Episode 29
Show Notes
Live with Matt Rad - Episode 29
Nov 24, 2020
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 26
Show notes by: Bradley Will
The greatest barrier to entry to having a career in music the persevering through the times when you get rejected or people don’t give a shit about what you do.
Jon doesn’t usually strategize.
The go-with-the-flow mentality can be a weakness if you want to be a leader and make a lot of change.
Jon is about to make a pivot in 2021 to start becoming a recording engineer that he also will mix with one production partner. He wants to sculpt records from the beginning to the end.
He doesn’t want production credit. He wants that to be clear and preemptively remove everyone’s ego from the equation.
Tiger Woods took a break during the height of his success to rework his golf swing.
On the micro level the reason Matt is a producer is because he gets super obsessed with doing things for 3 week periods.
Self-motivating is the replacement for having the structure of a pre-determined career arc.
Jon stopped producing because everything he was producing was speculative and wasn’t always being released. Whereas mixing was 95% released.
Now with this collaboration there will be a much higher chance that the material will be released.
Q: Music is looping in my head while I meditate. Do you experience this?
Matt experiences this all of the time.
It happens every time Matt meditates.
Matt thinks about his crushing anxieties and mortality.
Jon never experiences it.
Jon describes himself as having a pretty detached relationship with music.
Jon’s version of this is that he sees recipes while he meditates.
When Jon is distracted during meditations it’s him thinking about plating dishes that he’s going to do in the future.
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The tendency is to overproduce when the vocals aren’t great.
If the vocal isn’t carrying the song’s emotion, then people tend to try and dress it up.
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It’s always important to realize that if you don’t think something’s great you might change your opinion later on down the road. That happens to everyone.
If the producer isn’t excited but the artist has a strong idea, then let them run with it.
Q: How do you deal with the aggressive sound of female vocals when they are belting?
Focus on mic technique and what room you’re in. Could be early reflections building up.
Do you want to retain the aggression, or get rid of it? You need to answer this.
Jon loves the Ozone 9 spectral shaper. To warm up the region without reducing it too much.
On aggressive vocals Jon will first control and then do a narrow band boost afterwards in that same area to recreate that harshness.
Q: What would your mix-buss be if you had to mix in the box?
Jon:
Would probably just use his subtle Ozone preset.
Jon might use some additional group processing.
Jon leans into his current mix buss, and so it might be hard for him to go without it at first.
Jon wants to mix through tubes that even out the harsh spikiness of certain frequencies.
