Episode 88 - Jon Castelli
Show Notes
Live with Matt Rad - Episode 88
March 29, 2022
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 71
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Matt:
The most important piece of gear is a working computer. Spend your money on that and make sure it works.
Be very careful with updates and doing them in the middle of a project, because it can sometimes cause software to become buggy or suddenly incompatible and leave you without a fully working setup.
Q: Where are the best producers getting their samples from?
Matt:
I think for the best people that I know it’s from a little bit of everything (Splice, commercial packs, make your own, etc).
A lot of A-level pop producers do a lot of sound-design prep prior to starting a project.
Those who are the best are really spending time on sounds and prepping things.
Jon:
All of my successful producer friends prep their sounds.
Their drums sounds, synth presets, hardware instruments, etc
Just so there’s no tinkering in the session.
They’ll often have 10 snares and kicks ready to go before the session.
It’s more important to have an ear for what sounds good, than knowing where to find these samples.
I’ve been thinking about this idea of “almost music”, which is music that’s chasing the sound of a popular or distinct record and it’s “almost” there.
It’s not lazy to reuse the same drum sounds across an entire record. The creativity comes in the songwriting and the arrangement.
Matt:
The best people set the time aside to make sounds and explore sounds and organize sounds.
Any time you make a song with a sound that you love, sample it. So that you can use it again.
Jon:
Having your sounds ready to go is what enables inspiration to strike and prevents you from getting bogged down in doing sound design on the fly.
As soon as inspiration strikes you want to be able to get your ideas down as soon as possible.
Q: Why does Jon always do a 24db bell slope on his Pro-Q3 bell cuts?
Jon:
It sounds smoother to me in the context of phase around the edges of the cut. I think this sounds the best.
Changing Your Plugin Defaults
Matt:
People should change their plugin defaults in order to guide themselves down different paths and also to avoid falling into using the same default sounds that other people undoubtedly are also using.
Many plugins default to too long of a decay time.
Underrated Plugins
Matt:
I love the Soundtoys Devil-Loc because it’s super simple and it instantly changes the sound.
I love stereo-izing plugins these days
Jon:
I think the OTT is the most overrated plugin.
The Eventide H3000
Valhalla UberMod
Valhalla Shimmer - Not for long verbs, but on very very short settings.
Q: How should we think about and control the envelope of low end?
Jon:
The length of notes and sounds is something that I spend so much time thinking about.
Feel comes from the attack, decay, sustain and release of a sound.
