Episode 91 - Cian Riordan

May 3

Show Notes

Live with Matt Rad - Episode 91
May 3, 2022
w/ Cian Riordan - Week 4

Recording St. Vincent’s Daddy’s Home

Cian:
Many of these songs were started by me and Annie (St. Vincent) jamming together before she went to Jack Antonoff to work on the production.

A lot of the detailed effects work in the final mixes was committed to the tracks ahead of time.

Annie and I had met on the Sleater-Kinney record that Annie produced. And we hit it off from there and continued to work on stuff.

Annie is very much a musical engine and is diving into being her own engineer for her projects.

Q: What do you think is the skill or attribute most responsible for winning a Grammy?

Cian:
My friend Michael Harris won years ago for a Vampire Weekend record and had an interesting perspective: “You’re not winning for just that record. You’re winning for your body of work up to that point.”

This is how I feel about it.
It’s a great metric to have under my belt, but we’ll see what it amounts to.

I was nervous when Annie asked me to mix the record because I’m such a fan.

I think you do all of your best work when you’re a little bit nervous and slightly unprepared.

Matt:
I think the most underrated LWMR episode is my interview with Peter Asher.

Despite all of his accolades, even someone like him has impostor syndrome.
This feeling doesn’t go away.
There’s a benefit to feeling outside of your comfort zone.

This is why I’m running around to these different locations so much lately; I felt I was in my comfort zone and had to get out. Now I feel a little stressed doing all of these records, but I feel that I’m making great records at the same time.

Q: What do you consider a well-record vocal? Either when receiving vocals or engineering them yourself?

Cian:
I think the great ones are fewer and further between these days.

The skill of being a great engineer is less of a consideration these days for many people making records.

A good quality vocal for me is when it shows up raw with very little compression and it feels human and dynamic.

I think people are overcooking the UAD-type processing into their recordings.

In some ways this is the worst of both worlds: You’re getting the worst of analog and the worst of the digital sonics.
I hear this so much when vocals get sent to me an it’s hard to work with that.
My usual strategies start to fall apart if there’s a lot of processing already on there.
I always prefer to have the clean vocal as an option and to recreate their desired processing in my own way.
It’s rare for me to enjoy the stereo vocal commits that I receive for mixes.

What I’m hearing a lot is the sound of sub $1000 condenser microphones. I can hear that right away.

The high end is quite often weird.
I think the quality of modern preamps and converters is very good, so I wouldn’t fault that part of the chain.
I think people are over-committing their UAD plugin processing to their tracking, and that is often far too much.

Q: How much are you treating your mix buss and your group busses vs. your individual tracks?

Cian:
I love busses. They’re useful in the era of 100+ track counts.

It’s kind of the only way to stay sane.

I’ve put a lot of work into my template so that it is hierarchical.

It makes it easy to very quickly do stems at the end.

Once I get 75% through a mix I can fold my busses down as folder. It’s nice to visually collapse all of my folders down to 12 tracks (vocals, drums, basses, etc) at that point and do my final tweaks.

I feel that my mixes have gotten a lot more detailed towards the end because of this.

I’m a big drum buss kind of guy. I like to mult my drum buss into three busses: uncompressed, compressed, and distortion.

Very rarely am I compressing individual parts of the kit.
I like to think of the drum kit as one big instruments. It always sounds better to me that way.

For each of these three drum busses (uncompressed, compressed, distortion) I’m blending them in one at a time. Like building a house. Start with a good foundation and then introduce each step.

I usually start with the kick drum and then start working on phase and making my way through the kit.
If it doesn’t sound like a drum set to me from the get-go then I’m going to start second guessing all of my decisions that came up to that point. So it’s important to get the kit sounding like a kit before I proceed.

Sometimes you have to add distortion simply to keep it sounding contemporary.

You’re inevitably going to have to compete with samples.
You need to use every trick in the book to get that sound.
My busses allow you to try and audition ideas quickly.

Matt:
Templates are an important part of a mixer’s workflow.

Cian:
A lot of it is simply about having verbs/delays/settings ready to go so that you can get it sounding like a record quickly.

Live Bass Guitar

Matt:
This is always the hardest instrument to mix because people rarely know how to play it well.

Cian:
Even when you get a perfectly played performance from a seasoned player you still have to deal with the sonics of the bass, which sit in a weird zone between the drums, guitars, and keys, and it’s stepping on everything.

It’s all very arrangement-specific to know what the right move is in the mix.

If the bass part is super simple and doesn’t have a lot of personality I may not feature it in the mix and will instead have it just act as a foundational part of the mix that it is.

Bass often requires a lot of compression. It’s the one instrument that usually requires at least some compression.

I don’t think it’s something that you can get away with just distorting or saturating it.
You could conceivably clip-gain every note, but I’ve never done that.
Compression is your friend on bass guitar and vocal.

Matt:
A bass will often fill many different roles depending on the song: melodic, rhythmic drive, holding down subby low-end, etc.

Cian:
Modern production can make it much harder to mix bass these days when you can have subby kicks, bass guitar, and 808’s all at the same time.

A lot of this is simply arrangement choices.

Matt:
I once worked on a record where Pino Palladino emailed me a bass track he’d recorded for a song. As soon as I dragged the bass stem into the session it sounded perfect. When I asked Pino what his signal chain was that made it sound so good his reply was “A P-bass into an Apollo.” That’s it.

It goes to show that a good player counts for a lot.

Cian:
When you work with someone who has a command over their instrument like that there’s a real magic to that experience.

Undertone Audio Hardware

I use a lot of the Undertone Audio gear

I have an original Unfairchild that was designed with a different tube set.
The 6386 vari-mu tube was not being manufactured at that time.
The original Unfairchild used 6BC8 instead since they were unavailable. Sonically it’s a little more aggressive than the 6386
I don’t really use mine as a compressor. I use it on my mix-buss as a saturation box.
It has a pretty gnarly EQ curve that I mix into from the get-go. It has this huge midrange lift that I find adds a cool midrange presence that I wouldn’t normally add. It’s a 1dB lift around 1.5k. The Q is super wide, stretching from 100Hz to 12k.

That then goes into a pair of Undertone EQs in which I have a pretty drastic hi-shelf EQ going with a 4dB boost around 11k-12kHz.

It’s that weird shape where there’s a little dip around 3.5k.
That curve just gets me closer on mixes a lot faster.

On the Discord server I shared a Pro-Q3 preset of the curve that the Unfairchild is adding to my mix buss. It’s available on the server now.

Then to emulate the saturation I made a Saturn preset that matched it.

Matt:
I use the Undertone preamp with both transformers on and a little bit of the high-end shelf to track my vocals.

Cian:
I think those preamps are the gold-standard for today. They’re so flexible.

My two favorite preamps are wildly different. Either the Undertone preamp or the Ampex 351

The Ampex has amazing distortion. It’s the basis for the ‘A’ setting on Decapitator that everyone loves. The distortion is incredibly musical.

Q: How do you manage mix revisions?

Cian:
Some clients are organized and will send you a compiled list of notes, but a lot of time you’re just fielding text messages from different members of the group and it’s up to you to compile everything.

As they come in I’ll compile them all in a Notes app on my phone.

Every revision that I do gets a signifier (like Version #3, Version #4 etc)

I like to be very communicative and very explicit about what I did on each version, so that there’s no mystery for me or for the client.

Matt:
I find that it helps a lot to tell a band or group of collaborators up front that it will help me a lot to get mix notes from them all as one compiled document. Quite often they’ll respect that.

One of the benefits of compiling everyone’s notes in a place where everyone can see is that the contradictory notes I’ve received can be seen by everyone and they’ll be aware of that and find a solution amongst themselves before asking me to do both (usually).

I’ll send the mixes to people any number of ways based on what the artist likes.

Cian:
I like to have all versions centralized and organized, for my own sake, so everyone gets a Dropbox and an email link from me when I have something to send them.

Dropbox is great, because if I accidentally send the wrong version I can quickly replace it if I need to change it at the last minute.

A ‘version 1’ is the most important version of the mix that you send out, so it has to be right. Anything that will help me prevent sending the wrong file, if I catch a mistake, is valuable.

Always ‘Save As’ every version that you do.

On the first mix, always introduce the mix with a little bit of preamble. Explain how you feel about it, and what you did, and try to make it feel personal. Give them a description of how you approached it and start the conversation and establish some context for your mix.

You want to let them know that this is a conversation.
You’re in the service industry and you want them to know that you’re here to help them and make it as good as possible.

Bradley Will