophet 5 don’t have any frequencies above 15k. You shouldn’t have any boosts there.
Jon’s challenge: Don’t use a shelf-EQ ever. Get really surgical with how you ration out the high end.
Guitars can be filtered out at 7k-8k.
Mixes are harsh because a lot of stuff is competing for the high end.
Be careful of what EQ-phasing is doing. Bypass a lot. Low end is even more dangerous.
