Episode 24
Show Notes
Live with Matt Rad - Episode 24
Oct 27, 2020
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 22
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Q: How do you deal with stressful situations, clients, etc?
There’s no reason to act stressed, even when you are.
Be the cool customer whenever you can.
If you can be easy to deal with you are head and shoulders above the competition. Everyone has egos and stuff that will make it difficult to hang with.
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Realize that you’re going to get feedback from people who you feel don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s all part of the process.
Matt:
It’s important to understand who holds the authority in the decision making process. Is it the artist? Is it the A+R? Try to parse through that and know who’s really making the decisions.
There’s not always a good answer for this kind of situation.
No matter who the decision makers are you need to have good lines of communication to do your work.
Jon:
When there’s an A+R involved and calling the shots and the artist is more of an entertainer, defer to the A+R for judgement.
When the artist is calling the shots Jon wants to talk to the artist and the producer
It’s important to distinguish between these two types of artists in communication.
Matt:
Understand that for the artist, this is their whole career. Do your best to get them through it.
Jon:
They have to live that record. They have to love it. That’s their job. It’s your job to make sure that they love it. Understanding that will really separate the ego in this process.
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Jon:
The artist doesn’t care about warmth, they care about their vocal performance.
Jon is not getting hired for his warmth. He’s getting hired for making records.
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Matt:
Our job is to be the conduit, not the artist.
Jon:
Anxiety is tied up in the ego.
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Q: How important is it to have hobbies outside of music?
Matt:
It’s immensely important. You need an antidote to what you do. Somewhere else you can go if you are stuck.
Music and Business are inherently in tension with one another.
Anytime you’re making music that needs to make money you’re inherently going to compromise something.
You’ve got to have other things to go to to make yourself feel happy when the creative things you do fail.
If you’re stuck, go and do something creative.
Matt recommends: Start writing songs with the only goal to finish something. Remove all expectations or consequences from your thinking to keep your creative brain moving.
“It’s much harder to be consistently good than to have moments of greatness”
- Steve Martin.
Jon:
The minute that you say you did something that is brilliant, you should be slapped in the face.
That is something for other people to decide.
To say that what you did is brilliant really rubs him the wrong way.
Matt:
It’s important to be delusional in your excitement about things that you’re creating. At least in the beginning.
Holding on to that feeling later on when it proves not to be true is when the trouble starts.
You need to be unconcerned about what the world thinks about it.
You’re going to believe before other people do.
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Lots of questions about mastering:
Jon:
Jon thinks mastering is important. But in a different way than what A+Rs think about them.
The mixer has a relationship with a mastering engineer. They know what they can get out of the mastering engineer and where they can leave off before handing it off.
Jon delivers his masters at 0 peak and -9 to -12 LUFS.
If the mix was approved, the mastering should be very light. People have already spent time fine-tuning and balancing everything. A good mastering engineer has to be sensitive to that. Jon doesn’t think all mastering engineers are.
Dale Becker is Jon’s mastering engineer. He calls Jon’s sound “Big transients”, whereas lots of engineers squeeze that out of a mix.
Matt:
Mastering engineers see 10x as many tracks as mixers. Although they will spend far less time on the track than the mixer their perspective of the music is much greater.
They will catch a whole lot of things that we may miss.
Side Note: Mix engineers see 10x as many tracks as artists. So for every 1 track an artist creates, a mixer will work on 10, and a mastering engineer will work on 100.
You want to have an open line of communication with everybody in the process. The people handing you the project and the people you are delivering to afterwards. You want to be the person who is the easiest conduit for the song to be processed.
You want a relationship with a mastering engineer who you will have great communication with.
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Q: Dynamic EQ and transients?
Jon is into transient makeup post EQ and saturation moves.
Linear phase will destroy transients and phase. Especially in the low end.
Jon is using dynamic EQ because he notices it reducing transients less than regular EQ.
Usually these moves are very narrow to mid-narrow. No broad moves.
Any EQ move will reduce transients somewhat. Jon finds it best to control the sound with some saturation and smooth it out instead of EQing a harsh spot in a sound and then adding the transient back in.
Often it’s the narrowness of a frequency peak in a sound that is hitting the pain threshold in our ears. You can round that off with saturation and make that peak less pointy.
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Q: Recommendations for books/podcasts to listen?
Matt:
I’ve been listening to fewer podcasts these days.
Jon:
Naval Ravikant on Tim Ferris’ recent podcast. Listen to it twice.
Naval Twitter thread: How to get rich without getting lucky.
Matt Is back to doing hourly mediation a day. That’s a Naval prescription.
