Episode 79 - Jon Castelli
Show Notes
Live with Matt Rad - Episode 79
Jan 18, 2022
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 66
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Q: When should I use subtractive EQ vs. additive EQ?
Matt:
The short answer as a producer/engineer is: it mostly doesn’t matter. Do what you want and what sounds good.
When you’re in the mixing/finalizing role at the end of a project then it can make some important differences.
Jon:
I’d like to make a distinction between stereo mixing and Atmos mixing.
In Atmos mixing I’m almost exclusively additive because Atmos has almost 20dB more headroom than the LUFS standard of other mix types.
You want to send it at -20 to -18dB LUFS, or else it will be rejected by the algorithm.
I love all of the extra headroom in an Atmos mix.
I like to limit a lot, so there needs to be a lot of subtractive EQ before I bring the threshold down on the limiter.
I’ll hollow out the sound before I bring the limiter down
Once I do my limiting I may do some additive work to bring something out later.
Matt:
When I was working with Eric Valentine it was a lot of cutting low-end before going into a compressor so that it didn’t react too much to the low-end.
Nowadays we have SC key filtering so that allows us to reduce the low-end that the plugin would normally hear.
If I want an aggressive “thwacky” acoustic guitar sound I’ll often remove low end so that it’s not triggering the compressor too hard.
Jon:
Additive and subtractive EQ are the same thing, in a broad sense.
By reducing a certain frequency you’re effectively boosting the untouched frequencies.
When i’m reducing a single band on a sound I hear it as an additive EQ to that frequency in the other instruments in that range.
My approach is subtractive because a lot of producers are additive or aggressive.
If you are more subtractive and make an effort to unmask sounds you’re balancing out your mix so that there are less peaks across your entire mix.
We’re mixing for a certain format/platform right now (streaming services) and need to make sure that our mixes translate on those formats.
If you want something to sit back (like reverb) you take more of the presence frequencies out. Conversely if you want it to come forward you make an additive move.
Matt:
I’m actively mixing my records 25% of the time. And those are almost always my own productions.
Switching between mixer and producer brains is a hard skill to develop and maintain objectivity.
If your instinct is to boost sounds all of the time you’re going to eat up all of your headroom.
Jon:
Here’s what I would do If I were still mixing my own productions. Once everyone agrees that the production is done I would commit the stems by bouncing them out of my session as multi tracks.
I would then start a clean new Pro Tools session to mix the multi-tracks in.
Then, if possible, I would take a week off from listening to it.Then when I sat down to mix the first thing I would clip-gain all tracks down by 6dB to get more headroom.
Then I might put a clipper limiter on the mix to make up 2-4dB of that if the mix needs some aggression.
Then I would pull up the reference mix that everyone signed off on and reference that as I mixed the record.
It’s important for producer/mixers to step back from their productions and then get some objectivity before they mix so that they can hear it with fresh ears.
Andrew Wells told me that the minute he sends a song off to mix he moves the session to a separate hard drive so that he doesn’t have the option to easily go back and change the production.
Matt:
As I’m doing the mixes I’m also getting production notes.
In that case I will have to go back to the session and print the altered stem again.
There are no shortcuts. If you want to be the best you have to take the time to do it right.
Jon:
Never master your own songs/mixes.
Printing Stems and Multi Tracks
Matt:
Psychologically it makes a big difference to print the session as multi-tracks before you start mixing. It limits your ability to go back and make changes and focuses you on the song in front of you.
Jon:
I don’t want to know how you got the sound that you printed so that I won’t mess with the settings and potentially kill the vibe.
It’s a losing battle to strip down an entire session with no plugins and start the mix from scratch.
If the printed vocals sound horrible I’ll ask for the dry/raw vocal from the producer.
Mostly the producers I work with know what they’re doing.
I did 300 mixes last year and only 6 of them gave me that level of control over the balance. I would only do that for an artist that I love. Otherwise it will take forever and probably be a losing battle against the artist’s expectations.
Matt:
Mixing from scratch is just not the way that records are made these days.
You don’t want to make drastic changes to the rough mixes because the artist can have a strong attachment to the rough mixes. If you change it too much they won’t accept it.
The more dialogue and communication you can have with the artist about changes the better.
Printing Autotune As You Track Vocals
Matt:
If you aren’t committing to sounds as you work you are creating extra work for yourself later down the line. It also gives you consistency in the sound as the record is passed around between collaborators. Those Autotune settings are a part of the performance.
Jon:
If you never commit to anything you’ll never finish. You don’t want to have to go back and make those choices later.
Matt:
What we’re really doing is capturing a moment for the artist and that doesn’t always have to be perfect.
Jon:
You have to imagine what that moment was like in the writing room that made the producer/engineer/artist decide that sounded great. You have to put yourself in their shoes and understand why you probably shouldn’t change that.
A lot of engineers feel as if they have to change every sound. You don’t necessarily need to change everything. We should be asking these questions about what the sound was like the moment it happened in the studio and sparked inspiration.
Q: How loud to deliver mixes to mastering?
Editor’s Note: This question eventually expaned into a larger discussion about specialization in one skill and relying on the skill of your collaborators without needing to understand how they do what they do.
Jon:
I never take my limiter off of the mix before I send it to mastering.
I’m making all of my mix decisions with my master buss on, so I would never remove that because then it would sound different then what I was hearing.
I never ask my mastering engineer Dale Becker what he’s done to a mix of mine, unless it is so dramatically better that I have to know.
I don’t want to know what’s happening and how my other collaborators do what they do. There’s not enough time in the day to analyze all of these things. It’s better to rely on your collaborators to do a great job and not have to worry about how they’re achieving that.
Comment from Spider in the chat: Less knowledge = less bias.
I’ve chosen to specialize. How my collaborators do what they do is not something that I necessarily need to know. I want to be able to call on these specialists when I need them and offload the cognitive overhead of having to think about their role.
Book that Jon mentioned: Projections by Karl Deisseroth
