Episode 64 - Assistants
Show Notes
Live with Matt Rad - Episode 64
August 24, 2021
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 57
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Assistants
Q: How do people get hired as assistants?
Jon:
I’ve found my assistants by asking people that I trust if they know anybody that’s a great engineer. I prefer people who are very green.
Ingmar didn’t even know Pro Tools before he joined me.
Matt:
It varies quite a bit based on the temperament of the person hiring you.
If I’m hiring someone for a project I’m looking for someone with skill
If I’m looking for a long-term relationship what I’m really looking for is work ethic and personality.
If they’ve got that you can teach them anything.
Showing up on time, excited and adaptable is probably more valuable than being technically proficient.
Jon:
You need a deep level of trust if your assistant is going to come into your home every day.
Matt:
The truth is that you want to be making the best work with the people around you and then you will all come up together. Don’t count on meeting someone above you who pulls you up to their level.
This goes for collaborators, managers, and A+Rs. You build with the people around you who are at your level.
The big people already have their own people.
Jon:
At some point someone may not be able to afford your mentor and there is an opportunity to gain clients that way. But it’s important to be respectful of your mentor and run it past them first for their blessing if the opportunity presents itself.
Matt:
The idea of mentorship is underrated overall.
There is so much you can and should do on your own, even without being an assistant.
Resumes are not important in our line of work.
In our experience, we’re almost always overqualified for the jobs that we’re doing.
You want to be doing great work with great people who all talk to each other. That’s how you’ll meet the great bands or get put on by someone who knows you.
Far and away the #1 thing to do is to make great records with the people who are around you. If you make great work people will talk about you and your work.
Jon:
The opportunities that stick will come when you least expect them.
I will never read resumes. A proper resume to me is an .mp3 of their work with someone telling me how they want to be a mix engineer.
The preparation of sessions on a project I was getting from 6lack’s engineer were so clean and well put together and easy that I reached out to that engineer to ask who’s good right now?
Matt:
I got my in with Eric Valentine by having my name on a record that was passed around amongst Eric and his friends.
Q: What does an assistant do in your world and how important is it?
Jon:
Communication skills are very important.
Be able to speak for yourself, but also be able to speak on my behalf and in my voice when speaking with clients.
You need to convey that you care about the client.
Communicate politely and professionally.
Be cool. Communicate well. Be polite. But don’t take shit from people at the same time.
It’s easy to be walked on as an assistant.
I don’t refer to Josh as my assistant. I refer to him as my engineer.
He is credited as additional engineering on all of my mixes.
He’s to be treated as his own engineer.
I learned the hard way about not being credited on records I worked on.
Matt:
You’re coming in to be a part of a team.
You learn professional humility.
You learn to be in a hierarchy
To be opinionated and have good taste but know when to keep that to yourself.
Q: What does Jon’s assistant do?
Jon:
Jon has a one-sheet that he sends to clients who are sending him sessions and stems.
He receives the files from the client.
Either stems or Pro Tools sessions.
He converts them to the format that Jon prefers.
He makes sure that the arrangement is the exact arrangement heard in the most recently sent rough mix.
THAT is the most important part.
I want to receive a clean session that sounds exactly the same as the rough mix.
Josh is making the mix sound as close as possible so that I don’t have to.
I don’t want to think about the session prep. I want to be able to jump right in.
Q: Do you start co-mixing at a certain point?
Jon:
I will never put out a mix with my name that I wasn’t at least 95% responsible for mixing.
It’s somewhat common for the big name mixers to have a team of five engineers who do a large amount of the work for them.
I promise to never do that.
I do 99% of the mix notes. Not my assistant, because I want to interpret what the clients notes are actually saying.
Again, there are high-end engineers who have ghost-mixers or assistants who do these steps in their stead.
I don’t agree with the practice of telling someone that a mixer mixed a record when someone on their team may have actually done it.
Q: What can people learn who’ve never had the opportunity to be an assistant?
Jon:
Wisdom. Knowing that there’s another way to handle any situation.
If someone yells at you, being cool as ice and being reassuring.
These are things you learn through doing and through years of experience.
To truly understand a concept you need to be able to explain it three different ways.
If you know something truly you can teach it.
Matt:
The thing to do is to find your people. Make music with the people around you. Collaborate. The value of collaborating with others is usually where most of the learning happens.
There isn’t usually a substitution for being around older, more experienced, people.
There is no substitution for time spend working with others.
Jon:
Make music with your friends that allow you to sound like yourself.
Something about the record needs to point to what you did.
Q: Transitioning out of assisting into doing your own thing
Matt:
I was always making things outside of my work as an assistant. At a certain point you get an opportunity and you decide that it’s the time to jump and go out on your own.
Once you’ve learned as much as you can from your mentor.
An assistant job or working under someone isn’t part of a linear path.
The people who are going to get hired are those already doing great shit.
Now you do a “lesser” job for someone higher on the totem pole and work with the opportunities that that provides.
You’re constantly trying to put yourself in the position where you can make the best stuff and do it with great people. On the way you may get other opportunities.
Jon:
It’s really hard to find a mentor and get in the room with someone.
